The Sleeping Partner by Winston Graham

course it may not be – but it does seem to me that he’s putting forward more objections in this case than are reasonably justifiable.’
    â€˜What does he complain about?’
    â€˜Chiefly the lack of a terrain clearance instrument. You know the sort of thing: a radioaltimeter that feeds its information electronically to the rate-meter so you get an automatic compensation for undulations in the ground.’
    I said: ‘It means extra weight and a hell of an elaboration. Just what we’ve tried to avoid.’
    â€˜I know. But the Whitehall boys love something that sounds ingenious and can be expressed in words of five syllables. And of course in this particular field Steel’s influence is fairly powerful.’
    We talked for about twenty minutes. As he got up to go I said: ‘You want Dawson to stay down there at present?’
    â€˜If you can spare him. It might save you or Mrs Curtis another journey.’
    Mrs Curtis. Mike, Mike, Mike, she’d said my name over and over again on Sunday night, in different tones and shades of meaning. Protest, affection, passion, detachment.
    â€˜I called in to see them on the way here,’ Thurston said, making for the door. ‘It seemed a suitable thing to do.’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said, talking with him and walking with him to the dilapidated car he drove.
    â€˜I’ll ring,’ he said. ‘ Steel may have been only making routine noises. If not we’ll have to fight it out at a full conference.’
    He got into his car. I said: ‘Who did you say you’d been to see?’
    â€˜The Curtises. I’d only met him twice before, but one likes to pay one’s respects.’
    â€˜What, to Mr Curtis?’
    â€˜To Dr Curtis, yes.’
    â€˜I don’t quite get you.’
    Thurston looked at me. ‘Well, it’s a pretty big loss, that, while he’s still at the height of his powers.’
    â€˜I don’t follow you, David. What are you talking about?’
    He put in the ignition key. ‘You must know who he is. Curtis of the Cavendish Laboratories. As you’ve worked so closely—’
    I said. ‘I don’t know anything about him. You mean he’s a scientist?’
    â€˜Was. One of our ablest. I suppose you won’t remember the paper he read, two, no, three years ago to the Royal Society on “The Unity of Radiation and Matter”? It’s still the definitive pronouncement.’
    I said: ‘ Why the blazes didn’t somebody tell me?’
    Thurston shrugged. ‘I naturally thought his wife would have done.’
    â€˜She didn’t.’
    â€˜Not when you engaged her?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜There seems no reason to have made a secret of it. Perhaps—’
    â€˜Did she tell you?’
    â€˜No, but when you said you were bringing an assistant to Harwell, of course we had to have her screened, so naturally we knew.’
    â€˜Was that why you made such a fuss of her?’
    He looked at me rather queerly. ‘ I don’t know that I made “ a fuss” of her. Obviously one tries to offer some courtesy to the wife of a distinguished man who has been struck down as he has.’
    â€˜Wait,’ I said, as he reached for the starter button. ‘What’s the matter with him?’
    Thurston stopped with his hand half-way. ‘ We’re usually much too cunning nowadays to risk our lives monkeying about with these things without adequate protection. There aren’t gamma-ray martyrs dotted about the country the way there used to be with X-rays. At least, not yet! But now and then someone slips up. John Curtis slipped up – or that’s the general opinion.’ He started the engine. ‘I was surprised to see him still out of bed.’
    I held on to the door of the car like a talkative leave-taker. But I wasn’t feeling talkative. I was trying to sift the operative word out of Thurston’s last