It took Kit all of twenty minutes to decipher the two relevant bundles of papers. And that was that. She had come a long way for nothing.
She was still deeply tired, and didn’t at all feel like setting off back to Oxford again at once, so, with half-hearted curiosity, she began to look through the other miscellaneous documents in the boxes before her. Most appeared to have been stored together on the sole ground that they had been sent in the same general period to the reigning Under Secretary of State: a letter agitating for road improvements around Bolton in the Moors; a copy of a pamphlet aimed at the rate payers of Newbury, traducing ‘the American, whom you have the misfortune to call your Rector’; and, as Kit read with particular sympathy, a furious epistle from a Mr Cox, who believed he had been unfairly refused permission to read in the British Museum Library.
As Kit drew close to emptying the second box, and was on the point of pulling herself together and leaving, she turned over a loose file that made her heart jump. Uncatalogued but unquestionably real: she caught her breath and bent down closer to the near-impenetrable, nineteenth-century script—here, no, yes, God Almighty, was the official police record, Charles Field’s handwritten, signed police notes, every last detail, logged by him day after day as the investigation unfolded, of every step he had taken, every false step, all the evidence he had gathered, everything, in his painfully unsuccessful attempt to track down Eliza’s killer.
*
Kit stood with her arm around the bus stop, her knees sagging, trying to relive the moment of her discovery. Hard to believe she had been in Kew only a few short hours before. She and Joe hadn’t had time to speak before the dancing began. They had simply smiled their greetings, and she had then more or less collapsed into his embrace, so wiped out had she felt, weakly elated and unhappy—thrilled that he was there, but worried, even though he was, that he didn’t much trust her any more.
And then, well into the first hour of steps, Joe, without warning, had broken ranks and begun to turn her round and round in their corner at the back, ignoring everyone and—he had concentrated them, blindly but on purpose, within their own primitive dance: one two, one two; one two, one two; Lucille yelling ‘Hello?’ at them, ‘Hello? Hello?’—they ignored her as well—the pair of them dancing seamlessly as one, lost in rhythmic oblivion, tranquil.
They had continued like this, just as they pleased, until the music next stopped, when, still without speaking, they had left.
‘So, hello there.’ Joe also grasped the bus stop, with his good hand. The other, Kit noticed, he was still protecting. He sounded okay though, cheerful.
‘Hello, yes, hello. How are you?’ Kit replied.
‘This is where I first spoke to you,’ he said.
‘Yes. Yes, and I thought you were some kind of—what? I don’t know. Because of the way your hair is cut so short, and you look like—tough, you know.’
‘Perhaps you’d better not explain,’ he said humorously.
Nearly November, the frost in the air was making her nose prickle. There had been heavy rains earlier in the week, but the sky, now, was clear, clean, black, star-strewn, icy.
‘Come to my place. I’ll give you a feast,’ said Joe.
Kit let out a small cry of dismay.
‘What?’ he said. ‘I got artichokes. What is it?’
‘What about The Forfeit?’ she said.
‘We don’t have to. Humpty’s in Milan. I’m completely free. Come to my place. I need to talk to you.’
Kit didn’t know how to proceed. ‘He’s still in Milan?’ she said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Joe, ‘last week, when I told you he’d gone, I thought he had, but he turned up the next morning about six a.m. Christ knows, if you’d stayed the night instead of scarpering, you’d have seen him. But anyway, there he was, six in the morning, in a terrible state, fuck it. Turns out he and Pauly didn’t manage to leave until Tuesday; something about the car they were using.’
‘Bloody hell, I’ve totally messed up,’ said Kit, feeling fraught.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know I told you I have a brother, much older than me, Graham?’ she said. ‘Do you remember? I only usually see him a couple of times a year? Well, he phoned me up today at lunchtime, when I was in London, and said could I have a drink with him this evening because he was coming to Oxford for a meeting tomorrow, and where did I suggest, and—it’s just, he called me out of the blue, so I thought the best plan was The Forfeit because—I was going to say the pub around the corner, but I couldn’t remember what it’s called and, and listen, you don’t have to come. I can have a quick drink with him then meet you at your place, if that’s good. A really quick drink, fifteen minutes, is that all right? He’ll understand. He’s probably there already because he said he’d arrive before we finished at the club, because I didn’t know we’d leave early. I wasn’t even sure you’d come. I thought you might not,’ she said falteringly.
‘Why?’
‘Let’s not talk about it.’
‘We forgot to exchange numbers last week.’
‘True.’
After a pause, Joe said, ‘See that pied wagtail?’ and pointed at one that was bobbing along the pavement.
‘I like them,’ she said.
Joe looked back up at her. ‘You thought I might not come, but you came anyway? You’re a funny combination of being happy and scared. At least, I thought it was funny at first,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to wonder whether the two don’t go hand in hand.’
‘Well, my impression,’ replied Kit slowly, ‘is that you are a bit too weary at life to be scared much of anything.’
The traffic roared past them as each considered what the other had just said. ‘I think I’ve become more scared since I met you,’ remarked Joe, after a while.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘sorry.’
And he said, ‘If you ever had anything to apologise for, it isn’t that.’
Kit shivered as her body warmth began to dwindle. ‘Did you see the sun setting before class?’ she asked, ‘how red it was? It was blue-black that way,’ she gestured vaguely east, ‘and then, that way,’ westwards, ‘the horizon was ablaze, but with a couple of low-lying clouds in long streaks above, in this lovely, threatening, purplish colour? And above that, the aeroplane vapour trails were lit right up making brilliant orange squiggles over the sky, like the after-image on your retina when you stare at a lightbulb filament, except, I mean, all up in the sky.’
‘It was beautiful this morning too,’ said Joe.
‘Yes,’ she replied eagerly. ‘But like they said before—Humpty’s friends, remember?—this evening it was the sun and the moon both there at the same time, and the sun was rich and scarlet and blurry, and the moon—’ she waved a hand at it, rising, three-quarters full, ‘well, it’s incredibly distinct right now, incredibly precise. It was really possible to understand, looking at them both at once, that they’re these orbs out in space, and we are too. You know the clocks go back this weekend? I hate it. Look, here comes a bus. What am I saying? Sorry. Yes, I—’
They got on and settled in side by side.
‘How was your sudden-death talk?’ Joe asked. ‘And you said you went to London today?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, exhaling bleakly. ‘Oh. This week’s been very up and down. The seminar, I survived—I think. I hope. People did at least laugh here and there. I don’t know. It was okay. I should have done it better. My stomach was in complete knots while I was speaking, but I think my voice sounded normal. I hope so. Michaela’s been being incredibly narky, still. I mean she’s been being unpleasant for ages, for no reason I can make out. She seems to have this permanent bug up her butt: so critical.’
‘About what?’
‘Oh, stupid things, anything, small things. My clothes, for example.’
‘What about them?’
‘Exactly. Anyway, I don’t care. I’m completely out of it at the moment,’ said Kit. ‘God, last Saturday I had to go to a lunch thing
at the Master’s Lodgings, and I was talking to this bloke about what I did, just blabbing on in a superficial way, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember whether I’d already asked him what he did or not, you know—in, you know, our opening exchanges. I was talking to him pretty much on automatic pilot, thinking, if I ask him what he does and he’s just told me, I’ll give the impression I’m completely uninterested by him—which I was, by the way. But if I haven’t already asked, and I don’t ask, he’ll think I’m rude.’
Joe laughed. ‘So what did you do?’
‘I decided to ask, possibly again, and then be ludicrously interested whatever he replied. But just at the point of me getting the words out, he got taken to talk to this virus expert person, so I was effectively rude anyway, and may well have seemed uninterested as well, I don’t know. I mean we’re talking last Saturday lunch. It still qualified to me as basically the morning after the night before—so far as I was concerned. And you know about the night before.’ She glanced at Joe under her lashes.
‘I’d say the sacrifice in civility was worth it,’ he replied, with a little smile of his own. ‘And tell me about London quickly, before we tackle your brother?’
‘He’s a sweetheart.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘No, well, I got a train to Paddington this morning, got the Tube miles across London to the PRO—I mean, why exactly is the Underground so hot, when it is underground?’
Kit had intended this question to be rhetorical, but to her surprise, Joe replied, ‘In large part because the friction caused by the movement of the trains through the tunnels heats up the surrounding air.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘what a wonderful thing to know.’
‘I have a friend who worked as an engineer on the Jubilee Line extension.’
‘Very good. Brilliant. Have you been there?’
‘Where? The Jubilee Line extension? Oh, the Public Record Office. Me? No.’
‘I kind of liked it. They have this mosaic globe sculpture outside, called something like, “The World as Seen by Representative Lunatics”.’
‘Any good?’
‘Very disappointing, because it looks just like the world as seen by everyone else. Come on, lunatics! Try a bit harder! Anyway, strangely enough, I had an exceptional one of those laugh-out-loud-in-a-library experiences that I mentioned to you before. In fact, yes, prepare to be staggered.’
‘By you,’ said Joe, ‘I’m prepared to be staggered.’
‘Sort of by mistake,’ said Kit, ‘guess what I found? Only Charles Field’s actual daily log of his investigation into the Eliza Grimwood murder: Charles Field—Bucket—the actual police inspector in charge. Can you believe it? When I tell you it was handwritten, of course it was, because this was before typewriters. But it’s just such a thrill to hold these things for real, God; the real, real thing, the paper he breathed on; his own hand. The Home Office evidently called in his notes when they started receiving false confessions to the murder, then omitted to return them again. But they weren’t listed in the PRO catalogue, so I found them there entirely by surprise. I almost didn’t find them because I was just muddling through the rest of these boxes for fun. I mean, Charles Field: I can’t tell you how brilliant this is. This, I can really make use of in my thesis.’
‘A bit of a coup, then.’
‘Actually,’ said Kit, trying to look modest, ‘it is. I wasn’t there long enough to decode all the handwriting, but from what I was able to glean in the time, it indicates that the police had absolutely no extra, secret evidence against anybody.’
‘Right.’
‘They were utterly foiled. Which isn’t all that helpful regarding the murder, but does prove Field to have been an out-and-out liar when he talked about it to Dickens. I’ll have to go again and work through the thing properly, but I had to get back here for dancing, as you know. Anyway, I’ve been conked out ill in bed half the week,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry to hear it.’
‘Headaches.’
Their bus was crawling down the Cowley Road, past Chinese stores, Russian stores, tattoo parlours, wig shops, sex shops, Bangladeshi restaurants, bead stores, all muddled up with government and other outlets seeking to service variously bungled lives.
‘Yes?’ said Joe.
‘And I’ve stopped going to the cinema,’ said Kit.
‘Is that a good thing?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ve had a stupid week,’ said Joe. ‘One of my students pissed all over this girl’s door: quite a good mathematician. I’ve had to have endless meetings about it. Her parents want him sent down. I thought I’d already had my quota of this kind of idiocy for one term; but no.’
When they reached the bottom of the Cowley Road, Kit suggested they get off the bus again and walk. They waited for the rear doors to open, then stepped out into the frosty darkness. Cold as it was, they dawdled their way towards The Forfeit, by no means overly keen to arrive.
‘Can I run a thought by you?’ said Kit, as they paused to look from Magdalen Bridge down into the chilly river waters.
‘Not by any remote chance to do with Eliza?’ Joe asked, entertained when her body language confirmed that his suspicion was correct.
‘You know your comment, “Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence”?’ she said. ‘Can I tell you some more?’
‘Sure, go ahead.’ They started walking again.
‘Because, you know, I still feel,’ she said, ‘if nothing else, that there’s just too many of them.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, Bill Sikes, remember after he clubs Nancy to death he’s plunged into a terrible state of “dread and awe”, goes off for a couple of days, is completely unhinged, comes back still mental, and is desperate to know whether or not her body has been buried yet? And when he’s told it hasn’t been, because the inquest isn’t yet complete, he bursts out, why do they keep such “ugly things” above ground? Yes? Well, how ugly? one might ask. Or, putting it another way, what sort of shape do we think he left Nancy’s corpse in by the time he’d finished? Because, note that when her friend Bet has to go and identify it, what she sees drives her stark, raving mad. She begins banging her head on the floorboards, and is hauled off to be straitjacketed in a lunatic asylum. You remember that?’
‘I do—remember.’
‘So, you have to imagine that the corpse is in a truly horrendous and horrific state, yes?—if Bet goes mad at the sight of it? Okay, so bear with me. Sikes then tries to escape a mob that forms, “hurling execrations” at him, by climbing out onto the roof of the building he’s in. And, to wrap up, he then by convenient accident slips off the tiles with a rope around his neck and hangs himself. We’re agreed about all this?’
‘Yes. You’ve reminded me I wanted to point out to you that he falls thirty-five feet, as specified by Dickens, which without question in reality would cause your head to be torn off. But hey, never mind. Let the fucker dangle, as Dean would say.’
‘Yuk, I didn’t think of that,’ said Kit. ‘Thanks. Yuk. So anyway, now we come to Eliza’s murder. I’m not saying anyone made this fit a pattern, I’m not saying that, because I don’t see how they could have. But consider that when she was killed it was very hot weather, so her corpse rotted. We know this because, when the inquest jury was reconvened after five days of Charles Field gathering useless evidence, the jurors were unable to examine the new wounds that had been found on Eliza’s torso, after her underclothes were removed, because, after five days of heat, these stab wounds had become undetectable due to having putrefied, deliquesced—I mean, obviously this was before scene-of-crime photographs, it was before photographs, so you just left the corpse where it was until you’d finished the inquest. So anyway, yes, for rising a week she was left to decompose in her bedroom, while Hubbard, the main suspect, her cousin-lover-pimp, was under house arrest in the same house, and on suicide watch because he was going mad. Think of the smell, by the way. And he was eventually implicated as the murderer by an anonymous
letter that looked like it had inside information in it, but which the press speculated the police had sent to themselves. Anyway, whatever, it enabled them to get him, as it were. But the accusations couldn’t be made to stick in court. The magistrates said Hubbard must be allowed to go free. And the governor of the prison where they were holding him, Horsemonger Lane Gaol, let him escape out of a back window, apparently, because a mob had gathered at the front, and was “hurling execrations” again, according to The Times, and there was this fear he’d be pulled to pieces. I mean, I’m not saying anything, except, doesn’t this sound, in its main points, strangely similar to—’
She broke off as Joe took her arm to guide her safely through the traffic and over the street.
‘Drat, blast and bother,’ she said, when they got to the other side, smiling round at him blithely. ‘You still don’t find this all a bit close?’
‘Kit?’ said Joe.
‘Yes?’
‘This isn’t exactly a change of subject, but I’m curious, do you want to be an academic?’
She took a deep breath. They were nearly at the pub. ‘Not especially,’ she said. ‘I’m not thinking ahead about it, really. I don’t really know. I don’t want to be anything, particularly. I just like thinking about things, except when I don’t want to think at all; which is why dancing is so brilliant, for example. Thank you for this evening. Why did we leave? We just—did?’
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