Newton’s Fire. Will Adams

      ‘And Newton wanted a Jewish state, did he?’

      Luke nodded. ‘A lot of them did back then,’ he said. ‘They believed it was a necessary precondition of the Second Coming. But the point is that we know where the great majority of lots ended up. Keynes left all his to King’s College Cambridge, for example. Yahuda’s eventually went to the National Library of Israel.’ He glanced at Pelham. ‘Remember when Jay went to Jerusalem that time? That was to see the Yahuda archive.’

      ‘But some of the Sotheby’s lots have gone missing,’ suggested Pelham. ‘And this lawyer hired you to find them.’

      ‘More or less. It was good money, it meshed perfectly with my research and it wasn’t particularly demanding. I mean it’s not exactly Sherlock Holmes. Mostly it’s afternoons in reference libraries and public records offices, or writing letters and waiting for replies. The lawyer kept pushing me, but honestly there was only so much I could do. People have been hunting for the damned things for years, after all. It wasn’t as if I was likely to do any better.’

      ‘But you did?’

      ‘There were these buyers we call the three Ms,’ said Luke. ‘They have no connection with each other, except that they each bought one of the missing lots, and their surnames all begin with the letter M. May, Manning and Martin. Not much to go on, but I figured I could narrow it down. For example, they most likely lived in or around London. Any further away, they’d likely have bid through a dealer. And if they’d made a special trip for the auction, then surely they’d have bought more than one lot.’

      Pelham nodded. ‘Makes sense.’

      ‘So I went through various 1936 London and Home Counties directories for plausible candidates, then tracked descendants through obits and wills and the like.’

      ‘Sounds a hoot.’

      ‘It was, curiously. Or a distraction, at least. Anyway, I got no joy from that, so I tried alternate spellings instead. Mays, for example. Munnings. Martyn with a “y” rather than an “i”.’

      ‘Ah,’ said Pelham. ‘I sense we’re getting somewhere.’

      ‘A Bernard Martyn lived in an apartment in Bruton Place in 1936, just a short stroll from Sotheby’s. I checked into him: a particle physicist with a special interest in light.’

      ‘So bound to be interested in Newton?’

      ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? And likely to be pretty well off, too, with an address like that. Not that these lots were expensive; not for what they were. Ten to fifteen guineas, that kind of thing. About £500 in modern money. The entire collection only raised nine grand.’

      ‘What would they be worth now?’

      ‘God knows. They don’t often come up for sale. And it depends massively on how interesting it is. Twenty or thirty grand for anything half decent. And if it’s unusual, if it hints at original thinking …’ He shook his head. ‘A hundred grand easily. Quite possibly two or even three.’

      ‘No wonder your client wanted them.’

      ‘Anyway, Bernard Martyn died back in 1969. He was childless, so his estate passed to his nephew George. George died too, a few years back, leaving the residue to his widow Penelope. I tracked her down to the family pile in the Fens, so I wrote to ask her if, by any chance, she knew where Bernard Martyn’s belongings were. They’re up in my attic, she replied, covered by dust sheets. No one’s looked at them in decades.’

      ‘So you got in your car and drove on down?’

      ‘And what should I find in one of the boxes,’ agreed Luke, ‘but four pages of Isaac Newton’s alchemical notes?’ He told Pelham everything that had happened since, finishing with his arrival at Cherry Hinton Science Park.

      ‘Bugger me,’ said Pelham. ‘You have had a day.’

      ‘So you see why I need Rachel Parkes. Her aunt’s email and those photos are all I’ve got. If those bastards delete them, I’m toast.’

      II

      The policeman was uncommonly tall and thin, so that he looked disconcertingly like a marionette as he climbed out of his patrol car. And he kept dabbing at his septum with his index finger, as if tickled by allergies.

      ‘Thanks for getting here so quickly,’ said Walters, shaking him by his hand.

      ‘Sod all else going on,’ said the policeman. ‘Never is, round here.’ He folded his arms and leaned back against his car. ‘So you’re counterterrorism, right?’

      ‘We can’t discuss that, I’m afraid.’

      ‘I’ve been thinking of getting a transfer myself, see if I can’t get some proper action. What’s it like with your mob?’

      ‘I’m sorry. We really can’t discuss it.’

      He grunted and reached back inside his car for his cap. ‘So what do you need me for?’ he asked. ‘The governor only told me where to come.’

      ‘There’s a house we want to look inside. But we can’t have the locals complaining, so we need to show them we’re on the side of the angels.’

      ‘Mannequin duty, huh. Ah, well.’ He gave the house a gloomy look. ‘So this is part of the great terrorist nexus, eh? Should me and the boys be keeping an eye on it?’

      Walters shook his head. ‘It’s information we’re after, not bad guys.’

      ‘If you say so.’

      ‘And not a word about this, right? Not to anyone. We’re talking national security here.’

      ‘So I was told.’

      ‘Good.’

      Walters joined Kieran and Pete by Parkes’ front door. The locks put up little fight. They spread out inside, taking different rooms. The kitchen was clean but cramped, with shabby units and a noisy fridge. Walters peeled himself a satsuma as he flipped through a stack of bills.

      ‘Two bedrooms,’ said Kieran, appearing at the door. ‘One’s an old biddy’s; the landlady, I assume. The other is Parkes’. Her desk’s set up for a laptop, but there’s no laptop. She must have it with her.’

      ‘Any other devices?’

      ‘None that I can find.’

      ‘Shit. Then what do we do?’

      ‘They have broadband. I can put an intercept on the router. When she logs on, we’ll piggyback in with her, then hijack her ID and disrupt her connection. She’ll assume it’s a glitch with her router or her machine. By the time she’s turned everything off and on again, the email will be history. She’ll never even know it was there.’

      ‘How long to set up?’

      ‘Five minutes. Maybe ten.’

      Walters nodded. ‘Then get to it,’ he said.

      III

      Noxious smells and unnerving clanking noises were coming from beneath the bonnet of Rachel’s Rover as she bunny-hopped along her street. She clutched the steering wheel tight and let out a heartfelt curse. Everything seemed to be going wrong today. The meeting at her brother’s care home had been a near disaster. When you had nothing with which to bargain, you made rash promises instead. Ten grand by the end of the month. How on earth was she to find that? She was already pushing her luck at both her jobs. Her room was as cheap as Cambridge could offer, she’d pared every surplus expense from her life, had nothing left to sell. She could ask Aunt Penelope for help, but her pride revolted at the thought. If Penny’s odious sons found out she’d given Bren any more money, they’d cut her off from her grandkids out of sheer spite.