And Cece. She was, of course, Cecilia Beaufort. The woman he’d married after abandoning me and Mum. I hadn’t recognized her. I should have.
“Dad,” I said. The word left my mouth involuntarily. Just saying it felt like a betrayal of Mum.
Chapter Six
Sid
Sid arrived promptly at the Jack Cole building for computer science. It was a flat-roofed two-story building on a modern campus, a short walk outside the ancient town walls, an exposed site, separated but hardly sheltered from the ocean by the Old Course.
The sky felt bigger out here, and there was plentiful space around the buildings. A large parking lot was almost full, the leaves on the trees around it just turning from green to gold. It had the feeling of an out-of-town science park, and Sid liked it.
Professor Cameron Johns assessed him from behind an uncluttered desk. He looked like he had zero body fat, and his skin was weathered and tanned. Sid held his gaze calmly and reckoned him to be in his forties, a runner. The office was compact and faced the ocean. Its window glass was clouded from the salty air.
“This request from Professor Cornish to give you some work is unusual,” Johns said. “Generally, I prefer to hire my own staff.”
Sid was thrown by the acid in his tone. Diana Cornish had assured him he would be welcomed here, and he and Johns had exchanged emails over the summer that had seemed fine. Though, come to think of it, maybe they’d been rather terse. A cold feelinglodged itself in Sid’s chest. Had he got this wrong? Was he being foisted on this department? That would be humiliating.
“I gather from Professor Cornish that your partner is considered invaluable to her institute,” Johns said.
“She’s a new hire there, yes.”
“So that’s why you’re here, too? Happy wife, happy life?”
Sid couldn’t believe how quickly this was going south. It was mortifying. He said, “I think there might have been a misunderstanding. If there’s nothing for me here, I won’t waste any more of your time.”
Johns picked up a ballpoint pen and clicked the button on the end against his desk. The sound grated on Sid’s nerves. He felt ready to walk out. “How’s your wife finding life at the Institute?” Johns asked.
“We’re not married.”
“It’s brave of you to relocate for a partner at this early stage of your career. Not many men would do that.”
“I’m working on a project of my own. Look, this has been a mistake.” He stood, but Johns waved at him to sit back down.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m giving you a hard time. I’m sorry. You’re talented and your work is impressive. We both know it. I just don’t like being told how to run my own department. But here we are. I already have a department fully staffed with people who went through the normal recruitment process to get here, so I can’t offer you teaching just now because it would be at the expense of one of them, but I have an opening for an assistant on a project of mine that’s in the cybersecurity arena. You’d be supervising a few postgrads for a couple of days a week. How does that sound?”
Sid was tempted to refuse because his pride was hurt, he didn’t love the way Johns was speaking about Anya or to him, and it seemed like he’d walked right into some messy politics,butJohns was offering him a bone and it was probably wise to take it for now. St. Andrews didn’t have too many employment options for him.
“Sure,” he said. “Sounds interesting. Thank you.”
“Okay. I’ll be in touch with a start date. It’ll probably be in a couple of weeks, after we settle the new students. In the meantime, we’ll fix you up with access to the lab and some desk space.”
At reception Sid scribbled his initials in the sign-out column of the visitor book and asked about getting his pass. The receptionist gave him a temporary one to use for now. As he was leaving, she called out, “Hold on. There’s an envelope here for you, too.”
She passed it to him. His name was neatly handwritten on the front in block capitals. He frowned at it. Who knew he was going to be here?
“Do you know who left this?” he asked.
“I don’t. Sorry. I found it with the post when I got in this morning. I almost threw it away, but Cameron mentioned you were coming in.”
The phone rang and she answered it. Sid opened the envelope as he crossed the parking lot. It contained a single sheet of paper with just seven words printed on it:
“You need to know about Minxu Peng.”
Anya
“Dad” was the most loaded word of my childhood.
If you’d looked at Wikipedia the day Diana Cornish and my father ambushed me in his mews house, it would have told you that for many years Magnus Beaufort was mostly known for his work as a consultant nephrologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, and for the limited philanthropy he engaged in using the significant fortune he inherited from his eminent physician father, who had, in turn, inherited a great deal of money from Magnus’s grandfather. If there was one thing Beaufort men were good at, it was turning money into more money.
