Grantchester Grind

by Tom Sharpe

  *

  In the Council Chamber the Praelector laid down his pen. He had been thinking about writing his letter of resignation. He had achieved his purpose and the Council had accepted his nomination of Edgar Hartang as the new Master. The other Fellows had left and only the Dean and the Senior Tutor remained behind. They were neither of them in a good mood.

  ‘On your own head be it,’ the Dean said. ‘God alone knows what sort of monster we’re landed with, but we’ll have to cope with the man as best we can.’

  ‘We’ve had such men before. It was either that or bankruptcy. In any case I shan’t be here to see it,’ said the Praelector. ‘I am resigning.’

  ‘And not before time,’ said the Senior Tutor bitterly.

  ‘I agree. I have hung on uselessly for too many years now. It is time for younger, more talented Fellows to take over.’

  ‘And do you intend to stay in Cambridge and occasionally dine in Hall?’ the Dean asked with a little malice.

  ‘No. I have a niece in Chichester and there is a pleasant guesthouse nearby. I had always thought of going there. But I daresay the Park will suit me well enough. I shall see the term out, that is all.’

  They went out into the spring sunshine, conscious that an era had ended. The Dean and the Senior Tutor were thinking of their own futures. They had no wish to stay on and watch the changes that were coming. Even now in the Bursar’s office Ross Skundler was busy installing the screens and electronic equipment that he insisted were essential. His appointment had been one of the conditions laid down by Schnabel. ‘He was invaluable to you in the past,’ he had told Hartang at their last interview at the Transworld Television Centre. ‘And he had nothing to do with any of this. Forget the past. You are Master of Porterhouse and a free man.’

  ‘Free fuck,’ said Hartang.

  ‘And I wouldn’t use that sort of expression. As a respected member of the Establishment you’ve got to moderate the force of your language.’

  ‘I’m not there yet,’ Hartang said, but already in his mind he was. He’d been up to Porterhouse and seen the place for himself with Schnabel and Bolsover and while he hadn’t liked the look of it, he knew there was no safe alternative. In fact he had paid two visits, on each occasion without his wig or the dark blue glasses and dressed in a very quiet suit.

  But before that he had had a visit from four people, two men and two women, who had very tactfully handed their cards sealed in envelopes at the reception desk for Mr E. Hartang’s perusal only. They had also arranged for Schnabel, Feuchtwangler and Bolsover to accompany them. The legal team had looked suitably subdued. They recognized Intelligence when they saw them.

  ‘You’ve got your legal advisers here, Mr Hartang, so that you don’t feel under any pressure to answer questions you don’t want to or which you feel might incriminate you,’ the older woman who had blue-rinsed hair had explained very politely. ‘We just want you to know that.’

  Hartang knew better. Like they were telling him the lethal injection wouldn’t hurt one little bit.

  But he had known a lot more than that and the one thing he knew most clearly of all was that he wasn’t going to walk away from this situation except by telling them what they had come to hear. Schnabel and Feuchtwangler had tried to intervene as a matter of form, and Hartang had had to tell them to lay off. They didn’t know the score. Not that he put it like that. He had simply said that he didn’t require their presence and he had business to do with the two men and the two ladies, no problem. Cooperation for protection. And when the lawyers had gone, he had made only one request: that when they found all the information he was about to give them they would have found it from the persons he had already chosen for that role. All those persons, though he didn’t say this, had expressed intentions so violently antipathetic to him that he had had to take certain precautions about intruders and so on. Agree to that simple request and they could have every micron of information he possessed, though not by word of mouth. He wasn’t going to talk but they would find what they had come for on computer files composed under such electronically secure conditions that even the most sophisticated devices could not pick up the signals from the CPU. Again he didn’t give them the full explanation any more than he intended to give them every scintilla of information he possessed. That might come later if they kept to their side of the bargain and allowed him time and opportunity to cover himself with safety and protection. Again he didn’t say this but then he didn’t have to. They knew it and, provided he gave them those files and what was on them met their need for arrests and satisfactory verdicts, that was fine with them. They said they understood his requirements and, after some slight delay during which Hartang left the office and went elsewhere in the building to fetch the disks, they went away.

  A week later Schnabel arrived to say that the Mastership of Porterhouse was his for the asking.

  *

  On his first visit he had been treated with solemn courtesy by the Fellows and shown over the College. He had been reassured by the revolving spikes on the walls and the barred windows which were, they told him, to prevent intruders climbing in. He had found the Crypt under the Chapel rather more disturbing.

  ‘This is where the Masters are buried,’ the Dean had told him as they went down the steps. Hartang had surveyed the stacked coffins with distaste. He had expected proper stone sarcophagi, not this higgledy-piggledy arrangement of wooden boxes. Still, if the Crypt lacked orderliness and the Chapel was impossible to visit because of the scaffolding and the plastic sheets, something about Porterhouse lent credence to Schnabel’s assurance that as Master he could shed all connections with his own past.

  Even Hartang couldn’t see Mosie Diabentos or Dos Passos sending contractors into these ancient courts to blow him away. Like rubbing the Archbishop of Canterbury out in Westminster Abbey. There had been only one moment of unease when they were being shown the Combination Room by the Head Waiter. ‘This is where the dons take their coffee after dinner,’ he’d said.

  ‘Dons?’ Hartang whispered hoarsely to Schnabel. ‘You never said nothing about dons being here. Who are the dons for fucksake?’

  ‘Not that sort of don. It is Cambridge slang for the Fellows of the College. Like the Dean and the professors and so on.’

  ‘And I’m the top don?’

  ‘You are the Master. They won’t even call you Mr Hartang. They will address you as Master. It is a great honour.’

  ‘Five hundred million of honour, Schnabel.’

  ‘So it’s your pension fund out of petty cash, Master. Look at it that way.’

  *

  Hartang looked at it a great many ways, but his mind had already been made up for him. He still had Transworld Television Productions and he would never be poor. All the same, as he waited in his bleak suite in Docklands he regretted the days when he could telephone someone on the other side of the world in the dead of night and talk and the someone would listen dutifully to whatever he had to say and their fear would reassure Hartang that he had achieved power. That was out of the question now. They, the ubiquitous ‘They’, would pick up the call and even with the scrambler would know every word he was saying and analyse even his most guarded statements. He knew it just as surely as he knew his various names were being pronounced in police interrogation rooms in Rome and Palermo, New York and Los Angeles and in towns in South America by men who wanted to finger him just as he had fingered them. They couldn’t, of course, because the computer disks had been found in a garden in Colombia and the death of Dos Passos had been announced in the papers and on television. He was said to have died in a car crash after a week in custody. On his way home after such a short time being questioned in Bogota Dos Passos has a blow-out? And the disks with all that info were in his garden. Just went to show you couldn’t trust nobody … anybody, these days.

  There was another question that obsessed him. Whoever had set this thing up had known precisely what they were doing. There hadn’t been anything accidental about
it. They had seen Kudzuvine coming and had used him because he was a cretin and by using him they could get to Hartang. He didn’t doubt that for a moment. And they had targeted Hartang himself because it suited more ends than one: they’d taken him because he knew the source, the sums and where the money went which no one else, but no one else, knew. For why? Because the information, all the information, was in his head or so broken into completely unconnected pieces that no amount of putting figures together by the most sophisticated computer, one doing sixty billion calculations a second like the Cray they were said to be developing, would be able to find the answers. Because it wouldn’t recognize any conceivable pattern. Or even if it found the patterns – and for all he knew it might could – the pattern itself wouldn’t make sense, wouldn’t be recognizably different from all the other patterns it came up with because the numbers it needed weren’t there to be fed into it. Only in the multiple mnemonics of his own mind were the connections to be found and when he died or got Alzheimer’s the full picture would fade with him. He’d got the idea from a crazy in an automotive dump outside Scranton looking for the meaning of life. That was what he had said, ‘It’s got to be here, the meaning of life,’ and he’d picked up a hub-cap and laughed. ‘Could be this is it. Could be, couldn’t it?’ And Hartang had agreed that the meaning of life could be a hub-cap from an old Hudson Terraplane they didn’t make any more. Yeah, that crazy had shown him the way to hide what needed to be hidden in the confusion of calculated madness.

  So ‘They’ had targeted the right man and had ‘taken’ him, and in return he had given them enough of what they wanted without giving everything away. But who had ‘taken’ him? Who had set this trap up? Had to be a government agency. Couldn’t be anything else the way they treated him nice. Scary just the same, being treated that nice. No use worrying himself sick.

  Edgar Hartang turned on the tape recorder and began his elocution lesson again. Got to remember to speak properly. Got to learn to keep the ‘fucks’ and ‘shitsakes’ out.

  36

  Skullion was sitting on the verandah staring grimly out over the garden and the mudflats at the sea beyond when Mrs Morphy took Purefoy and Mrs Ndhlovo through the house.

  ‘I have to say he’s a very difficult one is Mr S,’ she told them. ‘The others, Dr V and Mr L, well they have their nasty little ways which is only to be expected at their age but I wouldn’t say they were unfriendly. Just a bit messy and so on, you understand, but as I say to Alf, he’s my husband, when you get to their age, not that he’s likely to the way he smokes and drinks, you’ll be the same, and I hope there’s someone around like me to clear up after you. I mean the cost of the laundry. Of course we’ve got a machine but …’

  ‘When you say he’s unfriendly …’ said Purefoy to change the subject.

  ‘You’ll see for yourself,’ said Mrs Morphy. ‘Downright rude, but then he’s only been here a short time and he hasn’t got used to it yet. But he will. They all do because we don’t stand on ceremony here and never have. Just the same, Mr S hardly opens his mouth and when he does what comes out isn’t fit for decent hearing.’ She paused at the glass doors of the verandah and said. ‘I won’t come out if you don’t mind. He’d only tell me to … well, you know what.’

  She slouched back into the kitchen and left them standing in what was evidently the dining-room. Next door a television was on. Purefoy and Mrs Ndhlovo looked out at the dark figure in the bowler hat hunched in his wheelchair on the verandah. This was not the Porterhouse Park they had expected but a red-brick house standing on a little promontory by itself and with a dilapidated wooden fence separating it from the gorse and tufted grass of the sand dunes on either side. There was nothing parklike about it and Purefoy had driven up and down the main road half a mile away several times before stopping at a petrol station and asking for Porterhouse Park.

  ‘There’s a house they call the Park,’ the woman at the till had said. ‘Don’t know anything about Porterhouse. It’s the old folks’ home down Fish Lane, you know, one of them geriatric places. I wouldn’t want to go there.’

  Now, standing hesitantly in the dining-room filled with dark furniture, and made darker still by the roof of the verandah, they could understand her reluctance to have anything to do with the Park. Purefoy opened the door and Skullion expressed his feelings for the housekeeper. ‘What do you want now, you old bitch?’ he asked, without moving his head. ‘Come to see if I’m fucking dead yet? Well, I’m not so you can bugger off.’

  Purefoy coughed diplomatically. ‘Actually, it isn’t the old bitch,’ he said and moved forward so that Skullion could see him. ‘My name is Osbert and I’ve come up from Porterhouse …’

  From under the rim of the bowler hat Skullion peered up at him and Purefoy found himself looking into two eyes dark with hatred and contempt. For a moment he almost backed away from such open hostility but he stood his ground and presently, much to his astonishment, Skullion grinned.

  ‘Dr Osbert? So you’re Dr Osbert. And you’ve come up from the College. Well I never. Wonders never cease.’ He paused and grunted, possibly with pleasure. ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I have indeed. Get a chair and sit down so I don’t have to break my neck looking up at you.’

  Purefoy pulled up a wooden chair and sat. At the back of the verandah Mrs Ndhlovo stood motionless. ‘And you can tell her behind me to sit down too,’ Skullion said and there was no doubt about his amusement now. ‘Want to know how I know she’s there?’ he went on and didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Because the old cow in there stinks, and I mean stinks, and her behind me washes. Makes a change. She your secretary?’

  ‘Not exactly but all the same we’d like to talk to you.’

  ‘Daresay you would,’ said Skullion. ‘I daresay you would.’ He transferred his gaze across the unweeded flowerbeds and the stunted roses to the brown mudflats and the silver runnels of water flowing through them. The tide was far out and only a few seabirds moved on the mud. It was a dispiriting prospect. ‘They call this Porterhouse Park. Funny sort of name for a dosshouse but then they’ve got a funny sort of sense of humour, dons have. That or they want to fool you into coming here without a fuss. But you’re a don, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be. I’m not sure I am, though.’

  ‘No more sure than I am,’ said Skullion. ‘No, you’re not a don. Not yet. You’re Mr Nosey Parker who’s being paid by that Lady Mary to find out who killed her husband. And now you know.’

  Purefoy said nothing. He was waiting to hear Skullion tell him.

  ‘And shall I tell you why you know? I will anyway. Because you were sitting in the maze the night I got pissed on Hardy’s and warned the Dean what I’d do if they sent me here and you were listening.’ He chuckled. ‘I could practically hear you listening. Know that?’ Again he paused. ‘I could hear you because I knew you weren’t hardly breathing. And if that doesn’t make sense to you, work it out.’

  Purefoy tried to. He was still afraid of the man in the wheelchair who had spoken without any guilt about murdering Sir Godber and his fear had returned now. With a difference. There was a mind at work underneath that ridiculous bowler hat. An old mind intelligent from years of watching and listening and waiting for someone else to do something and then suddenly doing something nobody would have expected. He’d just done it now by telling Purefoy he’d known he’d been in the maze that night.

  ‘So now you want me to tell you all about it,’ Skullion went on. ‘And I’m prepared to. I’m even prepared to tell you everything I know, everything. But not for nothing. And I’m not talking about money. I’ve got what they call a sufficiency in my bank account. I’m talking about something else.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Purefoy. ‘What else do you want?’

  Skullion squinted at him for a moment. ‘I want out of here. That’s what I want. Out of here. And I can’t do that on my own. Except the only way I’ve worked out is to wheel myself down there when the tide’s in and drown in the
mud and I don’t intend to do that unless I have to. No, you go back and get a van I can get into and some rope and a torch and come back here tonight at one o’clock and pick me up at the gate and we’ll go somewhere and I’ll tell you everything I know. That’s my terms.’

  ‘I suppose we could do that,’ said Purefoy a little uncertainly. ‘But the gate is locked. There’s a chain and a lock on it. The woman came out and unlocked it.’

  ‘And there’s a key here,’ Skullion told him. ‘And even if there wasn’t, the fence is so rotten you could kick it in. Anyway those are my terms. A van big enough to get this chair in and don’t forget the rope. That’s all. One o’clock.’

  They left him there and walked back to the road, got back into the car and drove up Fish Lane to the main road.

  ‘I wonder what he has in mind,’ Purefoy said. ‘You ever seen anyone like that before?’

  ‘Whatever he’s got in his mind he’s going to give it to you so long as you get him out of there. What a terrible place. And that awful woman.’

  ‘And you really think we ought to do what he wants? I mean supposing he dies or something.’

  ‘Purefoy, your trouble is you think too much. Just do something for a change.’

  *

  They hired a van in Hunstanton and bought some nylon rope. Then they spent the rest of the day walking along the beach and sitting in cafés and wondering what Skullion was going to tell them. And, in Purefoy’s case, worrying. He had never done anything like this in his life.

  At eleven o’clock they left the Renault in a side street, drove along the coast road towards Burnt Overy and the mudflats and parked up a lane inland and waited. At ten to one the van was outside the gate with the headlights off. Over the fence they could see the silhouette of the house. A light in a window at one end was still on but presently it went out.