Verwandte Artikel zu Fall of Man in Wilmslow: A Novel of Alan Turing

Fall of Man in Wilmslow: A Novel of Alan Turing - Softcover

Lagercrantz, David

 
9781101970416: Fall of Man in Wilmslow: A Novel of Alan Turing
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101970413 ISBN 13: 9781101970416
Verlag: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

From the author of the #1 bestseller The Girl in the Spider’s Web—an electrifying thriller that begins with Alan Turing’s suicide and plunges into a post-war Britain of immeasurable repression, conformity and fear

On June 8, 1954, Alan Turing is found dead in his home in the sleepy suburb of Wilmslow—an apparent suicide. Investigators assumed he purposely ate a cyanide-laced apple because he was unable to cope with the humiliation of his criminal conviction for gross indecency.

But Leonard Corell, a young detective constable who once dreamed of a career in higher mathematics, suspects greater forces are involved. In the face of opposition from his superiors and in the paranoid atmosphere of the Cold War, he inches closer to the truth and to one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Second World War—what was going on at Bletchley Park. With state secrets swirling in his mind and a growing fear that he is under surveillance, Corell realizes that he has much to learn about the dangers of forbidden knowledge.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DAVID LAGERCRANTZ is an acclaimed Swedish journalist and author. He has worked as a crime reporter for Expressen and has written several novels, including the #1 best-selling The Girl in the Spider’s Web. He worked with international soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovic on his memoir I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, which was short-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and nominated for the August Prize in Sweden.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

2
 
It rained the next day as well and young Detective Constable Leonard Corell came walking along Adlington Road. When he drew level with Brown’s Lane, he took off his trilby because he felt warm despite the rain, and he thought of his bed, not the miserable bed in his flat but the one waiting at his aunt’s in Knutsford, and as he did so his head sank down to his shoulder, as if he were about to fall asleep.

He did not like his job. He did not like the salary, the walking, the paperwork, or godforsaken Wilmslow where nothing ever happened. It had got to the point where even now he felt nothing but emptiness. And yet the housekeeper who called had mentioned a white froth around the dead man’s mouth and a smell of poison in the house, and in the past a report like this would definitely have sparked some life in Corell. Now he just plodded along the puddles of water and the garden hedges. Behind lay the field and the railway. It was Tuesday, June 8, 1954, and he glanced down, looking for the signs with the house names on them.

When he found the address “Hollymeade,” he turned in to the left and was met by a large willow which looked like a big old broom, and without needing to he stopped and retied his shoelaces. A brick pathway stretched halfway across the yard and then came to an abrupt stop, and he wondered to himself what had happened here, although obviously he realised that, whatever it was, it had nothing to do with the brick footpath. Over by the left-hand entrance stood an elderly woman.

“Are you the housekeeper?” he said, and she nodded. She was a colourless little old lady with sad eyes, and when he was younger Corell would probably have given her a warm gentle smile and put a hand on her shoulder. Now he just looked down grimly and followed her in, up a steep staircase, and there was nothing pleasant about the walk, no excitement, no policeman’s curiosity, hardly even a feeling of unease, only a “Why do I have to keep on with this?”

Already in the hallway he sensed a presence, a closeness in the air, and as he went into the room he closed his eyes and, to be honest, perhaps strange given the circumstances, one or two inappropriate thoughts of a sexual nature went through his mind which there’s no need to elabo­rate on now, other than to say that they seemed absurd even to him. When he opened his eyes, the associations lingered over the room like a surreal membrane, but they dissolved into something else when he discovered the bed, the narrow bed, and on top of it a man, dead, lying on his back.

The man was dark-haired and perhaps a little over thirty. From the corner of his mouth, white froth had run down his cheek and dried into a white powder. The eyes were half open and were set deep down under a protruding, domed forehead. Although the face did not exactly radiate tranquillity, one could sense a certain resignation in the features, and Corell should have reacted with composure. He was no stranger to death and this was no gruesome end, but he felt sick and had still not realised that it was the smell, the stench of bitter almonds hovering over the room, and he looked out through the window towards the garden and tried to return to the inappropriate thoughts, but was not successful and instead noticed half an apple on the bedside table. Corell thought, which surprised him, that he hated fruit.

He had never had anything against apples. Who does not like apples? From his breast pocket, he took out his notebook.

The man is lying in a nearly normal position, he wrote, and won­dered if that formulation was good, it probably wasn’t really, but on the other hand it wasn’t excessively bad either. Apart from the face, the man could just as well have been asleep, and after having scribbled down a few more lines—which he was not happy with either—he examined the body. The dead man was skinny, quite fit, but with an unusually soft, almost female chest, and even though Corell was not being too meticulous he found no signs of violence, no scratches or bruises, only a slight black colouration on the fingertips and then the white froth in the corner of his mouth. He sniffed at it and understood why he felt so sick. The stench of bitter almonds penetrated his consciousness and he turned back to the hall again.

At the far end of the corridor he found something odd. In an open­ing where a dormer window looked out over the garden, two wires hung from the ceiling and a pan was bubbling on a table, which he approached quite slowly. Could it be dangerous? Surely not! The room was some sort of experimental workshop. There was a transformer in there and clamps for the wires, and then bottles, jam jars and pots. Prob­ably nothing to worry about. But the stench crept in under his skin and it was with reluctance that he leaned over the pan. A revolting soup was bubbling away at the bottom and suddenly, from out of the blue, he remembered a train racing through the night long ago in his childhood and he braced himself against the table, panting. Then he rushed out and opened a window in the next room. The rain was falling. It was insane the way it fell. But for once Corell did not curse at it. He was glad that the stench and the dark memories disappeared with the wind and the water and, reasonably calm again, he looked around the house.

There was a bohemian feel to the home. The furniture was good, but had been arranged without thought or care, and there was obviously no family in residence, certainly no children. Corell picked up a notebook from the windowsill. It contained mathematical equations, and once upon a time he might have understood some of them. Now he under­stood nothing, no doubt also because the handwriting was hard to read and covered with ink blots, and he became irritated, or possibly envious, and grumpily he searched through a glass-fronted cupboard to the right of the window and found wine glasses, silver cutlery, a small porcelain bird and then a bottle containing something black. It was similar to the jars in the experimental workshop, but unlike them it had a label on it with the words Potassium Cyanide.

“I should have realised,” he muttered and hurried into the bedroom and sniffed at the apple. It smelled the same as the bottle and the pan.
“Excuse me,” he shouted. “Excuse me!”
He got no answer. He called out again and then steps were heard and a pair of fat calves stepped in over the threshold. He directed a challeng­ing stare at the grey face with the thin, almost vanishing, lips.
“What did you say your employer’s name was?”
“Dr. Alan Turing.”
Corell wrote down in his notebook both the fact that the apple had smelled of bitter almonds and also the name which seemed familiar or at least, like so much else in the house, awakened dim recollections in him.
“Did he leave anything behind?”
“What do you mean?”
“A letter or something which could explain.”
“Do you mean that he might . . . ?”
“I don’t mean anything. I was just asking a question,” he said, far too severely, and when the poor woman shook her head in fright he tried to sound a little more friendly.
“Did you know the deceased well?”
“Yes, or rather no. He was always very kind to me.”
“Had he been ill?”
“This spring he did suffer from hay fever.”
“Did you know that he handled poisons?”
“No, no, goodness me. But he was a scientist. Don’t they . . . ?”
“It all depends,” he interrupted.
“My employer was interested in many things.”
“Alan Turing,” he continued, as if...

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Verlag
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101970413
ISBN 13 
9781101970416
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
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