by Jason Foss
No, cretin, listen to what I’m saying! Flint thought, but after only a moment to re-engage his brain gave a more polite, more professional answer. He too had once been an oik asking banal questions of Professor Grant, or the late (and great) Henrietta Honey.
What of the late Lucy Gray?
What about Barbara Faber and Mrs Gray, still waiting for an answer?
‘We’re talking rural settlement,’ Flint said aloud, squeaking the chalk across the blackboard, ‘not just villas, but a whole living agricultural system.’
All this was rot, he knew. It was utterly irrelevant and useless to every student sitting in that seminar room, plus everyone else in the known universe. Everyone to whom the villa-system mattered had been dead for sixteen hundred years.
‘Look, shall we round it off there,’ he said.
The room erupted into motion before he had finished the sentence. Feebly he called out the title of an essay, knowing that it meant he would have to mark a dozen scripts. Once the inevitable keen student had asked his final question, Flint was left alone and he strolled back to his room. He tried to phone Michelle again, but again had no reply.
Along in Tyrone’s office, he found the postgraduate sticking pictures of pots to index cards. The Libyan student who was supposed to be sharing the room had not turned up due to visa problems, so Tyrone had colonised both desks and all the wall space. An airbrush print of a Stealth Fighter over the Arctic had been fixed to the back of the door. Flint disapproved but said nothing.
‘Sub-Roman pottery,’ Tyrone said. ‘Mathematical modelling of its distribution in the Roman/Post-Roman interface should enable me to draw up a chronology for the fifth century.’
‘Oh.’
‘Sounds great, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
Flint removed a roll of drawings from the Libyan’s chair and sat astride it, elbows upon the back rest.
‘This is a Lucy visit, isn’t it?’ Tyrone said, laying aside the cards. ‘I haven’t done much since Thursday, I thought I ought to do some thesis.’
‘You’re right, you’re right; carry on, don’t let me stop you.’
Tyrone fidgeted with his cards whilst Flint sat in silence for some minutes, watching his student in the failing light of the afternoon.
‘We’re buggered,’ Flint said, at length. ‘They know I know about Michelle, so nasty things start creeping our way again. Gratz, George Carlyle, now Monica, they have all had their warnings.’
Tyrone gave a smile which betrayed suppressed excitement, perhaps even the hint of fear. ‘They know they can’t frighten us off, so they’re picking off the easy victims.’
‘It might mean you’re next,’ Flint cautioned.
‘Oh I’ll be okay. If they try anything, we can bust them. We’ve got two names, we’d soon get more if you could get back into that Michelle’s place and swipe her address book.’
‘But what can we prove? That a group of people have an offbeat way of having fun. Okay so we name four or five or six minnows and perhaps we get sued for slander and meanwhile the real villain creeps up and incinerates us.’
From the rat-run below the office window came the sound of breaking glass. Constantly paranoid, Flint sprang to his feet and checked for a threat. Eight or ten students were criss-crossing the yard, making Rugby passes with milk bottles, chanting a supposed Zulu war cry. ‘Ali zumbah zumbah zumbah…’
‘Who are those rejects?’
Tyrone came to his side. ‘There’s Bunny.’
The familiar rounded shape jumped to catch a bottle as it lofted over his head. He missed and it shattered against the wall.
‘What are we doing letting him come back for an MA?’ Flint muttered.
‘See the big hairy one? That’s Ape Anderson, he’s the ringleader. They call themselves the Animals, it’s a piss-artists’ offshoot of the Rugby club who give themselves animal nicknames, and spend all their time in the Union Bar having drinking races and puking. It’s totally juvenile.’
‘Ali zumbah zumbah zumbah…’ echoed from below. Another bottle shattered.
‘They were the ones who were nearly arrested for invading Chelsea College last week?’
‘Yup, trying to steal trophies.’
Flint had been an equally puerile undergraduate. He remembered the pub crawls, the rag stunts and yes, even the mascot-hunting raids on other colleges. The bright, frivolous memory sparked briefly before his mind turned back to darker thoughts.
‘My thesis is still going to fail unless I get some hard facts,’ he said. ‘I’m going to Dulwich to see Michelle and I need someone to watch my back.’
‘You’ve been watching Clint Eastwood movies again.’
Flint shrugged. ‘Or Henry Fonda.’
Tyrone grabbed his leather flying jacket and within minutes they were out in the late afternoon air, stepping over a scattering of broken glass. Flint wore his RAF greatcoat with its CND patch, so the pair leaving Central College resembled crewmen from some alternative air force.
‘We could have asked Bunny and his mates along,’ Tyrone said as he set the pace of march. ‘Then you’d be safe.’
‘Safe in jail.’
‘We could get them to invade that Jew’s shop and cause a distraction whilst we look for evidence.’
‘Then we’ll certainly end up in jail.’
A bus came after a forty-minute wait, then they crawled the commuter-clogged route to Dulwich. Opposite where they sat, an advertising panel urged people to ‘Teach English as a foreign language’. After his excursions into folklore, myth and magic, Flint felt he could hold a course on ‘England as a foreign land’. A land which became stranger and more alien by the day.
It was dark by the time they reached the row of terraced houses. Tyrone found a shadow to loiter in, whilst Flint crossed the road to No. 37a. Where the gate was missing, he stopped at the end of the short brick path. The curtains of the ground floor flat were open, but the cheerful Celtic images which had brightened the uniform façade had gone.
Flint peered into the front window, resting his hands on the glass to shade his eyes. The sitting room was lit only by diffused street lighting, and had been stripped of all possessions beyond the cheap furniture provided by the landlord. Bare rectangles marked the former positions of Michelle’s wild paintings.
The scene of the torrid affair was deserted, the rug had been firmly tugged from beneath Flint’s feet and now even the dust had been swept away. He knew there was no point seeking out a forwarding address, there would not be one. Cold crept upwards from the path into his shoes as he realised Michelle lacked the drive, the organisation and the money to perform such an instant move. She had been helped, she had been pushed, she had been forced. She had disappeared as neatly as had Lucy.
He kicked the drab brown door in frustration. Tyrone jogged across the road to his side and looked through the window for himself. Flint simply stood there, at a loss as to what step to take next.
‘What now?’ Tyrone asked.
‘Either we give up, let them win, or we start again.’
‘If we leave it a bit, something might come up,’ Tyrone said.
‘And we might get a white Christmas. Do you fancy getting really plastered? At my expense?’
‘Yeah, don’t mind.’
*
The hangover was still thick when Flint arrived at Central College the next day. He had never had a ‘drink problem’, but could easily see how one could arise. Sally stopped him as he passed the photocopier. She was wearing her apologetic prophet-of-doom expression.
‘Can you see Ian PDQ?’
‘Bad?’ Flint grimaced.
Sally glanced sideways. ‘The Dean of Arts has sent him a letter.’
He shook his head. ‘If I had a dog, it would have died this morning.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Is he in now?’
Professor Grant had been reading the reviews in the back of Journal of Roman Studies. When Flint came in, he set it aside a
nd started to look for something else.
‘Ah, Jeffrey.’
He had called him Jeffrey, it was an ominous portent.
‘You’ve been ill, again?’ Grant paused and appeared to be licking his teeth behind his lips. ‘My, you don’t look well today.’
‘It’s part of the same thing, it keeps hanging on.’
‘Not hanging over?’ The Professor tried to laugh.
He stopped forcing jokes and produced the letter. The Dean of Arts had been made aware that Dr Flint had cancelled lectures, seminars and a night school class on the pretext of being ill. He held proof that this excuse had been totally spurious.
‘We have to fill in forms, Jeffrey. We can’t lie to the DSS, or whoever gets them.’
The letter went on. Flint had been associating with persons of dubious repute (unspecified). He had been using college resources (Land Rover, computers, telephones). He had drawn students away from their work (Tyrone plus the AeroSoc boys).
Grant closed the letter. ‘I understand,’ he said, ‘I recognise what you want to do, but I talked to the Dean this morning and he told me things that were not even in the letter. I cannot control your private life, but ask yourself, should someone who is teaching fresh young minds be spending his nights with an Irish witch?’
Would an English witch be okay? Flint kept his face straight and his expression submissive. He was bottom of the staff list, the first one out in any cutback.
‘Who has been putting the screws on?’ he asked, but the question was ignored.
‘I can only put it so strongly. There must be no more phoney illnesses, no more jaunts with witches, and no more distraction of students. That boy Drake gave a terrible lecture at Bradford.’
‘Tyrone will learn.’
‘Yes, but what will he learn?’
When the ticking-off was complete, Flint apologised, then left for the coffee room, found Tyrone with his nose in the Financial Times and told him the news.
‘No more Lucy, it’s official, the Prof says so.’
‘All that work down the drain?’
Flint shrugged. ‘I shall ring Vikki, then it’s back to solving the pressing questions of the Roman Empire.’
*
Whilst Flint was still sipping coffee and talking departmental trivia with Jules Torpevitch, Tyrone slipped upstairs to his own room. In part he was depressed by his lecturer’s surrender to authority, but also he felt a sense of freedom. This was his project now, he could work on it whenever he chose; no one cared when he came or went, nobody cared whether he did any work or not. He could quite easily do nothing for two more years, then fail his PhD without anyone in the department being aware of it. Plenty of other students did.
Within his room, Tyrone looked at the big wall chart and drew a few more lines, looping up from the box he had labelled HORNED MAN and bursting into the boxes for Gratz, Carlyle, Flint and Monica Clewes.
He wondered what she and Flint had seen in each other. Knowing Flint’s appetite for nocturnal athletics, the relationship must have progressed beyond prune wine and nut cutlets. She was forty-two, Tyrone had discovered, and she was Top of the Pops. Each of his suspect lists was composed along one line of enquiry and Monica came up in most of them. She was so obviously New Age, she had such a high and quirky profile that she entered most of his lists as favourite. She was in the Dark Ants, she had known Plant, she sold wholefood, she sold New Age books, she associated with this Temple-Brooke character and she had once written an article on folk songs for the Transactions. To his prejudiced eye, Monica Clewes was an obvious candidate for any fringe activity that could be imagined.
Flint had drawn a red biro line through her name. Perhaps she had been too obvious, but now the telephone threat had ruled her out of the running. Pity, it would have been a nice twist.
Tyrone deleted the name from his other lists, then looked for a male suspect. Tim Hapgood, the librarian, had suffered a stroke before Halloween. Strike him out. The red biro paused over the name of Sebastian Leigh, the County archaeologist. Tyrone took pleasure in leaving Leigh in the list and planned to dig around his past a little more. He was certain that the computer files breached the Data Protection Act (1984), but this only added to the fun. He should ring Vikki and inform her who was now in charge of the investigation.
*
Tyrone continued to work on ‘his case’, without saying anything to Flint. His supervisor seemed to be playing the new role well, keeping his lecture schedule, giving his night school classes and speaking only of archaeology in the tea room. Lucy was taboo, so Tyrone played the game, talked sub-Romans and methodology and ever so quietly continued to dig.
Sebastian Leigh had been eliminated: he had been at a conference in Utrecht on May Day. The Bishop of Durring-and-Sembolt had been eliminated, having launched a twin-pronged public attack on the paganism of Halloween and the godless nature of a new shop in Eastport. Adding the Bishop, and the judges, to the list had always been an offbeat idea.
The shop damned by the Bishop was called ‘Final Frontier’ and sold graphic novels, paperbacks, videos and board games with a science fiction/fantasy/horror flavour. Both members of staff were male, in their twenties and on Tyrone’s list, but it had been Vikki who discovered that it was owned by James Templestone. The same James Templestone owned a small publishing company called Samphire Fields, whose output embraced the myth-busting New Sceptic, the wistful poetry quarterly Lost Lands, the political magazines New England and Green Concern. Whatever the fringe interest, James Templestone also made it his interest, even if it conflicted with causes he supposedly espoused. Tyrone had straight political beliefs and one basic moral position on any issue. It was confusing to think of Templestone, or Temple-Brooke, changing his chameleon image to suit his audience.
All the new information went into his computer file, and Tyrone’s pulse quickened on sight of the resulting output. Flint had always wanted a man at the top of his suspect list.
*
Vikki had spoken to Tyrone almost every day for a fortnight. She never escaped the feeling the boy was trying to chat her up, or at least impress her with his wild ideas. She put down the telephone and consulted her pad. All around, the jarring bustle of the Kingshaven Advertiser office continued as normal. She’d have to visit that shop, Tyrone was still plucking at straws. Eric, the sub-editor, placed his cigarette hand on her shoulder.
‘Uh?’ She screwed up her nose.
‘Sorry Vik, the gaffer wants a word.’
Suspecting nothing she entered the editor’s office with a cheery ‘Good morning, Arnold.’
Fifteen minutes later, a chastened Vikki Corbett emerged from the office feeling trampled and ill-used. She went to her desk and collected her coat and handbag, then walked slowly past the racks of leather bound back-numbers at the top of the fawn mock-marble staircase. In her handbag was a pad full of Tyrone’s latest names, addresses, deductions and insane guesses. In her ears, the sound of the editor professing deep boredom and irritation with the Lucy Gray story. Plant was dead. The story was dead. No more witchcraft; the punters were becoming angry.
‘Look lass,’ he had said, ‘the tradesmen don’t like this picture of the town you’re putting out.’ Nonchalant in his shirt sleeves, the big man had put the little girl in her place.
‘The tourists love it,’ she had fought back.
‘The Chamber of Commerce don’t, and I have to lunch with them. No more witches and warlocks, Halloween is over.’
Vikki took the stairs one at a time. Rotten, crummy paper. Rotten, crummy town. She’d been beaten up for this story. She’d spent cold days and nights out in cornfields. It was the only story she had ever covered in depth. It was what she came into journalism to do. It was her child which the editor was trying to strangle.
No way. She thought of the list of names: crosses, ticks, hints and denials marked her progress towards a solution. That annoyingly analytical lecturer had told her to avoid face-to-face interviews and direct approach
es, as if he was the one in charge. In some respects, he was right, but Flint’s oblique approach fought against her nature. She wanted to confront, denounce and fight her way on to the front page, not cower and pick at evidence with a trowel and soft brush.
She burst from the swing doors into the car park and the rain. The cold grey sky suited her temper. Arnold the editor had almost confiscated her Lucy Gray file, but she had snatched it back and made excuses that it contained confidential information. She knew that one more fruitless excursion into the story would sink her career. A few G and Ts were needed to settle her nerve.
Hooray Henry’s was a smart town-centre wine bar which hyped its mock-chic image so well, it had become chic in reality. Feeling like a TV-movie slut propping up the bar, Vikki dug over the facts in her mind. She could no longer rely on Jeffrey Flint, if she could ever have relied on him. First, he started hanging around with that health food woman. Then he had become embroiled with that girl he refused to name, and lost her. Finally, he had backed out of the scene without giving her all that juicy information he had gathered during the summer. Even the kid Tyrone was keeping things back, she knew. Vikki could not wait until the laid-back intellectuals had humped and fumbled their way around the problem.
Harry Knowles came into the bar and folded his brolly. Harry was nearing the end of his innings, but lived on in hope of a gong for the twenty-five years he had given to the Tory Party. Councillor, greengrocer, ex-RAF, ex-mayor, he cheerfully stood drinks in Henry’s Ascot Bar for the charming Miss Corbett. With only the suggestion of wheezing, Harry wrapped his bony fingers around the drinks and carried them to a booth and she followed.
‘You don’t smoke, do you?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Wise girl. I had to stop, doctor’s orders. He wants me to stop this too.’ He raised his G and T. ‘Here’s to the afterlife.’
Vikki fenced around the subject, then passed over her edited-down version of Tyrone’s suspect list. Harry scanned it in disbelief.
‘I’ve been reading your paper, of course, but all these people cannot be followers of Satan.’
‘They’re witches, not Satanists. It’s a very fine line, I’m told.’