A Voss and Pike Casefile: The First Case
Section 5: The Medication
You counted the pill organiser carefully, Jonah's borrowed research instincts apparently rubbing off on you already. Tuesday: empty, as expected. Wednesday, the day he died: full. Thursday, Friday: full. But Monday's compartment held two pills where every other day held one - as though someone had corrected an error, or created one, without quite getting the pattern right.
"If somebody doubled a dose on Monday and he didn't notice," you said slowly, "that's not a heart condition doing what hearts eventually do. That's someone helping it along, and badly disguising the help."
On the desk, beneath a stack of marking, a single sheet: PUBLIC LECTURE, GRAND LANTERN, THURSDAY - DRAFT TITLE: "THIS SOCIOLOGICAL LIFE". Beneath it, in his own hand: Thirty years believing the facts would speak for themselves if I collected them properly. I no longer believe that. I intend to say so, publicly, on Thursday - and to say what Candour actually is.
Hume's pill organiser shows an extra dose logged on Monday - not the pattern of a heart condition progressing naturally, but of someone disrupting his regimen, clumsily, in the days before he died.
Hume's planned Thursday lecture, titled "This Sociological Life", was to be a public confession that thirty years of believing in value-free science had been a kind of self-deception - and a promise to reveal what "Project Candour" actually was.