The Titanic Enigma (33 page)

‘. . . and we know, of course, that Fortescue’s amazing theories were several decades ahead of their time,’ the presenter was saying over the picture. It cut to a montage of
images from Manchester University to Los Alamos and the devastation of Hiroshima.

‘After official complaints from Russia, China and a number of Middle Eastern states, and the mobilizing of Chinese naval forces earlier this week, NATO has agreed to place the findings and
the documents recovered from the wreck of the
Titanic
with an international body tasked with the job of deciphering Egbert Fortescue’s complex mathematics. This has appeased several
nations who were incensed by the partisan behaviour of the Western allies in establishing the Exclusion Zone when the radiation from the vessel was first detected a week ago.’

There was a tap at the door and Kate turned to see Lou and Jerry, each with a bouquet.

‘May we?’ Lou asked.

She beamed and switched off the iPad.

‘Thank you, they’re beautiful,’ she exclaimed taking the flowers.

Kate’s home nurse came in behind the men. ‘Shall I put those in water for you, Dr Wetherall?’

Kate inhaled the fragrance. ‘Yes, please.’

Lou kissed her on the cheek. She patted the edge of the bed and he perched there, an arm along the top of her pillow.

‘So, how you feeling?’ Jerry asked. He pulled over a chair and sat down.

‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘I still can’t believe I damaged my leg so badly.’ She flicked a rueful glance at the cast. ‘But then I think we’re all lucky to be
alive. Has Jane Milford’s body been recovered?’

Derham nodded. ‘And I’ve heard talk of a special commendation.’

They fell silent for a second.

‘The story is everywhere,’ Kate said, trying to break the mood.

‘Yes, there are some people who are not very happy about that, but the decision was taken out of the government’s hands . . . The UN Security Council forced the issue. The Chinese
were particularly aggressive.’

‘Can’t say I blame them,’ Lou commented.

‘And what about the saboteurs on the
Armstrong
?’ Kate asked.

‘The CIA are still coming up empty in their efforts to find out who they were working for.’

‘There must be some suspicions.’

‘There are rumours MI5 know more about who is involved than they are letting on.’

Kate raised an eyebrow. ‘And Professor Newman? Nothing on him either?’

Derham shook his head. ‘Appears to have simply vanished from the face of the earth.’

‘He must have been paid some serious money,’ Lou commented.

‘Sure, but somehow I don’t think he will enjoy it much knowing that his scalp is wanted by the British and US governments as well as the Chinese, not to mention whoever he was
working for originally . . . the mysterious organization who employed Van Lee and his thugs. The chances are he’ll turn up dead before long.’

‘I guess,’ Kate mused. ‘So what now? I saw on the news the material from the wreck is being placed with an international non-political body.’

‘The only compromise the Security Council would accept,’ Derham said.

‘But we only have half the material anyway,’ Lou said glumly. ‘The documents that were in cargo hold 4 have been lost for ever.’

‘That’s assuming they had not already crumbled to powder in Box 19AS,’ Derham replied.

Lou sighed and nodded resignedly. Kate gave him a gentle smile and ran a finger along the top of his hand where it lay on the pillow close to her cheek.

Her cell phone trilled. Lou reached over to the side table and handed it to her. She glanced at the number, but looked blank.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that Dr Kate Wetherall?’

‘It is.’

She heard a brief sigh down the line. ‘Kate, it’s Professor Geoff O’Donnell. We met at a conference in Houston last year . . .’

Princeton, New Jersey. Same day.

Professor Geoff O’Donnell pulled onto the drive of his late parents’ house and sat for a minute listening to the end of the news on the radio. The top story
was the amazing account of how scientific documents from a century ago had been retrieved from the wreck of the
Titanic
along with a radioactive source. He’d been following the story
closely as he did anything connected with the famous shipwreck. The
Titanic
had been constantly fascinating for him ever since he was ten years old and learned that his grandfather had
been a survivor.

‘Wow!’ he said quietly to himself. ‘Kate Wetherall.’ He remembered they had met at a conference in Houston last year and he had liked her straight away.

The bulletin ended, Geoff plucked up the roll of rubbish sacks he had gone to the store to buy and trudged up the drive. His sister, Amanda, had already made a start on sorting out the kitchen.
Geoff walked in. She waved and blew at a strand of hair that had slipped from under her baseball cap. He placed the roll of rubbish sacks on the counter and went up the stairs.

Reaching the landing, he wandered into the bedroom he had once slept in. Until he had left for university, this house was the only home he had known. He and Amanda now had a mammoth task ahead
of them sorting out two generations of accumulated possessions. Both his parents and grandparents had been hoarders.

Then he recalled something long forgotten. His father, Thomas O’Donnell, had told him that Grandpa Billy had kept a box of papers and pictures from his earliest days as an immigrant in New
York. He had never seen this box and had often wondered what had happened to it. He hadn’t dared to ask him because everyone in the family knew Grandpa Billy always refused to talk about the
Titanic
. But what if his grandfather had passed on the box of memorabilia to his son Thomas? Geoff mused.

‘Hey, Mand,’ he called down the stairs. ‘Gonna start with the attic . . . go top down.’

His sister came to the foot of the stairs. ‘Ever the logical one,’ she said with a smile. ‘You need a hand?’

‘No. You start at the bottom and we should meet in the middle . . . in about a month!’

In all the years he lived in this house he had ventured into the attic just once, and had put his foot through the ceiling of his parent’s bedroom. It was the only time he had been beaten
by his father and he had never considered returning.

The attic ladder slipped down easily. Geoff clambered up and flicked on a single naked bulb hanging from a rafter. He could see at least a dozen tea chests stacked neatly to one side of the
space.

Pulling a torch from his pocket, he began to look around. Removing the lid from the nearest wooden box, the first thing he saw was a neatly folded college scarf.

‘Wow!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’d forgotten I ever had that!’ It was his scarf from UCLA, pale blue and yellow. He had bought it the first morning there. That day he had
embarked on what was to become a life in academia. Six years ago he had been awarded the chair of Marine Studies at the University of Tampa.

He closed the lid and panned round with the torch beam. The rafters were hung with cobwebs and the air smelled of old books. He noticed a couple of piles of what looked like encyclopedias
stacked against the towers of tea chests. He lifted the top one, blew away the dust and read:
Encyclopedia of Natural Science, Vol. 4.

Turning to his right, he spotted the water tank, heard it gurgle, and made a mental note to switch off the water at the mains. He cast the torch beam around and was about to swing back to the
old boxes when the light caught a large faded leather trunk. He recognized it vaguely as being one of the massive trunks his father would strap to the roof rack of the Oldsmobile before the family
headed towards the freeway and their regular holiday spot in the Catskills.

Geoff picked his way over, ducking under a low beam and crouching in front of the trunk. It was covered with a thick layer of dust and he could see a few patches of mould at one end of the lid.
The brass lock at the front had tarnished. He knelt down and went to release the lock. It was a little stiff, but gave, and he eased up the heavy top, letting it rest back against the brick wall
behind it.

It was almost completely empty. To the right lay a wooden box, a cheap mass-produced container with gaudy beads around the rim. He lifted it and opened the lid. Inside lay an old pen, an inkwell
and a few inexpensive bracelets. He returned it to the trunk and spotted an ancient teddy bear propped up behind a stack of books. It was Gerald, his favourite toy when he was six.

A biscuit tin rested on top of the books. It looked incredibly quaint, edged in a tarnished gold pattern, the lid carrying the image of a woman in a flour-speckled apron, her hair pulled back,
sleeves rolled up. Many years ago this tin had been in the kitchen. He had a clear image of himself sneaking a biscuit from it one morning before leaving for school.

Geoff laid it on the attic floor and prised open the lid. Inside was a pile of old black and white photographs. He lifted them out.

The first was a picture of his parents. They looked young. He guessed it had been snapped around the time they were married. Then there were half a dozen photographs of him and Amanda at various
ages: playing in the yard, on a rocking horse, winning a three-legged race at school. He placed them carefully back in the biscuit tin and noticed at the bottom of the pile a very old photograph he
had never seen before. It was of a short, slender man in a suit and tie. He was standing on the corner of a street, an old-fashioned car parked behind him. It looked like the picture must have been
taken in the late 1920s, maybe early 1930s. Then he recognized the face. It was his grandfather, William.

William, or Billy as he was called in the family, had died in 1981. Geoff was nineteen at the time and he had loved the old man dearly, but he felt as though he had never really known him as
well as he would have liked. There was always some sort of barrier there. It was a feeling others in the family shared. His mother, Margaret, Billy’s daughter-in-law, had once told him that
she had felt the same thing. She loved Billy, but she sensed he could never give all of himself to anyone and put it down to the traumatic experience that had shaped his life . . . his rescue from
the
Titanic
when he was twelve years old.

Geoff shook his head. ‘So many memories,’ he said aloud and surveyed the other end of the trunk. He saw a square of moth-eaten brown velvet, and lying beneath this another box. This
one was made from what looked like mahogany. Geoff had no recollection of ever seeing it before. He lifted it, eased it open and held it up to the light. A roll of papers wrapped in a frayed and
faded red silk ribbon lay inside. Intrigued, Geoff lifted it out, pulled off the ribbon and unfurled the pages to reveal a wad of papers covered with closely packed mathematical symbols. On top of
this was a letter. The paper was desiccated, the ink faded to an orange-brown. He started to read.

August 7, 1945.

Yesterday, my country exploded an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, while this morning, my eldest son, Thomas, has been accepted into Yale. For me, these two events share an odd
synchronicity.

I don’t ever speak of the
Titanic
, and even my beloved wife Geraldine knows only parts of my story.

I was coming up to my thirteenth birthday when my aunt and uncle told me they had decided that we would be leaving for America and a hoped-for new life of opportunity.

We travelled Third Class, of course, and even getting the 32 pounds and 10 shillings to pay the fare for a family of nine must have been a task in itself.

I remember I was a bit of a tearaway and I had a fondness for exploring the ship. It was a game evading the crew, sneaking around First Class. That was how I met Mr Wickins.

Well, he told me his name was Wickins and that he was a schoolteacher. It was only later, just as we said goodbye for the last time, that he confided in me that his real name was Dr Egbert
Fortescue and that he was actually a scientist.

He was an extraordinary man and he had an extraordinary tale to tell. He was on a mission to take what he called ‘a special chemical’ to America and he had some notes on his
theories that he was to pass on to another scientist there. When he knew that he could not survive, he gave me the notes and wrote on a sheet of paper the name and address of the person I should
give them to.

Sadly, fate took a hand. I remember it as though it were yesterday. I was being lowered into a lifeboat. Dr Fortescue, almost lost in the crowd, was waving farewell from the deck. The front
page of Egbert Fortescue’s notes flew off into the Atlantic breeze before I could read it. At that moment, I knew that history had taken a strange and unexpected turn.

The six hours that followed are lost to me. The next memory I have is of the sun breaking over the horizon as though nothing had happened. I was in a lifeboat squeezed together with forty or
fifty others and I saw a rescue boat slicing through the water headed straight for us. Within an hour I was aboard the
Carpathia
, the ship that came to the rescue of those who had survived
the sinking.

We all arrived in New York around the time we had originally expected, but under very different circumstances, of course. Thousands of people lined the shore as the ship pulled into Pier 54.
Some reports in the newspapers said there were over forty thousand well-wishers there that day.

I was accosted by reporters, old ladies with ideas of taking me home with them, and photographers wanting to take my picture. I even saw a man with a movie camera.

I know some people made fortunes from the disaster; others traded on it and used the fact that they had survived to help them secure jobs and to forge careers, but I knew that was not for
me.

I had Egbert Fortescue’s notes, but I had no idea what to do with them. And, to be honest, at first, there were more pressing matters to deal with. I had to find work and a place to
sleep. I found a laboring job pretty quickly. Uncle Bert had been right all along in his belief that America would be a land of opportunity. I was one of the thousands of men who worked on the
Woolworth Building on Broadway . . . all fifty-seven floors of it!