Free Out of the Sun by Robert Goddard Page B

a fear he was equally eager to stifle. Could the call have been a farewell message to a former lover? In that case, her reticence would not merely be forgivable, but admirable. "What about Hammelgaard? Did he say anything when you met him?"
    "Not much. He offered his sympathy, of course. Apart from that, I don't recall..." She shrugged. "He seemed preoccupied with the whereabouts of David's notebooks, actually, but '
    "His mathematical notebooks?"
    "Yes."
    "The ones Hope said he was never parted from?"
    "Well, I don't know about '
    "Weren't they in his hotel room?"
    "No. As a matter of fact, they weren't."
    Too taken aback to speak for a moment, Harry walked slowly across to the bed and sat down in his chair. There was a flush of guilt in Iris's cheeks when he looked up at her. "You mean they're missing?"
    "I mean he didn't have them with him."
    "Did he have them with him when he came to see you in Wilmslow?"
    "I don't know. I didn't search his luggage." She shook her head. "I'm sorry. I assume he must have left them at his house in Washington."
    "Has anybody checked?"
    "I haven't. Perhaps Mr. Hammelgaard has since."
    "Only we can't ask him because he's gone missing."
    "Apparently so."
    "Hope specifically told me they went everywhere with him."
    "Well, she would know that much, I suppose."
    "So, if they weren't in his hotel room, either somebody removed them or he didn't take them there in the first place. Could he have left them somewhere else for safekeeping?"
    "Why should he have done?"
    "Because he thought they might otherwise fall into the wrong hands. Because he foresaw circumstances in which he could no longer protect them."
    Iris looked at Harry long and hard. "You realize what you're suggesting?"
    "Oh, I realize. But I don't understand. The abstract jottings and abstruse calculations of a higher mathematician. What value would they have?"
    "None you or I are capable of comprehending."
    "But it would be a different story for Hammelgaard, wouldn't it?"
    "Yes. I imagine so."
    "What did you tell him?"
    "That I had no idea whether or not the notebooks were in David's possession while he was staying with us. I suggested he should contact Athene Tilson, David's old tutor at Cambridge. David mentioned he'd been to see her before coming on to us. She's a mathematician, of course. He might have shown her his latest work."
    "Or left it with her?"
    That too, of course."
    Harry leant forward across the bed. "Where can I find her, Iris?"
    "Southwold. On the Suffolk coast. She's retired there."
    "Have you heard from her since David's illness?"
    "No. Strangely enough, I haven't."
    Then don't you think it's time she heard from us?"
    "Perhaps."
    "Don't you want to know what she has to say?"
    That depends on what it is."
    It was the earlier fear re-echoed. A man preparing to make a voluntary exit from this life might well leave the fruits of his most recent intellectual endeavours with his trusted mentor. Just as he might pay a last visit to his mother and make a farewell call to his ex-lover. Before hanging up the DO NOT DISTURB sign outside his hotel-room door and filling a syringe with enough insulin to stretch his night's sleep into eternity. That was really why Iris had shrunk back from probing the mystery of her son's final hours. Because she was not sure the truth was preferable to not knowing. Because ignorance was safe even if it could not be blissful.
    "You don't have to do this, Harry. You can still take Ken's advice. Stay out of it. Leave well alone."
    "I don't think so," he replied, glancing round at David's calm unchanging face. "I really don't think that's an option any more." He looked back at her. "Do you?"
    THIRTEEN
    Harry reached Southwold by bus from Ipswich on a bright breezy morning of fluffy fast-moving clouds and wide blue East Anglian horizons. Local poets might have been moved to verse by the bustle of the High Street and the gull-loud air of seaside purpose-fulness. But Harry was in far from poetic mood. He