Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [48]
Matthew was stunned. It was the last thing he had been expecting. “Do we show our interest by investigating it, or leave it to the Cambridge police?”
Shearing looked exhausted. He had the dazed, rather stiff air of someone newly bereaved, but Matthew knew it was not the young scientist personally whose loss bruised him so deeply, but the wound it dealt to the project that was possibly crucial to their survival in the war. He harbored the thought that perhaps this was another brilliant act of the Peacemaker’s. A blow like this, with such surgical precision, emulated the pattern of his parents’ deaths—swift, murderous, but in its own way hideously strategic.
“Reavley!” Shearing’s voice broke his moment’s inattention.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I can go to St. Giles without drawing any particular notice, if you want me to. I can stay at home, visit with my brother. He’s still far from recovered. But if it was a German agent who killed him, that won’t fool anyone.”
“We’ve no idea yet who it was,” Shearing replied. “He was only found this morning.”
“Where? By whom?” Matthew asked. It was still hard to grasp as reality. It was someone he had never met, but his death could affect the entire country, millions of lives, perhaps the course of history. It was too vast to have meaning yet.
“By his wife,” Shearing answered. He moved to stand with his back to the window, the late morning light shadowed from his face for a moment. “By the potting shed at the bottom of the garden. He was probably there all night.”
“She didn’t miss him?” Matthew was startled. Perhaps this was nothing to do with Germany, but was simply a domestic tragedy.
Shearing must have read the thought in his expression. The ghost of a smile touched his eyes and vanished instantly. “Don’t cling to that, Reavley. It means nothing.” He walked slowly over to his desk, but without sitting down in the leather-padded, round-backed chair, as if it would in some way imprison him. “His throat was torn out with the prongs of a garden fork.”
Matthew winced.
Shearing saw it. “It could still have been a woman’s crime,” he pointed out. “That doesn’t mean it had nothing to do with Germany. It could be any of a dozen things, and whatever it was, it is still the loss of the best scientific brain in the country. That matters more than any one man’s life.”
There was nothing to argue. “What do you want me to do, sir?”
“Get your brother the priest to resurrect the man!” Shearing snapped, his eyes blazing for a moment, then with fear and will suppressing the panic he leveled his voice. “We need to know whether it was personal or enemy inspired,” he answered. “We’ve done everything we can to keep the project secret, but it’s almost impossible. If there is a German spy or sympathizer in St. Giles, we must find and destroy him, preferably without exposing him publicly. It’s devastating for morale to know we are so vulnerable. And of course we need to guard ourselves better in the future.”
Matthew did not interrupt.
“In the hope that it was personal, possibly domestic,” Shearing went on, “we must avoid drawing undue attention. It’s a murder. Leave the local police to do what we have to hope they are trained for.” His lips tightened. “What I need you to do, Reavley, is find out from Corcoran the absolute truth, however bitter—can we complete the project without Blaine?”
“Yes, sir,” Matthew said quietly.
“We can allow other people hope,” Shearing said. “I need the truth, Reavley, whatever it is.”
“Yes, sir. I know that.”
Matthew assigned his immediate duties to his colleagues and cleared his desk, then early the next morning he drove to St. Giles. There was no point in going the same day. The police would need time to assemble the preliminary facts, and more important, Corcoran would have to assess the situation at the Establishment. He would investigate what Blaine had left in the way of notes or instructions to others, whom else he had trusted, or who might understand his calculations. It was not a