The Pink and the Grey (25 page)

I felt a ripple of events wash over me and begin to expand.

“You coup me?” the Master said, unbelieving. “Throw me over?”

“We do not, Master. We are placing you under temporary Lodge Arrest. Study leave, you might say, and we shall. Until this crisis is averted. You shall have no contact with the outside world.”

“We do not do this lightly, Amanda,” said Dennis.

“For the duration of the emergency Professor Sauvage, as Vice Master, shall take on the Master’s duties to the best of his abilities.”

“Bar Lulu, Lulu,” he said, unwisely attempting a joke.

Amanda began electric verbal exchanges of some vigour that led only to a rapid exit in the company of some trusted and toned elves and in the direction of her apartments, grandly called the Master’s Lodge, on the St Andrew’s Street side of Bottom Court. Here, I was told, she would be watched closely by cameras and eyes, and would not be allowed phones or computers. She would be isolated, for the good of the college.

It seemed to me a drastic step and I felt almost sorry for her. Dennis murmured in duplicated agreement, but believed we had no real choice. “She is a loose cannon, a loose cannon, my dear Spencer. We are already holed well below the waterline.”
 

“Indeed, Dennis, indeed,” I replied. “We flounder, sails askew, wheel spinning, at a dangerous list, low on rations, high on scurvy, pirates on our tail, sandbanks tickling our keel, and guided only by a faulty moral compass.”

He laughed grimly and grabbed my arm. I helped him to his feet.

“You must excuse me, young man,” he said, leaning in with a conspiratorial twinkle. “I believe it is time for me to walk the plank.”

I watched him leave, hoping his words were neither prediction nor euphemism.

At around six that evening, with college still fizzing at the day’s events, I received a text from Conor. He was coming to see me on a matter of urgency.

My nerves were by then a boxed, plastic-wrapped thousand-piece jigsaw under the sofa bed and I had rather begun to top up my levels of adrenalin from the gin bottle as I relayed the news — in only the most circumspect of terms — to Claire on the phone.

I attempted to bat Conor away at least until the morning’s grey blast. He persisted, abusing exclamation marks like a twelve-year-old, and ultimately I gave way: I never could resist a ginger.

 
I met him at the front gate with, I hoped, a sober air.

“Jeez, pie-eyed already, Spencer?” he said before even a
hello
.

“It has been a day of some stress, which I hope fervently shall not be added to.” I laid a hand on the curl of his shoulder and let it drift marginally south. “Gin? The bar will be—”

“No, please, no booze. I need your help. The Archivist’s help. I know youse lot have been in the office.”

I failed to fake surprise. In my enhanced form I could merely affect a cartoonish goggle that I imagine should have been accompanied by a throaty klaxon sound effect from an animated cartoon.

“We have a situation,” he said. “A shitty situation. A shituation. Can I see the Archivist?”

I brought him through briskly into the poorly illuminated Bottom Court where passers by might not hear the A-word.

“I suspect he might not be in the appropriate mind for a meeting,” I said, and related the tale of the day with the strongest counsel regarding its sensitive nature.

He absorbed the news showing no surprise or shock. I supposed that once you’d attended a meeting of the Women’s Institute you were incapable of such emotions.

“My turn,” he said. “Manish saw your camp old porter at the
Bugle
office, pretending to be a maintenance man. We reckon he was adding some network doohickey, are we right?”

I nodded reluctantly and began to explain. He held up a hand to stop me.

“Now,” he continued, “Manish was in the office that morning to set the Googles on our mutual friend. To find out whether he was all he cracked up to be. And when
I
did that, Geoff’s deputy Simon found out somehow or other and I damn near got a fist up me. If Simon sees that Manish has done the same thing…” He trailed off.

“I understand,” I said. “I am sure the Archivist can assist in some fashion.”

I took him the few metres to the Archivist’s ground floor entrance on the east range of Bottom Court. This was A Staircase: that is, the staircase labelled A, rather than merely a capitalised indefinite. Through the doors we descended the stone steps, slightly bowed through use, toward the restricted area, the all-seeing basement of knowledge.

Not half-way, yet already more than a few degrees warmer, we were met by an elf. It was Jay, the fresher I had seen frequently in the Hub in the last week.

“Mr Beardsley,” I said. “Going up for some air?”

“Still on shift, sir. I am here to turn you both away, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, but—”

“We must see the Archivist urgently.”

The lad’s gaze never raised above the nipple. “The Archivist says all is in hand, sir.”

“This concerns the
Bugle
affair,” I said, not wishing to say any more.

“Yes, he said all is in hand,” Jay repeated in an apologetic tone. His arms were outstretched, barring further descent.

“Runs a tight little ship, does your Archivist,” said Conor. “Do I have to beg on my hands and knees? I can be good at that.”

Jay chanced a smile. “I’ll bear that in mind, sir. It’s unnecessary in this case.”

“Am I given that the Archivist was, as it were, tuned in to our conversation a moment ago?” I said.

“I can tell you nothing else, Dr Flowers. It is all in hand.”

“That’s three hands it’s in,” said Conor. “Is it me, am I unclean? Do I smell of journalist? Do I need to be scrubbed down with antiseptic before I’m allowed in? The red doesn’t come off, you know.”

“All I can do is repeat the message, sir. Four hands now.” The boy blushed shyly, perhaps unsure whether he was allowed to joke with us.

“I believe we are wasting our precious, Conor. The Archivist is a busy man. He will set his elves upon the problem. A swift drink and then you can be on your way.”

I led Conor back outside so the four-handed elf might return to his duties.

“Is it like that all the time?” Conor asked as we stood beside the lawn under orange light-polluted clouds. “Do you get half-way through a sentence and some poor undergrad runs up with the rest of it on a bit of parchment? Jeez, I hope you boys don’t have a quiz night here. He must win every week. Question one:
what is
— and he’ll shout out
pomegranate
and everyone will tut and moan.”

“It is not quite as awful as that,” I replied, a foot straightening the edge of grass. “In normal times, such as these most definitively are not, we go about our business with hardly a thought as to what occurs below ground. On occasion one might spot the blinking of a red eye in a public or private corner, a gentle prod to the cerebellum. I dare say it does not alter behaviour greatly. I scarcely believe there can be anything the Archivist has not already seen, in some variant or another, in some multiplication, and you must admit that some gentlemen even find the concept… attractive. On the whole we feel the value outweighs the cost. Technically, of course, it’s a great achievement and something the college is terribly proud of, in private that is.”

Conor was thoughtful and about to respond when the Archivist’s double doors burst open and the same blond elf appeared once more.

“He has another message,” said Jay, marginally breathless. “He doesn’t enjoy quizzes or pomegranates.”

Conor accepted the offer of a drink.

With the hot blood of a chase pounding through his veins Geoff insisted on a Tuesday morning quick meeting around his desk. Not surprisingly I kept my mouth shut about the insignificant matter of the Master of St Paul’s being locked up. Neither did I mention the camera that was sitting up in the far corner watching every tea break, or the mysterious device plugged into our network that I now knew secretly copied everything that went through it straight back to a bunch of geeks at the college.

Spencer had been on a full-on drunken blab the night before in the college bar. I’d had to drag him away from the students into a quiet corner in case they were taking notes. Of course, he’d thought I’d had other reasons for a little privacy, and I was forced to let him down gently. OK, not so gently.

It had been painful to watch. I’d told him he really ought to knock off the gin and dry out for a while, at least until everything that was going to happen, whatever it was, had happened. And he’d gone all maudlin, and switched on the woe-is-me fairy lights, and I’d kept wishing that the cute barman would wander over telling me to leave Spencer there for the cleaners to mop up in the morning while we had a drink by ourselves somewhere nice and cosy and preferably not with a camera looking at us. But it hadn’t been my night.

“The more I think about this,” said Geoff, chewing on a pen since all the doughnuts had already gone, “the more I’m buying the immigrant angle. No wonder St Paul’s keeps a low profile. Don’t do anything too interesting, keep your heads down, here’s a few hundred grand and an Azerbaijani to put up for a few weeks until the coast is clear.”

“Why do the race thing, then, and come to us for publicity?” asked Manish.

“It’s a cover, ain’t it,” said Geoff as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “What you do is, you get everyone looking at a bunch of poofs running around Cambridge while you sneak coachloads of Muslims in the back door.”

“It’s not just St Paul’s students taking part,” I said. “They’re getting people from other colleges, and people who aren’t students at all.”

“Careful, ginge, it sounds like you’ve been doing some research. I wouldn’t want you to overdo it, pull a muscle.” He glanced across at Simon to get a smile of approval at the gag.

“Special occasion, boss,” I said. “Don’t get used to it.”

“I won’t. I’m spiking that story anyway.”

“What? Why?”

I tensed, waiting for him or Simon to cackle and rub their hands and reveal they knew everything about everything and were going to help me to accidentally fall down the stairs if I would just come this way…

“Cos it’s a distraction from the real story,” said Geoff. “I’m not gonna print a bloody great splash on illegal immigrants and have to make space for your shitty little piece on some tenners disappearing from bleedin’ charity buckets. I want you to start hunting down the routes in and out. How do they do it: come in on a student visa and then jump into the back of a bus? Very handy, next to the bus station. No coincidence.”

“Geoff,” I said, trying not to laugh, “They didn’t build the college next to the bus station. I’m pretty sure it was the other way around.”

“Well, how long has the bus station been there? Fucking Chaucer might have come here for a day trip on the back of a bleedin’ donkey for all I know. Find out.”

I wrote “fucking Chaucer’s bleeding donkey” in my notebook for future generations to decipher, next to the growing collection of snowman-like spheres with steam rising from them that were my artist’s impressions of the editor.

“But before you do that, I need to borrow your pink passport.”

“My whatnow?” I tilted my head like a confused puppy.

“This place you go to. Bar Humbug. Crappy name for a bar if you ask me.”

“Are you on the turn, boss? I tell you, there’s someone out there for everyone, even someone of your— of your calibre.”

“I’m not on the bleedin’ turn. Psych found a reference to it, didn’t you?”

Simon turned up the snark. “Some
forum
— is that better, ginge, happy with that word, are you,
forum?
— some forum, some bitter young queen going all handbags. Said the Archivist was always propping up the bar at Humbug, had given him the brush-off there.”

This was a plant, surely, I thought. Unless it was real actual honest journalism, in which case the Archivist could have been any one of a dozen bar-proppers I could recognise even if I couldn’t put a name to. I hoped St Paul’s weren’t trying to push the spotlight onto Quiff or someone. And then I realised that for all I knew Quiff
was
the Archivist. Maybe the whole secret squirrel thing could be run from there when Quiff fancied a drink. Maybe Quiff downed a special vodka and all the tables flipped over to the peep show.

All I could do was go along with whatever it was. I knew someone at the college was watching. I tried desperately not to peek at the camera and give it a little thumbs up.

“OK,” I said, “so what’s the plan?”

“Me and you,” said Geoff. “We go down and give it the once over.”

“You need me for that? It’s not that big. And I’ve given it the once over more times than I care to remember.”

“Well, you needn’t think I’m going to that place by myself.”

I laughed. “Fine. Conor Geraghty, ace reporter, chaperone to the straights. First Manish and now you. Of course, you can’t go dressed like that.”

“Like what?” He spread his arms and looked down. Pale blue shirt and a gut hanging over his slacks. I’d seen far worse, but it was worth the wind-up.

“Like that! We’ll have to butch you up a bit.”

“Geoff,” said Simon, cutting in. “Far be it from me to interrupt all this flirting, but if we’re done, can I borrow you for a moment?”

“You’re just stealing him from me now, so you can have your wicked way with him on the fire escape. And I thought it was me you liked.” I turned to Manish, who was enjoying this. “Men! They’re all bastards. You mark my words, Twiglet.”

“Enough,” said Geoff. “Clear off back to your desks.”

The two Londoners disappeared into a secret huddle out of sight, and I tried not to climb the walls in panic.
All in hand
, said the Archivist, or his shy blond representative on Earth with all the hands, and I had to trust him. Surely with their network gizmo it should’ve been the work of seconds to insert a seek-and-destroy virus that hopped between the computers taking an axe to the log files? But then most of my knowledge about this sort of thing came from TV shows and films where the password was always guessed on the second try and everything looked and sounded like a fairground ride, and when it went wrong the computers exploded as if they had a tank full of petrol.