“No.”
“See? And you’re not likely to even have a chance at getting it without your disks, right?”
The look on my face must have said it all.
“What research are you working on?” I asked, wanting to get the spotlight off me. I hated it when my questions came back at me.
“Oh, I’m quite eclectic. Move around and fill in the gaps left by my colleagues. Some taxonomy. I’ve worked with parasites and planaria, and done some studies with mice. I’ve spent the last few years working on moose and their predators, and a new project that I hope will prove very interesting.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t have enough data to go public yet or know for sure if the hypothesis will stand, so I’d rather not say just yet.” She smiled. She was actually quite pretty when her face lit up like that.
“It’s a new angle, may not pan out … but I have to wait and organize the data before I make it public. You know how it is with us scientists. Paranoid that someone else will beat us to it.”
The phone rang, and Leslie grabbed for it.
“Mitchell here.” I watched as she threw me a grimace and said into the phone, “Really Davies, don’t you have anything better to do than that? I’ll get it to you as soon as I have a moment. Yeah, she’s here. Why? You want me to send her over? Okay. No problem. I’ll tell her.”
She hung up the phone and stared through me.
“Odious little man, that Davies. Always skulking about trying to dig up dirt. Seems to hate us all. Can’t imagine what turns a man to hate so much.” She refocused her eyes on me and said, “He wants to see you. Two doors down and on the left.”
She turned back to her boxes and I started to leave, then hesitated.
“Why did it take so long for Diamond’s body to be discovered? Surely someone from the biology station would have gone up to his camp?”
“He never encouraged anyone to go up there. In fact, he actively discouraged anyone unless it was a dire emergency. We left him to his own devices. Didn’t make any difference to us. Even his women never went up there. It was his sacred turf. He guarded it like a cornered sow. We simply respected that, and by the time you found his body he wasn’t due out for another day.”
I thanked Leslie for answering my questions, but as I left, I hesitated in the hall outside her door, aware that something she had said had twigged something important somewhere in my mind. Problem was I couldn’t quite grasp what it had been before it was gone.
I followed Leslie’s instructions and found Davies sitting at his desk. He was a small man, no taller than I was, in his early sixties with a halo of white hair punctuating a bright red dome and a bristly, charcoal grey Groucho mustache. He was flipping through some files in the open drawer of a desk, but when he saw me he jumped to his feet and scurried around his desk to meet me at the door. He did rather give the impression of a rooster with his bald red head and jerky movements.
“You must be Dr. O’Callaghan.” His voice was cold but surprisingly beautiful with a deep, lilting, musical sound at odds with his size. He could have had a career in radio. He didn’t offer his hand or ask me in, so I stood in the doorway and waited. “May I ask you what you think you’re doing going around asking questions you have no business asking?”
Taken aback, I began to explain about my disks, but he impatiently waved me to silence.
“Yes, yes, your disks and larvae and things.” He dismissed my entire career with a wave of his hand. “Don filled me in on it all, and I want it to stop. I can’t have you in here wasting my people’s time. We’ve had enough from the police and the press. If you need anything please come to me.”
He was invading my personal space, herding me before him and out of his doorway and into the hall.
“Perhaps I can help you sometime, but not today. As you can see I am extremely busy.” With that, he withdrew his business card, handed it to me, and quietly closed the door behind him.
I stood in the hall a moment wondering why he felt so threatened. I debated precisely two seconds about going behind his back to see Patrick Whyte. But I was on a roll, my confidence level at an all-time high, and I wasn’t about to waste it — I never seemed to be able to count on it being there for me, so it was a real bonus. I needed it now, and I had it, so I cruised down the hallway and found a back stairway up to the second-floor labs, hoping Davies wouldn’t appear out of nowhere to scream at me. I peered into one lab and was directed down the hall to another whose door was wide open. Through it I could hear a male voice raised in anger.
“Yes, well, keep out of my damn business. I can speak to whomever I want. It’s a free world,” said the voice and then I heard a telephone slamming down.
I waited a discreet few seconds so that he wouldn’t think I’d overheard and then knocked on the open door. He was standing by the window looking out, and at the sound of my knock he jumped and turned around. Evidently he was making another phone call because he gripped the phone in his hand and I noticed his knuckles were white. He was very tall, maybe 6’ 5”, and well built, and his thick, unruly blond hair swept over his forehead like a tidal wave. His eyes were a soft, deep, clear cobalt blue, and as he turned them on me I felt myself involuntarily melting into them. We stared at each other in silence for some moments, and then he waved at me to sit down. Disconcerted I sat down rather suddenly as he barked some orders into the phone and hung up, having never taken his eyes off me.
“Photo lab’s always getting things mixed up” he said. “I asked them for black and white prints and they’ve given me colour. What can I do for you?” He smiled. You could get lost in a smile like that, I thought, momentarily sidetracked.
“My name’s Cordi O’Callaghan,” I said, when I finally found my voice. “I wanted to ask you some questions …” I hesitated, unsure how to proceed.
“So you’re Dr. O’Callaghan, eh? Tough luck about your insects.”
I looked at him and then laughed nervously. “Davies?”
“It was in the paper, and dear Davies just phoned to tell me not to talk to you. So, tell me why I should?” His eyes danced in amusement and watched me closely.
I gave him a brief outline of what had happened with my insects and disks and he seemed genuinely interested, so I asked him how well he had known Diamond.
“Well enough. He was a bit of a prick, to tell you the truth. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sorry he’s dead, but he and I never really hit it off.” He moved over to a jumble of folders on a desk. “Mind if we talk while I work?”
He folded himself like a jackknife into a chair and began sorting through the mess. I sat and watched.
“Quite a mess, eh? It’s not usually like this. It’s Diamond’s main work area — was, I should say. He did most of his work here. Always kept it neat as a pin, but somebody came in a week or so ago and rifled through it. I haven’t had a chance to clean it up yet. Whoever it was spent a lot of time here by the looks of it — all his files have been searched. Don’t know what they were looking for, but they sure left a mess behind. Now I have the job of going through it, tidying it all up, and seeing what sort of papers we can publish for him posthumously.”
“Did you call security?”
Patrick looked up in surprise. “Why would I do that?” he asked.
“In case something was stolen.”
Patrick laughed, a deep rich chortle that was infectious.
“Nothing to steal here, but lots over there, and nothing’s gone, as far as I can see.” He waved his hand around the room and made his point. I could see three computers, microscopes, and all manner of equipment.
“What