The No. 2 Global Detective (3 page)

She said this as if she were somehow disappointed, as if the Dean had just let her down, but before she could take it any further there was a sharp rap on the door.

‘Come!' cried the Dean, clearly relieved. Claire harrumphed and took a step back, subsiding with a rumbling sigh into one of the chesterfields, her back to the door just as it opened. In came a willow wand of a man clutching a small pile of leather-bound books.

‘Dean—' the man began in a high querulous voice, ignoring Tom and walking into the Dean's study with quick dainty steps. ‘Dean, I weally must pwotest at this term's we-allocation of pigeon holes—'

The Dean was in no mood to hear his protestations.

‘Yardley,' he said. ‘This is hardly the time. I've asked you here to meet our newest member of staff: Tom Hurst. Tom is joining us to help out with Tran and Path, aren't you, Tom? And you know Claire, of course. Tom, this is Professor Yardley, Lecturer in Formalist Fiction and Socio-Political Critique.'

Yardley – wearing a well-cut brown suit, a yellow waistcoat and, almost inevitably, to Tom's eyes, a mulberry bow-tie – stopped mid-stride and, with hardly a glance at Tom, he pulled a sickly and wholly unconvincing smile of joy at seeing Claire.

‘Claire—' he began, his voice thick with treacle.

‘It won't work, you know, Yardley!' Claire barked. ‘I'll not lecture from RUBBISH.'

‘Wubbish?' said Yardley. ‘I hardly know what you're talking about, Claire.'

‘Your book. The one that should never have been published. I know you want me to set it as a course text but I won't, you know, because it's
wubbish
. It's bunkum. You UNDERSTAND me, man?'

Yardley gaped a couple of times, struggling for breath, before withdrawing a folded square of canary-yellow linen from his breast pocket and dabbing at his bulbous brow. Before he was required to come back with a face-saving answer, there was a soft knock on the door and in came a battered trolley on which some tea things tinkled gently on its top shelf. Behind it shuffled an elderly woman in a housecoat.

‘Here we are,' she said, more to herself than anyone else. Her voice was grandmotherly and Tom was sure he could smell roses.

‘Oh not those BLOODY old fairy cakes again!' barked Claire from her position on the chesterfield. The tea lady – her face the shape of a scone, including dabs of flour on one cheek – looked up in surprise. Her periwinkle-blue eyes began to water.

‘But I made them myself,' she stammered.

‘I thought you might've,' Claire said. ‘They're horrible. Disgusting. Why don't YOU BUY SOME IN?'

‘Claire,' began the Dean. ‘Steady on. Please.'

‘I tell it like it is, Dean, you should know that by now. Her cakes – I don't like to call them fairy cakes, in the company of Yardley here – are dis-GUSTIN''

‘Well, Mrs Robinson, I will certainly have one of your cakes. I think they are delicious.'

The Dean helped himself as Mrs Robinson poured the tea. She was snivelling slightly, and a drop of something clung to the end of her nose, threatening to fall into someone's teacup. Yardley came and stood beside Tom.

‘She can be wather abwasive,' he said, referring, Tom guessed, to Claire.

‘Yes,' agreed Tom. ‘So I see.'

‘I wonder if you have read my latest work? The Pwototype and its Successive Wepwoductions: Magnum P.I., Higgins and the Poly-Industwial in Cwime Fiction Today?'

Tom shook his head.

‘Pity,' said Yardley, drifting away.

Once again there was a knock at the door.

‘Only us!' cried a bright-voiced girl as she popped her head around the door, a ponytail of gathered blonde hair swinging gaily around her chin. She was flushed from the cold or exercise and someone seemed to be playfully pushing her in from behind. Tom saw she was wearing old-fashioned tennis clothes. Behind her came a young man with a receding hairline, also in vintage tennis gear, including a cable-knit sleeveless sweater. He was carrying a couple of Dunlop max-ply rackets and a tube of balls. His arms were thin and very hairy and the skin seemed almost green.

‘We've just had the first set of the year!' he exclaimed in a deep voice. ‘So invigorating! You should all try it, you know!'

‘Ah! The two lovebirds,' smirked the Dean, hoping for some respite from Claire. ‘How was it?'

‘Wonderful! Although Rex will keep hitting those cross-court dinks!'

Introductions were made. Celia and Rex were Junior Research Fellows. He was writing his paper on the function of the personal trainer in Crime Fiction, hers was to be on the role of the mannequin. They were engaged to be married in the summer. Rex had a powerful grip.

‘Good to meet you,' he confirmed, crushing Tom's fingers. His breath was sour and Tom could not help but flinch. Celia made a fuss of Mrs Robinson and her tea cakes and it looked as if things were calming down again when Claire Morgan spoke up.

‘No one's FOOLED, you know?' she said.

This was aimed at Rex. The room froze.

‘Sorry?' Rex said, his face tensing.

‘I said no one's fooled. You act like a twenty-year-old but we can all see you're nearer fifty. What did ye think of the handshake, Tom? Nearly broke your bones, I'll warrant. He's very proud of that, is Rex. Thinks it makes him appear virile. Manly. We all know what it is, don't we? An ONANIST'S HANDSHAKE.'

‘Claire!' snapped the Dean.

‘He's got the grip of a compulsive masturbator. Look at yourself, man! Your head is like a skull! Love's young dream? BUMS AND FISHCAKES, more like!'

‘Claire!' spluttered Celia. ‘You can't talk to my fiancé like that!'

‘Oh BE QUIET. I've had enough of you. What? Three engagements is it now? Three rings, eh? No doubt your WEDDING DRESS IS WHITE!'

Celia burst into tears. Rex looked rattled – Claire's revelation was obviously news to him – and was almost unable to take Celia by the shoulders and lead her away.

Just then there was another knock at the door. The Dean shifted uncomfortably. Two more people appeared: an old lady with a cloud of white hair under a hat that looked more like a tea cosy, and a tall thin man in a slightly shabby but beautifully cut racing suit.

‘Ah,' muttered the Dean again, but half-heartedly this time. Things were obviously not going to plan and he was no longer enjoying himself.

‘Miss Featherstonehaugh! Lord Denbeigh! So glad you could make it. Do come in and help yourself to tea. You will not have met Tom Hurst. Our new Junior Lecturer in Tran and Path.'

Denbeigh, whippet-thin and with a sheaf of blond hair swept back over one permanently cocked eyebrow, shook Tom's hand, mumbling a stream of only vaguely intelligible patrician vowels, while Miss Featherstonehaugh blinked at him kindly and mewed something about the weather. Denbeigh guided Miss Featherstonehaugh to the chesterfield opposite Claire. He helped her settle herself with her appliqué bag of knitting.

‘There you are m'dear,' he drawled, hardly opening his mouth to speak. ‘I'll fetch you a cup of tea?'

The old lady nodded gratefully and fussed with her knitting for a second before, suddenly aware that she was being watched, she looked up. Claire was glaring across at her.

‘Well, if it isn't old Miss Marple herself,' she started. ‘Knit, knit, KNIT, you old NITWIT.'

Miss Featherstonehaugh straightened her tartan skirt and frowned slightly, her eyes taking on a faraway look, as if something that had just been said had triggered a distant memory. But of what she could not, or would not, reveal.

‘Oh look,' cackled Claire, ‘Old Miss Featherstonehaugh' – which she pronounced Feather-stone-whore – ‘has just discovered a clue! What is it? Go on darling, you tell us! That you won't see another Christmas 'cos you're SO DAM' OLD?'

Denbeigh's expression did not change as he returned with a cup of tea for Miss Featherstonehaugh, but anyone who knew him would have seen his pupils dilate slightly, the only sign that he ever allowed to show that he was irritated. He remained looking so youthful because he did not move his face over often.

On the other side of the desk the Dean was tight-lipped and the vein in his temple was fluttering again. He about to say something when there was a loud bang on the door. The handle turned and in came a man in a wheelchair, being pushed by a large, handsomely built black man in a Church of England dog collar. It was immediately obvious from the direction in which the second man pushed the wheelchair – straight into the Dean's desk – that he was blind. What was not so obvious, until he spoke, was that the man in the wheelchair was deaf. His words came out in a garbled stream, only comprehensible a minute or so afterwards, by which time it was usually too late. Crunch. Tom's toes.

‘Oh, great,' muttered Claire. ‘Here we go; the black and white minstrel show. Hey! Sooty! Why don't ye get yerself a PROPER guide dog? Old Ironsides is no good! Couldn't find 'is way out of a PAPER BAG!'

The coloured man turned and sniffed the air.

‘I smell something rotten,' he said, in a biblically deep voice.

‘Would you like a cup of tea, Vicar?' asked Denbeigh.

‘WOULD YOU LIKE A CUP OF TEA, VICAR?' imitated Claire. ‘Never mind about him, but I bloody well would like a cup. Only fix us a proper cuppa, will you, Denbeigh? And do it properly this time. Milk and three sugars in before the tea! And I like to be able to trot a mouse across the top!'

There was a volcanic silence.

Miss Featherstonehaugh began making some little wet gasping sounds, as if experiencing the onset of an asthma attack. Her eyes were fixed on Lord Denbeigh, who had turned and was looking at Claire with undisguised loathing. She stopped and turned and looked at them all with an expression that Tom could not place, but knew to be false.

‘Oh, go on with you all,' she said. ‘I'm only TEASING.'

^2.
Readers should note the inversion of the moral universe here, so that where cold would ordinarily represent bad, and warm good, here they represent their opposites. I do not suppose this is the last time I will muddle something up.

The Dean's party was over.

‘I'll show you to your room now, if I may, Tom, and then doubtless you should like to get on to the New Library, eh? See if young Alice is there?'

Nothing further was said of what had just happened. Before the Dean had managed to call a halt to the proceedings, Claire had also managed to insult those who had arrived late: Wilfred Drover, the Lecturer in Police Procedure (whom she called a ‘fat old whoopsie'); Dr Amanda Burrows, senior Lecturer in Forensics (‘a tight-arse with not enough grey matter to fill an egg cup'); and the Matron (whom she taunted for having ‘a mostly dead family' – something Tom understood was a bad thing to say even before everyone in the room blanched and Matron fled in tears).

They left the Dean's room in silence and walked across the winter gardens – a conservatory, barely warmer than the air outside, its brick-built beds full of strong-smelling pelargoniums and bare-branched fig trees. On the way, their feet echoing on the oak floor, the Dean pointed out some of the other rooms as they passed. Tom recognised a few names on the doors.

‘Now this is your room,' he said, striding ahead to remove a name label from the brass bracket on one of the doors. Wormwood, supposed Tom. The Dean took a key from his jacket at the same time as he pocketed the label – a move requiring some dexterity – and fitted it into the lock. He fumbled for a second, a puzzled frown creeping over his face, before removing the key and studying it as if it might reveal something. He was about to try it again when the door opened as if of its own accord and they were hit by an icy wall of freezing air.
³
The Dean took a step forward into the room and then, once he had seen inside, a step back in surprise.

‘Oh my word!'

The room, which Tom was beginning to think of as Wormwood's, whoever he might have been, had been carelessly, but thoroughly, searched: the furniture had been overturned, the carpet ripped up, the curtains torn down and drawers upended. Books spilled from their shelves and some of the pictures had been smashed. Over all the debris lay sheaves of paper from the drawers and piles of dirty kapok from the slashed furniture. One thin neo-Gothic window stood open and the bitter draught made everything flutter as if in a state of violated shock.

The Dean picked his way through the mess and closed the window with a leaden bang.

‘Wait!' said Tom, wondering for a second if this were some test of basic technique. Snow outside and an open window meant only one thing: footprints. Tom joined the Dean by the window and ran a finger over the lead frame around the latch. Just as he thought: scratched and bent. A screwdriver, probably. He pushed it open. He vaulted lightly onto the window ledge, landing on the tips of his toes.

‘Tom, I say—' began the Dean, meaning him to be careful. Tom peered out. Whoever had climbed through the window had done so with difficulty. A dense hedge of spotted laurel had grown up around the window, making it difficult to get in or out, but at the same time providing good cover while one did so. Beyond was a short stretch of grass and then some kind of side road. Tom could see the roofs of a line of parked cars. He ducked under the top of the window and leaped out across the laurel to land in a roll on the frozen verge on the other side. He was on his feet in seconds, brushing the slush from his suit. He stared about him for a few seconds, frowning.

‘Tom? Can you see anything?'

It was the disembodied voice of the Dean from beyond the hedge.

Tom couldn't see anything, for there was nothing to be seen, only a virgin expanse of snow
⁴
. The cars must belong to Fellows of the College, thought Tom: an Austin Seven, a flame-red Ferrari, a tuk-tuk and, propped against one of those old-fashioned bull-nosed Citroën vans, a tandem bicycle. Just as he might have expected.