"Oh, I suppose you could say I didn't care for his ways too much, but no, there was no problem, none at all. Steve and I got along just fine."
Something.
"I make no secret of it,” Anna Henckel said forthrightly. “Professor Tremaine was no friend of mine; there was little about him I respected.” She hesitated, not something she did often, John imagined. “But I am sorry he was murdered in that way."
Did that mean she'd have preferred some other way? Dr. Henckel didn't show much in the way of grief for the dead Tremaine. No more than Judd had. She had made an impressive entrance in her “Dracula cape"-not black these days, but bottle green-a dramatic, full-length, collared cape held together at the neck by a heavy chain. She had set the staff she carried in a corner and had taken the one unpadded wooden chair in the upstairs lounge. Since then she had sat with the cape around her shoulders, stiff and distant, as restrained as Judd had been wriggly. Occasionally she took a puff from a cigarillo, held between the tips of her thumb and middle finger, European-fashion.
"What was it about him you didn't like?” he asked.
"Because you are a policeman is no reason to dissimulate,” Anna replied sharply.
These weren't exactly your everyday interviews. He'd been at it only an hour and already he'd run into an “egad” and a “dissimulate.” What next?
"I'm aware,” she went on, “that you've already talked with Walter. Do not ask me to believe he passed up the opportunity to prattle about my long-standing differences with Professor Tremaine."
"I think maybe he did say something about it, now that you mention it,” John allowed.
Anna studied him expressionlessly. If that was her you-sir-have-the-balls-of-a-fish look, no wonder Tremaine had wilted.
"I'd like to hear your version,” he said.
"It's very simple, Mr. Lau. I did not dislike him. I was…disappointed in him. As a young man he had had enormous potential; a truly original mind, capable of the highest level of synthetic thinking. He had already done great work in the 1950s. He might have become…” For a moment the aloof gray eyes gleamed, but she cut herself off with a tired wave. “However, he threw it all away."
"To become a TV star?"
"No, that was later. That followed, perhaps inevitably. No, he threw it away by taking the easy course, not the scientist's way. He was lazy and he was dishonest,” she said flatly. “He plagiarized the ideas of others, Mr. Lau. No, that isn't the right word. He stole the ideas of others."
"Including yours."
"Most definitely. In 1966 he wrote a monograph, in its time a significant contribution, in which his ‘new’ approach to the nondirectional complexities of primary-plant succession were taken directly from an unfinished paper on which I had been working for more than a year."
"Rough."
The lounge was warm but she pulled the collar of the cape a little closer around her. “Afterwards I made the most strenuous objections, quite publicly, and he baldly denied my accusations. That's all there was to it."
"You never got any satisfaction?"
One gray eyebrow rose. “Prior to last night, you mean?"
John didn't smile. “Prior to last night."
"Once in print he went so far as to say that it was conceivable we had gotten the same idea at the same time, but that he had simply been fortunate to publish first. Like Darwin and Wallace, you know? That was not enough for me."
"Sorry, I know who Darwin was,” John said. “I'm afraid I never heard of Wallace."
She smiled for the first time. Not with humor, but not with malice either. “That is precisely my point."
"It must have been pretty hard to take."
"Mr. Lau,” she said wearily, “if I had wanted to kill him over it, I assure you I would have done it many, many years ago, not now. Believe me, I put all this behind me when I left the hallowed halls of ivy for the far more civilized world of commerce."
"That was when?"
"In 1970. I've been with Amore Cosmetics ever since. I'm now their director of research and development."
"Have you had much contact with Tremaine since then?"
"None at all. It was a chapter in my life I was happy to close. Nothing until his publisher contacted me about this book of his."
"You must have had to take a week's leave to come here."
"Yes, a week's vacation."
"Why?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Why use up a week's vacation for this if you put it behind you long ago? Why not just let him write whatever he wanted to?"
She stared silently out the window for a moment. “Audley was incapable of perceiving his own inadequacies, Mr. Lau. I have no doubt whatever that his book would have blamed his misdirection of the expedition on others. Especially on me, as the assistant director. I couldn't allow that."
"You think he misdirected the expedition?"
She gave a dry bark of laughter and looked levelly at him again. “Yes, I think he misdirected the expedition. I make no secret of that either."
"I understand you have some kind of report on that."
"I have?” She looked genuinely puzzled.
"You were showing it to some of the others in the bar."
"Oh, that, yes. Not a report, but a Park Service memorandum: the results of a pro forma investigation concerned with the tragedy. Sketchy as it is, there is no doubt about Audley's culpability."
"I'd like to see it, please."
"As I recall, I gave the copy I have with me to Mr. Pratt. But I can tell you what it said, Mr. Lau. Simply this: They should never have been on the glacier that day. There had been increasing earth tremors, even small avalanches, and what did any of us know about ice travel? I advised against it, the Park Service advised against it. But no, he knew better. And as a result of his obstinacy and Walter's incompetence, three young people died."
Two, John thought. One was already dead when the avalanche hit, assuming Gideon was right. Which he was, of course.
"Or rather two,” Anna murmured, in tune with him. “I understand someone seems to have been killed with an ice ax before the avalanche struck. Can you tell me which one it was?"
"I don't know which one it was. I hear there was some bad feeling among the crew."
"Oh, yes, there was considerable bad feeling."
"Over what?"
"Over Jocelyn Yount, primarily.” The dry, scaly corners of her mouth turned down. “She was a woman of scant discretion and few morals. To her, anything wearing trousers…surely Walter didn't fail to go into this?"
"No, ma'am. He told me her fiancee and James Pratt fought over her, that Fisk physically attacked Pratt."
"That is true."
"Would you care to make a guess about what happened out there on the ice?"
"No. Is there anything else?"
"Dr. Henckel, you said Jocelyn Yount was the primary cause of bad feeling. Does that mean there were other causes?"
"I see no relevance to what you are investigating, but at the end, of course, we were all somewhat irritated with Walter."
"Why was that?"
She eyed him. “You don't know why it was they had to go back into the field that final day, the day of the avalanche?"
"No, ma'am."
"Ah,” she said with a pale smile. “So Dr. Judd left a few things out of his account after all."
"Maybe he forgot."
Again the shadowed smile. “I don't think so."
"Suppose you tell me then."
She pulled the high collar closer about her neck, “Mr. Lau, our fieldwork had already been completed. We were to leave for home the next day. Our equipment was packed. And then it was found that Walter had bungled his sampling. An immediate, unscheduled field trip was required to regather the contaminated data. We had to put off our departure. Naturally, this was a source of annoyance and some bad feeling."
John played a hunch. “Between Steve Fisk and Dr. Judd in particular?"