The No. 2 Global Detective

by Toby Clements

A welcome, of sorts …

  The Dean’s party was over.

  ‘I’ll show you to your room now, if I may, Tom, and then doubtless you should like to get on to the New Library, eh? See if young Alice is there?’

  Nothing further was said of what had just happened. Before the Dean had managed to call a halt to the proceedings, Claire had also managed to insult those who had arrived late: Wilfred Drover, the Lecturer in Police Procedure (whom she called a ‘fat old whoopsie’); Dr Amanda Burrows, senior Lecturer in Forensics (‘a tight-arse with not enough grey matter to fill an egg cup’); and the Matron (whom she taunted for having ‘a mostly dead family’ – something Tom understood was a bad thing to say even before everyone in the room blanched and Matron fled in tears).

  They left the Dean’s room in silence and walked across the winter gardens – a conservatory, barely warmer than the air outside, its brick-built beds full of strong-smelling pelargoniums and bare-branched fig trees. On the way, their feet echoing on the oak floor, the Dean pointed out some of the other rooms as they passed. Tom recognised a few names on the doors.

  ‘Now this is your room,’ he said, striding ahead to remove a name label from the brass bracket on one of the doors. Wormwood, supposed Tom. The Dean took a key from his jacket at the same time as he pocketed the label – a move requiring some dexterity – and fitted it into the lock. He fumbled for a second, a puzzled frown creeping over his face, before removing the key and studying it as if it might reveal something. He was about to try it again when the door opened as if of its own accord and they were hit by an icy wall of freezing air.3 The Dean took a step forward into the room and then, once he had seen inside, a step back in surprise.

  ‘Oh my word!’

  The room, which Tom was beginning to think of as Wormwood’s, whoever he might have been, had been carelessly, but thoroughly, searched: the furniture had been overturned, the carpet ripped up, the curtains torn down and drawers upended. Books spilled from their shelves and some of the pictures had been smashed. Over all the debris lay sheaves of paper from the drawers and piles of dirty kapok from the slashed furniture. One thin neo-Gothic window stood open and the bitter draught made everything flutter as if in a state of violated shock.

  The Dean picked his way through the mess and closed the window with a leaden bang.

  ‘Wait!’ said Tom, wondering for a second if this were some test of basic technique. Snow outside and an open window meant only one thing: footprints. Tom joined the Dean by the window and ran a finger over the lead frame around the latch. Just as he thought: scratched and bent. A screwdriver, probably. He pushed it open. He vaulted lightly onto the window ledge, landing on the tips of his toes.

  ‘Tom, I say—’ began the Dean, meaning him to be careful. Tom peered out. Whoever had climbed through the window had done so with difficulty. A dense hedge of spotted laurel had grown up around the window, making it difficult to get in or out, but at the same time providing good cover while one did so. Beyond was a short stretch of grass and then some kind of side road. Tom could see the roofs of a line of parked cars. He ducked under the top of the window and leaped out across the laurel to land in a roll on the frozen verge on the other side. He was on his feet in seconds, brushing the slush from his suit. He stared about him for a few seconds, frowning.

  ‘Tom? Can you see anything?’

  It was the disembodied voice of the Dean from beyond the hedge.

  Tom couldn’t see anything, for there was nothing to be seen, only a virgin expanse of snow4. The cars must belong to Fellows of the College, thought Tom: an Austin Seven, a flame-red Ferrari, a tuk-tuk and, propped against one of those old-fashioned bull-nosed Citroën vans, a tandem bicycle. Just as he might have expected.

  He looked up at the window again. There was no way the thief could have gone upwards, surely? Onto the next window ledge and from there onto the roof? It was possible. There was a drainpipe nearby, but only a fully trained circus acrobat could have made the leap. Tom stood for a while, remembering the first and most easily recalled rule of detection: once you have ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. He studied the lichen that clung to the pipe. There were indeed marks, but the gap between the wall and the pipe was so narrow only the thinnest of fingers could have fitted. A child perhaps? But no. No child could be that strong. A midget then? A circus midget? Why not?

  If this were from the Golden Age of the Genre, then the next step would have been to find a copy of the local paper. No doubt he would have discovered an advert for a visiting troupe, the importance of which only he would guess and later reveal to the assembled cast. A circus was the perfect symbol here: playing on our fear of outsiders, our fear of the exotic, and, of course, one’s now unspoken racist fear of gypsies. Oh, it had all been so easy in the past.

  Tom turned and began walking back towards a door on his right, when something made him stop dead in his tracks. Perhaps it was his imagination? He was sure he had seen something, though; a blur of motion. In one of the windows on the fourth floor of the main house – a face at the window, perhaps? Watching, but not wanting to be seen. Tom stopped, startled, and counted again. One two three four five. It was the fifth floor and yet … He distinctly remembered walking up to his room with the Matron. His room was on the fourth floor; he was sure there were no steps up to another floor above his own.

  * * *

  3. More confusion over temperatures there, but I am wondering if it really matters?

  4. Snow might suggest innocence and optimism here. Or it might not. We’ll have to see.

  5

  But then a ghastly surprise …

  Tom was beginning to wonder where all this would end. The worst thing – or one of them, at any rate – was not having someone with whom to talk; someone off whom he could bounce ideas. It had been Serena, of course, but that had ended along with, it must be said, her. Unless he could find someone else to bounce ideas off, to humanise himself, then all his thoughts would remain internalised. No one liked a detective who spoke to themselves, and dialogue was so much easier on the eye.

  ‘I need someone to talk to,’ said Tom, aloud, to himself. It was a risk. That was the beauty of Serena. She knew when to ask the right questions, how to explain his more hare-brained theories and put him right when it came to all those all-too-human lacunae that made him the sleuth he hoped to become. Without her, he would be just another detective, too young to listen to classical music or nibble cheese or play the violin. He would dabble with cocaine, of course, but that was something else.

  When Tom had finally retraced his steps back to his study, the Dean was pale-faced, but exertion – or anger – had brought a flush to both cheeks. He had managed to right some of the furniture and gather some of the sheets of paper together.

  ‘There’s not much we can do about all that,’ he said, pointing a foot at the kapok that now lay about in drifts. ‘But I’ll get Symmonds – he’s the handyman – to come and clear the rest up. See if he can’t roust out some new cushions and whatnot while he’s about it. Come on, let’s leave this. There’s nothing for us here, I’m sure. We’ll go and see the library. See if Alice has arrived.’

  Soon they were crossing the Old Quad, leaving tracks in the thin snow on the gravel, just as it was getting dark and the lights were beginning to come on. Cuff College never looked more beautiful than at this time of day.

  ‘It’s just so bloody amateurish,’ the Dean was complaining. ‘That’s what annoys me most, Tom. Apart from all the mess, of course. We try to teach people to do this sort of thing properly, so that no one even knows their room has been searched, and then someone comes along and destroys the place. Attila the Hun couldn’t have made more mess if he had tried. It must have been some outsider – some bloody low-life. An Italian or a Cockney perhaps.’

  It was interesting that the Dean would not offer an apology for the ransacking, or speculate upon its motives. In truth, Tom had not taken it personally. Whoever
it was had been looking for something not of his, but of Wormwood’s. But what, though? That was just one question. Who was Wormwood, for a start? Why had he gone and where was he now? And who had carved those awful words in the door? And who had run away down the stairs? And who was it in room 113? And was there a way to the fifth floor? And, if so, where was it and what – or who – lay up there?

  And was there a circus in town? He had still not forgotten the midget acrobat.

  ‘Dean? Is there by any chance a circus in town at the moment?’

  The Dean paused in mid-stride and looked at him quizzically.

  ‘A circus?’ he said. ‘No. Or, at least, not that I know of. Why? Are you a fan?’

  ‘No. Not really. I just—’

  ‘Ah here we are,’ interrupted the Dean.

  The New Library was a handsome building of the same honeycoloured stone as the main building, but with taller windows. It had been built after the Old Library burned down, some time in the 19th century, and inside it smelled of oak, leather book bindings and dust. The floor was of intricate parquet planks and the shelves, as one might expect, were full of leather-bound books. It had changed since Tom’s day, though, and many of the books were in gaudy dust jackets. A great pile of unsorted books lay on one of the oak tables. The Dean picked one up and read the jacket

  ‘Slash and Burn. What a title. Part of the new “STD pathologist” school. Hmm.’ He tossed the book back on the pile.

  ‘But we’ve got to keep up, you see, Tom. It was all very well in my day: we used to get a couple of new books a week, all of them set in English villages or Oxford Colleges. You knew where to put the books in those days, and where to find them later on when you needed them. Culinary detectives went on one shelf, over there, you see? Couples on another. It changed a bit as the Americans caught on and we had a few more sub-genres to deal with but it was essentially the same: disableds over there, short fat detectives up there, with a cross-reference to plumbers over there, do you remember? Nowadays this place looks more like a publisher’s warehouse than a library. Do you know, we now have an entire section dedicated to what we have to call Canine American detectives? Sniffer dogs. Bloody hell.’

  There was a noise from the office behind him.

  ‘Aha,’ said the Dean, shooting up his eyebrows and glancing at Tom knowingly. ‘Perhaps it is Alice, eh? Let’s go and see.’

  Tom felt his chest clench again. Alice Appleton. Until he had met Serena, no other woman had really existed for Tom in quite the same way as Alice. They had met at the College and had from the first been inseparable. The Dean had had great hopes for them and Tom’s memories of their time together were, until that horrible last year, golden. He could remember them walking along the banks of the river in the lemony winter sunlight, arm in arm, each of them struggling to get a word in edgeways in their desire to share and communicate. They spent long afternoons in the Tea Shoppe, on Musgrave Street, reading and re-reading Golden Age detective fiction in preparation for their Finals.

  Their rivalry had been perfect until Alice had gained a double-starred first and her thesis, A Perfect Expression of Terroir: Vineyards, Phantasmagorias and the Amateur Sleuth, had reached the New York Times bestseller list under the title The Noble Rot. That had been the end of their friendship. Although her book – an if-only-I-had-known whodunit set in the caves of a château featuring an aristocratic, fine-wine-making sleuth called Baron Regis de Peyton-Grandeville – had been dedicated to him, Tom had been unable to overcome his envy. Filled with an unconquerable resentment, he had, against his best hopes, offended her so badly at the party for the book’s launch that they had separated on bad terms. He had not seen her since. Her second Peyton-Grandeville book, Phylloxera Vastatrix, had been too clever to do very well and Tom had been glad that it had been dedicated not to him, but to their Supervisor. It was now a cult classic among diehard crime-fiction fans for its sophisticated handling of the Locked-room Lecture, which Tom admitted was brilliant, but still—

  Since then Alice had written no more books. Tom had always wondered why.

  The Dean knocked on the office door and, receiving no answer, gave it a gentle push. A frown puckered his brow. A sense of déjà vu gripped Tom. The Dean seemed to sniff the air and then stopped dead.

  ‘Tom?’ he said, his voice flat. ‘Come in here, will you?’

  Tom had already followed him in and the tension he had been feeling at the prospect of meeting Alice had vanished, only to be replaced by something else, something altogether more terrible. The office was ordinary: two desks and chairs of good quality, a whole wall of small drawered filing cabinets for library cards, a microfiche machine and a computer terminal with a bulky monitor. Various flyers were pinned to a cork noticeboard and there was a kettle and the wherewithal with which to make tea and coffee on a side table.

  But there was something wrong with the room. It was not what he could see that was wrong: it was what he could smell. It was as if he had a copper coin in his mouth. He exchanged a look with the Dean. They both knew what it meant.

  Blood.

  The Dean shifted his weight and began walking very slowly towards the back of the office, the floorboards gently creaking. Tom watched. Then the Dean stopped, glanced down behind the furthest desk and closed his eyes. Tom stepped forward just as the Dean stepped back and they stood for a second, almost but not quite, touching. Tom flinched and turned away.

  The body was laid out apparently peacefully on its back, its heels together and a serene expression on its face.

  ‘Oh, my word,’ said the Dean quietly. ‘And now I don’t suppose she will ever finish her paper on The Performative Distortion of the Role of the Father-in-Law in Andrew Saville’s Bergerac and the Jersey Rose.’

  Claire Morgan’s face in repose had sunk back to the ears, exposing those teeth – corn nuts, Tom now remembered, which were not a Spanish snack – in a ghastly grin. Her monocle, still clutched between her brow and cheek, was cracked into a star, and from her ample chest stood a spear.

  6

  A challenge …

  ‘Poor Claire,’ said the Dean. ‘Although I can’t say it comes as much of a surprise.’

  ‘An assegai,’ Tom said, nearly reaching out to touch the shaft of the spear.

  ‘Mmm,’ said the Dean.

  ‘No, gentlemen, not an assegai, I think.’

  It was a thin voice that came from behind their shoulders. They both turned quickly. A man stood at the door of the office clutching a pile of books. He was wearing a heavy tweed cape (what is it about amateur detectives and tweed, wondered Tom) and his beak-nosed face was as thin as a blade. His shoulders were the narrowest Tom had ever seen, his head shaped like a marrow standing on end and his hair slicked down on either side, as if with Dickensian bear’s grease. He was pure intellect; a man of the ratiocinative school, ventured Tom absently.

  ‘Oh, God. Professor Wikipedia,’ muttered the Dean, rolling his eyes, but yielding some authority to the new arrival. ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘Or, rather, it is an assegai,’ answered the strange man, ‘but not what this young man means by the term.’

  The Dean was in no mood to make introductions.

  ‘Well, what does he mean by the term?’

  ‘When he – and I assume this is the new Lecturer in Transgression and Pathology: height six foot two and three quarters; one hundred and ninety-six and a half pounds in weight; optimum Quetelet index; early thirties; hair cut by a Turkish barber somewhere in northeast London using the number-six setting on clippers that were made in Germany, possibly by the Kuno Moser company; average-number wool worsted jacket, woven in Huddersfield from Australian merino sheep, cut somewhere behind Oxford Street in London by a man with slight astigmatism in his right eye and the first sign of rheumatism in the fingers of his left hand, using a pair of scissors made in Sheffield but sharpened by a man from what was previously Austro-Hungary able to speak five languages, none of them English—’

  ‘For God
’s sake, Wikipedia.’

  ‘Furthermore, he has recently experienced a stressful bereavement, but when he – slightly dehydrated and a novice practitioner of the Alexander technique; right arm around the wicket; a decent cook; moderate drinker (by which I mean he does not drink very much, not that he is a drinker and a moderate); early interest in philately replaced by ornithology and bicycles – employs the term ‘assegai’, he is referring to the spear that Shaka the Zulu developed in the early part of the 19th century, and which his impis generally used as a stabbing weapon in close-quarter combat. He has, as is usual with men his age, watched too many films.’

  The Dean sighed impatiently but the new man went on.

  ‘More correctly the term ‘assegai’, or ‘assagai’, originally from the Berber ‘zaġāyah’ for ‘spear’, via the French ‘azagaie’ and the Spanish ‘azagaya’, which more accurately comes from the Arabic ‘az-zaġāyah’, is a weapon for throwing or hurling, usually some light spear or javelin made from wood and with an iron tip.’

  ‘Well, exactly,’ interrupted the Dean, pointing to the spear that stuck out of Claire’s chest.

  The man stepped around the desk with precise steps. He bent down and studied the spear rather than Claire. Tom wondered if he had actually noticed that it was stuck in a dead body.

  ‘This assegai is, I suspect, judging by the length of its shaft and the mopane wood used, and look here – the way the blade is attached – yes, definitely this assegai is almost certainly turn of the century before last, from one of the tribes on the western limits of South Africa, perhaps the Batlhaping or the Bakgalagadi or perhaps the Buhurutsi or Barolong. I will not be able to tell for certain until I see the tip of the blade.’

  ‘I’ll ring the police,’ said Tom reaching for the phone on the Librarian’s desk.

  ‘Wait!’ The Dean caught Tom’s wrist in a surprisingly powerful grip and held it firm.