A Voss and Pike Casefile: The First Case
Section 10: The Consultancy Contract
You asked bluntly, and watched something behind Pryor's composure recalculate. He produced the document before you'd finished the question, which told you he'd rehearsed producing it.
"A consultancy retainer," he said. "Thorncastle pays me, separately from the department, for 'methodological assurance'. It's declared. It's in my annual conflict-of-interest disclosure, filed with Professor Ashby's office, entirely within the rules."
"Declared to the university. Not to Professor Hume, who thought the model's design was a matter of pure academic judgement."
"Desmond," said Pryor, with the particular precision of a man choosing each word as a small act of self-defence, "believed scientists should have no personal stake in their findings. A lovely principle. Entirely unworkable, in my experience, for anyone who'd also like to keep their house."
Pryor receives an undisclosed-to-Hume personal retainer from Thorncastle for "methodological assurance" - a direct financial stake in Candour's model being approved exactly as designed, in clear tension with Merton's principle of scientific disinterestedness.