Not only were they all likely to recognize her name, but Americans, Jones knew, were inclined to be permanently logged in to their email and usually replied swiftly. Indeed she received two messages almost by return, but neither sender seemed able to add anything to what she had already learned on TV and online.
She cursed herself for knowing so little about Connie and Paul’s personal lives. Everything to do with them had always seemed to revolve around RECAP. Indeed Jones had never been aware of Connie having any personal life at all. She had lived alone ever since Jones had first met her, as far as she knew. Paul, on the other hand, had been married for many years, and his wife, a frequent visitor to the lab during Jones’s days at Princeton, had been almost one of the team. But Jones knew that Gilda Ruders had died a couple of years previously after a short illness, and Connie’s recent remarks about Paul, during the brief phone conversation she had so thoughtlessly curtailed, appeared to indicate that he, too, had lived alone.
In spite of that, bizarrely perhaps, she repeatedly called both Connie Pike and Paul Ruders’ home numbers.
The sound of Connie’s voice on her answer service cut like a knife.
‘It’s Connie. Talk to me.’
Talk to me. That is what she had wanted Jones to do four days earlier. If only Jones had done so.
The first time she phoned she left a message.
‘Anyone who picks this up, will you please call me. I’m an old friend of Connie and Paul’s. I’m devastated by the terrible news and just want to find out exactly what happened at RECAP, and to see if there’s anything I can do to help.’
As if, she thought to herself. She kept the TV on, channel-hopping the news stations. There was a succession of further reports. Jones learned that the cause of the blast remained uncertain. One report suggested that the explosion may have been accidental and caused by a gas leak. But terrorist action, unsurprisingly in the modern climate, remained the most frequently mentioned possibility.
She also learned that there had been other casualties. A research scientist working in the biology laboratory on the floor above RECAP was believed to have been killed and two students injured, one seriously. Both CNN and Sky News explained that the list of casualties would have been much greater had the explosion not occurred early in the morning, before most staff and students had arrived in the building devoted to scientific research.
Jones leaned back in her chair and struggled to think clearly. Was it likely that Princeton had been attacked by terrorists? And, if so, could RECAP really have been the target? It was well known that Connie and Paul were early starters, who treated their lab more like a second home than a workplace. Anyone wishing to destroy both them and virtually all trace of their project, without causing a significant number of other deaths, might well have chosen to arrange an early morning explosion. Indeed, it was quite probably bad luck that anyone else had been hurt at that hour, let alone killed. And Connie had certainly been ill at ease. Perhaps more than that. Had she been afraid? Jones wasn’t sure.
Her mind was racing. She called Princeton police. On the umpteenth attempt she managed to get through to an officer who gave her the number of a helpline that had been set up for concerned relatives and friends. Again she had to redial the number several times before getting through. And, in spite of allegedly operating a help line, the young woman who eventually responded seemed unwilling at first to give any help at all.
‘I am afraid there’s a security clampdown on all information at the moment, ma’am, until we get a clearer picture of what has happened,’ she said.
‘Look, I’m Connie Pike’s cousin, from the Irish branch of the family,’ Jones lied. ‘The family over here are quite devastated, of course, and I’m just trying to find out exactly what happened.’
The woman’s attitude to her changed very slightly.
‘I’m sorry for the situation you and your family find yourselves in, ma’am,’ she responded. ‘But I’m afraid there’s really very little more information we can give you than has already been released to the media. Over the phone anyway...’
‘Well, where are Connie and Paul? Presumably there is no doubt that they are dead. Have their bodies been removed from the scene yet?’
As she spoke Jones realized what stupid questions those were. More than likely, Connie and Paul would have been blown to bits.
She winced. That was not a prospect she wished to dwell on.
There was a brief pause before the young woman spoke again.
‘Nothing at all has been removed from the scene yet,’ she eventually replied diplomatically. ‘The site of the explosion is still sealed off as part of the investigations by the various authorities involved. The entire campus has been evacuated and resident staff and students temporarily accommodated well away from the area, primarily at the Jadwin Gymnasium. There really is no more I can tell you, ma’am.’
Jones’s head hurt. She had hunched herself so tensely over her phone and her computer that the muscles of her neck and shoulders seemed to have seized up.
She needed to take a break. She made coffee, with which she washed down a couple of paracetamol, swallowing quickly before the heat of the liquid began to melt the pills.
She glanced up at the clock on the kitchen wall. She couldn’t believe how the time had raced by. It was now almost one a.m. Eight o’clock the previous evening in New York and Princeton.
She couldn’t rest, and she certainly couldn’t sleep. She had to do something. The weekend lay ahead, and Jones had few commitments over the early part of the subsequent week, apart from routine lectures which could be delayed.
She logged onto the British Airways website and booked herself on the lunchtime flight from Heathrow to JFK. Her visit need only be a fleeting one, she told herself. She would return in good time for both her Oxford dinner and her next filming commitment the following weekend.
In any case it was as if forces from another, until now, half-forgotten time were driving her to do it. As if she had no choice.
She left home soon after seven in the morning, driving herself northwards along the M5 and then east on the M4 to the UK’s premier airport, where she’d booked valet parking.
Her sporty Lexus SUV was a fine motor car, and it rarely failed to give her pleasure to drive it. But not on this occasion.
She’d had far too little sleep, but she didn’t feel tired, just spaced out, as if she were not quite conscious of, or certainly not in total control of, what was happening. As if she had been somehow taken over by her own past.
On the aircraft Jones found her thoughts drifting back to that special time in her life when she was at Princeton, and to her first meeting with the two extraordinary academics whose lives had been so brutally ended.
She remembered her first visit to the RECAP laboratory as if it were yesterday. She could see it clearly in her mind’s eyes. And she doubted that the place had changed much until its terrible destruction.
REsearch into Consciousness At Princeton. A wonderful, crazy, innovative venture which had never been more than tolerated by the powers that be. A scientific study of the power of the mind. The forgotten art, Connie had always called it. A series of laboratory-controlled experiments aimed at proving once and for all, in accordance with the accepted rules of mathematics and physics, whether or not the human mind really could exert control over matter. Whether the process of thought, conscious or even unconscious, could control the performance of machines.