The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn

by Colin Dexter

  Once inside the Secretary snapped down the red switch before opening a small cabinet and pouring himself a glass of gin and dry vermouth. Then he sat down behind his desk, opened a drawer and took out a packet of cigarettes. He never smoked at meetings, but he lit one now, inhaled deeply, and sipped his drink. He would send a telegram to Quinn in the morning: it was too late to send one now. He opened his appointments folder once more and reread the information on Quinn. Huh! They’d picked the wrong fellow – of course they had! All because of Roope, the bloody idiot!

  He put the papers away neatly, cleared his desk and sat back in his chair – a curious half-smile forming on his lips.

  WHY?

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHILST THE OTHER four took their seats in the upstairs lounge of the Cherwell Motel, he walked over to the bar and ordered the drinks: two gins and tonics, two medium sherries, one dry sherry – the latter for himself. He was very fond of dry sherry.

  ‘Put them all down to the Foreign Examinations Syndicate, will you? And we shall be having lunch. If you can tell the waiter we’re here? Sitting over there.’ His north-country accent was still noticeable, though less so than it had been.

  ‘Have you booked a table, sir?’

  He enjoyed the ‘sir’. ‘Yes. The name’s Quinn.’ He grabbed a handful of peanuts, took the drinks over on a tray, and sat down with the other members of the History Committee.

  It was his third Revision meeting since joining the Syndicate, and there were several others fixed for later in the term. He sat back in the low leather chair, drained half his sherry at a gulp, and looked out at the busy lunchtime traffic along the A40. This was the life! A jolly good meal to come – wine, coffee – and then back for the afternoon session. Finish with a bit of luck about five or even earlier. The morning session had been a concentrated, unremitting slog; but they’d done well. Question papers covering the periods from the Continental Crusades to the English Civil War had now assumed the final and definitive form in which they would appear before the following summer’s Advanced-level History candidates. Just the five papers left, from the Hanoverians to the Treaty of Versailles; and he felt much more at home with the recent periods. At school History had been his favourite subject, and it was in History that he had won his exhibition to Cambridge. But after Prelims he’d changed over to English, and it had been as an English teacher that he had been subsequently appointed to the staff of Priestly Grammar School, Bradford, only twenty-odd miles from the Yorkshire village in which he was born. Looking back on it, he realized how lucky the switch to English had been: the advertisement for the post with the Syndicate had stressed the need for some qualification in both History and English, and he’d realized that he might stand a pretty good chance, although even now he couldn’t quite believe that he had landed the job. Not that his deafness . . .

  ‘Your menu, sir.’

  Quinn had not heard the man approach, and only when the inordinately large menu obtruded itself into his field of vision was he aware of the head waiter. Yes, perhaps his deafness would be slightly more of a handicap than he’d sometimes assumed; but he was managing wonderfully well so far.

  For the moment he sat back, like the others, and studied the bewildering complexity of permutations on the menu: expensive – almost all the dishes; but as he knew from his two previous visits, carefully cooked and appetizingly garnished. He just hoped that the others wouldn’t plump for anything too exotic, since Bartlett had quietly mentioned to him after the last jollification that perhaps the bill was a little on the steep side. For himself, he decided that soup of the day, followed by gammon and pineapple would not be beyond the Syndicate’s means – even in these hard days. A drop of red wine, too. He knew it would be red wine whatever happened. Many of them drank red wine all the time in Oxford – even with Dover sole.

  ‘We’ve got time for another drink, haven’t we?’ Cedric Voss, Chairman of the History Committee, passed his empty glass across the table. ‘Drink up, men. We shall need something to keep us going this afternoon.’

  Quinn dutifully collected the glasses and walked over to the bar once more, where a group of affluent-looking executives had just arrived and where a five-minute wait did nothing to quell the vague feeling of irritation which had begun to fester quietly in a corner of his mind.

  When he returned to the table, the waiter was taking their orders. Voss, after discovering that the cherries were canned, the peas frozen, and the steak delivered the previous weekend, decided that he would revise his original ideas and go for the escargots and the lobster, and Quinn winced inwardly as he noted the prices. Three times his own modest order! He had pointedly not bought a second drink for himself (although he could have tossed another three or four back with the greatest relish) and sat back rather miserably, staring at the vast aerial photograph of central Oxford on the wall beside him. Very impressive, really: the quads of Brasenose and Queen’s and—

  ‘Aren’t you drinking, Nicholas, my boy?’ Nicholas! It was the first time that Voss had called him by his Christian name, and the irritation disappeared like a lizard’s eyelid.

  ‘No, I er—’

  ‘Look, if old Tom Bartlett’s been griping about the expense, forget it! What do you think it cost the Syndicate to send him to the oil states last year, eh? A month! Huh! Just think of all those belly-dancers—’

  ‘You wanted wine with your meal, sir?’

  Quinn passed the wine list over to Voss, who studied it with professional avidity. ‘All red?’ But it was more a statement than a question. ‘That’s a nice little wine, my boy.’ He pointed a stubby finger at one of the Burgundies. ‘Good year, too.’

  Quinn noted (he’d known it anyway) that it was the most expensive wine on the list, and he ordered a bottle.

  ‘I don’t think one’s going to be much good, is it? With five of us—’

  ‘We ought to have a bottle and a half, you think?’

  ‘I think we ought to have two. Don’t you, gentlemen?’ Voss turned to the others and his proposal was happily approved.

  ‘Two bottles of number five,’ said Quinn resignedly. The irritation was nagging away again.

  ‘And open them straight away, please,’ said Voss.

  In the restaurant Quinn seated himself at the left-hand corner of the table, with Voss immediately to his right, two of the others immediately opposite, and the fifth member of the party at the top of the table. It was invariably the best sort of arrangement. Although he could see little of Voss’s lips as he was speaking, he was just about near enough to catch his words; and the others he could see clearly. Lip-reading had its limitations, of course: it was of little use if the speaker mumbled through unmoving lips, or held a hand over his mouth; and absolutely useless when the speaker turned his back, or when the lights went out. But in normal circumstances, it was quite wonderful what one could do. Quinn had first attended lip-reading classes six years previously, and had been amazed to discover how easy it was. He knew from the outset that he must have been blessed with a rare gift: he was so much in advance of the first-year class that his teacher had suggested after only a fortnight, that he should move up to the second-year class; and even there he had been the star pupil. He couldn’t really explain his gift, even to himself. He supposed that some people were talented in trapping a football or in playing the piano: and he had a talent for reading the lips of others, that was all. Indeed, he had become so proficient that he could sometimes almost believe that he was in fact ‘hearing’ again. In any case, he hadn’t completely lost his hearing. The expensive aid at his right ear (the left was completely nerveless) amplified sufficient sound at reasonably close quarters, and even now he could hear Voss as he pronounced the benediction over the escargots just placed before him.

  ‘Remember what old Sam Johnson used to say? “The fellow who doesn’t mind his belly can’t be trusted to mind anything.” Well, something like that.’ He tucked a napkin into his waistband and stared at his plate with the eyes of a Dr
acula about to ravish a virgin.

  The wine was good and Quinn had noticed how Voss had dealt with it. Quite beautifully. After studying the label with the intensity of a backward child trying to get to grips with the Initial Teaching Alphabet, he had taken the temperature of the wine, lightly and lovingly laying his hands around the bottle-neck; and then, when the waited had poured half an inch of the ruby liquid into his glass, he had tasted not a drop, but four or five times sniffed the bouquet suspiciously, like a trained alsatian sniffing for dynamite. ‘Not bad,’ he’d said finally. ‘Pour it out.’ Quinn would remember the episode. He would try it himself next time. ‘And turn the bloody music down a bit, will you,’ shouted Voss, as the waiter was about to depart. ‘We can’t hear each other speak.’ The music was duly diminished a few decibels, and a solitary diner at the next table came over to express his thanks. Quinn himself had been completely unware that any background music was being played.

  When the coffee finally arrived Quinn himself was feeling more contented, and a little befuzzled. In fact, he couldn’t quite remember whether it was Richard III on the First Crusade or Richard I on the Third Crusade. Or, for that matter, whether either Richard had been on either Crusade. Life was suddenly very good again. He thought of Monica. Perhaps he would call in – just for a second – before they started the business of the afternoon. Monica . . . It must have been the wine.

  They finally arrived back at the Syndicate building at twenty minutes to three; and whilst the others were making their leisurely way back to the Revision Room upstairs, Quinn himself walked quickly along the corridor and gently knocked on the furthest door on the right, whereon the nameplate read MISS M. M. HEIGHT. He tentatively opened the door and looked in. No one. But he saw a note prominently displayed beneath a paperweight on the neatly cleared desk, and he stepped inside to read it. ‘Gone to Paolo’s. Back at three.’ It was typical of their office life together. Bartlett never minded his staff coming and going just when and how they liked, so long as their work was adequately done. What he did insist upon, however (almost pathologically), was that everyone should keep him informed about exactly where they could be found. So. Monica had gone to have her comely hair coiffured. Never mind. He didn’t know what he would have said, anyway. Yes, it was just as well: he would see her in the morning.

  He walked up to the Revision Room, where Cedric Voss was leaning back in his chair, his eyes half-closed, an inane grin upon his flabby, somnolent features. ‘Well, gentlemen. Can we please try to turn our attention to the Hanoverians?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  BY THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century radical reforms were afoot in Oxford; and by its end a series of Commissions, Statutes, and Parliamentary Bills had inaugurated changes which were to transform the life of both Town and Gown. The University syllabuses were extended to include the study of the emergent sciences, and of modern history; the high academic standards set by Benjamin Jowett’s Balliol gradually spread to other colleges; the establishment of professorial chairs increasingly attracted to Oxford scholars of international renown; the secularization of the college fellowships began to undermine the traditionally religious framework of university discipline and administration; and young men of Romanist, Judaic, and other strange persuasions were now admitted as undergraduates, no longer willy-nilly to be weaned on Cicero and Chrysostom. But, above all, university teaching was no longer concentrated in the hands of the celibate and cloistered clergymen, some of whom, as in Gibbon’s day, well remembered that they had a salary to receive, and only forgot that they had a duty to perform; and many of the newly appointed fellows, and some of the old, forswore the attractions of bachelor rooms in the college, got themselves married, and bought houses for themselves, their wives, their offspring, and their servants, immediately outside the old spiritual centre of Holywell and the High, the Broad and St Giles’; especially did they venture north of the great width of tree-lined St Giles’, where the Woodstock and the Banbury Roads branched off into the fields of North Oxford, towards the village of Summertown.

  A traveller who visits Oxford today, and who walks northward from St Giles’, is struck immediately by the large, imposing houses, mostly dating from the latter half of the nineteenth century, that line the Woodstock and the Banbury Roads and the streets that cross their ways between them. Apart from the blocks of weathered yellow stone round the white-painted window frames, these three-storeyed houses are built of attractive reddish brick, and are roofed with small rectangular tiles, more of an orange-red, which slope down from the clustered chimney stacks aslant the gabled windows. Today few of the houses are occupied by single families. They are too large, too cold, and too expensive to maintain; the rates are too high and salaries (it is said) are too low, and the fast-disappearing race of domestic servants demands a colour telly in the sitting-room. So it is that most of the houses have been let into flats, converted into hotels, taken over by doctors, by dentists, by English Language schools for foreign students, by University faculties, by hospital departments – and, in the case of one large and well-appointed property in Chaucer Road, by the Foreign Examinations Syndicate.

  The Syndicate building stands some twenty yards back from the comparatively quiet road which links the busy Banbury and Woodstock thoroughfares, and is modestly sheltered from inquisitive eyes behind a row of tall horse-chestnut trees. It is approached from the front (there is no back entrance) by a curving gravelled drive, allowing space sufficient for the parking of a dozen or so cars. But the Syndicate staff has grown so much of late that this space is now inadequate, and the drive has been extended along the left-hand side of the building, leading to a small concreted yard at the rear, where it has become the custom of the graduates themselves to park their cars.

  There are five graduates on the permanent staff of the Syndicate, four men and one woman, severally superintending the fields of study corresponding, in the main, to the disciplines which they had pursued for their university degrees, and to the subjects taught in their subsequent careers. For it is an invariable rule that no graduate may apply for a post with the Syndicate unless he (or she) has spent a minimum of five years teaching in schools. The names of the five graduates are printed in bold blue letters at the top of the Syndicate’s official notepaper; and on such notepaper, in a large converted bedroom on the first floor, on Friday, 31st October (the day after Quinn’s deliberations with the History Committee), four of the five young shorthand typists are tapping out letters to the headmasters and headmistresses of those overseas schools (a select, but growing band) who are happy to entrust the public examination of their O- and A-level candidates to the Syndicate’s benevolence and expertise. The four girls pick at their typewriters with varying degrees of competence; frequently one of them leans forward to delete a misspelling or a careless transposition of letters; occasionally a sheet is torn from a typewriter carriage, the carbon salvaged, but the top sheet and the under-copies savagely consigned to the wastepaper basket. The fifth girl has been reading Woman’s Weekly, but now puts it aside and opens her dictation book. She’d better get started. Automatically she reaches for her ruler and neatly crosses through the third name on the headed notepaper. Dr Bartlett has insisted that until the new stocks are ready the girls shall manually correct each single sheet – and Margaret Freeman usually does as she is told:

  T. G. Bartlett, PhD, MA Secretary

  P. Ogleby, MA Deputy Secretary

  G. Bland, MA

  Miss M. M. Height, MA

  D. J. Martin, BA

  Beneath the last name she types ‘N. Quinn, MA’ – her new boss.

  After Margaret Freeman had left him, Quinn opened one of his filing cabinets, took out the drafts of the History question papers, deciding that a further couple of hours should see them ready for press. All in all, he felt quite pleased with life. His dictation (for him, a completely new skill) had gone well, and at last he was beginning to get the knack of expressing his thoughts directly into words, instead of first havin
g to write them down on paper. He was his own boss, too; for Bartlett knew how to delegate, and unless something went sadly askew he allowed his staff to work entirely on their own. Yes, Quinn was enjoying his new job. It was only the phones that caused him trouble and (he admitted it) considerable embarrassment. There were two of them in each office: a white one for internal extensions, and a grey one for outside calls. And there they sat, squat and menacing, on the right-hand side of Quinn’s desk as he sat writing; and he prayed they wouldn’t ring, for he was still unable to quell the panic which welled up within him whenever their muted, distant clacking compelled him to lift up one or other (he never knew which). But neither rang that morning, and with quiet concentration Quinn carried through the agreed string of amendments to the History questions. By a quarter to one he had finished four of the question papers, and was pleasantly surprised to find how quickly the morning had flown by. He locked the papers away (Bartlett was a martinet on all aspects of security) and allowed himself to wonder whether Monica would be going for a drink and a sandwich at the Horse and Trumpet – a pub he had originally misheard as the ‘Whoreson Strumpet’. Monica’s office was immediately opposite his own, and he knocked lightly and opened the door. She was gone.

  In the lounge bar of the Horse and Trumpet a tall, lank-haired man pushed his way gingerly past the crowded tables and made for the furthest corner. He held a plate of sandwiches in his left hand, and a glass of gin and a jug of bitter in his right. He took his seat beside a woman in her mid-thirties who sat smoking a cigarette. She was very attractive and the appraising glances of the men who sat around had already swept her more than once.