Death and the Visiting Fellow

by Tim Heald

  The thermos was tartan rather like the flasks that Tudor remembered from the beach picnics of his childhood. It was a tartan belonging to no known clan but none the less authentic for that.

  ‘The McTudor thermos, eh Basil?’ he asked the dog, who glared back reproachfully.

  The punch had been simmering since before Jazz Trethewey’s arrival and was maturing more or less to his satisfaction. From time to time he added a pinch of ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg or dried wattle but he did so very judiciously for he knew from a lifetime’s experience that whereas you could always add to this sort of mixture you could never subtract.

  It was interesting that Jazz Trethewey had been so patronizing about the idea. Ashley, or whoever had sent the last e-mail, suggested that Jazz along with her friend the bearded axeman, had monopolized the spoils of this competition in recent years. The way she was talking you would have thought she’d have nothing whatever to do with it. On the other hand Tudor guessed that her amour propre would be damaged if she were ever to come anywhere except top where wine was concerned – even adulterated plonk. He would soon see.

  He tried to cast his mind back to university days and to remember if he and Ashley had done mulled wine. It had been a beer culture as far as he could recall. Maybe some college clubs or tutors had provided hot grog in the bleak midwinter but mixing such drinks wasn’t on the undergraduate syllabus – even the extra-mural one. The college had a cellar of which legends are forged but it was a privilege confined to the senior common room. Dons only. He seemed to remember that Miranda had done champagne. That had been part of their problem. Miranda liked champagne and MG sports cars with gramophones. Neither Tudor nor Ashley could do much more than beer and bicycles. Miranda would condescend to both but she made no secret of the fact that doing so was slumming.

  He sipped the brew, puckered his lips and brow thoughtfully. This was as good as it was going to get. He wondered if the concoction would have met with Ashley’s approval and then, failing to find an answer to the question, moved with alarming rapidity on to asking himself whether he cared. On balance he decided that he didn’t much. Concern for his old friend had given way to irritation. In other words he believed that Ashley was still alive, had disappeared on purpose and was playing silly buggers. This was not a matter of proof but of instinct. Disconcertingly he found that all his youthful beliefs about head being more reliable than heart were proving increasingly suspect. Miranda? Ashley? Mulled wine? Being fond of people or things, let alone falling in love with them, seemed natural and right in youth. Now, in middle age, it was becoming clear that it was a dangerous indulgence. Forensic intelligence was all. Feelings were folly.

  It was time to decant. Tudor found a battered ladle and transferred the mull from saucepan to thermos allowing a small proportion to escape down his throat. Not bad.

  He decided to check his e-mail one more time before leaving for the competition. He had no messages which, of course, meant nothing, but still left him feeling unreasonably disappointed. The e-mail messages were his only contact, real or imaginary, with his friend and host. He still couldn’t be sure whether or not the communications were from Ashley but they had to be from someone and they were all he had to work with. It wasn’t much but without these few words from space that was all he had: space. Ashley Carpenter had disappeared into it and was communicating from it. Everything was emptiness. Tudor was reminded of the unfinished Sherlock Holmes case concerning Mr James Phillimore ‘who stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella was never more seen in this world’. And then there was the cutter Alicia ‘which sailed one spring morning into a small patch of mist from which she never again emerged; nor was anything further ever heard of herself and her crew’. Tudor didn’t want Ashley to turn into James Phillimore or the crew of the Alicia.

  There was a half-pint or so of hot wine left after he had filled the thermos so Tudor decanted it into a half-pint mug decorated with the college crest – gum tree, wombat and parakeet above the legend Mens sana in corpore sano. The slogan was the target of feminist revisionists without the benefit of a classical education who considered it elitist and sexist. They wanted something in a native language such as Pitjontjajora, or at least the addition of the words ‘and womens’ after ‘mens’. Of this, however, Tudor Cornwall knew as yet nothing. He was after all only a Visiting Fellow.

  ‘I think a drink is called for, don’t you, Basil?’ said Tudor, already the worse for a half bottle of Bee’s Knees and a slurp or so of the Ashley mull. Not that he was drunk or even on the way there. He was abstemious by inclination and habit but could hold his own and keep his head if and when it came to hard liquor. This wasn’t often but it happened. That was in the nature of academic life and of criminal studies.

  He drank the brew thoughtfully, the pungency penetrating his sinuses like Friar’s Balsam. It had a distinctively Antipodean flavour which he found difficult to put into words. Was it a winner? He couldn’t say but he felt it might be in with a shout.

  ‘Good grief, Basil,’ he said, out loud, ‘I’m in danger of taking this thing seriously. There must be something wrong. It’s a competition to find out who’s produced the best mulled wine, for God’s sake. I have better things to worry about than that, surely to God.’

  The dog looked at him muttishly but said nothing. Tudor half-believed he would speak, an aberration he was not going to attribute to his booze intake but rather to the increasingly surreal state of mind induced by Ashley’s disappearance and his new surroundings and acquaintances. He did feel as if he was a character in a shaggy dog story. After all, here he was speaking to his canine companion as if he were a human being. This way madness lay.

  He pushed away the barely touched mug and stood up. This vinous competition was an ordeal which had to be faced, though he hardly knew now why he had been inveigled into taking part. He was, he realized, seriously contemplating the possibility of packing his bags, folding his tent and heading off home to the security of his office and supporting staff at the University of Wessex. That was a decision he would postpone until after this absurd blind tasting.

  He wondered who would be there? Dame Edith, he presumed. Brad Davey, Jazz Trethewey, Tasman Penhaligon. They seemed to be the only resident Fellows apart from Ashley. Did Lorraine Montagu enjoy the status of Fellow in her capacity as college Secretary – Sammy the Sikh would be acting as a sort of master-of-ceremonies but would surely not be entitled to a vote. The student body would presumably not be represented, not even by the balefully ubiquitous Elizabeth Burney. Was she the college tart or the college thief, or either or both? Had Ashley harassed her? Had she led him on? She was hiding something – that much was obvious – but was she concealing Ashley and if so was she doing so with his connivance or against his will? And if the latter, could she be doing so alone? It seemed impossible. In which case she must have accomplices.

  He picked up his thermos in its vivid tartan livery and headed towards the door.

  ‘Be a good boy, Basil,’ he said. ‘See you soon.’

  Were the names he had just run through the suspects in this case, he wondered, as he locked the door and dog behind him. But what case? The case of the vanishing professor? Nobody but him seemed to regard the matter in that light. Was that in itself suspicious? If Tudor had gone absent without leave from the Department of Criminal Studies at Wessex, there would have been a speedy hue and cry. Wouldn’t there? Would the Vice-Chancellor have called in the police, or decided that to do so might invite scandal? Would he and his colleagues assume that Tudor was going through some sort of mid-life crisis and needed time and space to sort himself out? Or that he was conducting some illicit sexual liaison which he did not want discovered or even speculated about?

  Put yourself in their position. That was what he was always telling his students. What would you have done if you were Crippen? How would you have reacted if you were the Wests in Gloucester? What would a murderer do in these circumstances? How would a victim react?

&nb
sp; Easier said than done, he thought, ruefully. There were so few facts to go on. No body, dead or alive. Only these arch and cryptic messages on the screen of his laptop.

  He began to walk downstairs, cradling his precious flask and wondering if it held more than mulled wine. Was there a dark secret in the e-mail prescription? Was there a cryptic clue in the messages from space? Was Basil the dog that failed to bark in the dark? Was Ashley missing presumed dead, or waving not drowning? Was he going mad? Was that the intention? And if so, whose?

  It was dark in the courtyard. In the distance he could hear the coo-ee of some strange foreign bird of the night. And was that the sawing of cicadas in the long grass? A thin sliver of moonlight silhouetted the mountain and the omnivorous wilderness which engulfed the countryside beyond the city boundary.

  Tudor shivered. He felt a long way from home, assailed by doubt, foreignness.

  ‘Rich cocoa,’ said a voice from the cloister, ‘dark chocolate, cherries, plums and toasty cedary oak. And that’s just the nose. I’m sure you have a nose for such smells, Professor.’

  It was Jazz Trethewey.

  ‘And as for the palate,’ she continued, ‘more of the same but blueberries, mulberries, crunchy cassis, blond tobacco and cedary oak.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Tudor, screwing his eyes in the direction of the voice. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The Bee’s Knees,’ said the Professor of Wine, ‘I looked up the tasting notes. You’d never have identified all those tastes and smells. But you might have got the colour. Full bodied, full blooded, sparkling red.’

  ‘I’d never have guessed,’ he said, as she fell in alongside him.

  ‘And eat with Eggs Benedict, smoked salmon and asparagus omelette, pates, blue and white Castello cheese, soft curd and hard cheeses, antipasto, Yum Cha and, of course, blackberry pie!’

  ‘Quite a choice.’

  ‘Mmm,’ the professor agreed. ‘And serve chilled at around ten degrees Celsius. It’s a wine best served cold. Like revenge.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Bob Hawke Room already felt familiar, though this evening’s arrangements did not. A long table was set with a white cloth on which, at regular intervals, there sat small bunsen burners under trivets surmounted by copper tureens. They looked like a group of smart fondue kits gussied up to convey an impression of old-world senior common room antiquity and gravitas. The paradox was that this was achieved with more conviction than would have been managed in the real old world itself. Doctor Cornwall was impressed, not for the first time, by the way in which imitation outshone reality. Modern Oxford or Cambridge would have been all polystyrene, plastic and chrome. For the true patina of dusty leather and ancient mahogany you really needed the ivory towers of American or Australasian academe.

  Sammy took Tudor’s thermos with the fastidious disdain of a doctor accepting a urine sample.

  ‘I’ll allocate your entry a number,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be the only bloke who knows what the number is. Everyone who tastes, tastes blind.’ He then handed over a voting form and a pencil.

  ‘First past the post,’ he said. ‘X marks the spot. Biggest number of x’s wins.’

  And in the event of a tie?’ asked Tudor.

  ‘Then there’s a taste-off,’ said Sammy. ‘One-on-one. Sort of like a penalty-shoot-out.’

  Not really, he thought, but what did it matter? Taste one mulled wine and you’d tasted the lot. They were in the middle of a serious missing-person’s crisis and they were supposed to become exercised over a comparative tasting of warmed spicy alcohol. In the divine order of things, the relative taste of different hot drinks rated low.

  ‘Well, Doctor Cornwall,’ said Dame Edith, fussily patting the creases out of the tablecloth. ‘We do seem to be entering into the spirit of the occasion. I wish all our Visiting Fellows were so eager to assimilate and come to terms with our little ways. It makes life so much easier. I don’t believe we’ve ever had a visitor before who’s concocted their own mull, especially after such a short time in college.’

  ‘I’m sure Doctor Cornwall is going to be a great asset,’ said Jazz Trethewey. ‘He’s showing all the signs of being an assimilator.’ She smiled conspiratorially. ‘I’m afraid some of your fellow countrymen can seem more than a shade patronizing. Even in my discipline. I must say that it’s a little hard to take when a Professor of Wine from Perfidious Albion starts laying down the law on vintages or terroir when all his own country has produced is elderflower or dandelion and burdock.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know.’ Doctor Cornwall felt obliged to defend his countrymen’s wine industry. ‘There are one or two quite decent whites in the south of England and I believe they’re doing well with pinot noir in North Cornwall.’

  ‘Piss and wind,’ said the bearded Tasman Penhaligon, who had entered left with his tartan thermos. ‘Northern hemisphere wines are like northern hemisphere rugby football.’

  ‘Doctor Penhaligon used to play open-side wing-forward for Tasmania B. He still turns out for the state veterans.’ This was Brad Davey attempting, somewhat ineffectually, to be emollient. He, too, had a regulation tartan thermos which he handed over to the hardworking Sammy with an ingratiating leer. ‘That should blow the bows off your sneakers, Sam,’ he said.

  ‘No alcoholic additives allowed, Brad,’ said Sammy. ‘The rules say instant disqualification for anyone submitting a mixture of more than thirteen per cent proof.’

  ‘How does anyone know?’ asked Tudor, mildly.

  ‘I run a cool random drug check,’ said Sammy, disappearing behind a gold and black chinoiserie screen with an armful of thermoses to which he had attached sticky yellow tabs with numbers on them. Tudor supposed he knew what he was doing. It seemed rather haphazard to him and he had no serious expectation of fair play. Whether the result depended on financial bribery or college politics he could not guess, but he did not for a moment suppose that the best man or woman would win.

  ‘We’re just waiting for Lorraine,’ said the Dame, beaming round the assembled company as Sammy re-emerged and started to pour the contents of the various thermoses into the waiting tureens. Each one had a ladle by the side. The drill seemed to be that you ladled a small quantity into your individual pewter tankard, sniffed, tasted and spat, if so inclined, into the senior common room spittoon in the middle of the room. Tudor sensed that most of them would swallow rather than spit.

  ‘Lorraine’s late for everything,’ said Jazz Trethewey in an aside intended only for him, ‘and recently she’s been later than usual. She’s not been herself these last few days. Even when she is herself she’s not entirely up to speed. I’m afraid your friend Professor Carpenter has not been treating her in a gentlemanly manner.’

  Tudor arched an eyebrow.

  ‘Care to elaborate?’ he said.

  ‘Later, maybe,’ replied the Professor of Oenology. ‘Ah, here she is! Not in good order I’m afraid.’

  This was true. The college Secretary seemed dishevelled. Her eyes had the pink, puffy appearance of someone who had been crying, though, thought Tudor, pragmatically, it might just as well have been hay fever or a heavy cold. As he was constantly telling his classes, the one thing you shouldn’t do with a conclusion was to jump to it. Conclusions were there to be arrived at methodically, slowly, after all considerations had been taken into account. For that reason, if no other, he did not allow himself to assume that Lorraine Montagu had recently been in tears.

  Ah, Lorraine,’ cried Dame Edith, with a heavy hint of irony, ‘how good of you to come!’

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ said Lorraine, handing her thermos to Sammy who gave her what looked to Tudor like a particularly sympathetic smile. ‘I got held up.’

  ‘How remiss of you,’ said Dame Edith. ‘However your being held up hasn’t held us up unduly,’ and she gave a dry, donnish cackle, as if she had cracked a particularly clever joke which the rest of the group were too unintelligent or ill-educated to understand.

 
‘So!’ The Dame clapped her hands together and rubbed them with a positive glow of self-satisfaction. ‘Now that we are all assembled once more for this, one of our most enjoyable St Petroc’s traditions...’

  ‘Tradition my arse,’ hissed Jazz Trethewey into Tudor’s right ear. ‘She invented the thing just five years ago. It’s just a bad habit she’s got us into.’

  ‘Traditions,’ repeated the Principal, who had noticed Professor Trethewey whispering to the Visiting Fellow and assumed that the whisper was not just a sweet nothing (sweet nothings being a completely unknown quantity as far as either of them were concerned). She had not been able to hear what was said, but could see from the scepticism on Trethewey’s face and the amusement on Cornwall’s that whatever had been said was evidence of bad attitude.

  She then paused and stared in order to show that she had noticed the subversion and was determined to display her authority. ‘In the world of wine it is said that only rot is noble.’ Here she cackled another note of impenetrable superiority. ‘But in the world of St Petroc’s we not only talk no rot but also believe in the nobility of tradition.’

  Cornwall winced. The old bird was becoming severely encumbered by the exuberance of her verbosity. He had always understood that her countrymen were remarkable for their plain-speaking and was surprised.

  Dame Edith seemed surprised by this sudden flight as well and coughed as she collected herself.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to record the absence, for the first time in several years, of our distinguished member, Professor Ashley Carpenter. However, as you know, Professor Carpenter has taken an unscheduled leave of absence. This will I trust be brief, though I should record with sorrow that Ashley has not sent me a formal apology which isn’t like him. He’s usually very correct about such matters.’