with purpose this man, whoever he was, at a pace that suggested his destination was not far off.
The hardest part of any pursuit is the turning of a corner, when the risk of losing the subject is at its greatest. The temptation is to accelerate, but that too carries a risk: the subject, if vigilant, will notice that someone previously distant has come much closer. And once a pursuer has been noticed, he is useless.
James maintained his speed, but as he turned the corner, he looked to where he expected the subject to be — and saw nothing.
Damn. Hurriedly, James scanned the other side of the street. Not there. He examined his own side of the road, and again saw nothing. He stared into the distance, to see if the man he had followed had cottoned on and broken into a sprint, but there was no sign of him.
There. He had been searching for a moving target, and so his eye had passed over the static figure. His prey was just one building ahead, standing by the front door of what looked like a large Georgian house. His demeanour suggested he had no idea he had been followed.
James sucked in his breath, a predator trying to shrink into invisibility and avoid detection. Now, at last, he could get a decent look at the man. He was tall, impressively built, but much younger than James would have guessed, perhaps even an undergraduate. Was this a ‘junior’, and therefore a current member of Wolf’s Head? His right leg was vibrating slightly under his trousers, a sign, James decided, of impatience. The man knocked on the door a second time. A moment later the door opened.
Instinctively James stepped back, trying to recede into the street scene, as he watched the young man hand over a large white envelope. There was a brief exchange and then he appeared to be invited inside. The door clicked shut behind him.
James walked past the building, as naturally as he could manage. He glanced rightward once, noticing that mesh curtains blocked any view inside the windows. A brief flash of sunlight dazzled him: a reflection bouncing off the nameplate by the front door.
The least risky option would be to move fast, right now. Wait, and the young man he had followed might re- emerge. Wait, and he would eventually be noticed. James marched to the front door, his stride purposeful, as if he too were making a delivery. He pretended to ring the doorbell, instead taking a quick look at the brass plate just beside it. Then he looked again to make sure he had read the words properly.
What he saw there surprised and baffled him, but there was no mistaking what it said in clear, engraved letters.
AMERICAN EUGENICS SOCIETY, NEW HAVEN OFFICE
Chapter Thirty-four
London
He remembered this feeling sharply. The same hot blend of nerves and pleasure, of fear and excitement. The last time he had experienced it had been in his junior year at St Albans. A few of the seniors had got hold of some ‘erotic’ pictures, a set of photographs rumoured to be utterly depraved. Everyone in his class was desperate to see them and it fell to young Taylor Hastings to get his hands on them.
He had done it through a series of negotiations, trades and promises — but he had done it. As he left the seniors’ dorm that night, his satchel containing the all-important ‘documentation’ slung over his shoulder, he had felt his face grow hot. He was aroused in anticipation of seeing those pictures, most certainly — indeed, he made a stop at the squash court bathrooms in order to have his own, personal private viewing — but he was also engorged with the thrill of the forbidden. His bag contained a set of photographs of women in a variety of poses, some acrobatic, others shocking — including one of a bare backside greeted by the smack of a cane — but all in violation of at least a half-dozen school rules and perhaps a couple of state obscenity laws into the bargain. What’s more, he had, through a rather smart sleight of hand, taken more pictures than the seniors had agreed to. The result was the pleasure of a deception, the kick of committing a small, but elegant crime — and that, he understood at that moment, was a sexual pleasure too.
He felt it now as he walked across Grosvenor Square, his bag once again weighty with illicit cargo. He had staged this heist with much greater sophistication than his little trick at the expense of the St Albans senior year. He had had to use his hands — switching papers from one pile to another with the panache of a magician producing the ace of spades from a handkerchief — but also his wits.
He had created a distraction, summoning his colleagues to huddle over an intriguing cipher that had just come in, asking them to pool their collective knowledge to work out what it could possibly mean. And, while they were puzzling over it, Cellucci scratching his ear with the eraser-end of his pencil, Taylor had salted away carbon copies of the key papers right there and then, inches away from their very eyes.
That, he complimented himself now, was the genius of it. At the moment he had chosen to strike, he had not ushered the dullards of the cipher room out and away. No, no, no. Nor had he done anything so cheap or pedestrian as wait for them to leave. On the contrary, he had beckoned his fellow decoders over to his very desk. As they gathered in a knot around the bait he had laid for them, he had taken one pace back before calmly and quietly taking exactly what he wanted. He had turned potential witnesses to his crime into alibis for his innocence.
As he walked back through Hyde Park on this bright summer evening, he felt the blood rush to his loins. He was hardening at the thought of what he had done. He pictured himself with Anna, looking at the papers together, tonight, in bed. He would read them out loud, impersonating the authors’ voices. He imagined her praising him, calling him ‘her clever little boy’, rewarding him with her tongue, starting at his chest and working steadily downward…
Or perhaps he would forego that particular delight, exquisite though he knew it would be. Perhaps he would show restraint and wait for the greater prize. It would mean going straight home now, stashing these documents where they would never be found — until he was ready to show them to the man who would understand their true power. The man, indeed, who had already entrusted him with his own great secrets, held together between the covers of the magnificent Red Book. Imagine what Rawls Murray could do with these papers. He would be overawed the instant he saw who had written them — but once he had digested their substance, well, he would fall to his knees.
Taylor Hastings would become an instant hero to Reginald Rawls Murray, that much was obvious. He would, of course, be a hero to the Right Club. But the young American dared dream of a greater accolade still. By his actions he, Taylor Hastings, would become nothing less than a hero to history.
Chapter Thirty-five
Eugenics? James squinted at the sign to make sure he had read it properly. Eugenics? How on earth did the science of human breeding — improving the quality of the human race and all that that implied — fit into everything that had happened these last few days and weeks? Unless, of course, it didn’t. Unless he had simply followed a random member of the Wolf’s Head Society with a scholarly interest in eugenic ideas and no connection at all to Lund, the Dean and his niece or, crucially, Florence and Harry…
Reason told him to walk away and to think again. And yet he had learned since that early morning in Oxford that reason did not always deserve the last word, that there was more to him than the power to add up logical propositions, one following another. He was made of flesh and blood, with instincts and intuitions — as well as rages and sorrows — that he had tried to deny for too long. And so he listened to his gut as it told him to ring the doorbell and attempt to get inside the New Haven branch of the American Eugenics Society.
He did not have to wait long. A bespectacled man, his glasses misting up in the heat of this last day of July, answered the door. Judging from his expression, and the sound of voices coming from within, he had been letting people in for a while: it seemed a meeting was underway.
Once again, instinct intervened. Instead of offering his name, James simply nodded and stepped forward.
