Newton’s Fire

‘You quiet ones, eh,’ grinned Pelham, pulling away. ‘What was it? A bank?’

‘That’s where the money is,’ agreed Luke.

They reached the junction with the main road. ‘Where are we going?’ asked Pelham.

‘I need to find a woman.’

‘What have I been telling you?’

‘Her name’s Rachel Parkes,’ said Luke. ‘She works at Caius College. But she’s not there this afternoon. I already checked.’

Pelham slid him a glance. ‘You haven’t turned into some weird stalker-man, have you?’

‘Look who’s talking.’

‘Fair enough.’ Pelham pulled out his phone. ‘Caius, right?’

‘Yes. Why? Do you know someone there?’

Pelham grinned as he scrolled through his address book. ‘Mate, I know someone everywhere.’

III

The man had a Midwest accent, and he sounded to be in his fifties or even his sixties, though Croke had been wrong in such assessments before. ‘You don’t need to know my name,’ he said. ‘But my boss was just called by a friend of yours. A reverend friend.’

‘Ah,’ said Croke. So this was the Office of the Vice President calling. Instinctively he set down his glass and sat up a little straighter, only to smile when he caught himself at it.

‘We’ll speak only this once,’ said the man. ‘If you ever breathe a word about it, you’ll regret it.’

‘I’ll bet it turns your wife on when you talk like that,’ said Croke.

‘Don’t get smart with me. You’ve already made a bad impression coming in through the back door like this.’

‘Would I have got in through the front?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Maybe not to you.’

‘If we’re going to work together—’

‘We’re going to work together just fine. You know why? Because your boss just ordered you to help us, or we wouldn’t be talking. So stop wasting my time and get on with it.’

A rustling of paper. ‘I’m reading your CIA file,’ said the man. ‘Fascinating stuff.’

Croke took a sip of bourbon. ‘I do my best.’

‘Front companies in D.C., London and Hong Kong. I’ll bet they could do with an audit.’

‘They’re not front companies. They provide high-level business intelligence and security consultancy services.’

‘That’s not what it says here. It says here they’re cover for your arms deals.’

‘Is this really what you want to talk about?’

A page was turned. ‘Your father is Dr Arthur Croke, I believe. The guy who used to run our USAF lab up in Rome.’

‘He still runs it.’

‘Really?’ He sounded genuinely surprised. ‘I thought he’d had to have retired by now. I mean, god, he was getting on when I met him. And that has to be twenty years ago, at least.’

‘He’s been running it thirty-three years,’ said Croke, with genuine pride.

‘A fine man. A real American patriot. His whole life dedicated to his country.’

‘Yes.’

‘So despite some of these … startling things I’m reading in your file, we’d have no reason to doubt that you’re a patriot too; no reason to fear you’d ever do anything to harm our nation or bring shame upon your father.’

‘Quite right.’

‘Good. So the story’s going to run like this: in your work as an arms dealer – forgive me, as a security consultant – you sometimes bump up against people of dubious character. It so happens that two of those people have recently and separately warned you of an attack being planned on our great ally Britain. As a loyal American citizen, you naturally passed this intelligence on to us. It happens to tally with some chatter we’ve been picking up ourselves. We’re therefore about to warn the Brits that we fear some bad guys are planning an atrocity in and around Crane Court. The good news is that your sources are prepared to pass along new info as they get it. The bad news is that they’ll only speak to you. But you’ve agreed to be our middleman, passing that information on in real time.’

Croke snorted. ‘So if this turns to shit, you can put all the blame on me.’

‘Of course. What did you expect? Now, you’re already on your way to England, right? Which airport?’

‘Cambridge.’

‘We’re shifting you to City of London. One of our people will meet you there. His name’s Richard Morgenstern.’ He gave Croke his cell and other contact details. ‘He’s seconded to a new counterterrorism group the Brits have just set up; but he’s loyal to us. To us personally, I mean. To my boss.’

‘Does he know what we’re looking for?’

‘He knows what. We had to tell him that much. But he doesn’t know why. My boss just told him that finding it was her number one priority right now. That’s all he needed to know. He’s a true patriot.’

‘Another one. Excellent. We can sing anthems together.’

‘We’re not going to talk again, you and me. Everything is to go through Morgenstern. And if you ever breathe one word about our involvement in all this, you’re a dead man. Am I clear?’

Croke smiled. ‘As crystal,’ he said.

EIGHT

I

Before setting fire to Penelope Martyn’s house, Max Walters had flipped through her address book to find out where Rachel Parkes lived. Now he pulled up opposite her front door. There was no sign of life inside, and when he tried her telephone he was switched over to voice mail. He glanced around at Kieran, who was monitoring the old bat’s email account on his laptop. ‘Any reply yet?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Okay,’ Walters said. ‘Let’s do it.’

They waited for a cyclist to pass, crossed the road. The afternoon had grown sticky, hinting at storms. A communal front path led to a shared front door with buzzers for the top and bottom floor flats. He rang the ground-floor bell. No reply. An elderly couple walking slowly by along the pavement darted suspicious looks at them. Walters smiled cordially and wished them a good afternoon, but it did no good. They kept glancing around as they crossed the road and went inside a house opposite. Then their net curtains began to twitch. ‘Shit,’ muttered Walters.

‘Maybe there’s a back way in,’ suggested Kieran.

They walked to the end of the street, turned left. ‘What about those locks?’ asked Walters. ‘Any problem?’

‘The Yale’s a piece of piss,’ Pete assured him. ‘The Chubb’ll be a bit harder. Say a minute for the pair. Plenty of time for those old farts to see us and call the cops.’

They turned up the next street. An unbroken terrace blocked any hope of breaking into Parkes’ flat through a rear window. ‘Maybe we’d better wait until dark,’ said Kieran.

Walters snorted. ‘Today’s about the longest bloody day of the year. And what if she opens her email while we’re waiting?’ He took a deep breath. He hadn’t yet reported this mess to Croke, hoping to sort it all out first. But he couldn’t put it off any longer. He didn’t want Pete and Kieran listening in, however, so he walked off a little way before calling Croke’s number.

‘Have you got my papers?’ asked Croke.

‘Yes,’ said Walters. ‘But there’s been a hitch.’

‘A hitch?’ asked Croke.

Walters had meant to play it cool, but somehow the story came blurting out. Croke had that effect on him. ‘We’re outside the girl’s place now,’ he finished. ‘But there are curtains twitching everywhere.’

‘I don’t believe this,’ said Croke acidly. ‘I ask you to buy me some papers, and instead I get arson and a dead woman. And now you’re worried about curtains?’

‘We work for one of your companies, sir. If we’re arrested, it’ll lead the police straight back to you. I wanted to make absolutely sure you think it’s worth the risk.’

Silence. ‘Okay,’ said Croke finally. ‘Stay where you are. I’ll see what I can arrange.’

II

Pelham scrolled for a number then jammed his phone between shoulder and ear. ‘Hey, gorgeous,’ he said. ‘It’s me. Yeah. Listen, that friend of yours at Caius. Sonia, isn’t it? You couldn’t give her a call for me, could you? Brilliant. I need to get hold of a girl there. Rachel something …’ He glanced across at Luke for a prompt.

‘Rachel Parkes,’ said Luke.

‘Rachel Parkes,’ relayed Pelham. He listened a moment, laughed loudly. ‘No. Nothing like that, I promise. A favour for a mate.’ He laughed again. ‘What do you mean? I’ve got plenty of mates. I just won’t introduce you or you’ll run off with one of them.’ He nodded vigorously. ‘Yeah, anything you can get. Mobile, home phone, address, whatever. Thanks, sweetheart. Love you.’ He killed the call, turned to Luke. ‘Miriam,’ he said. ‘I think she might be the one.’

‘You always think they might be the one.’

‘Keeps the heart young, falling in love. Try it yourself sometime.’

‘Maybe next week. This week I’m focusing on staying alive.’

‘You’ll need something to write on when she calls back.’ He gestured at his glove compartment. ‘Have a rootle around in there.’

‘Jesus, mate,’ said Luke, as he precipitated a small avalanche of candy bars and boiled sweets.

‘Better give me one of those,’ said Pelham. ‘Wouldn’t want to faint from sugar deficiency; not with all these telephone poles around.’

‘Was that when the last one attacked?’ asked Luke, finding himself a stubby pencil and a notepad. ‘While you were feeding?’

‘What are you? A claims adjuster?’ He tore the wrapper off one with his teeth, stuffed the molten mess inside into his mouth. He was still chewing when his phone rang, had to give himself a couple of moments to swallow it away. ‘Hey, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Any joy?’ He listened a moment, grinned. ‘You’re a star.’ He called out phone numbers and an address for Luke to jot down. ‘Thanks, gorgeous,’ he said. ‘And we’re still on for tomorrow, yeah? Great. Then take care, now.’ He ended the call and handed Luke his phone so that he could try the various numbers. Without success. ‘Do you want to go sit outside her place?’ asked Pelham. ‘You can’t consider yourself a proper stalker until you’ve done that.’

‘How far is it?’

Pelham turned on his GPS, typed in her address. ‘Other side of town,’ he said. ‘Twenty minutes or so.’ He gave Luke a pointed look. ‘Just about long enough for you to tell me what the fuck’s going on.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Luke. He took a moment to order his thoughts. ‘Remember that business with the Uni?’

Pelham nodded soberly. ‘Of course.’

‘I tried to get myself another job, but I was way too toxic. It was clearly going to be a year or two before the whole thing died down, so I decided to make a virtue of necessity, write my book. I’d been talking about it long enough.’

‘Telling me.’

‘I had some savings, but it was still going to be pretty tight, you know; so I put the word out that if there was any work—’

‘I asked around,’ said Pelham. ‘I swear I did. But you know how things are.’

‘I wasn’t having a go. I’m just explaining the background. Because around last Christmas this guy rings out of the blue. He tells me his name is Steven, though I doubt now that it really was. He says that he’s a lawyer and that he’s got a possible job for me. One of his clients is apparently a Newton obsessive.’

‘You should get on famously, then.’

‘This client had commissioned him to track down all of Newton’s papers still missing from the Sotheby’s auction. You know about that, right?’

‘Do I?’ asked Pelham. He pulled up at a set of lights, indicated to turn left. ‘Tell you what: why don’t you give me the refresher?’

III

Richard Morgenstern sounded young, enthusiastic, and distinctly Texan. ‘Great to hear from you, sir,’ he boomed, when Croke called him. ‘ I’m on my way to City Airport now. You’re not there already, are you?’

‘No. But I need something done and I hoped you’d be able to help.’

‘If I can, I will. Anything for a man like you.’

‘A man like me?’

‘A friend of hers. She called me herself, you know? I mean, hell, I saw her a few times during the campaign, and once at the Academy. But I never spoke to her before. And she wasn’t my Commander-in-Chief then. It’s not the same, is it?’

‘No. I guess not.’

‘You know what she told me? She told me this is her number one priority right now. She said this trumps everything.’ He laughed a little giddily, as though he still couldn’t quite believe it. ‘So tell me what you need. If it’s in my power—’

‘There’s an email that could be problematic,’ said Croke. ‘I need it deleted.’

‘Civilian or government.’

‘Civilian.’

‘Hell,’ said Morgenstern. ‘It would be. Reading an email’s easy. We get copies of everything sent anywhere. But deleting one is hard. The service providers can be real assholes. They like evidence of threat or wrongdoing. They like warrants. Can we take this to the courts?’

‘No,’ said Croke.

‘Then I don’t know what to suggest.’

‘How about the police?’ asked Croke. ‘Will they do what you ask without going to a judge?’ He outlined his idea.

Morgenstern laughed. ‘That shouldn’t be a problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on to it now. I’ll call back if I have any trouble; otherwise you can assume it’s taken care of, and I’ll see you on the ground in thirty.’

‘Thanks,’ said Croke. ‘I’ll let my people know to expect company.’

NINE

I

It wasn’t easy, giving an abbreviated history of the Newton papers. Luke had to start way back. ‘Okay,’ he told Pelham. ‘Newton never married or had children, so he left all his papers to his niece Catherine. Her daughter married into the Portsmouth family, who offered them to Cambridge University back in the 1870s. Cambridge only wanted the scientific ones, so the rest were eventually auctioned off by Sotheby’s in 1936. Sotheby’s kept a record of who bought every lot. Most of the buyers were well-known dealers, but there were some private collectors too. The economist John Maynard Keynes bought a huge number of the alchemical lots; and a Sephardic Jew called Yahuda bought a bunch of theological papers that were later used to support the case for a Jewish homeland.’

‘You what?’ asked Pelham.

‘I know it sounds strange, but the British were occupying Palestine at the time. Newton was the great man of British science, so his belief in the restoration of a Jewish state really meant something.’

‘And Newton wanted a Jewish state, did he?’

Luke nodded. ‘A lot of them did back then,’ he said. ‘They believed it was a necessary precondition of the Second Coming. But the point is that we know where the great majority of lots ended up. Keynes left all his to King’s College Cambridge, for example. Yahuda’s eventually went to the National Library of Israel.’ He glanced at Pelham. ‘Remember when Jay went to Jerusalem that time? That was to see the Yahuda archive.’

‘But some of the Sotheby’s lots have gone missing,’ suggested Pelham. ‘And this lawyer hired you to find them.’

‘More or less. It was good money, it meshed perfectly with my research and it wasn’t particularly demanding. I mean it’s not exactly Sherlock Holmes. Mostly it’s afternoons in reference libraries and public records offices, or writing letters and waiting for replies. The lawyer kept pushing me, but honestly there was only so much I could do. People have been hunting for the damned things for years, after all. It wasn’t as if I was likely to do any better.’

‘But you did?’

‘There were these buyers we call the three Ms,’ said Luke. ‘They have no connection with each other, except that they each bought one of the missing lots, and their surnames all begin with the letter M. May, Manning and Martin. Not much to go on, but I figured I could narrow it down. For example, they most likely lived in or around London. Any further away, they’d likely have bid through a dealer. And if they’d made a special trip for the auction, then surely they’d have bought more than one lot.’

Pelham nodded. ‘Makes sense.’

‘So I went through various 1936 London and Home Counties directories for plausible candidates, then tracked descendants through obits and wills and the like.’

‘Sounds a hoot.’

‘It was, curiously. Or a distraction, at least. Anyway, I got no joy from that, so I tried alternate spellings instead. Mays, for example. Munnings. Martyn with a “y” rather than an “i”.’

‘Ah,’ said Pelham. ‘I sense we’re getting somewhere.’

‘A Bernard Martyn lived in an apartment in Bruton Place in 1936, just a short stroll from Sotheby’s. I checked into him: a particle physicist with a special interest in light.’

‘So bound to be interested in Newton?’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? And likely to be pretty well off, too, with an address like that. Not that these lots were expensive; not for what they were. Ten to fifteen guineas, that kind of thing. About £500 in modern money. The entire collection only raised nine grand.’

‘What would they be worth now?’

‘God knows. They don’t often come up for sale. And it depends massively on how interesting it is. Twenty or thirty grand for anything half decent. And if it’s unusual, if it hints at original thinking …’ He shook his head. ‘A hundred grand easily. Quite possibly two or even three.’

‘No wonder your client wanted them.’

‘Anyway, Bernard Martyn died back in 1969. He was childless, so his estate passed to his nephew George. George died too, a few years back, leaving the residue to his widow Penelope. I tracked her down to the family pile in the Fens, so I wrote to ask her if, by any chance, she knew where Bernard Martyn’s belongings were. They’re up in my attic, she replied, covered by dust sheets. No one’s looked at them in decades.’

‘So you got in your car and drove on down?’

‘And what should I find in one of the boxes,’ agreed Luke, ‘but four pages of Isaac Newton’s alchemical notes?’ He told Pelham everything that had happened since, finishing with his arrival at Cherry Hinton Science Park.

‘Bugger me,’ said Pelham. ‘You have had a day.’

‘So you see why I need Rachel Parkes. Her aunt’s email and those photos are all I’ve got. If those bastards delete them, I’m toast.’

II

The policeman was uncommonly tall and thin, so that he looked disconcertingly like a marionette as he climbed out of his patrol car. And he kept dabbing at his septum with his index finger, as if tickled by allergies.

‘Thanks for getting here so quickly,’ said Walters, shaking him by his hand.

‘Sod all else going on,’ said the policeman. ‘Never is, round here.’ He folded his arms and leaned back against his car. ‘So you’re counterterrorism, right?’

‘We can’t discuss that, I’m afraid.’

‘I’ve been thinking of getting a transfer myself, see if I can’t get some proper action. What’s it like with your mob?’

‘I’m sorry. We really can’t discuss it.’

He grunted and reached back inside his car for his cap. ‘So what do you need me for?’ he asked. ‘The governor only told me where to come.’

‘There’s a house we want to look inside. But we can’t have the locals complaining, so we need to show them we’re on the side of the angels.’

‘Mannequin duty, huh. Ah, well.’ He gave the house a gloomy look. ‘So this is part of the great terrorist nexus, eh? Should me and the boys be keeping an eye on it?’

Walters shook his head. ‘It’s information we’re after, not bad guys.’

‘If you say so.’

‘And not a word about this, right? Not to anyone. We’re talking national security here.’

‘So I was told.’

‘Good.’

Walters joined Kieran and Pete by Parkes’ front door. The locks put up little fight. They spread out inside, taking different rooms. The kitchen was clean but cramped, with shabby units and a noisy fridge. Walters peeled himself a satsuma as he flipped through a stack of bills.

‘Two bedrooms,’ said Kieran, appearing at the door. ‘One’s an old biddy’s; the landlady, I assume. The other is Parkes’. Her desk’s set up for a laptop, but there’s no laptop. She must have it with her.’

‘Any other devices?’

‘None that I can find.’

‘Shit. Then what do we do?’

‘They have broadband. I can put an intercept on the router. When she logs on, we’ll piggyback in with her, then hijack her ID and disrupt her connection. She’ll assume it’s a glitch with her router or her machine. By the time she’s turned everything off and on again, the email will be history. She’ll never even know it was there.’

‘How long to set up?’

‘Five minutes. Maybe ten.’

Walters nodded. ‘Then get to it,’ he said.

III

Noxious smells and unnerving clanking noises were coming from beneath the bonnet of Rachel’s Rover as she bunny-hopped along her street. She clutched the steering wheel tight and let out a heartfelt curse. Everything seemed to be going wrong today. The meeting at her brother’s care home had been a near disaster. When you had nothing with which to bargain, you made rash promises instead. Ten grand by the end of the month. How on earth was she to find that? She was already pushing her luck at both her jobs. Her room was as cheap as Cambridge could offer, she’d pared every surplus expense from her life, had nothing left to sell. She could ask Aunt Penelope for help, but her pride revolted at the thought. If Penny’s odious sons found out she’d given Bren any more money, they’d cut her off from her grandkids out of sheer spite. Rachel would never forgive herself if—

A police car was parked outside her house, a gangling officer leaning against it. And she could have sworn she saw movement in the front room, even though Betty was in Ireland for a fortnight. Her heart sank. They couldn’t have been burgled, could they? Not on top of everything else. She parked and hurried across. ‘What is it?’ she asked the policeman. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Do you live here, ma’am?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Why?’

The front door opened and three men came out; plain-clothes officers, presumably. They looked big and purposeful and more than a little mean.

‘This young lady lives here,’ the policeman told them.

The eldest of the three was blond-headed, about forty, wearing an expensive pale-grey suit. When he looked at her, he gave a little double blink that she found strangely unnerving. ‘Rachel Parkes?’ he asked, coming towards her.

‘That’s right. Why? Who are you? What’s going on? Has there been a break-in?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’ He nodded at her front door. ‘Perhaps we could talk inside.’

Something about him and his companions gave her the creeps. The last thing she wanted was to be alone with them. ‘What’s wrong with out here?’ she asked.

‘Very well.’ He touched her shoulder to turn her away from the policeman, then adopted the falsely sombre expression of one about to deliver tragic news.

Her heart plunged. Bren had done it, the thing she’d feared he’d do, too proud to be a burden. ‘My brother,’ she said.

The man shook his head. ‘Your aunt. Penelope Martyn.’

The relief was dizzying; she had to put a hand on the railing to steady herself. Then came a strange mix of grief and guilt and puzzlement. ‘That’s terrible,’ she said. ‘But why tell me? I’m not her next of kin.’

‘There was a fire,’ he said. ‘We have reason to believe it was set deliberately. Do you know a young man called Luke Hayward?’

‘Luke Hayward?’ She shook her head. ‘No. Why? Was it him?’

‘Let’s just say his name rang some rather loud bells. Let’s just say we’re very keen to talk to him. Which is where you come in.’