Death and the Visiting Fellow

by Tim Heald

  All this was at one and the same time quintessentially Tasmanian and peculiar to Hobart, yet also familiar. Perhaps even depressingly so. Doctor Cornwall felt he had not come to the far end of the earth in order to be confronted with canned Guinness and massed produced Pizza Margarita. If he had wanted a Big Mac he would have stayed on campus at the University of Wessex.

  ‘I guess you have McDonald’s in England,’ said Ms Burney.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Where I come from in the north of the state you still get old-fashioned steak sandwiches. You know, with the lot. Old-fashioned white bread, and thick, brown gravy, half a pound of sirloin, fried egg, tomatoes, onion, cucumber, mayonnaise, pineapple, ketchup, mustard, lettuce, beetroot.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Tudor, aware that he was sounding prissy. ‘All that in a single sandwich.’

  She looked at him with amusement and scorn. ‘You poms!’ she said. ‘You don’t know what a sandwich is. Thinly sliced cucumber and the crusts cut off. Call that a sandwich? Get out of here!’

  Tudor grinned. He was beginning to quite like the college thief.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘This is the main road in to the city from Pippin Valley,’ she said. ‘Standard drag. In a minute or two we’ll hit the Isle of Wight Barracks; then the Real Tennis Court and Dettingen Look Out. Then it’s real downtown: Gucci, Pucci, Davidoff, Ripitoff. Made in New York, made in Rome, Paris, London, Tokyo, Hobart. Know what I mean?’

  She laughed. And Tudor found himself liking her even more. Part of him was saying ‘Help!’ and the other part, ‘Lucky me!’

  They walked on in silence. Outside the gates of the Isle of Wight Barracks were two vintage twenty-five pounders and a small cenotaph in memory of the dead of the two world wars. A sentry in khaki shorts stood in a box. He was wearing a bush hat and carrying a stubby black automatic which looked too modern for the rest of him. A hundred yards further on, Tudor saw what he thought was a pub sign swinging gently in the breeze. It consisted of two antiquated-looking gold tennis rackets on a black background. Underneath the rackets was the date 1873.

  ‘Real Tennis?’ he enquired, looking up at a sandstone barn of a building with windows just below roof level. It was set back from the road with a neat lawn in front of it.

  The girl nodded. ‘Some Pom governor brought it out. It’s weird.’

  ‘I know,’ said Tudor. ‘I used to play it once a long time ago. In fact it was when I was at university myself. Actually I used to play with Professor Carpenter.’

  She glanced at him sharply but said nothing. ‘Perhaps I should take it up again,’ he mused, half to himself.

  ‘Do you want to check Dettingen Look Out?’ she asked. ‘It’s the nicest part of Hobart.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s the old area round the look-out. Beautiful old warehouses and there’s this fabulous tower right at the end by the harbour. They used to have a man up there twenty-four hours a day keeping watch for ships. They stopped that but anyone can climb up. It has three hundred and sixty-five steps. One for every day of the year. Great view from the top but it’s steep.’

  ‘I’ll save the climb for another time,’ he said, ‘but I’d like to have a look.’

  So they turned right off the main road and soon came on to a wide cobbled avenue flanked by fine warehouses, the ground floors of which had been converted into health-food shops and wine bars, ethnic clothing stores and all the arty-crafty outlets associated with the mildly trendy, almost alternative life-style Tudor had seen in similar developments elsewhere.

  ‘There’s a fabulous market here every weekend,’ said the girl. ‘Not just food and drink. There’s fortune-tellers and jugglers and a fire-eater. You know, street theatre.’

  Tudor nodded. He had seen lots of that sort of market in his time.

  They walked on to the water’s edge where the tower stood. There was a stone set in the base with an inscription which said that it had been laid there by His Grace the Duke of Dorset, Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in Tasmania 1803. The structure was imposing – a colonial campanile soaring high into the southern sky.

  ‘It used to be a favourite spot for suicides,’ said the girl, ‘but they put reinforced glass round the viewing platform. Nowadays most people jump off the harbour bridge.’

  She shaded her eyes and gazed up at the column. ‘Way to go,’ she said.

  Rusty fishing boats lined the quayside, several of them selling their catch of the day. Scales and fins gleamed in the sunlight: purplish squid, silver salmon, ebony eels. Away to the left, one of the warehouses had sprouted a glassed-in terrace overlooking the water. It was a seafood restaurant called Roddy’s. Outside the door there was a picture of a voluptuous mermaid wearing a chef’s hat. Cornwall looked up at the sky and shivered slightly though not from the cold.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said. He wondered again if he should broach the subject of the girl’s sexual harassment charge against his old friend, but again decided against it. He needed to do some thinking.

  ‘You’ve been very kind, Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken up much too much of your time. Very selfish of me. Thanks very much for guiding me here. It would have taken me ages to find it for myself. But you must have lots to be getting on with.’

  She took the hint with a swift assurance which surprised him.

  ‘My pleasure,’ she said. ‘Can you find your way back to the college?’

  ‘Oh, I think so,’ he said. ‘If not I can always take a cab.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘See you around. In fact I’ll see you this evening in Hall. It’s a formal dinner night.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said.

  She gave him a wide flirty smile and walked away through the crowds with long extravagantly coltish strides. Tudor Cornwall watched her go, smiling after her, and felt a strange sinking feeling.

  Chapter Five

  Cornwall dressed for dinner.

  As he did so he mused. Part of his musing was devoted to Hobart itself. This, after all, and despite impending excitements, was to be his home town for a semester. (Semester was not a word he liked, but it appeared to be part of the St Petroc’s vocabulary and when in Rome...) What he had seen of Hobart seemed agreeable in a mildly old-fashioned, genteel sort of a way. It reminded him of Bournemouth, only further away. Perfectly congenial for a couple of months though he suspected that anything a lot longer might have seemed uncomfortably like a prison sentence. He couldn’t help remembering that part at least of the colony’s original purpose was penal. The present-day city, however, seemed blissfully innocent and unthreatening. He knew such appearances could be misleading. What was it Holmes said to Watson? ‘Not all the vilest alleys of the city can produce more horrifying crimes than this smiling and beautiful countryside.’

  Quite so.

  He also found himself musing on the girl with no bra but dismissed these thoughts as inappropriate and potentially dangerous for a Fellow of the college, even a merely visiting one.

  And finally, of course, he mused on the whereabouts of his missing friend. This was a puzzle and his musings were therefore inconclusive and frustrating. It was not like Ashley to shirk confrontation. This, more than anything, was what bothered him. Mystery was second nature to him. And Ashley also liked playing games. If he had simply disappeared and said, ‘Come on, find me!’ Tudor would not have been particularly surprised. Irritated maybe, but he would have thought it more or less in character. ‘Oh, Ashley’s up to his old tricks.’ But on this occasion it sounded as if his friend had a problem. True, his e-mail message sounded breezy and cheerful enough, but that was easily fixed. No, all his experience of Ashley told him that he was a man who always faced the music. If he had done a bunk it was not because he was under threat even of sexual harassment. The charge was the one which modern academics feared more than any other, but even if there was any substance in it – a
nd Tudor was certain there wasn’t – Ashley would never run away.

  Even so, the thief with no bra was disturbingly fanciable.

  Dinner was not a black tie occasion but Dame Edith had made it plain, in the nicest possible way, that a jacket and tie were de rigueur. So was an academic gown. Such formality was far from the norm at the University of Wessex which tended to be laid back and informal in most matters, particularly sartorial.

  This place almost took Tudor back to the days of his youth before scruffiness, laissez-faire and egalitarianism. Jack was now as good as his master and the student as his teacher. Although it was politically incorrect to admit it, Tudor found this tiresome and unfair. In his undergraduate days he had definitely not been allowed to think himself in any way the equal of his tutor. Indeed, his tutor had been allowed to talk the most fearful tosh without fear of contradiction and Tudor had looked forward to the time when he would be allowed to do the same. This had not happened and it made him peevish. Now that he was in his prime he had to listen to his students talking almost as much rot as his teachers a generation or so earlier. And political correctness decreed that he was not allowed to contradict them. No justice. Not much sense either.

  He decided on his dark pin-stripe with a plain blue silk tie just wide and vivid enough to hint at something marginally less staid than the rest of his exterior suggested. First impressions were so important. He glared at himself in the mirror, bared his teeth, slapped his cheeks, tightened the tie, smoothed the hair and winced. A few months earlier an anonymous reviewer in The Wyvern, the University of Wessex’s student magazine, had described his lectures as ‘elegant, amiable and undemanding’. The faint damn rankled. He could be extremely demanding.

  High Table convened in the senior common room for pre-prandial sherry. Doctor Cornwall was one of the last to arrive. He was late-ish but not exactly late so the gathering was almost safely gathered in. Conversation was hovering somewhere between hum and hubbub on the vocal equivalent of the Richter or Beaufort scales: noisier than just polite but quieter than quite convivial. Dame Edith was standing in front of a leather-topped club fender warming her ample bottom in the glow of a pungently fumed log fire. It smelt of juniper.

  As Tudor entered, she beamed in his direction and made a beckoning gesture with her sherry glass, spilling a slurp of its contents on her academic gown which was tinged with copper sulphate green and evidently of considerable antiquity like its owner.

  ‘Doctor Cornwall,’ she cried, a little too loudly, ‘I’d like you to meet Professor Trethewey who runs the Department of Oenology.’ She gestured at a small fortysomething woman with sparrow features and a red bandanna tying down a shock of blonde frizz. And this’ – she indicated a short, wide man with an impressive black squared-off beard reminiscent of Dr W.G. Grace, the eminent Victorian cricketer – ‘is Dr Penhaligon who is a fellow of the college and reader in Green Studies. As you know, Dr Cornwall, Tasmania likes to think of itself as an eco-paradise and Dr Penhaligon is very much at the cutting edge.’

  ‘In more senses than one,’ said Professor Trethewey, arching eyebrows which had been pencilled on to her face like a proof correction. She grinned, revealing uneven teeth. The lipstick around her mouth echoed the pencil mark above the eyes. It looked, thought Tudor, as if it too had been stabbed on because she was displeased with the quality of her basic text. Tudor couldn’t see why. It was a perfectly agreeable face in a spiky professorial way. Not exactly sexy but quite fun to have around.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, realizing that he had missed an allusion of some kind.

  ‘Cutting edge,’ said Dr Penhaligon, ‘does not simply refer to my place at the intellectual fulcrum of environmental activity here in Tasmania, Dame Edith was making a word play with my arboreal activities. Axiomatically as it were.’

  Tudor must have looked as nonplussed as he felt.

  ‘Dear Tasman here,’ said Dame Edith, ‘is a demon chopper. He has a way with wood. As you’ll discover, Dr Cornwall, ours is, in some respects, still a primitive hunter-gatherer culture which has changed very little since the days of the first settlers.’

  Not before time little Brad appeared on the scene. He was carrying a tray with a fullish glass for Tudor and a decanter to refuel the others. They all took advantage. Brad said nothing but looked obsequious.

  ‘I’ll give you a tutorial one day, if you’d like.’ The ecologist’s remarkable beard twitched with what seemed to Tudor’s jet-lagged and friend-deprived susceptibility a mixture of amusement and menace. Rather more of the latter than the former.

  ‘Tasman is an amateur axeman,’ said the professor of wine. ‘It gets rid of his inhibitions. I know as a Pom that you’ll find it extraordinary, but lumberjacking is a major sport here. Bigger than golf.’

  ‘Isn’t chopping down trees a bit, well, ecologically unsound?’ ventured Tudor, who had already formed a dim view of Dr Penhaligon. ‘It doesn’t sound very tree-friendly.’

  ‘Oh you won’t catch him out that easily.’ Professor Trethewey seemed amused. ‘First of all, he mostly attacks dead trees. And then when he does cut down the living he says it’s like culling deer or seals. He only kills the poor specimens which aren’t worth preserving. If it wasn’t for people like Tasman the world’s forests would be completely out of control. Isn’t that right, darling?’

  The great Green sipped and nodded.

  Tudor followed suit and there was an almost awkward pause. Luckily conversation flowed all around them. There were between twenty or thirty people in the room. They were of both sexes, most ages and several colours. The only unifying features were the gowns and the sherry.

  ‘You’re Ashley’s friend,’ said Professor Trethewey. Tudor was startled. He had been filling the pause with an appraisal of the SCR’s walls which were decorated with portraits of principals past and present. The one of Dame Edith showed her in academic kit of such dreamcoat garishness that it would have shamed Joseph himself. She sat on a garden chair and on the grass at her feet there were two echidnas. Her predecessors were painted in less alfresco situations but the whiskery steel of each sitter transcended all artistic shortcomings. They constituted a galerie formidable which no amount of institutional chocolate box portraiture could conceal.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, Tm Ashley’s friend. But he seems to have disappeared.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ she said. ‘With the exception of Tasman here I can’t think of any member of the college better able to look after themselves. Ashley was one of nature’s truffle hounds.’

  ‘Was?’ said Doctor Cornwall. ‘Why the past tense?’

  Professor Trethewey frowned. ‘I did say “was”, didn’t I? I wonder why. My name’s Jasmine, by the way. My friends call me Jazz.’

  She smiled, in an unexpectedly gamine way, but did not explain why she had referred to Ashley in the past tense. Tudor was on the point of repeating the question but Jazz was saved by the bell. The summons to dinner was as commanding as the call of the muezzin. It brooked no hesitation or interruption and left Tudor perplexed and mildly suspicious.

  ‘For what we are about to receive,’ said Dame Edith, when the assembled company was more or less silent, ‘may the Lord make us truly thankful.’

  Tudor was disappointed that the Grace was not in Latin. Or even Greek.

  He was seated, as was clearly the custom, between two students, both female and both rather disconcertingly attractive in a tanned, blonde, tennis-playing sort of a way. Antipodean Joan Hunter Dunn. One was majoring in anthropology, the other in dentistry, for which her immaculate teeth were a good advertisement. Tudor found them easy to talk to even though the talk was mostly small even when it moved on to teeth and animals. Professor Trethewey had been placed opposite him and even though during the minestrone (heavy on the carrot) and fried fish (firm textured but unfamiliar) they did not exchange words he sensed that she was watching him from the corner of an eye.

  Presently, in a lull, Professor Trethewey leant across the table and
asked, conspiratorially, Ashley says you share his taste in fine wine.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Tudor. ‘I know what I like but I’d hardly say I was an expert.’

  ‘But you can tell a shiraz from a pinot, chardonnay and viognier?’

  Tudor grinned. ‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ he said. ‘I know if something’s corked. And I can tell good from bad. I wouldn’t go further than that.’

  Ashley told me you had a fine nose.’

  ‘Then Ashley flatters me. Or he’s teasing you.’

  ‘Well,’ the professor conceded, ‘he did say you had a fine nose for a Pom.’

  ‘That sounds more like him.’

  ‘Even so,’ she said. She seemed thoughtful. Then she said, ‘Tasman and I are having a small tasting after dinner. We and Ashley constitute the college wine committee. As Ashley’s not... er... with us... perhaps you’d care to join us in the Bob Hawke Room. Say half an hour’s time?’

  ‘Well thank you.’

  ‘Just half a dozen reds and a couple of stickies. All local.’

  ‘I should enjoy that,’ he said, as the toothsome dentist passed him a cup of coffee and he returned to small talk.

  Moments later, Dame Edith banged a gavel on the table and said another grace. Latin this time, to Tudor’s satisfaction.

  ‘Benedictus, benedicatat.’ And everyone filed out in a more or less orderly fashion. The air had grown evening cold and stars started to appear. Looking up, Tudor saw the Southern Cross and Orion upside down. He shivered. Somewhere out there up on the mountain, out in the bush, his old friend would be looking at the same stars.