The No. 2 Global Detective (2 page)

^1.
For the purposes of this book I have put Seaton Street as running parallel between Pilton Place and Andover Street, behind Colchester College.

‘And this is your room,' Matron said with a lopsided smile, opening the door to a space no bigger than a prison cell. There was just enough room for a single bed, a scarred desk, a sink and – and he was glad to see this – a waste-paper basket. He remembered his own supervisor when he had been an undergraduate telling him that the waste-paper basket would always be his best friend. How right he had been, thought Tom, picturing all those bins full of telltale balls of screwed-up foolscap that had followed him wherever he went, and were all he had to show for himself so far.

In one corner there was a stone fireplace that seemed to be funnelling cold air into the room and above it hung a portrait of some Tudor grandee's wife in dark oils who reminded Tom of Margaret from the Tea Shoppe. They were on the fourth floor with a view across the Old Quad and through the ill-fitting casement window he could see that a new flurry of snow looked like settling on the roofs opposite.

‘It isn't much, I know,' Matron said behind him. He was aware of her gaze fixed on him. For want of some distraction, he turned on one of the taps with a squeak to let loose a dry sprinkling of rust flakes.

‘Oh dear,' she said. ‘No one has used this room since …'

She stopped herself.

‘Well, for a long time.'

She was elderly, with a rheumy eye, her accent faintly ginny and pre-war. He remembered her as a younger woman when he had been an undergraduate, but doubted she would have recalled him unless reminded. He put his suitcase on the unyielding bed and sought to reassure her.

‘Oh, it's fine, Matron, honestly. I couldn't have asked for anything better. I'll be right in the thick of things here.'

His breath bloomed in the icy air. Matron nodded quickly and glanced at the watch hanging upside down on her bosom with a practised tuck of the chin.

‘The Dean will meet you in his room in about ten minutes,' she said. ‘Give you time to—'

Her eye strayed to the tap.

‘—
wash
and so forth. The bathroom is along the corridor. No baths to be taken after eleven in the evening or before seven in the morning, and if you wouldn't mind taking care not to use too much hot water, I'm sure the other Fellows would appreciate it.'

Tom smiled and thanked her and she was just about to leave when she ducked back into his room.

‘Mr Hurst,' she whispered urgently, her eyes fixing his in some grip he could only struggle to resist.

‘Can I just say how pleased we all are that you have come to help? It hasn't been easy here these past months, as you can imagine, but with you here – well, I think we'll all rest a great deal more easily.'

Tom nodded, the sort of nod you give to get rid of an elderly drunk in the street, and he stood with a glassy smile on his face as she closed the door behind her. What on earth could she have meant? What hadn't been easy? Tom began unpacking his suitcase and found himself standing, stalled, with a pile of shirts in his hand looking for somewhere to put them. His room had no furniture. Perhaps there was a chest of drawers in the corridor?

He opened the door and was about to step out when he felt, or rather sensed, a movement in the gloom. His skin froze in prickles. He was instantly sure the movement was not random, but a reaction to his arrival. This is good, he thought, with a slight thrill of recognition, remembering his lessons. Basic Solipsistic Paranoia – a prerequisite of the top-flight sleuth.

‘Hello?' he called.

No reply. And yet he was sure he had not imagined the movement. There was something about the quality of the silence, as if it were holding its breath. He retreated into his room, put the shirts back in his suitcase and then tiptoed softly along the corridor, keeping to the outside edges where he imagined the boards would creak less. Around him the light was dim and diffuse. The walls were punctuated by doors that seemed long locked. On each was a label, encased in a dull brass holder, indicating the name of the occupant in spidery copperplate: Cordelia Gray; Arsène Lupin; Srnt. Maj. Samuel B Steele; Susan Silverman.

‘Hello?' he tried again, approaching the end of the corridor. There was a furtive scurrying movement, the suggestion of a slight sibilance, the click of the latch of a door and then the sound of well-shod feet running quickly down spiralling stone stairs.

‘Wait!' shouted Tom, turning the corner of the corridor. There was a door to some stairs. He jerked it open.

‘Come back!' he shouted down the stairs after the footsteps. He was answered only by a strange shrill laugh and a sudden harsh gust of warm air that blasted him in the face until it was cut off with the bang of a heavy door. Tom ran to the window and tried to peer down into the Quad; nothing. He was about to turn again and run down the stairs when he saw, from the corner of one eye, the handle of one of the doors – room number one hundred and thirteen – turn slowly from within. He stepped back to wait. The door remained shut.

‘Who's that?' demanded Tom.

The handle stopped turning.

‘Who are you?' he asked again, examining the label in the brass clip. It was blank. Tom knocked on the door. The door remained shut. He knocked again.

‘Hello? Anyone in there?'

Tom stood back and then crouched to look under the door. He could see the soles of two stout black shoes and what he took to be the rubber tip of a walking stick. Whoever it was stayed absolutely still. A warm draught flooded from the cracks around the door. Tom straightened up and knocked again.

He tried to speak but his throat was dry. He felt suddenly vulnerable and when he did manage to force out some words his voice fluctuated and caught unpredictably.

‘Hello, in there. Sorry for disturbing you. I thought I heard something – someone, I should say – in the corridor.'

There was no reply. Tom put his ear to the panel. There was a wheezed inhalation and then nothing. Complete silence. He listened again. Nothing. Only perhaps a faint smell. What though? Something familiar yet also – no, he could not place it. He listened again. Then he heard it. A rasping, whispery voice.

‘Go away. Go away now. Get away from here before it is too late.'

Tom stepped back again. He stared at the door, his eyes wide and round, the hair on his neck on end.

After a second he shook his head and returned to his room. He was being stupid, he reasoned. He noticed the label on his own door read just ‘Wormwood'. What did he expect, he wondered? This was Cuff College. Of course there would be running feet, locked doors, unexplained disappearances and strange smells.

He was smiling to himself until he turned and saw something that made him shrink back in terror. Hanging from a nail driven into the wall, a small crudely carved wooden doll with a long hatpin sticking from a bloody wound in her chest. Under her someone had carved some words that made Tom step back in terror: The Dean and Prof. Wikipedia are bum chums.

‘Bum chums?' he said aloud. Did people say such things anymore?

‘Ah, Hurst, my dear boy, there you are at long last. Settled in all right, eh? That's the job.'

Once again the Dean was standing by a fire, under another portrait of Wilkie Collins, with what looked like a
pastis
in his hand. The only differences from the first time they had met were that he had shed his smoking jacket and there were, post-Christmas, no mince pies. Instead he was wearing a white shirt, pristine, gathered with articulated steel bands just above the elbows, and some skull-and-crossbones cufflinks. A present from an indulgent nephew, perhaps. He looked well, slightly tanned perhaps, and the vein that Tom had noticed before Christmas no longer throbbed in the Dean's temple.

The Dean waved Tom to one of the two leather chesterfields and retreated behind his own magnificent dark wood partner's desk. The fire spat and the ice in the Dean's glass chinked
²
as he put it down on the leather blotter. Tom sat. It was ostentatiously civilised.

‘Good Christmas? New Year?' the Dean asked, careless of the answer, shuffling through his papers looking for something.

Tom thought for a moment. He recalled a few long days with his parents: his mother absenting herself in the kitchen, his father sitting in the armchair in front of the fire, deep in a Danielle Steele novel.

‘Quiet,' he said.

‘Hmmm,' approved the Dean absently. ‘I always like to get some sun, myself.'

The Dean's room seemed designed to give away nothing more than the obvious: that he was a bookish dandy who kept his whisky in a heavy cut-glass decanter; his taste in art was orthodox to the point of nullity and he liked to keep his room warm. There was a series of framed photographs – portraits – on the wall. Past Deans of the College, by the look of them, in their fur-lined academic gowns. They were names Tom would know, of course. Some of the most famous names in the Genre. From where he was sitting he could see a photograph of a man with a very large head – he must, thought Tom, wear a size-eight hat.

The Dean now had a sheaf of papers for Tom to sign and a ‘chit' that he explained was redeemable from a tailor in town for one of the long black gowns similar to his own, although without the silk-lined hood. Together they went through the timetable for Tom's lectures – two a week – and the list of his undergraduates. They were, as the Dean had suggested, a mixed bunch.

‘I understood I was to supervise just five students,' Tom said. ‘Yet I see six names here? I am not complaining, you understand, but perhaps it is a mistake? One name is repeated. Chowdhury? Or are they siblings?'

‘Ah yes,' agreed the Dean. ‘Chowdhury. Rather awkward. Chowdhury is – are? – Siamese twins. Joined at the head. Twice the brains; double the insight. I'm expecting great things of them. There aren't many in the Genre from the subcontinent. Can't think why.'

It seemed that Tom was also to supervise an Argentinian gaucho, a Chinese tumbler and a man skilled at deep-sea diving. There was also a woman bus driver. The Dean tutted when he read out her name.

‘Means she can only solve crimes committed on bus routes.'

Tom was pleased to see that the fashion for Scandinavian detectives seemed to have waned in favour of the more exotic.

‘This one's a Tuareg.' The Dean pointed at an unfamiliar name. ‘Knows a lot about camels and the desert and so forth. According to his CV he can track week-old footprints across dry sand, but he doesn't talk much. Worried sand will get in his mouth, I suppose. And with that headgear on, you can't see much of his face. Not a pull for the film rights, is it? Still, he is supposed to be very loyal and he might make a decent sidekick in something light. I won't say you haven't got your work cut out there, though.'

The Dean glanced at his watch.

‘Now I hope you don't mind, Tom, but I've asked some of the members of staff to join us for tea. Your first chance to meet them, although no doubt you'll know some of them by their work. And you ought to meet Claire.'

‘Claire?'

‘Claire Morgan. Your head of department.'

The Dean took on a slightly uncomfortable look as he said her name. Distant alarm bells began ringing in Tom's mind again. Why had a vacancy come up mid-year? What
had
happened to his predecessor? Why had he not met his head of department before he was given the post? Something was wrong, but what?

He was about to ask when the Dean continued.

‘I ought to warn you, though, that Claire can be rather—' he paused, searching for the right word. He found it: ‘Abrupt. Particularly if she has had a drop to—'

There was a heavy knock at the door and it opened before the Dean had time to say anything else. It was a heavy-set, formidable-looking woman in her middle age, wearing a teal-blue three-piece tweed trouser suit and a gold-rimmed monocle. Her greying hair was drawn back, but wildly, and her craggy face was ruddy. As the door opened Tom saw she was consulting a large, handsome half-hunter watch, which, once she had announced the time – four o'clock exactly – in a contralto voice, she pocketed in her waistcoat, leaving a heavy chain stretching across her substantial girth.

‘DEAN!' she boomed, making the Dean flinch.

‘Hello, Claire, I am glad you're here first—'

‘Always punctual, Dean. You said four o'clock. It is four o'clock and so HERE I AM!'

‘Yes,' mumbled the Dean. ‘Good stuff. Now, Claire, this is Tom Hurst, your new Junior Lecturer.'

Claire turned to squint at Tom through her monocle. He felt as if he were something on a plate that the Dean was offering in the same manner as a waiter trying a new dish on a tricky but important diner. He knew he might be sent back at any moment.

‘So this is HE!' she bellowed, loud enough to make the ice in the Dean's whisky shift. ‘The Dean has TOLD me about you.'

Flecks of sputum flew from a mouth in which her teeth were square and yellow, like those Spanish snacks the name of which Tom could not instantly recall. Anyone could have smelled the drink on her from a hundred paces. Tom forced a smile and proffered his hand. She recoiled.

‘NEVER shake hands! Can't bear to TOUCH people! Hate to think where that hand's BEEN, you see! KNOW too much about 'em, I do!'

Tom shrugged as if he sympathised, but then could suddenly think of nothing to do with his hands. He clasped them with a slight clap.

‘Stand still, will you!' she snapped. ‘Let me have a look at you! Hmmm. Good seat. Like your father's and I dare say you father's father before him. Runs in the family, you know, Dean, FROM THE PATERNAL SIDE.'

The Dean raised his eyebrows.

‘Really?'

‘You DON'T believe me.'