The Yeare's Midnight (5 page)

Her lecture series, ‘Reconstructing Donne’, was based on her recent book. Stussman had set about the academic orthodoxy on the Metaphysical Poets with a ferocity she was beginning to regret. The
New
York
Times
Book
Review
had pretty much caught the critical response: ‘Stussman’s attack on post-structuralism
is memorable more for its vigour than its rigour.’ The others weren’t much better. ‘Try to avoid meeting Dr Stussman down an intellectual dark alley,’ warned the
Washing
ton
Post
: ‘her vitriol is fatal at ten paces.’

Both of these reviews were better than the one in the
Sunday
Telegraph,
which had described her as ‘bereft of empathy, temptingly putdownable and probably certifiable’. The controversy had sold more books than she had ever expected. Her lecture classes were extremely well attended. However, she had clearly got the bird from the grey-hairs at the English Faculty who had given her the highly unpopular five p.m. lecture slot. Perhaps she was being paranoid. She doubted it.

The faculty site at Cambridge was a spectacular architectural horror. The dismal cluster of buildings resembled an old Eastern Bloc military hospital. The lecture rooms were no better. They were small, badly ventilated and uncomfortable. Stussman longed for the airy auditorium at the University of Wisconsin, with its remote-control slide projector and sound system. Still, at least the room was full and not many lecturers could claim that distinction. She noticed that for the second week running her audience was mostly male. Next time she would wear trousers.

‘Last week, we talked about the intellectual context of metaphysical poetry. We talked about its associations with the religious uncertainties of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and with the rise of humanist philosophy during the Renaissance. Today, I’d like to consider the anatomy of metaphysical poetry. In particular, the intellectual and stylistic devices deployed by the poets to force home their points. If we accept the view that many of these pieces were composed for a highly specific coterie audience, then we need to understand what that audience was looking for. Foremost among the literary devices used was die “conceit”. Who can explain that to us?’ There was a shuffling of feet and a couple of nervous coughs. She had expected this. British students were notoriously taciturn. She pointed at a shaggy student in the front row who seemed to be
fixated on her ankles. ‘How about you?’ He jumped slightly and sat up in his chair.

‘Well, a conceit is a kind of metaphor. A clever image used to make an argumentative point.’

‘Good. A conceit is a metaphor or simile that appears at first glance to be unusual, improbable or even shocking. However, as the poet develops the image, the reader is gradually persuaded of its intellectual value.’ She heard a few students starting to scribble notes. The sound was always rewarding.
Screw
the
New
York
Times
Book
Review.
‘John Donne famously compares a humble flea with a marriage bed. He is trying to seduce a woman and bitterly complains that because the flea has sucked his blood and his lover’s it has enjoyed a closer intimacy with her than he has.’ More scribbling. She was beginning to relax. Next week she would try making a joke.

It was dark when Stussman left the Faculty. The reflected lights of Queen’s College wobbled brightly in the black Cam as she retraced her steps across Silver Street Bridge. There was a lot of traffic in Cambridge, far more than the small town deserved, and Stussman was soaked with spray from the roadside puddles by the time she arrived at her rooms. She could hear her phone trilling sharply behind the door. She fumbled with the key and stepped quickly inside, making it to her cluttered desk just in time.

‘Heather Stussman.’ There was a faint crackle of electricity. Then she heard the voice that would come to haunt the silent spaces of her existence.

‘Your book is promising.’

‘Pardon?’

‘The newspapers have mistaken your originality for carelessness. Sadly, your obsession with logical clarity seems to have dulled your empathetic reflexes.’

‘I’m sorry. Who is this?’

‘Did you receive my letter?’

‘If you don’t tell me your name, I won’t know if your letter arrived or not.’

‘It would have arrived this morning,’ the voice said simply.

Stussman paused. This was getting weird. Her mind chewed over the alternatives: a practical joke, maybe. It was probably Mark, an ex-boyfriend from Wisconsin now researching Milton in Edinburgh. He could do all sorts of funny accents. She reached into her rucksack and pulled out the envelope, still unopened, that she had received earlier in the day. She wedged the phone between her right cheek and her collarbone and tore the envelope open. Inside was a neatly folded piece of writing paper.

‘What does the letter contain?’ said Crowan Frayne.

‘A line of poetry.’

‘You recognize it, of course?’

‘Is this some kind of joke? If that’s you, Mark, I’m going to kick your ass.’

‘Tell me.’ The voice was insistent. Stussman could feel the frustration rising within her.

‘It’s a fragment from “A Valediction: Of Weeping” by John Donne.’

‘You are familiar with it?’

‘It’s all in the book, Buster – maybe you should read it more closely.’

‘I read it voraciously,’ Frayne said. ‘I am a poet. Watch the evening news.’

‘Who
is
this?’ Stussman’s patience had never been her strongest feature and now it evaporated completely in the sudden heat of annoyance. Whoever this was, it wasn’t Mark.

‘Explain it to the police.’

The line went dead. Stussman slammed the phone down angrily and closed the door to her rooms. It was probably some student trying to freak her out. Or one of McKensie’s cronies. She looked out of her small window across the dimly lit courts of Southwell College and its braying cabals of students. Car headlights crawled interminably up Trumpington Street as the early-evening rush hour tightened its grip on the ancient city.

Heather Stussman felt very alone.

Underwood sat at a desk in the Incident Room. A list of Lucy Harrington’s known friends and local acquaintances lay in front of him. Harrington’s parents had managed to provide most of the names that afternoon before heading back to Peterborough. None of the names struck him as particularly promising. Most of the people they belonged to were female and none had criminal records. Lucy Harrington was a serious-minded athlete and her social circle was limited, consisting mainly of her fellow swimmers. Underwood felt that the curious and savage circumstances of the case would require more complex treatment. They were hunting a predator.

Dexter was opposite him, frantically writing a crime-scene report. She had brought in an electric lamp from home and Underwood found its hard white light hypnotic. He was a rabbit in Dexter’s headlights. Now she was tiring him out and he was finding it hard to concentrate. A brief conversation with Julia ten minutes previously had done nothing to improve his mood. She was apparently going to the cinema with her sister.

Underwood didn’t believe her. His stomach flipped again. He had to find out what was going on. He had learned to beware the banal, suspect the plausible. His wife was a good liar: too good, in fact. Underwood dealt with liars all the time. He recognized the symptoms.

‘Have you got a minute, sir?’ DC Jensen was standing at his side. Dexter tensed visibly. Underwood wondered for a second if his sergeant was the jealous type. He crushed the thought.
Jealous
of
what,
exactly?
Don’t
flatter
yourself,
pal.

‘We are continuing the house-to-house, sir. Nothing as yet. We’re going to work up one of those “Did you see anything?” major-incident posters for motorists and put them up on Hartfield Road,’ Jensen said.

‘And London Road.’ Dexter shot across Jensen’s bows without looking up. Jensen ignored the detective sergeant and continued.

‘Harrison and I have been going through the newspaper articles that were printed after she won her medal.’

Dexter swore under her breath. She had been planning to do that herself.

‘Good,’ said Underwood. ‘What have you got?’

‘There’s an article in the
Echo,
sir,’ Jensen waved the paper in front of him, ‘Can I read you a section?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘It’s just one paragraph, actually.’ Jensen sat on the edge of Dexter’s desk and read aloud. ‘“Lucy Harrington returned home today after a triumphant Commonwealth Games. Lucy won the hundred-metre freestyle in a new European record time, narrowly defeating Australian world champion Suzy Baker-Douglas. Lucy, of Hartfield Road, Fawley will be guest of honour at a Civic Reception on December 9th. Tickets available from the Town Hall.”’

‘So?’ Dexter put her pen down firmly. ‘I imagine they all say much the same thing.’

‘They don’t, actually.’ Jensen smiled, ever so sweetly. ‘This is the only one that says where she lives.’

‘It doesn’t give her address, though. Hartfield Road goes on for miles. She lived in a cul-de-sac off the main road anyway,’ said Dexter dismissively. ‘There’s no mention of that.’

Underwood shook his head. He was getting the point. ‘Think about it. Hartfield Road, Fawley.’ He got up and walked over to the map board. ‘Fawley isn’t a village or a town. The area only has that name because of Fawley Wood.’ He pointed at the green smudge on the map that represented the woodland behind Lucy Harrington’s house. ‘The implication of the article is that Harrington lived somewhere along the Hartfield Road as it cuts through the wood. If you look, there are only two groups of houses in this section of the map: Fawley Close and Sherling Drive. It wouldn’t have taken our man long to figure out which one she lived in.’

Dexter thought for a second. ‘Who wrote the article?’

Jensen checked. ‘George Gardiner.’

‘That’s the journo the killer called this morning,’ Dexter said.
‘If the killer read the
Echo
then he’s almost certainly local. It’s delivered through the letter box.’

‘Well done, Jensen.’ Underwood watched the detective constable as she walked away. The double helix of desire and despair twisted darkly inside him. He tried to crush it. ‘Dex. We should pull up records of people arrested for burglaries in the county over the last five years. The way our boy gained access to the house suggests to me that he’s done it before. If he’s local, he might already be in our system.’

‘Right. That’ll be a long list,’ she said tightly.

‘What’s up, Dex? Jensen gets your hackles up, doesn’t she?’ Underwood asked.

‘Off the record?’

‘Always.’

‘Jensen is a slag. She screws around. She thinks she knows it all. She’s a bright girl but you should see her off duty –’ Dexter was warming to her theme ‘– staggering around the pubs with a fag in one hand and a double gin in the other.’

‘Doesn’t make her a bad person.’

‘It makes her a bad
police
person. You don’t become one of the lads by screwing them. The way she behaves affects the way the other coppers look at me.’

‘That’s your imagination.’

‘When I was a uniform, back in London, I was sent to Coventry by my entire relief because I wouldn’t sleep with any of them. That’s the mentality we have to deal with. I decided that if I was going to be a serious copper, then I should behave like one. If a bloke slags around he’s a hero. If a girl slags around, she wrecks her own reputation and makes life twice as hard for the rest of us.’

Underwood went quiet. He thought of Julia again: cold and uninterested. Screwing another man and enjoying it. Laughing at him. He was angry that somehow the thought excited him: as if it had injected life into their dead sexuality. Dexter sensed her boss’s change of mood and switched the subject. She was learning how to play him.

‘This case, sir. Have you ever seen anything like this before?’

‘Not really.’ Underwood stood and pulled his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘But I’ve got the feeling that it’s going to be a long winter.’

Dexter watched him leave. They were both flying blind. They would have to learn together.

The
railway
line
cuts
into
the
northern
suburbs
of
New
Bolden,
through
the
city’s
new
retail
and
industrial
parks
and
then
on
towards
Parkway
station.
The
line
has
become
much
busier
in
recent
years,
following
New
Bolden
’
s
growth
both
as
a
com
muter
station
and
as
a
business-development
zone.
A
number
of
software
and
logistics
companies
have
sprung
up
in
the
city,
taking
advantage
of
the
new
sites
and
financial
incentives
that
the
city
council
has
made
available.
Their
hi-tech,
smoky
glass
buildings
back
onto
the
railway
line,
reflecting
the
tired
faces
of
rail
passengers
as
the
crowded
commuter
trains
for
London
flash
past.

The
line
is
old
and
unsuited
to
the
increase
in
traffic
volume.
The
fencing
is
rusted
and
broken
in
places.
At
some
points,
it
has
ceased
to
exist
altogether.
Sometimes,
at
the
weekends
or
during
school
holidays,
children
crouch
in
the
overgrown
hedge
rows
and
hurl
stones
at
trains
as
they
accelerate
out
of
New
Bolden.