by Plum Sykes
“‘No. Can. Do,’” huffed Scrope. “Meaning what? Just get the girl to hospital.”
“Problem with that, sir,” Ursula heard one of the paramedics say, “is that we can only take a body to hospital if it’s still alive—”
“Not that we can officially say she’s dead,” interrupted his partner.
“What?!” snapped Scrope.
“Only the police can officially declare someone dead.”
“Well, if you can’t declare her dead, surely that means she is, in theory, alive,” insisted Scrope, “in which case you can take her to hospital.”
“Oh no, sir, I’m not saying she’s alive, I’m just saying we can’t formally declare her dead. But she clearly is dead, to all intents and purposes. Which means we can’t take her to hospital.”
Scrope snorted like a frustrated stallion.
“Even if the victim had been decapitated, it’s still the case that the police surgeon is the only one who can officially declare her dead,” the paramedic continued. “Now if you’ll excuse me, High Provost, I’m going to radio the police from the ambulance.”
The door to the porter’s lodge received an irritated kick from Scrope, and its two-hundred-year-old hinges creaked in protest as he stormed inside.
“Bloody red tape. Deddington, in about ten minutes the college is going to be crawling with coppers. Keep them under control, would you? And keep the press out,” he blustered, red-faced. “Lord Brattenbury is expected to arrive fairly soon. Poor man. Send him straight to the mansion when he arrives.”
“Yes, High Provost,” Deddington replied.
As Scrope turned to go, his eyes lighted on Ursula and he scrutinized her for a long, uncomfortable moment. Ursula prayed he wasn’t going to accuse her of student journalism, punishable by some kind of ancient Oxford torture, and was relieved when he finally just said, “You’re the one who found her, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“Are you all right?” barked Scrope, not seeming particularly concerned.
There was a killer on the loose. Nothing was “all right,” Ursula thought to herself. Still, the last thing she was going to do was admit to Scrope—or herself—how terrified she really was. “I’m fine,” she said.
“Jolly good. Don’t disappear off anywhere.”
“I won’t,” she promised.
* * *
Nothing could have prepared Ursula for the task that lay ahead. Not only had she never written a newspaper article, she’d never been mixed up in a murder, either. She knew that if she was going to write something decent for Cherwell, she’d need to get a scoop that no one else had. She would cover the police investigation from the minute it started, but in the meantime, she needed to understand as much as she could about the girl India had been.
Ursula hoped desperately that Nancy was in her room. Perhaps Nancy’s recollections of her lunch with India a few days ago might give her a clue about where to start. As she dashed along the west side of Great Lawn towards the Gothic Buildings, Ursula glanced up towards the windows of the Old Drawing Room. The curtains were closed, even though it was past one o’clock already. Crumbs, she thought, maybe Wenty doesn’t know yet. She prayed she wouldn’t run into him now.
She took the steep stairs of the Gothic Buildings two at a time. When she reached the top and was standing outside Nancy’s door, she was completely out of breath.
“Nancy!” puffed Ursula, rapping on the door.
She waited a few seconds and knocked again. Finally, Nancy’s voice could be heard uttering a muffled “Hey?”
“It’s me, Ursula,” she said from the other side of the door.
“Come in, it’s open.”
Ursula opened the door and stepped inside. Nancy’s extensive evening wardrobe was still strewn around the room, and her desk was now submerged under an avalanche of writing materials. The surrounding floor was covered in scrunched-up balls of paper. Gosh, thought Ursula, American girls were much more studious than English ones. It looked as if Nancy had been working all night, even before she’d had her first tutorial.
Nancy was still in bed, her hair distributed wildly across the leopard-print pillowcase upon which she was lying facedown.
“Ow,” she croaked. “My head.”
Gingerly, the American turned her face towards Ursula. Nancy’s eyes were covered by a quilted madras-check sleep mask on which her initials had been monogrammed in an elaborate copperplate script. The breast pocket of her light blue cotton Brooks Brothers nightshirt displayed the same monogram, as did, Ursula noticed, a pair of slippers that had been tossed beside the bed. (An infinitely more exciting way of identifying your clothes, thought Ursula, than the standard-issue Cash’s nametapes that Plain Granny had sewn inside her uniform throughout her school days.)
Without removing the sleep mask, Nancy sat up, wincing as she propped herself against the cold bars of her iron bedstead. “I feel like an extra in Annie,” she complained, slowly pushing up the mask until it was perched like an Alice band on top of her head. With her mascara from the night before still smudged around her eyes, unkempt hair, and several pillow marks indented on her cheek, she looked like an accidental version of Cyndi Lauper.* She rubbed her eyes, blinked a few times, and yawned. Suddenly she sat bolt upright and exclaimed, “Oh my God, I overslept! What time is it?! Have I missed my tutorial?”
“It’s almost one thirty,” said Ursula.
“Phew,” sighed Nancy. “My tutorial’s at two. How was yours? Utterly terrifying?”
“Well, um . . .” Unsure exactly how to explain just how frightening her tutorial and entire morning had been, Ursula let her voice trail off.
“Oh Jesus,” said Nancy, rubbing her temples. “I had way too much to drink last night. But, wow, what a party! I don’t know how I’m going to cope with Dr. Dave. My brain feels like one great big pink champagne bubble.”
She tumbled out of bed, flopped down in the hard wooden chair at her desk, and started fumbling beneath the piles of papers there. Finally she retrieved a packet of Camel Lights and a glossy red matchbox with the word “AREA” splashed across it. Nancy offered Ursula a cigarette, but she shook her head. She was secretly desperate to try one, but St. Swerford’s punishments for smoking had been harsh enough to prevent her ever even contemplating it. Seeing Nancy blowing curls of smoke as proficiently as a 1940s movie star made Ursula feel unbelievably square.
“I’ve been writing all night,” Nancy said, casting her eyes over the chaotic desk. “Letters of Love. To Next Duke. Here,” she continued, handing Ursula a piece of fuchsia-pink paper. In extravagant, curly-wurly letters written in silver glitter pen were the words:
Hi Next Duke!
How are you? Can you ever forgive my totally gross American behavior last night? First off, I was so drunk that despite our awesome conversation, I cannot remember your Christian name. Secondly, sorry for spilling champagne all over your coat. As all the JYAs were warned at our orientation last week in London, we must try to be “civilized” now that we are in Oxford. I guess I failed!!!
The only way I can make it up to you is to come and get your gorgeous coat and have it dry-cleaned.
R.S.V.P., please.
xxx
Nancy Feingold
(Room 3, Staircase C, Christminster)
“It’s a very . . . original love letter,” said Ursula, handing it back, though she couldn’t quite see the romance in it.
Nancy winked as she folded the letter and put it in an envelope with “F.A.O. The Next Duke of Dudley, Merton College” written on the front in the same glittery ink.
Discarding her nightshirt, Nancy pulled on a pair of drainpipe Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, added an oversized yellow sweatshirt, slipped her bare feet into high-top sneakers, and threw a stonewashed, shoulder-padded denim jacket over the whole ensemble.
“You look really fashionable,” Ursula complimented her, envying the ease of the wonderful American outfit. Her own collection of kilts and cardies really did
seem outdated, she thought, looking down at her own clothes.
Nancy must have sensed Ursula’s sartorial discomfort. “Hey, I had an idea for you,” she said sweetly. “I mean, you’re so cute, so pretty. You’ve got legs like Jerry Hall . . . but no one can see them. Why don’t we cut your kilts short? Make them into mini kilts. That would be so cool. Everything has to be mini now to look trendy.”
“Oooh . . .” Ursula smiled at the idea. Shortened, her kilts would be much more fashionable than they were now. But it would take her forever to hem them, with all the pleats. “But I just don’t have time for all that sewing—”
Ursula was interrupted by the unmistakable tones of Alice the scout calling from outside Nancy’s room, “Are you in there, girls?”
“Here!” replied Nancy.
Alice put her head round the door.
“I was just passing,” she said, “and I wanted to check you’re both all right. Dreadful news, isn’t it?”
“What is?” asked Nancy curiously.
Alice’s face fell.
“Hey, come in,” Nancy urged her.
“She doesn’t know yet,” Ursula told the scout as she came into the room.
“Oh, oh, I see. Oh dear.” Alice looked on the verge of tears.
“What’s going on?” Nancy asked.
“Don’t worry, I’ll explain everything,” said Ursula.
“Thank you, Miss Flowerbutton,” Alice replied gratefully. “I’ll leave you now.” Just as she was closing the door, she added, “Do take care, girls, won’t you, round college? And I don’t mean to seem nosy, but did I just hear one of you talking about kilts needing to be taken up? I take in sewing. I could have them done by tomorrow morning.”
“That would be great,” said Ursula. “Thanks!”
“All right, I’ll take them from your room,” said Alice, disappearing.
After the scout had gone, Nancy asked, “What’s happened?”
“Oh, Nancy, it’s awful,” said Ursula, sitting down on the bed. “I went into Dr. Dave’s rooms this morning for my tutorial. He wasn’t there, but India was lying on his chaise longue. She was dead.”
“Dead?” Nancy stared at Ursula, completely shocked.
“I think she was murdered.”
“Murdered?” Nancy gasped, her face turning pale. She took a long drag of her cigarette.
“Her neck . . . I don’t know how to describe it . . .” The horror of the scene came back to Ursula. “Her neck had been . . . slashed. The blood had dripped down her dress.”
“But—? I can’t believe it. And . . . I thought she was studying English, not History. Why would she be in Dr. Dave’s rooms anyway?”
“I don’t know. But we’ve got to find out. I went to the Cherwell meeting this morning, and somehow . . . well . . . I’ve got to write an article about the murder. By Sunday morning. I don’t know where to begin.”
“Come on,” said Nancy, grabbing a miniature Louis Vuitton rucksack into which she put a notebook, pens, and the letter to Next Duke. “We’ve got the perfect excuse to go back to Dr. Dave’s rooms. My tutorial’s in twenty minutes.”
The girls clattered down the staircase. At the bottom they came upon Mrs. Deddington and Alice with a mountain of sheets at their feet. Ursula noticed her kilts piled next to them. But work seemed to be the last thing on their minds. They were discussing something intently in whispers. When Mrs. Deddington noticed the girls, she gave them a wary glance and tapped Alice smartly on the shoulder. Both scouts abruptly stopped talking.
“Hello again, girls,” said Alice.
“Just helping out with a little bit of extra laundry this morning,” said Mrs. Deddington. She started gathering up the dirty sheets.
“Are you okay?” she asked Ursula. “I hear you were the one who found her.”
Ursula nodded gratefully. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Poor India.”
“It’s a great shame,” said Alice. “She was a lovely girl, wasn’t she, Mrs. D.?”
Mrs. Deddington didn’t say anything. A sour expression momentarily clouded her face.
“You didn’t like her?” said Nancy.
“I didn’t really know her. Like Alice says, I am sure she was very nice,” protested Mrs. Deddington. But her brittle smile was unconvincing. “I better get on,” she said, and scuttled off with a large armful of laundry.
As Ursula and Nancy headed out into the courtyard of the Gothic Buildings, Ursula noticed the afternoon light was now starting to bathe the stone walls in mellow amber rays.
“Can you tell me about your lunch last Thursday with India?” asked Ursula as they walked along.
“Sure,” Nancy said. “So, it was, like, totally awesome for me to be hanging out with this super-cool English girl. We walked to this cute little brasserie called Browns on Woodstock Road. Anyway, we get there, she walks straight in past the line of people waiting—who all looked kinda irritated—and asks the maître d’ to take us to her favorite table.”
Once Nancy and India had been seated at the best table in the restaurant, Nancy recalled, India had ordered a hamburger for her, saying, “Wouldn’t want you getting homesick.”
“It was like the smallest, most pathetic hamburger I’d ever seen. I could have eaten twelve, literally,” Nancy said. “Anyway, then she asked me if I wanted to join her shooting party in a few weekends’ time at her dad’s country place.”
Ursula fished her reporter’s notebook from her satchel and, as they walked, scribbled some notes:
—Otto had mentioned shooting weekend. Annoyed he hadn’t been invited.
—Why would India invite Nancy, whom she only had met that day, and exclude old friend Otto?
Nancy continued with her account of the lunch. “So I said to India that I loved to shoot, I used to spend hours at the range with my father in New Jersey. Anyway, India was totally freaked when I said this. She was like, ‘Girls don’t shoot in England. We just load.’ So I asked her, hadn’t she ever heard of Betty Friedan? She said, ‘Who?’”
The upshot was that, despite the thorough lecture Nancy had proceeded to give India on the subject of gender equality in the modern world, India deemed this information completely irrelevant to the politics of an English shooting weekend, telling Nancy that she hadn’t been in England long enough to realize that even though the UK had Mrs. Thatcher and punks, things weren’t as modern as they seemed. Shooting weekends at “Bratters,” her ancestral home in the Derbyshire Dales, were run as though it was 1925.
Still, Nancy had become extremely excited when India informed her that shooting parties had a dress code all of their own. The American girl loved the idea of dressing in tweed plus fours and green Wellington boots during the day and changing into a black-tie party dress for dinner.
“It sounded like Falcon Crest,* only classy,” Nancy told Ursula.
India had invited nine “guns”—the boys—and nine girls. The tenth gun would be her father, Lord Brattenbury, the tenth girl India herself.
“What about her mother?” asked Ursula.
Nancy pondered for a moment. Then she said, “You know, I don’t think she mentioned her mom . . .” Nancy frowned, trying to recall the exact conversation. “No, I’m sure she didn’t . . .”
“So if she’d invited nine girls and only nine boys because her father was going to be the tenth gun and India was the tenth girl,” interrupted Ursula, “that must mean, for some reason, her mother wasn’t going to be there. Did she say exactly who she’d invited?”
“Oh, yes, she was very clear that it was going to be a weekend for the Champagne Set. She said Wenty and Eg were definitely going, and Dom Littleton . . . and I think she mentioned Dr. Dave.”
While they headed towards the porter’s lodge, Nancy peered over Ursula’s shoulder as she scrawled:
—India invited don to shoot. Why? Same don in whose rooms then found dead.
“That is so creepola,” said Nancy.
“I know. And why invite an Oxford don and not
Otto, who was her friend?”
Nancy shook her head. “I wonder who’s going to play Hamlet now?” she asked.
“Her understudy, I suppose . . .”
Ursula broke off. She and Nancy looked at each other as they walked. They seemed to be thinking the same thing.
“You don’t think . . . Isobel . . . ? No way,” said Nancy slowly.
“She couldn’t have,” Ursula agreed. “They were best friends.”
Still, she found herself adding a grim note to her pad:
—Could Isobel really have killed India over the Hamlet role?
—Or what about Henry Forsyth? Could he have done it?
The girls had reached the gate tower. Deddington was standing underneath it talking to a smart-looking man dressed in a navy suit and a camel coat.
“. . . the entire college is saddened, Lord Brattenbury,” Deddington was saying.
“Oh my God, India’s dad!” gasped Nancy to Ursula.
“The high provost awaits you in his mansion,” said Deddington, pointing to the far end of Great Quad.
“Thank you, Mr. Deddington,” said Lord Brattenbury. “Are the police here yet?”
“Just one junior officer so far. Apparently the senior detective’s delayed. Something about a stolen Blues boat.”
“God almighty. There’s a life lost and the police are tending to a boat. Oxford! Will you come and tell me the minute the detective arrives?”
Deddington nodded and went inside. Lord Brattenbury rushed past the girls with barely a glance at them. His face looked pinched, tragic.
They dashed into the porter’s lodge.
“Ah, Feingold,” said Deddington. “Delivery just arrived for you.”
“Oh?” said Nancy.
“You’ll find it on the apron in front of college. Wouldn’t fit into the lodge. Here,” he added, handing her a key.