Necroscope: The Mobius Murders (14 page)

Finally, putting his glass down with the fine cognac barely touched, and while Darcy sipped, smoked and said nothing, Harry laid the photograph aside and began to read the typed text; and to scan the newspaper excerpts, the school and university progress reports, medical records, transcripts of Mensa evaluations and comments; and to literally consume every detail of his suspect subject’s life…except, of course, for any proof of his guilt.

Perhaps most interestng was the fact that the ex-Professor now regularly toured within a hundred mile radius of Edinburgh, lecturing to various UFO societies and groups with similar pursuits on all kinds of exotic subjects, including the mystical—and, according to him, the magical?—properties of numbers…

And after forty minutes or so of absorbing all of this:

“Gordon J. Hemmings,” Harry mused, almost to himself, “‘this is your life.’ But how many other lives? That’s assuming you’re it. A colour photo would have been better, but beggars can’t be choosers.” And then, to Darcy:

“Your man Geoff Lambert deserves a medal. And if this turns out to be my great leech I’ll pin one on him myself! You called it ‘a fortunate coincidence,’ his being on duty last night. Me, I call it a bloody miracle! Have you
read
this file, Darcy?”

Nodding, the other said: “Just finished when I called you. It took me about the same length of time, too. It was my intention to give it to one of the fellows here, someone who doesn’t have too much on his plate already: David Chung, maybe? Or—”

“What?” Harry was quick to cut in. “Chung, your top precog? David Chung, who unlike Lambert is the genuine article: a fully-fledged clairvoyant or futurist? No! Because that could rebound. We’ve seen before how some people get all itchy, nervous, aware that they’re being scanned. And I can’t take the chance that it might happen this time. I
want
this fellow—if it’s really him—and I want him cold, dead cold!”

“—Or maybe Anna Marie English?” Darcy finished what he had started to say.

“Your empath? That’s out, too, and for the same reason. Empathy, like telepathy, can sometimes work both ways. No, Darcy, this is down to me now; but there’s still something I need. And since Geoff Lambert has taken it this far, he’s the man I would like to see working on it…with your permission. Because for my money he’s already proved himself three or four times over!”

“Yes,
if
he really has found you your man,” Darcy answered. “But anyway, since he’s on Duty Officer again tonight, I’ll get him working on it. So what is it you’d like him to do?”

“Can I borrow your pen?” said Harry, scrabbling through the loose leaves from his For-Your-Eyes-Only envelope. And as Darcy passed him a ballpoint: “These four names and dates here—” he ringed them in, “—could be all important. It was my intention to ask you to search for something, anything that might connect them. That’s still what I want, except now we know
exactly
what you should be looking for, and what that connection might be.”

Darcy nodded. “Your man’s lectures, right? You want to know if maybe he was in the right place at the right time.”

Harry nodded grimly. “Or the wrong place and the wrong time, at least for his victims!”

“Okay, you can consider it done,” said Darcy, as the Necroscope stood up with the Hemmings file in his hand. “But for now…is that it? You’re done here?”

“For now, yes,” said Harry. “Hopefully for good.”

“And if Hemmings is your man, what then? You’ll try to kill him?”

“Or he’ll try to kill me.” Harry nodded.

“He can do that?” Darcy was more than mildly concerned.

“He can do some strange and deadly things, certainly,” said Harry.

Shaking his head as he came round from behind his desk, the other looked troubled. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, Harry, but I don’t much care for the way you say that sort of thing. I mean, the way you openly admit to planning something like that: which amounts to an execution, an unauthorised, illegal killing…in fact a murder!”

“I’m not too keen on it myself,” said Harry. “But
you
certainly wouldn’t want to do it, and how the hell can you ask MI5? The only proof we have is me, and how would I go about explaining what I’ve seen, or how I know what I know? So—”

“So it’s your way or not at all?”

“Well, what do you reckon?”

“Good luck, Harry.” Darcy offered his hand.

Harry took it, shook it, and said. “You get that connection for me, okay? And then when this is over I’ll let you know what happened. But if I don’t get back to you—or if I
can’t
—well then you’ll know what you must do. Because that’s when it’ll be down to you.”

With which he stepped backwards away from Darcy, and disappeared, and there was a sudden, brief draught as the air rushed in to fill the vacuum where he had been…

On his way home, the Necroscope broke his fantastic journey at a favourite fish-and-chip shop he remembered from his formative years in Hartlepool on the north-east coast. Tightly wrapped in greaseproof paper and pages from yesterday’s
Northern Echo
, and smelling of salt and vinegar, the food had no time at all to go cold; it was still steaming deliciously when Harry returned instantaneously to his living-room study and ate from the opened-up wrapping papers.

Then, ignoring his slightly greasy fingers, he opened Hemmings’ file and read through it again, and again—and yet again—each time more slowly and carefully than the time before.

He pictured Geoff Lambert, a man he had never met, working furiously hard through the night and morning to put all of this material together, and thought,
Not just one medal but ten, and a raise and a commendation to boot
; the man’s investigation had been
that
thorough, was
that
complete! Then again, he’d had the benefit of every E-Branch resource to work with, not to mention his own contacts in Mensa; but still he’d made a remarkable job of it.

As Harry had pored over the file’s contents, he’d ringed in red ballpoint the details he found most intriguing; that way he could more readily relocate and re-examine all such information among the crammed text, of which there was more than enough to make doing it worthwhile. Information such as:

A medical detail from Hemmings’ childhood.

Aged nine he had been diagnosed with a mild encephalic disorder, when X-ray scans had detected a small mass of apparently anomalous or extraneous nerve fibres in an area of his cerebrum believed to regulate language, logic, numeracy, rational thought and intelligence in general; and in particular spatial and temporal relativity. And Harry had pondered over that one for many long, thoughtful moments…

Another interesting detail:

Hemmings’ high opinion of himself perhaps amounting to megalomania, especially noticeable in a comment Geoff Lambert had obtained from one of the ex-Professor’s former students at the university:

“He didn’t like questions from the class, and wouldn’t even listen to arguments! Hemmings was almost—no, strike almost—he
was
a doctrinaire. We complained about him, the way he would introduce his own crazy theories into his so-called lessons. As a result, the fat arrogant pig (no one liked him) was called before the vice-chancellor for a huge dressing-down, which didn’t sit at all well with him. He left the university and his job on the same day, following which we actually went back to studying maths again—thank God…!”

As a footnote to this, Lambert had written:

“In re the above, the vice-chancellor was Professor (soon to be ‘emeritus’) Latimer Calloway; he retired shortly thereafter, but his retirement had nothing to do with Hemmings. Calloway was simply an old man; in fact he died just five weeks later during an evening country walk near his family home in Devon. The post mortem said it was a massive heart attack, and he was buried at…” Etcetera.

Buried
, thought the Necroscope, disappointedly.
Not simply vanished, having been flung out across the sea and dropped from a great height.
Which appeared to cancel out at least one possible area of investigation, or, numerically speaking, one factor of the equation. But it still might be worth looking into.

As for “doctrinaire”: oddly, that was a word the Necroscope hadn’t come across before. He checked it out in his dictionary, which advised him…quote:

“
Adj
theoretical; highly preoccupied with theory, inclined to carry principles to logical but unworkable extremes; impractical; dogmatic.”

So, if Geoff Lambert’s university contact’s description of Hemmings’ teaching practices was accurate, his use of that word was right on the money. Not only did it fit the ex-Professor to a tee, it simultaneously helped in complementing Harry’s mental picture of him: his character and disposition as opposed to his purely physical appearance.

This last was bolstered by the comments of one of Lambert’s former colleagues in Mensa, in fact the society’s Recorder, who had replied to Geoff’s request with the following details:

Gordon J. Hemmings had been inducted into Mensa a few weeks before he was ten years old. After the next three or four years however, his attendance at various local meetings of the organization had become infrequent and eventually ceased altogether. When contacted after he had left home and started to teach, the “excuses” he had given for his apparent tardiness had been very disparaging of other members, and even insulting. Those several members whose chief interests lay in mathematics, for instance, were (in the young Hemmings’ opinion) “mainly innumerate beyond the most basic levels of mental arithmetic,” while the majority of Mensa’s remaining “alleged intellectuals” were “barely capable of spouting parrot-fashion the frequently erroneous mantras of their far superior forerunners, utterly failing to grasp the fact that the true secrets of the universe lie far beyond them, abiding the exploration of more adventurous and visionary intelligences!” Such as himself, doubtless.

All such comments had been—at least ostensibly—struck from the society’s records, but were nevertheless remembered. As for the Recorder’s final conclusion: “What a pompous, insolent, affected and deluded little prick was
that
one!”

The Necroscope had to agree with most of the latter, though he wasn’t at all sure about Hemmings’ supposed “delusions.” For the man—or monster—had very definitely gone on to explore some of “the true mysteries of the universe…”

With which, at exactly that point in his examination of the file’s contents, Harry had realized that apart from any further confirmation from Geoff Lambert and/or E-Branch, he was already some three-quarters convinced that ex-Professor Gordon J. Hemmings was indeed his great leech.

Nor was he finished, for as he moved on there were yet more details that attracted his attention. For instance:

The fact that Hemmings had been present—presumably alone—by his father’s deathbed at the house near Dalkeith, which he now owned. But…his own father? Surely not! The thought that had crossed Harry’ mind was barely tenable, and even less acceptable in light of the fact that the elder Hemmings, much like Latimer Calloway only a short while later, had apparently “died of natural causes.”

But, on the other hand, why not? Familial scruples aside—if such were valid in the case of the red-faced devil—a murderer is after all a murderer; and the younger Hemmings, as the only son and heir, had inherited everything. As for his father: his remains now resided in a Dalkeith graveyard.

All in all there were things here—which to anyone but the Necroscope would certainly be considered “dead” matters, “cold cases”—that Harry might have decided to investigate personally; but while he waited for that one final piece of conclusive evidence from E-Branch, it probably made more sense to request the assistance of his Ma and the Great Majority.

For which reason he took the Möbius route to the riverbank, there explaining his final needs to his ever forbearing Ma, and returned as soon as possible to his study.

And then it was simply a matter of patiently waiting, which was something he’d never been very good at…