A Matter of Trust (5 page)

Callum felt like laughing. Trust Rosemary to try and beat the system. She'd always been something of a rebel, and this was another reason why her colourful ways made him the envy of his friends. But Callum had always been aware of a touch of cruelty in her breezy way with the truth, and the way she had of trampling over anyone or anything in her pursuit of having fun, and, rather than attracting him, it had always repelled him.

Now he said flatly, ‘I think you haven't changed, Rosemary.'

He saw her lips thin. ‘No, I don't suppose I have,' she said boldly. ‘And you're still standing in judgement on us lesser mortals, aren't you, Callum?' she taunted. ‘I was hoping you'd have loosened up a little by now!'

Callum felt himself wince. Once or twice before he'd heard similar things from other people. His own mother was openly despairing of him ever marrying and producing children, warning him he was in dire peril of becoming a curmudgeon of an old bachelor in the worst Oxford style, if he wasn't careful.

He shrugged the thought off uneasily and
finished
his coffee. Carefully placing the mug on the table he rose from the chair. ‘It's been nice to see you again, Rosemary,' he said politely, if less than thruthfully.

She grimaced as he rose to his feet, a big Adonis of a man, and felt her rage build. ‘You're such a cold fish, Callum, did you know that?' she said mockingly. ‘We could have had such a good time together, but no, you were all hands off. And even now, you're giving off waves of haughty disdain as if you were somebody's maiden aunt being shown something nasty in the woodpile. Why don't you grow up and get a life?'

Callum smiled grimly. ‘Thanks for the coffee, Rosemary,' he said and walked to the door. But when he looked back at her, he suddenly felt a shaft of pity for her wash over him.

She looked lonely, and just a little beleaguered.

‘Are you all right?' he asked softly. ‘You have someone to talk to?'

Rosemary shot him a furious look. ‘Of course! And of course!' But if she was openly showing how vulnerable she felt to Callum Fielding of all people, she'd have to be careful!

When her temporary bedmate had told her who'd been short listed for the Prize, she'd known instantly that Ngabe and Fielding had to be the front runners. She didn't know Ngabe well, but had decided there might be
something
to gain by trying to con Callum Fielding. After all, if he could be persuaded to split even half the prize money with her, it would fund her own research project for another couple of years. It wasn't going very well, and already there were rumblings at Truman's that she might have to cut it short.

But she should have known that Callum Fielding would have a knight-in-shining-armour attitude when it came to personal honour and integrity. Damn him.

For a long, long while after he left, Rosemary Naismith stared at the wall in front of her, her face outwardly blank, her inner mind churning.

Callum had been born into a staid, reasonably well-to-do upper middle class family. He'd always been able to take his privileges and his first-rate education for granted. What did he know of self-doubt?

But she, Rosemary Naismith, had been the daughter of a small-town provincial solicitor. Her mother, when she wasn't secretly drinking, had done nothing more civic-minded than chair the odd church committee. She'd been educated in a run-down, clapped out grammar school. She'd earned her undergraduate place at Oxford by sheer force of her own self-discipline, her grim and dogged willingness to study after school in the public library, and had even then only succeeded in gaining a place by the very skin of her teeth.

There'd
been no old-school tie sponsor in her background, smoothing the way. But she'd got her place. And even, again through sheer and unremitting slog, had managed to gain an upper second. Even so, she had to watch and burn with envy as others, far less hardworking students than herself, had somehow breezed their way to a first class degree and a guaranteed graduate place.

She knew that, by comparison, she'd only been allowed to go on to get her B.Sc., because her tutors had backed her corner. Knowing that she didn't have a first-class academic mind, they argued that her drive and hard work would make up for it.

But she'd shown them all, and had got the B.Sc., and then scraped a two-year Research Fellowship on the basis of it. Enough to allow her to at least start on a D.Phil. thesis of her own. Nobody, though, had believed she'd get it. Not even, in the deepest, darkest part of her, herself. But if she'd wanted to stay in Oxford, if she was to become a full-fledged Oxford Don, she needed that D.Phil.

Needed it badly.

And Rosemary was determined not to leave Oxford. From the very first day she'd arrived to begin her undergraduate studies, the city had captivated her. Enthralled her. Boosted her. Back home, in that dull little Midlands town, she was a nothing and a nobody. But here, in Oxford, she was one of the elite. And
as
a Don, rather than a student, she could be one of the super-elite.

Dining at High Table. Being invited to ceremonies at the Sheldonian Theatre. Striding to Schools, in the lush rich gown of full academic dress, seeing the sightseers watching her, having her picture taken by the tourists. Somebody noteworthy. Somebody important. Somebody other people in the street pointed to with admiration and respect.

It was not surprising then, when she'd been assigned as Brian Aldernay's supervisor, she'd been thrown into despair by the quickness and quality of his work. He'd made her feel totally inadequate, as she compared his progress towards earning a D.Phil. degree, and her own. Because her B.Sc. was in the same area as his own research, she'd been able to follow his line of thought faultlessly. And quickly realised that it was vastly superior to her own.

Rosemary leaned forward in her chair now, rocking back and forth, her arms folded across her chest in a mute attempt at self-comfort. Her mind, however, sped back over the years.

Brian had been a shy, uncommunicative sort of man, a typical academic, living in his own narrow world. She'd encouraged him not to discuss his work with others, mainly because she couldn't bear to have others know how bright he was, in comparison with herself.

As his supervisor, she'd made encouraging reports on his progress and work, without
going
into detail about it. So when, her own Research Fellowship having run out only a month before, Brian Aldernay had died before being assigned another supervisor, the plan had leapt straight into her head.

She'd contacted his widow and learned that she was going back north with their young daughter. So there would be no opposition there, and no awkward questions coming from that quarter.

She'd very cleverly represented herself to Brian's widow as both his tutor and the university's representative. Thus, acting as a go-between, she'd managed to make sure that nobody else from the university would ever have the opportunity to read Brian's work.

It was during that time that she'd copied down all of Brian's work before handing it back to the grieving widow. Even then, Rosemary hadn't been sure she would go through with it.

And yet she'd found herself finishing his research, bringing it to a conclusive, clever resolution, something that was easy to do, since he'd already done all the hard work and thinking for her. And because their fields were so similar, and she'd been so purposely vague with her own supervisor about her work over the months, she was able to gradually incorporate Brian Aldernay's work into her own and represent it as totally her own thinking.

When
she'd finally submitted the thesis, she'd half expected the heavens to open. For somebody—Brian Aldernay's ghost, his widow maybe or the university authorities—
somebody
, to expose the sham, ruin her life and have her drummed out of Oxford in disgrace.

But it had never happened.

She'd been awarded the D.Phil, and been accepted by her own College as junior tutor in Experimental psychology.

And if those in the know had, in private, expressed some surprise that the rather mediocre Rosemary should come up with such a brilliant thesis, most had put it down to her being a late-achiever.

And over the years, she'd settled down, thinking about Brian Aldernay less and less, until his memory bothered her not at all. She rarely thought about the young man, killed when knocked off his bicycle by a drunk driver. Writing minor, thesis-related articles that were at least regularly published, she'd managed to weave her life into the fabric of Oxford, until she'd almost forgotten that she'd ever stolen someone else's work in the first place.

But things had not been going well for her for some time. She did not have an original mind. She needed to do something to put her back on top, which was why she'd been hoping to muscle in, through the back door, by getting her hands on some of the Kendal Prize money.

And
she still wasn't finished with Callum Fielding yet. There was something about his aloofness that made her itch to shatter his armour of invulnerability.

*           *           *

Nesta Aldernay paced restlessly about the small bedsit she'd rented for herself in the suburb of Holywell, trying not to feel so helpless.

It had been over a week since she'd first introduced herself, and her problem, to Sir Vivian, and the waiting was torture. But he was the kind of man who needed time to do his research well and thoroughly, and only then would he act.

He would simply have to. Dr Naismith had robbed her father of the credit for his life's work and then cynically climbed to prominence off his back—she'd stolen his very thoughts, his brilliant conceptions and had blatantly plagiarised his theories, no doubt thinking that it would be safe for her to do so.

As it had been, for so many years.

Nesta knew that her father must have been barely months away from presenting his thesis when he died so suddenly and tragically. And with that degree under his belt he could have done anything he desired. Private practice. Teaching. Pure research. A glittering career could have stretched before him. How
different
all their lives would have been if only fate had been kinder. But instead of a life of promise, Brian Aldernay had died, and his family had ended up with no money, no home, and no prospects.

After all, what did Brian Aldernay's widow know about her husband's brilliant theory in Experimental psychology? Nothing. Mavis Aldernay had been the daughter of a coal miner, perfectly content to do a dead-end job and be the family bread-winner, safe in the knowledge that eventually a glittering, professional lifestyle lay just around the corner for all of them.

She'd been happy with her baby daughter, and working in the local branch of Mothercare until such time as Brian had finished his studies. It wasn't hard to understand, then, that when he'd died so senselessly and catastrophically, she'd wanted to do nothing more than return to her home in Durham to lick her wounds, where her own mother and family could give her the support and loving care she had so desperately needed.

Even if she'd given her husband's papers a passing thought, she'd never have been able to understand them. Much less realise their true value and worth.

But somebody else had understood them. And had stolen them. And only Nesta, uncannily following in her father's footsteps in pursuing a career in psychology, had been
qualified
to understand what she was reading, when she'd stumbled on his academic papers in the attic all those years later.

Nesta jumped as she heard a door slam just along the passage. One of her fellow tenants, no doubt, just on the way out for the evening.

She was glad that she'd made some plans for the evening.

Her lodgings were in the converted attics of a rabbit warren of a house, and came complete with a garrulous landlady and extremely bad plumbing. Although reassuringly cheap, it wasn't the sort of place you hung around in when you could be somewhere else.

Now she walked determinedly to her wardrobe (the doors of which didn't quite meet in the centre) and pulled out her one good dress—a black satiny-looking creation with a square, lace-filled neckline and long, black lace sleeves. It fell to knee length in a no-nonsense cut, but with her bell-shaped red hair and large green eyes, the colour suited her perfectly.

She was looking forward to this evening. Her father still had friends who remembered him in Oxford, and when she'd tentatively approached two of them, a married couple who'd both roomed with Brian way back when, they'd instantly invited her to Dinner. She hoped they'd remember something of what her father had been working on. When the monkey wrench was thrown into the works,
she
wanted to know that she had people who would stand by her.

And more importantly, stand by her father.

Not that she could tell them the whole story now, of course. Not after her promise to Sir Vivian. But she could feel out the lie of the land. In this town, she was sure, she was going to need all the friends she could get.

She sighed and collected her bag, then switched off the light. The time was just gone seven o'clock when she let herself out of the building and got into her VW Beetle. As she turned on the rather noisy engine and indicated to pull out, she wondered what Dr Rosemary Naismith was doing right now. Had Sir Vivian approached her yet? And if he had, what had been her reaction?

Unaccountably, she found herself shivering, just as if someone had just walked over her grave. A feeling of foreboding sent her hands trembling.

‘Damn it, Nesta, get a grip,' she muttered angrily to herself. ‘Nothing
that bad's
going to happen.'

But she was wrong.

CHAPTER
THREE

Callum Fielding checked his appearance in the mirror briefly. Normally on a Thursday night, he'd be dining at High Table, where a dark suit and tie would make him amongst the better dressed. But tonight was hardly any other Thursday night.