Caught unawares, reception took a few minutes to find a suitable minder to escort DI Gorrie to Horace’s office. When he arrived, he noted that the pile of papers had grown a bit, as had the smell of furniture polish. Horace himself remained unchanged, not quite dismissive, yet not what one might call polite either.
“I can’t recall Ewie Cameron calling me. You can check the diary with my secretary,” Horace told him. He held a fountain pen in his hand, and every time he answered a question he glanced down at the paper at the top of his desk, applying another check.
“Perhaps I will do that,” said Gorrie.
“Mackay called him concerning the plant?”
“I didnae know that he did.”
“He didn’t bring anything to me,” said Horace. “No problem was reported.”
Gorrie nodded. There might be many reasons Mackay wouldn’t talk to Horace about a problem, starting with the fact that he thought Horace was involved.
“I might talk to your secretary then, and Mackay’s,” said Gorrie.
“Please,” said Horace, who now put his head down practically onto the desk, checking off a succession of blanks on the paper in a wild flurry.
The secretary had not recorded any meeting with Mackay during the week before his death, and according to the records they hadn’t spoken outside of regular staff meetings since he had come on. Gorrie formed no judgment of that, just as he did not hold Tora Grant’s frown against her when he appeared at her doorway. Mackay had not been replaced and she was obviously overworked trying to help handle some of the paperwork. Gorrie’s first request — for a roster of the department — was met with an even deeper frown.
“Addie at Personnel,” she said, digging her fingernails into her folded arms.
Gorrie nodded. “Miss Grant, what is the procedure for removing waste from the reactor?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know all the steps. The procedure — you’d have to talk to the men. It’s not like taking out the trash, Inspector. Spent fuel has to be carefully handled. The regulations are enormous. It has to be cooled in one of the ponds near the reactor. The spent rods stay quite long — years.”
“Had there been a removal since Mr. Mackay arrived?”
“I can check the records, but I believe the last was eight months. There’s no set schedule. You see, there are so few places for it to be reprocessed, and transport is quite a procedure. The spent rods have to travel in special containers, and can only be taken aboard a special ship.”
“Who owns the ship?”
Grant frowned, but pulled over the keyboard to her computer. Punching a few keys, she brought up an address book.
“BNFL. British Nuclear Fuels plc. The amount of material is very small, you understand; it’s the way it has to be transported that complicates things. Sellafield is typically where it would be sent.”
“What happened to the man who held Mr. Mackay’s job before his arrival?”
“Matthew Franklin transferred to UKAE — the energy commission.”
“Hard worker?”
“I couldn’t say. I came on with Mr. Mackay.”
Gorrie paused, considering how to proceed. The secretary pushed a piece of hair up at the side of her head behind her ear, her whole body heaving with a sigh. She seemed a good sort, slightly bewildered by the job and loss of her boss, he thought. She had a round, attractive face, but in five years, maybe less, her looks would muddle into a sort of plainness as her hips rounded and her legs grew thick. Gorrie thought of his own wife, which made him sympathetic toward the girl.
“Do you know who Ewie Cameron is?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Did Mr. Mackay speak of any government official?”
Another shake.
“Would he have?”
“The plant manager would generally handle any important matter, I believe,” said Miss Grant.
Mackay had not kept an appointment book, and a look back at the department phone records did not turn up Cameron’s number, nor any besides Cardha Duff’s that seemed extraordinary. The secretary’s sighs grew as she showed Gorrie through the forms and papers Mackay had been working on before he died. To Gorrie, nothing was amiss — or everything was; he couldn’t tell.
“Specialty Transport,” he said finally, “does the name mean anything?”
“Trucking firm that handles the spent fuel and some of the items that are bulky,” said the secretary.
“Are there reports here that pertain to it?”
“The traffic file,” she said, going to the files and thumbing through.
Gorrie took the folder and opened it on the desk. Four sheets sat at the top of the folder, out of order; they had been photocopied from other reports, which themselves were copies of thicker filings. The pages documented pickup times, routes, transmittals; all had blanks in the areas for “Incidents” and “Comments.”
“They record when the waste was picked up and when it was transferred to the next shipper,” said the secretary. “The main copies are filed with the commission.”
“UKAE.”
“Yes.”
“Why would Mr. Mackay be looking through them?” Gorrie asked.
“To help plan for another shipment of spent waste, if he was. Would you mind terribly, Inspector, if I went back to work?”
Gorrie nodded, but the secretary hesitated. “I heard — the woman Ed…”
“Aye, Cardha Duff. I wouldn’t call it suicide,” he added. “Probably an accident due to medication.”
She pursed her lips and shook her head, then turned away quickly to her desk to have a cry.
Gorrie went back to the documents. Except for the dates and some slight variation in the waste amounts, they could have been identical. The pickups were always made around the same time, late at night, moved by the same route, and were presented at the dock loading area roughly sixty minutes later.
Gorrie took out his notebook. Cameron’s pad had mentioned Lin Firth Bridge. The bridge wasn’t noted here— it wasn’t much of a landmark — but the truck would have crossed over it.
So that’s what Mackay had found.
Gorrie took down the dates of the transport, knowing even before he checked that one would include the few days the bridge was closed.
NINE
Marked against the sun’s 4.5 billion years of existence, the coming event was nothing truly anomalous, but a result of the natural interplay between its atmospheric and orbital processes.
A body of seething gas and plasma, the solar sphere does not rotate on its axis in the same coherent way as the solid globe we inhabit. Rather, its rotation is fluid, the radiative and convective zones that compose its outer layers — and 85 percent of its radius — turning faster at the equator than at its poles. This causes its lines of magnetic force, which run longitudinally from positive north to negative south, to stretch and twist.
The phenomenon is easily understood with this model:
Imagine a ball sliced into three crosswise sections. Now imagine rubber bands attached to it, top to bottom, with pins inserted into each section. Give the middle slice of the ball a faster spin than the others, and the rubber bands are stretched along with its movement. Continue spinning it faster and the rubber bands coil tightly around the ball, eventually tangling and kinking up in places… assuming they have sufficient elasticity not to snap first.
As the sun turns in its differential rotation, the lines of force running through its gaseous outer layers stretch and intertwine until they develop similar kinks — wide, swirling magnetic fields that most often occur in leader- follower pairs that are bonded by their opposite polarities and drift across the surface in unison with smaller fields strung out between them like ships in a flotilla. Attenuated lines of force bulge up from the positively charged leader
