‘Let’s just think about this for a minute, shall we?’ he said quietly.
Tom almost laughed.
‘You’re surely not going to suggest we don’t call the police, are you?’
A silence followed. All three men looked at one another. Both the Dean and this new man were excited.
‘Tom,’ began the Dean, talking to him, but looking at the arrival. ‘This sort of thing comes along only once in a generation. There is a chance to prove something here. Whose methods work best? The police, with their size 13 boots and flashing blue lights and stupid questions from men who can’t even write “bum” on a wall, or ours, with recourse to experimental scientific methods and recondite knowledge such as Wikipedia’s here.’
Now Professor Wikipedia introduced himself with a long, thin, tepid hand. Tom shook it. It was like gripping a dead eel.
‘Professor Aldous Wikipedia,’ he smiled, revealing two rows of tiny sharp teeth. ‘Reader in Scientific Detection and Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University. Pleased to meet you. The Dean is, if anything, understating the case here, Tom, if I may call you that?’
Tom nodded.
‘You see,’ continued Wikipedia. ‘With all this terrorism in the headlines, we have been losing ground to thrillers. You know the sort: government agencies, global conspiracies, multinationals and unknowable biochemical Jihadis with their dirty bombs lurking in every distant cave you care to mention. Death has become random now. It’s all suicide bombers and Operation Wrath of God. We need to get back to the personal again, Tom, where individuals can make a difference.
‘It is a strange literary fact, not wholly germane to our conversation, true, but worth noting nonetheless, that those people who vote ‘to get the government off their backs’ always want to read about the Government intruding in other people’s lives: an intrusion that usually takes the shape of a Chinook helicopter overhead and the muzzle of a machine gun in your face.’
He turned to the body of Claire with a zealot’s gleam in his eye.
‘This, on the other hand, is a body in the library!’
Had Wikipedia or the Dean been younger or American, they might have whooped or done a dance of victory here. Their elation was almost sexual. Tom felt suddenly uncomfortable, the odd man out.
‘So, Dean,’ Wikipedia said. ‘What you are proposing is a competition between us and the modern state. Whoever solves the crime first wins? Nothing but intellectual pride at stake. Rather unfair, don’t you think? Harharhar.’
He had an unpleasant forced laugh that cut itself off dead.
‘The police must, of course, remain within the law,’ the Dean continued, ‘and they don’t know they are in a competition, but they have far greater resources at their disposal.’
Wikipedia rubbed his hands together. Tom could hardly take his eyes off them: it was like watching snakes writhe.
‘Tom, you ring the police,’ suggested Wikipedia. ‘Tell them we have found A Body in the Library. They’ll never believe you, of course. I’ll have a look at this spear and the aforementioned body, if I may.’
Wikipedia squatted down and touched her forehead.
‘Still warm,’ he murmured to the Dean, who squatted next to him. Tom, using the phone on the desk, got through to the police station at St Aldgate’s. It took him a full five minutes to persuade someone he was not wasting police time. Eventually the police agreed to come. He put the phone down and joined the two men.
‘Now,’ said the Dean. ‘The first question we have to ask ourselves is whether Claire had any enemies.’
‘Enemies?’ said Wikipedia ‘Good Lord! Did she have any friends?’
‘Yes, well, it doesn’t make it any easier,’ agreed the Dean. ‘We shall have to draw up a longlist. Tom? Grab a pencil and paper, will you? We should write this down. I am thinking first of Yardley, who hated her for not using his books on her course, and whom she regularly teased about his speech impediment. Then there is Mrs Robinson, who hates – hated I should say, dear God – her because she was always so rude about her cooking. Then there is Rex, of course, whom she thought elderly and homosexualist – a fatal combination – and then poor dear Celia, who so hated Claire for telling Rex about all those previous engagements. Then there is Miss Featherstonehaugh, whom she ridiculed for being A Bit Like Miss Marple, but who might be thought of as being a touch on the frail side for fighting with spears, which might, I suppose, rule her out, but then there is Lord Denbeigh, who detested her because she was c-o-m-m-o-n.’
The Dean spelled the word out, peering around him as he did, as if just saying it were enough to evoke the forces of darkness.
‘As good a reason as any to murder someone,’ chimed Wikipedia. ‘Happens all the time.’
Tom scribbled away.
‘Then there is poor Father Dennis,’ continued the Dean, ‘whom she persuaded that people had been lying to him all his life and that he was not, in fact, black but a Native American Indian. He might, now that I come to think of it, be the most natural person to be throwing a spear about the place, were it not for the fact that he is blind. Again, that is something that might just rule him out, unless he did it in cahoots with Thorneycroft, whose deafness has only served to enhance his sense of touchiness, and who hated Claire for calling him Ironsides and ‘The-seeing-eye-dog-of-Tonto’ in that absurd cod ‘Red Injun’ voice she used to put on, although to be fair, this part of the Library is not equipped for wheelchair access, and so that might rule him out too.’
‘I sense we are getting somewhere,’ said Wikipedia, wiggling his eyebrows.
‘And then there is Drover, whom she was always calling fat but who thought of himself as merely portly and who hated her because she would not come on the Gay Rights march in London last year and who thought she was a hypocrite for not publicly admitting her love for Dr Burrows, whose marriage she had ruined by stalking her so incessantly, even while she was married to her own husband, who then committed suicide, but whose sister, Nurse Lane, is the Matron and whom you, Tom, saw earlier this afternoon. How did she seem?’
‘Oh,’ said Tom, a little lost. ‘Fine, I think.’
‘That’s all very well,’ said Wikipedia. ‘They were all in the College at the time of the death and they all had a motive, if not the means, but it is this spear that really intrigues me.’
Tom sensed that something had changed. He had been sure they were right to concentrate on the list of people with the motives and perhaps the means to kill Claire, and that they ought to consult the porters in their cabin to find out if anyone had come or gone through the gates in the last couple of hours. Yet here he was, having to concentrate on the spear. He was being corralled in a direction he did not necessarily want to go. This was the sort of thing that only usually happened in films.
‘Wait a minute—’ he began. ‘The police will be here any minute. They won’t want you to disturb the—’
But Wikipedia had wrapped his silk handkerchief around the shaft of the spear and pulled it from Claire’s body with the sound of someone removing a spade from wet sand. Tom looked away as he wiped the sticky blood from its vicious tip.
‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘Very interesting. Look at this. It is extraordinarily ornate. Too ornate for the Batlhaping. It must have been made by the Bamangwato of what we used to call Northern Bechuanaland, now Botswana. They were the finest metalworkers in southern Africa, you know. Even then the detail is really remarkable. This must have been made for a king. Look at the decoration here. Very ornate. Very rare. I know of only one like this in existence: in the National Museum in Gaborone in Botswana.’
‘Who could have got hold of a spear like this?’ asked the Dean. Tom was, despite himself, interested in this development. A rare antique as a murder weapon had a nice, familiar chime.
‘Obviously it’s a message,’ Wikipedia said, looking at the Dean with a significant leer.
‘You don’t think?’ The Dean looked aghast at some fresh possibility. Wikipedia nodded, enjoying the gravit
y of the moment.
‘Have you told him?’ he asked, tilting his strange-shaped head towards Tom. Tom could see he was being drawn into something else again here. The atmosphere changed and it seemed as if the lights had dimmed around them. For a moment he managed to forget that at their feet was the bulky body of his erstwhile Head of Department.
‘What?’ Tom asked, speaking in a whisper.
‘Tom, the police will be here soon and so we do not have much time. There has been some trouble here at the College in the last few months. You may have heard something? And not just here. All over the place. It started with just the odd slip-up. A case unsolved, unresolved. Once or twice this is all right – terribly po-mo – but it has been happening too often and people do not like it. The reading public like to be reassured that, through whatever means, disorder is contained and transgression punished.’
‘You see,’ took over Wikipedia, ‘too many of our alumni are reporting mistakes or, worse, blank walls, dead ends. At first we thought it might mean increasingly cunning criminals, increasingly interesting Crime Fiction, but then we started getting the letters.’
‘Letters?’
‘In the post. From all over the world. Someone is trying to undermine us, Tom. Trying to catch us out, trying to show that the current crop of literary detectives are no good; unsettling them and destroying their confidence. There have been cases of them acting strangely: taking to drink, or giving it up. Someone is challenging us. This,’ he held up the spear, ‘is just another sign. It is a summons. One of us needs to get out to Botswana and find out what all this is about.’
‘But—’ began Tom.
The Dean held up a hand.
‘Tom, even to so much as suggest there may be alternative courses of action, such as waiting for the police, even to suggest we may be wrong about this, is to lose the plot; lose the game; lose the audience; the reader. Surely you know that?’
This was one of the Basic Rules of the Genre, something Tom had known in theory almost all his life. He had not realised how hard it was to rub up against it in real life.
‘We have a contact in Botswana, of course. Delicious Ontoaste; class of ’74. You may have heard of her?’
Of course Tom had heard of Delicious Ontoaste. She had been one of the College’s great successes of the last ten years. Despite having started with a minor academic publisher, she had become a word-of-mouth bestseller – the best kind of bestseller.
‘And you want me to go, don’t you? Because of my father?’
Wikipedia nodded sharply. Then he tossed the spear up in the air, its point missing Tom’s eye by an inch, caught it by the shaft and plunged it back into the wound in Claire’s chest with a glutinous squeal. The body gave a kind of a sigh and deflated.
‘Always wanted to do that,’ he said and smiled.
At that point they heard a voice at the door – a curious high-pitched squeak – and together all three whirled around. Alice Appleton. Tom’s first sight of her after ten years was just as she twisted at her knees and fainted to the floor in a heap.
‘Oh dear,’ said the Dean.
Part II
The 11 O’Clock Moral Dilemma
CHAPTER ONE
The Tiny White Aeroplane and the man in the uniform of the Botswana Postal Service both make an appearance.
Mma Delicious Ontoaste, redoubtable founder of The Best Detective Agency in the World Ever! No. 2, was sitting beneath a striped parasol outside the café at the Sir Seretse Kharma International Airport in Gaborone. On the table in front of her was a mug of foaming bush tea and the sky above her was of the colour it usually assumed at ten o’clock in the morning: clear, blue and cloudless. It was a good sky, Mma Ontoaste sometimes thought; the best sky in the world, stretching all the way to the horizon of the best country in the world, and she was the best woman in the world, sitting there, still with that mug of foaming bush tea, still thinking strange thoughts, except that today Mma Ontoaste was not thinking strange thoughts about the sky. Mma Ontoaste was thinking strange thoughts about the tiny white aeroplane and the Very Important Person on board whom she had come to the airport to meet.
It had begun a few days before, when Mma Ontoaste had been sitting in her office on Merchistone Drive, sipping bush tea from her own mug, the one her dear late daddy – that good man – had passed on to her, and listening to her new assistant, Mma Murakami – that good woman – as she typed very quickly in the grass hut next door. Outside nothing except the air moved. It was one of those long hot African days, when there seemed to be no escape from the heat. The sun beat down on the grass roof of the hut and the cattle sought out the shade of the acacia tree. The red soil bounced the heat back up and it seemed as if between them the sun and the earth had declared war on anything cool and green and living.
Behind the steady clatter of Mma Murakami’s typewriter, Mma Ontoaste could hear a radio playing some jazz music. It was Mma Murakami’s radio, a leather-encased Roberts radio, with a wire clothes-hanger in place of the original aerial, which Mma Ontoaste assumed had been broken off in some accident or other in the past. Ordinarily jazz was the outward sign of deep inner corruption or incurable evil, of course and, had Mma Ontoaste known that her new assistant Mma Murakami not only had a radio, but that she also listened to jazz while she typed, then it is doubtful that Mma Ontoaste would have given Mma Murakami the job in the first place, even if she had, as she claimed, got 98 per cent in her final exam at the Napier Secretarial College.
But lessons were there to be learned, were they not, and once her old assistant, Mma Pollosopresso, had revealed herself to be a bad woman, who would go so far as to blow up her employer’s tiny white van with explosives made from a half cup of sugar which she must have hoarded while she had been working at the Detective Agency and some fertiliser that she would have borrowed from the orphan farm, well then Mma Ontoaste had had no choice but to ask her to leave the Detective Agency and employ Mma Murakami in her place.
And it was just as Mma Ontoaste was sitting on the chair on the veranda of the grass hut, sipping more bush tea, and looking out across the yard at the pumpkin patch and the melons and the other nameless shrubs that filled the space, thinking of how much she loved it all, that the man wearing the uniform of the Botswana Postal Service, a smart uniform, with blue shorts and a white shirt, had knocked at the gate of the stock fence and greeted her modestly.
‘Mma.’
‘Rra,’ she had said, getting to her feet to meet her visitor and to show him to a chair in the old Botswana custom. The man in the uniform of the Botswana Postal Service had looked puzzled for a second, but he had readily accepted her offer of bush tea and a slice of cake and this pleased Mma Ontoaste. So few people these days had time to stop and talk. Her beloved father, Pepe, was of the mind that anything that could not be solved over a cup of bush tea was probably not worth solving anyway. In this he was probably right, if you believed, as Mma Ontoaste did, that people were basically good, but, sadly, just a little bit thick. They needed to be told what to think and what to do and here they were in luck, because, apart from bush tea, thick slices of richly fruited cake and her husband, Mr JPS Spagatoni, that good man, as well as numerous friends and the cows that her father – that other good man – had left her in his will, Mma Ontoaste loved nothing more than telling people what to do.
‘Now, Rra,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Mma,’ he replied, using the respectful greeting that, along with his polite acceptance of her offer of the chair and the thick slice of cake and the bush tea, confirmed him to be a good man, ‘I have a telegram for you.’
In one hand he held out a brown envelope with Mma Ontoaste’s name and address written upon it.
‘Oh Rra, a telegram!’ Mma Ontoaste clapped her hands together. ‘I am so happy! You are so clever! However did you find me?’
The man in the uniform of the Botswana Postal Service pointed to the name and the address written on the envelope in black ink. True it
was not handwritten, but printed rather, which was a pity. Mma Ontoaste was not against progress or change, of course. Just look at Botswana. Had not that good country changed since that hot night all those years ago when the fireworks failed to ignite and which seemed to augur ill for Independence, etc etc?
And yet change was not always a good thing, Mma Ontoaste sometimes thought, especially if it led to people becoming cold and selfish as they were in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Malawi and, of course, the Democratic Republic of Congo. She could have gone on listing the countries where people were also lazy and stupid, and full of malevolence, but Mma Ontoaste was one of those people who preferred to emphasise the positive.
‘Oh Rra!’ she exclaimed. ‘I must show this to Mma Murakami. She will be so excited. She is my new assistant. She passed her exams at the Napier Secretarial College with 98 per cent.’
‘Oh, that is good, Mma. Napier Secretarial College is a very fine college. Your new assistant must be very clever. Ninety-eight per cent is better than 97 per cent.’
‘Exactly, Rra. I am glad to hear you say that. I had to ask my last assistant to leave because she only got 97 per cent in her final exams. And then she blew up my tiny white van. Can you imagine that?’
‘Oh, Mma. Are you sure it was her?’
With that the man in the uniform of the Botswana Postal Service wiped the cake crumbs from his lips with the back of his hand. Mma Ontoaste was taken aback. This was not the old Botswana way. Wiping one’s mouth with the back of one’s hand was the rudest thing a man could do and it occurred to Mma Ontoaste that the man who was dressed in the uniform of the Botswana Postal Service was not perhaps from Botswana, but rather Nigeria, where they were known to be very rude and selfish and constantly wiping crumbs from their mouths with the backs of their hands. Yes. The more she thought of it, the more certain Mma Ontoaste became that this man in the uniform of the Botswana Postal Service was not from Botswana but from some other country, somewhere else. The question then was why had he got a job in the Botswana Postal Service in the first place?
The No. 2 Global Detective Page 4