‘If he was going to look for it at the university, it must be something rare.’ She put in ‘Meekie’ and started working through the results, which were startlingly unhelpful and nothing to do with shipping. ‘Did you know that a meekie is a person with an abnormally large head?’ she said. Patiently she scrolled on.
‘Hager Loch,’ Atherton said, looking at the next heading. ‘I never heard of a Hager Loch. You carry on – I’m going to get the atlas.’ He brought it back with him to be companionable, and there was silence, except for her clicking. ‘There is no loch called Hager. I thought not.’
‘Maybe it’s not in Scotland. Do they call lakes “loch” anywhere else? What about Canada? That’s very Scottish in places, isn’t it?’
‘But what could be the connection with Canada? I can’t believe his mother wouldn’t have noticed if he’d gone there.’
‘Maybe it’s a misspelling. He couldn’t spell “university” or “museum”.’
‘But a misspelling of what? I can’t find anything even remotely resembling Hager.’
‘I’m getting bored with Meekie. What’s the next thing?’
‘This bit of scrawl. Hart thought it was Newark, but if we can’t allow him to have gone to Canada, he can’t have gone to New York either.’
‘Let me see. I’m good at bad handwriting. Dad’s was pretty terrible.’ She studied the word and said almost at once, ‘That’s not an “n” at the beginning, it’s a “v”. That bit is the upstroke, see?’
‘Vewark?’
‘I don’t think that’s a “w” either. Look at his “m” in “Museum” – the small one. Doesn’t it look the same to you? And here, and here.’
‘You’re right. It is an “m”.’
‘So that makes it Vemark – which is pronounceable, at least,’ Emily said. ‘I suppose we ought to be thankful for small mercies.’
‘And for big ones,’ Atherton said, and the tone of his voice made her look up at him. ‘Not Vemark but Vemork. Put it in. Vemork, 1942.’
‘You know something?’ she asked, tapping.
‘There’s no end to the wonder of what I know,’ he said. ‘It comes of having an interest in history.’
‘And a brain the size of a planet?’ she said. She had been around the station long enough to have heard
‘Well, he didn’t have to go there, did he?’ Atherton said. ‘Only tippy-tap away on his rinky-dinky little computer. Vemork was the subject of a daring bombing raid during the war, because the Germans had taken it over. It was a source, they discovered, of heavy water.’
‘Heavy water? I’ve heard of it, of course, but I don’t really know what it is.’
‘It’s water enriched with an extra atom of deuterium. I don’t know all the science, but I do know it’s used in nuclear fission.’
‘And even I know the Germans were experimenting with nuclear fission towards the end of the war. Don’t they say they were on the brink of making a nuclear bomb?’
‘They do,’ Atherton said, though his voice was far away now as his brain processed. ‘But what’s Vemork and heavy water got to do with—?’
‘What?’
‘Hager Loch. It’s just ringing bells like anything, but it’s not in Scotland, it’s in Germany. You asked if they called them lochs anywhere else. Try Hagerloch, all one word, in Google.’
She tapped, and read out the prompt that came up, ‘Did you mean Haigerloch?’
‘I think we did, Danny old bean. Spelling really wasn’t your strong suit, was it – even when you were copying things down?’
‘Haigerloch, now a museum,’ she read. ‘A heavy-water test reactor. The Germans conducted experiments in nuclear fission in a cave under the Schlo?kirche in a small town in Germany. The Atomkeller – cute name!’
‘It’s a cute place.’
‘The Atomkeller is now a museum. For opening times click here.’
‘That’s where the heavy water from Vemork ended up, and why the RAF had to conduct its daring bombing raid. I remember doing it at school. World War Two was just becoming compulsory, but my history teacher was a real buff, and liked to go into a lot more detail than was strictly necessary.’
‘But what’s all this got to do with Dad and Clydebrae and all the rest of it?’ Her eyes widened. ‘You don’t think—?’
His eyebrows went up. ‘That the reason we haven’t got anything on Waverley B before the Fifties is that they changed the name, and the reason they changed the name was that they were doing the same sort of experiments there during the war?’
‘Well, if they knew about Haigerloch, they’d obviously want to try to catch up,’ Emily said logically. ‘And they’d obviously have to keep it secret.’
‘Thinking’s all very well, but we need some evidence. I wonder if it’s all in this Meekie book, whatever that may be. Maybe you gave up on Meekie too soon.’
‘Spelling!’ Emily exclaimed. ‘He’s a bit of a phonetic speller, isn’t he? And suppose he’d only heard the word, never seen it written down?’
‘M-e-a-c-h-i-e. The good old Scottish name of Meachie, sept of the Mcdonalds if my memory serves me right.’
‘How can you possibly know that?’
‘I don’t, I’m just making it up,’ he grinned. ‘How do you think I got my reputation for omniscience? People hardly ever check up on you.’
‘You charlatan!’ She put Meachie into Google and hesitated. ‘There’ll be five million entries.’
‘Try Meachie and Clydebrae,’ Atherton suggested.
She added the word and hit enter. ‘Bingo,’ she said softly. ‘Angus Meachie:
‘We’ll have to get hold of that book. And I wonder what else he found out at the Scottish War Museum – the clue is in the title, folks – and the other places. If it was secret, there won’t have been much in the public record office, you can bet.’
‘Whatever he did find out,’ Emily said, ‘he will have passed on to Dad. And that’s probably what was in the file they took away.’
‘But your father wouldn’t have had only one copy, would he?’
‘Not if it was important.’
‘He didn’t have a safe, or a safe-deposit box or anything?’
‘Not that I know of. But I still don’t understand what this has to do with Richard Tyler and Anderson-Millar and all the rest of it, and why it was important enough to want to . . . to kill Dad for.’
Atherton laid his finger beside the last line of Danny’s list. ‘Cad and Ber. There’s a full stop after each word. They’re abbreviations. Dopey old Mrs Masseter said he talked about Cadbury’s and someone called Beryl. If she remembered those words, he must have repeated them a lot.’
‘I’m not there yet,’ Emily confessed.
‘Cadmium is used as a barrier to control nuclear fission. And beryllium is an isotope moderator.’
‘How do you
‘I read a lot. But the thing you need to know about cadmium and beryllium is that they’re both extremely toxic, particularly beryllium.’
She looked stricken. ‘The Scottish Ornithological Union notes there are no more red-throated divers at Clydebrae,’ she said quietly. ‘Or Forster’s terns.’
‘Or much of anything else, I imagine. We’d better go and see the guv.’
Eighteen
The Ego Has Landed
