‘And I suppose your granny is the queen of England.’
‘Well, actually…’ Kate laughed. ‘Look, my father was a don — you knew that. He spent two years at Princeton. He and Uncle George became best friends.’
‘Uncle George!’
‘And,’ she went on, ignoring Lou’s sarcasm, ‘although I said it wasn’t my decision, I couldn’t be happier about it. Professor Campion and his wife Joan are probably the nicest people I’ve ever met.’
‘I’m sure they are. Where do they live?’
‘Only an hour from here, near Franklin.’
‘So we’ll go see them? Talk to Uncle George about the EF docs?’
‘Well, yeah. That’s what I was thinking.’ She was flicking through screens on her iPad. ‘Oh, damn!’
‘What?’
‘I’ve got a conference call at eleven o’clock.’
‘Anything important?’
‘Yeah. It’s the CEO of Avalon. The company in Oregon? Remember back on Bermuda I mentioned there was some interest in putting private money into our Lavender project?’
‘I’d totally forgotten. The last few days have been a whirlwind.’
‘You’re telling me!’
‘So OK, let’s call the Campions,’ Lou said. ‘When could we get there by?’
‘Can’t do that.’
‘Why?’
‘They don’t have a phone, no cell, no computer. They’re kinda eccentric… in a nice way.’
Lou pulled a face.
‘I’ll be done by twelve. We’ll go straight after the conference call with Avalon.’
In the end, they didn’t get away until one o’clock. Lou’s T-Bird was in the garage for new brake linings, which he had no time to install himself, but the garage had provided him with a little Toyota courtesy car for a couple of days.
Lou went back to the institute to pick up Kate. He was wearing his authentic Second World War USAF flying jacket which Kate had always loved seeing him in.
‘Not quite the right attire for this titchy thing, is it, Lou?’ she said, nodding towards his jacket as they approached the Toyota compact.
‘You should have seen the second choice of car,’ he laughed.
They headed south-west on the freeway, the rain driving hard against the windscreen, the wipers beating. Weekday, early afternoon, and the traffic was light. Kate had her iPad perched on her knees.
‘We still know almost nothing about this character EF,’ she said, tapping on the screen.
‘We know he was in First Class, cabin C16; probably a scientist, although he could have simply been a courier for the isotope and the documents.’
She pulled up the Titanic manifest on Google. Scrolled down. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘What?’
‘There were no First Class passengers with the initials “EF”.’
‘Travelling under an assumed name then. Who was in cabin C16?’
Kate tapped the screen again, ran her finger across the glass. ‘C16. A John Wickins.’
‘John Wickins?’ Lou said and glanced at Kate. She gave him a blank look. ‘While Isaac Newton was at Cambridge, he shared a room with a John Wickins for almost twenty years.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘History of science unit at UCLA. There was a great book on the reading list — Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. You read it?’
Kate shook her head.
You should — will change any preconceived notions you had about Sir Isaac Newton.’
‘Well, using that pseudonym adds weight to the idea “EF” was a scientist, I guess; but it doesn’t tell us any more about who the man was.’
‘Or why he was on the Titanic with a radioactive sample.’
They turned off the freeway at intersection 13B taking the road to Suffolk. The rain had stopped, the trees lining the road left dripping. They passed along Main Street, through an old-fashioned city centre with low-rise brick buildings, some dating back to the early nineteenth century, and picked up the highway west towards the small town of Franklin.
They pulled off onto a narrow two-lane road. The landscape became more wooded, houses fewer and further apart. The rain started again.
‘So tell me a bit about Professor Campion,’ Lou said, his eyes fixed on the beating wipers and the soaked road.
‘Well, you know the public figure — “science celebrity”, “the cleverest man since Einstein”, all that nonsense. My godfather is a great physicist, but you know what it’s like — the usual stampede to make some sort of cartoon figure out of any amazing talent. The media did it with Stephen Hawking, then ten years ago they repeated the trick with Uncle George.’
‘After he proved that the speed of light was not the upper limit for the universe.’
‘Yes; refuting Einstein is one thing, proving him wrong is quite another.’
‘The myth is all true then? Campion couldn’t stand the limelight and retreated to…’ Lou lifted a hand from the wheel and swept across the view through the windscreen.
‘That’s pretty much it. He was never one for drawing attention to himself. He hated the constant trivializing of his work, the film crews barging into his rooms in Princeton. And then to cap it all, he attracted the opprobrium of some of his colleagues.’
‘With his radical ideas.’
‘Now he’s seen as existing on the fringe. It’s almost as though the scientific community have ostracized him for being right and Einstein wrong. They have to accept it, of course. Science is all about progress — absorbing a concept if it is proven to be right, adapting one’s vision of the way the universe works — but scientists are human too…’ She pointed to a sign indicating a track off to their left: ‘It’s there.’
A hundred yards along the track Lou pulled the car up outside a stone cottage.
‘Wait here a second,’ Kate said, getting out of the passenger seat. ‘I’ll see if anyone’s home.’
She walked quickly through a low arch on to a cobbled path running between two stretches of wet lawn girded by rose beds, the flowerless bushes looking a little bedraggled in the rain.
The white painted door had an old-fashioned bell pull. Kate tugged on it and heard sounds from inside the house. The door opened slowly and an elderly lady with greying auburn hair and a round, rosy-cheeked face stood at the opening. She was dressed in a flowery dress covered with a flour-stained apron. The smell of baking wafted along the hall.
‘Kate!’ the woman exclaimed, breaking into a rapturous smile. ‘Sweetheart, it’s been so long!’
Before she could reply, Kate saw a figure appear from the shadows at the end of the hallway. The elderly lady stepped forward and hugged Kate as George Campion arrived at the door, a big smile on his face. He was wearing worn-out corduroys, a brown sleeveless sweater over a shirt and an ineptly knotted tie. He held a pipe in his left hand. Tufts of white hair either side of his bald head softened his weathered face.
‘My dear girl,’ Campion said and held her tight. ‘What on earth brings you here? It’s not my birthday, is it, Joan?’ he added, turning to his wife.
She rolled her eyes and was starting to usher in her guest when Kate said, ‘I have a colleague with me, in the car. I wanted to check you were home first.’
‘Oh, we’re always home,’ Joan Campion remarked, leaning out and seeing Lou in the car. He gave her a brief wave, opened the driver’s door and approached along the path.
The Campions’ house was a modest but cozy home that suited them perfectly. Their two sons, Nick and Simon, had left some twenty years ago, but their presence remained in plentiful photographs on the living-room wall and atop a grand piano that took pride of place in a small conservatory looking out onto a lush rear garden.