She giggled. ‘I’d forgotten how refreshing bad taste is. Let me tell you a bit about what it’s like living with someone who doesn’t approve of inappropriate language…’
15
Fighting back a rising tide of panic but trying gamely to maintain a calm exterior, Rosa Karp was spending the evening in the House of Lords chairing a meeting of ‘Reclaiming our past’—a group of academics, teachers and political activists who were planning a campaign to make women’s and ethnic studies a core part of the school curriculum. Although she kept trying to tell herself that—after all she had suffered at the hands of the Troutbeck monster—Wysteria had been in a sufficiently disturbed state to have let the tide creep up on the eyot, Rosa was failing to convince herself. So troubled was she that half-an-hour in, Parminda Kumar, the militant director of the outreach unit of the liaison officers’ union, accused her of marginalizing her by failing to respond to her concerns about the ideological necessity of stressing the secular rather than religious nature of the Indian community. ‘Post-imperial capitalist, you mean,’ snarled Angela Euston, the Afro-Caribbean sociologist, and as Parminda demanded that the chair rule such offensive remarks out of order, Rosa burst into tears and ran headlong out of the room, along the corridors and out of the Lords.
***
Pleading a virus, Felix Ferriter had cancelled his well-thumbed lecture on ‘Literature through the pink prism’ to a London students’ gay, lesbian and bisexual society. He spent the evening at home compulsively watching news bulletins and wishing he could think of a face-saving excuse for going back to America. He flinched every time the clip was run of Geraint Griffiths insisting that Abu Mohammed was as good as instituting a jihad and demanding that the Home Secretary initiate his own Holy War against fascism. Having talked to him earlier, Ferriter was all too aware that Griffiths saw the Knapper-Warburton committee as the frontline troops in a glorious battle and was in maniacally high spirits about the possibility of martyrdom. Ferriter had tried to make contact with Rosa, Den Smith and Hugo Hurlingham in the hope that one of them might be weakening, but none of them could be reached. It was after ten before he disciplined himself to turn off the television and read over the first draft of his paper for the forthcoming international Queer Theory conference which flew a challenging yet ironic kite about Oscar Wilde as a symbol for the proto-post-postmodern phallus. After a few pages, he threw it aside and reached for the vodka. He pulled out his phone before going to bed and was drunk enough to fall asleep quickly. When, at midnight, the doorbell began to ring, it was a few minutes before he realised what was happening. He lay under the duvet, terrified, trying to summon up the courage to get out of bed and ring the police.
***
Dervla’s agent had hired four heavies to escort her to the fashion show she was being discreetly but generously paid to attend. She wished desperately that she’d taken Amiss’ advice to cry off and go to Dublin for a few days. Sitting in the front row trying to look interested and vivacious, she wondered how long she could keep up the façade. At the end of the show, she managed a glass of champagne and some air-kissing, but as she left the Savoy and faced a battery of clicking cameras and screaming reporters, she felt sick and dizzy. As the words ‘Dervla, are you frightened?’ floated across the ether, she crumpled to the ground.
***
Hugo Hurlingham had attended the literary agents’ dining club as a guest of the chairman and had drunk enough to suspend his fears and enjoy his favourite pursuits of boasting, gossiping and character-assassinating. ‘You’re very brave, Hugo,’ said his host. ‘In your shoes I’d have quit that committee PDQ.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it, old man. Job has to be done. I think I can pride myself that I’ve managed to steady the nerves of my colleagues.’
His host shook his head in mingled surprise and admiration. Who would have thought that the pompous old git had balls? He escorted him from the restaurant at around eleven, shovelled him into a taxi and waved him off. When he reached his apartment block, Hurlingham got out slightly nervously, much more conscious than usual of the darkness of the street. He paid the driver and, while waiting for the receipt, fished his keys out of his pocket. He had just inserted a key in the lock when the noise of the taxi driving off was drowned out by the sound of a motorbike. As he opened the door he pressed the light switch and presented to the pillion passenger a much better target than he had anticipated.
***
Despite his underlying nervousness, Den Smith had had a most enjoyable day. First, there had been coffee with one of his regular contributors, a young man who regarded Smith as an inspirational guru and who was suitably awestruck at his courage in defying whatever dark forces were threatening the Knapper-Warburton. The interview with Susie Briggs had given him a chance to savage the ghastly Troutbeck on the lunch-time news programme, then there had been lunch with a radical historian who wanted to consult him about the origins of American imperialism and who had given him extra ammunition with which to kick the stuffing out of the Foreign Office Minister of State during the debate that evening at the Cambridge Union.
It was three in the afternoon when he checked into the Trinity College guest room the Union had booked for him and had a nap, after which he read a bit and worked on his new poem, ‘Stiff the Cunts,’ for which inspiration had come to him on the train. Within an hour or so he had a full draft:
There’s only one way.
Stiff George W. Bush and his poodle Tony Blair, hired to sniff his ass.
Stiff the neo-con cunts who turn our world into a rodeo for their Texan whoremaster.
Stiff the racist Nazi Zionist serial killers.
Stiff the barbarians before they stiff you.
It was powerful and true, he felt, but perhaps still in need of some polishing. He tried replacing full stops with semi-colons, but felt it took from the staccato effect. Then he tried capitalising the whole of the first line, but concluded reluctantly that the effect lacked subtlety. Reading it out loud to make sure the cadences were right, Smith heard a chime and realised with a start that it was six-thirty, and time to stroll up the street for a pre-dinner drink with the Union officers.
Having been asked to wear a black tie, Smith wore a red open-necked shirt, jeans and a bomber jacket. Seeing the students dressed up made him guffaw loudly, while deriding them for their slavish adherence to anachronistic styles and values kept him happy throughout most of dinner. He lost his temper, though, when the President—who had arrived late and flustered—told him that his main opponent had had to cancel and that his place would be taken by Geraint Griffiths, who was now speeding to Cambridge by car.
Not being able to admit that he feared Griffiths more than any minister, Smith took refuge in loud denunciations of the lack of courtesy involved in failing to consult him: the President’s explanation that it all happened so late it was a miracle he had found a replacement was thunderously dismissed as a lie. ‘I’m thinking of leaving now,’ he growled but the volume of grovelling and begging that elicited persuaded him graciously to change his mind. By the time Griffiths arrived, Smith had sufficiently recovered his temper to ask him if he’d had a good journey and to agree to pose with him and the Union officers outside the building for the benefit of a freelance cameraman.
The debate would long be remembered by those present and not only because of what happened subsequently. Proposing the motion ‘That this House would cage George Bush in Guantánamo Bay and throw away the key,’ Smith began with his now familiar account of how the mass murderers leading the fascist states of Britain and America and Israel had organised the air attacks on America in order to justify a war destined to seize the oil resources of the whole of the Middle East. Bush was not the moron he looked, explained Smith, but a brilliant, ruthless, ravening despot who had sought and found an excuse to begin enslaving the world: it was the duty of Muslims, Christians and every other moral person to defeat this evil axis by any means necessary. As he conclude
d his peroration, Smith hesitated about whether to recite his new poem, but decided to go for it. Griffiths’ roars of laughter so enraged him that he had to be pulled back from assaulting him by the President and a few other students, but Smith recovered himself enough to shout ‘Men and women, I beg to propose the motion,’ and sat down to thunderous applause mixed with boos and jeers.
Griffiths’ onslaught on Smith was given considerable immediacy by his insistence that they were both potential victims of Smith’s new best friends the Islamofascists. ‘Only today,’ he intoned, at only a quarter of his usual speed, ‘on the BBC, that alleged bastion of freedom and democracy, the fascist cleric Abu Mohammed was allowed to threaten every member of our committee with death. Two of us have died already, but it seems we are all to be sacrificed because of the self-delusion and cowardice of those who don’t realise that George Bush is our only hope of saving the world…’ Seeing Smith on his feet waving and shouting maniacally, Griffiths gave an elaborate bow and gave way.
‘They were not murdered by Muslims,’ screamed Smith. ‘They were murdered by MI5 at the behest of people like you in order to justify a brutal clampdown on critics of this insane, blood-soaked government.’ Griffiths responded with his standard defence of democratic imperialism, worked himself into a gabbling frenzy against the tradition of British traitors and moral delinquents that included the Bloomsberries, who put their friends first, the Cambridge spies, who had put their ideologies first and these days people like Harold Pinter and Den Smith and all their cranky well-heeled Islington friends, who hated their country’s allies and loved its enemies. He came to a sudden halt, formally opposed the motion and sat down to a chorus of cheers and boos.
The rest of the debate was an anticlimax, although the young stand-up comedian who was seconding the motion annoyed both guest speakers by parodying them so brilliantly that the whole audience dissolved into screams of laughter; ultimately, to Smith’s fury, his side just lost the vote and a triumphant Griffiths did a victory jig before rushing off to the taxi which was to take him to London. Smith was in such a bad mood that he almost refused the invitation to come for a drink, but he wanted one badly and the President was so complimentary about his speech and about Rage that his face was saved and he agreed. He was mollified also by the urgency of a journalist’s request for the text of his poem; pausing only to scratch ‘copyright Den Smith’ underneath, he handed it over and followed the President to the Union bar. After a few large whiskies he picked fights with the comedian and half-a-dozen students and, shortly before midnight, he realised that there were only two others left in the room and that the President, himself also considerably the worse for wear, was pointing to his watch and reminding him that Trinity closed at midnight.
Smith had had enough to drink to take violent umbrage at this information. Convinced that he was being insulted by being denied the hospitality that was his due, he responded to the President’s offer to escort him back to Trinity by telling him to fuck himself, grabbed his jacket and stormed off. Alone and angry, he marched past the Round Church to Bridge Street and into the view of the loiterer with the mobile phone at the ready. His being on his own as he crossed the road into the semi-darkness of St John’s Street was a lucky break for the man on the pillion of the motorbike waiting around the corner.
***
‘It’s been a wonderful evening,’ said Amiss to Rachel at around midnight, as they finished yet another cup of coffee.
‘The best I’ve had in a long time.’
He took her hand. ‘I don’t know what the etiquette is.’
‘Nor do I.’
‘Do you feel like a nightcap at my place?’
She smiled. ‘Why not. I could renew my acquaintanceship with my least favourite cat.’
They were in his flat within forty-five minutes. It took some time to satisfy Plutarch’s needs and settle her down, but peace had just been achieved when the telephone began to ring. Amiss felt a surge of worry. ‘Sorry, Rachel. I’d better get that. I really should have checked my mobile for messages.’
‘You certainly had, Robert. At one a.m. it’s likely to be serious.’
Amiss lifted the receiver. ‘Hello, Ellis…Yes…Oh, sweet Jesus…Dead? What about the others?…All?…You’re sure?…Yes…yes…yes…Yes, I do see…OK…I’ll be ready…How long for, do you think?…I understand…They’ll be able to give Rachel a lift home?…Thanks…Yep. See you shortly.’
Rachel, who had gone rigid with dread, found herself unable to speak. He sat down beside her and took her hands. ‘It’s all right. Well, that is, it’s not all right. I’m selfishly relieved that Jack and Mary Lou and Dervla are safe, but Hugo Hurlingham and Den Smith have been killed in drive-by shootings, Hugo in London and Den in Cambridge. Not surprisingly, the cops want to take us all into protective custody and are on their way, so I guess I’d better go and pack.’ He looked at her ruefully. ‘I’m so sorry, Rachel. This is not a good end to a happy reunion, but I don’t have any choice. And Ellis says they’ll be here within fifteen minutes and I must pack for at least a few days. Not easy when you’re rather drunk.’
She hugged him. ‘You’ve certainly arranged this well as a reminder that you don’t live an orthodox life. Now, what can I do to help?’
He hesitated.
‘It’s OK, Robert. I’m ahead of you. I’ll look after Plutarch. Give me the spare key.’
‘You’re a saint. Though I’m not really happy about your coming here. It may not be safe.’
‘I’ll be fine. I can’t imagine they’re going to take you somewhere safe without telling the world there’s no point in trying to get you at home. Now, come on, let’s pack. Why don’t you get books and papers and that sort of thing and I’ll start sorting out clothes?’
He hugged her again. ‘Welcome back.’
‘I don’t know if I’m back. I don’t even know how long you’re likely to be around to go back to. But so far so good.’ And she disappeared into his bedroom with a purposeful air.
16
‘Ridiculous,’ said the baroness. ‘Completely ridiculous.’ She was wearing an all-enveloping creation in bottle-green velvet that she called a siren suit—one of several which comprised what Mary Lou referred to as her ‘babygro’ collection. She waved her pipe energetically. ‘All we needed at St Martha’s were a few patrolling PC Plods and we’d have been fine.’ She leaned forward and helped herself to some more whisky and shook her head. ‘It’s very disappointing. I was looking forward to beating up puritans tonight at a debate about legalising prostitution, but I suppose I’ll have to cancel.’
‘I can’t say I’m too bothered about legalising prostitution right now,’ said Mary Lou. ‘I can think of a few more urgent issues.’
‘We’d have one fewer,’ said Pooley acidly, ‘if you hadn’t taken up Jack’s mad invitation to join the committee.’
Amiss felt suddenly cross. ‘Look here, it’s bad enough to be locked up in this suburban Gulag without the inmates falling out.’
‘Did you have to put us somewhere so ugly, Ellis?’ asked the baroness. ‘Mock-Tudor. Really! Just look at that carpet! And as for the wallpaper…! It’s all deeply upsetting.’
Pooley jumped up. ‘Jack, I don’t think I’ve ever shouted at you before, but I’ve had enough. It’s well after four o’clock in the morning, we’re in the middle of a most frightful tragedy and we plods are trying to ensure the carnage doesn’t get worse. Hermione Babcock was poisoned, Wysteria Wilcox was almost certainly drowned and Den Smith and Hugo Hurlingham were shot dead. Only a complete lunatic would think there was any alternative to taking the rest of the committee into protective custody. We found two safe houses at short notice and you’re doing an Oscar Wilde about the bloody wallpaper. Well, I sincerely beg your pardon for having been so remiss. Can you ever forgive me?’
The baroness pouted. ‘I came when you told me to, didn’t I?’
‘Not quietly.’ He waved at the covered cage in th
e corner. ‘And you browbeat the protection squad into bringing a bad-tempered and raucous parrot to a place of hiding.’
Mary Lou stood up, went over to the baroness and patted her head. ‘What he’s trying to say, Jack, is that things are very difficult for him and it would be helpful if you would try to be supportive.’
‘And uncomplaining,’ added Amiss.
‘And uncomplaining.’
‘Even about food,’ said Amiss. ‘It’s bound to be awful but at least we’re alive to peck at it.’
The baroness yawned. ‘All right, all right. I’ll try not to make a fuss. Bring us up to date, Ellis.’
Pooley sat down again. ‘Bad as it all has been, we’ve had some luck. Hugo was murdered outside his flat, but his downstairs neighbour found him so he was quickly identified and, fortunately, the local police knew to report immediately to us since they were supposed to be keeping an unofficial eye on him. Den Smith had been debating in Cambridge and one of the students followed him back to Trinity at a discreet distance because he was afraid he might be too late to get in and feared he’d run amok because he was both drunk and furious. The lad saw the shooting, ducked into a gateway and phoned 999. He’s lucky to be alive; we’re lucky that he was there. So that gave us time to get hold of all the…survivors tonight and get them into safekeeping.’
‘The Cambridge cops must be a bit pissed off,’ said the baroness. ‘They’d taken the trouble to look after us and Den gets rubbed out on their doorstep.’
‘Where’s everyone else?’ asked Mary Lou. ‘The cop who drove us here didn’t know anything.’
‘Nor the one who collected us,’ said Amiss.
‘Who’s us?’ asked the baroness. ‘Plutarch? Is she here?’
‘Rachel. We had dinner together and she’d come home with me.’
The baroness grinned from ear to ear. ‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘Mary Lou told me she seemed to be coming to her senses. About time too. Why didn’t you bring her along here?’
Carnage on the Committee: A Robert Amiss/Baroness Jack Troutbeck Mystery Page 18