The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  The heavy guitars of Rammstein throbbed through the room. For Tommy weights had nothing to do with appearance, nothing to do with image or attracting attention. They were everything to do with strength, and with a mindset. It was a mindset that focused everything into a single moment of intensity. Lift or be crushed. Tommy performed only five exercises, the three power lifts: bench press, deadlift, and squat; and the two Olympic lifts, cleans and snatches. Now he was deadlifting, his feet a yard apart in perfect alignment with his strapped knees, thighs parallel to the ground, back arched in perfect form. Chalked hands were in the alternate grip, one over the bar, one under, just inside the feet. His head was fixed forward, eyes boring through the wall, six 20kg weights on either end of a 20 kilogram bar.

  Shrieks came from the speakers. Tommy breathed in. Forced out. Breathed in. Forced out. In. His eyes drilled into the wall, finding a face; finding an unknown, nameless face; finding David’s face. The ligaments on his neck shot out like halyards; his skin turned purple; calluses on his hands went raw. With a scream to wake the dead and Tommy was upright; gnurls on the bar ripped the skin on his thighs, and then it smashed into the floor.

  Tommy threw his head back and howled. “Nooooo!” He fell on the rubber floor and flailed his already bleeding hands against it. “Em!” he screamed. “Em!” But all night nothing escaped the soundproof room.

  ____

  6

  The light is off but neither the man nor the woman is asleep. In the blue-grey smudges that slip past the curtains it is just possible to make out some of the details of the room. There is a table on either side of the bed. On her side there are many books, heaped chaotically as though they are in constant use. On his side there is only one, placed square to the edges as though it has possibly never been read. It is too dark to make out any of the titles but from the stockiness of its silhouette you might guess that the book on his side is a Bible. Whether it has ever been read or not it is too dark to tell.

  The quiet is absolute save for the sound of breathing. The students are not yet back for the start of term and the vast soundproofing space of Martyr’s Quad is more than enough to keep out the noise of Oxford’s evening traffic. The breathing is ragged and too fast for night time. Neither of them is close to sleep.

  “I asked Barnard Ellison to speak at the Memorial Service,” says Hedley.

  “I’m sure he preened himself with delight,” Clarissa, his wife, responds.

  “He made out he didn’t want to do it.”

  “Only because he can’t say exactly what he thinks with everyone listening. I’m sure he’d be delighted to speak at the funeral where he could dig the knife in where it counts, with no-one to notice.”

  “I told him I’d be speaking at the funeral.”

  The room is quiet again. Slowly one set of breathing eases into a gentler, regular pattern. Maybe it is a little too regular and undisturbed by apnoeia for someone in their middle age carrying a few extra pounds, who is sleeping on their back. But only maybe. There is the sound of cotton sliding on cotton as the one of the couple shifts and shifts again in an effort to settle; but both sets of eyes are closed, and the movement is coming from the middle of the bed. It is too dark to make out anything more.

  WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 5, 2007

  ____

  7

  Take care of my daughter.

  It had been light for several hours and at last Tommy’s head was clear. Take care of my daughter. That was his way in. The words confirmed what Tommy realised he’d already assumed. Wherever he was going he wasn’t going blind. The Professor had prepared the ground for him meticulously. Tommy had never met the professor’s daughter. He had absolutely no idea what he might do for a conversation starter, but somehow he knew it wouldn’t be a problem.

  Maybe it was just the famous Tommy West intuition he’d lived by for years. Until he got ill, that was. Until he realised that to stop himself getting ill again he had to draw up a strict set of rules and stick to them, rules built to stop him a long time before he flew off down whatever wild road his intuition took him on.

  Turning his back on these rules scared him. But as he played with the thought it became clearer. He had lived by his intuition. That was it. He might have got ill – once. But before he got ill he had lived. How long had it been now since he had really lived?

  He took a deep breath and picked up the phone book. Let’s see where you’re taking me today, Professor Shaw.

  The phone rang six times. “Becky Shaw.” The voice had a steadiness he found unnerving in someone who’d lost their father less than a day before.

  “Hi,” said Tommy. There was a brief silence. He wondered if he’d heard her swallow. It was probably nothing.

  “Hello?”

  It was clear that Tommy was going to have to fill the silence. “I used to be…”

  “I know who you are,” she said blankly. “You’re Tommy with an ‘i’. Dad told me you might call.”

  “So.” Tommy wasn’t sure whether to be pleased that he’d been right, he needn’t have worried about introductions, or nervous. “Are you doing anything this morning?”

  “Well, we’re going to the funeral directors at 11. I could meet you before that.”

  “The funeral directors? I’m sorry, I’ve called at a bad time.”

  “No. Well, yes, it’s a bad time. Dad died yesterday.” She sounded distant. “The police think he killed himself. But no, I’m glad you called. I need to get out of the house.”

  “Charles is dead? He wrote to me yesterday. I was going round to see him some time this week.”

  “Yeah. He told me he was going to get in touch with you.”

  Now Tommy was sure he was on the right track. Or the wrong one if that’s how you looked at it. That depended if you were Tommy or Tommy’s therapist.

  “I’ve heard all about you,” she continued. “Can you get to the Jericho Café for 10? There’s time for a coffee before I have to go.”

  “I’ll see you there.”

  The Jericho Café on Walton Street was only a few hundred yards from Tommy’s house. It was a favourite hang-out for bohemian students and north Oxford’s melange of environmentalists, artists, and thinkers. People in baggy jumpers and berets spun out coffees whilst they read scripts, committee papers, and paperback philosophy. The small deck-floored room at street level slipped down to a large dimly-lit cellar.

  Tommy picked Becky out at once as he carried two espressi downstairs. She was sitting with her right foot pulled up onto the chair, fiddling with the frayed fabric of her jeans. A flop of dyed red hair fell over her pale skin. The moment he saw her he shivered, just as he had done standing over John’s dead body. Something was pushing at a trapdoor in his head but he had no idea what.

  Becky stood up when she saw him coming. She was wearing a white T-shirt pulled tight over her wiry frame with the slogan Tag Slag splashed across her chest in pink.

  “Hey, Tommy.” He put the coffees down in case she was going to shake his hand but she kept her hands in her pockets and sat back down. Then she took them out and began playing with her hems again.

  “Hey.”

  “Look, Tommy. Fuck the lot of this. Someone killed my dad. I know that.” She paused “And I know you know that, too.” She paused again. “That’s what you called about, isn’t it? Or did you want to meet up with a stranger for small talk?”

  “I don’t do small talk.” Tommy looked around, holding the smell of his espresso.

  “Nor do I.” She smiled. Tommy smiled back. “The day before he died,” she said, “dad said he was going to get in touch with you.”

  Tommy said nothing.

  “He said you’d go straight to see him.”

  Tommy raised an eyebrow.

  “‘He couldn’t wait for a rare steak,’ is what he actually said.”

  Tommy grinned, then he checked himself. It felt wrong to be laughing with someone who’d just lost her father. Maybe it was just her way of coping.


  “So if he didn’t get in touch with you, you probably wouldn’t have called me. And if you went round and had a nice little chat, and it happened to be mentioned in passing that you might look me up, I’m pretty sure you’d have got my mobile number from him, not called me at home where you could just as easily have got hold of my mother.”

  “Hmm.”

  “So I reckon that means you went round and he was dead.”

  “And that would make me a suspect in a murder case.” He supposed he’d known this was true from the start, but it was only as he said the words out loud that he really understood them. It was the kind of dissociation from the reality of risks and consequences that he knew all too well. Intuition was fine, but he still had to tread very carefully until he knew more about Becky, and about her father. Besides, right now his intuition told him it was OK to be nervous.

  Becky laughed. “Dad knew someone was after him. He thought you were his best chance of finding them. You might be a suspect to the police, but not to me.”

  Which wasn’t much of a comfort. “Unfortunately,” said Tommy, “if he was dead when I went to see him, he didn’t get to tell me any of this. Or anything about you.”

  “You know me already, Tommy. You can read people as quickly as you can read books. Dad told me all about the way your mind works.”

  He wondered exactly how much the Professor had told her about the way his mind worked; and the times when it hadn’t worked. “Great.”

  “Heh heh. Go on, Tommy. Tell me what you can see.” She bent her shoulders over the table and eyeballed him like she was waiting for a Tarot reading at a fair. “Should I cross your palm with silver?” she laughed. “Or just buy you a coffee some time?”

  “OK,” said Tommy. “Here’s my best reading of the text.” He paused. This wasn’t comfortable. He had always been able to empathise with people. He couldn’t explain it but he knew it was nothing preternatural. He guessed it was just noticing body language, the tone of someone’s voice, how they dressed, what they chose off a menu. Nothing more than attention to detail really – exactly like a fairground mind reader’s so-called second sight. It gave him an uncanny ability to transform a client’s room into the exact realisation of what they’d always wanted but never imagined. Outside of work, though, he didn’t see many people. Just a few close friends, hardly the social whirl of old. Now he was supposed to look into this girl’s eyes and perform his juju cold. It felt like the light was being shone inside him. “I can tell that your father loved you,” he said.

  “I loved my dad too, you fuck.”

  “Like I said, I can tell that your father loved you. I can tell you’re bright, but then with your genetics that’s a no-brainer.” He paused. “There’s something in you that’s totally alien to society’s norms, but I don’t think you know what it is.” He stopped again. She didn’t fill the space. “And I can tell that you’re really pissed off that your mum and dad split up. But I haven’t worked out which of them you’re pissed off at. That’s it, not very much.”

  “OK, then.” Becky sat up straight and put her feet on the floor. She flicked her hair and steepled her hands. “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know why, if you think your dad was murdered, you’re speaking to me and not the police.”

  “Well, Tommy,” she began. “Suppose I’d been somewhere with lots of people when he died. Or suppose people didn’t know I was angry that he cut my mum off dead and left her to bring me up on her own straight after my twin sister died. Then, I suppose, I might have wanted to persuade the police to look more closely.”

  Tommy made a mental note of the information about the twin sister. “And how angry were you with him?”

  “These days? Not much really, but that’s not what people remember, is it? I’ve seen quite a bit of him recently. Mum doesn’t know. I’d like it to stay that way,” she added hurriedly. “We were starting to get close. Fuck it, Tommy, I was just getting him back and now he’s dead.”

  “So basically you’re not going to the police because you don’t want your mum to find out you were seeing your dad? Don’t you think it’s gone beyond that?”

  “What the fuck do you know?” She didn’t raise her voice, didn’t break from her steepled hands. If she had recomposed herself when she carried on there would have been no way of knowing. “As well as that, of course, I wouldn’t want to get anyone else in trouble either if they’d gone in the house after dad was killed and they hadn’t called the police.” She looked at him. Tommy didn’t flinch. “Well, whatever,” she shrugged. “Dad said if you couldn’t work it out no-one could.”

  “Let me have a think.” Tommy smiled.

  “You don’t need to think, Tommy. You’ve already decided what you’re going to do. Are you going to tell me what it is?”

  “Well,” said Tommy. “How about supper tonight?” He wanted to go home and catalogue the papers in his head. “I’ll tell you then.”

  “OK,” she said. “Meet me here at half six.”

  Tommy jumped. Wagner, Siegfried’s funeral march, reverberated through the room. He looked at the screen on his phone. “It’s my ex-girlfriend,” he said.

  “Lovely,” said Becky.

  “Emily Harris. DCI Emily Harris.”

  ____

  8

  “So, any thoughts during the night about the delightful Shaw women?” asked Emily, gulping her coffee between words.

  “Thoughts like whether one of them was capable of murdering the Professor?” said Rosie. The truth was she hadn’t had any thoughts on the subject at all. She’d got home shortly after 11, managed to fetch a few locusts from the fridge for Chris, her pet chameleon, and within ten minutes she’d been spark out.

  “It would be great if you had.” Her boss didn’t sound hopeful, but Rosie caught something she didn’t often see in Emily’s eye. Maybe it was too much coffee, but Rosie would have sworn it was something akin to malevolence. It was something she rarely saw in her devoutly Christian boss, and she didn’t know if it made Emily seem more human or whether it scared the bejesus out of her.

  “Sorry, boss.”

  “Never mind.” Her face was hopeful, but Emily’s body language was resigned. It was certainly a coincidence that the man’s lawyer should turn up dead the same day he did, and the guy’s home life clearly wasn’t all sweetness and Norman Rockwell, but the house they’d visited last night didn’t feel like a murder scene. Yes, the banquet for one was eccentric, staged even, but so was the rest of the house. There was no sign of forced entry, or an argument; no one else’s fingerprints, no sign that another person had been in the house for a long time. No, this reeked of the pointless banality of suicide.

  “So do we carry on looking?” asked Rosie.

  “Yes we carry on looking.” There was steel in Emily’s voice. “The letter Shaw sent to Tommy West said he was heading to the States. That doesn’t fit with suicide.”

  “Want me to check on it?”

  “Later. I don’t think our American friends would appreciate a call just yet. I’d like you to go back to his house, look through his study, see if you can find anything about his plans. I’m going to speak to the Warden of St Saviour’s to see what he knew about his colleague’s career progression.”

  Emily got up from her desk and began walking to the coffee machine. She didn’t make eye contact once. Rosie knew exactly what that meant, and why Emily was sending her to do the donkey work in the Professor’s house. It meant she wanted to be alone; and that meant she was going to go and see her ex, Tommy West. Tommy was the great unspoken in Emily’s past. What Rosie knew about him from Emily was that he’d been her first love, and that he’d dumped her. What she’d inferred from Emily’s all too Christian silence about the details was that he’d acted like a total shit, and royally screwed her up.

  For all that she was nearly ten years younger than Emily and a grade her junior, Emily’s religion and generosity gave her an unworldliness that brought out the maternal in
Rosie; and perhaps the fact that Emily had never been able to have kids of her own meant that she’d never lost her own childish vulnerability. For years Rosie’s protective side had fostered the image of Tommy as some kind of monster, but the lonely, rather ordinary man she’d met last night didn’t match the image. Then again, they’d hardly met under the most normal circumstances.

  “What are you waiting for,” said Emily sharply, returning with another coffee that was already half empty. This wasn’t the time to push things.

  “On my way.”

  “SOCOs have long since finished. You’d better pick up some spare keys from the college porters.”

  *

  Rosie loved old Oxford houses that seemed to leak books from the cracks in their decaying plaster. She’d never been to university. There had been no need. She’d always known she wanted to be in the police, like her father and grandfather had been in Hong Kong. But the mix of books and solitude made her feel totally at home.

  Professor Shaw’s was a typical academic’s study, a cross between a bombsite and a fly tip. It might look like it’s a mess, but I know where everything is, and that’s what matters. That’s what people who lived like this always said. From the number of times she’d watched them foraging for a vital piece of paper with all the desperation of a bear emerging from hibernation and finding its larder still buried under snow, she knew this was a lie.

  Somehow she had a feeling that Professor Shaw would be different. It was true that everything looked a mess; but the dinner he’d laid out for himself had been beautifully ordered. She had a feeling he wasn’t the kind of person to leave work half done. All of which meant there had to be some kind of order underlying the chaos. Either that or he was murdered after all.