The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  When he came to he couldn’t remember opening his eyes. Looking at his watch it was as though an hour of his life had gone, which wasn’t the first time he had simply lost chunks of time. He knew what that had meant the last time, and hoped desperately he could fight off total breakdown long enough to find the truth.

  The screensaver was on, a bottle of Tokaji slowly pouring itself into a crystal glass. Tommy flicked the mouse and the screen came back. Tommy gagged instantly. There was something wrong, though. Of course there’s something wrong! he screamed at himself. No, not that. The emoticon, the smiley.

  What the hell did it mean? That Charles knew what had happened to Carol and found it funny? That he had done it to her himself? No, he couldn’t bring himself to think that. Besides, why get Knightley involved and then make such a point of being miles away when Carol was born if he was going to sue her himself?

  No, Shaw hadn’t done this to her, but Tommy had a sickening feeling that’d known who had; and that he’d been part of a set-up with Knightley to make it happen. Tommy had a terrible feeling all of a sudden that he knew where the Professor’s money had come from.

  This wasn’t a thought experiment; it was a real one. It was a real experiment for someone’s actual pleasure. And, however obliquely, the Professor was writing the whole thing up. Someone wouldn’t want it published. Someone would want it kept secret very much. Surely that was a motive for murder.

  Then a thought that made Tommy even sicker. Someone had already killed to stop this becoming public. Now he had the only copy.

  ____

  41

  Tommy picked up the phone and dialled Rosie’s mobile.

  “If you’re with Em just say ‘that’s right’.”

  “That’s right.”

  “If you want to see me this afternoon say ‘I’ve considered that already’. If you don’t, say you hadn’t thought of it.” He opened the door to his top floor flat and went downstairs to collect the post.

  “Yes, I’ve considered that already.”

  “Great. Five o’clock at mine unless you tell me that you have to wait for results the path lab.” He flicked through the post. There were a couple of catalogues for some new Chinese silks. Can’t they be bothered to send some real cloth? he thought. It would probably weighs less and cost them less than thick glossy paper and bad Photoshop.

  “I think I’ve got those results already, sir.”

  “What can I say to get you to blush in front of the boss then?” There was a thick cream envelope, simply addressed to Tommy West. Something felt wrong. Instinctively he took off his shirt and picked it up by the corner through the cloth.

  “Goodbye, Sir.” Rosie hung up.

  Tommy put the letter on a tray on the kitchen side. He went to the cupboard, got out some corn flour and turmeric, and mixed them together in a bowl. It was hardly Thames Valley’s finest fingerprint powder, but what was he supposed to do? Ask Rosie to do it for him? And why would you want me to do that? she’d say. Oh, I’m just investigating a murder. I would have told you but I nicked a hundred grand. If he had a print, though, who knows what he might be able to do from her laptop next time he went round. He dusted the fine mix over the envelope with an egg brush. Nothing. No surprise there. He slit the envelope with his paring knife, and shook it onto the tray. A tiny piece of thin paper with nail scissor trimmed edges floated out, thin crisp paper like you’d find in a Bible. He dusted it but still there was nothing. What did it say?

  “Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought”

  Hmm. He turned it over. It said exactly what he expected. “…the younger.’ Just as it is written: ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

  He recognised the translation as coming from the New International Version of the Bible. It shouldn’t take too much work to find the edition by comparing the layout of the type to his vast collection of scriptures. He knew he should be scared but all he could do was wonder if this was how Shaw’s letters had come. It made him smile. All he had to do was ask who was bulk-buying Bibles if that was the case. Then he remembered what he’d read in the Professor’s papers and it snapped his mind right back into focus. This was no longer a game. It wasn’t therapy for him; it wasn’t an adventure. People had lost their lives, and now someone knew that he was looking around for something they wanted left hidden.

  ____

  42

  “Who was that?” asked Emily.

  “Just someone from the lab.” Rosie answered.

  “No it wasn’t.” Emily looked at her intently. “Have you finally got yourself a boyfriend?”

  “No,” she said. Almost at once she gave up. She knew she’d never be able to keep something like that a secret from Emily. “Well, it’s too early to say, but who knows?”

  “That’s fantastic!” Emily was already out of her chair and on her way to the vending machine for a celebratory coffee.

  Rosie decided to walk with her before everyone else found out.

  “So who is he?”

  Rosie could feel that her cheeks were going the same colour as her lipstick.

  “Shit, Rosie, do I know him?”

  Could say that, she thought. “Let me get these,” she said, turning her back and making herself busy with change in her handbag.

  “Come on, Rosie, you know I’m not going to give you any peace until you tell me. I’ll keep shooting names at you and you can’t keep your back to me all day.”

  Rosie turned round and handed her a dark brown liquid that purported to be coffee. “OK.” She stirred her own black unsugared drink.

  “I’m waiting. I assume OK means you’re going to tell me.”

  “Mm.”

  “Get on with it then.”

  Rosie started walking back to the office, Emily at her shoulder. When she found a piece of partition wall that looked like it didn’t have anyone behind it she stopped. “You did say you thought we’d be suited. Well, we are. On the evidence so far, anyway.” She didn’t look up.

  “No!”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  “Well I didn’t see that coming. No, actually I did but I thought I’d have to lock the two of you in a room together before you’d do anything about it.”

  “So you’re not pissed off?”

  “Shit, no. That’s wonderful, Rosie. You’ll have to come round for dinner.”

  “And what would David make of that?” said Rosie, imagining just how many permutations of conflict a dinner like that could give rise to.

  “David might finally get off my back about both of you if he thought you were going to be busy keeping each other amused.”

  “You’re worse than my mum you know. You’ll be sitting me down with cake designs and flower arrangements if I’m not careful.” She looked around and then looked at Emily, unable to control the grin that had broken out, “God, I’ve been bursting to tell you since yesterday morning.”

  Emily put her arms around her in a bear hug, “Soft git. I couldn’t be happier.”

  Rosie walked back to their big open plan office smiling and relaxed. She knew that half the people who saw her were wondering why she looked different, and that many of them would spend their tea breaks guessing, but she didn’t care. For the moment things felt better than they had done in a long while, and for now it really didn’t matter how long that moment lasted.

  ____

  43

  It didn’t take much googling to find the full CV of Professor Charles Shaw. The University’s Theology Faculty posted full details of all staff on its website. In some cases it even gave details of where people went on holiday, and had snaps of their kids. Tommy wondered if they’d heard of the Data Protection Act.

  Tommy knew a lot of the Professor’s CV already, from his first ever article, Conceptions of Co-existence: The Moral Importance of Identical Twins, and the early books that had made Shaw’s name: It is better for a man not to marry: History’s Misrepresentation of St Paul on Marriage, Consent and Concubines:
Marriage and Medieval Misogyny. Then, of course, there was a hiatus before 1992’s masterpiece, Aquinas: Sacrament and Sin in Marriage. 1992, he thought. The timing would fit perfectly with Shaw working on the book at the Sorbonne then publishing it when he got back.

  What Tommy was really interested in was the list of papers he had published in the years directly before the book. If the Professor really had been working on his book, then Tommy would have expected him to have published some preliminary papers in the area. Or he may have published nothing at all if he’d locked himself away and dedicated himself to researching his book. Tommy scrolled down to the papers section. Here it was, 1990-1992. Shaw had published four papers in two years. That was at least as high a strike rate as any other time in his career. Clearly he hadn’t been holed up in his ivory tower.

  So what had he been doing? Tommy printed off the list.

  Delayed Passion or Delayed Parousia: the Meaning of Marriage in the End Times

  Fruits of the Womb of God: the Gift of the Spirit in Neo-Platonism and Eastern Orthodoxy

  She Wept for her Children: the Meaning of Motherhood in Medieval Iconography

  Child of our Time: the Infant Jesus and Modern Parenthood

  Well there we go, he said to himself. These papers had nothing to do with Aquinas. What the hell were you doing in Paris for two years? You’d already written your book, hadn’t you? I bet you had these articles put aside for a rainy day and wheeled them out to make yourself look busy. So why did you have to go to Paris, then? Need to get out of the heat for a while? Need a bolt hole away from prying eyes?

  He would try and find a copy of the articles later and see exactly what Shaw had been working on, see if it gave any hint of his state of mind at the time, although he thought it probably wouldn’t. Nonetheless he’d order the journals up on line and pick them up tomorrow. From the collections desk at the Sorbonne. Something told him it was time to follow the Professor to the continent.

  Tommy logged off and picked up the phone. “Bon apres-midi, Madame,” he said. “Puis-je parler avec Professeur Bonnard?”

  “Bien sur, c’est qui?”

  “C’est Docteur West, ami de Charles Shaw, professeur de théologie à Oxford.”

  He waited a few seconds before the line went live again and a heavy, crackly voice answered in a heavy Bordelaise accent. Tommy had learned most of his French in the Gironde, in the area around Bordeaux. He felt at home with the slightly nasal voice on the other end of the line. “A friend of Charles Shaw’s?” said the French Professor. “I read in the papers that he killed himself. I’m sorry.” He sounded old. Tommy gathered from the internet that he was in his early sixties and had been at the Theology Faculty for at least 30 years, researching medieval theology. He sounded much older, the result of smoking rather than drinking Tommy guessed from the clarity of his diction and the slight hiss in the lower register.

  “Thank you,” said Tommy. “He supervised my doctoral thesis,” he added, feeling the need to justify the remark.

  “You’re that Dr West, then?” Tommy tried to work out if he was surprised, amused, or impressed.

  “If you mean the Dr West who worked on the Ecole Freudienne, then yes, I am,” Tommy said, hoping that Bonnard was referring to his speciality, and not his breakdown.

  “It was a remarkable thesis, Dr West. You know, we would have been delighted to have you on our staff.”

  “Thank you, Professor.” It was interesting, thought Tommy, that after all these years he could still open doors with his academic past; a past that seemed so far ago he had forgotten was part of his life at all. Or maybe it was just a past he had come to hope was nothing to do with him any more.

  “How can I help you?”

  “I’m putting together a memorial brochure for Professor Shaw, and I was hoping to include something by the people he worked with over the years. I believe he spent two years at the Sorbonne in the early 1990s working on Aquinas. I thought you might know whom I should speak to there who might have worked with him.”

  “Yes, I remember. He was registered with the Faculty here. He gave a couple of lectures on the politics of marriage and church courts in the middle ages, but he never hung around.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he came. He gave his talks, and then he took off again. Sometimes he stayed for dinner, but he never stayed the night. We thought it was very peculiar at the time, but we were pleased to get him to speak at all.”

  This definitely felt like a breakthrough. Shaw had lied about where he was for two years of his life. He’d pretended to be working on something he wasn’t. What the hell was he doing? “Can you remember where he was based,” he asked.

  “He was living somewhere in Spain I think.” Bonnard went quiet. Tommy could almost here him closing his eyes in thought. “Andalucia, that was it. Jerez.”

  “Jerez?” said Tommy. He remembered what Henry Wilde had said. Shaw had made his money in Spain. Whatever had gone on, that was where it happened.

  “Yes, I remember teasing him about his taste in drink. I was brought up drinking Lillet, the finest aperitif in the world.”

  “I thought I detected a Bordeaux accent,” Tommy said.

  “Likewise, Dr West.”

  “Professor, was Charles connected officially to a faculty in Spain?”

  “No, as far as I know he was there to write. He finished his book on Aquinas and wrote up some fairly important papers from the previous couple of years. I think he’d given most of them at various conferences. He was would have been writing them up for the conference proceedings. I don’t think he produced any new papers. He just enjoyed the heat and the sherry,.” Tommy flicked through the CV that he had saved offline. Bonnard was right. Each of the four papers Shaw had produced from 1990-1992 was a write-up of a paper he had given in 1988 or 1989 at conferences in Leiden, Stockholm, Sofia, and Princeton. There would have been hardly any work at all in getting them licked into shape.

  “Didn’t anyone there check up on him?”

  “No. We got to put him on our visiting professor list for two years. He got peace. Everyone was happy.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone would have an address for him whilst he in Spain? Maybe I could catch up with his neighbours and get something a little more personal for the brochure.”

  “I expect so. We sent him journals from time to time. Send me an e-mail and I’ll send it back to you before I leave this evening if I have it.”

  “Thank you for your help, Professor Bonnard.”

  “You’re welcome. And I meant what I said earlier. If you ever want to come and work in Paris, please call.”

  “Thank you, I will.”

  Tommy put the phone down and logged back on. He googled “flights London Jerez”, and a few seconds later he found himself on the Ryanair website booking flights for the next morning.

  Now he just had to tell Becky that he wouldn’t be at the funeral.

  ____

  44

  Tommy had time for a good workout and a relaxing bath. He had decided that he would do nothing before he headed to Spain. He’d still have to be up by half past two to get round the M25 and make check-in, but the way he was, or wasn’t, sleeping at the moment, the thought wasn’t unduly worrying. The thought of being away for a night or two was also good. The one thing that having time to think did mean was that he had time to realise just how serious his position was. The sooner he got out of the country, the sooner he’d get away from danger. He thought for a moment that he shouldn’t be thinking like that, worrying about himself. But, at least until now, Becky seemed safe. Whoever had killed Shaw knew that it was Tommy that was on their trail. As soon as he thought it, he realised what that also meant. If they knew that much about what he was up to, quite possibly they knew his next move would be to Spain. Suddenly even the soothing heat of Andalucia seemed less of a haven. He had to face up to the fact that nothing was going to feel great until this was all over..

  He watched from t
he front window as Rosie pulled up in her orange Matiz and flicked it neatly into the snuggest parking space. She carried a cool-bag with her out of the car. Her step was brisk and playful. She seemed happy to be coming. Tommy surprised himself that he felt as excited about seeing her now as he had about seeing her again when he left her flat yesterday morning. Perhaps he wasn’t entering a manic phase. Perhaps he really did like her. Whatever the truth was, though, tonight wasn’t going to be easy. He’d have to tell her he was going away. What he couldn’t tell her was why. He still hadn’t made up his mind whether he should ask her to come. He knew he should. He also knew she almost certainly wouldn’t be able to make it; but if she did, the whole trip would be pretty much pointless.

  “It’s nice to be here without a stiff to climb over,” she said, grinning as she handed him the cool bag. She let the door slam behind her as she pulled him onto her. The door smacked as she fell against it and she felt it wind her as she grabbed his head and kissed him furiously.

  “There you go, pretend it’s Ready Steady Cook.”

  They went upstairs and Tommy emptied the cool-bag onto his worktop. It spilled out a haul of fresh squid, spinach, and pancetta.

  “Good stuff?” she asked.

  “Delicious. Fancy a drink?”

  “Fuck, I should have brought wine. Sorry!” She looked almost as young as Becky, he thought, as she stood there in black jeans and an off the shoulder red jumper bound at the waist with a metal-spiked belt. The hands in pockets were the same, the hunched shoulders, everything except for the slight lines around her eyes. He realised he was staring at her lines and looked away embarrassed. He liked them, as much as he liked the eyes they surrounded. She had large, dark eyes tinted with a little sadness that he thought had something to do with leaving her childhood home and believing that she wouldn’t go back. They were as unlike Becky’s as it was possible to get.