The No. 2 Global Detective (25 page)

He was trying to think when he had ever felt more pleased with the way things were going. Wikipedia was right. He was brilliant. When he had first created Nak-ka-khoo, all those years ago now, he had been slightly too
avant garde
for his time, he could see that now. Out of place among all the procedurals and, of course, very foreign. Putting the boy through Cuff College had cost him dear and the long years afterwards, when no publisher in the land, not even Canongate, had been even slightly interested, had been dispiriting. Now though, now that he had brought Nak-ka-khoo down from that Godforsaken island and had him leave all those bafflingly inane clues all round the world so that Tom Hurst and those swollen-headed morons would stumble upon them, now that he had done that, the Dean was being bombarded with offers from every cash-rich publisher in the land. Six figures! And all that bloody respect he would earn.

He allowed himself a long peal of laughter that echoed across the New Quad, all the way to the New Library, where Alice Appleton sat with her head bowed over a book. The air around her still smelled of damp wood where she had scrubbed at the stains of Claire Morgan's blood. She looked up and shivered. It had sounded like a hyena.

On the River Thames between London and Oxford there are no fewer than 32 locks, and piloting a submarine through each of them is not easy, even with the help of the obliging lock-keepers. It had taken Captain Carpaccia and the four detectives just three days to cross the Atlantic, following the Gulf Stream all the way from Richmond, Virginia, in the USA, to Land's End in England, but now, as they powered their way up the Thames past Sonning, it looked like they might be late for the Gaudy.

It had been a fraught journey. Just as they had crossed the Laurentian Abyss in the North Atlantic Ocean, Captain Carpaccia explained that Creepy Lesbian Niece was incapable of letting her go, and while the submarine they were travelling in was a hi-spec super-sub, capable of 100 knots an hour, Creepy Lesbian Niece had a hi-hi-spec super-super-sub, capable of even higher speeds.

‘And hers is panelled in cherry wood, inside and out.'

This unwelcome news had haunted the crew all the way to the point where the Thames becomes the Cherwell, but by then Carpaccia had whipped all but Mma Ontoaste into shape and by the time they rose out of the turgid waters at Magdalen Bridge, morale was high.

‘Oh, Rra,' said Mma Ontoaste, addressing Tom. ‘It has come back to where it all began. Imagine how much time and money you would have saved by being paraplegic and unable to travel.'

‘Or if you had been eight months pregnant,' suggested Rhombus.

‘Or in an iron lung.'

‘Or a coffin.'

Despite the time that had passed since he had learned that Nak-ka-khoo had murdered Claire Morgan, Tom was still not yet in the mood for this sort of banter. He was exhausted from the effort of keeping the detectives apart and had come to the point where he did not really care for them or the case or, in fact, anything very much. He was in the grip of black nihilist rage. He could see that from the very outset he had been played with, and that perhaps a more experienced detective, or a disabled one, or a pregnant one, or even a dead one, might not have so enthusiastically pursued all the conclusions to which he had jumped.

He wondered if he ought to have kept notes on what had happened. After all, this was something that he could write up and turn if not into a bestseller, then into something at least. He studied his companions again, wondering what made them so special.

There was Mma Ontoaste, with apparently limitless reserves of compassion, bush tea and cocoa butter, as well as those cursed Botswana skies, of course, but now, after a few days under water, she looked sunken and depleted. She had not had a drink in days and had lost kilos. She had reacted the worst to their sub-aquatic confinement and had been snappish and ill-tempered ever since Captain Carpaccia had rationed her to one piece of toast at breakfast.

Meanwhile, Colander was happy doing logic problems from a back copy of
The Puzzler
magazine, wetting the tip of a blunted navigation pencil and filling in the answers without any trace of the hesitancy and morbid self-doubt that usually characterised his investigations. He too had lost weight and was even whistling a happy tune.

DI Rhombus, being a Scot, was used to the lack of sun and the cramped and noisome conditions. He had kept himself busy trying to recall all the goals scored by (or, more trickily, against) the Scotch national football side in World Cup competitions. With no privacy on the sub, he had been unable to Dwell on his Time in the SAS and, although he had tried to suggest that crime writers were really frustrated rock stars, Tom had only had to mention PD James to stop him taking that line too far.

And if Captain Carpaccia had been strangely muted and thoughtful, Tom put it down to the responsibility she had shouldered as captain of the
SS Stalker
. It occurred to him that perhaps she would be happier being the captain of a pleasure cruiser or maybe the unelected head, or fuehrer even, of a small but mightily well-armed boutique nation-state, rather than an implausibly tetchy mortician with an inquisitive streak.

‘Stand by,' ordered Carpaccia as they approached the wharf by Magdalen Bridge, deserted now, with the punts neatly stored for the winter.

‘DI Rhombus, throw a line, will you?'

‘A line? You mean a joke?'

‘Rope. Tie a rope onto a bollard so we can tie up.'

Rope. Old rope. It was then that it really struck Tom. That was their genius: their ability to recycle rope. It was the same old rope every time, wasn't it? Braided and plaited, bound and knotted in subtly different ways, but ultimately always the same piece of rope, the same personal piece of rope that they had started with, uncoiled, re-coiled, twisted and woven in different ways. It was this secret, this shared knowledge, that gave them all this grumbling pleasure in each other's company.

The submarine docked with a gentle bump and Colander, first out of the hatch, lowered the gangway from the conning tower and held it steady as Mma Ontoaste led them onto dry land. It was dark and the air crisp and almost too sharp to breathe after the fug of the submarine. For a moment they looked like five drunks, staggering along Musgrave Street, too hurried to take the time to let their sea legs acclimatise to the dry land. Ahead of them were the
flambeaux
in sconces in the wall of the façade of Cuff College, lit to celebrate the Gaudy.

‘My God, it has hardly changed at all!' puffed Colander. ‘Or perhaps it is we who have not changed?'

Tom could almost hear Rhombus rolling his eyes at this remark. The two men had bickered on the trip over, but had never come to blows – possibly because Mma Ontoaste had withdrawn her favours from both and slept in her own chaste berth next to Captain Carpaccia. Mma Ontoaste was used to solving such awkward problems.

The porter stepped from his lodge to say something to them as they crossed Sjuzet Bridge, where, it seemed years ago now, Tom had stopped to finish his cigarette.

‘What's all this, then?' he started, but stopped and stared open-mouthed. It occurred to Tom only then that although they had grown used to the sight of one another, to others they might look unusual. With the exception of Carpaccia – who was wearing a full naval outfit in keeping with her rank as captain of a submarine – they were still in full Highland fig and looked terribly drunk.

Carpaccia had been half expecting the porters to stop her and throw her out of the College, as they had done all those years before over the missing adverbs and the case of the misunderstood thesaurus, and so she had her trusty Tokyo Marui M4 R.I.S. automatic rifle at the ready. The porter stepped back into the warmth of his lodge and let the door shut quietly behind him.

The Dining Hall of Cuff College is a splendid room, longer than it is wide, with a high, ribbed ceiling from which chandeliers hang on long chains. The walls are punctuated with heavy oil portraits in baroque frames and the dark wood panelling is etched with faded gold letters to mark long-since-forgotten academic or sporting success. At one end of the room, under a stained-glass window that shows Cain murdering Abel, a high table is raised on a dais. Below this are two further tables, each more than 30 foot long, filled that night with the brightest and the best in detective fiction, including most of the Americans who had come over on scholarships, the Swedes and all the other more marginal characters at work in the Genre today. The din of conversation and chink of china and cutlery was constant. Waiters darted up and down the lines of men and women, all in their finest, serving what was roundly agreed to be execrable food and indifferent wine.

The Dean sat at the top table, with a very large female police commissioner from Manchester on one hand and a glamorous forensic scientist from Montreal on the other. He was laughing at a joke he had made and taking compliments on the very fine speech he had just delivered in the Junior Common Room.

‘So, Dean,' purred the forensic scientist whose name – something like Tempura (but no one would be named after a type of batter, surely?) – the Dean could not get the hang of. ‘Where is the hero of the hour?'

‘Ah! Nak-ka-khoo? He is over there. Talking to a publisher.'

They studied the scene. Nak-ka-khoo did not look like a terribly graceful dinner companion: he was a stranger to conversation and he had spent long enough in the tundra to know that you eat when there is food, starve when there is none, and so he was forcing food and wine into his mouth, his eyes all the while resolutely bolted to the cleavage of the dark-haired woman sitting on the opposite side of the table. Nak-ka-khoo was a wolfish-looking man, with long dark hair and a sallow, closed face. His body was somehow ill-suited to the constraints of a bow-tie and dinner shirt.

‘Oh, he looks charming,' murmured the woman, not for a second meaning it. ‘I hear he can skin a polar bear in less than a minute?'

‘Yes. It is just one of his party pieces,' the Dean agreed. ‘He is also a talented snake charmer. He can do it with just an ocarina and a dab of Vaseline.'

‘But he can't speak English?'

‘Not very well,' admitted the Dean with a sigh. ‘That has held him back, I must say, and made him rather frustrated.'

The Dean had hoped any Nak-ka-khoo adventures would be translated into English, of course, but he had timed it badly; just as soon as there was an appetite for foreign detective fiction among general readers, the Crime Writers' Association had barred translations from their awards. The Dean would now have to teach Nak-ka-khoo English if he was ever to get the Golden Dagger he so coveted.

The Dean took a sip of his wine and speared a slice of watery courgette on his fork. Further down the table was Alice Appleton, looking, the Dean thought, very fetching in some dark-blue dress that showed off her shoulders and what he could only think of as her upper chest. She was listening to Wikipedia banging on about something.

‘A chicken can be hypnotised too, you know,' he was saying, his mind obviously very much on Nak-ka-khoo. ‘By holding its head down and continuously drawing a line along the ground with a stick, starting at its beak and extending straight outwards in front. It'll remain immobile for anywhere between 15 seconds to 30 minutes, continuing to stare at the line.'

‘Really?' asked Alice, genuinely interested. ‘How on earth did they discover that?'

‘Well, the first known reference to it was in 1646, in
Mirabile Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae
by a man called Athanasius Kircher, but how he found out about it – well, I suppose one might have to read his book, but you know – who can be bothered? Hello. What's this?'

At that moment Tom Hurst and the other detectives came through the door at the other end of the room. They stood in an untidy group.

‘It's Tom!' cried Alice, flushing slightly. ‘He made it.'

The top table went quiet. The Dean stood up, his pale face clenched, his eyebrows drawn. His eyes flicked from Tom and the detectives to Nak-ka-khoo. Conversation and hubbub at the tables petered out until there was silence. The Dean had no need to tap his glass to attract attention, but did so anyway.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,' he began. ‘I can't tell you how glad I am that tonight we have with us, by some amazing feat of navigation, not to mention—' and here the Dean was genuinely lost for words ‘—all the other things, none other than four of our most successful alumni from, I think, the class of '74.'

He introduced the detectives and there was a ripple of respectful applause. Tom Hurst led them between the tables until they reached the top table.

‘Dean,' began Tom, ‘I know who killed Claire Morgan.'

There was a gasp of taken breath all around him. Claire Morgan's murder had been on everybody's lips.

‘Oh yes, dear Claire. So much missed. But surely this can wait until tomorrow, Tom? Don't want to cast a shadow over the Gaudy, do we? Why don't you all sit down? Have a drink.'

‘I should say that the murderer is in this room.'

There was another collective gasp. Nak-ka-khoo, unable to understand English, had no idea what was going on and was yet to appreciate just who the detectives were or what they were saying. He was forcing a chicken breast down his mouth.

‘He sure is, Dean,' Carpaccia started, jumping in front of Tom, swinging her rifle about carelessly. ‘When I was examining the bodies of the chickens so senselessly slaughtered in Florida, I noticed a powdery residue that glittered coppery under Electron Microscopy. It turned out to be resident in a particular brand of talcum powder that you can only buy on the internet. By getting Creepy Lesbian Niece to hack into the internet company's records, I discovered that the talcum powder is regularly ordered by a man who has the Canadian hand-made moccasin slipper franchise. Now his slippers are made from the pelt of a particular kind of beaver that only lives north of latitude 66° 33' 39'—'