The Cambridge Theorem (29 page)

“Thanks for coming. I'm sorry if I was a bit weird. Do you wanna take off your coat? Hang it on the back of the door. Here, sit down.”

She showed him to the single arm chair that faced the fireplace. He looked around the room and saw a fairly featureless student bedsitter. A desk and chair stood under the window, where heavy green curtains had been pulled closed. A single bed was against the same wall, above which hung a poster of a rock musician Smailes vaguely recognized. The only other furniture was a small standing bookcase which was only partially filled with books, but held a stereo unit and some bottles and glasses, and a standing lamp by the chair. There was also a sink and mirror in the corner of the room, and a small hot-plate. Smailes sat down and Lauren Greenwald sat on the half moon-shaped rug in front of the fire. He looked at her closely.

She seemed to like black. She was wearing black pants, black tennis shoes and a black waistcoat over a white blouse. The dark eyes looked at him intently behind the round spectacle rims.

“Well?” asked Smailes eventually.

“I just got back from the college, right? I saw Giles there. You know, Giles Allerton, the guy who…”

“I know who you mean.”

“Well it seems that Simon's sister called him today, or left a message for him and he called back, I guess, and asked him to drive over to the police station and get the things that were found on Simon's body that day, when Simon was found.”

“I know, I made the arrangements with her.”

“So you know what the contents were.”

“Sure,” he said. He hoped he didn't sound ingratiating.

“Well, Simon's glasses were in their case. That meant they were in the case in his pocket when he was found, right?”

Smailes thought for a second. “Right. I found them there myself.”

“Did you see how strong those lenses were? Simon was blind as a bat without his glasses. He would never have taken them off before doing something as intricate as threading his belt through a hook to hang himself. Don't you see, it means that someone else had to be involved.”

Smailes had not thought of this. He said nothing for a minute.

“Not necessarily. It's the kind of maneuver you could do just by feel. Or maybe he hooked the belt on the hook, then put his glasses away in his pocket before he kicked the chair away. He was a careful type, you know.”

“No way, no way. Someone helped him do it.” Lauren's voice was starting to waver.

“Come on, Lauren. You don't help someone commit suicide.”

“Right. Maybe the whole thing was faked. Maybe he was unconscious or doped up or something and someone strung him up. Don't you see? Christ, you're the professional.”

“Lauren, the post mortem would have shown if Simon was unconscious before he died. There were no injuries to his body. And there were no unusual substances in his blood. The evidence is that he was fully conscious when he hanged himself. And even if he wasn't, do you know how much strength it would take to lift a man even of Simon Bowles' build up to that height, and suspend him there? More than one person has, that's for damn sure. Lauren, I appreciate what you're trying to say, but what you're telling me is completely inconclusive. You must see that.”

“Shit, Giles was right,” she said angrily. “He saw it first, but refused to talk to you. Said you were too hostile to students to believe anything we came up with. I thought, I dunno. I thought you were different.” She looked up at him defiantly and tears welled up in her eyes.

“I'm sorry, that's not fair,” she said. She got up and walked to the bookcase. “Look, I'm going to have some Scotch, do you want some?”

“Sure,” said Smailes. “Don't apologize. It's okay. Look, I've given this case a lot of thought, and confidentially, I'm not ready to give it up yet. There are a number of, well, inconsistencies that bother me. What you have said throws a little more doubt on exactly how he met his death, I agree. But it's not conclusive. Anyway, what motive could anyone have for wanting to kill Simon Bowles?”

She came and sat down again and handed him a small tumbler of whisky. “That's the question I can't answer, except I keep thinking that maybe he was involved with something or someone we knew nothing about, something really heavy. He was real secretive, you know. He'd make these trips to Oxford and London, and we really didn't know why. He wouldn't say anything about the research he was doing.”

“Did you know about the trip he made to London the day before his death?”

“Sure, I saw him on Sunday, he told me about it, he was going down the next day.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“No.”

“Did he mention it Tuesday night, when you saw him?”

“No. I knew better than to ask.” Lauren paused, and then asked urgently, “Are you levelling with me? Won't the inquest find it a suicide?”

“Oh sure, but that doesn't mean unofficially I can't keep the file open. I found those glasses in his pocket myself, and didn't get the incongruity.” He looked at her and smiled a little. “I guess it's because I don't wear them myself. I can't think what it's like to function without them if you're dependent.”

Lauren looked through her spectacles at him and smiled weakly. “Right, right,” she said. “So seriously, you're still asking questions?”

“Not actively. But I'm still asking questions in my mind.” He thought momentarily of telling her of Bowles' research notes he had copied, of his suspicion that file had been removed, of the relationship with Fenwick, which she had almost guessed, and the unexplained payments to him, but dismissed these ideas quickly. It was already unprofessional enough for him to be sitting drinking Scotch in this woman's bedroom, technically a material witness in an unusual death investigation, telling her information in confidence. He felt a little uneasy.

“Great boots,” she said unexpectedly.

Smailes held out one of the Tony Lama's and cocked his ankle. “Yeah, I like them,” he said.

“You're a pretty bizarre policeman,” she replied quietly.

He did not recognize the impulse that made him ready to confide in this person, but suddenly he found himself telling her the whole story of his involvement with the police force, about his father's career and death, his marriage and divorce. She would prompt him from time to time, or murmur comments, but mostly it was monologue. He had not recounted these thoughts and feelings to anyone in years, and he felt strange as his story gathered momentum. He took his account right up to the present, and tried to explain the equivocation he felt about police work, but how it was difficult for him to imagine doing anything else. When he had concluded he felt embarrassed, and asked politely, “What about yourself? Tell me the real reason you're in Cambridge.”

When he looked back on the evening, Smailes could not remember at what point his desire for her became unmanageable. It must have been at some point in her own monologue, as he watched her staring at the pillars of flame in the gas fire, tugging at her hair. He remembered looking awkwardly at the point where the sallowness of her throat met the white fabric of her blouse, and his mouth becoming dry. He was painfully aware that she did not wear a brassiere, how her breasts rocked when she shook her head and its dark curls in emphasis of some memory that exasperated her.

His concentration on her story faltered, but he heard her describe her conventional middle class Jewish upbringing in a suburb of New York, how she had felt compelled to study and achieve for her parents, Howard and Mimi, to reward their expectations as the only child of their old age. She said she understood his painful feelings about his father, that she had had a classical Freudian fixation herself, before her father had died in her early teens. He had enjoyed brief success as a screenwriter, but then had settled down to teach English in a high school on Long Island, until his sudden death from a stroke. Her mother was a Sephardic Jew, a first generation immigrant from Turkey, from whom Lauren drew her exotic looks. Her parents had spoiled her and she had not been a particularly rebellious teenager.

Some survival instinct told him his lack of professionalism had already gone far enough. He should not have come to her digs in the first place. He felt regret that he had confided in her. He shifted in his chair and tilted the whisky tumbler, as if to confirm it was empty, a prelude to leaving.

She turned and rested her dark eyes on him, and then caught herself, embarassed. “I'm sorry. I've been going on and on. It must be late.”

“Yes, I must be going.”

There was a hiatus in which he felt a mounting constriction in his throat and a pain in his stomach. Wordlessly, he got up and walked to the door, and reached for his raincoat hanging on the hook.

Afterwards, they agreed that he might have actually left if his larynx hadn't given way. Standing with his back to the door and the handle in a backhand grip he tried to say, as Lauren walked towards him, “Call me if anything comes up.”

What he actually said sounded more like, “Cock-a-doodle-do.”

She threw back her head and laughed, a free and melodious laugh. He had not time to feel mortified because as he released his grip on the handle Lauren took a step towards him and then the blade of her nose was against his cheek and her lips against his, softly at first, then more urgently. Her arms rose around his neck and he felt the soft, untethered weight beneath her waistcoat with his hands, his excitement surging. She broke away and held him close.

“Oh, I've been wanting to do that,” she said to his shoulder. She stood back and helped him with the reverse process of removing his raincoat, then his jacket. She ran her hands over his shoulders and kissed him again.

“You don't wear a gun,” she said. “All the cops in the States wear guns.”

“Of course I don't wear a gun,” he said softly.

She left him standing there and went to turn off the standing lamp, then the lamp on the desk, then sat on the bed and turned off the lamp on the nightstand. He heard the light popping of buttons.

As he sat beside her and began to tug at his boots he did ask himself briefly what the hell he thought he was doing, but it was a token protest. Her long nakedness waited for him as he climbed in beside her, and he felt exultant.

He was gratified that the preliminary moves were familiar and delightful until suddenly a surprisingly strong arm pushed him over onto his back and he became a baffled spectator. She knew what to do and Smailes found himself in entirely new territory, with all kinds of room for his hands. He had not made love in this way before and wondered with alarm as he approached his climax if gravity was going to be a problem. It wasn't.

Lauren kept moving against him and in the glow from the streetlight he saw her face, distracted and intent. Then she gave a low moan, and her body shuddered, then relaxed against him. There was a long silence.

She had moved away and lay curled against him in a fetal position when her voice interrupted his thoughts.

“Sorry. To be so pushy. It's more of a sure bet for me that way.”

He found her modesty lovely, after such assurance. He found her hand. “No problem. No problem at all. Are you okay, I mean, I didn't ask…”

“Sure. I'm a modern girl. I have an IUD. You know, I don't know what to call you.”

“What?”

“Your name. You're just Detective Smailes. I can't call you that. What's your name?”

“Derek.”

He felt her shoulders rock with suppressed laughter. “What's wrong with that?” he asked.

“Nothing. Nothing. I've never known anybody with that name, that's all. It's sort of an old man's name.” She cupped her hand over her nose. Derek Smailes had never liked the name either, but he didn't tell her that.

“Call me anything you like, Lauren.”

“Okay, Plod. You can be Mr. Plod.” Now it was his turn to laugh at the preposterous caricature of the British bobby. She laughed too, and then it was still again.

Smailes lay in the dark, his thoughts streaming. He had never had such a strange, illicit encounter, or felt such an overwhelming excitement. He had broken no laws, only an unwritten code. There was no crime here, only suspicions. A brilliant and lonely young man was dead, by his own hand, and his friends felt cheated. They contrived motives, criminals and plots, to blame someone for their own failure to prevent the waste. A file may have been removed, it may not have, he could not be sure. Officials at the college had behaved strangely, impelled personal agendas he could only guess at. He felt irked by the loose ends, but then, he always did. It went with the turf.

His thoughts turned to the girl who lay beside him, her breath soft against his shoulder. My God, a sexually assertive female. Smailes had thought they were inventions of the letters pages of girlie magazines, or inhabited a different realm than his own. Yvonne had never done more than gently return his thrusts, her face averted and absent. Bernadette had been more adventurous, but inexperienced, and his other encounters had been too brief to be anything more than fleeting contests. But he had known that sex was not just a male obsession. What would she say if she knew it was the first time he had made love this way? He knew, instinctively, she would laugh.

But what on earth did she see in him, an ungainly provincial cop with white flesh and strange vowels? He turned to her and she murmured something. He felt a surge of tenderness towards her, her Jewish strangeness, her strength. They made love again, and this time Smailes led the way.

He awoke in a strange room with no idea where he was. Bruce Springsteen looked down on him from the poster on the wall, and he remembered. He felt a moment of triumph. You just bonked your first Yank, he told himself. What time was it? It was no matter, he was on late mornings this week.

Lauren was not around. He saw their discarded clothes on the chair. He heard the distant sound of water running in a bathroom. He needed to relieve himself.