She did not really know why she was there. She told herself it was because she had more work to do, but she did not believe her own explanation. She had run out of tasks, out of clearing the desk, out of ideas. She was simply there avoiding going home.

‘Home’ was an important concept, at least for Sally. She had never before been afraid of going home, since home represented everything safe about life. Home was where the comfort lay awaiting even the most fraught days; it was where apple pie was made like no one else could make it; it was where smiles were translated into layers of language and where hope was manufactured. Home was not a place to be scared of. But now she was.

She was not really sure how she had arrived at the point when she did not want to face home. There had been times before when she did not want to face her father, such as the time she had ‘borrowed’ the car against his expressed command and then had promptly wrapped it around a tree; or the time she had put vinegar in a beer bottle and placed the top back on in the hope that it would discourage his occasional drinking, which it did but also brought other consequences for her. She had once been afraid to return home and meet with mother – she had taken money from her purse without her permission and she was sure that she would be angry with her. But families recover from these things. But this felt different.

Sally slowly picked up her things and placed them in the leather briefcase her older sister Margaret had given her on the day of her appointment as a Professor at the law school. It was made in Australia and was ideal for an academic lawyer with a complex set of files for complex cases or moots, lectures and research. She loved the case – the feel, the smell of leather it always exuded, the neat little compartments for pens, business cards, paper clips, diskettes and all the other paraphernalia a modern business woman had to carry with her – symbols of the corporate samurai. She took her time, making sure that everything was in the right place and that nothing was missing. Her week-end work was all there.

It was yesterday that she had made her decision to tell her parents. She had hinted at it before, but had never openly said to them that she was sure she was gay and that she had been having a flirtatious, but not physical, relationship with Angela Jackson from the Seattle branch of the FBI with whom she had been working on a fraud investigation about one of her former law firm’s customers. She had not been explicit, just hints. Neither her mother or father, who were now retired and spent their time reading, watching television and cooking gourmet meals for each other, seemed to pay any attention. Even when she had commented that Sandra Bally, an actress they all admired in a television drama, had the ‘most kissable lips and was someone she would like to cuddle up to’ her mother just agreed.

But now she had decided it was time to live out her life to the full and to explore a lesbian relationship if that is where her relationship with Angela went. She wanted to be upfront about it. To be clear. To be understood. When she really thought about it, she wanted her parents to give their permission for her to be someone other than they thought she was. To be different from their image of her and what she would become.

She also wanted to stop them pestering her and nagging her about finding the right man and settling down. At least once a week either her mother or father, usually mother, would talk to her about men, relationships, marriage, family, the family name, having children, settling down: there were all sorts of ways in which the topic could be broached. But broached it always was. Once she thought she had made it from Friday through to Sunday without it being raised, but just before she was going to bed on the Sunday night her mother looked at her wistfully and said ‘you know, you could be cuddling up in bed with a young man who was your husband right about now..’. So persistent were her parents that she thought they must have been taught by a Jewish mother anxious about the last daughter to be married from the household. She remembered the joke her father used to tell.

“‘There was this Jewish woman at the opera – Carmen – and at the end of the first act she stands up and shouts very loudly ‘Is there a doctor in the house? Is there a doctor in the house ?!’ and a man replies ‘Yes, I am a doctor:’ The woman looks at him very carefully and then says ‘Have I got a daughter for you:”‘

Her father tells this story once a month, and he and mother then laugh for a few minutes before her mother asks if she would like to go to the opera with her next week, which causes them both to start laughing again. The monthly joke is now a ritual statement to Sally that she should think about getting a man and settling down.

The other conversation that took place regularly was about work. About compulsion, stress, blind ambition, excessive expectations. They knew that being a ‘big shot academic lawyer’ was a tough job, but when you come home you should leave the work behind you and enjoy life – food, wine, music, literature, friendships, travel, art, landscapes, stars, people, doing nothing – “you cannot work all the time, it makes for a boring retirement and an early grave” according to her father.

He was right. She worked hard, not because she had to but because it stopped her dealing with life. Her life had been about avoiding a basic truth. The academic life suited her well. She could explore other people’s truths, cases, histories, concerns, theories. It provided a means of burying “self” in “other” in a kind of allocentric way. Now that she had chosen to confront and accept her own basic truth – “I am gay” – she now had something else to avoid. “Home”.

She left her crammed-full University office and began to walk the six blocks to the family home in downtown Seattle. It was a large house, an old sea merchants’ mansion which father had bought for a low price in the early 1950’s and had restored. The furniture was eighteenth century, by and large. Though her bedroom and study had some more modern furniture, the desk she used and the bed she slept in came from a sea captain’s house and were both made around 1874. She loved the feel of the wood, the shine of the polish and the craftsmanship of furniture. Just thinking about the rooms she had spent most of her life in made her feel better – there were spaces at home to which she could retreat and feel comfortable.

On the way home, she bought a bottle of Champagne and a cheesecake that she knew both her mother and father really liked from the Italian shop in Pike Street market. Peace offerings, she asked herself, or celebratory gifts? After all, she was making a decision about who she was and who she would become.

She arrived home at 8.15pm. Mother smiled as she came though the door and hung her coat and scarf on the rack that had held coats and hats for over one hundred years. She put the cheesecake on the table and went to fetch the Champaign flutes that were normally used for births, marriages or deaths (“hatches”, “hitches” and “heavings” her father called them). Father said “hi” as she passed through the music room into the formal dining room with its French polished table for ten that her father had found and bought for $25 in 1958 and lovingly restored and polished himself.

When all the glasses were assembled, Sally drew a breath and made a statement.

“I have something to tell you and it’s very important,” she began. Father put down his book and turned down the stereo, though the sounds of Handel’s opera Alcina could be heard gently in the background.

“I know you both want me to settle down and marry and have children and be like Margaret with her beautiful twins, but I have to tell you that it’s not likely to happen: in fact, well, it’s pretty well impossible:”

“You mean… is it something physical, my dear?”, asked her mother, who knew full well that the only time Sally had been to the doctors since she was seven was for an injection when she went to India for a project for the University.

“No mother, it’s not a medical thing: it’s more a personal thing: it’s about me. Who I am:” By now both parents were standing, looking puzzled and perturbed.

“It’s not bad,” Sally continued, “it’s just, well, just that I think I am different from the image you each have of me.” They still looked puzzled. “Look, can we sit down for a minute while I explain?” They did so, silently and without taking their eyes off her face. She blushed and held her left hand to her right cheek in a way she had always done since she could first remember blushing.

“I have been out with boys and with men and I like them for company. I like the way they act before they think; the way they can be very sensitive but pretend to be very strong; the way they can be tough as nails one minute and shy and retiring the next – I like these and other things about men. But over the last two or three years, I have noticed that all of the people I care about – feel passionate about, want to be with, want to have relationships with are women: I like women and prefer their company to that of men. I don’t have a relationship right now with either a man or a woman, but I am sure in my own mind that when I do find the right person it is certainly going to be Ms. Right rather than Mr. Right, if you know what I mean.”

Sally looked to her mother for encouragement, but instead found a face that was caught between sadness and fear – a face she had never seen before. When she turned to her father she saw sadness and shyness, a coyness and a tear that took her breath away, at least for a moment.

“What I am saying is that I am pretty sure that I am gay and that I have been suppressing this for a long time.. I think it’s time I did something about it.”

“Are you sure, Sally, I mean this sounds like a big thing for you, like it’s a mission or a : oh, I don’t know, a giant step: it’s all so sudden, so direct, so determined, so shocking:” said her mother.

“I am sure, mother, and I am telling you this because I am sure.”

“Sally, I don’t know about Mum, but you know me, I can’t hide my feelings any more: I am too old to try keep them in: I am proud of everything you have done and I will always be proud of you as my daughter. I don’t know whether you are gay or straight, and I don’t think you do either, but if you are telling me that you have to find out, then go and find out and make sure you know for certain what it is that you are doing. For me, I don’t want to get involved in crusades and campaigns, I just want you to be happy, to be yourself. If you say you need to find out what this means, then that’s fine with me… after all, you are twenty six now and you have a good job and your own life to lead: all I ask is that you ask for help when you need it and you talk when you need to talk: I…” and then he stopped speaking in mid sentence and just looked wistfully at Sally, and then went to her and hugged her.

Sally was overwhelmed. She had not really known what to expect from her parents when she presented her new self to them. She had always been straight with them, but she knew that this was difficult for them to understand, after all, there had been no real relationship where they could have developed an idea that she was gay – she just knew that she was.

“I am not at all sure what is really going on Sally,” said her mother, suddenly stronger, “but I’ll tell you this: women are harder work than men and are meaner, more vindictive and more difficult to please than men: I know, I worked mainly with women all my life and the men were much easier to handle: so you’d better be careful: I don’t know, Sally, I really don’t understand at all, but if you say that this is how it is: what can I say?” She left the room and went upstairs to her bedroom.

It had been much easier than she thought, at least for now. They had not rejected, challenged, fought, harangued or indeed done anything other than support her. It was almost as if they had known all along.

The next morning at breakfast father asked a simple question. “Will any of this affect your position at the University, not that it should?”

“Oh no, father. I am in a University where at least a quarter of the Faculty of Arts are openly gay and the gay society is one of the largest in the Student Union: I don’t think that’s a problem at all father: anyway, all the cases I known of sexual harassment are of men harassing women: I don’t know of a single case of women harassing other women:”

“Well, that’s all right then,” said her father with an air of finality about the conversation.

After this exchange, and a brief conversation with her mother about how difficult sorting out sex was (“all that fuss and fumbling”), the subject was never mentioned again. What had appeared as a challenge – revealing her real identity to her parents – had turned out to be not at all difficult.

But she was wrong about one thing. Eight months after her breakfast interchange with her father, a female Professor was suspended for making advances and “stalking” a female student. The Professor, a member of the politics department, admitted that she had become “excessively infatuated” with the woman and had become so obsessive that she could think of almost nothing else. When confronted, she admitted the harassment and was suspended and subsequently dismissed. During her disciplinary hearing, it was revealed that she had maintained a daily diary of her contacts with the student, had taken illicit photographs and had worked in every possible way to invade the woman’s privacy.

The campus community was horrified. But for Sally, the case made her think about her own interest in women. Since revealing her understanding of her own sexuality to her parents, she had done nothing to pursue anyone, let alone a student. What is more, having said out loud what it was she felt inside, she felt no longer a hunger or a quest for her “self”. Work became less important – a part of her life, but not the whole of it. As she began to realise that life was about more than work, she received more compliments for her work, more opportunities to do interesting things within the University and more opportunities to meet more people. As she did so, she realised just how much of her life had been taken by waiting to decide who she was. Now that she felt she knew, life was waiting for her.

It was a simple thought, but it paid off big time.

In 1976 my father began working at Chase Manhattan’s headquarters in New York. A former major in the army, he had retired with honours and was found a job as head of night security at the Chase by his connected friends who had left the fields of war and fought their way into the Pentagon. A quiet man, he had decided that 32 years in the army was enough and that he wanted to spend time with his family. A year later, his wife of 35 years died of cancer. I was his only child.

Born in 1960, I was variously described as a “bookworm”, “teachers pet”, and, given my interest in technology, “geek”. While the underlying sentiments here were intended to be derogatory, the basic statements were correct. Teachers did like me; I spent all of my spare time reading books and I loved to play with technology – taking things to pieces to find out how they worked and studying the design of technologies. If these activities came with peer abuse, so be it. I was intending to follow in the footsteps of the great thinkers – Keppler, Heisenberg, Einstein, Edison, anyone who had achieved fame from their scientific or practical work. I read and studied anything and had a good memory for everything.

My father, who I always called “Sir”, began to worry about me at night. He persuaded his manager to permit me to come into the bank and work in a room on my homework until “no later than 10pm” and then I would walk the two blocks home. This way, he could keep an eye on me; I would have the peace and quiet of an office to work in and he could ensure that I ate properly. Each evening at six, I would walk with him to the bank and log in my presence. I would then settle in to my work in the room where the computer operators worked during the day. Exactly at eight each night, father would bring a meal to me and we would eat together for exactly twenty minutes. On completion of the meal, father began his tour of the building, which finished at 10pm. He would then escort me to the door and watch me walk two blocks south until I made the turn to walk the remaining block and a half to our apartment.

What my father did not realise was that this routine, intended to ensure my safety and security, would prove to be more dangerous than leaving me at home. The room in which I was supposed to work diligently at my Mathematics, Social Studies, Science, Spanish and so on was filled with interesting books and technology. Around the room were bookcases filled with technical manuals, programming guides, manuals and code books. In other parts of the room were keyboards, machines and screens. Soon an idea germinated.

Within six weeks I had mastered the basic programming which permitted me to work the computers in the room. While it looked difficult, programming was in fact very straightforward. It was a set of devices to permit logic to flow through cables and transistors – the microchip came later. I began with simple programs and used the terminal and code books in the room to test them. Soon, I could examine how much money was taken in by each of the branches on a daily basis, how much was made in interest at various interest rates and how much was owed to the bank by its debtors.

Then I began work on a more elaborate idea. I developed a program that, on the 12th day of each month would deduct $4 from each of the 4 million accounts managed by the bank and then restore $2 to these accounts on the next day. The other $2 I routed to a large number of company bank accounts set up with false company names at different branches of the Chase, though the deposits would be made in $200,000 amounts on the 15th of each month. On the 20th of each month, these false company accounts would transfer all but $2500 to a numbered full interest bearing Swiss bank account I had arranged to open by sending a letter to the Foreign Accounts Director of Bank Nationale Suisse using stationary I found in the Director of Foreign Credit office when father was holding a night team meeting of the security staff – his office was on the same floor as the Director of Computing Services, which was the room I was using. The program was written to continue for two years and then to stop. I estimated that the total capital amount deposited in the Swiss account after two years would be around $195 million.

I did take some precautions. Before transferring the funds, the program adjusted the computers’ clocks and made it look as if the transaction had been made during day time, but always at different times and from different branch identifiers. The program itself was buried in computer files linked to the payroll system which the bank had recently installed – one of the first companies to fully automate payroll for its employees. The program was called “tax system 227.113” and was buried in the middle of several such systems. Finally, the program itself was “double coded” – that is, a cursory inspection of the code would not reveal the true actions of the code.. the program had to be run in a mode where its actions could be viewed for its real work to be understood – at the time, this was a recent development in the field of programming.

After eight months, father decided that I was just as safe at home as I was at the bank, so my night visits ceased. I had no opportunity to modify or delete my program, no opportunity to see if others had visited the accounts I had created or had challenged the automatic deductions and account restorations. While I had assumed that people would consider $4 deduction followed by a $2 restoration no more than a quirk in the system, someone may eventually discern that this pattern could be something more sinister. However, the total sum involved – $24 a year – would be explained away at branch level as a form of bank charges and would soon be forgotten, especially since it could rightly be said that “this is a fee that everyone is paying”.

At the age of nineteen I won a scholarship to read science at Harvard. My father was proud, not only of my achievements in getting into Harvard, but of the fact that I had won the scholarship named after General Conhausser – the General my father had first served under. The scholarship, established for the academically outstanding sons of army officers, was awarded annually to the two best students in science and mathematics who applied to the army scholarship fund.

Harvard was a pleasant experience, and I excelled at the tasks I was assigned. While I was no “fun”, according to my peers, I was “a first class” student according to my teachers. I was seen to be especially gifted when it came to computing science, then relatively new to the curriculum at the ivy covered academy. After four years, I decided to read law and to focus my energies on legal questions as they related to scientific matters. While most of my contemporaries were rushing to do research in plastics, the emerging world of bio-pharmaceuticals or stress in metals, I decided to look closely at the law. One reason was the feeling I might need to know more about the law sooner rather than later.

Throughout my time at Harvard, I lived as if the evenings I had spent at the bank were no more than a fiction. I lived on my scholarship, which was just enough to pay for my rooms, my books, tuition and meals and the occasional concert. I did not holiday, I wore my clothes until they would wear no more. I did not date, entertain or otherwise offer any signs of having money to spare. I played safe and retreated to books, spending the colder nights in the law library until it closed.

At the end of my time, I was deemed to be expert at patent law, trade mark protection and the law as it then related to scientific discoveries and, what has since become known as “intellectual property law”, but was then all lumped under copyrights and protection of discovery.

I graduated in 1986 and was asked to join a fast growing company called Microsoft as part of its legal team, which then was comprised of just three people. Though this meant an initial move to Seattle, I was happy to have work and to be in a company than was not only growing quickly but also innovating all the time. There was a lot of work. For the next five years, we worked hard to protect our software products and complete legal agreements for their distribution. At the end of five years, I was the most senior lawyer on board the fast train and worked for the next decade as Vice President and Legal Counsel.

Travelling the world to secure binding legal agreements with distributors, but more specifically to ensure full protection of our copyrights and trademarks, I was very involved in the core issues of intellectual property protection. I was also centrally involved in the anti-trust suits which, from time to time, we had to face as competitors challenged our market dominance and our distribution agreements with computer manufacturers to ship our products loaded on their systems at the point of manufacture. While we won our anti-trust cases and secured sound agreements with our distributors, we did also face significant intellectual property theft, especially in Asia, China, India and Africa.

My travels took me through Switzerland from time to time and I was able to use some of these visits to make myself known to the foreign credit managers at various banks, including Bank Nationale Suisse. On my first meeting, I mentioned that I myself had an account there and produced my letter of authorization from the Chase to access this account, supported by relevant codes and identifying documents. I was pleased to find that no queries had ever been made about the account, that that capital deposited between 1976 and 1978 was $198 million and that, by 1992 this had grown to $345million. Still I did not withdraw from or otherwise adjust the account, I merely recorded that the account holder had reviewed the account.

In 1999 I retired from Microsoft and sold my shares in the company, which had been the way in which I had received bonus payments since I began working there in 1986. After thirteen years with the company, my shares were worth $23million. I was thirty nine years old, a multi millionaire and I had nothing to do.

I decided to spend the rest of my life reading, exploring and understanding science and to do so in style. I moved to Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the technology capital of India and one of the fastest growing knowledge economies in the world. There I did some legal work for companies based in India wishing to protect their intellectual property, but most of the time I read, took journeys of exploration to locations around the world and settled into a simple pattern of a life of basic luxury – good food, a beautiful house with air conditioning and servants, the best sound system money could buy, literally thousands of compact disks, computers linking me to the world and all the books money could buy.

On January 1st of this year, I transferred all but $50 million of my Swiss accounts into bank accounts in six countries. The Statute of Limitations is twenty five years, so technically I could still be held accountable for the fraud committed before “hackers” were heard of and before computer crime was invented. But I have had long discussions with lawyers at Chase about computer crime in the last five years – telling them that I wanted to write a history of computer crime. I asked when they first detected a crime which was based on programming. The answer made me smile.

In 1978 a staff member of the Chase used the computer to deduct one cent a month from each of the accounts holding more than $1,000. The criminal, one Bob Delser, admitted his guilt to the head of security at the time – my father, who had moved from night work to day work, once I went up to Harvard. Rather than create concerns about computers and their security, Delser agreed to work with the bank to look at how security could be improved and to work with the bank to prevent computer fraud and theft. “It takes one to know one,” Delser said. I could empathise with that.

What was interesting about this story is that they still did not know about the first computer fraud.

The money I now have is used to support scholarships for scientists and medical researchers around the world. Known as the “Edison Fund”, after one of my childhood heroes, some 500 students a year in thirty countries receive support from the funds.

I don’t feel guilty, only quietly amused.

In the end, it didn’t take long, after all. Just a few still minutes. Then it was all over. The game was ended and the masquerade exposed.

He always knew it would be. Six years was a good run to pretend to be an intellectual. A person with a mind, a passion and an understanding. Writing, speaking, conferring, engaging, debating, questioning, gossiping, presenting. All of the tricks of the trade.

For a time he was the doyen of the trade. The “man” of the moment. The guru of musicology. The man who had discovered not just one, but two Mozart symphonies in an attic in Vienna. The man who had restored, nurtured and authenticated them. The man who had all of the world’s attention as the greatest Mozart scholar and detective of all time. His account of the find, his story of the reconstruction of the decaying manuscripts, his portrayal of the diligence and depth of research to ensure that they were real had reached every music student in the world – all was still possible, provided we engaged in scholarship and study.

The first performance of the symphonies – both in one day, each with a different orchestra and a different conductor – had been variously described as “the greatest musical event of the century”, “a triumph of music, research and rehearsal” and as “one of the most intriguing days in the life of any musician”. Two Mozart symphonies yet unread, unplayed and unknown, all played on one day.

The recordings sold well, and a small percentage of the revenues had accrued to him. But his big return came from the film rights for a manuscript he had written which fictionalised both the writing of the symphonies in the last six months of Mozart’s life and his discovery of the manuscripts and then his work to bring them to life. Not only did the sale of this film script make him wealthy, it made him a celebrity and a person in demand.

In a single year, he made seven documentary program appearances, including three full length accounts of his work. He was variously portrayed as a scholar who stumbled on an amazing find; an entrepreneur-academic who was always searching for the “big chance” , who finally found what he was looking for; and even as someone with a mystical connection to a mysterious voice of Mozart, the voice directing him to the manuscripts.

One of these documentaries, shown on the SouthBank Show in Britain and repeated in Canada and the US on PBS, portrayed him as a brilliant scholar, relentlessly pursuing a hunch and then rigorously researching a find. It was a powerful portrayal of scholarship at its best – a documentary which needed to be made about the funding of the arts within Universities, then as now massively under threat. “His work was proof”, the interlocutor intoned, “that investment in scholarship in the arts produced results that benefited community, culture and common understanding”.

Whatever the truth of the claim, this documentary was one of the factors that led to the offer of his tenured Professorship at Kings College, Cambridge – a considerable step up from his junior lectureship at Keele. Named the Lord Stevas Chair of Music, after a recent peer who took to drink, music and vitriol, his tenure began with a triumphant lecture on Bach, Mozart and Britten and Other Popular Music – Themes Across an Age in which he showed how six common tunes, that were also to be found in the music of Pearl Jam, Led Zeppelin, Blue Rodeo and k.d.lang, were also found across the great masters and used extensively by Bach, Mozart and Benjamin Britten. The BBC carried the lecture live, while several other broadcasters bought rights. Again he made money.

What surprised him about Cambridge was the absence of suspicion and the pursuit of glee. As he remarked to one of the women who attached herself to him almost as soon as his Gladstone bag had been deposited with the proctors for delivery to his room, “its as if the Cambridge glee club is delighted to have found a new performer for their weekly ritual glee club meeting!”. For performer he was expected to be.

The Master of Kings College, Lord McLeith, invited him to dinners, buffets, soirée’s, chats and other meetings with worthies, donors, significant alumni and others. So frequent were these invitations they affected his ability to meet with students. He was listed as available for no more than two hours each week for student time, and only for students with exceptional abilities in musicology. There were few such students, and even fewer specializing in his own areas of expertise.

It was at one of these meetings arranged by the Master that seeds of doubt about the Mozart symphonies began to be planted. Michael Meckmore, once a leading programmer at from a well known company, and now a self made billionaire who had developed expert systems which run on computers and solve problems faster than human experts can, suggested that it would not be difficult to program an expert system with all the works of Mozart now on compact disc and ask the expert computer system to use the patterns of musical writing it discerns to develop new Mozart music – string quartets, symphonies, chamber music, overtures – provided that a basic theme for a tune or set of tunes were provided. Meckmore called it “neural networking” – a kind of systematic look for how Mozart created patterns within his scores and then an attempt to replicate this way of thinking for a new melody. The Master looked sceptically at Meckmore and said dryly “I wonder if the machine could do the same with the performance of certain horses at Redcar, in which case we would all be better off..” – a line which secured the dismissal, for the time being at least, of Meckmore’s more serious proposal.

Unfortunately for the newly inaugurated Stevas Professor of Music, the billionaire software developer did not leave his idle thought at the dinner table. In fact, he began work on the idea almost immediately, sensing commercial success in providing millions with the ability to compose like Mozart, Bach, Britten, Pearl Jam or anyone, provided they rigorously followed the requirements of entering all known work by the chosen composer into the system. Within a week of the ill-fortuned dinner, sixteen people were working on prototypic software, aiming at a release of “Just Like Mozart” and “Just Like Brahms” and “Just Like Purcell” in time for Christmas.

Eight weeks after the Masters dinner with Meckmore, the Stevas Professor of Music was invited to attend a performance of Mozart’s most recent symphony, written just a week before hand. The Orchestra Romantique under the baton of Maestro Bernard Hublik was to perform. All the press had been invited. One from The Guardian in particular had started to detect a theme – the idea that computer technology may help look at the similarity and dissimilarity between well-known Mozart works and the two new symphonies recently unearthed by the doyen of Cambridge music circles and well known profiteer of culture. The hawk was off the sleeve and searching for prey.

The performance of Meckmore’s Mozart symphony was a gala. Everyone who was everyone, and some who were no one but knew one, was there. Minor royals mixed with major scholars; reporters with debutantes; movie stars with maharaja’s. The music was well performed and stylishly conducted, but most important, at least for the future of our Professor, was the short lecture given at the end of the performance by Meckmore.

The gist of the lecture was simple. Expert systems were now so sophisticated that they could take a melody and “Mozart” it but, more intriguingly, they could take a Mozart piece and locate it in the cannon of Mozart’s work. By looking at the underlying patterns of the music – how its counterpoint was written, the styling of the orchestration, the phrasing of the instrumentation and so on – the “expert system” could tell which piece of Mozart’s was written with the same or similar patterns and which were “most like” and “least like” the particular work.

No one paid much attention, except our hawk from the Guardian. As questions were asked, he stood, poised and erect, and began.

“Is what you are saying, Mr. Meckmore, that we could take the two recently found symphonies of Mozart and work out just where they came from in terms of the sequence of Mozart’s work?”

“Yes, that is what I am saying..we could accurately link the three symphonies to works he composed at roughly the same time.”

“Would this also confirm that the works are Mozart’s own and not written by a student of his or a profiteer?”, asked the reporter.

“My understanding,” offered Meckmore, “is that the works have already been authenticated by scholarship unmatched in the history of musicology and that the issue is not whether Mozart wrote these symphonies, but when and under what circumstances, is that not correct Professor?” he asked, turning the attention of some six hundred people towards our scholar.

“I believe that Mr. Meckmore is essentially right, except for one thing. The Mozart manuscripts from Vienna are dated. We know exactly when the scores were written – June 1733 through to October of that same year.”

“I only observe, Professor, that dates are one source of information:most burdens of proof require confirmation by at least two other sources”, said Meckmore.

“So, its not yet established when these were written, or even by whom ?” asked our hawk, swirling above his prey.

“Look. We will run the new symphonies through our system and report on our findings, will that satisfy you ?” asked Meckmore of the journalist, who simply nodded without smiling, though those around him suggested later that his eyes shone and teeth glistened.

The Professor was troubled. Deeply troubled. This simple interchange – which took less than a minute – was the beginning of an unravelling which would damage him and one other. Damage that would be irreparable. Damage that would challenge many, leave scars and burn at the heart of academic integrity.

First thoughts were of refusing to co-operate. Then he realised that his co-operation was not being requested – the symphonies were publicly available, all that had to happen was that the recordings were fed into a computer. His second thought was to prepare his escape. He ensured that funds were moved into accounts abroad that were not subject to scrutiny, he hired one of the most expert lawyers on fraud and contract law he could find and briefed her to expect his urgent need of her services. He purchased a retreat home in Mexico and waited for the storm.

He did not have to wait long. Seven weeks later, a story appeared in The Guardian outlining the findings of the Meckmore project. The truth was out – the symphonies were actually pieced together sequences of existing Mozart music, orchestrated in the style of the last two known and well played symphonies. Not a single sequence of ten bars or more of the symphonies were new, they were directly taken from existing string quartets, oboe concerto’s, harpsichord works and opera’s and patched together with sophisticated linkages. The author of the piece, who cited “informed sources”, observed that “while clever, the fraudulent claims about these works will raise questions about the legality of certain claims made with respect to the symphonies and may lead to serious questions about the legitimacy of the appointment of the Stevas Professor of Music”.

At a press conference later that day, Meckmore confirmed the story in the Guardian and went further – he produced the scores for each symphony showing exactly where the elements had come from and used this as proof of the veracity of his expert systems.

His departure from Cambridge took place quietly on the same day the story first appeared in the press. By the time Lord McLeith called upon his rooms, he was flying at 37,000 feet en route to Mexico. His lawyer, briefed on the story in an early morning phone call, made clear that her client “had nothing to say about allegations and innuendo contained in press speculation based on unnamed sources about something that happened two hundred years ago” – it was a spirited statement, which showed her at her best. She way buying time. Two days later, she quietly settled his affairs with the University, from which he had now resigned, and began discussions with the record companies and others.

Record sales soared. In the month after the revelation sales exceeded those of any CD in any of the charts – it actually was the number one best selling CD in the world for six weeks. His royalties soared, and the record companies approached him with a suggestion for doing a similar project on Bach or Beethoven or indeed, anyone he would care to chose. But he had had enough. He made another TV documentary, this time in America, on how easy it was to fool the establishment, both academic and musical, and how his lectures were also pieced together from various lectures published by other people. “It is interesting to note,” he states, “that one can rise to the top of a profession on the basis of saying or doing nothing new, but doing nothing new well”. It was a phrase that earned him the praise of the right wing critics of Universities, scholarship, arts institutions and grant giving agencies and led to his new career as a critic of fraud in University research and academic employment and promotion.

Five years after these events, at a meeting of the Council of the Universities of Britain, Lord McLeith, the retiring Master of Kings College Cambraidge, said this:

“Some of you may recall an incident some years ago concerning the misrepresentation of an individual’s own musical tapestry as the work of Mozart – an incident that caused some embarrassment to my own College at the time. I am happy to report to you today that, while we continue to have grave concerns over the incident, a new Centre for the Study of Music and History has been established, following the grant of money and other supports, from the late Lord Meckmore’s Trust.”

In the end, there were no losers. Mozart’s works were more widely listened to and his music more extensively purchased than before. Despite a temporary issue of credibility, the College gained a new Department and five endowed Chairs. The record companies secured record level sales for a classical CD, and the two symphonies are now part of the repertoire of some orchestras, who run a fund raising competition to see how many works the audience can spot. Our hero is now a Professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches on the sociology of fraud within Universities – a position he holds, despite never having obtained any qualifications in sociology, which, in a sense, makes his point.