“So a clearance is required?”
“It is, but…” Graham broke off and nibbled her lip for a moment.
“Go ahead, Dr. Graham, please. No one is upset with you or your company. We only want to get to the bottom of this.”
“All right,” she sighed. “Well, I’m sure you remember how things were before Emperor Trajan, um, put an end to the Imperial Council and the bureaucracies and procedures they had in place…”
“Oh, yes. I am extremely familiar with it.” Ashton allowed the disgust to show on his face.
“Ah. Um, so, it’s entirely possible that such things were, uh, acquired rather than earned…?”
“Aha. Yes, I understand. What you’re saying is, whoever held the job may not have actually had the requisite knowledge or ability to perform the job.”
“Yes.”
“All right. Do you have a list of the staff who compounded all of this for her?”
“Oh, there was no staff, as such,” Graham said. “Part of our security is to have only one person plus backup, responsible for either dispensing or compounding the medications for the Imperial Residence. That would have included the Empress Regnant and any heir to the Throne, as well as spouses and children. It currently includes the Emperor and Empress and their children, and the Consul and his wife. Generally, the principal handles the Emperor and/or the Empress – in the current situation, both, as well as Consul Saaret, with the backup filling in where needed. The backup, in turn, is the primary for the rest of the family, with the principal backing up that. So, for instance, right now the backup handles the Emperor’s children and Saaret’s wife.”
“Do you know who those people were for Ilithyia I?”
“Yes. Dr. Tomás Staffordshire was the primary, and Dr. Jenny – uh, Jennifer Hardacre, was the backup. I have their personnel files here; my supervisors are quite distressed about this, and they want to help find out what happened.”
She pushed him the files; the VR depicted it as handing him two stuffed folders.
“Are they still with you?”
“Hardacre is – she’s been with us for several decades now – but she insisted on you having her files,” Graham said. “She wants her name cleared, she said. Staffordshire isn’t.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Um, yes, I do – he’s dead,” Graham said then, hesitant. “He died about a month after Empress Ilithyia I.”
While Graham supervised the assays of the old samples, Ashton dug into Hardacre’s background.
It turned out that Jennifer Hardacre was a graduate of the Imperial University of Ostrova, having obtained a baccalaureate in chemistry and a doctorate in pharmaceutical chemistry. She graduated summa cum laude, an ancient but well-respected term that still meant she was one of the top students from that school. She came from a good family on Ostrova, not wealthy or titled, but trusted and well-liked, and had been hired by Physike as soon as she had completed her doctorate; she had, in fact, been a cooperative student there while completing that degree. Ashton could find no indication that she had any ulterior motives behind accepting the job… which she had obtained several years prior to Jiahui Song’s ascending to the throne, or even being named heir presumptive, let alone heir apparent after the Council approved the matter.
“Which would tend to let her out,” Ashton decided, thinking aloud, “but you never know.”
Tomás Javier Staffordshire was another matter, it seemed. His mother Inez Rodriguez Staffordshire was from Catalonia Sector and his father James Robert Staffordshire, Junior, from Sintar, and he had been raised on Sintar, in a large house – almost a mansion – on a corner of the family’s estate outside Imperial City. The actual address, according to geotracking systems, was in, or just outside, Roseville, a small town considered one of the upper-class bedroom communities for Imperial City.
Tomás had attended the Imperial University of Sintar, having had a few strings pulled by his family for the admission – though, at that time, that was the norm, and it didn’t imply anything about Tomás’ secondary-school grades, which had been good, as far as Ashton could tell. Rather like his colleague Hardacre, he had gotten a baccalaureate in chemistry, but had also picked up an additional specialty in pre-medicine before going on to a doctorate in pharmaceutical chemistry; this gave him some insight into the biological systems affected by medications, and the mechanisms by which they worked. He had bounced around between pharmaceutical manufacturers for a few years, being released from Waldrop Medical’s pharmaceutical subsidiary for causes unspecified, then hiring on with Kinameer, before jumping ship and joining Physike some four or five years before Ilithyia I ascended to the throne.
A quick check with Waldrop Medical revealed they still had him in their personnel archives, but the cause of release was a downsize reduction in force combined with a personality conflict with his supervisor.
“Nothing there, to speak of,” Ashton decided. “People have been clashing with their bosses for about as long as humans have had industry. And I should know! So. Let’s check his connections.”
Tomás’ family, the Staffordshires, were a prominent family on Sintar, especially in the Imperial City, where the family patriarch – who lived in the ‘Big House’ on the family estate – owned a popular chain of gourmet groceries, Epicure Allure. Ashton had some familiarity with it, because the chain was one of the clients of his father-in-law’s wine import/export business, and sometimes Cally, Laura, or Alexandre picked up specialty ingredients there. Many of the patriarch’s descendants worked in various positions in the corporate structure, and this apparently included Tomás’ father. James Robert Staffordshire, Junior, was in the direct line to inherit the family estate, which included the grocery chain.
The senior Staffordshire, James Robert, had been very active and outspoken in political matters – at least until his health had deteriorated in recent years – and his views
