LITMIR.BIZ

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He calls himself the dean of the zoology department such as it is here, only four profs, you know. We’re a small operation. The student rumour mill has it they hated each other’s guts.”

      “Why?”

      The woman laughed. “Diamond was a free spirit, you know what I mean? He was classy, like, and didn’t care what Davies thought of his lectures so long as the students liked them. Like the time he taught us the mechanics of flight. He brought in a whole slew of mechanical birds and he had them flapping all over the lecture hall. It was great. Then Davies walks in and everybody shuts up. He’s kind of a dried-up little man. He kinda looks around and eyeballs Diamond with his fierce little flinty eyes and just as he’s about to say something — God, we would have given a lot to know what he was going to say — a little whirly-bird bashed into his bald head and everyone started laughing. Davies was furious and he stalked out like a scorched rooster. After that there were lots of rumours that he was actively trying to get rid of Diamond. Hard to do when Diamond had tenure but, well, there you go. Guess Davies won’t need to worry anymore, eh?”

      “Davies doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would have liked his profs getting involved in stuff like logging protests and things like that,” I noted.

      “You can say that again. He wants to be president of the university here, not just dean of science, and I think he feels Diamond was preventing that from happening. He was furious about Diamond’s high profile in this logging spree, said it harmed the reputation of the university — meaning his reputation. Oooeee was that fun. Manning the barricades. It was like one great big …”

      She stopped in mid-sentence as footsteps sounded in the hall. She glanced at me, suddenly anxious. “Don’t tell anyone I said any of this, will you?” She turned and raced back to her typing as a gaggle of students entered the office on some mission or other.

      I walked down to the end of a long tiled corridor, peering at the doors as I went. Each door had a glass pane in it, but most of the occupants had carefully blocked them with pictures of animals or pithy sayings.

      Unlike the other offices, whose doors were closed, the door to room 202 was open. I knocked and walked in.

      Allenby was sitting at a desk surrounded by papers and looked up quickly as I came in. He didn’t look much better than when I had last seen him in the bush, except that his clothes fitted him and were immaculate and his crisp white shirt highlighted the extreme pallor of his face.

      “Dr. Allenby. I’m Cordi O’Callaghan.” I held out my hand. “We met up in Dumoine. I stumbled across the body.”

      “Oh yes,” he said uncertainly. “Yes, I remember now. Come in, come in.” He didn’t get up to shake my hand because he hadn’t seen the gesture. Not surprising since the man hadn’t looked at me since his first quick preoccupied glance. He remained behind his desk as if it could defend him from my presence.

      “Did we arrange to meet? I didn’t ask you to come, did I?” he said, looking at a point somewhere way off to the left of my ear.

      “May I sit?” I asked.

      Finally he looked at me and smiled. “Oh, yes, sorry, do.”

      I studied him for a moment trying to evaluate how much to tell him.

      I decided to keep it simple and told him that my lab had been fumigated and my disks stolen and suggested there was a possible link between that and Diamond’s death.

      “What possible link could there be?” he asked.

      I told him briefly about the significance of the cedar twigs and my certainty that the body had been moved. I was sure the disappearance of my larvae and my data were related to that one fact.

      “I don’t know if there’s a link. I may simply be on a wild goose chase, but you’re a researcher. You can understand what it means to have your data stolen and why I’m grasping at the only straw I can find.”

      Allenby began shuffling the papers on his desk. His eyes flitted across my face avoiding eye contact. I could see a fine mist of sweat forming on his upper lip. What was he so worried about? Could he have moved the body, and if so, why?

      “What do you hope to get from me?” he asked the wall in front of him. I followed his eyes and saw a picture of a young woman and a small girl swinging on a hammock, laughing at the photographer. The little girl was the spitting image of Don.

      “I don’t know. I’m hoping something will twig. What can you tell me about Diamond?”

      “Diamond?” The word rang out like the tolling of a bell and lingered in the air, as if it were the first time Allenby had ever uttered the name. Finally he shifted in his seat, but the silence dragged on. Suddenly Allenby looked directly at me.

      “He was a bit of a legend. He knew the bush backwards, could survive on nothing. You know the sort of thing. Give him a knife, a tinder and flint, and some snare wire and fishing line and he could live forever. Sweet irony that he got done in by a bear.”

      I said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say.

      “We were working on a paper together, a cycle paper on lynx and hare. Hares are my baby, lynx his. Now, I don’t mean to be rude but I don’t see why any of this should interest you. He’s dead, isn’t he? Mauled by a bear, so why are you poking about? It won’t bring your insects back to life and it’s not going to help you get your disks back. It isn’t related at all. Just some macabre coincidence.”

      I didn’t say anything, waited. The silence lengthened until Don couldn’t stand it any longer.

      “He was a good man. Ruthlessly honest in all his dealings, almost to a fault, and when he got behind a cause he gave everything he had to it.”

      “Like the logging?”

      “Yeah,” sighed Allenby. “Like the logging. It became a personal vendetta to him.” He glanced out the window, as though he were seeing a magnificent pine slowly topple, and then dragged his eyes back to me.

      “Jake organized everyone to oppose logging up here in the Dumoine area. It’s prime logging country, has been for generations, but the logging companies haven’t done much replanting and the clear-cutting of the past has caused a lot of erosion.”

      “How many of the faculty have study sites up in the area?”

      Allenby looked at me and nodded.

      “Yes. That’s right. We have a biology station up in the area and most of us have some ongoing and longstanding projects up there, either our own or those of our graduate students. If the area is logged, lots of research could go up in smoke. So yes, Diamond did have a very personal reason for fighting the logging companies. He’d been studying lynx and bobcat in the area for fifteen years. So, it was not all altruistic, although he probably would have argued otherwise.”

      “I understand he organized a barricade to keep the loggers out.”

      “Yeah. And it worked. Jake was the sort of guy that could inspire you. He was the catalyst. Now he’s dead, and no one has taken over his leadership. Without him the cause is winding down. Because of the barricade and the publicity surrounding it we got a temporary injunction, but it didn’t last long. Now the loggers are poised to move in and we’re without a leader. You see, Jake was one of a kind. He really believed we had to win or the world would collapse. That’s what drove him. No one else has quite the same drive.”

      “Was he well liked?”

      “What’s that got to do with it?” Allenby raised his thin voice to the stretching point, was about to say something and then thought better of it. Instead his voice dropped and he said, “Yeah. He was well liked by most. He had people who didn’t much like him, loggers and people like that, but I don’t think he had any real enemies.”

      “Were you in the area on or around the day he died? Did you see anything that might help me?” He hesitated only a fraction.

      “I was

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