Deadly Misconduct Read online

  For Mum, who has read this book more times than it deserved and told me each time that it was just because she enjoyed it.

  Copyright © 2018 RJ Amos

  All rights reserved.

  The small town of Kingston Beach, the city of Hobart, and the university contained therein, do actually exist and are worth a visit. However, the events taking place in this book only occurred in the imagination of the author and bear no relation to real life.

  As with all novelists, the personalities that inhabit this book are figments of my imagination, blends of different personalities that I have come in contact with over the years, and bear no relation to real people. Any resemblance to my friends and colleagues is unintended and I hope this book does not cause offence.

  I want to specifically thank my PhD supervisors and emphatically state that they are not in any way represented in this book and that I never had any desire to murder them, no matter how much red pen was splattered over my horrible thesis rough drafts.

  I was determined to enjoy myself at the conference dinner that Thursday night even though I’d usually prefer to be tucked up at home with a nice glass of wine and a good book. This was my chance to catch up properly with my conference buddies, Robbie and Misaki. We had worked together at various universities and now we only managed to visit at conferences. There was always a lot to catch up on. And never quite enough time to do it.

  Misaki and I had met in Adelaide where I was on my first post-doctoral position and she was a fresh-faced PhD student. We had cubicles next to each other in the office and often worked on the same lab bench. I used to help her bring better English into her writing and she would bring back treats from home that were different from anything I had ever tasted, and sometimes even yummy. And always good for a laugh. I laughed at her for eating the stuff, and she at me for being so tame in my tastes. One day we are going to head to Japan together and I’m going to eat such delicacies as hot chocolate in a can from a vending machine, and a special dish she’s told me about where the fish is sliced so thinly that it waves in the hot air rising from the dish and looks like it’s still alive. I’m not sure why anyone would want to eat anything that still looks alive, but I’ll eat it if she asks me to. And if there’s lots of sake.

  Robbie was (and still is) the lab manager of the lab where I worked in Sydney. He is a totally ocker Aussie bloke and pretty blunt in what he says and how he says it. But I think that somewhere inside him there is a heart of gold. I’m not really sure why we’re friends, to be honest, maybe he says things that I wish I could, but don’t, because I’m such a good girl. Or maybe it’s the way he looked after me when I first arrived in Sydney, and made sure I was settled and happy working in his lab. Maybe he puts up with me because I listen to what he has to say without arguing, well, without arguing too much. We’re not exactly an obvious pairing, still, it’s a friendship that’s lasted and it was good to be able to catch up again.

  So there we were, the three of us, catching up again after a long break, and able to chat about everyday things after a long week of scientific lectures and poster presentations.

  The conference that had brought my friends to me was held in Hobart, Tasmania (known as Tassie to the locals). Which was really handy, because I lived in Kingston Beach, Tasmania, about 10 minutes away by car and I didn’t need to catch planes or stay in hotels or do any of that expensive stuff. You see, I was attending this conference in the hope of finding a job, a research position at a university. I was qualified and experienced and had worked for about ten years as a researcher and lecturer. But then my mother got ill and I came home to care for her. Dropped everything. Nothing else was important, not when Mum needed me. And she really needed me. And I was so glad that I was home with her for those last few months, and then I needed the time to recover – to walk on the beach, to write in my journal, to cry, to think, to wander around in an unseeing haze for a while.

  Then one day I woke up and realised that I needed to go back to work. I needed to start thinking about supporting myself. I needed to find a professor who would take me on after my long break from research, from publishing my chemistry. Too long a break in your publications and you’re toast – no chance of getting funding, no chance of moving up the ladder. No matter whether I felt like it or not, I needed to get moving again.

  But without a job, without a source of funding and a university to be attached to, attending academic conferences, making connections, and finding professors to talk to was just a little difficult. I could write emails, but I knew that professors get them every week from every Tom, Dick, and Harry. How could I bring my shining personality to the table without a table to talk at? I needed a way to display my wares, to convince someone to take me on.

  And then this conference had fallen into my lap. I had started my job search by heading to the local uni and asking them if there was any work available, just on the off-chance. There wasn’t anything, as I had thought, it was really the wrong time of year to be asking when you think about funding schedules and such, but my old honours supervisor had wangled me a ticket to the conference out of the goodness of her heart. I had a week to make a good impression.

  I had made good use of the time. Professor Conneally, from Cambridge, had given a brilliant talk on the first day of the conference and I had made sure I talked to him about it, not straight afterwards, but later in the conference. And he had made noises about inviting me to his group. He had some funding coming, he said, and he was sure that he could make room for me. His group was biochemistry but he was a far-seeing bloke and was willing to take a chance that collaboration with a chemist like me could add value to the work he was doing. We were going to have a longer talk about it on Friday and line it all up.

  But before that came the conference dinner. It was a chance for some good food, reasonably good wine, and for us all to let down our hair after all the lectures and deep thinking of the previous few days. Hobart had come to the party too with mild, even warm, weather (by Tasmanian standards). The restaurant chosen for the dinner looked out over the Derwent River and the decorations inside the spacious room were complemented by the sight of ferries passing by filled with their own evening parties, and even the occasional yacht motoring back to its mooring.

  The fluid conversation rose and swelled around the room with occasional fountains of laughter bubbling over. All the delegates were chilling out, eating, drinking, and swapping stories of previous conference dinners, interesting lab accidents, bush walks, fun student behaviour, just about anything. Well, almost all of the delegates – Misaki, Robbie, and I passed the time waiting to be served by making a study of the different behaviours on show at the head table where the keynote lecturers were seated.

  The table held eight people, all of them either the big stars of the conference, or the plus-one belonging to the big star. On one end was Professor Conneally – tall, fit, stylish, with his wife sitting next to him. Next to the Conneallys was Professor Anne Starly from the United States, followed by Professor Yuri Ostanov and his wife, then Professor Izumi Ali and finally Professor Brasindon and his wife right on the other end. We had learned earlier in the conference that Professor Conneally and Professor Brasindon had started their research careers together here in Australia but there may have been a good reason to separate them on the VIP table. They had very different takes on life. While Prof Conneally was enjoying the dinner and the atmosphere, Brandon was still completely focussed on the research.

  ‘Does Professor Brasindon ever stop working?’ Misaki asked, ‘I think he is even writing notes on the table napkins.’

  ‘It’s a good thing they’re paper.’ I said, folding mine in half and sticking it into my fork.

  ‘Conneally is the complete opposite – holdi
ng court with all the gorgeous girls,’ Robbie put in. ‘Not judging – I know which end of the table I’d like to be on.’

  ‘Yes, me too, the fun end,’ I said.

  ‘Dr Alicia Conway,’ Robbie mocked me, ‘I was sure you’d say Brasindon’s end. You’re so shallow.’

  Not that I wanted to be surrounded by gorgeous girls, but there were loud shrieks of laughter and endless giggles coming from that end of the table. It made me wonder a bit what the research group was actually like and whether I’d fit in. The younger crowd were gravitating to the fun, and the crowd at that table was predominantly girls, leaving all the male delegates to their beer and wine at the lesser tables. The professor was attractive, there was no denying it, and yet his wife sitting next to him was the dumpy type – short, round, wearing a pastel pink cardigan, greying hair. She stood out negatively next to the bevy of beauties trying to get Conneally’s attention.

  There was the girl that Robbie introduced to me on the first day of the conference – Lisa – dressed fit to kill. She always looked like something out of a magazine, but there was more cleavage involved tonight and a shorter skirt, and she must have spent hours on her makeup – there was sparkley stuff around her eyes, and her face was, you know, made up. I don’t know how to describe it and I don’t know how it’s done – you can tell I’m not the dressy type. Despite this being a dinner I was wearing jeans and a shirt like always. A nice shirt in honour of the dinner but I preferred to have pre-dinner drinks with my friends than spend that time troweling makeup on.

  There was that other girl, the one I think of as ‘headphones girl’ because I saw her in one of the conference sessions watching a movie on her laptop and wearing headphones. Yes, headphones, covering both ears. You’d think she’d at least pretend that she wanted to be at the conference but there was no hiding her boredom that day. Today, on the other hand, she looked absolutely fascinated with whatever the professor was saying. I wondered whether something had changed or whether she was putting it on in the interests of getting a position working with Conneally’s group. Or whether the conversation around Conneally was just so much fun that she didn’t have to pretend to be interested.

  ‘Did I just see her drop something into Conneally’s bag? How weird.’

  ‘What?’ said Robbie.

  ‘I’m sure I saw that girl put something into the bag next to Conneally’s seat.’ I edged my seat out and looked up the aisle between the tables.

  ‘How could you see that from this angle?’ Robbie also craned his back to see what he could see up at the top table.

  The conversation degenerated into a good-natured argument about who could see what from what angle. That was our friendship really, arguments about things that didn’t really matter.

  ‘If you sat over here, you could see that the end of the table is in clear view.’ I leant over slightly to make my point.

  ‘Look whatever, but she’s standing right in front of the bag. There’s no way that you could see her do anything.’ Robbie waved at the girl, who had obviously changed her position now.

  ‘You have no idea, you’re not taking into account the movement of the people around the table.’ And so on.

  Misaki listened for a while and then got bored. That also happened a lot around our friendship.

  ‘I’m so hungry, I wonder what’s on the menu,’ she picked up the decorated card from the middle of the table and read from it, ‘Starters: savoury quiches. We’ve had that. Mains: beef and chicken (alternate drop), Dessert: cheesecake and lemon tart (alternate drop). If I get the beef can I swap with someone for the chicken?’

  ‘I’ll swap,’ I said. Sometimes on nights like this I wish I had a husband so that we could swap meals or share desserts. But I have to admit it would be rather extreme to get married just to be able to swap a meal on the occasional night out. And friends like Misaki made the swapping possible anyway.

  ‘I wonder if there’s a Murphy’s law for eating – you know, something about how service always starts at the other end of the room.’ I drummed my fingers on the table.

  ‘The speed of service is inversely proportional to the hunger of the people sitting at the table,’ said Robbie.

  ‘That would be it.’

  ‘If you’re going to be like that,’ said Misaki, ‘you need to go up to the special table and write chemical equations on napkins like Brasindon and company.’

  We looked up to the table again. They were being served now, and I recognised one of the servers from somewhere, a blonde girl in her late twenties, but this was Tasmania – everyone knows everyone in Tasmania. She could be my second-cousin or some such relative who I hadn’t seen for years, or someone I hung out at the beach with at some stage. I was trying to remember where I might know her from when something happened that put all that out of my mind.

  Professor Conneally stopped talking, grabbed his chest and started to gasp. His wife turned to him, stretching out her hand, but he shook her off and stood up to move away from the table. His chair fell over behind him and he fell on top of it.

  Robbie responded immediately, his first aid training taking over. He stood up and ran to the top table, along with a few other diners. The bevy of beauties that had been so attentive was pushed aside and their giggles turned to panicked shrieks.

  I lost sight of Robbie and the head table as the news of Conneally’s collapse spread like wild fire, and diners began to stand up, crowding around, trying to see the action. Mrs Conneally was screaming and sobbing. The wait staff ran in from every direction.

  ‘Does he have pills? Conneally, do you have pills to take?’

  ‘Is he choking?’

  ‘Is it a stroke? I know what to do with a stroke.’

  ‘It’s a heart attack. I’m sure it’s a heart attack.’

  ‘Someone call an ambulance!’

  It was all so completely unexpected. So totally out of the blue. I collapsed back into my chair and my mind slowed down and refused to process what was going on. I found myself begging the ambulance to hurry up, wishing these amateurs would stop mucking around, wishing that someone with some authority could calm the situation. I knew how much relief there had been during my mother’s illness when the visiting nurse would come and take over and I could relax in knowing the right treatment was being dispensed. How much more in this emergency situation did we need someone who knew the drill, who could fix things, make it all right. Where was the ambulance? How long did it take to get here?

  How long can panic last for?

  Eventually the sounds of sirens cut through the uproar of the restaurant. The officers in their bright yellow assessed the situation and lifted the prostrate body onto a stretcher and moved him to the ambulance, and the wait staff calmed the diners and continued to serve the plates of food. Robbie left with the ambulance officers, as did Mrs Conneally. The Conneally’s table settings were removed and the restaurant management tried to make it look as if nothing had happened.

  But I couldn’t pretend nothing had happened. I was stunned, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. The grief that I had thought I was getting over rose and swirled around my head like a thick fog. Through the fog came scraps of conversation, ‘what do you think happened?’ ‘heart attack?’ ‘do you think he’ll be alright?’ but I couldn’t respond. I was too busy trying to hold myself together.

  I felt a gentle hand on my arm, ‘Are you ok?’ asked Misaki. That was all it took, the tears welled and dripped down my face and I ran outside with Misaki following. Not that outside was much better. The ambulance was still there with its back doors open and paramedics in high-vis clothing were milling around.

  I sank down on the footpath, resting my back against the cool restaurant wall. I felt nauseous and faint. But I thought Misaki needed an explanation so through my tears I told of my mother’s death from pancreatic cancer just a few short months ago and the grief that had been resurrected by the scene in the restaurant.

  ‘Is that why we didn’t hear from you for all t
hat time? I’m so sorry.’ Misaki put her arm around my shoulders.

  ‘I’ll be ok, I just need to be alone for a while. Thanks for caring for me – but you go ahead and enjoy the meal. I just don’t think I can eat now.’

  ‘Will you get home ok?’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine. Thanks so much, but I’m ok.’ I just wanted to be left alone. Just for a while.

  Misaki checked a few more times then headed back into the restaurant to finish her interrupted dinner.

  I sat for a bit longer, the cool air and the sound of water lapping against the wharf wall helping me to calm down.

  After what felt like a long time Robbie appeared from the direction of the ambulance. He sank to the ground and put his head in his hands. I sat down beside him. I had never seen him like this.

  ‘Will he be alright?’ I asked.

  He shook his head, ‘They tell me there was nothing I could have done. I don’t know, I don’t know.’

  ‘But ...’

  ‘Don’t talk to me. Just ...’

  ‘Right’

  We sat together for a while and watched the ambulance doors close on the covered stretcher. Mrs Conneally, weeping copiously, was helped into a car and driven away. The footpath emptied of people, the show was over.

  Eventually, I became aware of the hard ground, and the hard wall. I creaked and groaned and pulled myself up and brushed myself off, and Robbie joined me.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Go back to the hotel and destroy the mini bar.’

  ‘Right,’ there wasn’t much to say to that.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Home. Bed. Probably lie awake all night, processing.’

  ‘Right. Each to his own.’

  ‘Look after yourself, Robbie. Don’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me. You take care.’

  ‘Alright.’

  We wandered into the night, each wrapped in our personal bubble of pain.