by Tom Sharpe
*
At Kloone University Purefoy Osbert finished his day of Continuous Assessment, the monthly process of reading his students’ essays, appending a short commentary to each of them and giving them grades. He had driven up from Cambridge with the satisfying feeling that he had something to tell Mrs Ndhlovo that would surely convince her he was a proper man. It had taken him some days to get over his cold and the fear he had experienced in the maze but during that time his view of himself had changed. He had come to Porterhouse to find out who had murdered Sir Godber Evans and in the space of a few weeks he had succeeded where lawyers and trained private detectives, who had spent months and even years, had failed. He had recorded the time and place, the Dean’s presence and the circumstances surrounding the event most carefully and had even gone to the expense of hiring a safety deposit box in Benet Street in which to keep these documents. On the other hand he had rejected his first impulse to go down to London to tell Goodenough and his cousin Vera, on the grounds that they would either consider his findings inconclusive or take immediate and, in his opinion, precipitate action. He needed time to think things over, and besides his own theories about the causes of crime and the role of the police and law as being responsible for criminal behaviour had been thrown in doubt. Worse still, for the first time in his life Purefoy had, if not met a murderer face to face, seen his shape and heard the violence in his voice. There’d been no reasoned argument, no plausible excuse or even explanation for his action, only the threat to tell Purefoy that he had murdered Sir Godber if the Dean and Fellows tried to send him to Porterhouse Park. Purefoy Osbert had never heard of Porterhouse Park before. Now he knew it was where old Fellows went when they became a nuisance or got in trouble with the police. That much he had learnt. But basically the mystery of Skullion’s motive remained unsolved. There was a lot of groundwork still to do before he could submit convincing findings to Lady Mary and to Goodenough and Lapline.
The more he thought about the problem the more he found fresh snags. He had disclosed his reasons for being the Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow to the Dean and to the other Fellows in the Combination Room and they would be on their guard. Purefoy cursed himself for his drunken indiscretion. It meant that every question that he asked would meet with silence or a deliberately misleading answer. In short, he had learnt what he had come to learn, but could do nothing with it. There was another reason for not knowing what to do, and one that weighed upon him all the time. Skullion was old and crippled, a tragic figure in his wheelchair and his ancient bowler hat, and to expose him now would do no good to anyone. Only Lady Mary’s sense of vengeance would be satisfied and Purefoy had come to feel no sympathy for her. The murderer would never kill again and, even if the case against him could be proved, what good would prison do? Not that, in Purefoy’s informed opinion, prisons did any good to anyone. They were the symptoms of society’s failure and infected what they were supposed to cure. Skullion was already punished and imprisoned by his immobility. With so many conflicting thoughts colliding in his mind Purefoy Osbert sought escape by concentrating on his love for Mrs Ndhlovo. He would explain it all to her and, being a woman who had seen so much of life, she would be bound to know exactly what to do.
Having finished his marking and made arrangements to meet all fourteen students the following day for lunch in the University Canteen to discuss any problems they might be having with their reading list, he went off rather more cheerfully to visit Mrs Ndhlovo. On his way he bought some red roses. Mrs Ndhlovo’s flat was on the first floor of a large Edwardian house. Purefoy climbed the stairs and was about to knock on the door when it was opened and he found himself looking at a woman who resembled Mrs Ndhlovo, but wasn’t, and who didn’t seem surprised to see him. She was dark-haired, wore glasses and was dressed rather formally in a skirt and a high-necked sweater. ‘Oh my God, it’s you,’ she said. ‘I might have guessed it. You don’t give up do you?’
With a feeling that something was very wrong, though for the life of him he couldn’t think what except that he had somehow come to the wrong house and that the woman must suppose he was a rent collector, or someone who looked like him and who had been making a nuisance of himself or even sexually harassing her, Purefoy stammered his apologies. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘I was looking for a Mrs Ndhlovo.’
‘Mrs Ndhlovo doesn’t live here any more,’ said the woman.
‘I see,’ said Purefoy. ‘Do you happen to know her new address?’
‘You want to know Mrs Ndhlovo’s new address? Is that what you’re asking?’ said the woman with what Purefoy could only consider rather gratuitous repetition and an almost sinister emphasis. He had a feeling too that her voice had changed.
‘Yes, that is what I’m asking for,’ he said staring at her blue eyes behind the thick lenses of her glasses. ‘I’m an old friend of hers from the University.’
‘So,’ said the woman, and looked him up and down rather rudely. ‘How old?’
‘How old?’ said Purefoy, feeling even more peculiar. The woman’s accent had changed with that ‘so’. It sounded middle-European. ‘Oh, you mean how long have I known her? Well, actually I’ve known her –’
‘Not vot I meant,’ said the woman. ‘I vant your age.’
Purefoy stared at her. Something was terribly wrong now. Her accent changed from relatively normal if upper-class English to something he had only heard before in movies featuring KGB interrogators. He glanced past her into the room. Mrs Ndhlovo’s clothes were scattered on the sofa and an empty suitcase was lying open on the floor. ‘Now look here –’ he began, but the woman interrupted him.
‘Mrs Ndhlovo has disappeared,’ she said. ‘Do you know where she has gone?’
‘Of course I don’t,’ said Purefoy. ‘I wouldn’t be here if I did, would I?’ Again the feeling hit him that whatever was going on made no sense. The woman’s accent had changed once more. It was distinctly English.
‘But you could identify her body?’
‘Body?’ said Purefoy, horribly alarmed. Within a very few minutes he had been assailed by the conviction that he had come to the wrong address, had met a total stranger who seemed to have been expecting him and who had then changed from talking normal English to something guttural and who had now switched back to English with a question that implied Mrs Ndhlovo was dead and if she hadn’t entirely disappeared was in such a mutilated state that it required an old acquaintance to identify her. ‘Body? You don’t mean …’
‘How often vere you intimate viz ze voman? You vere her loffer, ja?’
‘Jesus,’ said Purefoy, and clutched the side of the doorway for support. The beastly woman’s changing accents, not to mention the appalling implications of her questions, had him reeling. And now she had taken him by the arm and was dragging him into the room. Purefoy Osbert clung to the doorway. ‘Look,’ he squawked. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t a clue –’
‘Ah, that was what I was waiting for. Clue,’ said the woman. ‘We rely on these little mistakes in cases of this sort, Dr Osbert. You said “Clue.”’
Purefoy Osbert’s hand left the doorway partly as a result of the woman dragging him but far more because she had just called him Dr Osbert, and had added to his sense of utter horror by speaking about cases of this kind and clues. He staggered into the room and leaned against the wall. The woman locked the door and pocketed the key, then, with a distinctly sinister movement which involved keeping her eyes on him, sidled across the room to the bedroom door and shut that too.
‘Sit down,’ she said. Purefoy remained standing and tried to marshal some reasonable thoughts. They didn’t come easily. In fact they didn’t come at all. ‘I don’t,’ he tried to say, only to find that his voice wasn’t responding properly. It sounded extraordinarily high-pitched and tiny. He tried again. ‘How do you know my name? And what’s going on? And why are Mrs Ndhlovo’s clothes all over the place?’
‘I said sit down,’ said the woman. Sh
e pulled a chair from Mrs Ndhlovo’s desk, turned it round so that its back faced Purefoy, then straddled it, showing a good deal of leg in the process. Purefoy Osbert crept away from the wall and sat on the arm of the sofa.
‘Right. Now then, Dr Osbert, I want you to start at the beginning and tell me in your own words how you first became acquainted with Mrs Ndhlovo.’
From the arm of the sofa Purefoy eyed her and tried desperately to think. It was almost clear to him that he was either in the presence of some sort of plainclothes police person or, since she was apparently alone and had multiple accents, most of them foreign, a member of a secret intelligence service. Either way she was alarming. ‘How do you know my name?’ he asked in an attempt to get some bearings.
‘You will answer my questions,’ she said. ‘I am not here to answer yours. If you are not prepared to cooperate with me, I will have to call my assistants.’ She glanced significantly at the door into the bedroom.
Purefoy shook his head. The woman was bad enough without any assistance. He looked miserably round the room at all the familiar African ornaments and knick-knacks Mrs Ndhlovo had decorated it with, but they gave him as little comfort as her clothes and the empty suitcase. ‘I just met her at the University,’ he said. ‘In the Common Room or the Canteen. Somewhere like that.’
The woman reached across the desk for a notebook and opened it. ‘We have reason to believe that is not the truth,’ she said. ‘You attended her evening class on Male Infertility and Masturbatory Techniques in Room Five in the Scargill Block. The excuse you gave at a later date was that you mistook it for a lecture on Prison Reform in Sierra Leone.’
Purefoy Osbert swallowed drily. This was infinitely more awful. The woman shut the book and put it back on the desk. ‘That is what happened,’ he admitted. ‘It was a genuine mistake.’
‘The following week you returned. Would you please explain why?’
Purefoy looked round the room again and tried to think of a suitable answer. ‘I just –’ he began and stopped.
‘You just what? You just wanted to learn how to masturbate?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Purefoy angrily. ‘This is insufferable.’
‘Insufferable? How you mean insufferable?’ said the woman, lapsing into middle or eastern European English again. ‘Like you don’t suffer from von Klubhausen’s Syndrome mit der hairy hands?’
‘Jesus,’ said Purefoy, breaking out into a cold sweat and beginning to think, in so far as he was able to think at all, that he was going mad. The next question convinced him.
‘Tell me, Dr Osbert, tell me about your interest in clitoral circumcision. Have you ever had any experience of it personally?’
‘What?’ Purefoy shouted, and for a moment it looked as though the woman hesitated herself. ‘What did you say?’
‘You heard me,’ she snarled. ‘Answer the question.’
‘Personally?’ yelled Purefoy. ‘How the fuck can I have had any personal experience of female circumcision? I haven’t got a bloody clitoris for God’s sake.’
‘Yes, zere is zat,’ the woman admitted switching to Lubianka 1948. ‘Afterwards, of course not, but before …’
‘Afterwards? Before?’ yelled Purefoy. ‘Any time I couldn’t have a clitoris. I’m not a woman.’
‘You think not?’ said the woman doubtfully. ‘To go to evening classes on Clitoral Stimulation and Female Circumcision and you’re not a woman? We can see about that at a different stage of the investigation.’
Purefoy was about to say she could see about it now, but he thought better of it.
‘So,’ said the woman, ‘when did you last see Mrs Ndhlovo alive?’
Purefoy Osbert felt sick. The significance of that ‘alive’ had not been lost on him. ‘You mean she’s dead?’ he stammered.
The woman stood up. ‘You should know, Dr Osbert, in what condition she was when you last saw her. Was she alive, Dr Osbert? Or was she already … All right, I will rephrase the question.’ She stopped and said nothing for half a minute. It seemed longer to Purefoy. Like half an hour. ‘Well?’ she snapped at him suddenly. ‘What is your answer to that?’
Purefoy blinked. ‘To what?’ he asked shakily. ‘You said you were going to rephrase the question.’
‘Rephrase the question, Dr Osbert? Why should I do that?’ Purefoy’s fingers tightened on the back of the sofa. It was the nearest he could get to keeping a grip on reality. Whatever he was involved in didn’t begin to have anything real about it. To make matters worse, he thought he could hear someone sobbing at the back of the flat. ‘I don’t know why you said you were going to rephrase the question,’ he said. ‘How could I know? I didn’t even know what question you were talking about.’
‘Very clever,’ said the woman. ‘Your evasive technique is psychologically interesting. You have evidently prepared yourself for just this sort of interrogation. And the flowers are not without significance. You brought them as an indication that you did not know what had happened. Is that it?’
‘I didn’t. I brought them for Mrs –’
‘Not true,’ snarled the woman, her pale eyes glinting behind the spectacles. ‘Not true. It is time you were brought face to face with the facts.’ She got off the chair and moved towards the door into the bedroom, and for a moment Purefoy’s hopes rose.
At the door the woman paused and looked back at him. ‘It is not nice vot you vill see,’ she said thickly. ‘Three veeks viz ze central heating turned up high and ze refrigerator door open iz not nice. But then you will know about deliquescence, the liquefaction that takes place when …’
Purefoy had gone ashen and he was sweating profusely. ‘For God’s sake, get it over with,’ he squeaked. The sound of sobbing was clearly audible now. The woman opened the door with a flourish and pushed Purefoy Osbert into the room. Mrs Ndhlovo was lying on the bed with a handkerchief pushed into her mouth, and she was red in the face with tears running down her cheeks and with her knees doubled up in a spasm. For a moment Purefoy gaped at her and a surge of relief swept over him. It was a brief moment. There was absolutely nothing the matter with her. It was simply that she was howling with laughter.
With a final spasm she rolled off the bed and took the handkerchief out of her mouth. ‘Oh Purefoy,’ she said weakly, ‘you were delicious.’
But Purefoy Osbert hardly heard her. The other woman was doubled up with laughter too. In blind fury he pushed past her and out of the flat and was presently striding angrily down the street. He had had Mrs Ndhlovo and Kloone University and the whole damned lot. They could stuff themselves for all he cared. Without even bothering to collect his papers from the University he made for the car park and began the long drive back to Cambridge. And as he drove he composed in his mind a letter that would say exactly how he now felt about Mrs Bloody Ndhlovo.
*
Behind him in the apartment the woman he had thought of as Mrs Ndhlovo, and who had insisted on being called by that name, looked up from the red roses still lying on the floor and said sadly to her sister, ‘We seem to have gone too far this time. Poor Purefoy. I suppose he’s never going to forgive me. And you have to admit that he did face the facts terribly well.’
‘If he’s really in love with you, he’ll get over it,’ said her sister. ‘And he has to have a sense of humour somewhere or he wouldn’t be worth marrying anyway.’
‘It’s not going to be easy to explain,’ Ingrid said. ‘Oh dear. How the past comes back to haunt us.’
27
Getting hold of a black woman who was prepared to do what General Sir Cathcart D’Eath wanted done to Purefoy Osbert was proving harder than he had expected. His contacts in the SAS had not been able to help him at all. ‘Financial cuts,’ he was told. ‘Half our chaps are on secondment somewhere or helping the Americans out. We’re practically becoming a self-financing service. Bloody diabolical state of affairs. Sorry not to be of any use but there it is. Recruitment is down to nearly zero.’ As a result the Zulu woman had been made redun
dant and had gone back to South Africa to stiffen up the new Defence Force there, and none of the General’s chums in London was able to suggest an alternative. In the end he was forced to make do with a hefty white woman from Thetford whom one of his stable boys recommended as being hot stuff and not particular.
The General, inspecting her across the bar of the pub in which she worked, could see what he meant. She was an elderly peroxide blonde well past her sell-by date whose best days had been in the Sixties and Seventies when the American airbases had been at their busiest and she’d had ever so much fun with the boys at Mildenhall and Alconbury and all, know what I mean? The General thought he did, and arranged for her to come to the safe house opposite the Botanical Gardens he kept for his own peculiar practices. Surrounded by offices and occupied on the ground floor during the day by a firm of architects, it was virtually indistinguishable from all the other buildings in the street and had the added advantage of being approachable through a garage in a lane at the back. Here in a pink and padded bedroom the General discussed the choice of costume and the scenario he had in mind for her. ‘He’s quite a young man,’ he said, conscious that he wasn’t sure how old Dr Osbert was.
Myrtle Ransby said she liked young men too. She also liked older men. ‘More experienced like, know what I mean?’
The General preferred not to. His diverse tastes did not run to anyone quite as ripe as Myrtle. He preferred to concentrate on Purefoy Osbert’s supposed preferences. In the next room behind the mirror Sir Cathcart’s attractive secretary had already sighted the video camera and arranged the sound. ‘The thing is,’ he continued, ‘he’s spent a long time in Africa, in fact he is South African and he is both attracted to and terrified of black women. The point of this therapy is to prove to him that colour is completely irrelevant …’