by Dan Holloway
“It’s OK,” he said. “I’m not hungry.”
Becky scraped a handful of something green, that seemed to have bits of black grit on it, into her mouth. “So do we have a deal?”
Tommy reached out his hand. He looked at the slick of hummus and oil on her skin and made a fist, wiggling his pinkie at her. She locked fingers with him and they smiled.
Not that he’d had a choice. Drawing up a pros and cons table had taken a few seconds. Cons: maybe she killed him and you’re next, which was unlikely but he thought he could look after himself; maybe there are things she shouldn’t know. That was slightly trickier. Charles had wanted Tommy to look after her, but would it really help her never to find out what had happened to him? Anyway, if it came to it he was rather good at hiding things from people. Pros: he knew nothing about Charles’ friends or anything else he’d done in the last ten years. She did. And – it had taken him aback as he thought it, almost aloud to himself – he was lonely, and having someone around at a time like this almost certainly wasn’t a bad thing.
“Can I ask a favour?” Tommy said.
“Can I finish my supper first?”
“Of course. And then do you feel up to going to your dad’s house?”
“I was wondering why you hadn’t asked earlier,” she said. “I assumed you must have seen everything you needed to already,” she added casually.
Who had seen what the day Charles died? More to the point who had seen what and not called the police? Or an ambulance. It was a subject he would have to broach at some stage, but for the moment it could wait. They were starting off with less than the truth. Tommy wondered if it would set the pattern for their working relationship. “I’d like to pick up some wine.”
“Dad mentioned that,” she said. “You know, I inherited dad’s palate. I know how good some of that stuff is.”
“I’m sure you do.” Tommy looked at the tasteless straggles of fibre she was dragging around the plate with her fingers.
“Fuck you.”
Tommy was about to laugh, bond over a moment of dry humour with her, when he realised she wasn’t sharing a joke. He remembered, properly for the first time, that she had just lost her father. He was sorry, but he didn’t know how to say it, and he didn’t trust himself if he opened his mouth. As much as he didn’t want to hurt her there was also a part of him that didn’t want to mess things up and lose the leads she could give him.
“I could contest his wishes,” Becky said. She seemed to be absolutely serious. Forget the muck she was hoofing into herself. It was probably just something she’d learned from her trendy friends at school. If she had inherited Charles’ taste she was probably feeling it now as one of the few fragile threads that connected her somehow in her mind to the man she hadn’t had time to know. Tommy shuffled on his seat.
And as if the needle had jumped, Becky grinned. “Or I could assume you’ll do the right thing when it comes to drinking it.”
“What would that be? Invite you round for birthdays and Christmas for the next ten years?”
“Well,” she said, clapping the crumbs off her hands. “Most of it, even the old stuff, still isn’t at its best. Especially the pudding wines. And on a selfish note I haven’t exactly developed my taste buds to their full potential yet. So the right thing would be to wait for ten years before you open a bottle.” She paused. “Do you like to do the right thing, Tommy?”
“When I can.”
“And when’s that? When you can do it straight away? Or when you’re not nuts?”
Tommy couldn’t detect the slightest hint of humour or malice in her voice. Clearly Charles had gone into more than basic details about his background. He wasn’t sure whether it should, but that made him feel more relaxed with her. He said nothing.
“Good answer,” said Becky. “Sorry,” she added, seeming to shrink into herself. “Dad didn’t believe in the right thing.” She wasn’t looking at him. For the second time Tommy felt her loss coming through whatever act it was she was putting on and, looking at her line-free face, he was reminded just how young she was. “People thought he cared about pleasure, yeah? That it was all that mattered to him but it wasn’t. He believed in projects. He was a sentimentalist, you know? The best project, he used to say, the only project really worth following, is love.”
Tommy wondered when Charles used to say it. He took the deep red pashmina from the back of her chair and placed it around her shoulders, his hands firm through the silk cloth as he did so. “Let’s go and get the car.”
Tommy parked the old white Renault 4 in Bane’s Avenue. It was strange being inside Charles’ house again. The meticulous order was still there, but it wasn’t the order that had been the soul of the place. That had been in the heavy air that dripped with expectation of things that might be. But the expectation had gone. The smell of game had disappeared and was replaced with nothing but the sharp must of a house going cold.
“It’s downstairs in the cellar,” said Becky. “Follow me.”
Becky turned right at the end of the corridor, opened a white clapboard door, and reached inside for the switch. “Mind yourself on the stairs,” she warned.
Tommy followed her down the narrow, uneven concrete. He could feel the air getting cooler and damper, the atmosphere protected year-round from the vicissitudes of sun and central heating. At the bottom Becky stopped and huddled herself against the wall. “Through there,” she said, ushering Tommy past her. The cellar had two rooms. The ante-chamber, in which they were standing, was cluttered floor to ceiling with tools and meters, fuse boxes and DIY paraphernalia. It was no more than 6 feet across, a tiny fraction of the building’s footprint. Through the overalls and wrench kits it was difficult to see that there were actually steps immediately in front of him, and that they led up to a small hole no more than 30 inches square – just large enough to put a case of wine through. Tommy blinked as Becky flicked on the lights.
“You’d better hurry.” He heard her voice, agitated, just behind him; then back on an even tone. “You don’t want to raise the temperature too much.”
That’ll be the least of the wine’s problems if the college movers get their hands on it, Tommy thought.
“The cases should have your name on,” she called.
Tommy banged his knee on the concrete steps, taken aback by their steepness. The top step was just as narrow as the others. How the hell was he going to get a case of wine through there safely? “Any chance of a hand?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I haven’t got my inhaler with me. This place fucks my chest.”
Great.
He looked into the vast cellar. He couldn’t tell how far back it went through the walls of racking but from the size of the house he guessed it was upwards of 30 feet. He was through now. It was very different from his own customised cellar, just rack on rack of bottles slotted into little square pigeonholes. Underneath each was a hand-written label listing the wine’s chateau or estate of origin, its year, date and place of purchase, and provenance. Around the outer walls were neatly stacked unopened cases. Tommy guessed that the arrangement of the cellar would follow the pattern of the rest of the house, that rather than store bottles by region or by date, Charles would have ordered them towards the far end in ascending quality. Quality judged by what? he wondered. Points that had been assigned to them by the Wine Spectator or some other source of received wisdom? He doubted it. Years of Charles’ own tasting experience, or just a sense when he held the bottle in his hand? Possibly. Most likely, Tommy thought, Charles would have ranked the wines according to the strength of anticipation he felt at the thought of drinking them. He could easily imagine the Professor planning the direction of his life as a road that led to the back of the cellar, planning his death at the moment he tasted the finest wine of all.
Tommy made his way to the back of the cellar, and was pleased to see that there were several holes in the rack, and two plain crates on the floor marked “Tommy West. This way up.”
; “Got them yet?” Becky sounded anxious.
Tommy picked up one of the crates. “Coming.” He carried it deftly to the small entrance, his back to the antechamber, and laid it lightly just inside. “Two seconds.” He looked out at her and smiled. She had taken a couple of steps back up the stairs and was sitting with her arms folded around her knees. He brought the other case and laid it beside the first, climbed out and bent back inside, lifting one case at a time very slowly until the bottom of the case was level with the bottom of the hole. He eased it gently through towards him, and took it down the steps. As soon as the second crate was through the lights went off.
“I’ll get you a drink, shall I? Meet you in the sitting room?” said Becky, already on her way.
“Please,” seemed to be the right answer, and he followed with the first of the cases, which he set down with a feather touch in the hall, pleased that Charles seemed not to have set the thermostat for winter before he died.
The sitting room on the first floor was where Professor Shaw had held informal drinks parties for students and visiting academics. It had a wall-length bar along one side, every inch of which the Professor had filled with bottles of spirits and fortified wines. They were divided into whiskies, brandies, armagnacs, cognacs, calvados, ports, madeiras, and sherries, each ascending by age. The room’s deep crimson walls matched the fabric of a chaise longue, and the only other furniture was a polished black grand piano and red velvet stool. The room was laid out to be wholly functional, and that function was entertaining.
Tommy remembered the receptions he had been to. At some stage someone would always sit down and play the grand piano flawlessly. For a moment people would fall silent to listen and then the gentle background would fade against the sound of laughter and the rat-a-tat-tat of ideas being fired off, always with passion but never with anger – not in this room at least. As he remembered one by one the evenings he had spent here, he came inevitably to the last of them; and the pleasant sounds disappeared.
He joined Becky on the chaise longue and took an enormous balloon-stemmed glass from her, with a cinnamon-scented Armagnac swirling around the bottom. Her wrap and trousers blended into the upholstery and Tommy noticed for the first time how small she was.
“I’m going to stay here tonight,” she said. “I don’t want to go home.”
“Will you be all right on your own?”
“No,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“Then I’ll stay.”
“Thank you.”
The armagnac was mellow like caramel and candied pears. Warm smells and tastes returned, the start of new memories of being here.
“Want to talk?” Tommy asked.
“No.” They sat as the sky turned the rich colours of the room and finally everything became textureless and grey. “Want to make love?” Becky asked flatly.
“No.”
“Hold.” Which may have been a question, a command, or just a noun.
Becky leaned over into his arms. Olives and green tea, the smell of her hair. Gentle rise and fall of her shoulders on his chest. Tommy ran his fingers over her cheeks, round her chin, and noticed again how small she seemed with his hands against her.
Pulling her into him he closed his eyes and returned in his mind to the cellar. What had he seen? Immaculate shelves, with barely a few weeks’ dust anywhere. No cobwebs, no cellar mould. How often was the wine disturbed to wipe down the bottles? It must take weeks each time to do it with enough care to preserve the precious liquid. Perhaps Charles employed someone just to do that – someone he trusted sufficiently. A graduate student perhaps. He retraced his steps to the back wall. How many holes were there? 26. Good. Two bottles from Shaw’s last lunch. Yes, there were the labels. 12 in each of Tommy’s cases. He hadn’t managed to catch all the labels. Becky had been too anxious to leave the cellar. Not to worry. What could he see in the place he had made sure to look, topmost and furthest right? The very back of the cellar, the place of honour. Two holes. Two labels. Chateau Cheval Blanc, 1947, Berry Bros, 1994. Eszencia, Mezes Mały, 1864, Sotheby’s New York, 1998, private collection, Budapest.
1947, 1864. Sweat caught in the small of her back, arching round, full lips turning to draw him in.
Tommy opened his eyes. Becky was asleep. He bent his neck forward and kissed the top of her head; nuzzled his lips into her hair; whispered. “Now I know your father was murdered; and I’ll find the person who did it.”
MARCH 1995
2 am. Tommy should have been sleeping. For the last two and a half years he hadn’t slept, but he’d always known that it was because he was thinking about his thesis. Now it was finished at last. He had submitted two bound copies, one for each of his examiners, to the Graduate Studies Office. Tradition, and common sense, dictated that candidates keep a third copy for themselves so that they could use it whilst they prepare for their viva voce, the grilling session in front of their examiners and, according to Oxford’s diktats, any members of the public who cared to attend that determined whether they received their doctorate or not. But Tommy was spent. He didn’t want to see his thesis again before the viva, so he had left his third copy in Professor Shaw’s college pigeon hole. He needed to forget it altogether for a month or so, so he felt fresh and enthusiastic again when he started applying for posts.
But he couldn’t forget it. It played itself like a loop in his head. The idea that anyone would need a printed copy to remind themselves of something that had been their whole life for years was absurd. He knew every comma in every draft he’d written.
He was becoming increasingly frustrated that he couldn’t settle. Perhaps he’d built this moment up too much in his head and it would take a day or so for him to settle into the new routine; or at least into a life where he had no routine. He knew he shouldn’t let it get to him. That last thing he needed to do if he was going to sleep was think how much he needed to sleep He’d tried everything he could to distract himself but nothing had worked, not television, not a trashy novel, not food, not drink.
He gave up on bed and went to his study. He looked at the pile of papers on his desk. Time to change all that, he thought, picking them all up in one great pile and depositing them in a corner. Time to do something so this doesn’t remind me of work all the time. Perhaps he should cover his desk and use it as a dining table for a change. That wasn’t a bad idea, he congratulated himself, wondering what colour would make the room feel the least like it felt at the moment. He fetched a bundle of T-shirts from his wardrobe and by the time he had brought them back from his bedroom his thesis was out of his mind completely.
The sound of the telephone shattered his newly discovered peace. He reached for it instinctively. “Hello?”
“Good evening, Tommy.” It was Professor Shaw.
“Hello,” he said again, not quite sure what else to say to a supervisor calling him at past two in the morning.
“I got your thesis,” Shaw continued. “Thank you.”
Tommy couldn’t tell if there was a hint of sarcasm in the Professor’s voice, or maybe bitterness. Tommy hadn’t shown his supervisor the final draft, which was very much not the standard procedure. It hadn’t occurred to him that the Professor would take it as a snub. Tommy just knew that he had finished. There was no point in asking anyone else what needed changing. Nothing did. Still, there was something in the voice that he couldn’t explain by the fact that it was two in the morning. A slight hesitation of some kind.
“I thought you’d want to read it straightaway.”
“That was very thoughtful.” That didn’t seem to be a rebuke.
Tommy had already pushed the T-shirts off his desk. He could feel himself being sucked back in. He couldn’t help asking. “What did you think of it?”
There was a slight pause. “It’s complete,” said Shaw.
“Thank you.” Tommy had never heard his supervisor praise anyone’s work. He wondered for a second if the hesitation he heard might have been jealousy, but the idea was ridiculous
“No, Tommy. Thank you for letting me read it.” The voice was as clear and sharp as ice. And as cold. Tommy shivered as though the Professor’s words had fallen down his spine. “Good night.”
“Good night,” said Tommy, but the line was already dead.
Tommy went back to bed, but any possibility of sleep had long gone.
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 6, 2007
____
14
Waking in David’s arms, Emily turned and looked up at him sleeping, lids closed over his bright blue eyes, short dark hair ruffled over the creases in his forehead. She let herself be guided by the slow rhythm of his breathing. Gentle lift and fall; his chest tautened against her breasts and then relaxed. She pressed herself against him, her stomach moving with his; pressed her lips against his, just enough to wake him slightly; hooked her leg around him, kissing harder. A gentle moan from him as she slid herself on top of him, pushed him slowly inside her.
The police was the perfect career for Emily. She had satisfied both her intellect and her parents by going dutifully through college, but the thought of the Job had promised her just the right mix of brain stimulation, social contribution, career progress, and adrenalin. So far, as her ambition and sharpness had carried her up through the ranks of the CID, she hadn’t been disappointed.
Emily met David at St Adlate’s, Oxford’s largest evangelical church, shortly after she joined the police. They had sat together in the pews; after a month or so they began to look around for each other. Soon they were going for coffee after church, then dinner. It wasn’t an instant romance, and it wasn’t like many of their friends’ church marriages, with their short crushes, short engagements, and desperate dash for the bedroom. They were friends for several years before Emily realized one night that there was a reason why she always wanted to go to David’s after church, why she always called him if work was going badly, why she always wanted him to know if it was going well.