Chapter 5

Act 2, Scene 2: Flight

Eric sat on Sinead’s desk and the four of us speculated, without facts, it is true, but we invented what we did not know. I was treated as an expert on Molly, of course, but I could not guess why she should have reacted so violently to the news that I was joining her team. It did not occur to any of us then that it was nothing more than an excuse. It was almost lunchtime before the situation became rather clearer.

Paul began the meeting of the team leaders as usual by passing on information from head office; the second order of business was to announce that I would join Molly’s team at the conclusion of the meeting. She had been sitting quietly chatting to Peter before the meeting was called to order; he reported that she said her weekend had been wonderful, including a visit to a London theatre. Peter claimed not to have heard it, but Geoff sitting on the other side thinks she said ‘Show time’ when Paul announced my move.

They both agreed on what happened next. Molly was on her feet in an instant, a finger pointing at the end of her outstretched arm at Paul’s heart. She told him that he was useless as a director and that her team was the only good thing about the laboratory. She embroidered the accusation at some length. Eric particularly liked a passage which began by telling Paul that he was unfit to direct traffic on a desert island and concluding with a most unfavourable comparison with lollipop ladies. Eric was too much of a gentleman to tell me what Molly had said about me, but there were others who took great delight in ensuring that I did not miss a word.

Before anyone had time to react, Molly concluded her curtain speech and flounced out of the board room. Peter was the first to react, getting to his feet as the door closed behind her. He caught up with her as she left the building and they argued in the car park for some minutes before she drove off and he returned, dejected. Paul met him in the foyer, and they agreed that Peter should collect Molly’s personal effects and drive to her home with them.

The director insisted that Kate accompany Peter on his search of the office; when they visited her home, Amanda informed them that Molly had packed her car the previous evening and was now on her way to an undisclosed destination. Presumably, Kate was added on the grounds that it would be improper for a man to rummage in a lady’s drawers, even if the drawers he was rummaging in were part of a desk. Molly had left nothing behind. She had gone straight from the board room to her car so she must have cleared her desk before she took Friday afternoon off.

“I thought her farewell speech was a bit too well rehearsed,” Kate told me later. “She must have been planning her departure for some time, sly bitch!”

It was almost lunchtime when she offered this opinion, while I was waiting in her office to be called into Paul’s inner sanctum. He and Geoff, the senior team leader, had been in closed session since the earlier meeting ended in disorder with Molly’s dramatic exit. I had received the call ten minutes before, and I was joined by David a couple of minutes later. He was extremely nervous, wanting to know what was going on. Kate probably knew the whole story, but she would only talk about the personal attacks Molly had made before she left.

“She must have got to know you pretty well, Mark, to be so scathing about you. I have to say that you hide your abysmal ignorance well for a total loser.”

She thought that was wonderfully funny and even David managed a rather wan grin.

“It sounds to me like she had a lucky escape,” I conceded. “I’m just surprised it took her six months to notice.”

“I’d have settled for that verdict in return for six months of her company,” David sighed wistfully, surprising Kate and me into silence.

Moments later, we were standing shoulder to shoulder in front of Paul, seated at his desk.

“The team’s yours if you want it, David.”

“Not at any price, Director. Not my scene, I’m afraid, although I must admit I’m flattered that you asked.”

“You’ll be the brains of the outfit whatever your title, so give me the name of someone you’d be happy to work for.”

“Well, I must admit that I’ve thought about it. I suppose I should name one of the other deputies, but I honestly don’t think any of them is quite up to the job. It may not be politically correct, but have you considered Mark for the job?”

“Great minds, and all that,” Paul grinned, and they both turned to look at me.

It was flattering but not altogether surprising, if I must be honest. Paul once told me that my greatest quality as a scientist was my ability to concentrate totally on a problem to the exclusion of all else. After the shooting, I had lost that skill, but it had been returning as I worked with the other team leaders over the months I had been in the lab. In the past week, I had gone a long way towards mastering the intricacies of Molly’s research. With David’s support I could do the job.

“What happened eighteen months ago that drove a wedge between you and Molly?”

David looked startled, but Paul relaxed in his chair, looking amused; he knew how my mind worked.

“We were always having disagreements about the direction we should take. She respected my opinion, you know.”

“I know that when she and I argued I always had to give in.”

“It wasn’t like that at first. We would argue for hours, sometimes coming back to a question for days on end, but in the end, we adopted my ideas as often as hers. But you’re right, about eighteen months ago things changed and after that she had to get her own way every time.”

I was going to continue when Paul interrupted, telling us to continue the discussion in my new office.

“I’ve already wasted the morning on that silly woman and, interesting as it is, I don’t have time to learn how you two are planning to put things right.”

David had been almost chatty in the director’s office, but he had returned to his shell by the time we reached what had been Molly’s office. There had been a number of things happening about eighteen months ago; could I, he asked, be more specific. I was rapidly losing patience: I explained again what I had deduced from the quarterly reports, and he promised to wrack his brains. As soon as lunchtime was over, I called the rest of the team into the office and explained what was happening.

David sounded sincere when he assured them that he did not want to be made team leader. There were five others in the room and my judgement was that two approved of my appointment, one disapproved and the other two were waiting for events to unfold.

“It’s no secret that the team has not been making the expected progress recently. After going through the reports, there seems to be a moment about eighteen months ago when a wrong turn was taken. Can any of you remember what was happening at that time?”

“Have you looked at the working notes?” James asked, tapping the four-drawer filing cabinet he was leaning against.

There was a search for the keys, which were not in their usual place, and I called the caretaker to come up and break the lock. In the meantime, I set the five of them writing down everything they could remember about the work they were doing eighteen months before. The caretaker did better than drill out the lock: he brought a spare key. The top drawer contained copies of directives from head office, but the other three were empty: no working notes.

I shrugged it off, telling the others that their recollections were even more important now. Elizabeth, a rather mousy girl just on the wrong side of thirty, spoke up.

“I keep a diary. I’m sure there will be something in that.”

“Great! Can you run home and get it now?”

She blushed so her scalp gleamed through her blonde hair.

“I can’t do that! It’s my personal diary, you see.”

She agreed to transcribe the bits we could see, and I sent her home, telling her to stay there until she had covered the period between one and two years earlier. Just as she was leaving, I could not resist a crack:

“Don’t forget to send the naughty bits straight to me in a plain brown envelope.”

“Stop it Mark! I don’t know how I’m going to face any of you in the future.”

“Take it from me, you’ve gone up a full two points on the attractiveness scale now we know you have naughty thoughts.”

She laughed, turning her head slightly to look straight at James, back to lounging against the filing cabinet.

“Do you think it will get me a date?” and with that she was out the door, shutting it firmly behind her. The others teased, but James looked thoughtful.

At ten past five, I told them all to go home. I had originally planned to see Pat at lunchtime and now I was determined to talk to her before she left for the day. Yet another plan went aglae when David returned to the office as soon as the others had gone. He was carrying a sheaf of papers which he placed on my desk.

“I think I know exactly what you were talking about,” he began. “I was so concerned at the time that I wrote down my proposal and my objection to Molly’s. She just wouldn’t listen – said some terrible things about men in general, and me in particular. I really thought she liked me as a person until then.”

I waved him to a chair while I read through his version of events. I did not, at that stage, know enough about their work to judge. David’s idea seemed sensible, but the important thing was that Molly had failed to make her alternative work.

“I was never very confident around women you know, but I thought that Molly really appreciated that my brain made me someone special. I deluded myself about her and maybe I’m equally deluded over my proposal.” He indicated the document he had handed to me.

We had to go back to go forward. I had picked up a general sense of their work from the quarterly reports, but I demanded that David go over every step they had taken. It was seven o’clock before I became aware of a loud rumble from my companion’s tortured tummy. That reminded us that we had already missed lunch, and we adjourned the meeting to a nearby Indian restaurant. We spent our time in that public area talking about his lack of success with girls.

Never having learned when to keep my mouth shut, I suggested that he should pay more attention to the girl than to her reaction to him. Instead of worrying if he was making a good impression on her, he should spend his time listening to her and complimenting anything he found appealing.

“Are you suggesting that my diffidence might look like self-absorption?”

I suppose I was, but he said it so much better than I had. We returned to the office to thrash out a plan for the future, finally going home just before midnight, tired but happy. That euphoria lasted until about one in the morning when I had an attack of paranoia; all seven members of the team had been working there when Molly chose the wrong path. There was enough circumstantial evidence to exonerate David but what about the others? Had they genuinely forgotten or was the memory lapse a deliberate attempt to keep me in the dark.

I lay awake for another hour analyzing the situation. I did not know any of my new staff well enough to reach a conclusion. I did know that Molly had gone off with all the working notes, which strongly supported the idea that she planned to continue with her research. The development had reached the point where it really needed more than one researcher. She must know that Paul would keep her team together and she would surely accept that her successor might find the path she had missed.

Molly had planned her departure from the lab. The question that dominated my thoughts in the early hours of Tuesday morning was, what else had she planned? I could only interpret the removal of all the notes as an attempt to slow our progress while she settled in her new position. The other thing that would speed that transition and slow us down still further was to lure several of my team away. If I had been in her shoes, I would have left the renegades in place to act as spies and to slow our work if they could.

I had agreed with David that we would tell the team what was going to happen first thing on Tuesday morning, but I phoned him at eight to tell him I had changed my mind. I told him that I wanted to wait to see which way Molly jumped before finally deciding our next moves. He was reluctant but promised to say nothing until I could explain in greater detail. I called a meeting as soon as I got to work, at which they reported the results of their trips down memory lane. Elizabeth must have worked most of the night for she brought four pages of extracts from her diary.

The one change I noted from the day before was that James now stood just behind her chair, putting a hand on her shoulder at some point during the hour we spent discussing the problem. Elizabeth had noted that there was a major row between David and Molly, but she had not suggested a cause. Now she shrugged and supposed it had been personal.

“We all knew David was sweet on her and around that time she was being particularly catty in her remarks.” The others nodded when she added that they all suffered but David most of all.

Just before eleven, I took them all down to the canteen to treat them to coffee and cakes. As soon as I had paid, I excused myself and headed out, ostensibly to go to the toilet but actually to talk to Pat. She had not been on duty when I arrived, but she was there now and alone.

“Can I come round this evening to talk to you and the kids?”

“No!” She must have seen the distress on my face, because hers hardened before she added: “You’re twenty-four hours too late, Mark. I think it’s best if you don’t see Alice and Brian again.”

I was searching for words when Elizabeth came into the foyer.

“I thought Pat might enjoy a cake,” she smiled widely.

Simultaneously, my phone rang; it was Kate summoning me to a meeting with the director. Pat was chatting to Elizabeth with her back to me, so I accepted the inevitable and took the lift to the top floor. Paul wanted a progress report. I told him what David had proposed and I asked for his approval of my decision to keep the news from the rest of the team for a couple of weeks. He had called Amanda who told him that her daughter was in London, but she did not know exactly where.

Paul asked Amanda to pass the word that Molly had signed a legal agreement when she joined the lab prohibiting her from taking information away with her. Amanda insisted that the rule did not apply since Molly had brought the original idea with her. The matter was in the hands of the company solicitors. The rest of the day dragged on. I was in the foyer a few minutes before five, but Pat had already left; I drove round to her apartment but there was no answer to my knocking, and I could see no lights on in the house.

Having no idea where her mother lived, my choice lay between going home and sitting on the doorstep. I had been awake half the night after a stressful day, and I was beginning to get stroppy. I had been totally frank with Pat and I believed that she owed me a little more time to resolve my problems before she cut me off. I rarely drink, but I had two large whiskies when I got home. I thought gleefully that they would put me over the drink-drive limit so I could not change my mind and return to Pat’s apartment.

I awakened sometime later to my phone ringing; I was a bit disorientated but eventually managed to make a coherent response. It was Morag; one of her clients is the wife of a senior executive in the company that funds Witherstaff’s chair. Samantha does not like the guy and was only too happy to spill the dirt. The professor sells himself well, which is what got him the job in the first place, but recently he has dropped below the required standard. Not to mince words, he has been told to come up with something profitable or risk being dropped.

When the same thing happened about five years before, Witherstaff’s answer was to sell the idea that he had a brilliant research student who would do anything he asked. Samantha could not remember the name of the girl, but it all happened at the time he seduced Molly, and it would have been too much of a coincidence if there had been another brilliant student in his cross-hairs. All Samantha remembered was that the deal fell through.