"He's got his own friends." India had walked over to her husband. She took his arm proprietarily. Just then the gong sounded for dinner, and James led the way towards the dining hall, rather charging ahead and dragging India with him. Portia wondered: Was he hoping to snag a seat next to Lexy? If so, he was out of luck. It was Augie Cramb, unencumbered and making an heroic sprint, who managed to gain the coveted spot. -- A short time later, the St. Mike's alumni group sat beneath the painted bosses of the Hall's hammerbeam roof and the painted eyes of the former Masters' portraits, steadily working its way through the appetizer course (although as someone observed: "Appetizer is rather a misnomer in this case, wouldn't you say?"). The conversation gradually gathered strength and became a collection of discordant noises, like a symphony warming up on untuned instruments. Adding to the cacophony, four undergraduates, huddled in a corner, sawed away on stringed instruments until they were finally banished by the Master, well before they'd run through their repertoire.
Because of the presence of the distinguished guests, the High Table was unoccupied, the Master, Bursar, and Dean having literally come down from on high, the better to exercise the personal touch in their fundraising efforts. These were dark days indeed for the Master, who, having sacrificed much to attain his status in the college, loved his usual position above the crowd. The Bursar felt similarly. The Reverend Otis, however, was always happiest amongst what he endearingly thought of as his flock.
Portia, who was seated next to him, had trouble hearing what was said throughout the meal, and remembered little of it afterwards. Of course he, dear man, tended to waffle on about nothing in particular, but in the most soothing way. One felt positively shriven after an hour with the Dean.
The American woman (Portia had learned her name was Constance and her husband was Karl) had a voice like the crazed yapping of a caged dog. The acoustics in the room had always been terrible, and with drink the noise level became intolerable. Still, above it all could be heard the yap, yap, yapping of Constance Dunning. She seemed to be discussing triangles, which puzzled Portia, until she realized she meant relationships.
"Divorce is always such a pity. I don't care what the circumstances." Portia heard this plainly. "Don't you agree, Karl?"
Of course, Karl did agree.
Constance's yap was punctuated here and there by loud guffaws from Augie Cramb, who was clearly going all out to impress Lexy, who in her turn was probably secretly storing up the Texan's buffoonerisms to amuse her friends back in London.
Gwenn Pengelly had walked in a minute late, earning a frown of disapproval from the Master. Gwenn smiled unperturbedly and took the nearest empty seat, which happened to be on Karl's other side at the far end of the table.
Portia looked down the table, past the field of candelabra flames that flickered like gold against the polished wood, and saw that Sir James, far from Lexy, was flanked by his wife on one side and Hermione Jax on the other. How rare a sight, thought Portia: Although Hermione was always one to stand on ceremony, she had apparently happily relinquished her spot at High Table for a seat next to the illustrious Sir James.
For his part Sir James, awaiting the next course with every appearance of joyful anticipation (that smile will soon be wiped off your face, thought Portia, or I don't know the college chef), leaned over to talk with Hermione. But his eyes frequently drifted, as if by compulsion, in the direction of Lexy Laurant. -- An hour had passed in apparent conviviality. Had the Bursar but realized it, his cost-cutting schemes usually back-fired in this regard: The inedible food led to over-consumption of wine, saving the college little and almost certainly adding to the monthly expenditures. It did, however, frequently lend a bacchanalian air to the tenor of the evening meals, featuring many a loud, impromptu toast to the founder of the college and its various benefactors. Gwennap Pengelly and Geraldo Valentiano, in particular, might have been said to have overindulged, judging by the increasing volume of their laughter. That was unfortunate on this particular evening, about which the police were going to ask numerous questions that almost none of the guests were going to be able to answer.
The conversation ranged and wandered, as conversations of the reunited will, over the fields of "Do you remember so-and-so?" and "Whatever happened to what's-his-name?" Hermione Jax, however, had other things on her mind and was emboldened to speak that mind. With Hermione, this was not uncommon.
"I realize I was probably not your first choice in dinner companions this evening," she said to Sir James, launching into one of the few conversations that would later be remembered.
While what Hermione had said was indisputably true, Sir James, true to his upbringing, demurred politely.
"See here," she continued. "May I give you some advice?"
Sir James, guessing at the topic, said quickly, coldly, "I'd much rather you didn't."
"Yes, I suppose when one can guess at the advice already, one would rather not hear it. An observation, then. You've already crossed the Rubicon with regard to Lexy, you know. Years ago. There's no going back."
Sir James arranged his silverware, which was one centimeter out of true.
"There's always a way back when it's a question of forgiveness," he said gruffly. "Otherwise we'd all be… doomed."
"A bit melodramatic that, what?"
Lowering his voice still further, although it was highly doubtful his wife could hear them over the din, he said, "I should say it depends on how many lives you think you have. I believe I have only this one, and I've made a right cock-up of… a few things. I won't have a million chances to put it right. This weekend is it."
Hermione, being in many respects an intelligent woman, forbore to ask what his wife would make of this new resolve of his. She could guess, only too well. -- As the alumni dinner ended, Sebastian was still moving with practiced speed along the river, his sculls cutting rhythmically through the dark water, the sky as it deepened towards night making him feel both invisible and invincible. It was nearly Lighting Up, and he was reluctant to stop when his strength was nowhere near exhausted, but he didn't want to be too flagrant about bending the rules. To be selected only for the second boat, which Sebastian regarded as a fate worse than death, was one thing. To accumulate so many fines he was forbidden the river altogether was unthinkable.
Minutes later he slowed as he approached the college; leaning onto the outside scull, he turned the boat until it was parallel to the bank. As he stepped out and lifted the boat from the water, his head was filled with the future glory of winning a Blue and the imaginary applause of onlookers, which is why he never noticed the lumpen pile of black cloth to one side of the boathouse doors. He might not have seen it at all in the light ground mist but that a slight disturbance caught his ear, causing him to turn towards a rustle in the undergrowth. Some small animal making its way to shelter before total darkness fell, perhaps. It was then to the left of the boathouse he noticed a shadow, nothing more. He went to investigate. There was a scull lying on the ground, next to that lumpen pile.
If someone had forgotten to put away the college's equipment there'd be hell to pay, he thought. Was all this stuff lying there when he'd set out? He wasn't sure…he hadn't been looking in that direction.
One year, during May Bumps, a group of undergraduates had thrown a plastic dummy in the water dressed in Queens' colors. Intimidation of their chief rival was the goal. It was the kind of harmless rag that went on all year, usually in the run-up to the Bumps. So Sebastian didn't hesitate, but poked at the lumpen form with the tip of one of his oars.
That didn't feel right, he thought. He couldn't have said why it wasn't right, but the form was softer and more yielding and yet heavier than he, in his limited experience of dummies and lumpen forms, would have expected.
No. No sirree. That couldn't be right.
He stepped a foot closer, peering into the darkness. Then, dropping his oars with a loud, jumbled crash, he ran.
THE PARTY'S OVER
St. Just sat eighteen mil
es away in another suicidally boring meeting at Hinchingbrooke Park, Huntingdon-headquarters for the Cambridgeshire Constabulary. The meeting had convened some hours ago in a building that looked like a prison, only with larger windows, in a room that resembled a classroom in a particularly underfunded comprehensive school.
It was an unusually late meeting, even by the standards of the new Chief Constable, who would accept nothing less than the one-hundred-percent proven devotion of her team. These after-hours catered meetings had become both her stick (metaphorically) and her carrot (literally) for attaining that devotion. She was delivering herself of her usual views on Crime Management, views illustrated with colorful pie charts displaying crime trends, transgression "hot spots," and intelligence analyses. With all the fervor of the convert to the scientific method, the Chief believed that if only crime could be precisely quantified, it could be made magically to disappear.
As though, thought St. Just, anything as unpredictable and bloody-minded as the criminal element thwarted of its desires could be managed. Pacified, perhaps. Bribed, certainly. Managed, never.
St. Just was sketching a caricature of the Chief in the margins of his hand-out sheet-unobtrusively, he hoped-confining himself to a very small corner of the page, trusting that his occupation and less-than-full attention to the grave matters at hand would go unnoticed. He was trying to capture the look of her hair, which she wore in a shining helmet-impenetrable, St. Just feared, to any idea that could not be summed up in a catchy slogan.
A few more of these interminable meetings, he thought, and I might develop some talent as a miniaturist. Perhaps Hilliard got his start this way.
"Citizen advisory councils are of course crucial," she was saying. Which side, he wondered idly, darkening the Chief's widely spaced eyes, was meant to be on the receiving side of whatever advice was being sent 'round? And if there was one thing that got up St. Just's nose, as his sergeant would have said, it was the kind of claptrap that made the police sound like social workers. "Multicultural Inclusiveness" he understood, but what was "Community Outreach Delivery" when it was at home, he wondered?
And was any of it adding to the number of solved crimes?
The Chief's "Reach Out!" PR campaign continued apace, the Chief wending her way through various stupefying talking points, pausing for emphasis only, it seemed, when she wished to share an insight of spectacular dullness. She remained undaunted by the fact that sending the police door to door in some of the worst neighborhoods in Cambridgeshire had netted them nothing but verbal abuse and several bites requiring stitches from a poodle of peculiarly vicious disposition in Histon. One unfortunate Constable had had the contents of a dustbin emptied on his head from the upper-story window of a rooming house. He was lucky-in another age, it would have been a chamber pot. The dustbin offender remained at large, but for every one captured, it was felt, another would soon grow to take his place. St. Just thought all the reactions perfectly justified, including the poodle's. As one community member had been heard to exclaim, nicely capturing the prevailing philosophy, the very Zeitgeist, as it were: "If we want the bloody police we'll ring for the bloody police."
Since the meeting-lecture, rather-had been planned to run even longer than usual, the Chief Constable had had catered in for the delectation of her team large trays of what he was sure she would call canapes but St. Just would call rabbit food. Thus it was that once he and the rest of her Reach Out! team had finally been freed for the night, he decided to stop on his way home at the Three Jolly Butchers for a leisurely meal and a pint. The pub wasn't crowded, and he easily secured a wooden table to himself near the Inglenook fireplace. He had already placed his order for one of his favorites, the pan-fried pork medallions with bubble and squeak. Looking about now at the low, beamed ceilings, he thought he should bring Portia here soon, as the food was as excellent as the atmosphere. That he had not done so yet was probably because he equated the place with his work, and he struggled, as did most of his colleagues, to draw a firm line between the personal and the official. Events would soon prove this was nearly impossible. He had no sooner been served than his mobile phone vibrated, the surprise jolt sending his fork flying through the air. Blast the thing. He unhooked the device from his belt and looked with apoplectic disbelief at the number. It couldn't be, but it was. The Chief herself, reaching out. Sod it. He was supposed to be off duty. He took the call outside.
"St. Mike's. Yes'm, I certainly know it. A woman. Strangulation, you think. Good God. The University Constabulary…Yes, of course. Quite outside their brief. I'll give Sergeant Fear a ring and we'll be right over."
Ringing off, he punched in the number to Fear's house, cursing the late hour. His right-hand man had taken a short furlough, but needs must. Why did murder always seem to happen after dark? But he knew the answer. "Under cloak of darkness" was a cliche for good reason. Nighttime, when the good and the just were tucked safely before the telly in their homes, no doubt watching a crime show-that was the time the predator went on the move. -- Someone picked up the receiver on the first ring, but there was dead silence at the other end.
"Emma?" St. Just guessed. "Is that you, Emma?" Silence. Emma was Fear's four-year-old. Four going on thirty-five. What on earth could she be doing up so late?
"Emma, may I speak to your…" What would she call him? "Your daddy, please?" Silence. Thinking he just wasn't using the right vocabulary, he tried again. "Your dadda?" No. "Your Pops? Poppy?" He was running out of options, and he had a murder to investigate. "Your father, please, Emma?"
"Who is that, Emma?" St. Just heard Sergeant Fear call as if from a great height, where no doubt he was, from Emma's perspective.
"It's Inspector St. Just." Her slight lisp rendered this as, "Ith Inthpector Thaint Justh." He felt his heart melt.
"Bye-bye, Emma," said St. Just softly.
"Bye!" yelled Emma, loud enough to pierce an eardrum.
There were sounds of a minor scuffle, and Sergeant Fear came on the line.
"Sorry, Sir. Emma hasn't quite found her volume control yet."
"Just the on-and-off switch, I take it."
He filled his sergeant in on as much of the situation as he knew, concluding, "Someone called the CU Constabulary, who naturally called us in." The Cambridge University Constabulary was a small, non-Home Office force that was most often called upon to deal with crowd control and internal university matters. Murder in a college setting was rare to the point of being unheard of. Quite naturally, the University had called in the Cambridgeshire Constabulary.
St. Just quickly settled his tab with the landlord, who was getting used to these abrupt departures. He offered to package up the meal but, reluctantly, St. Just declined. As these things went, time for the next good meal was hours or days away, and he'd have to exist on the Chief's dainty offerings for a while.
Travelling at a rapid but measured pace along the A14, he arrived at St. Michael's College within minutes of Sergeant Fear, who stood waiting for him at the entrance. Already parked beside Fear's car in a small lot at the front of the college were the SOCO van and Malenfant's red Daimler.
The two men-St. Just tall, broad, and middle-aged; his sergeant tall, with a youthful gangliness-strode towards the college, their footsteps ringing out against the cobblestones, to the massive wooden double gates, built to withstand the sieges of earlier centuries. They stepped through the inner door cut into the gate for pedestrians. After showing their warrant cards to a shaken Head Porter, who presided from within an intricately carved neo-Gothic cage at the college entrance, they were shown by his assistant the way to the Master's study.
"Frightful business, this," said the Master. He had seen their approach and walked briskly across the first court to greet them, hand out in practiced greeting. They might have been dignitaries come to plant a tree or open a new building. But releasing the handshake, the Master began wringing his own hands distractedly, betraying his anguish at having a corpse on the premises. St. Just had the distinct feeling
that the corpse wasn't nearly as worrying as its location: hard by the college boathouse, according to the Chief Constable. The Master confirmed this impression with his next sentence.
"To have this happen this weekend, of all weekends," he said. "And here." He sighed deeply, adding in aggrieved tones, "Why couldn't it have been Jesus?"
St. Just felt Sergeant Fear stiffen beside him in alarm: Were they dealing with a religious mania of some sort? But St. Just, familiar with some of St. Mike's history, assumed the Master meant the nearby Jesus College. It was well known there was strong feeling between the two rivals. Something to do with one of the boat races held between the wars-allegations of sabotage resulting in wounded feelings, hurled insults, and umbrage taken-all the usual. The St. Michael's boat had sunk, if memory served, giving all aboard a good and embarrassing dunking. Such memories ran long and deep in Cambridge.
"I doubt there would be a good time, when you think about it, Sir?" said St. Just. "Or a good place?"
The Master thought for a moment and then said, "No, no, I suppose not."
But he didn't look convinced. How much better if Jesus College were going to be splashed all over the newspapers as a haven for murderers and cutthroats. Applications to St. Michael's would be down next year because of this, no question about it. The students wouldn't mind-they'd love it, in fact, the ghoulish little cretins-but their parents… Really, it was most distressing. He voiced the last thought aloud.
"I can't begin to tell you how deeply distressing this is. It was our alumni weekend, you see. Well, that's certainly ruined, for a start," he fumed huffily. He might have been a vicar's wife complaining about low participation in the Bring and Buy.
St. Just, watching him, thought he had the kind of face designed for a periwig-the long, high-arched nose, the sullen set of the full but bloodless lips. But St. Just nodded, not without sympathy. It was definitely a sticky wicket: deuced hard to explain to the old members how standards had slipped this far since their day.
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