Death at the Alma Mater (5 page)

BLOCKED

Portia De’Ath was working
on her thesis. At least she sat, pen in hand, surrounded by books, notebooks, papers, and other tools of the academic trade. On one side of her desk sat a laptop, its cursor blinking balefully, like the countdown-to-doomsday screen in an old science-fiction movie.

“Psychopathy,” she read aloud portentously from her notebook, “as a predictor of violent criminal recidivism among the various age groups of a prison population has been shown to be … Shown to be correlated with a tendency … A tendency towards and documented history of …”

She threw her head down on the desk and, after a moment, tilted it slowly to glare at the clock on the wall.

Oh bugger, bugger, bugger it. I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. Her thesis topic—basically, the reasons old lags became and remained old lags—had all seemed so important to her at one time. Now she cursed the hubris that had made her think she had something to contribute to the academic discussion. With a deadline bearing down, she could barely summon up the interest to finish the thesis, let alone remember why she’d started such a long, painful, and expensive process in the first place.

What on earth was wrong with her? She had her heart’s desire. The basics: food, clothing, shelter. The esteem of students and colleagues—well, most of them. A sense of self, hard won though it had been. The success of her novels, bringing both satisfaction and financial reward. And now, the man with whom she was, without question, going to spend the rest of her life. The gods having their little senses of humor, they’d sent a policeman, no less. She and her policeman had met, in fact, over a murder in Scotland. Hardly a propitious beginning. But very quickly she’d known, without second-guessing the knowledge, without a shred of reflexive self-doubt: This was it.

She had returned from the mystery conference in Scotland, had a break-off dinner with Gerald, and then she’d waited to hear from Arthur St. Just, the Cambridgeshire DCI who had run off with her heart. And waited. Feeling more like a conceited fool each day, she’d waited.

Breaking it off with Gerald had been the right thing to do, and inevitable in any case. That was all right. But … where was St. Just? That detective with the burning eyes, as she’d come to think of him. The man whose integrity seemed to surround him like a force field, compelling her to reexamine all her preconceived notions about the police. She found him absurdly attractive, like a matinee idol of the thirties, his face all craggy planes and angles, the kind of face that photographed so well in black and white.

What now? she had wondered. Was she to be reduced to blockbuster, bodice-ripper prose?

But she couldn’t have been wrong. She knew she had not misread the signs, misheard the words. She’d begun keeping a journal, so unique had it been in her experience to long for the sight of another human being in this way. She felt she’d go mad otherwise, for she wasn’t the type of woman to confide in girlfriends. Then she’d torn up the journal, afraid of its discovery.

And so she’d waited some more, “focusing” on her thesis. And then, a little over three months ago, and one week after her return (it had seemed no less than two years), a handwritten letter had arrived on embossed notepaper: Would she do him the honor of having dinner with him at St. Germaine’s? She should have known. Arthur St. Just was an old-fashioned man. No phone calls for such in important occasion: no less than a formal invitation would do. He’d arrive on time with flowers, wearing his best suit and aftershave, driving a newly washed and hoovered car.

She’d played hard to get for all of three minutes, then she’d dialed the number he’d provided.

After that, with very little fuss or soul searching, Portia had settled into their relationship, although settled was the wrong word. Rather, she quickly had reached a near-constant state of ease and contentment. There was no drama between them, and no cause for it. She knew he would appear when he said he would. There was no angst. He loved her with a clear, unwavering, forthright, and simple intent, which she soon reciprocated, likewise without reservation.

Smiling at the thought, she pulled the manuscript of her latest DCI Nankervis novel from the right bottom drawer of her desk. Her mystery writing, she knew, served as an escape from the opaque, brocaded prose of her dissertation, and from anything else that might be troubling her. Time and again her mind returned to her inspector, working his way through a complex investigation in the jagged peninsula of England known as Cornwall. It was all far more engrossing—and more solvable—than the high rate of recidivism. She was stymied, she knew, by her belief that she had to present an elegant solution to the problem in some kind of thundering, resounding conclusion—some humane and all-encompassing answer. That there was no real solution to all the ills of society she had become more and more convinced, the more she researched the mind-numbingly tedious and long catalog of essentially fruitless research, which always seemed to conclude with the sentence: “More research is needed.” Ah, well, it kept the academics employed. “The poor you will always have with you,” Jesus had said, and Portia wondered if he weren’t quite correct about that. He may as well have added, “And crime, too.”

She reread her pages of the day before, and then began writing a scene where her detective was interviewing a suspect in a restaurant in Cornwall. He was supposed to have conducted this interview in the suspect’s home, but as Portia could think of no reason the suspect might offer to cook the detective a meal on the spot, or any reason he would trust the suspect enough to eat it, she felt a restaurant scene was called for. She had DCI Nankervis order roasted scallops with a vermouth sauce, slow-roasted lamb flavored with rosemary, fried zucchini, and scallion-potato puree. For the pudding course, a Tarte Tatin.

Not surprisingly, when she put down her pen and paper an hour later it was because hunger had derailed her train of thought. Dinner tonight in college might be better than the norm, she thought, given the arrival of the weekend guests and the Master’s desire to impress; but also given the usual low standard, that might not be saying much. The vegetables would still be boiled to a consistency suitable for a toothless baby, and for pudding there would be something involving tinned fruit, as if summer had never arrived.

Portia’s natural gourmet tendencies had been brought into full play by the poor choices available in college. She had a tiny kitchen in her college flat, from which she had managed to coax some miraculous results, the most memorable to date being Peking Duck, which duck had hung in her window to dry forthree days one winter as part of the process of producing the famously crisp skin. (She had daily expected a knock on the door asking her to remove the duck but no knock had arrived.) She kept a wine rack in her front hall closet stocked with the best vintages she could afford; she had once macerated fruit for fruitcake under a chair in her sitting room. Her supervision students had kept remarking on the wonderful smell, not knowing it was coming from underneath them.

Perhaps a quiet Indian takeaway in her room would be the better option than dining in Hall, she thought now. Tomorrow night, the big gala dinner to which the Master had invited her—nay, commanded her to appear—might be marginally better, but the college “chef,” as she was now called, would still be in charge, so how much hope was there, really, for a lean portion of meat not disguised by a vile Mystery Sauce?

Now thoroughly famished, thesis completely forgotten, Portia wandered off down the corridor to retrieve a power drink she’d left in the common refrigerator, praying it would still be there. They had a food thief in college—several, probably, so she knew the chances were against her. But—she checked her watch—the college bar would be open now. She could buy something to bring back to her room, enough to carry her over until she could get to the shops.

She was in the area of the college designated for use by unmarried Fellows—a relatively modern add-on, circa 1780, connected by a long corridor to the main building. The circa 1980s, Gulag-style dormitories for the undergraduates, of no architectural distinction whatsoever, were tucked firmly behind a screen of trees, well away from the main building. The youngest students, who called it Cell Block Nineteen, were roundly encouraged to stay there, where they reigned in squalor, according to the Bursar, like wild monkeys surrounding the main compound. But their Junior Combination Room was in the main building.

Portia’s steps carried her past the open door of this JCR, a room not unlike the waiting rooms of airports in many a third-world country, generations of slothful, untidy students having rendered redecoration pointless.

Three students, having apparently escaped the cell block, sat watching the start of a DVD, laughing as they tried unsuccessfully to fast forward through the government’s copyright violation warnings. One of them, a young man who she remembered gloried in the name Gideon Absalom, began reciting his own version of the warning, adding additional, personalized threats.

“We’ll take your wife and your
children
!” he sang. He stood and began dancing in an exuberant style, part hoochie koo, part Michael Jackson. “We’ll confiscate all of your property!” Here he leapt, spinning, into the air, landing en pointe with all the precision of a ballet dancer. “You’ll spend your life in prison!” he cried. The rest joined in the chorus, throwing their arms wide: “So don’t fuck with us!”

In spite of herself, Portia, trying to slip past unobtrusively, let out a loud splutter of laughter. Gideon, seeing her, took a bow, smiling as he doffed an imaginary hat.

Ah, to be young again.

She continued towards the central staircase in the main entrance hall, where she nearly collided with the Bursar, and where she had her usual Stepford Wives-caliber exchange with him. Quite voluble in some circumstances, Mr. Bowles seemed not particularly comfortable around the female sex, which added to the stiltedness of most of the conversations Portia had had with him. He was quite a formal man, most at home, she thought, in black tie. Even his dark, slicked-back hair and rounded belly added to the illusion that one was addressing a penguin of good breeding but limited vocabulary. His embonpoint seemed to be increasing with his status as a pillar of the college, she noted. He must dine out frequently as a guest at other colleges; it couldn’t be because he enjoyed the food on offer from St. Mike’s kitchen.

“How are you, m’dear?” he asked her now. He was the kind of man who called women m’dear, especially when he couldn’t recall their names. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” she agreed, falling into line. “Quite.”

“Will you be at the dinner tomorrow?”

“Oh, yes, of course. Quite looking forward to it. Just popping into the bar and then back to work on the thesis!” she said heartily.

“Quite, quite! You may find one or two of our visitors there. Pay them no mind.”

“Quite!”

The college bar, like all such amenities, was the heart and soul of the college. It nestled in a room just off the main entrance hall, near the Great Hall, and with a view over the front grounds. Small and cozy, it was surrounded on three sides by leather-padded benches; the bar itself ran the length of the fourth wall. It was largely intended for use by the undergraduate and graduate students, and although college Fellows were in theory welcome to mingle, they (horrified by the very idea) preferred to do their drinking in the sanctuary of the exclusive SCR at the far side of the Great Hall.

There was only one other person in the bar. Somehow she’d become aware of his presence in college without having actually met him. Big and tall, with a voice to match. It was Augie Cramb, returned from his visit to the Eagle and changed for dinner. He was playing about with what looked like a GPS gadget, poking and prodding at its screen.