Page 82 of Reinventing Cato
“I’m sure you’ll think of something while we’re on our way back to your place.”
~~~
They stepped out of the club and shivered. Vigge put on his beanie, tugged Cato’s down over his ears, then pulled his hand into his pocket.
“Damn, it’s freezing,” Cato said. “That’s scuppered one idea. I was going to borrow a dog lead, but it’s too cold for you to crawl back without your clothes.”
“That is never going to happen.”
Cato squeezed his fingers. “This has been the longest day ever apart from New Year’s Day. That was pretty long too. Can you stretch time?”
“That would be useful. There are never enough hours in the day. What’s a typical day like for you?”
“A lot of coding, reading, more coding, talking, coffee, writing equations, and yet more coding. I do a lot of data processing. There are loads of department lunches, meetings, seminars, colloquia. We talk a lot and I go away quite regularly. The UK, Europe and further afield. But most of my time is spent in front of a computer.”
“You really don’t use a telescope much?”
“Nope. Even if I had my own custom observing hardware, I’d still spend more time writing proposals than using telescopes. Observing is mostly done remotely. I do a lot of planning, motivating observations, then processing the data gathered rather than looking directly at the sky. If we need to use one of the telescopes, we have to apply for time from an allocation committee, give them details about what we want to observe, how we’ll use the data we collect and what we hope to achieve. There’s none of that looking up into the sky with a scope and shoutingoh my God, I’ve found a new star.”
“If the job with NASA happened, what would you be doing?”
“More of what I’m already doing. They’re looking for a specialist in strong gravitational lensing and I’m…pretty shit hot at it.”
“You think they’ll offer you the job?”
Cato shrugged. “I don’t know. Talking of stars, how are you going to explain recognising the constellations on…you know what?”
“Changing the subject?”
“Yep, but you do need to come up with something.”
“Any ideas?” Vigge was genuinely interested.
“We could stop on Coe Fen on the way back, sit on a bench and look at the stars. You could claim inspiration. But we’re not going to find Lynx without a telescope. It only has one star brighter than third magnitude. Cygnus is fairly easy to see, but not at this time of the year. You’d have to just say you saw Orion or Taurus, which are easy to spot, and they made you think of Cygnus. Do your colleagues know you’re into stargazing?”
“No.”
“Well, if they ask you about them, you know stuff, right? Which one’s the sun, how to recognise the moon, to duck if you see an asteroid coming…”
“I can guess.”
Cato smiled, then looked around before he spoke. “I wonder why that was the killer’s signature? Why would he want the police to link the cases?”
“Because he thinks he’s cleverer than we are. Once I point out the link, the NCA will step in and the case will be handed over to an MIT at the Met.”
“And in English?”
Vigge chuckled. “The national crime agency will hand the case over to a major investigation team within the Metropolitan Police.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“My team have already done a lot of donkey work on this, so there might be resentment, but it’s the way it goes. The Met unit has more resources at their disposal, though they still need our input.” He exhaled a cloud of water vapour into the air. “I have to stop talking about this.”
“Okay.”
“Thanks for taking me out tonight. The last time I danced was at a school disco.”
“Good to see you’ve not lost it.”
