‘That’s where the heavy water from Vemork ended up, and why the RAF had to conduct its daring bombing raid. I remember doing it at school. World War Two was just becoming compulsory, but my history teacher was a real buff, and liked to go into a lot more detail than was strictly necessary.’
‘But what’s all this got to do with Dad and Clydebrae and all the rest of it?’ Her eyes widened. ‘You don’t think—?’
His eyebrows went up. ‘That the reason we haven’t got anything on Waverley B before the Fifties is that they changed the name, and the reason they changed the name was that they were doing the same sort of experiments there during the war?’
‘Well, if they knew about Haigerloch, they’d obviously want to try to catch up,’ Emily said logically. ‘And they’d obviously have to keep it secret.’
‘Thinking’s all very well, but we need some evidence. I wonder if it’s all in this Meekie book, whatever that may be. Maybe you gave up on Meekie too soon.’
‘Spelling!’ Emily exclaimed. ‘He’s a bit of a phonetic speller, isn’t he? And suppose he’d only heard the word, never seen it written down?’
‘M-e-a-c-h-i-e. The good old Scottish name of Meachie, sept of the Mcdonalds if my memory serves me right.’
‘How can you possibly know that?’
‘I don’t, I’m just making it up,’ he grinned. ‘How do you think I got my reputation for omniscience? People hardly ever check up on you.’
‘You charlatan!’ She put Meachie into Google and hesitated. ‘There’ll be five million entries.’
‘Try Meachie and Clydebrae,’ Atherton suggested.
She added the word and hit enter. ‘Bingo,’ she said softly. ‘Angus Meachie: The Clydebrae Glory. The Scottish maritime historian and archivist tells the story of the Clydebrae shipyard from 1869 until its takeover in 1943 by the Ministry of Defence.’
‘We’ll have to get hold of that book. And I wonder what else he found out at the Scottish War Museum – the clue is in the title, folks – and the other places. If it was secret, there won’t have been much in the public record office, you can bet.’
‘Whatever he did find out,’ Emily said, ‘he will have passed on to Dad. And that’s probably what was in the file they took away.’
‘But your father wouldn’t have had only one copy, would he?’
‘Not if it was important.’
‘He didn’t have a safe, or a safe-deposit box or anything?’
‘Not that I know of. But I still don’t understand what this has to do with Richard Tyler and Anderson-Millar and all the rest of it, and why it was important enough to want to . . . to kill Dad for.’
Atherton laid his finger beside the last line of Danny’s list. ‘Cad and Ber. There’s a full stop after each word. They’re abbreviations. Dopey old Mrs Masseter said he talked about Cadbury’s and someone called Beryl. If she remembered those words, he must have repeated them a lot.’
‘I’m not there yet,’ Emily confessed.
‘Cadmium is used as a barrier to control nuclear fission. And beryllium is an isotope moderator.’
‘How do you know these things?’
‘I read a lot. But the thing you need to know about cadmium and beryllium is that they’re both extremely toxic, particularly beryllium.’
She looked stricken. ‘The Scottish Ornithological Union notes there are no more red-throated divers at Clydebrae,’ she said quietly. ‘Or Forster’s terns.’
‘Or much of anything else, I imagine. We’d better go and see the guv.’
Eighteen
The Ego Has Landed
It all makes sense,’ Atherton said to the assembled desk-squatters. ‘Clydebrae was a ship-building yard until 1943, when the government takes it over. They use the site for secret nuclear experiments, trying to catch up with the Germans. After the war they hand it back for shipbuilding, but change the name in case Clydebrae has any associations for anyone. But the land is contaminated with cadmium and beryllium. Nobody realises this, but the yard is known as an “unlucky” one with a high absentee rate. Not the workers being naturally bolshie, but falling sick rather too often, and not feeling terribly well when they are at work.’
‘And there are no seabirds any more on the nearby beach that used to be a bird-watching site. I wondered why there was a road to nowhere,’ Emily added.
‘Finally Dansk, the latest in a series of owners, decides it can’t make a go of it, and decides to sell. And then the government gets involved, because there’s an election coming up and the loss of two thousand jobs could just swing the seat in favour of the Nats. Anderson-Millar buy it, but they don’t really want to run a shipyard there where everyone else has failed. They want to sell it for development.’
‘Like Salford Quays,’ Joanna said quietly, from Slider’s shadow.
Atherton nodded towards her. ‘Freddie Bell said the profit of a development like that depended on what you had to pay for the land.’
‘But if the land was toxic and had to be decontaminated, it would add millions to the cost.’
‘Could be a billion or more,’ Atherton said. ‘And it would ruin the cachet—’
‘The what?’ said Hart derisively.
‘Who would want to visit, let alone live and work in, a development they knew had been built on contaminated land?’ he translated for her. ‘Even if they were told it had been cleaned up. It could never be a prestigious, luxury venue for the movers and shakers with that reputation. On the other hand, if you don’t tell anyone . . .’
‘Nobody could be that cynical,’ Joanna said, shocked. ‘You’re talking about risking people’s lives.’
Slider said, ‘Two of the players, at least, have no particular reverence for life.’
‘If they knew about it,’ she said.
‘Somebody knew about it,’ Emily said. ‘There was a big housing development project supposed to happen right next door after the war. But it didn’t go ahead. They cleared the land and demolished most of the houses, but they never built on it. Why, when they were so short of housing? I think somebody back then knew the truth and the project was just quietly dropped.’
‘It would be something to know the history of that,’ Slider said, ‘and who owns the land now.’
‘If it was bought for council housing it must be the council,’ Atherton said. ‘And they’ve just left it empty. Maybe that was one of the things Danny was looking into.’
Hart came in. ‘All Danny’s protests were environmental things. He tried to get the Hartlepool ship-recycling thing stopped. And he’d borrowed that book from the library about breaking up nuclear submarines. So he’d know about the toxic chemicals that came with it.’ She clapped a hand to her mouth. ‘Blimey, I forgot to ring Reading Library, to get them off Ma Masseter’s back.’
‘What does it matter? They can buy another copy, can’t they?’ Fathom said, wanting to get back to the exciting bit.
‘It’s not like the new Dan Brown,’ she told him severely. ‘It costs two hundred and fifty quid a copy.’
‘Yeah, and it’s rubbish,’ Hollis said. ‘You could never make a film out of it. Guv, it occurs to me that Richard Tyler was junior minister in the Department of the Environment. So any questions about cleaning up a toxic site would come to him, if anyone. And he was supposed to be tight with Sir Henry Paxton, the boss of Anderson-Millar. Suppose Paxton had found out about the contamination, and went to Tyler quietly, saying what are we going to do? We know Tyler was in to make a lot of money out of the development, through his shares in Key Developments . . .’
‘Do we?’ Atherton said. ‘I thought that was only a supposition until we got an answer from Vollman Zabrinski.’