The Green papers

When I saw Christine get into Cartwright’s boat that first morning, I knew there would be casualties. She did not just tumble, she literally collapsed head first into the well of the hull, her leg left hanging over the side where the fabric of her trousers had caught on a cleat. That Cartwright laughed was only to be expected; that he did nothing to help we might have anticipated; that he laughed loud and hard and set off at higher than normal speed to exacerbate her discomfort came as a mild surprise. The fact that she also laughed after an initial screamed curse will surely surprise us all. It was almost as if, from the very first moment, Christine had changed from the seasoned professional we all knew into an adolescent along for the ride. Perhaps eventually it made things clear, but at the time it was hard to read, and happened too fast to allow a considered reaction. It was only when I later reviewed the scene that I realised how completely things had gone wrong. Cartwright had surely approached the whole encounter with a plan and inevitably it was a plan to proffer cooperation, but with the overall intention to disrupt, frustrate, undermine and eventually triumph. His apparently callous reaction to Christine’s collapse into the boat was merely a diversion that worked. It was immediately apparent that he was someone who could act quickly, could think on his feet - or on his foot, if that is the more appropriate wording in the circumstances.

To that point, Christine’s assignment had progressed entirely to plan. She had arrived on the offshore island after spending two days with our people in base, where she was able to brief our contact who, of course, had no prior need to know anything about her task. At the time we all judged his surprise as genuine. Cartwright, after all, had received some official support over the years, albeit minimal, since he retained dual nationality. He made few demands, but those he did make were sometimes significant - his own change of name, his children’s nationality, for example. But, according to the person who was most likely to have known more about him, Cartwright’s significance appeared to remain unknown until Christine briefed him on her objectives. He certainly seemed surprised, but then he may have been a good actor. Frankly it is inconceivable, given Cartwright’s recent rise to prominence, that our contact at base was unaware of why we would be interested in him. The operative in question has been in his current post for more than three years, some time before Cartwright began to achieve success in his venture and a year and a half before his activities were drawn to more general attention. We have, of course, taken the trouble to interview the current incumbent’s predecessor, and she too appeared to have no knowledge whatsoever of Cartwright’s interests, despite having had extensive social and professional contact with him before he officially retired from the university. Her ignorance of his current status is understandable since, as far as we are aware, Cartwright did not begin to apply his ideas until after his own retirement, which happened after the previous incumbent left her post.

After her two days of rest at base, Christine took the eight o’clock boat across to the island and then a taxi to the hotel on the north coast, where she had negotiated her rendezvous with Cartwright. She had only light luggage of her own, merely a carry-on bag with a few clothes and her laptop, but she did also have that heavy metal box for the cameras and their charger, but it was not this that caused the fall.

The hotel has its own small jetty, but it’s designed to be used by the hotel’s own craft that does tourist trips out to the reef. There are no proper landing stages apart from the one designed for that particular boat, since they hardly wanted to encourage or attract general traffic. Cartwright moored his own boat just off the beach, so that the heavy camera case could be easily lowered down directly to him from the jetty’s walkway, thus avoiding the risk of a carry over water to the boat. Christine, however, did not feel confident with the half metre drop onto a rocking boat, so she elected to board from the beach. Cartwright ran the bow aground in the shallows, as close to the beach end of the jetty as he could, meaning that Christine had to lunge forward with one reaching step from the very end of the jetty to plant her right foot on the bow platform and rely on a pull from Cartwright’s helping hand to get her on board. He, however, also had to keep hold of the tiller, meaning he was over-reaching. It worked fine, except that the fabric of Christine’s left trouser leg caught on the bow cleat, and over she went in a screaming bundle. Cartwright’s surprising, even baffling response was to smile, leave her there and gear up his outboard to pull them off the sand. He reversed and then set off at full pelt, the bow of his light water taxi standing up as he bounced the little craft over the waves. All I could see at this stage, of course, was the bottom of the boat which, presumably, was also Christine’s point of view at the time. I could hear how she cried out, however. At first I thought they were screams for help, but I was wrong.

It galled me, I admit. I could cope with Cartwright’s crass behaviour, which frankly I had expected. I could cope with Christine’s obvious discomfort, for it soon became obvious that she was in no pain, despite being almost upside down with her face pushed against one of the cross-plank seats. My problem arose when she too started laughing, almost enjoying the relief of not having to keep up appearances for once. And then, when my wife of thirty years turned on her side, undid her belt, buttons and zip and struggled to slide out of her trousers to a seated position, still laughing, I sensed, just minutes into the encounter with Cartwright, that she had already become a stranger to me. At the time, quite understandably, perhaps, I assumed that she was doing her best to rescue the situation. The ultimate professional was the label that my rationality sought to attach, as she sat there in her knickers, belly-laughing like an idiot, her trousers with the now detached prosthesis still in situ hanging like a bagged amputation from the cleat into the boat, agitated and apparently alive on the jolts of the waves. In thirty years of marriage, I had never once seen her even expose her false leg in public, let alone take it off. And now she was presenting the stump of her left leg proudly, almost erect to the wind, like maleness both rampant and misplaced.

“Morning, Tom,” she had said plainly as he approached the jetty, her feet and heeled shoes sinking deep into the soft white sand. She stumbled a little under the weight of the camera box.

Cartwright had not replied. He remained silent and seated at the stern of the boat, his right arm resting on the outboard’s tiller as the engine idled. His shorts and shirt looked dirty, but later I concluded they were just heavily worn. Throughout, I never saw him wear anything other than these two garments, but they were washed several times a day, I later learned, via his habit of dropping fully clad - if that might be the relevant expression in the circumstances - into the sea to cool off. He did this regularly, at least two or three times a day.

Now I could accept his need to steady the boat while Christine struggled to lower the weight of the camera box from the jetty. And I was appreciative of his manoeuvre designed to assist Christine’s boarding, but I almost screamed at the monitor when his response to Christine’s potentially catastrophic fall came in the form of laughter.

“I can’t get down from here,” Christine had said, as she rose from an attempted crouch she had adopted to lower the box, which even then did fall the last foot or so into the boat. “There’s nothing to hold on to...”

“Go back to the beach, where the jetty meets the sand. Take your shoes off,” Cartwright replied. She did as he said, but in reverse order, throwing the shoes down into the boat. This was my first hint of the surprises to come, since Christine is usually careful with her shoes, even possessive. It is many years since she had the moulded mirror image of her right foot created in fibreglass so she could have it attached to her false leg, thus allowing her to shop for shoes like any other obsessive. And, over the years, her collection has grown to such an extent that she has had to operate a near-filing system in her wardrobe to enable her to find particular pairs. Seeing her cast this pair carelessly down into Cartwright’s boat was certainly not in character.

After her fall, all I could see, after an initial glimpse of the bottom of the boat approaching quickly, was sky. Her spectacles must have fallen off. I heard the laughing, of course, and eventually I caught sight of my wife momentarily as she stripped off her trousers. Only then did she lean over to retrieve her glasses and put them on. And then all I saw for the next fifteen minutes was the sea and skyline with its quickly approaching miniscule island, since she faced resolutely forward, unwilling, or perhaps unable to pivot because of her need to hold on to the sides of the pitching craft. Cartwright, of course, was still at the outboard’s tiller, directly behind her. The outboard was too noisy to allow any conversation, but I did hear her prolonged laughing. Christine did occasionally look down, and it was then that I saw that stump of a left leg that I had never before seen exposed in any public place. I then realised, of course, that only Cartwright could see it and, given the circumstances, that could hardly be classed as ‘in public’. Nevertheless I was still having difficulty reading Christine’s signals, a state to which I was unused, to say the least.

What I was not prepared for, despite all our detailed briefings, was just how small Cartwright’s island would be. To describe it as a wooden house floating on open sea with a small rock attached would not be an exaggeration. The rock, of course, is the only part of a reef that protrudes through the surface. The surrounding coral and sandy shallows were clearly over a hundred metres across, but at sea level the wooden house seemed to stand on water, its stilts seemingly reluctant to get their feet wet. Christine was clearly taken with the place, because the house remained in view for several minutes as their boat approached, indicating the continued concentrated focus of her own gaze. It was concentrating her attention, but I had not realised why until she spoke.

“How do we get in, Tom?” she shouted at the top of her voice, half turning towards Cartwright, still at the tiller behind her. “I can’t see any steps.”

“There aren’t any steps,” Cartwright shouted above the engine noise.

“...seems now I have to learn to fly as well...” Christine mumbled.

I found this immediately and completely reassuring. She had already turned back to face the pitching bow of the boat, so her words were clearly spoken purely for my benefit. Cartwright would have had difficulty hearing something shouted towards the stern, let alone a comment mumbled under her breath towards the bow. She had taken the opportunity to communicate directly with me, and she had done so completely without risk to herself or the project. I remember commenting out loud at the time on her remarkable reassuring professionalism.

There was no more communication during the ten minutes or so that elapsed before Cartwright drew the boat up to the house stilts with its engine at idle. Christine obviously remained concerned about how she was going to get up to the level of the veranda, because she was clearly inspecting every element of the structure as they approached, her gaze resting in turn on selected details of the construction, perhaps to give me the opportunity to record it. I was sure, however, at the time that her motives were purely selfish.

She watched as Cartwright tied the boat’s bow rope loosely to a cleat on one of the house poles and then engaged reverse to hurtle at a startling rate towards another. Though Christine turned around almost immediately to see what might be happening, all I saw was Cartwright already disappearing out of the field of view, apparently shinning up the pole. Closer inspection revealed that the pole had protruding pegs every foot or so along its length, thus forming a ladder, which he obviously habitually used to access the boat. It was clear, immediately, however, that Cartwright possessed quite remarkable upper body strength. A fit young man would find a vertical climb up a makeshift ladder something to dwell on. The fact that this sixty year old with only one leg rose as fast as he did illustrated immediately that his arms and shoulders were quite extraordinarily powerful. My initial assessment was thus that he was a subject who could offer physical threat.

Christine was quickly angry again, and understandably so. “I can’t get up there. How on earth...”

Cartwright was ready with his response. “The wonder of human beings is that they are capable of planning. Just wait on...and shut yer gob, as we used to say.” He was already on the open balcony that we knew went all round the house, since it had been visible on our aerial photographs. He had climbed up his makeshift ladder carrying a light string. This, I now could see, was tied to the heavier rope attached to the boat’s stern and enabled him to pull the mooring rope up as he took the four or five paces he needed to reach the end of the walkway, where a small L-shaped extension jutted out. Here he attached the mooring rope to the balcony rail and then tightened it, so that the boat floated secure but free of any of the wooden structure.

“How on earth am I going to get out?” shouted Christine, impatient.

Without answering, Cartwright returned to the rail closest to the moored boat. It is worth recording that he moved with both speed and ease. His method was clearly learned from and highly adapted to his environment, which I found reassuring, since it suggested he was quite used to the demands of his strange little house. Prior to Christine’s departure, I had convinced myself that Cartwright’s unwillingness to meet anywhere apart from this silly, remote island was just a ruse to increase Christine’s vulnerability and insecurity. Basically, to get around his little house he hopped, but with one hand always on the wooden handrail at waist height for the extra support needed. Using this technique, he appeared to be as mobile as anyone might be across the rickety and uneven surface.

“Catch this,” he said as he threw down another light rope.

Christine did as she was told, but also shouted, “Things go from bad to worse...”

“You’ll see it has a loop at the end...?”

“Yes...”

“Now thread the loop through the handle of your camera case ... that’s right ... and now pull the slack through so you have enough to throw the loop back up to me.”

Christine did as she was told and within a few seconds Cartwright had tightened the rope around a small hand-cranked winch built into the balcony railing where he stood.

“Give it a lift, just to help it clear the side of the boat.” And with that he took up the slack until the rope was taught. “Now lift the box as I take the strain to stop it swinging to the side.” This she did, and when the box was at the level of her shoulders, Cartwright told her to let go. The box did swing, of course, but by that time it was hanging on barely a metre and a half of rope, and its oscillations were immediately damped by the rope’s contact with the balcony’s lower edge. He continued to wind in the rope to lift its load.

“I’m glad you have your priorities right,” said Christine ruefully. “Get the cargo safe and then worry about the women and children...”

“Any rational human being would realise that the box has to come first. If you were up here, who would attach the rope to the box?” She smiled in recognition of her lack of foresight.

A moment later, with the box safely on the balcony, Cartwright threw the rope back down. “Put your leg through the loop and then work the rope up to your backside so you are sitting on it.” Christine took some time to do this. She was clearly unsure of what to do. Cartwright remained patient, despite the delay, during which time she twice almost fell out of the boat whilst trying to stand. She clearly did not feel secure without maintaining two points of contact, a foot on the boards and a hand on the gunwale. The second hand grasped the rope, of course. But getting from there to a state where her foot was through the rope’s loop proves a significant logistical challenge. It took time. Cartwright remained patient.

“That’s fine. Now I am going to lift you. Hold on to the side of the boat to begin with. As I take the strain, the boat will lift a little and come slightly towards the house. When I shout, let go.”

Things happened quite fast, too fast for Christine, who was unaware that she would get wet.

“OK, let go!”

She did as she was told and slid over the side of the boat that seemed to spring away behind her. She screamed as she hit the water, which came up to her waist. With a couple of pulls on the winch she was clear of the surface, but drenched.

“It’s lucky you’re already down to your knickers,” said Cartwright.

“It’s fucking cold.”

“Welcome to the tropics,” Cartwright answered, as he strained to crank the winch.

A few seconds later, Christine was level with Cartwright, but still in mid-air over the sea. He reached out an arm and pulled her over the balustrade so she was over the balcony and then gave some slack to the winch to lower her onto the timber floor.

Before Christine could speak, Cartwright had already said, “Wait there” and launched himself over the rail into the sea. Christine’s trousers and prosthesis were still attached to the cleat on the boat of course. Also, her travelling bag was still waiting to be retrieved and her shoes were still loose in the bottom of the boat. Cartwright retrieved them all and then came up his makeshift ladder once again to rejoin her, the load this time being light enough for him to carry.

“Here’s the rest of your luggage, Mrs Green. And here are your trousers.”

The stressed formality was another attempted joke. In normal circumstances, which might include every other situation with which she has ever been presented, Christine would have immediately put her prosthesis back on her leg before trying to move. But it seemed that Cartwright’s display of apparent freedom, his ability to move with ease around this familiar space, encouraged her to copy. Looking back, this was just the first indication that it was already Cartwright who was calling the shots. I cannot judge whether she saw his performance as a challenge to emulate but, still barefoot and only in her knickers, she too tried to hop along the balcony towards the shade and a waiting chair. She fell, of course, and there was another exchange of laughter as she literally crawled into the seat.

“Why didn’t you bring the camera box up the ladder, like you just did with my bag?”

“Because I know my limitations, Mrs Green. It’s too heavy. I might have dropped it, and then where would your little project have been? It was safer on the rope.”

The view when she eventually came to her senses was breathtaking. The main island, the place I will call ‘the mainland’ to distinguish it from the ‘island’ to which she had travelled that morning, seemed to shimmer in the distance between two swathes of blue, a lighter sky and a glittering sea. There was a breeze, so the humming sound of the boat seemed to continue, but lighter, of course, suggesting a distance that the view presented. From this angle, the port on the landward side of the island was barely visible, a few cranes and a couple of tall buildings being the only structures to break the line of palms and giant mangroves. To the left there was only sea, but to the right there was the coast of Borneo with its forests and hills, both apparently compressed onto the sea beneath the tropical heat and humidity I could recognise but not feel. There was a hubbub of boats, taxis, small craft, fishing boats and passenger ferries occupying the strip of water that Christine had crossed that morning, but from this distance, they were as silent and anonymous as the distant trees, despite their perpetual, frenzied criss-crossing of the strait.

“There’s nothing complicated,” Cartwright said. “I live on the balcony, which goes all the way round. The roof overhangs, so there’s shade nearly all day. Inside there’s the living room, which stays quite cool. My study is at the back, but there’s only space for one inside. The kitchen is outside on the back balcony. There’s a butane stove. The toilet is also at the back.”

“Long drop?”

“You’re kidding! We’re on solid rock here, so there are no holes in the ground. It’s a conventional toilet into a digester, so only a measured amount of water goes down. And that has to be fresh water from the bucket... and that has to be filled from the kitchen tap. There’s only the one tap, so you can’t miss it. It’s rain water, of which we have a plentiful - even daily - supply. It’s also perfectly safe to drink, but might sometimes taste a bit of diesel. I put a drop into the tank to kill the mosquito larvae. It helps a lot if you take a dip in the sea whenever you need a pee, but the brown stuff can hang around so please use the loo for that.”

“Electricity?” asked Christine, patting the laptop she had already retrieved from her bag.

“A little... enough. I run a small windmill onto a car generator and a couple of batteries, and then step up the voltage. I can’t raise much power, but then that thing doesn’t need much. There’s a socket in the living room and another in the kitchen, but don’t leave it plugged in all day.”

“Internet?”

“There’s unsecured wifi from a satellite link. Just use it. I need it for my work, so it runs all the time.”

“Where do we sleep?”

“We?” Cartwright paused here for what seemed like an age to stare directly at Christine. “Mrs Green,” he continued, eventually, “you sleep inside. The sofa is wide and low. It’s longhouse style, the same size as a single bed. I have a hammock strung on the side balcony. And by the way, neither of us will be able to sleep when it rains. If it does, I’ll go into my study and work, so don’t be alarmed if a light goes on. The rain makes a heck of a row. Come inside,” he said, bending to pick up Christine’s accumulated luggage. “I’ll show you where you can put your things.”

Going inside amounted to a couple of hops through the uncovered doorway, its strung bamboo and bead screen having been gathered to the frame. Once inside, Cartwright dropped everything onto the floor next to what I presumed might be what he called the ‘sofa’, which was merely a construction of loosely lashed bamboo poles with a thin flat cushion, obviously the very cheapest foam.

“So this is your palace?”

Cartwright offered a sidelong, rueful glance. “I assume that was a typo in your speech. This is my place. There’s enough palaces in this part of the world without further contribution from me.” He nodded towards the wall, which was also made from bamboo poles lashed with twine. “There are nails and pins here and there. Use any of them to hang your clothes. They won’t take any weight, so the laptop and anything else that’s heavy will have to stay on the floor. Because we’re over the sea, there’s no problem with bugs, so everything will be quite safe... apart from ourselves, of course, because we do get sand flies. They are the little black ones, microscopic, but with jaws like crocodiles. Don’t use repellent, because they love it. Just get bitten and suffer. They lose the taste for you after a couple of days. And don’t scratch the bites... It is, however, extremely humid, and moulds might spring up inside your box and even inside your cameras. Keep everything tightly shut when not in use and...” he said, hopping across to the room’s only shelf, “...I took the trouble to get a few bags of silica gel.” He took a sealed plastic bag from a wooden box, the only item on the shelf, and held it up rather like a prize. “If you put a few of these inside the cases, it will help to keep the moulds away. Always double seal the bag to keep the others dry. I’ll leave you to settle in. As I said, there’s a shower on the back balcony, and there’s always the sea.” He seemed not to realise that Christine would not be able to get back up to the house if she swam in the sea. On the other hand, perhaps he understood fully what he was saying and had thus chosen, in his way, to mock her. “I have to go out for an hour or so, back to town for a few things.” He moved to the side to retrieve a cloth from one of the nails in the wall. “If you prefer a wrapper to your trousers, you can use this. See you later.”

Within a minute, the boat’s engine had already started with what seemed like an ear-splitting roar, since Christine’s microphone level had already adjusted to the tranquillity of the place. And in a moment he had gone, the rasp of the outboard fading quickly behind the constant soft lap of the waves under the floor. Neither Christine nor I had paid any attention to the fact that she was still only in her knickers. Now alone, she spent a couple of minutes extracting her false leg from her trousers. The fabric had ripped where it had caught on the boat and threads had become tangled in the joint. Once free it immediately again became that essential, signature part of her body. The trousers, which were a complete write-off, she crumpled into a ball and stuffed inside her bag, once she had emptied out the few things she had brought. She then began her work.

I have thought long and hard about Cartwright’s decision to leave Christine alone in the house almost immediately after arriving, and I continue to find it paradoxical. I had already concluded that he knew from the moment he accepted our invitation that it was more than a journalistic venture. But to give Christine, who after all was virtually a complete stranger, someone he had not met in over forty years, free rein to do exactly as she wanted, to give her complete freedom to search everywhere, install whatever she wanted, I found strange, to say the least. And so she was able to place her own devices as we had planned, and do at will, almost at leisure. Our protracted discussions on the subject, including the formulation of endless contingency plans to cover what she might do if the task might prove impossible, began to seem absurd.

We had, of course, correctly anticipated the sparseness of Cartwright’s interior, so the trinkets that Christine had carried as her mementoes, good luck charms and the like were perfect for the task. She hung them along with her clothes anywhere they would fit, but there were so many places to hang things from the bamboo poles that she was able to establish views of the entire space with some ease, much of it from multiple angles. It would be accurate to state that in our wildest dreams we had never anticipated such comprehensive coverage.

Cartwright had not even secured the door to his office, so she was even able to place items inside. First impressions of his only private space proved that our assumptions had been completely accurate. The room, or cupboard might be a better term, contained a small table and chair, a computer, desktop variety with separate monitor, and a large stock of paper, pens, pencils and other stationery items strewn in a couple of boxes, that only later I learned were made from woven banana leaves. There was a miniature spotlight with a switch on the flex above his desk. The room had no natural light, so the spotlight was always on when he was in there and, as we were to learn, he always switched it off whenever he went outside. Apart from the IT equipment and the little light, this could have been a Malay water village house from a century ago. There were no obvious signs of recent work, no notes, no books of any description, except for a couple of manila folders lying flat on a single shelf to the left of the desk. With cameras in place inside the office, Christine resisted the temptation to examine the contents of the folders at this early stage.

Christine, reinstating my faith in her professionalism, carried out all of her assigned tasks in complete silence, resisting any temptation to communicate with me. We did not know, at this stage, of course, whether Cartwright had his own systems in place. All that I can claim for certain is that, since the opportunity arose, Christine did carry out an initial scan of the entire house and found nothing, but of course one can never be sure.

She deployed her systems, just enough to provide what we wanted, without over-complicating the task of monitoring. She placed devices in the main living room and the office, and then two more at opposite corners of the continuous balcony. By placing them at waist height in the outer banister rail she was able to cover the entire walkway. She put one more above the main entrance facing out so that I could see all the comings and goings. There was no need for more angles, because she had everything covered. As a fail-safe measure, however, she did place three systems to duplicate certain key angles, one in the main living area, one in the office and an extra one on the front balcony.

She then set up her laptop, and checked her personal email, avoiding, as agreed, any address that might appear, on monitoring, to have any connection with official or encrypted sites. She did send a short message to me, as would be expected from a wife to her husband on reaching her destination. She used only the technical terms and codes we had agreed to confirm that everything was in place and that I should be receiving signals. I acknowledged and, I admit, did include a word or two that were not specifically related to her task. We had then exchanged the two messages we had planned to exchange, and thus our One-On-One assignment was up and running. From now on, the only direct communication I could expect would be via coded, verbal messages slipped into the conversation.

She had again become the complete professional, carrying out everything exactly as we had agreed, and it was I who broke the rules with my extra few phrases. The fact that she ignored my unnecessary comment and carried on with the job completely restored all the confidence in her that I had questioned when she reacted to her fall by joining in with Cartwright’s laughter. She signed off from her account and went inside to rest. When Cartwright arrived back at the house she was dozing on the couch.

I could now see everything, of course, and was no longer reliant on the single point of view offered by Christine’s spectacles, so, an hour later, I was able to observe Cartwright’s approach. He was travelling slowly, much slower than when Christine had bounced around his boat. When he reached the house, I could see that he was quite heavily laden. He had two full butane bottles on board, plus boxes of provisions, some fresh vegetables and fruit were visible above several stacked tins and bottles. His water taxi was designed to carry seven or eight passengers, so he could obviously take more weight, but he was clearly trying to avoid upsetting his hastily loaded and only lightly secured cargo. His approach was audible for some time and by the time he moored the boat as before, Christine had clearly been listening to the approach for several minutes. When he came to check on her comfort, she feigned sleep and then a wake-up routine, before moving to a chair on the balcony, as Cartwright continued about his business in silence.

He immediately unloaded the boxes and gas bottles using his looped rope and winch. I watched him with great care, suspecting he would make a surreptitious inspection of the house in search of the systems that surely he knew Christine had placed. But he did nothing of the sort, which suggested four possible explanations. One: he might be a very good actor and, having assumed that systems would now be in place, resisted the temptation to look for them; two: he might not care because he already had superior systems of his own in place and had thus recorded everything she had done; and three: it was just possible that he really believed that Christine was actually on the freelance mission she had described. At the time - and even now - I am not satisfied with any of these conclusions. The fourth possibility was that he was simply naïve and, though subsequent events may have suggested this might be correct, I still cannot believe it to be possible. He did remain very quiet, however. But he was quite used to living alone. Why would he suddenly want to talk?

The gas bottles he stowed under the stove on the back balcony. This simple two ring burner on a metre long table was the extent of his kitchen. I must record again the man’s impressive strength, since the butane bottles had to be carried some distance to the back balcony, a task he completed by lifting them to the shoulder and hopping, seeking support as usual with his free hand. He was still not panting after completing the task. I was surprised that he hung the fresh fruit and vegetables in their plastic bags from various hooks and nails along the timber wall. One of the bags fell directly over one of Christine’s cameras and I privately applauded her for placing alternative views. There was a small refrigerator, but he did not seem inclined to use it.

With his jobs complete, he filled a plastic tumbler with water from his single tap and then rejoined Christine on the front balcony. She had a reporter’s pad open on her lap and pen in hand, but she had written nothing and probably thought less while she absorbed the view. The day’s intense light had just begun to soften, and I saw for the first time the colours that would mark the progress of the following days, the iridescent but threatening glow that would mark the incremental disintegration of our task.

This view struck Chris too, that first evening on Cartwright’s island. She was, of course, a much-travelled international correspondent, travel-hardened it might be said, and having worked with her on countless assignments, as well as being married to her - which ought to count for something! - I ought to have been surprised by her reaction. But in fact I hardly noticed her almost enraptured awe until later when I reviewed the scene, because at the time I too was as captivated as she was. The show in the sky was quite breathtaking, and would repeat its magic each time it reappeared to mark the passing of each day, each day of increasing deviation from our aims.

“Which way are we facing?” Christine had to shout her question, since Cartwright had wandered off along the veranda, out of sight to her left.

“We?” he shouted back. “I’m facing north. You’re looking east.” He remained standing at the veranda rail as he spoke, around the corner from Christine and out of her sight. He seemed to be staring at the water below the veranda, apparently watching the waves roll past the house stilts.

“I thought I was facing east, but...” said Christine slowly. After a pause she continued, “...so why am I looking at a sunset?” She rose from her seat, took a pace and turned to her right to inspect the western sky behind the house. The solitary rock of Cartwright’s island obscured the sunset, but the whole of the western sky behind the black of the rock glowed crimson. She turned back to the east to reveal again her captivation with the vision.

There were clouds, enormous billowing clouds milling high above the forest skyline. These were tropical clouds, thousands of feet deep, full of menace and power, whose silence seemed to promise even greater threat. They were heavy and massive, as if conceiving a future storm, but simultaneously light, high and gravity-defying. And they were pink. And not just tinged with a pink that an amateur artist might splash to exaggerate a copy of a photograph to claim something personal; no, they were bright, iridescent, shocking pink, only enhanced by the occasional tinge of grey in shadowed folds. Beneath them the sky was already almost dark, a steely grey that pressed its weight onto the distant forest, apparently to compress it onto an unyielding sea, itself a darker, more solid grey, seemingly adopted from an onrushing night.

Christine looked on in awed silence, a state I shared via my monitor from the comfort of my office chair, as the colours changed, glowed, darkened, and then greyed out over the next few minutes. “That’s the first time I have ever watched a sunset in the east,” she said eventually. Cartwright was still not in view. As far as Christine knew, she could have been talking to herself, or even to me, for that matter. There was neither reply nor comment.

As the sky began to darken quickly from the horizon, Christine retrieved her laptop from inside the house and then returned to her balcony chair. She opened up the machine and, as promised, again found Cartwright’s wifi signal without problem. She was browsing the news when Cartwright appeared at the corner. She was slightly taken aback when her machine indicated receipt of a new message from me. I did send another message, despite our agreement to restrict our communication, because I had received a new estimate of Cartwright’s wealth.

Whether it was the staggering size of this figure, or conversely her impatience at my having mixed the personal and the professional in a single message sent from a mailbox normally reserved for domestic use I simply cannot say, but the conjunction of events threw her and for the first time in our professional association, I saw her panic.

She had snapped the laptop shut and tried to stand before she spoke. Her words made no sense. All she managed was a set of disconnected fragments from a rush of simultaneous, all misdirected intentions. I have replayed the scene countless times and still can not fully read what happened. For certain he seemed to offer no initial reaction. He simply stood, one hand resting on the balcony rail for the support he needed. From the back, it is possible to detect the slightest tilt of the head to his right, but from other angles there is little to suggest that he had even bothered to look at the screen of Christine’s laptop to his left. She had been facing slightly to her own left, towards the corner where he had disappeared earlier. But, of course, he had walked all the way round the house and had appeared, effectively, from behind her. And, given that he could only have seen her screen for a second or two, we must conclude that his eyesight remains perfect. But, as Christine hurriedly got to her feet, closing her screen, he offered no initial comment. He did, however, smile.

He watched as Christine re-opened the laptop to close the email client, whilst she mumbled platitudes to change the subject and hide her panic. The mistake, of course, was entirely mine and I must accept full responsibility. It remains my opinion, however, that Cartwright’s reaction, his almost calculated lack of surprise, his complete control and apparent preparedness for such a revelation indicates his prior knowledge of every aspect of our quest. It would be inaccurate, therefore, to ascribe any significance to my error. It was an unfortunate slip, but did not itself contribute to the eventual outcome.

Precisely twenty-eight seconds after Christine had risen in panic from her chair, Cartwright spoke. “The sun really does set in the west here, Chris. But the real light show happens in the east. It’s because of reflection off the sea. The light is partially polarised, so when it hits the high clouds, the colours look like they have been painted.” As Christine nodded, in a single movement, he swung his body over the balustrade, using the pole on his right for leverage. He then balanced for a moment, standing on the wrong side of the balcony, but facing the house, and stared across the now separating rail directly at Christine. He offered no expression, but said, simply, “Your figure is out of date. I am worth a good fifteen per cent more than that now. If you’d have asked, I’d have told you.” And before Christine could offer even a word, he launched himself backwards to complete a reverse dive into the sea.

***

Perhaps I had seen enough. Perhaps I was merely tired. It had been a long day, though no longer than it had been for Chris. But I was tired, and a tired observer can miss things, so I slept. I had anyway a good idea of how things would progress and I was proved correct when later I reviewed the recordings. While Chris slept and Cartwright continued his work through the night, I began my own new day watching what I had missed on fast forward. A time difference of eight hours is always difficult, since sunset for the objects in view is merely mid-morning for the observer. To be effective, therefore, the body must be trained into a new sense of time, best achieved by working in permanent dark. Establishing the pattern, however, seems to get harder as one ages.

After his dip in the sea, Cartwright climbed back up his makeshift ladder on the house stilt. Christine quizzed him on the safety of his dive and he replied that there were at least two metres of water above soft sand on this side of the house, and that there was nothing to worry about. He invited her to try for herself, but she declined, of course. It was by then quite dark and the glow of Christine’s laptop screen was the only light. From my angle the two of them looked like some internally-lit painting, like some glowing Wright of Derby discovery against a portentous black backdrop. Of all the places we have operated, this was unquestionably the most remote, the only place our professional lives had visited where you could not even walk away. The result was that our task seemed only to increase in its focus; it alone dominated every detail of communication, intended or otherwise. There was simply no diversion, no people, no traffic, no noise, no media, no light, save for the moon and stars, which, once the sky had completely darkened, provided their own cool inverted daylight. But despite the isolation of the place and the proximity of the protagonists, I was convinced that nothing would persuade Cartwright to offer anything that first night, and I was right.

“There’s rice in the pan on the stove and ikan bilis, peanuts, cucumber and sambal in the pots at the side. Help yourself. I have to work now. You take the sofa. Use the cloth draped over the back if you get cold. I’ll see you in the morning, unless it rains, in which case we’ll both be out here again because it will be too noisy to stay inside.”

And, apparently uninterested in whether there might be either response or query, he set off for his room, closed the door and did not reappear, except for a minute or two in the early hours to assemble a plate of rice and sambal. By that time Chris had already eaten and gone to sleep. He did pause for a while to look at her as she slept. She did not wake. He leaned against the frame of his office door and simply stared at her. She had taken off her prosthesis, of course, and it was clearly too hot to sleep under the cloth he had provided. The wrapper she wore had come loose and her bare leg showed to the crotch. He spent several minutes watching her sleep as he spooned his rice and sauce. I watched the passage several times, but he gave nothing away. His gaze was utterly concentrated on her, but his expression remained quite blank. When he had finished his food, he washed his plate, left it to dry it on the surface next to the stove and then took a short nap on his office chair before working again on his papers.

For the record, I must restate how impressed I was at his ability to get around his house. His short shuffled hops made his progress look more like a gentle glide across my frame of view. There seemed to be no impact as the bamboo floor both gave and sprung back under his weight, emitting the barest of creaking groans as he moved. His progress seemed to anticipate the rhythm of the floor’s response, so the bamboo’s spring actually assisted his progress, his movement thus more a controlled application of pressure than a use of power.

I followed him into his office and fast forwarded through his labours, but saw nothing of interest. He did not use his computer, but merely scribbled what looked like a few symbols in a notebook that was already mostly filled with hand-written material. He spent most of his time reviewing the last two or three pages of entries, all of which were in his own hand. He read and re-read each page several times, spending sometimes a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes on each page, and then repeating the process. Of course I captured still images of his notes from the video and passed them to our mathematicians for comment, but both their initial and considered response was only confusion, since the symbols he was using did not correspond to anything they themselves could recognise. This in itself is strange. Either he was doing a variety of mathematics that was unknown to other mathematicians, which is possible in his case, given his achievements, or he had deliberately set up pages of gobbledegook to confuse us, having correctly predicted that we would be able to reproduce his notes. Later, I even had the material double-checked by an eminent professor of the subject and he could make neither head nor tail of it, despite the majority of each image being quite clearly readable. He did suggest, however, that the manipulation and analysis of probability distributions was not his specialism and advised we seek further help elsewhere. I have placed a request that the material be passed to such a specialist and, at time of writing, await the nomination of a suitably cleared candidate.

Their dawn, of course, was the start of a late night session for me. Christine stirred first and clearly believed that Cartwright had been asleep throughout, whereas he had snoozed for only a couple of hours at most. She started her day as ever by donning her prosthesis and then let herself into his office after checking that he was asleep. The lashed bamboo here and there had gaps wide enough to allow her to see inside his little room to check his activity without needing to open the door.

“Morning, Tom,” she said. It was loud enough to wake him.

He stirred, coughed a few times and momentarily looked tired. His notebook was still open on the only space available on his desk and he made no attempt to hide the open pages from Christine’s view.

“Where is your tea? I’ll make us a brew.” She paused for a moment. “You do drink tea, I suppose...”

“I may be an exile,” he mumbled, “but I am still English. It’s under the stove like everything else I use. I’ll come and do it. I haven’t told you how to use the stove.”

“Don’t worry. I mastered the technology of matches some time ago. I presume you start your day by jumping off the balcony into the sea. Don’t let me interrupt.”

“Anyone would have thought that you’d spent months watching my daily routine.”

The comment was barbed. Christine smiled before taking the five tentative steps across the uneven floor onto the back balcony. In contrast to Cartwright, Christine’s progress was both heavy and clumsy, the foot of her false leg often snagging on the split bamboo, causing her to take short, but determinedly heavy and deliberate steps. The wrapper Cartwright had supplied as casual wear did not help. She was not used to the garment, and almost tripped on its hem.

Cartwright rose, still in the same clothes as when he took his previous bath and, true to form, went immediately to the front of the house and launched himself into the sea. This time, however, he did take a short fresh water shower afterwards. Christine, of course, did not waste the opportunity and, after setting a pan of water to boil on the stove, returned to his office to leaf through his notebook while he swam. She was still at the task when he reappeared, dripping. She made no attempt to hide her interest in his papers and he showed no surprise at her snooping.

“Anything of interest?”

“I don’t understand anything. I can’t even translate the full stops.”

“That’s because they are operators, not full stops.”

“It amazes me that there are people like you on this planet who communicate in a way that barely anyone else understands... I was never any good at mathematics.”

“I know. I used to do your homework.” Cartwright smiled. It was a warm smile, the first inkling that the hard outer shell might give a little.

Christine laughed as she withdrew to make the tea. The clatter of cups and pans interrupted my audio, but I am sure I missed nothing.

“This work of yours - the stuff in your notebook - just how many other people on the planet could understand it?”

Cartwright looked down at the open notebook next to his computer. “You mean this material here? This is all new material. I’m not even sure if I understand it myself yet. I am playing with a couple of ideas.” He took up the book and was still reading his notes when Christine reappeared to hand him his mug of tea. She had carried her own mug as well and had spilled a little during her unsteady progress.

“There’s no milk as far as I can see...”

“I don’t use it.”

“...or sugar...”

“I don’t use that either... but you never used to take sugar...”

“And still don’t.”

“But you had a good look for some, no doubt.”

Christine smiled again. In my opinion she could have profited by restating her professional interest in his work, but she chose not to.

“So how many people on the planet could understand this?” she asked, nodding at his notes.

“This?” he asked, waving his book through the air. “Probably no-one. It’s quite new, even for me.”

“And what does it mean? What are you trying to do?”

“Now that would be telling...”

“...and why have you never published anything? Don’t mathematicians like to make a name for themselves? And isn’t receiving the peer review that goes with publication the only option for a mathematician who wants recognition?”

Cartwright shrugged as he closed the notebook and replaced it in the unlockable drawer of his desk. “There are other ways.”

“Like being the richest man on the planet?”

“In the capitalist world it’s called commercial advantage. In academe it’s called recognition. Commercial advantage produces profit. Recognition gets your name in a textbook, while commercial success puts your name in thousands of textbooks, because you can buy the publishing company.”

“And how many of those do you own now?”

“A few.”

Christine was already pushing harder than any of us would have recommended at this early stage. “So that number you saw on my computer screen last night was, as you claimed, an under-estimate of your worth?”

“Certainly.”

“How on earth did you do it?”

Cartwright ignored her question at first, brushing past her to shuffle out onto his beloved veranda, where he paused to survey the morning. The sun had risen above the distant forested hills and shone at its low angle directly onto the front of the house. He then laughed, turned back to face her and said, “The reasons are complex and multi-dimensional.” A hydrofoil ferry was approaching noisily from the right, the first of the day between the mainland and the island, its engine noise carrying the half a kilometre across the near silence above a flat calm that rendered the sea a virtual mirror in the early morning light. “And I use the terms advisedly.”

Now he was starting to play games. His wry smile at the end of the phrase confirmed it.

I have spent many hours deliberating over this. I have played and replayed this short sequence and I am convinced that he must have known more of Christine’s broader intentions than we initially assumed. Was he trying to elicit an error from her? Was he feeding her with keywords he knew had been part of her briefing? And if so, does this mean he has access to inside information? His words were clearly carefully chosen, and were not offered in jest. The only interpretation that fits both the context and his reaction is that he was signalling, for Christine and for me, that he was aware of the covert motives in play, as well as the declared reason for the interview request. Chris must have picked up this thread immediately, because, true to form, she did not take his bait, choosing to ignore the provocation.

“When can we talk about our interviews, Tom? I’d like to start as soon as possible.”

“Okay. How about now?”

Christine suggested they sit on the front veranda, the area facing the mainland and foreground sea that had already become their shared space. They both sat. Cartwright said nothing as Christine essentially repeated what we had sent in the initial contact emails, starting with an explanation of the format of the One-On-One interview, stressing its confrontational format. She asked if he was happy with this and he nodded his reply. It was an understanding of what she had said that he offered, rather than his assent to cooperate. She outlined our idea of three half hour programmes, the first an introduction to the public figure Cartwright had become, examining his status and the reasons why he had become an object of public interest; the second a portrait of the man himself, covering his background and life; and then thirdly an open-ended ‘where do we go from here?’ analysis of what might become of his wealth and power. Cartwright nodded throughout, but again he was doing no more than acknowledging that he had absorbed the message content. He was still not actually agreeing.

“So is that quite clear?”

Again he nodded.

“...and what about the format? Are you willing to participate, given the specific, confrontational nature of the One-On-One interview?”

“I think so,” he replied. He took a moment to reflect before continuing. “But if things go wrong I’ll just issue a string of expletives and then you’ll have to edit out the whole section.”

“Tom, I haven’t come here to waste my time.”

“...or mine, I hope.”

“You seem to have quite a lot of time.”

He became mildly aggressive. “I work every minute of every day, and have done for decades. I am working now, because there are ideas of how to proceed with my analysis in my head all the time, even as I speak. If I appear to be unoccupied, it’s because I am required to attend to a visitor, who asked for the invitation.” Christine did not respond when he remained silent for several seconds.

Clearly she was considering whether there was advantage to be gained in pushing him. She decided there was. “So why did you accept this time? Why did you agree to do a One-On-One when thus far you have refused all other contact with the media?”

He answered immediately, surprisingly without pause for thought. “Because the request came from you.” He looked at her, stared for several silent seconds before continuing. “And then there was the joke, of course.”

“Joke?”

“Well it made me laugh... One-On-One - it’s a good title for a confrontation between two monopedal adversaries.”

Christine laughed. “It never occurred to me.”

“It should have. We shared the experience, after all...”

“But that was a long time ago... and our lives have turned out so differently. I have to admit that I have concentrated so much on the differences that the obvious similarities have just passed me by.”

They both drank their tea and were silent for a while, allowing the self-adjusting microphones to amplify the distant hum of marine engines. They exchanged small talk about the view, with Cartwright helping Christine identify exactly what could be seen from the balcony. On that cool morning, he was able to point out the faint outline of Mount Kinabalu to the north, but it faded behind clouds even as she tried to discern it.

“But why this time, Tom? Was it just because it was me?”

“There was the joke, as well...”

“Of course. But why change the habit of a lifetime?”

He smiled. “Hardly a lifetime, Chris...In the first fifty-eight years of my life, the media could have unlimited access to me, if they had ever asked for it.” He paused, but the comment was obviously rhetorical. “But there comes a time...”

They were still standing at the balcony rail and neither seemed inclined to sit.

“I never thought my project would prove quite so successful. I never expected to achieve the growth rate my theory had predicted. I knew it was possible, and my theory had identified that it was likely. But I was still convinced I had overlooked something, a flaw that would dilute or undermine the eventual outcome.”

“And there were no flaws...”

“Apparently not. The system performed as theory had predicted.”

“But the results have been spectacular, to say the least. You must have expected...”

“No,” he interrupted, raising a finger to make his point. “...not spectacular. They have been in line with what theory predicted, so they add evidence to suggest that the theory might even be correct.”

“So what did your theory suggest?”

Cartwright turned to face her before answering. He looked long and hard before saying, “Is this an official question?”

“Meaning?”

“Who is asking? Is it you, out of interest, or is it your pay-masters, the interests that want to get their hands on my material, to undermine that ‘commercial advantage’ I mentioned earlier?”

“Now you are being silly...”

Cartwright said nothing for some time. He finished his tea - or almost finished it, deciding to throw the dregs into the sea below. He then followed his tea into the water, this time pausing to stand on the balcony rail, fully balanced on his one leg, before diving, still holding his mug, into the sea. “It saves washing up,” he said just a couple of minutes later as he clambered up his pole ladder. He could raise himself just using his arms, his remarkable upper body strength again in evidence.

“You were about to tell me...”

“Five per cent a day ... on a good day.”

“And a bad one?”

“Flat, at worst.”

Christine paused. There was an effort of calculation about her expression. “Five per cent... That doesn’t sound very much...”

Cartwright laughed. “You ancient historians just don’t get exponentiation. Come here. Follow me, I’ll show you.”

He led her to his office, where he powered up his desktop computer. In rapt silence, apparently with concentration, they both watched the screen deliver its start-up messages. Cartwright then loaded his spreadsheet, typed a few characters and swept his mouse down the column. “Look. Let’s say I started with ten thousand and grew at five per cent a day. After a hundred days - just three months into the project - I have one and a quarter million. I hit a hundred million before six months are up and by the end of the year I am over twenty billion.”

“I had no idea... and this is what you have done?”

“Not quite... there has been an occasional hitch, but I have achieved more than sixty per cent of what was predicted by the theory.”

“Why should there be a shortfall?”

“Noise.”

“Noise?”

“Noise.” The word had already become a surreal absurdity. “Unforeseen factors - miniscule effects that were too small to quantify in the model... they add up... When we mathematicians have to return to the real world, we have to become engineers. The models had to ignore some factors in order to identify the important principles. Back in the real world, you can’t ignore them any more. Their effects are small, hardly measurable in themselves, but the deviations arising from them can be cumulative, in which case the end result predicted by theory can be different from what is actually achieved.”

“So everything could have gone wrong anyway...”

Cartwright sighed. “Media people...” he muttered under his breath. “I said nothing about everything. I said, and repeated that these variations were small, even minuscule. The theory works, but does not deliver every cent of its predictions. I offer you five dollars as a present and it turns out to be four ninety-seven. Are you going to complain? But the shortfall was not predicted.”

“...but they do reduce your returns...”

“They can also increase them, but if they do that on a regular basis, then there was something wrong with the model. What they do is prevent the theoretical target from being achieved exactly.”

“And they don’t go away?”

“Well yes, in fact they do, but not of their own accord. The model is programmed to learn. It continually monitors its actual performance against its theoretical predictions. Discrepancies are analysed and any adjustment that produces a better fit with reality is automatically incorporated into future calculations.”

“So in theory, your system should get even better over time.”

“Correct. Unless, of course, there is a major shift in the system we are modelling. And that does happen, such as when markets fall or rise steeply. The system then takes a while to recalibrate.”

“But your system would adapt to that, from what you have just said.”

“I wish I could say ‘yes, in theory’, but I can’t. I am still working on the idea.”

“But...” Christine was confused, not just acting.

“Imagine a car that steers itself automatically by following the white line down the middle of the road. If it goes slightly off course, the sensors can hunt a little to each side to relocate the line. But imagine it comes to a stretch where the line disappears and the car runs into the ditch. It can hunt all day, but it will not be able to find a line to set it back on course.”

“But that has not happened to your system thus far, because it has performed well until now.”

“Correct.”

“But...” Christine had a question to ask, but clearly lacked a framework in which to construct it. “Wait... Can we step back a moment? Okay, five per cent a day is the target...” He nodded. “But that was an initial estimate that you did not achieve?”

“Correct... but now often I do better than that because the system is already more refined as a result of its self-optimisation.”

“So you are now guaranteed that return?”

“No. There are no guarantees. But I actually do achieve it now, if I aim for it.”

“And after a year you finish with twenty billion?”

“If you achieve that result every day.”

“So where did that figure on my screen last night come from?”

Cartwright shook his head. It seemed that Christine was a seven year old who could not add up. He made another stroke of the mouse down his spreadsheet. “After two years at five per cent, would finish with about five times ten to the sixteen.”

“Meaning?”

He sighed impatiently, but paused to visualise the number. Fifty thousand trillion in your language. And that’s American trillions, of course.”

“But you have nothing like that.”

“You were just complaining I had too much, not too little! So I’m a failure now. What on earth are you doing here then?”

Christine laughed. “You know what I mean. Why is there a discrepancy?”

“These figures are for trading in one market only. I trade several markets - not quite all of them, because some of them will obviously not adhere to the model, but, as I have said, I never achieve the theoretical results. From what I have described, given that I trade several markets, I should be worth many times the figure you showed me last night.”

“So why aren’t you worth that much?”

“Because like all investors I have been very conservative. I was afraid to be too aggressive, at the start because I was afraid of grinding to halt before the ideas had been tested, and now I am careful because I have a lot to lose.”

“So after eighteen months we finish with the figure on my screen last night.”

“We? In fact, I finish with substantially more than that, as I said last night, but a lot less than I could have been worth, had I followed the theory to the letter.”

“That brings me on to another question. You are not merely trading now, are you? These days you are very much a holder as well, aren’t you?”

“I never did ‘merely’ trade.” Cartwright gave her a sidelong glance. He was still wet, of course, and now stood in a small puddle of drips, since the office floor was tightly slatted. His foot made comical squeaks on the laths as he adjusted his position. “You are clearly well informed about my affairs.”

Christine said nothing, but looked straight at him, inviting him to continue.

“About six months into the project, six months of pursuing growth as my primary goal, I realised that, broadly speaking, the theory worked and could even be relied upon. So I changed the emphasis. Instead of looking for short term gains, I consolidated the gains I had already made and begun buying long term stakes in blue chip companies. I continued to trade more aggressively with a proportion of the funds.”

“You were consolidating your profits, like any good capitalist would.”

“Correct.”

“So the shortfall between the times ten to the whatever and where you actually are is down to the fact that you began to trade only a fraction of your total assets.”

“Broadly.”

“And now you own some significant stakes in many of the world’s biggest companies.”

“And that’s why you’ve been sent here, isn’t it?”

Christine did not reply.

We had discussed at length how we would handle the situation, should Cartwright opt for the strategy of denial, which we had expected. I remember how surprised I was, the first time I went through this material, at how much he appeared to offer. On review, however, I realise that he had told us nothing we did not already know, and thus he knew precisely what he was doing. Not only did he understand implicitly how much we knew about his work, he had correctly anticipated the level of Christine’s briefing, and had thus carefully told her nothing significant. What he had sought via these apparent revelations, of course, was this opportunity to put her on the spot. And Christine was thrown momentarily. There was no point in her denying the involvement of others in her declared project, because he clearly had some inside knowledge of her intentions. What he perhaps still did not know was from where this interest in him originated. Fortunately, neither did Christine. Her silence, therefore, was in fact born of ignorance. Her eventual reply was anodyne, but at least it was truthful, thus offering him no avenue of duplicity that he might later exploit.

“Your achievements have been noted by several governments. The problem is the secrecy...”

“All my interests are declared. You know that. I am just like a big pension fund.”

“But you have no shareholders of your own. Potentially, you’re an unguided missile.”

“I’m no missile and I am much more guided than most, certainly more than anyone else who trades for profit. I am wholly underpinned by theory. And you would not be here unless I had succeeded. Essentially, you are telling me that I can do as I like, as long as I fail and put money into other people’s pockets.”

“But you keep your theories secret.”

“Like any other commercial advantage...”

Christine did not offer comment.

He continued. “It took thirty years to develop my ideas. I had no idea where they would lead. They started because there were things I could not explain, such as why that bowling ball in the park was so hard to control across the crown of a green. It has taken me thirty years of intense, concentrated and unrelenting effort to get to where I am today. I have devoted my life to my work, my life’s work. And my work is my life.”

“And you have shared it with no-one.”

Cartwright said no more. He simply disappeared from Christine’s view and headed for the back balcony where he began to prepare a meal. Chris neither followed him nor pursued the matter, despite the fact that she still had not confirmed a time to start her interview. Her comment had hit a nerve and this clearly was a defensive reaction on his part. This inability to communicate, this tendency always to play the loner we knew was something that would bug him. We had already identified the idea as the lever to help us lift the interviews. Back in the days when he worked briefly as a teacher, professional assessments had identified his tendency to seek isolation. They had been only passing references, of course, since considerations of his complete inability to control his students in class were always uppermost. He could never cope with their comments about his disability, and his tendency to draw attention to it as his own coping mechanism simply made things worse. As we know, he did manage to survive the year, but only on short-term, supply-teacher arrangements. Thus his decision to leave the country at the age of just twenty-five can only be interpreted as a desire to seek a complete break from Britain.

He did have his Master’s degree at that stage, but no doctorate, of course, since he completed that as an extra-mural student with the Australian university mentioned in the briefing papers, by which time he was already established in Asia. He was in his mid-thirties by the time he submitted his thesis whose title, “n-dimensional probability spaces - a digital analysis of distribution characteristics” shows that he had already begun work on the two main areas of his current work, probability and numerical analysis algorithms. It was the PhD award, of course, that facilitated his subsequent transfer on completion of his then current contract.

He had already worked in secondary schools quietly and apparently successfully, without once drawing attention to himself. His application to join the university was supported by his future head of department, whom he had befriended socially and who was also at the time a close neighbour. Both men shared a north of England, working class background and thus clearly felt they had much in common. There are no surviving reports of Cartwright’s service as a secondary school teacher and those colleagues from the period we have been able to trace and contact remember him only for his being utterly non-memorable, barring his disability, which always registered. He went to work every morning, never had a day off, taught the classes he was assigned, stuck to the tasks he was given, asked no questions and went home every afternoon. Even his Ministry of Education file, which still exists and has been copied, contains nothing other than administrative documents, such as official forms, leave requests and contract renewal formalities. Reports on his work included in these renewal applications merely state how boringly dependable a teacher he was.

This was a pattern he repeated when he took up his new post in the university. He was assigned teaching in the areas of applied mathematics and statistics, but gave only four hours of classes per week. The rest of his time, we now know, he devoted to his research. It was clearly a successful project eventually, but there are no records of his progress, or indeed of his areas of interest, since he published nothing during his years in his academic post, apart from a handful of papers on pedagogy, most of which were no more than regurgitations from other published work. He thus did just enough to satisfy his professional evaluation requirements and more than enough, given the country in which he worked, to divert any official criticism. So, head down, he worked another ten years, through three more contracts and then, to everyone’s complete astonishment, in his mid-forties, he suddenly announced he was getting married and thus converted to Islam.

***

I paid only scant attention to the next couple of hours. After my rest I took time to review the material a couple of times on high speed, but this only confirmed that there was nothing of substance to record. Cartwright swam again, and Christine sat, essentially watching him, while she wrote a few notes. When he clambered back up his pole, after more than half an hour in the water, Cartwright prepared fried rice for their meal, using the leftovers from the previous evening, none of which, incidentally, had been refrigerated. He ate his own serving quickly with a spoon, but Christine only nibbled at hers, despite Cartwright’s repeated advice to her that she should keep her energy levels up to cope with the climate. He eventually finished her rice as well. Then he disappeared into his office and there he stayed until late morning.

I watched as his pattern of work was repeated. Everything he needed seemed to be within the pages of a solitary notebook he kept on his desk. He wrote very little, no more than a few lines each hour, and most of those seemed to be crossed out later. Most of his time was spent reviewing material from earlier in the book.

Christine, meanwhile, continued with her own planning. It was all make believe, of course, since we had already identified the general thrust of each of her interviews, before she left. When eventually Cartwright emerged from his room to announce that he needed a break, I expected their conversation to start again. But Cartwright merely jumped into the sea and swam. A few minutes later he was back in his office, at work.

Cartwright and Christine hardly interacted. He busied himself at the cooker on the back balcony while she reviewed her notes and wrote new ones. After another hour or so, it was clear that Christine was starting to get worried. She had by now been on Cartwright’s island for a full day and thus far had made no progress whatsoever. She did not even yet have an agreement that he would give an interview. She had clearly decided it was time to act and so she tore the page on which she had been making notes from her reporter’s pad and delivered it to Cartwright. He spoke first. “I got some dried shrimps. A curry ... okay?”

She nodded. “Here are the areas I want to cover in our first interview. How about this afternoon?” He assented with neither a sound nor a nod. “We’ll have to set up on that side of the house, on the balcony, in full sun to get the best of the light.”

“Then we should leave it until after five. We can’t sit in the sun earlier than that without some shade.”

This was the sum total of their interaction until mid-afternoon. Cartwright took another short swim, showered off and then disappeared again into his office. He reappeared a few times during the afternoon, once or twice to stir his curry and then, once more on the front balcony, he sought Christine to tell her that she could eat whenever she wanted. “I’ll wait,” he said and disappeared again until after four. In the end he did not eat.

During the afternoon, Christine experimented with the placement of chairs on the side balcony. They had to face the sunset and they had to leave enough room for her cameras. Equally, they had to allow angles where the subjects did not have the sun directly in their eyes. She did several tests to check picture quality, sound and angles. The technique was one we had used before, where we formed the interview from two cameras running simultaneously. Later it would be possible to inter-cut a final edited version and then insert continuity shots taken afterwards. The interaction suggested by the edits was not wholly artificial, of course. Just an occasional shot of the surroundings would provide visual punctuation. By four o’clock, she was as ready as she was going to be. She then sat with a plate of rice and prawn curry to await Cartwright’s reappearance from his office.

He was carrying the paper she had given to him earlier. I knew, though Christine did not, that he had done no work during that last visit to his office and had spent all his time reading and re-reading Christine’s list of draft questions. Christine was clearly expecting a set of queries on the content, but instead he offered nothing verbal as he returned the paper to her.

“The curry was superb,” she said. “Aren’t you having any?”

He shook his head. “I’ll fry it up in the morning.”

Christine nodded back towards the side balcony. “I’ve set up over there.” She paused but he did not react. “When could we have a go at the first interview?”

Cartwright seemed surprised. “I thought you had set everything up...”

“So you want to do it now...right now?”

He nodded. And with that they took their places at the side of the house. She explained a little about the process and asked if he had any more questions. He did not reply. She assumed, therefore, that she could start the cameras and then begin her interview. I will record nothing of the process here, because the transcript will be available later. Cartwright, clearly, had prepared.