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properties of the new element, and before Sarah’s death I’d been running a set of experiments designed to establish its base-line reaction to magnetic fields. Nothing interesting had turned up so far.
    The PC disgorged a load of departmental email that I scanned and then deleted. I was starting to review the results of some experiments that I had run just before I’d last left the lab when the door burst open. I twisted round on my old swivel chair and my heart sank to see Dr Bill Gilbert standing in the doorway. Our head of department is a tall man with iron-grey hair and a ‘devil take the hindmost’ attitude to management. At his heels, as usual, was Freddy Wright, sometime post doc and Gilbert's nephew, who seemed permanently attached to Uncle's coat-tails like a big, soft leech.
    ‘Morning, Adam,’ said my boss, striding energetically into the tiny room. Automatically I wheeled slightly backwards to give him some room.  ‘How are you?’
    ‘OK, thanks,’ I said, eyeing up Wright as he sauntered in with his hands in the pockets of his bright yellow posh-boy trousers.
     
    A memory of Freddy, drunk and red in the face, chatting up my wife at the lab Christmas party shot into my mind. He'd been right in the middle of his usual 'I'm headed for greatness' speech when I'd spotted him, and Sarah's eyes had met mine in silent appeal as I strode across the Common Room to rescue her. She took a half step towards me, but Freddy didn't like his audience escaping, and had grabbed her wrist with a fleshy hand.
    'Where are you going? I didn't say you could leave!'
    He dropped his fake matey tones when he was pissed, reverting to the nasal tones of what he probably thought was the ruling elite. My voice in his ear, as I leaned over his shoulder and snapped my own hand over his and squeezed hard, had no such pretentions.
    'Get your fucking hands off my wife, you shit,' His puffy face went pale under its unpleasant sheen of sweat, and he released Sarah's wrist. She stepped away to my side, rubbing her arm and I could tell she was both rattled and furious.
    'Arsehole!' she said, then linked her arm through mine and we wove away through the rest of the drunken department, leaving Freddy behind.
     
    I clicked back into the present moment just as Gilbert nodded, his ten-second interest in my wife’s death ticked off.  ‘Well, glad you’re back. Harvard have been hassling me about your results from the 122 trials.’  This annoyed me, I’d hardly had the bloody element a week before Sarah’s accident and the US team knew I had been on compassionate leave. More than likely Gilbert had promised his boss, the almost mythological Professor Ed Collins, that the results were amazing and already being written up for publication. He tended to over-egg results before they had actually been found and then hassle researchers to cover his arse for him.  Gilbert cocked an imperious eyebrow at me and went ‘Hmm?’
    ‘I’m working on it, Bill,’ I replied, trying not to sound as pissed-off as I felt, and also trying to ignore Freddy who was now leaning against the door with a badly-disguised grin on his face, clearly enjoying my discomfort. ‘In fact I was just reviewing the latest batch of experiments when you came in.’ I gestured at the screen which displayed a graph of various colours. ‘I’ve been testing the usual Tesla spectrum, but I’ve had some contamination of the sample from the thorium layers…’ 
    Gilbert stooped over me to read the screen, leaning heavily on the back of my chair and making it creak.
    ‘Hmm’, he said again, not especially interested in anything I’d actually found. ‘Just hurry it up, Adam, we need those results pronto.’ He wheeled round, waved Wright into the corridor and slammed the door, leaving me scowling.
    ‘Fuck off!’ I said under my breath.
    I turned back to the results, but I was too irritated by Bill bloody Gilbert and his parasitic nephew to pay them full attention. If he