• Chapter 18
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 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows 
... and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all
 – Isaiah 53:4–6

Monday had been a bad day for Bradley Pettier. Although he’d been in early, at 8:30, and – unusually – without a hangover, this hadn’t been nearly early enough to avoid Little Miss Lady Cop and her unladylike temper. Not to mention her language.

She’d been pissed that the local cops had been snooping around in her investigation, and wanted to know what he, Brad, had said to get them involved. No amount of denial seemed to satisfy her. The look of (genuine) confusion hadn’t helped – probably only served to strengthen her opinion of him as just another dumb ex-colonial. 

The fuss had even, eventually, coaxed the boss out of his lair, leading to an increasingly awkward series of questions, culminating in “Are you ever going to write that paper?” and “Why the fuck do I even pay you?”.

The rest of the week could only get better, he’d thought. But here he was, 9 on a Tuesday morning, wondering why there was a 25 kg tub of ammonium nitrate on his lab bench. 

He peered at the lid again. There was a handwritten label, the ink smudged but definitely ‘De Kooij’ and not ‘Pettier’. That jerk in Stores must be illiterate as well as thick, Brad decided.

“Bradley.” A voice from the corridor outside the lab. “I think you have my order. It is a mistake.”

“You’re telling me. What would I want with the free world’s supply of ammonium nitrate?”

Michel stepped cautiously into Brad’s lab. 

“Nitrate? Ammonium nitrate?”

“Yeah. Fertilizer. You taking up industrial-scale gardening or what? Maybe a sideline in GMOs?”

“Verdomme. I wanted sulphate. For salting out. They got it wrong again. How stupid are these people?”

Brad shook his head, too tired even for low-level ragging of this crazy Dutchman. 

“Just take it, man. Get it off my bench.”

Michel nodded. 

“Thank you. We should talk science some time.” Then he lifted the tub without a sound and left the lab, leaving Brad to wonder if he’d just been made a fool of, and whether this was after all an improvement on the previous day.

**********

When Michel got back to his own lab, Felicity the graduate student was loading a gel, while Sabine and Slater were sitting side-by-side, taking turns looking down a microscope. Sabine looked up, smiled. 

“Michel! I wondered where you were.”

“I was chasing a lost order. It is an old Dutch sport.”

Slater snorted, without looking up from the microscope. 

“You’ve been working on your sense of humour, Mike. I approve. I also approve of these latest crystal trays. We’ll be able to book a synchrotron trip soon.”

“Good. Perhaps you can take Sabine and Felicity. It would be good training.”

Slater straightened, turned round. 

“Really, Mike? You’re usually so protective of your crystals. You like to see projects to completion.”

Michel shrugged, putting the heavy tub of chemical down by his own bench. 

“I have enough to be getting on with. Sabine, Felicity… they need papers too.”

Sabine looked from Michel to Slater and back again. 

“Really, Michel? You would do that?”

“Sure. It is no big thing.”

Sabine bent her head. 

“I am not sure how I can thank you,” she said. “Maybe I can buy you that drink sometime.”

Slater wagged his finger in mock seriousness. 

“Now stop it, you two. We have work to do. And you, Mike, need to shift that icing sugar off my desk.”

Sabine’s smile turned into a puzzled frown. 

“Icing sugar? Why are you bringing icing sugar into the lab?”

“I am making a cake.”

“That’s a shedload of icing for one cake, Mike,” Slater said.

“It was a bulk buy discount. And I think we should celebrate Felicity’s PhD upgrade.”

“Very true. Just get it off my desk, all right?”

“In good time, Tom. In good time. But now I have to feed my cells.”

Michel picked up a notebook and walked down the corridor towards the tissue culture lab. Sabine turned to Slater, and said,

“Icing sugar? Does Michel normally make cakes?”

“He hasn’t before, but he’s a man of many talents. And he keeps surprising me. So it’s not impossible.”

She laughed. “Maybe he is making a bomb!”

Slater fiddled with the focus on the microscope. 

“I have worked with Mike for many years, Sabine, and one of the things I have learned is that you don’t question what he’s doing. It all works out fine in the end – usually with a Nature paper.”

**********

The sky outside the lab was darkening, pink tinged with a sombre grey, when Slater emerged from his office. 

“Right you two. Ready? Felicity’s gone ahead – I said we’d catch her up.”

Sabine was already at the lab sink, peeling away  the hated latex gloves and dropping them elegantly into the biohaz bin. 

“Are you ready, Michel?”

Slater chimed in: “You joining us? It’s nearly 8, you should take a break at least.”

Michel looked up at the clock above the door. The minute hand ticked onto the 10. 

“You guys go. I’ll just set up this tray and follow you later.” He reached for his pipettor, and turned to Sabine. A genuine smile spread across his face.

Sabine caught her breath, and smiled back as she walked out the door with Slater.

“Tot ziens, schatje.”

**********

The rest of Brad Pettier’s day had not improved. Truth be told it had got worse, culminating in a letter that he still hadn’t read, having not been able to get past the ‘Formal Warning’ header.

On his way out for a final cigarette before calling it a night, he stood against the corridor wall to let four or five giggling girls go past. One of them he recognized – a grad student from the Slater lab, apparently having passed her upgrade to PhD status. 

Well good luck lassie, he thought, welcome to hell.

He took a detour by the pigeon holes – dammit, bad news loves company, he thought – and was more than slightly surprised to find a large brown envelope in the ‘P’s, his own name handwritten in a Gothic script. He hesitated momentarily, before sliding the envelope under his arm and heading out to the carpark.

Outside, he leaned against the wall of the loading bay, and reached into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes. But then he changed his mind, and slit open the envelope. As he withdrew a sheaf of stapled, laser-printed A4, a loose piece of paper fluttered out. He caught it, and scanned the note quickly, eyes widening. He looked back at the stapled sheaf and quickly flipped the pages with a mounting sense of incredulity. Why would he do this? And why put himself middle, not first? (Or even last? God knew the mental bastard deserved that). 

“You crazy Dutch son-of-a – “

“What’s that you’ve got, Dr Pettier? Looks like a manuscript. Are congratulations in order?”

Startled, Brad looked up to see Sabine and Slater. The older man had a strange smile on his face.

“Uh, good evening, Professor Slater. Your postdoc seems to have given it to me.” Almost guiltily, he slipped the sheaf back into the envelope. “I haven’t read it, but he’s written this note, I’m not sure why – “

Suddenly Slater took him by the arm and pushed him firmly but not roughly into the shadow of the loading bay. Sabine followed. Slater held up a finger and nodded towards the Micro building.

Brad looked in that direction as a white car approached. It stopped under the security camera, and Brad had a sudden flash of insight that this was a deliberate manoeuvre.

A man and a woman got out and headed towards the building. Brad turned to Slater, his mouth open, but Slater shook his head. Sabine also remained silent, but her brow was furrowed.

When the newcomers were safely inside the building, Slater said, 

“Did you know this is the only place in the goods yard there’s no light? And that,” pointing out the white Ford, “is apparently a security camera dead zone.”

Brad shook his head. 

“Never thought about it. I just come out here to smoke.” He felt for his cigarettes again, thumbed one out, and on an impulse offered the packet to Slater and Sabine. Sabine shook her head, but Slater said,

“Don’t mind if I do, that’s most generous of you, Dr Pettier.”

Brad mumbled, his cheeks flushing pink, “Call me Brad.” He held out his Zippo.

Slater drew on the cigarette, a little too deeply for comfort, and coughed, his eyes watering. 

“It’s been a while. But you don’t forget, do you?”

Brad shook his head. 

“I guess not. I should quit, I guess. Say, what are you guys doing out here anyway?” Being so nice to me an’ all left unsaid.

“Tying up some loose ends,” Slater said. “Maybe you can tell us about your manuscript. Michel should be joining us soon.” He looked up to the window of his own lab. Brad and Sabine followed his gaze, and the main light went out, replaced by a smaller glow. “Oh, look. They’re in my office.” 

The glow in the lab window appears to shrink, but is replaced by a strangely blue light, moving faster than thought, expanding into the twilight sky, pushing the glass of the windows before it. The noise follows, crushing their eardrums, collapsing into the patter of glass shards cluster-bombing the tarmac. Orange flames start to lick around the empty window frame. 

Brad recovers first. 

“Mike – Michel? Christ, was he in there?”

He slaps the envelope with the manuscript against Slater’s chest and runs back towards the Institute. 

Sabine sobs, “Michel!”, and starts to follow him. But Slater catches her arm, shaking his head, and she stops. He takes the manuscript out, dropping the envelope on the concrete path, where splots of rain smudge the ink as effectively as they hide the tears on his face. 

Over the sound of the building’s fire alarm, a siren wails in the distance.

• Chapter 17
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My mother she taught me how to read
My mother she taught me how to read
If I don't read, ’n’ my soul be lost
Ain't nobody's fault but mine
 – Unknown

Tom got to his feet, took a step towards Michel. Mallory reached inside his jacket, but stopped when Alice held up her hand.

Slater crouched down by Michel; put his hand on the younger man’s knee. 

“Why, Mike? What is this all about?”

Michel, keeping his gaze on his own feet, said, “She was pregnant. With your child. That’s why I killed her. Even though she promised she never wanted to hurt you. It was a risk I couldn’t take.”

“I don’t understand, Mike.”

“She was a distraction, Tom! You were late in the lab in the mornings, you weren’t concentrating – it was better after she left, but she still had a hold on you. And a child… we would have lost you.” Michel looked up, his cheeks glistening in the fading light. “What would happen to the science? I couldn’t allow it.”

“How did you do it?” Alice asked.

“For God’s sake, woman!” Slater said. “Can’t you just leave it alone for two minutes?”

Alice shook her head. 

“Dr de Kooij, we can give you immunity from prosecution. From a certain point of view, you were on Government business and… collateral damage happens. But, you need to help us to help you.”

“It’s OK, Tom,” Michel said. “It’s only fair. I tell them, and we go back to the lab, and we do good science together again. Maybe we can even build a bridge with Bradley – he has good ideas.”

Slater looked up sharply at Michel, and then sat down. 

“All right. Fine. Tell me. Tell her. Tell all of us.”

Michel drew an invisible line with his finger along the arm of the chair.

“After I hacked your computer I began to think about implanting snake venom into a vector. All the chikungunya work suddenly made sense, of course. Splicing the venom sequence – I thought an alpha neurotoxin would work best – into the genome would have been the work of a couple of weeks. But the challenge was ensuring that the virus itself would have been sufficiently virulent, but not deadly in itself. And we wouldn’t want it to start expressing neurotoxin until we were ready.” Michel smiled. “That would be very bad.”

Slater nodded, thoughtfully. 

“And naturally, the infectivity part of the project fitted in with everything else we were working on. Legitimately.”

“I liked the idea of chikungunya as a vector because it’s not dangerous,” Michel continued. “Not very, anyway. Nobody would suspect it, and unless they took the trouble to sequence an isolate they wouldn’t realize it had been tweaked. All very James Bond. But then the neurotoxin would have given it away. People would know it was a biological agent. Also you wouldn’t sign my orders for reagents, so I didn’t have a template. But then I had a better idea. I could easily get immune components by PCR. Human sequences.” Michel smiled faintly. “I used my own blood for the template.”

“Oh, very clever, Mike. I knew there was a reason I hired you.”

“Yes,” Michel said, “it wasn’t obvious but worked very nicely. Interleukin 4 and a transcription factor or two. It looks like allergic anaphylaxis, or even Reye’s syndrome in the right individual.”

“Wait, stop,” Alice interrupted. “You’ve lost me. How does it work?”

“It’s quite simply, really,” Slater said, sounding more excited than at any other time that afternoon. “What Mike did was use key components of the body’s own immune system – controlling components – to provoke an ongoing immune response in the absence of an authentic immune challenge.”

“So a bit like an autoimmune disease? Arthritis or something?”

Michel nodded. 

“Exactly like that. Except much worse. A positive feedback loop that just gets worse and worse until the body destroys itself.”

“I see,” Alice said. “How did you get it into the test subject?”

“I put the expression cassette behind a heat-inducible promoter. I loaded a sample of the recombinant virus into a sprayer. I knew she liked vintage stuff, so I found a pretty Victorian-replica glass atomizer at a car boot sale. And I gave that to her with some flowers – Freesias. Yellow and white. Charlotte filled the sprayer with water and sprayed the flowers, transferring the virus. Then she must have sniffed the flowers. The warmth of her body activated the virus.” Michel shrugged. “It was not that difficult.”

“Oh come on, Mike!” Slater sounded almost excited. “You must have worked like a demon. I know you have late hours, but that’s one hell of a project. And everything else was progressing too – as far as I could tell, at least.”

“I don’t have much of a social life, Tom. It was for me an interesting exercise. At least, until Charlotte… I was not happy with that, Tom.”

Alice walked over to Michel and put her hand on his shoulder. He tensed, a slight tremor in his arm, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Well done, Dr de Kooij! Excellent work. Heat inducible, you say?”

“It seemed sensible. It was March, cold outside, and such a device should only go off when it comes into contact with a living body, no?”

“Precisely. I think you have great potential.” She lifted her hand and Michel sagged. “Anything else we should know? When can we get a sample?”

“I built in an off-switch. It is crude, but if the virus gets too warm, more than about 45ºC, it will inactivate. Permanently.”

“And the sample? Did you bring some with you?”

Michel opened his eyes wide. 

“No! Of course not. I will need to grow some up from the freezer, and get the files together.” He paused, as if in thought. “Come to the lab at eight on Tuesday night and I will have something your scientists can use.”

Mallory/Peter stepped away from the window. 

“That will do nicely. Come on, ‘Alice’. Let’s get out of here. I need a fag.”

**********

When the white Ford had crept gently away through the gloomy Cherry Hinton streets, Slater closed the curtains and turned the room lights on.

Then, matter-of-factly, not accusing: “You… spent a long time on my computer, Mike.”

“It wasn’t all at once. I put it together over several nights. And you never changed your password.”

“Well, that’s a lesson for me, then.”

Mary appeared from the kitchen, slid her hand into Slater’s. 

“Tom. I’m so sorry. This has been awful, hasn’t it.” She sniffed.

Slater turned, took her fully in his arms, stroked her hair until she stopped shaking. Eventually, Michel said,

“There was one other thing. I did a quick SNP analysis. If Charlotte was going to have your child, I had to know… for sure.”

“How?” Slater asked.

“Coffee cup. Human primers. I had the reagents. But no, it only took a couple of gels to be sure. I couldn’t have murdered my own brother. Or sister.”

Slater nodded. 

“I didn’t really – well, I guess it’s for the best. No more loose ends.”

‘Just one,” Michel said. “There is work to do if I am to be ready on Tuesday.” He nodded politely towards Mary. “Thank you for the tea. And sorry for the shock I gave you.”

“Which one?” Mary whispered, but Michel was already opening the front door.

“Wait!”

Michel turned.

“I know you wanted to get rid of them,” Slater said, “but are you really going to give them a weaponized virus?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Michel said, as the door closed behind him. 

“Do you ever worry we’re too attractive?”

“Ha! Daily.”

“No, I’m serious. We’re supposedly research scientists, but we barely do any research. Instead we’re constantly, like…falling in love, betraying and getting betrayed, having sex in closets, and delivering heartfelt monologues. I worry we’re not actually scientists at all, but sexy actors in a show about scientists.”

“Interesting. How would we test this hypothesis?”

“I think better in the hot tub.”

“Now that you mention it, it does seem strange we have one in the lab.”

My adorable rats, imagining themselves as human actors portraying scientists. Damn, this acid is strong!

I’d been mulling over the concept of ‘lab lit’ fiction since I coined the term as a thought experiment back in 2001: fiction about science as a profession, featuring scientists who ply their trade as part of a realistic plot. (You can read more about that journey in a piece I wrote for Nature.) The genre remains vanishingly rare, which has always struck me as odd given how central science is to our daily lives, and given how many millions of people practice it worldwide.

But of course there are obstacles to lab lit that could explain its rareness: the general lack of understanding of what it is we actually do as scientists; the potential complexity of the contextual subject matter; and of course, the fear and distaste many people feel about science – which would include authors and potential readers as well as the literary agents, editors and marketeers who gatekeep what gets published.

So I launched the website in 2005 to try to illuminate both the real-life world of scientists and the fiction that attempts to illustrate it – both existing works, alongside new fiction submitted to the site. As part of this, our Lab Lit List was, and remains, a living, curated database of all such books ever published – alongside other forms of fiction such as plays, television and movies. (The latter categories we freely admit are full of holes, as it’s not our main focus. If you see any missing, do let us know!) It’s been updated today with 30 new works, and by popular demand, alphabetized by author surname – do check it out.

None of this would have been possible without the hard work of our deputy editor, Richard, who keeps the site running smoothly, aids in editing, and also contributes content to the site. Also key are those who have stood by the website for many years – of this wonderful group of people, the Labliterati, more here.

When we launched, the List contained only about a hundred novels; with our latest update published today, that number stands at a whopping 495. This increase is due to two main factors. First, it’s thanks to the kind assistance I’ve had from many readers who have nominated their favorite older works, alongside the tireless sleuthing of our chief “Lab Lit Sniffer”, Dom (read his personal musings on this unusual role here). Dom spends most of his free time scouring published book reviews and nosing around bookshops looking for lab lit novels. In fact, at a recent Fiction Lab pub session, Dom attempted to buy a round of drinks, only to discover that he’d spent all his beer money on books.

But the second reason for the increase is far more exciting. And that is that the number of lab lit novels being written is definitely on the rise. Back in 2010, I published a piece in Nature with a graph suggesting an uptick in the late 1980s – see the image above. But as the numbers might have been plateauing as of 2010, it was really difficult to predict if this trend would continue.

So for this anniversary issue, we decided to revisit the experiment (thanks again to Dom for his hard work compiling the data from 2010 to 2022). As you can see from the above updated graph, the year-on-year increase in lab lit novels is absolutely real. (A big shout out to 2016, which saw the release of a whopping 28 books!) From a norm of no annual publications to perhaps one to two, we have been averaging a steady 16 for the past decade. And the trend very much looks like we can expect a continuing rise in the future.

Much has changed since 2005. The site itself was revamped in 2019, migrating to a fresh new look that worked better on portable devices, and leaving behind the original site as an unconnected archive. (If you want to search pre-2019 content, click on the archive button and you will be taken to the last issue of the old site, where the normal search bar can be used. Searches on the new site will only recover pieces from the post-migration period.) Long-time readers will have noticed that our updates and articles have become far less frequent than in the old days – a reflection of the fact that, in returning to academic research and eventually becoming a professor, my time is increasingly commandeered by teaching, writing papers and grants, travelling to give talks, and just generally trying to survive in the cutthroat profession that lab lit novels seek to convey.

Despite this, I remain fiercely proud of the website, and hope that you all will stay with us for many more years to come. If you’d like to contribute a piece for get involved in any other way, just drop us a note on editorial@lablit.com.

Of course I said yes. Our first meeting took place in June 2008, where a small group of about a dozen people discussed Philip Ball’s The Sun and Moon Corrupted. The author kindly came along too, which was a bonus. 

In the intervening 17 years, we have met every month nearly without fail, discussing the good, the bad and the ugly. (As most book group attendees will know, the bad books are always more fun to discuss than the good ones, though we are always surprised by how polarized the views are: the book might score a full ten points from one member, and negative numbers from another. Once a book was even tossed across the room in exasperation.)

After our Ri session, we’d decamp to the nearby King’s Head for more chat, drinks and signature cheesy chips. For Fiction Lab’s tenth anniversary in 2010, the Ri kindly hosted a gala event in their storied Library, the very same room where we’d met for the first time. But in reality, we met all over the building over those years, wherever there was a room free – a few times even in the basement, or in the famous prop room where all the stuff from the Christmas Lectures is stored. We often had authors come along to chat – never to sit in on the regular group, as we didn’t want to dampen anyone’s true opinions, but they’d come in afterwards for a (polite!) Q&A session. These exchanges were always fascinating, no matter how people had felt about the actual book.

We kept meeting even when the Pandemic drove us online in 2019. Once the lockdowns were over, we resumed as a hybrid group, having realised the benefits of allowing far-flung members to join in. But unexpectedly, the Royal Institution turfed us out in September 2023, having decided that they could no longer afford setting aside periodic space for us when there were clients who could pay. So even though we’d offered an enthusiastic but unremunerated public engagement event for so many years, promoting the Ri’s cause, our time there was sadly at an end. Homeless but undaunted, we kept the name, went back online and have been there ever since – which still works, although we all miss the cheesy chips. 

One of the most remarkable things about the group is how many longstanding members we still have: those who first came in June 2008, alongside regulars who started later, but still have been coming for many years. While others have come and gone, this steadfast bunch – who I call the LabLiterati – have remained loyal. They came from all walks of life and were all attracted to the group for different reasons. Some are scientists, others are decidedly not. Some are members of “normal” book groups too, in parallel, and others who have left London have seeded their own lab lit book groups in their new locations, but still meet up online each month with us.  They – we – have become friends who socialize outside of literary meet-ups, and who keep up a robust literary chatter on the dedicated WhatsApp. 

This dedicated group of people has become the world’s experts on lab lit novels – the constraints, the challenges, the triumphs and failures of authors trying to get across a world that is sometimes difficult to pin down and whose fundamental concepts can be prohibitively abstract. Did the scientist character come across as realistic, or were they freighted with disappointing stereotypes and cliché? Did the writer manage to avoid falling into the trap of using of informative dialogue and infodumps to explain the science to an unsuspecting non-scientist character? Was the science woven in seamlessly in a way that was clear but not annoying to those who might know the subject?

The LabLiterati, especially Dom, have also been instrumental in helping to keep the Lab Lit List stocked up with the latest books, and many have contributed to the website over the years, including original stories. I can’t imagine LabLit.com having lasted as long as it did without the support and friendship of this remarkable group of people.

Below, in celebration of our 20^th anniversary, I’m highlighting some of the LabLiterati , and their literary picks, in their own words. If you’d like to join the group, please email us at editorial@lablit.com!

Name: Simon
Year joined: 2014 
Favorite lab lit novel:
The only book I’ve so far given 10/10 was The Red Arrow by William Brewer – a mind-bending journey through one man’s struggle with, and recovery from, depression, incorporating interpretations of quantum mechanics and space-time with humour, playful writing, and great insight into the human condition. I loved it!
A good lab lit novel must be (three words): 
Engaging, Accurate, Innovative
What do you value about the group?
I’ve made great friends, and have read lots of interesting books that I wouldn’t have otherwise read. Even the bad books are fun to talk about!

***

Name: Simon (no relation to the first Simon!)
Year joined: 2024
Favorite lab lit novel:
Orbital by Samantha Harvey. I really liked the flow of the book. It conveyed complexity with clarity and simple language in a quite special way.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words): 
Distinctive, Relatable, Enriching
What do you value about the group?
It is enough of an addition to my general life that my colleagues at work will ask what I am reading for book club this month, knowing that it will prompt at the very least an entertainingly acerbic response but often an introduction to something that they might wish to read. In general, it has connected me with interesting and informed people through the excellent conversions and has directed me towards books that I might never have picked up.

***

Name: Catherine 
Year joined: Founding member: I was at the first meeting in 2008!
Favorite lab lit novel:
The Housekeeper and The Professor by Yoko Ogawa. We read this ages ago but it’s the one novel out of all the many we’ve read which sticks in my mind for good reasons. On checking it out now on Amazon I see that Publishers Weekly called it ‘a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow’ – which I’d go along with. 
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Accurate, Sympathetic, Illuminating
What do you value about the group? It’s a place where curiosity and dissent are valued and celebrated, within a supportive and respectful group of amazing individuals. 

***

Name: Mariana
Year joined: 2022
Favorite lab lit novel:
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. Light, funny, with an original plot and a bit of science. But I haven’t read many lab lit books yet and still hoping to find more good ones.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
I couldn’t narrow it down so here are two answers:
(1) Good fictional plot. (2) No real scientists! (Editor’s note: there is a hardcore faction of the group who really hate when novelists attempt to write about real historical figures and put words in their mouths…which is very common in the genre.)
What do you value about the group?
A great opportunity to meet new friends with similar interests, read books that I might not read otherwise, have nice discussions, and learn new science stuff from other areas.

***

Name: Philip
Year joined: Day one! (2008)
Favorite lab lit novel:
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck: Beautifully drawn, engaging characters run riot through an intriguing, unpredictable plot in which the crucial marine science thread is seamlessly woven into the story rather than shoehorned in as an awkward add on. You are inextricably pulled into this book – wanting to know what comes next but also hoping it never ends.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Plot, Characterisation, Creativity
What do you value about the group?
This book club has been a marvellous opportunity to make great friends – we are a close-knit group, even enjoying off-piste adventures such as visiting behind the scenes at Charles Darwin’s Down House. The book club is a relaxed, free and open space where everyone is encouraged to give their opinions on the books we read. We have the added bonus that some of the members are senior medical researchers or science communicators, so they can often offer a unique perspective on the content of the lab lit books. Plus having the authors occasionally visit the club is an invaluable and illuminating experience. Many of the authors have said that they enjoy the probing and expert questioning about their work.

***

Name: Tricia
Year joined: 2015
Favorite lab lit novel:
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. So much warmth in describing such a variety of people. So quirky. So well written. I also really enjoyed The Bloodless Boy by Robert J. Lloyd, as it ticks boxes for sorts of fiction I enjoy: historical, and murder mystery.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Plot, Characters, Facts
What do you value about the group?
Intelligent discussion about books I would probably never have otherwise read. Fiction Lab has become a group of very good friends, who may have different opinions about the books we read but otherwise find a lot to agree about – like good food and drink and interesting places to visit.

***

Name: Dom
Year joined: 2015
Favorite lab lit novel:
Very hard to say that one book stands out as I do not remember much fiction for long, except in very broad terms. Possibly C.P. Snow’s The Affair, or Wang Xiaobo’s Golden Age, but don’t ask me why now! There are comparatively few that are based in actual laboratories, but one I recall liking in that setting was Austin Duffy’s This Living and Immortal Thing. I love stories set in very cold places like Antarctica (a subgenre I like to refer to as ‘Ice lab lit’ – there are surprisingly a lot of these on the List…alongside ‘Wolf lab lit’). I also like literary lab lit; often books no one else likes; and novels where the author has not felt a need to tie up loose ends in a neat package – knowing what not to say is as important as what one does say.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Story, Science, Snow
What do you value about the group?
I miss when we met in person and drank beer. I value the frank exchange of views (and I like to argue!). I am interested in what other people find curious in what we read, but some people are never satisfied….

***

Name: Becky
Year joined: 2012
Favorite lab lit novel:
Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s engaging, accurate, and gives pertinent insights related to both nature conservation and social inequalities.
What do you value about the group?
Friendship. This is particularly relevant as we mark five years since the first Covid-19 lockdown – at a difficult time, Fiction Lab friends kept me feeling connected.

***

Name: Richard (no relation to our Deputy Editor!)
Year joined: 2008
Favorite lab lit novel:
Litmus, a collection of short stories rooted in science by well-known authors. The quality is quite varied but the best are truly excellent. In fact, reading Litmus inspired the group to embark on our own science-in-fiction short story project (published on Lablit.com under the series title The League of Imaginary Cats), and several of us, to continue writing.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Beware the infodump!
What do you value about the group?
Discovering novels and short stories I’d otherwise never have come across, and becoming friends with a fantastic and diverse group of interesting people. Despite not attending regularly since the Pandemic, I still feel a part of the group and maintain the friendships made there.

***

Name: Joe
Year joined: 2018-ish
Favorite lab lit novel:
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. As a work of literature it’s merely good, but as lab lit it’s superlative. A novel that truly captures the highs and the many, many frustrations of a life in research. I felt a strong sense of recognition on every page, which isn’t bad for a hundred-year-old novel.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Enlightening, engaging, thought-provoking
What do you value about the group?
Lovely people; interesting, intelligent discussions; a reason to read things I might otherwise have missed; the (rare) thrill of discovering an overlooked masterpiece; and the chance to let off steam about the many that aren’t.

Ants. It was ants that brought me to LabLit.com. 

I cannot recall the year I joined Twitter (remember that?), but it was when it was still an interesting place to be. I originally joined for work – to promote the University College Library library where I was working – but I made a personal account at the same time. Not being a scientist (at least in the employed or trained sense, though I consider I am in the sense that I just want to know), I enjoyed the fact that one could interact with Actual Real Living Scientists and that they would often reply. 

Social media turns out to be a brilliant way for scientists to communicate their work, and even to involve ordinary people in their research in the form of ‘Citizen Science’ projects. These allow the public to provide basic data on a mass scale that a small group of researchers could never acquire on their own. Soon after I joined Twitter, I noticed a post from Dr. Rebecca Nesbit, an entomologist by training who was working for Society for Biology. She was advertising a Citizen Scientist project that the Society was running in collaboration with fellow entomologist Dr. Adam Hart to see if there was any truth in the idea that ordinary black ants (Lasius niger) shared a common day for their mating flights. When the Society and Adam held an event, I attended and got to know Rebecca, who was at that time an early member of LabLit.com’s official London ‘Fiction Lab’ reading group, which met monthly at the Royal Institution to discuss novels about scientists. In January 2015, she convinced me to come along. (That’s her in the picture with me, chatting afterwards in the King’s Head.)

At that point, I did read the odd bit of fiction, but was more interested in factual things, such as popular science, history, and natural history. The first book I read with the Fiction Lab group was – it turned out – not very “lab lit”. Someone in the group had suggested Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil (1925) based on its back-cover blurb, which mentioned that the main character was a bacteriologist and physician. Unfortunately, the novel didn’t make the cut to be considered proper lab lit, or even ‘lab lit lite’ – which has happened from time to time over the reading group’s 17-year history. 

My experience reading The Painted Veil was frustrated further by its odd semi-religious ending. When I raised this during the discussion, everyone else was baffled; we soon realised the edition I was reading had been expurgated of its grittier, more downbeat ending by the Christian publisher of my copy! Such discrepancies were far from unusual in a group where the books were sourced far and wide, from libraries and book shops to Amazon and second-hand re-sellers. On another occasion, we were reading Lily King’s Euphoria, which I enjoyed, but my hardback edition talked about sloths (a species confined to the Americas), while the novel was set in New Guinea! It turned out that everyone else had the paperback where this had been corrected to a quoll. Don’t get me started: I think I have a very different idea of what basic general knowledge is than most people. But getting those details right is important. While I enjoyed Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop, it had eucalyptus trees in West Africa, at a time when they had only just been discovered in Australia.

Regardless of any niggling irritations in the books we read for Fiction Lab, I was hooked. There were a few hundred books in the lab lit genre on the List, but I started looking for new ones. I hope you all know by now, but lab lit must feature a major (not always the main) character who is a scientist (our Dear Leader allows mathematicians) in a plausible scientific setting. This means it excludes a lot of science fiction, most dystopian novels, and also some that encompass past, present, and future, like Maja Lunde’s recent novels. For better or worse, at some point I evolved (in Jenny’s words) the website’s official “lab lit sniffer”. 

Genre is a chimaera. No artist is identical with another in style, most lab lit authors are unaware of the concept and are just writing a novel, and everyone has a different perception of what they are reading. Ultimately whether or not we decide to consider a particular book for the List is down to what we can glean from reviews, blurbs, and a crafty butchers in the bookshop; but deciding whether it truly makes the cut requires someone to read nominations from cover to cover – often “taking one for the team” if the nomination is particularly bad writing – and successfully making the case. I started suggesting books to Jenny and the reading group. Then, rather than a scattergun approach of firing off emails or tweets to Jenny every time I saw something, which then would get lost in her thousands of emails, I began to compile an online candidate list that we could use to promote anything suitable to the official Lab Lit List once or twice a year, when our Dear Leader managed to find a moment for her feet to touch the ground. 

Consequently, I search book reviews in the newspapers, and systematically go through new publication shelves on book shops, to see if they might be suitable for inclusion. As I am sure we might have missed some books published years ago, so browsing all sorts of books in charity shops or libraries is useful. In fact, that was how I discovered the H.G. Wells novel Ann Veronica. The problem is, it is not always clear a book is lab lit, until you read it. It is a truism, but the editor’s decision is final. 

There seems to have been an increase in the number of novels that fit the lab lit model (see the companion piece here), but it is difficult to know if this is due to the ‘availability heuristic’, or is rather a real increase. I tend to think that the perceived increase is real. I created a spreadsheet of novels on the List, and tried to find out more about the authors. There is a clear increase in the number of female lab lit authors; there are quite a lot who have studied science to a degree level and a smaller number who have been working scientists. But you do not need to be an expert to write a decent lab lit novel; you only have to write well – thrillers, crime, romance, family sagas, literary novels, horror and everything in between.

You find it, or write it, we’ll try to read it!

We are pleased to present the latest update of the Lab Lit List, our iconic database of fiction about scientists. This time around we have 26 regular novels, three plays and three novels in the ‘crossover’ category (i.e., hard science fiction with particularly good renderings of scientists) to add. As always, thanks to Dom for helping to find most of these – you can read more about his process in this companion article.

By popular demand we have also – finally – re-ordered the main list of novels alphabetically by surname. Sorry that it has taken so long.

This update coincides with our 20th anniversary edition. Elsewhere in these pages you can find our updated graph of lab lit, which charts the seemingly unstoppable rise of the genre from a trickle to a modest…flood is too strong a word, but over the past decade it’s averaged 16 books per year, whereas before the 1980s, it was one or two per year, and usually nothing at all. So this is another milestone to celebrate!

Something missing? If you know about a book that you think should be on the master list, please do let us know at editoral@lablit.com.

In the meantime, happy reading! All the new works are listed below.

NOVELS

The Only Woman in the Room

by Marie Benedict
Historical Drama: A fictionalized account of Hedy Lamarr, an actress who was also a scientist.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Her Hidden Genius

by Marie Benedict
Historical Drama: A fictionalized account of scientist Rosalind Franklin, in which she is obscured by her male colleagues and rivals.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Magnus

by Mark Carew
Thriller: Students and a professor clash while doing fieldwork on a small Norwegian island.
Links: Amazon (UK)

You Can’t Hurt Me

by Emma Cook
Thriller: Anna is working on the biography of charismatic neuroscientist Nate, but ends up uncovering his toxic secrets.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Small Museum

by Jody Cooksley
Thriller: Newly married to a naturalist in the Victorian era, Madelaine is framed for a crime she did not commit.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa

by Nicholas Drayson
Comedy/Lab lit lite: Two rivals for the affection of the East African Ornithological Society’s bird-walk leader agree on a competitive bird-watching contest.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Bonding

by Mariel Franklin
Thriller: Mary meets a brilliant young chemist working on an experimental drug claiming to cure the anxieties of modern life, but she soon discovers there are side-effects.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Speak

by Louisa Hall
Historical drama: An exploration of the creation of Artificial Intelligence, though five disparate characters over many years, including Alan Turing.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Not in Love

by Ali Hazelwood
Romance: A biotech engineer at a food science start-up falls for the man who is leading a hostile take-over of the business.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Great Divide

by Christina Henriquez
Historical drama: An exploration of the construction of the Panama canal through the lives several people, including a scientist dedicated to eliminating malaria.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Alternatives

by Caolinn Hughes
Drama: When a geologist disappears, her sisters track her down to a remote bungalow in rural Ireland, where they confront old wounds and diagnose new ills.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Stars Turned Inside Out

by Nova Jacobs
Thriller/Lab lit lite: When a young physicist is discovered dead at CERN, an investigator uncovers petty rivalries and wonders what physics secrets are worth killing for.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Health of Strangers (2017)

by Lesley Kelly
Thriller/lab lit lite: After a plague, a small Health Enforcement Team in Edinburgh has to keep the lid on a new influenza virus and track down some missing girls. (First of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Daniel

by Henning Mankell
Historical Lab lit lite: In 1875, a young Swedish entomologist in the Kalahari ‘rescues’ a boy whose family was killed, but when he takes him back to Sweden, the boy faces all the prejudices of the age. Translated from Swedish.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Sign of Her Own

by Sarah Marsh
Historical drama: Alexander Graham Bell betrays a deaf woman involved in the invention of the telephone.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Naturalist

by Andrew Mayne
Thriller: A computational biologist uses science to investigate what he thinks is the murder of one of his students. (First of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Whale Fall

by Elizabeth O’Connor
Historical Drama/Lab lit lite: When a dead whale washes up on a Welsh island, a young woman is drawn to two ethnographers studying island life.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Shear

by Tim Parks
Drama: An English geologist working on a Mediterranean island becomes entangled in a nightmare web of deceit, corruption, lust and tragedy.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Enlightenment

by Sarah Perry
Drama: Two men share an obsession with the vanished nineteenth-century female astronomer Maria Veduva.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Playground

by Richard Powers
Drama: In Polynesia, plans for floating cities bring four people together, including a marine biologist and an AI researcher.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Mr Einstein’s Secretary

by Matthew Reilly
Historical/Lab lit lite: Hanna Fischer wanted to study physics under Einstein, but her life is disrupted by the Second World War.
Links: Amazon (UK)

There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak
Historical Drama/Lab lit lite: A split timeline links different people in the past, from Ashurbanipal in Assyria to Victorian London, a Yazidi girl in ISIS-controlled Iraq, and a hydrologist in the present.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Weeds

by Katy Simpson Smith
Historical Drama: Two women separated by time, but linked but their botanical work.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Pathways

by Katie Ward
Drama: A neuroscientist and her partner’s daughter struggle to form a relationship when the partner disappears.
Links: Amazon (UK)

One Perfect Couple

by Ruth Ware
Drama: Post-doc researcher Lyla joins a reality TV show, and things go horribly wrong.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Distant Dead

by Heather Young
Thriller/Lab lit lite: When the body of a former mathematics professor is found burnt to death in a desert, social studies teacher Nora Wheaton investigates what happened.
Links: Amazon (UK)

CROSSOVER NOVELS

Venomous Lumpsucker

by Ned Beauman
Drama: In the 2030s, biobanks of lost organisms are cyber-attacked, wiping out the last traces of the perished species.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Ascension

by Nicholas Binge
Drama: When a mountain appears in the Pacific Ocean and a group of scientists is sent to investigate, explorer Harry Tunmore agrees to join the secret mission, for reasons beyond scientific curiosity.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Feed Them Silence

by Lee Mandelo
Drama: Using a neurological interface to translate her animal subject’s perception through her own mind, Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon realises a lifelong dream of being a wolf.
Links: Amazon (UK)

PLAYS

Dr Semmelweis

by Stephen Brown
Play: Drama about the real-life doctor who promoted hand washing to stop the spread of diseases.
Links: National Theatre

Farm Hall 

by Katherine Moar
Play: German nuclear scientists deal with life in British captivity in 1945.
Links: Guardian

Test Room Eight

by Lester Powell
Radio play: Philip Odell and his assistant investigate suspected sabotage at a pharmaceutical plant.
Links: Internet Archive

Okay, so there’s this kind of slime mold, only, it isn’t a mold. Not really. Molds are usually in the fungal family, but this mold, or “mold”, is really an animal. Well, wait, no I think they’re some other family actually? Protists, or…wait, is Monera still a kingdom? I feel like it was when I was little, but I think last time I looked at the Wikipedia page for taxonomic kingdoms it wasn’t there, and I remember I was kind of confused about that. But they aren’t fungi is what I’m getting at. They’re these giant stalks made of amoebae.

Normally, amoebae just float around, eating bits of algae or whatever: reaching out with their weird tentacle pseudopod things and absorbing little particles. But when one amoeba senses that it’s run out of food, it sends out this chemical signal. This signal alerts other amoebas that food is low. Then their amoeba buddies that heard the first guy’s signal start scooching closer to their starving friend and firing off their own starving chemical signal – starting this whole chain reaction until they’re all huddled up together into a gigantic clear balloon of ectoplasm and vacuoles and nuclei. The amoebas that are the hungriest all start bubbling up to the top, which makes this growth start appearing on the top of the amoeba-ball. It looks a bit like a nipple. 

So, all the hungry guys are in the nipple, and all the well-fed guys are on the bottom. And the hungry guys start doing some chemical reaction thing, which basically is a no-holds-barred everything-must-go laxative kind of evacuation. This turns each of the starving amoebae into hard, empty shells, and has a nice side effect of bathing all the lower amoebae in nutrient-rich slime. Biologists call this portion of their life cycle the slug stage. The bubble structure from before has turned into a writhing, little goo-worm, shooting out a sticky snail trail. 

As this is happening, the well-fed amoebae are also slimming down. They basically eject everything except genetic information and stick to the inner walls of the slug. The slug propels its passengers higher and higher until finally, the slug’s propellers are all dried out: dead. The result of this process is a tall stalk with a big ball of freeze-dried amoeba on the tip. Hopefully, later, something bigger will come by, break the stalk, and send the sleeping amoebae somewhere with more food. At this point, the residents of the spore will wake up, and resume business as usual: maybe with a renewed sense of motivation not to be hungry for too long.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because I always wondered why the hungry amoebae play this game in the first place. The starving ones have nothing to lose. They’re going to die anyway, so why not just go look for more food instead of using their last dying breath to help the guy who happened to be standing in a crowd with him? I think it’s because they’re selfish. 

I know, that doesn’t make a lot of sense but hear me out. So, they know they’ll die no matter what, but they also know that if they’ve self-replicated lately, one of their clones will probably be out there in the crowd too. I mean, they can’t know this, obviously. They don’t have eyes, so if their clone wandered off away from the pack, they have no way of knowing. And more than that, they don’t have brains, so they have no memories. Whether they’ve had a million children, or they’re virgins – whatever that means for an asexually reproducing thing – they won’t remember. They can’t remember. So, for all they know, they’re standing next to their entire family. Maybe their kids or siblings or whatever are well fed. The amoeba doesn’t know. The best thing to do is self-sacrifice. Maybe that amoeba’s genes will live on. 

I’m hoping this will explain why I did what I did. 

When Jake asked me to be his second author on what would no doubt be his last paper before defending his Ph.D., I was overjoyed. I would dutifully labor away, contributing to his work for little or no reward just to add another publication to my CV. He was an algorithms guy, and I was more into pure math. Category theory, as you probably already know. 

At the time, we were both research assistants in the Discrete Computing Lab. It was a real “publish or perish” kind of environment. There was this one student, Sean, I think his name was, who was working there with us for a while. He was a student for a year or so, and he was Jack’s last co-author. There was some issue with his writing, or his lack thereof, or something I was never exactly made privy to.  Eventually Sean was sent a firm email suggesting that maybe he and his advisor would both be made a whole lot more comfortable if he applied his accumulated credits to a Master’s degree, and subsequently left the department: “mastering out”, we called it. It was something spoken of in hushed tones between classes. It was always an option, but then again, so is suicide. He left with little fanfare. There was no lab meeting about it. One day, he simply stopped coming into school. Jack was left without a second author, and asked me to fill the slot.

Jack was one of those rare people that just understood things. He could read a paper, really fly through it, and when he was done, he could explain it in such simple terms it was almost infuriating. So, when he asked me to help him with his paper, I knew it wasn’t to contribute anything. I knew he didn’t need any help solving whatever problem he was working on. My contribution would be writing the boring “Related work”, and “Background” sections so we could push this thing out as fast as possible. He would do the heavy lifting. 

That’s how it started. I set up a big, annotated bibliography, I checked his grammar and so forth. But after a while, he started asking me to write proofs. I was overjoyed by this. Proofs are important; proofs are like the ingredients that make up the whole pie, you know? He kept asking me to prove these seemingly unrelated concepts, building out a series of lemmas: closures on specific directed graphs, optimal node colorings…for some proofs I had to go back and reference Alfred North Whitehead’s work on the logic of arithmetic. It was weird stuff. 

I kept asking him to let me see the whole paper, and maybe then I could be of more help, but he refused. He was careful not to reveal exactly what this was building to. Something about not wanting to bias me in my work. Keeping my math straight so that no one could say I was on his side when this thing came out. He explained that it added to the verisimilitude. I wasn’t pleased about this, as you can probably understand, and it made the math a lot harder than it needed to be. But, despite his best efforts, after a few months, I had a pretty good idea of what he was building to. 

There’s this theory: P=NP. Basically, there’s a class of algorithms, P, that you can do in polynomial time: in other words, really fast. There’s another class of algorithms called NP, where that isn’t the case. What this means in real terms is that for P problems, you can just tell a computer to do it, and after a few seconds it’ll shit out a solution; for NP problems, you’re shit out of luck. Either wait a year for the program to find the answer, or settle for a close approximation. P=NP just means that those problems that seem to take a long time can really be solved much faster, we just haven’t figured out how yet. Jack had set out to prove the opposite. 

This revelation was disappointing at first. Sure, most computer scientists were pretty sure this result was inevitable, but still. If P=NP, then protein folding, kidney donor matching, and even optimal wedding seating charts could be calculated in the blink of an eye. Tragically, weddings would always take NP time to plan. But being the bearer of bad news had its own kind of charm. No, I’d think. You and your partner can’t get residency at one of your top 3 hospitals efficiently, I would imagine telling prospective medical students (yet another NP-complete problem). Sorry, Garmin, your GPSs will always route round trips slowly. It was liberating to be so evil.  

But after weeks of writing, I began to notice something. I didn’t think it was intentional. Maybe Jack had just made a mistake. More likely, I had made some mistake, and all of this just stemmed from my lack of understanding. I arranged for a meeting to try and clarify. 

***

“I’m not worried about the schedule or anything,” Jack started, “I think we’re making excellent progress. So, I hope that isn’t what this is about.” 

“No, nothing like that.” I looked away. The walls were made of alternating glass and whiteboards. The glass showed the still hallways of the science and engineering building. The whiteboards were covered in equations and diagrams from the previous meeting. More likely the previous ten or so meetings. I think they told the janitors not to clean off the whiteboards because it made the meeting rooms look more “academic” or something. Some dean or manager saw A Beautiful Mind and decided to make it school policy. 

“It’s about the paper itself,” I said. “I’m having some serious doubts about it. Like, I’m sure it’s just that I’m not understanding this stuff, so I don’t want it to come off as me saying you’re wrong about this, but I’ve just been noticing a lot of…inconsistencies, maybe? Or not inconsistencies, that’s not the right word. I guess you’d say that there are still some gaps we need to patch up before this thing is really steady enough to be called a proof. It’s those gaps I’m worried about.” 
            Jack took a deep breath in through his nose. He put his hand on his chin. “Gaps?”

“Well, okay, so like for one example, I think it was…” I quickly flipped through a copy of the paper I had printed out for this exact occasion. On the fourth page, I found the highlighted section. “Okay, here. Equation 6 is true…but we omit that it’s only true for certain cases. And then later on in Lemma 2 we extend it, but then right here,” I point to a letter in subscript below a Greek Zeta, “sometimes this variable falls outside those cases where it’s true. Not all the time! But it happens in a few cases, so we can’t really say that this is…true. Like, in all cases, I mean.” 

Jack was following along in the copy I had printed out for him. He raised an eyebrow for just a second, lowered it, and then looked up at me. He just stared, waiting for me to continue. 

“…and, we build a bunch of other proofs off of that one. So, I guess we just need to…find a way to fix that?”

Again, silence. He looked down at the paper again, pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes, and sighed. Finally, he said, “Do you think we can bridge those gaps?”

“It’s possible-”

“No. I mean really. Do you actually think it’s possible? You must have tried to do that before you called me in here.”

“Well…no, not really. Actually, I think I was close to a proof showing that…it’s impossible. But that’s the good news! That’s the whole reason I called for this meeting! I think that means we’ve proven the opposite!” I got up, smiling, and wrote on the whiteboard: “P=NP”. Jack seemed unimpressed, so I circled it a few more times. “P equals NP, Jack! P equals N. P.!”

He stood up, snatched a marker from the whiteboard tray, and drew a slash through the equal sign. He looked at me with a quiet intensity. “Don’t say that,” he said. “Never say that”. 

I didn’t understand. If I was right, this was the most important discovery of the century. The consequences of this proof were unimaginable. Humanity could only benefit. We had discovered this, and he was angry? “I don’t understand.”

“Let me show you something”. 

<center>***</center>

We left the building. He walked with a brisk pace down the city street. 

Someone a block away was shouting through a megaphone. “THEY ARE LYING TO YOU!” he cried. “THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION IS FUNDED BY DEVILS!” 

As we walked, his sermon faded away. Jack did not seem to notice. We pushed through a crosswalk at a pace slightly faster than a walk. For several blocks, we pretended to ignore the relentless requests for spare change that echoed off alleys and alcoves until we arrived at an imposing brick building just off the river. A metal door: in the spots where mint green paint had long since peeled off, rust scabbed over the wounds. Jack scanned his student ID to open it, and I followed him in. 

I had never been to the school’s data center before. I knew it existed, I had used some of the computers for projects; I was vaguely aware that it powered the school’s VPN and did some sort of routing for the larger internet, but I had never actually seen it. I always imagined it would look more crisp and clean and chrome: white tile, bright fluorescent lights, imposing black obelisks holding hundreds of rack-servers. Instead, the floor was mottled concrete, the ceiling, a dusty skeleton of metal trusses, webbed with wires. The lights were bright fluorescents, though. 

Jack led me to a far-off corner in front of one of the nondescript metal boxes that housed computers. LEDs blinked green and red in codes too abstruse to decipher. “The server room,” I said. “Very cool.” I looked at the computers through the cage that blocked them from intrusive human hands. “Oh nice. Is that an A100?”

“I’m not here to show you the hardware,” he said. He withdrew a tube key and opened the door to the rack. He pulled a laptop out of his bag and plugged it into the server. White text scrolled down the black screen faster than I could read it. 

“Have you ever heard of Philip Maymin?”

I shook my head. 

“He wrote this paper. Almost a decade ago. It was pretty controversial. He said that markets are efficient if and only if P=NP.” He paused and looked at me. I had no idea what he was talking about, and it must have shown. “Okay, so his theory was that if there was a pattern in financial data that could be extrapolated in polynomial time, then people would use it to predict the market. But, if such a pattern does exist, and people aren’t using it, then it must mean that the pattern takes such a long time to compute that it isn’t usable.” 

I just cocked my head. He seemed angry. 

“The efficient market hypothesis – or EMH, if you prefer – says that if enough smart people are trying to benefit themselves at the cost of others, and the others are all also smart, that the market should be perfectly efficient. So, stocks are always traded at fair prices, and no one can get a leg up on anyone else, assuming everyone has as close to perfect information as possible, which, believe you me, those MIT quants have. But, if everyone has perfect information, it means that everyone could find some pattern in old trading data that perfectly predicts future data. The only reason they don’t is because it would take longer than real time to use all the past data to make those predictions. I.e., any algorithm that could perfectly value trades must be in the class NP. He, dubiously, goes on to say that rational agents who are highly motivated to find a P-class solution to such a problem would have found it by now, and because they can’t or haven’t, that means that either the market is not fair, or such a solution does not exist. Are you following?” 

I wasn’t.

“He also makes mention – and this is important – he also makes mention of the ‘No Free Lunch’ theorem, which states that if some perfect algorithm was discovered by one agent, all of the others would also discover it, and it would come out in the wash. So, after enough people found whatever perfect trading pattern existed, everyone would just use it, and again, no one would have a leg up. But, and this is a big but, it doesn’t work if only a few insiders know the pattern.” He gestured again to the laptop. “Turns out, markets are not fair,” he said, “but not because P doesn’t equal NP.”

I took a closer look at the laptop. The text whirring by began to make sense. It was numbers and stock tickers. There was a number at the end of every line. It was hard to make out, but it seemed to be getting larger with every second that passed. I suddenly understood.

“I don’t think your fake proof will last very long,” I said. 

“Maybe not,” he said. He looked at the computer again. A contentedness washed over his face. “But then, it only needs to last about a decade. This account started with just one dollar. Do you want to take a guess at its value now?” 

I squinted but couldn’t read the terminal. 

“Hundreds of millions,” he said. “And if it runs long enough, I’ll crack ten billion and change. I can give you access,” he said, smiling, “if you want. If you’re willing to play ball.” 

“I don’t think it can be done,” I said. “Maybe, and it’s a slim chance, but maybe it will get past the reviewers, but you know as well as I do that this is going to be unpopular. And if I could figure it out from your notes, what makes you think other people won’t figure it out from your paper?” 

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I found it first. The longer it stays unproven, the longer the market remains unfair.”

“Then why publish anything at all? Isn’t it better to just let it be? Isn’t this just inviting the world to try and prove you wrong?” 

“Afred North Whitehead,” he said. “He set out to prove that arithmetic was both sound and complete. He and Bertrand Russel published the first volume of Principia Mathematica in 1910; it was completed in 1913, but it took until 1930 for Kurt Gödel to figure out their logical inconsistencies. But you know, when people talk about Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem, they inevitably cite Alf and Bert. They get to ride Kurt’s coattails into the annals of mathematical history. So, no. Not really. I’ll have a few more years of profits. Probably not 18, thanks to the internet, but time enough. More importantly, my dissertation proving P doesn’t equal NP will be ground-breaking. I’ll probably have my pick of tenure-track Ivy positions. As for you, if you play your cards right, maybe you can be my Gödel. In a few years or so, you can come along and prove me wrong.”

“And what if I publish on my own?” 

“Well, Sean asked me the same question. It’s interesting. The number on that machine actually used to be quite a bit higher. It’s surprising how expensive some jobs are…. No, hitmen aren’t real. Believe me. But there are other services that can be just as convincing.” 

The text continued to scroll by agnostic to its meaning or purpose – a white blur of numbers and letters. Characters on a screen that symbolized value. Theoretical value or true value, I wasn’t sure, but value. I stood there in silence for a long time, watching. At one point, the solid rectangle of text bumped up a place-value and became a stair-shape for just a moment. Nines rolled into zeros. Wealth accumulated. For my R.A. services, I was paid $14/hr.

“How much does my silence cost?”

***

The paper was finally in pretty good shape. We had worked out most of the inconsistencies, and buried the fallacies so deep in minutia and appendices that it didn’t matter who the reviewers were. This would get published. Moreover, it was structured in such a way that the reasons we were wrong were so convoluted and difficult to discern, that when the inevitable counter-paper emerged, and discredited us (I was already working on such a paper –however, my portion of the proceeds was held in a trust such that I was forced to wait at least two years before submitting it anywhere) the authors could not say we were intentionally deceptive. Instead, we had made one of those “mistakes” that was so important to advancing science that we would inevitably be credited with the real proof’s discovery. Or so I hoped. There was always the gut-wrenching possibility that someone at Tsinghua University had made the parallel discovery, and their paper was even now in the process of being fast-tracked into The Annals of Mathematics, pending an English translation. 

After our advisor’s stamp of approval, the paper was officially camera-ready. There were still some minor formatting issues to sort out: it was a tiny bit over the page limit. There were probably some grammatical errors still hiding in plain sight. Our advisor had this fixation on paragraphs whose bottom line contained a single word. These were all things that were fixable within an hour. It was 4:56 PM, and I was done for the day. 

Around this time, it was always horrible to try to ride the trains. Obviously, you couldn’t find a seat; that should go without saying. But even standing room at rush hour in the city was a nightmare. Right at closing time, you were lucky if you could find a hand-sized opening on any of those roof-attached grabby-bars throughout the train. I was about halfway through some book, and really wanted to get at least a good spot to lean back on a wall so both of my hands could be free to hold it and turn pages on my commute home, but this was an unthinkable dream. So, to kill some time, and to celebrate the conclusion of this horrible paper, I decided to have a beer or two at the campus bar. I walked over, grabbed a stool, and sheepishly told the bartender that no, I wouldn’t be needing a food menu. I just wanted something with an ABV higher than 6.5% and silence. 

Just over two hours had passed when I closed my tab and shambled to the train station. I had that warm feeling in my belly that accompanies local ales sloshing around in there as I walked down the dark city street. With the sun down, it was cold. I seemed to hit every “do not cross” sign as I walked but took the time to appreciate the graffiti and posters that adorned every light fixture on the corners. I was in no rush. 

Blood has this bizarre, indescribable smell to it. When I was younger, we had this unit in chemistry or physics or something. Back in high school – it was a guest lecture, or whatever you would call that for pimply sixteen-year-olds – we had to take human blood in these droppers. I still don’t know how they sourced this blood. I assume that’s what happens when you check the little “organ donor” box on your driver’s license. Anyway, we took the blood in these syringes and dropped it from various heights onto little metal plates at differing angles and we were supposed to measure the splatter the droplets made. We’d take readings, and report back the size and shape of the little crimson splatters that plopped down onto the slides. 

When we were doing this whole experiment, I told the cop that brought in the blood that the big puddles of sticky liquid settling into our Petri dishes had a smell that reminded me of the beach. He asked me what the hell kind of beaches I was going to, and I didn’t have a great answer for him. Either way, blood, in my opinion, has a salty, umami kind of scent that smells like the beach. It’s intrusive. It penetrates your nose and doesn’t do that thing that air fresheners do where it just becomes ignorable after a while. It lingers. It has this thick, heavy quality to it that smells like brine and sand and…the beach. I stand by it. 

But, so, I had managed to wander back to campus, only a few blocks away from the Science and Engineering Hall, just about to the train station, when I thought that I was smelling something that was out of season. It was one of those smelling bug spray in the middle of winter kinds of moments. As soon as it hits you, it starts a whole chain reaction of thoughts and feelings about warm weather, and shorts, and flip flops even though it’s November. I’m not even sure how much this permeated into my conscious mind. That smell was filling the air, totally impossible to ignore, and I looked down and watched as this slick carmine pool pulsed out of some guy’s neck, as he was spread out, supine in the middle of the road. I was totally unable to grasp what was going on as his blood pooled onto the pavement, permeating the air with that salty, beachy smell. I was so disconnected from reality that I didn’t even realize that I was looking at Jack. 

So, I’ll admit it, it was a pretty big ask. When I saw him lying there in the middle of the road, emanating that beachy aroma, I made a calculation. I said that I would only help if he relinquished first-authorship of our paper to me and allowed me to fix the necessary passages to prove that P does indeed equal NP. To hell with the money in the trust. I wanted glory. Given the circumstances, it didn’t seem like a very difficult decision. His options were (1) I could call the ambulance, they could make him stop bleeding out, and he would live: all for the small price of my discovery of a polynomial-time algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem. Or (2), I wouldn’t, and he would bleed out; I would go ahead and publish by myself, and still be the sole discoverer of the TSP proof.

So, imagine my surprise when he told me that he didn’t exactly appreciate my terms. I tried to explain it in a way I knew he could understand. I told him that this was a classic Nash equilibrium-type situation, and that no matter what he did, it was in my rational best interest to just wait it out until he told me I was the rightful first author. Either that would happen, or he could just lay there and quietly exsanguinate onto the pavement, at which point, I would just pop open the LaTeX project, quietly rearrange the author order on our paper, roll it back to my secret counter-proof draft, and go ahead and post it to an open access preprint server while I waited for the reviews from Nature to flood in, begging to accept it. 

This made a lot of sense to me at the time, and I think it made sense to him too, because between violent, productive coughs, forcing out brownish clots of sputum, he gestured in a way that made it seem like he was all too happy to live another day, and write papers about my proof. At which point, I was all too happy to call the paramedics, alert them to the situation I had discovered on my walk home from campus and addressed – rather heroically, I might add. 

So, the EMTs arrived, and scooped him off the pavement. The cops showed up and asked me for a statement. I told them that while I hadn’t seen the collision in person, I was quite sure that he wasn’t the kind of guy that would jay-walk. I was certain that he waited for the little walking man to show up on the sign before entering the crosswalk, and that surely the person that hit him must have driven off into the night, possibly  – no, probably drunk, and that they would be much better informed by checking the closed circuit televisions that surely must monitor this intersection at every hour of the day and night. While I wish I could be of more assistance, unfortunately I was just a good Samaritan that called this incident in to help a good friend and colleague in a time of desperate need. 

Of course, you know as well as I that Jack Wilton et al. (me being among those et alia. The second, in fact. But this ellipsis will at best be a trivia fact for particularly studious algorithm and discrete math students.) was indeed the discoverer of the proof that the TSP is solvable in polynomial time, and therefore P=NP, and now all of our GPSs and map colorings and knapsacks can be routed and colored and filled with items of non-discrete weights in a much faster manner than before. Not that most people really noticed. 

The problem with the logicians is that they rarely consider what happens after their little thought experiments end. Prof. John Forbes Nash Jr., for all his brilliance, failed to consider that after one criminal rats on the other in the prisoners’ dilemma, there is hell to pay. Jack got to the hospital, they stitched him up, and in 5 days he was back at the Discrete Computing Lab. By which point, he had already switched my edit permissions on our paper to read-only. I asked him about the little deal we struck that night, and he just motioned to the stitches on his neck using only his middle finger. I didn’t have a great retort. So, he submitted his proof to Nature, and, well, you know the rest. 

But the proof he submitted was the correct one. All of my old edits and questions and counter arguments were taken into account, and his whole efficient market hypothesis was now out the window. In a few months, all the rational agents at the New York Stock Exchange will be reaping the benefits of it. You probably noticed a small bump in your 401ks around that time; that’s why. 

So, to circle back to your original question, I guess the way I handle difficult situations in the workplace is to wait until the right time, and then address them head-on. Sure, Jack sabotaged my entire academic career after I forced his hand that night. But my self-sacrifice was really for the good of all mathematics, right? 

I mean, I would have loved to be the first author myself, but sometimes we have to destroy ourselves to propel the colony up the slime stalk. 

• Chapter 16
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Do I lie like a lounge room lizard
Or sing like a bird released?
 – Neil and Tim Finn

Slater had not expected to be troubled by the line of questioning taken by Cambridgeshire police, and he hadn’t been disappointed. It wasn’t at the “We know it was you what done it so own up now and we’ll go easy on you”-level, but it wasn’t much higher. 

He had tolerated the recent questioning much as he might listen to a graduate student from another lab give their first talk – part of his brain on the lookout for anything intellectually stimulating, but the rest of him detached and dispassionate. He knew the police had nothing to go on; and of course, he knew he was innocent.

Of causing Charlotte’s death, at least.

“They just accused you of murdering the little tart!”

Mary, on the other hand, was not coping so well.

That he could deal with – was used to dealing with. The question puzzling him was, “Why?”

Why had the police shown up? Why were they asking him such asinine questions? And then who – who in the name of God had put it into their tiny little heads that he might have murdered Charlotte Stowell?

Slater actually had a pretty good idea about that one. Someone with peroxide hair, a black coat – and who wore dark sunglasses to a funeral on a rainy April afternoon.

The only explanation that even started to make sense was one that made him very worried indeed. But for now, he had his wife to deal with. He walked into the living room and sat in his armchair. 

“Mary, I did not murder Charlotte.”

“But you were in love with her!”

“No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.” Slater sighed, sat down. “She was young, pretty, keen, clever…”

“And she could give you something I couldn’t? Like that whore in Amsterdam and that freak Michael?”

“Michel. He’s not a freak and he’s not my son.” He looked up at his wife. “He’s not my son. I know he’s not. I don’t know if he knows, but he can’t be. It was folly to think it.”

Mary seemed to him to calm, her hand on the back of his chair.

“But, after she left, you were still…?”

“Say it, Mary. You never have, have you? Just, for once, fucking well say it.”

Mary breathed deeply. “After she left, you were still… screwing her. Yes?”

Tom was silent, but his neck was tinged with pink. 

“Oh Tom,” Mary said. “What have you done?”

Slater spread his hands in front of him. 

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all, Mary. Truly. I’ve been as good as gold. The last time I saw her was – “

In the quiet after the storm the doorbell seemed louder than ever. Slater stood up, too rapidly, his face fully red. “Who in God’s name is it this time?”

Mary opened the front door, but didn’t stand aside. “I think it must be someone for you, Tom.”

Slater came out into the hallway, his face suddenly pale again. “I think you better let them in, Mary.”

The woman nodded to Mary. “Thank you, Professor Slater. And this must be your lovely wife. We’ve heard so much about you.”

“Cut the crap,” Slater said, “and close the fucking door. I know who you are. Who’s the goon?”

The man in the doorway smiled slightly, running a thumb along the line of his chin as he turned to pull the front door closed. “The good professor has a point, ah, Alice. Shouldn’t you introduce us?”

The blonde woman nodded, moved further down the hall. “Of course. You may call me Alice. My colleague here is Mallory.” She reached into an inside pocket, pulled out a black-clad rectangle bearing a photograph and some text too small for Slater to read in the gloom. 

“We’re with the Intelligence Service. MI6 as the papers like to call us. May we sit down?”

**********

Mary went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea, and Slater sat back down on his chair in the living room. ’Alice’ pulled up a dining chair to face him. ‘Mallory’ stood by the window, occasionally moving the net curtain aside to get a better view of the drive.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“Yes, I do fucking mind! You might be MI6 but this isn’t the Soviet Union.” Slater stood up, suddenly puzzled. “But wait a minute. Isn’t MI6 the bunch that go off toppling foreign governments and whatnot? I thought you people were domestic, MI5?”

“Well done, Professor. But charity isn’t the only thing that begins at home. Alice, this is your project,” Mallory said, smiling. “Why don’t you explain?”

The woman he called Alice leaned forward. 

“We met, Professor Slater, a couple of years ago. You will remember we came to an agreement. Your work had not gone unnoticed by our superiors, and it was decided that you had a great deal to offer your country. I seem to remember you being quite keen on our proposal.”

Slater looked towards the window. “Mallory wasn’t your driver that night.”

“No,” she said. “My driver was blown up two weeks after that meeting by a roadside bomb in Helmand. This is serious, Professor. It’s not an academic exercise. It’s real, and real people are getting killed, and more real people will get killed if you don’t stop acting like a spoilt brat and start remembering who is paying your generous salary.”

“Now, just a minute Alice, or whatever your name is. I’m respected in my field. My science is competitive and I get grants from all over the place – the MRC, the BBSRC, the – ”

“And who do you think tells them who to fund, Professor Slater?” She leaned back, turned her palms upward on her knees. “Look, we’re not here to argue. We’ve given you everything you’ve asked for, maybe even a little extra, and we just want to know when we can expect to see a return on our investment.”

Before Slater could reply, there was a scream from the kitchen. Mallory was across the living room in two strides, pulling something from inside his jacket as he went.

“No! No! Don’t shoot him, it’s only Mike!” – Mary’s voice from the kitchen. “He just startled me, that’s all.”

Slater and Alice arrived in the kitchen to see Michel, even paler than usual, cowering against the fridge-freezer with his hands on his head. Mallory was standing between him and Mary, holding a short, ugly-looking pistol in both hands, pointing straight at Michel’s face.

“For God’s sake, Peter, put it away,” the woman called Alice said.

Mallory – or Peter – slowly lowered the gun.

“Who the fuck is this?”

“This is my postdoc, Michel,” Slater said. “If you’re looking for a ‘return’ on your ‘investment’, shooting him wouldn’t be the best move.” Turning to Michel, he said, “How did you get in? I’d swear we haven’t been out back since we got home.”

Michel lowered his hands. “If you can’t pick a lock, you’ve no business working in a lab.” He shrugged and dropped something into his coat pocket. “Besides, the Noorderbrug tramps had to eat somehow.”

“Right, fine. Whatever,” Slater said, “We’ve got guests. Mary will make you some tea, and we’ll all go and sit down and have a cosy little chat, because I suspect this concerns you as much as anyone else here.”

**********

Mallory/Peter had taken up his usual place by the window. Slater and Alice sat where they had been before Michel’s arrival. But there was an extra chair, now, with Michel occupying it. Mary hovered nervously.

Michel took a sip from the mug, put it down. “Thank you, Mrs Slater. Your tea is excellent as usual.”

Slater pinched the bridge of his nose.

“So. Let me get this straight. Your lot,” he said, waving a finger at the two intelligence agents, “have been making sure I get the funding to continue my research, in return for some research into transmissible biological agents. And now, despite the small size of my group and losing one of my key personnel, you think the work hasn’t progressed fast enough?”

“You haven’t made it easy for me, Tom,” Michel said. “I don’t know how many times you’ve said you’ve lost my orders for signing.”

Slater pushed his hands through his hair. “Mike, please, I know you’re trying to help but can you be quiet for a minute?”

“No, no, this is interesting,” Alice said. “Michel… Mike? Please continue. I’m very interested in what you have to say. Professor Slater did imply that you were critical to the success of this project.”

Michel looked from Slater to Alice, and back again. Slater nodded, flicked his hand towards Michel. Alice smiled encouragingly.

“OK.” Michel looked down at his feet, but didn’t say anything. One minute, two minutes passed. Mallory/Peter took a step away from the window, eyebrows raised. Alice waved him back.

Finally, Michel spoke. “When you visited Professor Slater two years ago, naturally I was curious. The very next day he got me to work on the virus. It seemed… innocent enough. On the face of it. But I was suspicious. Being suspicious is most of what it is to be a scientist. The rest is finding answers to your suspicion. So when the normally efficient Professor Slater started to lose my orders, or forget where samples were… well, at first I thought it was dementia.”

Alice smirked. Slater just said, “Thanks Michel. This is why I hired you.”

There was a momentary flash of confusion in Michel’s eyes, but he continued.

“Just after that, Charlotte left. But I knew she kept coming back, because I could smell her perfume on your jacket, Tom.”

Mary’s hand covered her mouth, and she left the room. Slater remained impassive.

“And then,” Michel said, “just when things were coming together, you spent a lot of time out of the lab. It was impossible to get new reagents. I was still worried about you. But I was distracted by the project. I was so close. Then one day you came in, spent all day in the office, and left. I hoped you were signing my orders. That’s the day I cracked your password.”

Alice sat up.

“You what? Does the professor know this?”

“Yeah,” Slater said, “he told me a few days ago. No secrets now. He’s seen everything. But you could probably guess that a man of his calibre would have figured it out himself. It was just confirmation, to him.”

Michel nodded. “Quite so. It didn’t matter. I had what I needed, but I wanted to know why. You told me what, more or less, was going on. Last week in the Park. State-sponsored terrorism, you called it. But I discovered something that I didn’t know, that I hadn’t foreseen. And that changed everything.”

“And that was…?” prompted Alice.

“Charlotte was pregnant.”

It was Slater’s turn to sit bolt upright. “No! No. I mean yes, she told me she thought she was, early days, and yes, I assumed it was mine. The coroner said she wasn’t, though. She must have had a miscarriage. And not told me.”

“Professor Slater,” Alice said, not unkindly, “the coroner would have said she was carrying Elvis’ child if we’d wanted. Or she could have been the size of an elephant and he would have said it was wind. Her pregnancy wasn’t something we wanted to be widely known.”

“But why would you do that?”

“It didn’t suit our purposes. We didn’t want to shame you – we suspected you had finished the project already.”

“Which is why you sent the Plod round. But why would I have killed her?”

“Because she was pregnant. Because that complicated matters. Because we had grown tired of waiting, and stressed people do strange things.”

Slater shook his head.

“You’ve got the wrong man. I could never had hurt her.”

“Maybe. But you’re not the only player in this game, are you? You’re not the one who would have done the experiments.”

Slater sat back, his face unreadable.

“Go on,” he said. “What are you saying?”

Alice cocked her head towards Michel, who turned and stared out the window, a faraway look on his face. He said nothing for a while. 

Then:

“Tom. I’m so sorry.” Another long pause. “I killed Charlotte.”

• Chapter 15
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If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
 – Lizzie Douglas (Memphis Minnie) and Wilbur "Kansas Joe" McCoy

It was always trying, visiting Mary’s mother. 

Most Saturdays, Slater would rise early and sit in the box room he liked to call his study, with a pile of academic papers, perhaps a lab notebook or two or a student’s thesis, and catch up with everything he hadn’t been able to do during the week. He’d emerge briefly mid-morning for fresh coffee, then take a late lunch. Towards late afternoon, if Mary wasn’t visiting friends they’d go for a walk out towards Fulbourn or over the Gogs, afterwards often heading into town for dinner. They never booked ahead, but rather looked around until they found somewhere not too busy, hang the cost.

Was the spontaneity of their Saturday evenings an attempt to recover some lost romanticism? Or maybe one or other of them was trying to apologize for something – or even simply reminding themselves that not having children was perhaps not without its benefits. All his friends had grown up, had children, and although they seemed to work as hard as he did, he could occasionally feel their envy, disguised though it was as pity.

Whatever the reason, he looked forward to Saturdays – except when once a month when they’d make the tedious drive to Leicester, to the drab Fifties vision that was the Eyres Monsell estate, to the semi smelling of stale cigarettes, Camp coffee and cat piss.

In another life, perhaps, he could have got on with Mary’s mother. She had been by all accounts quite a looker in her youth. But while some women age gracefully, maintaining an air of elegance, even desirability well into their greying years, she had fared no better than her declining council estate environment. Neither was she immune to the more medical slings and arrows of age: the signs of angina and creeping dementia were clear.

She’d also taken an immediate and deep-seated dislike to her only son-in-law. When they arrived at her door, Mary had to tell her Tom’s name repeatedly. When at last she did appear to remember him, she would ask why he’d dropped out of med school, or what kind of career was journalism for the husband of her daughter. He had almost convinced himself that the old bat wasn’t at all senile, but was rather deliberately needling him.

As usual, they had driven home in silence. Slater let Mary through the door first, then threw his keys with slightly more force than intended onto the table. Mary frowned without saying anything, and Slater hated himself just a little bit more.

The decanter was rattling on the edge of the whisky tumbler when the doorbell rang.

**********

Unsubtle.

That was the single thought that occupied Michel’s mind. The blue lights reflecting off the windows in the quiet Cherry Hinton street; the two uniformed officers hammering on the door; the shrillness of Mary’s voice, audible even out here in the allotments.

Unsubtle.

When, an hour after they’d arrived, the police went back to their car and drove off, Michel wasn’t totally surprised that Tom wasn’t with them. Even the Cambridge police must have realized there wasn’t a shred of evidence. No; what was surprising was that they had got involved at all at this stage. There was but one hypothesis that fit his observations, but he couldn’t yet be sure he was right. He needed the fox to come out of its hole.

He’d waited all afternoon; a little longer wouldn’t hurt.

And there it was. The white Ford with the Sheffield licence plates turning into the cul-de-sac, reaching the end, and reversing into the Slaters’ driveway. And the platinum blonde – and a man he didn’t recognize – crunching up to the front door and ringing the bell. 

When the door opened, he pinched out the joint and walked slowly up to the house.

**********

When the police had gone, Slater stood with his forehead pressed against the wood of the front door, the tumbler still in his hand but the whisky untouched. Behind him there was silence, but it was the silence before an earthquake.

I will be calm, he thought. Whatever happens, I will be calm.

A chair creaked; footsteps across the hall to the kitchen. A clink of glassware and the sound of running water. 

Be calm.

The footsteps returned, and he heard Mary gulp down the water.

“What,” she said, just a hint of a quiver in her voice , “was that all about?”

Slater moved his head away from the door and looked up at the architrave. Hmm. Mould. That’s going to be have to seen to this summer.

“Well?”

Calm.

He turned around to face her, dispassionately noting the water dripping from the corner of her mouth; the wide, unblinking eyes; her hand, still holding a glass, hanging limply at her side.

“There’s some mould up there above the door. We should get the wood treated,” he said.

He barely flinched as the glass exploded against the doorframe, inches from his face.

I am so fucking calm, he observed, a bomb could go off and I wouldn’t blink.

He looked down, and poked a piece of broken glass with the toe of his shoe. “For some reason,” he said, “the Cambridgeshire Constabulary think I had something to do with the death of Charlotte Stowell. They’re not the sharpest tools in the shed, as you know.” 

He looked up, and smiled brightly. “Good job that was one of the cheap Tesco glasses and not your mother’s crystal.”