by Jason Foss
Flint scanned her posters: Roger Dean’s Another Time, Another Place; a low-light photo of two dolphins breaking surface; a watercolour print of the Holy Grail suspended above Glastonbury Tor; a copy of Desiderata. Absolutely standard.
Her bookshelf came next, and his fingers ran along a scattering of approved course reading and overdue library books. Amongst the latter was one of J. S. Flint’s more recent publications. Lucy’s fiction interests were clear, embracing one battered copy of The Hobbit plus several more sub-Tolkien fantasy epics and a Poe omnibus. Flint took down a rules booklet for the roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, turning over the pages covering spells and monsters with mild amusement.
‘She was into this stuff?’ he asked.
A faint smile came to Barbara’s lips, but she shook her head as the faintly bizarre volume of rules flicked before her eyes. It was replaced on the shelf, next to a new facsimile reprint of a Victorian tarot book. Alongside rested The Green Manifesto, one astrology book, Erich Van Daniken’s latest money-spinner, plus several heavily foxed paperbacks of eccentric, semi-occult nature. Flint flicked the pages of a book of herbal remedies. Spirits and the underworld, goblins and magic. He began to appreciate the width, if not the depth, of her interests, a ripple of disquiet running through him. He suppressed it. Students enjoy being weird.
‘Will there be anything more I can do?’ The Deputy Warden spoke from the door, but was ignored.
Lucy’s stereo-cassette player was on the wide mock-marble window ledge. She owned only two dozen or so cassettes, few of which were truly contemporary, consisting of offerings by Lindisfarne, Lennon, All About Eve, Motley Crue, Blue Oyster Cult, a little folk, one Elgar compilation and a trio of whimsical New Age tapes.
A thin paperback lay on her bedside table, a small press publication of poetry by R. Temple-Brooke, whoever he was. Flint flicked to the dedication within the front cover. ‘To Hazel at Samhain, with love, R.T.B.’
Second-hand, thought Flint. No – it was too new, so logic said that it was borrowed. ‘Has she a friend called Hazel?’
Barbara shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll ask around. Has she got a regular boyfriend?’
Barbara continued shaking her head. Flint allowed a little exasperation to slip through. ‘You don’t appear to know much about your sister.’
‘She is rather younger than me. We don’t have much in common; first I went away to college, then she came up to London almost as soon as I got back. Oh, she used to come up to Mother’s once a month, but she was always full of college stories. I can’t claim to know the real her.’
Flint turned to the Deputy Warden. ‘You haven’t seen her?’
He shook his head, mouthing an almost silent no through the prophet’s beard, so Flint put the next question to Barbara. The depth of her concern had him puzzled. ‘Where does your family come from?’
‘Durring. Well, Nether Durring actually. I took up my father’s practice just before he died.’
‘And Lucy normally stays with you in the holidays?’
‘She stays with Mother; she lives about six miles from us.’
Flint returned to the search, pulling open drawers looking for clues, letters, notes, hoping for a diary. Barbara found a file of documents which included Lucy’s driving licence, birth certificate and passport. One possibility had been ruled out. They found no purse, no student railcard or union cards, no chequebook or banker’s cards. The pocket diary she had received from an aunt last Christmas was absent, Barbara commented. In her small wardrobe, each hanger was full, save two. Her navy blue suitcase was found stuffed into an otherwise useless ceiling-level cupboard over the sink.
‘Lucy might be “away”, but wherever she’s gone, it’s not far and she intends coming back,’ Flint concluded. ‘We’ve narrowed the possibilities down, at least.’
At that moment, although he felt uneasy poking into someone else’s life, he was beginning to gain a curious intellectual kick from gathering this negative evidence about Lucy’s activities. It was almost like the thrill of discovery on site when an unlikely collection of archaeological artefacts starts to build up an answer to some ancient puzzle. Archaeologists are born nosey; they share much in common with detectives.
‘We’re not going to find anything here.’ Barbara was, if anything, even more tense. ‘Can we check her post?’
‘It will be in the rack, downstairs,’ the Deputy Warden said.
Barbara gave Flint one glance then left the room. He followed then waited for the door to be locked. The trio returned to the ground floor by the concrete staircase, without bothering to wait for the lift. At the base of the stairs, behind the desk of the surly porter, hung a nest of wooden pigeonholes. Nine letters were waiting for Lucy, with postmarks scattered from late January to the previous weekend. Barbara made to open one.
‘I can’t allow you to do that.’ The Deputy Warden’s hands slipped the letters from below Barbara’s quivering finger.
‘No, we shouldn’t pry. She won’t thank you.’ Flint tried to ease away the sense of crisis in the woman.
Angry resentment flashed across her face and tinged her voice. ‘All right! Do you mind if I look around and ask if anyone has seen her?’
‘The common room is through that door,’ said the Deputy Warden, ‘and there’s another television lounge on the fifth floor.’
Barbara said nothing else and pushed her way through the swing door. Flint watched her go, then sat down on a coffee-stained easy chair by the porter’s desk and took up an abandoned Daily Mirror. Twenty minutes saw the paper read and re-read and Flint was into the adverts when Barbara returned, pale-faced and tense.
‘She’s not been seen for weeks,’ she said.
‘And you’re sure she’s not rung or written?’
‘No. I mean yes. We’ve heard nothing.’ Barbara strained at the strap of her handbag, out of ideas. ‘Four of those letters were from us – from Mother or myself.’
‘I’m sure everything is okay. I’ll ask around the department. If you’re really worried, you could always go to the police. They get paid to do this sort of thing.’
‘What sort of thing?’ Barbara seemed dazed by the thought.
‘Missing persons.’
‘Missing? God, no, I haven’t wanted to think of her as missing.’
Chapter 2
‘We have a missing century, a century about which so little is known.’ Flint scrawled the first line of his paper on third-century chronology.
‘We have a missing student, a student about which so little is known.’ Lucy Gray nagged into his brain as he tried to finish his afternoon’s work. He pushed away his notepad, with its one line of text and leaned back in his chair, thinking of Lucy, student and young woman. He had never done so before, but it was a thing he would find himself doing time and again.
Lucy had arrived at Central College as a pale English rose, with collar-length blonde hair which quickly acquired red highlights as university life led her astray. After the first Christmas, she had mellowed, allowing her hair to recover its colour and to flow over her shoulders. Her face was round, almost chinless, her nose petite and her eyes were Viking blue. Her voice was quiet, but could quaver with a hint of excitement around the fringes. Flint’s memory tended towards the photographic and every detail of the girl’s appearance could be recalled on demand. The fashion was for dangling oversize Oxfam bargains, or chunky-knit Aran and jeans, plus the obligatory badges which proclaimed Green-tinted politics.
She had never been terribly High Church. His remark to Barbara had been a casual quip, but he quickly realised it was founded in truth. He recalled a seminar of more than a year before, when Lucy was beginning her second year. It had been late autumn when she had been competing for attention with a mixed group of second- and third-year archaeology undergraduates.
In the sunlit seminar room, nine of them had been grouped around a Formica-topped table, discussing ritual. It was an old chestnut, o
ne that keeps both anthropologists and archaeologists in business. The slob known as ‘Bunny’ had yawned and lowered his head on to his file, provoking his lecturer into deploying a well-tested routine for dissipating afternoon apathy. Flint put effort into his lectures, he was a born showman, an extrovert teacher and someone who loved to exercise uncomfortable thoughts.
‘Okay, Bunny, if you can’t relate to Neolithic ritual, let’s consider the modern Catholic Church. Let us imagine an archaeologist a thousand years hence excavating the remains of, say, Westminster Cathedral. He would examine the plan of a great building and deduce from the absence of utilitarian features that it had some religious or ritual purpose.’
Flint had paced slowly in front of the roller board, solidifying verbal images with hand actions. ‘Our archaeologist would find repeated suggestions that a cross was an important feature of the ritual. He would find artefacts, perhaps a crucifix: a man nailed to a tree. What would he deduce? What is the significance of a man suffering a slow and painful death? It is obvious: human sacrifice.’
A murmur of humour escaped from a number of lips poised on the point of yawning. Even Bunny had opened one eye beneath the straggling black hair.
‘Next, he would uncover statues of the saints in their niches. Obviously cult figures: this religion had a large pantheon of gods. The worshippers were polytheists.’
Flint had noticed Alison, a keen Christian Union activist, fidget by his elbow. At least she had taken note.
‘And what does our future archaeologist make of the repeated image of the mother and child?’
He had paused to receive heretical suggestions.
‘Fertility symbol,’ Tyrone Drake spoke from the back corner. Assured, confident, as always.
‘Mother Goddess,’ Lucy whispered with a smile.
Flint spread his hands, satisfied they were catching his drift. ‘Unless a Holy Bible was recovered intact, or a book of prayer, what would our archaeologist really know of the beliefs which lay behind the ritual? What of the Immaculate Conception, the Holy Trinity, the sacrament, baptism, confession, absolution? None of that is easy to decipher from cold stone and broken statues. So what can we say about Stonehenge, whose builders’ view of the world may have been both childishly simple and ridiculously complex?’
Class had awoken. Flint cringed as he recalled his own rather brash and provocative lecturing style, but it was effective. Neil, the bane of the group, usually pitched for centre stage. Afflicted with a burning acne-riddled complexion, he had rambled through ‘evidence’ relating to the properties of stone circles, ending by extolling the power of ley-lines. Flint had let him inflate his imagination so far, then ran out of patience.
‘This so-called evidence doesn’t hold water. If I wrote a sensible, well-reasoned textbook about Stonehenge, it would sell five hundred copies. If I wrote one claiming it had been built by space aliens after they’d finished the pyramids, I’d sell twenty thousand. Parascience is entertainment.’
‘But there is evidence...’
Square-jawed and impatient, Tyrone intervened brutally. ‘It’s a load of crap.’ Alone of the students, this third-year wore a tie and a smart jacket. His blonde hair was kept in a cropped, fashionable style. Sitting beside Lucy, he could almost have been her brother, but his politics were firmly Conservative rather than conservationist. He continued to put down Neil’s argument without mercy.
Neil waffled back ineffectually whilst Bunny had again lapsed on to the desk top mumbling, ‘Bullshit, bullshit.’
This was when Lucy had become agitated, trying to intervene but not finding a chance amongst the machismo.
‘Lucy?’ Flint had jabbed a hand at her, offering a pause.
‘It isn’t all rubbish, there is some sense in the New Age movement. Pagan beliefs relate to the Earth, to the world around us. Feeling and understanding.’
Immediately, Flint had regretted this move, but waved down Tyrone’s attempts to bully her into silence.
Lucy had continued in her wavering, gentle voice, ‘We don’t need churches and statues and prayer books. Religion is more than just hoping for an afterlife, it is the essence of being. People are becoming estranged from the modern world and want to feel in harmony with the environment. They are returning to their spiritual roots.’
Thinking back dispassionately, Flint had deserved this, as reward for putting so much effort into projecting his own alternative, anti-establishment image. Some might say that Lucy was simply following his lead.
‘Okay, I think we’re straying.’ He had tried to re-impose his authority.
Lucy’s face had adopted an almost mystical glaze. ‘But Doctor Flint, no-one gives megaliths their true role. Visit one, feel the power, unload the senses and harmonise...’
‘Oh Gawd,’ Bunny had groaned, ‘let’s just sacrifice a virgin.’
Class had begun to slide towards anarchic cross-comments which bypassed the main argument. Flint fought back into command. ‘Okay, the important thing to remember is that just because ancient people believed megaliths to be magical, and behaved as if they were magical, it does not mean that they actually are magical. We are looking at belief, belief is intangible and – some would say – inexplicable.’
It could have been the mantra which framed his life for the coming year, but at the time it was simply a gentle put-down to Lucy’s eccentric suggestion. He had sat back and allowed the argument burn itself out before he turned back to the central theme of his seminar. More than a year had passed since that seminar, and he should have forgotten it, along with a hundred others, but fortune was not going to permit it.
*
Thursday afternoon saw a pair of policewomen moving around Central College questioning students and lecturers at random, disturbing the equilibrium and setting the internal rumour-machine whispering. Professor Grant had breezed into Flint’s office and asked if he’d ‘sort things out’ with the police, meaning a lost afternoon and the end of all hope of progress on the paper before Easter. The third century would have to wait, so after a day of frustration Flint decided to indulge his love of offbeat movies. Jules Torpevitch was a tall Bostonian with an eye for animal bones who had married the delicate palaeobotanist Sasha Aziz the year before. That evening the three sat through an Alex Cox double bill of Repo Man and Walker at the ICA, then dissected the films in a late-night Camden curry house. Inevitably the conversation drifted to departmental gossip and to Lucy, Flint objecting when Sasha described her as ‘your student’.
‘She’s not my student,’ Flint protested, ripping up a chapatti.
‘The policewoman kept referring to her as your student.’ Sasha’s Turkish eyes were almost totally black under the dim mock-candle lighting.
‘She’s Sam Hanley’s student.’ Flint continued to defend himself.
‘But Sam is away; someone should take an interest,’ Sasha purred.
‘She’s right, you know, kid,’ Jules chipped in. ‘You could adopt her, until Sam gets back. None of your other students are problem cases, are they?’
Flint raised his eyebrows, making his glasses twitch. ‘I’ve got Tyrone Drake.’
‘Oh, lucky you,’ Sasha said, with heavy sarcasm. ‘I take back my suggestion.’
‘Tyrone’s got some good ideas on bone counts in sub-Roman deposits,’ Jules commented.
‘But he’s a fascist,’ Sasha protested. ‘Tell me, Jeff, is he as bad as he seems?’
‘And worse,’ Flint replied, ‘but we don’t discriminate on race, colour, sexual orientation, religion or politics, do we? We accept anyone who can think and although I hate to say it, Tyrone has a first-class brain to go with his first-class degree. He works hard, but doesn’t let it make him a dull person. His problem is he needs to soften up and learn a little compassion. I was just thinking yesterday, that if we could somehow weld Tyrone and Lucy together we’d probably have the perfect student.’
*
Tyrone Drake knew nothing of his supervisor’s late-night speculations.
He found Jeffrey Flint amusing and provocative and regarded the avant-garde trimmings as mere affectations. He had been in the year above Lucy, had already graduated and was studying for an MPhil, with the hope it could be converted to a PhD. Tyrone had spent the week polishing the introductory chapter of his thesis: ‘A critique of previous work’. Flint should have read it by Monday.
As rain pattered on the window of Flint’s office, Tyrone lounged in the soggy chair, fishing for compliments. ‘So, is it good for an upgrade?’
His supervisor sucked air, letting nothing away.
‘It’s got to be PhD standard,’ Tyrone continued. ‘I thought of entitling it De-Romanisation as analogue to Romanisation.’
‘You’re sticking with the fifth century?’
‘It’s the place to make a name. Everyone else has just messed the subject about.’
Flint handed back the chapter. ‘Brilliant, as expected.’
Tyrone let his rubber features expand into a broad grin. ‘So I’m on the PhD list for next year?’
‘Why not?’
Flint seemed to have his mind elsewhere: he had a way of looking through people and objects when thinking.
‘Is there anything wrong?’ Tyrone asked.
‘You know Lucy Gray, third year? Do you know if she’s got a friend called Hazel?’
After a moment’s thought, Tyrone delivered a definite ‘No.’
‘Does she have any regular relationships?’
‘You mean a boyfriend? No, everyone says she’s a lesbian.’
‘So much for our liberal, non-sexist elite. Is there any proof, or is this just undergraduate slander?’