The Cambridge Theorem (6 page)

He took a look around Poole's rooms, or rather Poole's room. It was a more modest version of Hawken's offices; a sofa which looked as if it might convert into a bed, armchairs, coffee table, desk, telephone and bookshelves. He walked over and examined a shelf. It seemed Dr. Poole had the complete works of Desmond Bagley, in a book club edition. Smailes turned up his nose.

He wondered if his irritation with St. Margaret's College wasn't in part due to his resentment at never having been to University himself. He could have gone, he knew it. He was always near the top in English, and would probably have gotten high enough marks in the languages to get accepted at a redbrick. Not Cambridge. He wouldn't have wanted to attend this place anyway. Moral tutors indeed. And Hawken, tooling up to town for a woman. It was all quite disgusting.

But despite his lack of formal education he had always been a bookish man, which unhappily Yvonne had resented from the start. It had seemed unimportant at first. There had been the excitement of sexual discovery, the strange miracle of Tracy's birth, the sense of a shared predicament as they entered the unknown territory of marriage and adulthood. Sure, there had always been things they didn't talk about, which Smailes accepted as part of the trade-off of marriage. You hang up the hunting cap, you get square meals and regular sex, and you talk about things that don't interest you. But he had never been one to go out with the lads, and when Tracy was small and down for the night, he preferred to sit with a book in the kitchen than watch television night in and night out. Yvonne began to see it as an implicit criticism, which it wasn't. He just preferred Thomas Hardy to stories about the neighbors during the commercials.

When he looked back, he figured it was during the early imprisonment of his marriage that his fascination with America had really taken hold. It had begun much earlier, in his boyhood, when he would choose to accompany his Uncle Roy up to the Alconburys base just north of town rather than go with his Dad to the dog track. His mother's brother Roy was employed as a handyman by the U.S. Air Force and would let Derek ride up with him and carry his toolbox when he worked the weekend shift. Roy would become engrossed fixing the massive steam kettles in the kitchen or tinkering with the refrigeration units in the PX, and Derek would be free to roam around. The base was a chunk of an exaggerated alien culture just miles from his home, and he would marvel at the strange accents and mannerisms, and the shocking profusion of goods on sale in the PX store. Roy would give him American coins so he could play Johnny Cash and Bobby Darin on the jukebox as he roamed the aisles along with the air force wives and their kids, or as he pressed his face against the windows to watch the huge-finned cars sailing noiselessly by on the wrong side of the road. Best of all he liked to watch the planes, the fighters and bombers and the giant transports, and the airmen themselves, which he could when Roy worked in the barracks near the runway. For young Derek Smailes, the American fliers had a mythic status. With their crewcuts and flight overalls and the bowlegged way they walked weighed down by their equipment, they were the real cowboys, infinitely more impressive than their silly counterparts on television. He would daydream about faking an accent and enlisting when he was old enough, and was broken-hearted when Roy lost his job during a budget review and their trips had to come to an end.

To be a fan of America was not to make yourself particularly popular at Cambridge police station, Smailes was aware, where the old resentment from the war years could still be felt. Younger officers too felt that America was a bad influence on British youth, promoting violence and drugs, and in general, people could find angry things to say about the U.S., no matter how transfixed they were by its television programs. But for Derek Smailes, the fascination was both enduring and involuntary.

The United States became a safety valve for his imagination, a place of deserts and forests and cities, of cornball decency and shocking excess, a place where things happened. He was particularly attracted to a certain kind of American renegade. He liked Jack Nicholson, who grew defiantly fat and bald as Redford and Hoffman ate grape-fruit and pursued romantic lead roles. He liked Mailer, who threw punches on the cusp of journalism and literature. And he liked Willie Nelson, above all, who reminded him of the country singers he had listened to on the PX jukebox as a boy. He would have given anything to be able to sing like that. As he grew older, he realized his Americanisms had become part of an adopted style, a way of defying respectability and the expectations around him.

Perhaps there had been an aloofness in his attitude during his marriage. He had been accused of superiority too often in his life to be able to simply shrug the claim off. But he had tried, he felt. He had done all the things you were supposed to do when you were married. But his heart wasn't in it, and Yvonne realized it intuitively early on, which maddened her. By the end of the second year she had begun to brandish the time-worn weapons of marital decay—silence, overspending and the withholding of sex. Smailes might have been able to handle the first two, but in combination with the third, they were a lethal strategy. In bed she wielded enormous power over him. He had always been crazy about her physically, her creamy skin and slightly feral smell, the way she turned her head and stabbed timidly with her pelvis, her girlish pleasure. She began to turn away from him deliberately, rejecting all his ploys. He was stricken by her cruelty. He had tried his best.

His capitulation came about inexorably. Janet in the typing pool started to smile at him a little more than she need to, he would linger to joke just long enough to let her know he understood, he was interested. He often worked late when he was on special squads, so it was easy to telephone Yvonne with his excuse the night Janet agreed to go for a drink with him after work. She lived out near Cherry Hinton and they would go there where he thought no one knew him, sly preliminaries in the pub before they would saunter in past her frowning flatmates and copulate like the blazes on her frilly bed. But he knew he was doomed, and was almost relieved when a former school friend of Yvonne's spotted them in the pub and called her up. He didn't attempt to deny anything, and his remorse came more from the realization that he was no better then the rest of his sex than from any real feeling of failure.

He had done his best, and it wasn't good enough, but he would have stuck it out if she had wanted to. But then maybe he was unrealistic, because he realized how insulting she found his attitude. She screamed and cursed him and wept pitifully, but he knew that she was also relieved, and was more frightened about what would become of her than heartbroken. He had moved out that week, and within three months Yvonne and Tracy had had to leave the police flat, and went back to her mother's. There was the child support, but he didn't mind that. He knew Yvonne would remarry. She was an attractive woman with no greater ambition than to keep a house and raise children and be in the swim. Tracy would be better off too, if Yvonne remarried fast enough. It might be better if he stayed out of the picture altogether.

They had been divorced for six years, Yvonne eventually wanting to push the whole thing through so she could marry an optician who was a friend of her family. She had had two more kids since, although Smailes had decided not to stay completely out of the picture. He saw Tracy twice a month, and she was a fair-haired little beauty. They got along famously, he felt.

There had been others, of course. Bernardette from the hospital, who started to get too serious. Paula from the Ops Room, which had been a mistake. He was in no hurry, and had grown used to being on his own. Maybe one day he would leave Cambridge and the police, and try again for a degree. Maybe he would go to Texas and work the oil rigs. Unlikely, but he was determined to visit the States one day, no matter what.

There was a knock at the door and he opened it to a small, sandy-haired man with a high forehead and a paunch who strode past him into the room, visibly distressed. Professor Ivor Davies was about five feet four and wore a brown corduroy jacket and a green rayon shirt with a wide matching tie, which he was wringing with the fingers of his right hand. He wore thick-lensed glasses which made his eyes look like tadpoles. Smailes introduced himself.

“Yes, yes, I know, officer. Hawken told me you were here. Do excuse me. This news about Simon is most upsetting. It was not expected. Not expected, you know.”

Davies bobbed slightly as he spoke, and stopped worrying his tie to run his hands through his wiry hair, which was long on the sides and very thin on top. Smailes sat down behind Poole's desk and took out his notebook. He gestured for Davies to sit down, but Davies was too agitated.

“I had no idea, you see. I saw him about two months ago, and he seemed cheerful enough. He was working too hard, but then, he always did that, you know. When did this happen? Dr. Hawken only gave me the bare details.”

“Last night, we think,” said Smailes. “He was found hanged this morning by the cleaning woman, and it looked like his bed had not been slept in. There was a note.” He wondered about telling Davies of its peculiar message, but Davies preempted him.

“What did it say, for heaven's sake? Did it say why he did it?”

“No. It just said ‘they' came back, and he couldn't take it. Any idea who ‘they' might be, professor?” asked Smailes.

Davies pursed his lips, then grimaced.

“Good heavens. Maybe the snakes. Yes, that would be it, wouldn't it? They came back, and he couldn't take it, you know.”

This insight seemed to pacify Davies to the extent that he could sit down. He steered himself absently into the chair opposite Smailes and then blinked at him twice.

“Perhaps you could tell me what you mean, Dr. Davies,” he asked softly.

“Well, you see, it's not the first time. I mean, the poor fellow had tried to kill himself before. At least, that's what we all thought, although when Simon was well enough again to tell me about it, he said all he was trying to do was get away from the snakes. Not real snakes, you know. Hallucinations. But real enough to make him jump out of his window. Real enough for that, you know.

“It must have been two years ago, nearly. Before Finals. Of course, Simon was heading for a First. Absolutely brilliant chap, didn't need to work nearly so hard as he did. I was always trying to get him to take up some hobby to relax with, stamp collecting or something, but he would never listen. All he ever thought of was his work and his projects.”

“Projects?” asked Smailes.

“Yes. Simon was one of those people who loved a mystery, or so he told me. He had been interested in them since he was a boy. You know, flying saucers, the Bermuda triangle, things like that.

“Anyway, he was also interested in real-life mysteries, if you like. He told me a little about them. Two years ago he was working on President Kennedy. The one who was assassinated, you know.”

Smailes indicated with an inclination of his head that, yes, he knew.

“So anyway it was one month to Finals and we all wanted him so much to have the research fellowship and stay on here and I kept telling him to put aside his work on this Kennedy business until the exams were over and he would have the whole summer to write to whomever he liked in America, but of course he wouldn't listen.”

Smailes said nothing.

“Anyway, then he had this terrible blow. His father died. Car accident. He was in insurance, I think. The news seemed to throw poor Simon into a loop.

“I make it sound as if I knew all this as it was happening, which I didn't, of course. The junior members aren't usually very forthcoming about their personal affairs, although Simon was less secretive than most. It was one of his friends that came to me and told me Simon seemed to be very depressed, that his friends were worried about him.

“So I went over to his rooms and found him in bed. Hadn't eaten in days, said he couldn't concentrate on his work, that he was going to fail his exams, that his life was not worth living. Gave me a bit of a fright, you know. So I got my doctor round to him. Selby—wonderful chap. I think he put him on some pills and gave him the name of a psychiatrist to see. I urged him to visit him, but I don't think he did. Said it would do no good.

“I started to visit him two or three times a week. Anything more would have been a little too intrusive, you know. I talked to his sister and told her that I was concerned about him, that he should go home for rest immediately after the exams were over.

“And then he was found one night in the court. I heard about it the next day. Screaming hysterically about snakes. Very upsetting. He was taken off. To Myrtlefields, you know. I went to see him out there. Awful place. Tried to cheer him up about getting an
aegrotat
and how I knew the maths faculty would stand behind him. Of course, he was too depressed to care. Too depressed, you know.”

Smailes had noticed his attitude towards Bowles changing subtly during Davies' monologue. He had once blown some pretty important examinations himself after his own father died. He felt an odd link with Simon Bowles.

“But blow me, within a month if he wasn't as right as rain, sitting in my rooms laughing and saying it was all like a bad dream to him and he felt absolutely fine whatever the faculty committee decided, and anyway he knew who killed President Kennedy. It must have been the new drugs they have nowadays, because they certainly made the difference for Simon. He was like a new man.”

Davies paused and a sudden sadness clouded his features as he remembered that Bowles was no longer a new man, that he was dead. He blinked again at the detective and looked at his hands.

“How often had you seen Simon Bowles since his release from the hospital? Dr. Hawken told me you had been out of the country, but that you had resumed your relationship with him. I understand it's not customary for a graduate student to see a tutor.”