NUCLEUS by Rory Clements
June 1939. Before the phoney war, the phoney peace. Britain is partying with gas masks at the ready. In Cambridge the May Balls are played out with a frantic intensity.But only the most optimistic believe the good times can last. The Germans have invaded Czechoslovakia, with disdain for the Munich accord. The persecution of the Jews gathers pace to such an extent that mothers and fathers desperately send their children to safety aboard the Kindertransports. Closer to home, the IRA has launched its S-Plan bombing campaign, perpetrating more than 100 terrorist outrages.
Perhaps the most far-reaching event of all goes largely unreported: in Germany, Otto Hahn has produced the first man-made fission – meaning an atomic device is now a real possibility. The Nazis have set up the Uranverein group of physicists. Its task: to build a superbomb.
Knowing the potential of such a weapon and knowing that there are scientists working on similar lines in England and the US, the German high command needs to do two things: 1) Discover how soon the West will be able to produce such a bomb, and 2) Eliminate anyone who might make it happen.
Only then will it be safe to go to war.
Behind the scenes, some of the world’s greatest physicists at the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge – where the atom was first split – are alert to the dangers. So are the British secret services.
Philip Eaton of MI6 arrives in the ancient university town begging his old acquaintance Professor Tom Wilde to take in and protect a renowned physicist named Arnold Lindberg, who has escaped Dachau. The plan is that Wilde’s neighbour and lover, Lydia Morris, will take care of Frau Eva Haas, the woman who effected Lindberg’s escape in mysterious circumstances, and who is also a physicist and graduate of Girton.
But there has been a terrible hitch in the plans. Eva’s eight-year-old son Albert was put on a Kindertransport with the intention of meeting his mother in London. He never made it. Someone removed him from the train at the Dutch border – and no one knows where he is. Or why he has been detained.
It is impossible for Eva Haas to return to Germany – so her friend Lydia travels to Berlin to investigate. At great danger to herself, she discovers that there is more to Lindberg and Eva Haas than meets the eye. And she learns that the secret to young Albert’s whereabouts might lie in Cambridge itself.
Meanwhile, one of the Cavendish’s most brilliant physicists is found dead in the river. At first it is thought he drowned – but it emerges that he was killed by mustard gas. Tom Wilde, who knew the man, finds himself investigating the murder.
Along the way, he must discern the true motives of the glamorous Americans who have taken over a stately home near Cambridge for the summer. With them is Clarissa Lancing, a beautiful but highly-strung English actress, taking a break from Hollywoood. Her brother, a senior scientist, is one of Wilde’s closest friends.
Captivated by Clarissa’s seductive charms, Wilde must look deeply into his own life – and think hard about his true feelings for Lydia. What he cannot know is that Clarissa and her brother share a terrible secret stretching back to their childhood – a secret with a direct and shocking bearing on her true character, and on present events in Cambridge.
Wilde must also deal with a face from his own past – an Irishman named Henty O’Gara, a cousin, whom he remembers from childhood summers in Galway. Whose side is he on – and why does he have a bag full of explosives?
In a conspiracy that stretches from Cambridge to Berlin and from Washington DC to the west coast of Ireland, Wilde finds himself battling deadly forces which threaten the very fate of the world.
We are thrilled to announce that Rory Clements has won the 2018 CWA Award for the Historical Dagger for NUCLEUS.
