‘Go on,’ she icily says. ‘Help yourselves.’
‘Thank you, Doctor. These are good.’
After finishing the plate, Mma Ontoaste returns to her theme.
‘I am the positive print of your negatives,’ she says, talking to Rhombus and Colander. ‘The exact opposite to you. I am a black, tea-drinking woman with a happy marriage.’
Here Tom wonders about the state of her marriage to Mr JPS Spagatoni; wonders about the state of Mr JPS Spagatoni, if it came to that.
‘I come from Botswana and see only good in things, while you are both white alcoholic males with no love in your lives, you live in the north and you see only the worst in everything.’
There is a short pause. Outside rain has begun to fall very heavily. The wind rocks the trees.
‘I sometimes wonder if I deal with abstract quandaries too much,’ intones Colander to no one in particular.
There is a pause. Mma Ontoaste cannot suppress a giggle and Rhombus, encouraged, starts laughing.
‘Your books are shite!’ he jeers.
He takes a quick sip of the wine and puts the glass heavily down on the table. The others exchange glances. Tom Hurst opens his mouth to speak, but Rhombus continues.
‘I’ll say this for you, though, pal: you’ve managed to make a career out of nothing. And I mean nothing. Nothing ever happens in Sweden. There is no crime at all. You invent the crimes and then go around suggesting they have some wider implication.’
Mma Ontoaste jumps to Colander’s defence.
‘Well, Rra, your books deal with the same sorts of things, don’t they? Corruption in the police force; the rich, the poor; escaping the past; the SAS; and then something topical like immigration or cannibalism.’
Cannibalism? thinks Rhombus. He wonders how many of his books she has read.
‘Er, look,’ says Tom Hurst, trying to calm things down. ‘Let’s agree that any of our perceived faults as writers are more to do with the limitations of the Genre and the human desire for strong stories, however improbable either may be and then let’s leave it at that, shall we?’
A vague truce is called.
‘Okay, let’s all drink to huge sales figures and forget about it.’
Carpaccia opens a bottle of vintage Cristal champagne but she will not offer any of the champagne to Rhombus until he apologises to her submarine. Nor does she offer any to Mma Ontoaste until she admits it is perfectly natural to own something like a thousand guns.
‘Including three 50-calibre machine guns?’ she asks.
‘Including three 50-calibre machine guns,’ agrees Mma Ontoaste.
‘Can we talk about why we are here?’ asks Tom. He explains about the death of Claire Morgan.
‘Oh, the poor thing!’ exclaims Carpaccia. ‘I feel for her already. Did you bring the body? I bet she is covered in some kind of coppery residue.’
‘It’s possible,’ he agrees, before explaining the series of clues that have brought them to Virginia. As Tom continues, the brevity of his case becomes apparent. When he is finished there is silence for a while until Mma Ontoaste snores suddenly.
‘I think you are being played with,’ suggests Carpaccia. ‘Often what happens in my cases is that I discover all this weird stuff about the dead bodies that have absolutely nothing to do with how I catch the criminal in the end.’
Carpaccia is not used to drink and is becoming confessional.
‘Mostly it’s chance,’ she continues. ‘Sometimes something I find out about the body does help catch the criminal, but there are times when I wonder why anyone lets me near the criminal investigative process.’
‘I’m like that,’ Rhombus impatiently agrees. ‘Especially as I am usually suspended or “in the frame” for the murder in the first place.’
‘I usually get a pretty clear idea who the murderer is,’ enjoins Colander, ‘and then I get into my tracksuit and take a gun into the woods and sort of roll about in the pine needles and mud until the murderer turns up and then I shoot him.’
‘Oh, yes. Luck plays a big part,’ agrees Mma Ontoaste. ‘No doubt about it.’
There is a silence for a while. Sips of drink are taken, Twizzlers eaten.
‘What sort of stroke of luck are you hoping for in this case, Tom?’ Colander dolefully asks after a while. Tom does not really know.
‘I suppose I was hoping you would come up with something. You seem to be the luckiest detectives alive.’
‘Amen to that,’ agrees Rhombus. ‘Hey! I wonder what happened to the others in our year at Cuff. Do any of you see anyone from those days?’
There is a round of regretful head-shaking.
‘I wonder what happened to that old guy who solved crimes while stacking shelves at a DIY store somewhere in middle England?’
‘He wore an orange tabard, didn’t he? With a slogan that said something like “stop me if you need any help”.’
‘I bet he’s still there.’
‘It’s good to have a trade, Rra,’ muses Mma Ontoaste. ‘That way you have something in the quiet times.’
‘And wasn’t there an Eskimo? What was his name?’
‘I remember him, Rra! His name was Nak-ka-khoo. He tried to kiss me once.’
‘God, yes. Now he was really stupid. How did he ever get a place at College at all? He couldn’t detect his way out of a paper bag, could he? He was always failing his practicals.’
‘And he could hardly string a sentence together.’
There is an embarrassed silence for a second.
‘But couldn’t he hypnotise people?’
‘And he was a musician. He could play loads of musical instruments. He could play the viola, the viola. Like the Music Man.’
Dr Carpaccia stretches across to jot down the name of her next compulsive murderer: the Music Man.
‘Oh Rra, he used to play the most wonderful music. He played the Spanish guitar and all the girls would …’ She stopped and took a sip of her wine.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘The strange thing is that I think I saw him the other day,’ murmurs Colander.
‘You saw Nak-ka-khoo? How odd. Where?’
‘He was – wait, let me think. He was in a shop somewhere. Buying something. Yes, he was buying something in a shop, but what?’
‘And where? In Ynstead?’ asks Tom urgently.
‘I think so, but it could have been Malmö. Wait a second it was in Malmö. At the video store. He was renting a video. I thought at the time that it was him, but I was in a real hurry and I could not be sure and then it hit me only later.’
‘What does he look like now?’
‘The same,’ shrugs Colander. ‘Small; dark hair; weather-beaten face; fishing pole; fur-lined hood; shoulders hunched from all that fishing.’
‘Oh, Rra! That is strange. That sounds exactly like my new assistant, Mma Murakami. She locked herself in her office all day and I hardly saw her, but she looked just like that.’
‘Did you ever see her handle a canoe?’ Carpaccia sharply asks.
‘No. But she did play jazz on her radio, and she smelled strongly of fish, now that I come to think of it.’
‘Fish?’
‘And seal meat and whale blubber, I suppose.’
‘And jazz? That is odd. The new officer from Stockholm who was called Knut Knutsson was always playing jazz on his radio in the next-door office.’
Rhombus is looking worried.
‘I heard some music in a kitchen in Edinburgh that made me forget for a second who I was or what I was supposed to be doing too. Ah. A haunting refrain; the power of cheap music.’
‘And those notebooks!’ recalls Tom Hurst. ‘Sealskin.’
‘How strange. We have been finding bodies in Florida bound in fishing twine.’
The weight of coincidence reaches a tipping point.
‘All right,’ says Tom Hurst. ‘I am ringing the Dean to see if I can find out where Nak-ka-khoo is now.’
Non
e of the detectives look convinced.
‘But it could be anyone,’ says Rhombus. ‘I mean have you no’ walked down the street, heard some music playing – some Eric Clapton, for example – and you just start tapping your feet and, before you know it, a whole afternoon has passed?’
‘And just because I thought I saw him doesn’t mean anything.’
‘And my assistant looking a little like someone Burt thought he saw? Rra, I know he could be good at disguises but Nak-ka-khoo and I “knew” each other at Cuff. I do not think that Mma Murakami could be Nak-ka-khoo in disguise.’
‘And the fact that someone is tying chickens up with fishing twine? C’mon. It’s too far-fetched.’
It struck Tom then just how far these detectives were off-song. He had fought them all the way to Richmond, reminding them to trust their instincts, to seize on one particular thing and go with that, just as they had learned in the first year at Cuff, but now here they were ignoring the most fantastically oblique chain of clues in favour of rational observations and, God forbid, Probability.
Before he can say anything, they are dazzled by star-bright white light shining in through the Venetian blinds at all the kitchen windows. The detectives flinch and try to cover their eyes. All are panicked.
‘What is it?’ asks Mma Ontoaste, her voice rising maybe a couple of octaves.
‘Put your weapons down and your hands up!’ blares an amplified voice from the darkness outside the house. ‘Come on out, Aunty Faye! I have the house surrounded. There is no escape.’
‘Oh, sweet smiling Baby Jesus!’ Carpaccia whispers. ‘I recognise that voice! It’s Creepy Lesbian Niece! Get down, everybody. There is no telling what she will do.’
They slide off their chairs, copying Carpaccia, and onto their hands and knees. They are staring wildly at one another now.
‘What does she want?’ Tom asks.
‘It’s you I want, Aunty Faye,’ comes the booming voice again. ‘I know everybody else loves you the most but I love you even more than that and I mean to make you mine and mine alone!’
‘Quick!’ Carpaccia whispers. ‘To the submarine!’
There is a chaotic scramble back through Carpaccia’s house as behind them there is a deafening explosion. Creepy Lesbian Niece has bazooka-ed the kitchen in which minutes ago they had been having a quiet drink. The noise is awful. The blast is fearsome. Scraps of metal and wood fly down the corridor after the fleeing detectives, followed by a rolling cloud of choking dust and smoke.
‘Well, butter my biscuit!’ Carpaccia exclaims. ‘That ungrateful bitch!’
In the hallway she turns and opens a door from which steps lead down to her indoor submarine pen, where the green water softly laps against cinderblock walls. Moored in the middle is a small M8-63 hi-tech submarine made in Norway and usually used in off-shore salvage operations. It is slate-grey and barnacled in places. The hatch to the conning tower stands open.
‘Quick!’ Carpaccia urges. ‘The gangway.’
She gestures with the barrel of a Tokyo Marui M4 R.I.S. automatic rifle that has appeared as if from nowhere and the four detectives run as fast as they are able down the stairs and along the dock, their footsteps ringing loud on the steel mesh beneath them.
‘Nice murals,’ says Rhombus, admiring the marbled walls that line the pen.
It is a struggle to get Mma Ontoaste into the submarine but with some pushing she is soon past the hatches and down the ladder, where she and all the others are bathed in the green glow of the submarine’s navigation system.
‘Thank God for cocoa butter,’ Mma Ontoaste says, rolling her black dress down her thighs.
Carpaccia follows them down the ladder, sealing the conning hatch above her head and dropping down into the galley. There is not much room for manoeuvre but she squeezes past the detectives and seats herself in the captain’s chair.
‘There’s no reasoning with her when she is in that mood,’ Carpaccia, referring to her niece, says. ‘We just have to give her time and space and hope to hell she has not invented some damned software that will take us off course.’
Through a porthole they can see only the black water of the tunnel that Carpaccia tells them will lead them to the James River and from there to wherever they need to go. Carpaccia types some coordinates into an onboard computer and beneath their feet a turbine whirrs and the submarine sinks and jerks forward. They are off.
‘Where are we going?’ asks Rhombus. ‘Back to Scotland?’
‘We need to find Nak-ka-khoo,’ urges Tom.
‘He could be anywhere, Tom. We do not know where he is and we do not know where to start. Any start we do make might be in the wrong direction. I am not convinced we will ever find him. In fact, I do not see how we might ever find him.’
‘But I think he wants to be found,’ counters Tom. There is a pause. Colander does not know what to say.
‘You are good at this, you know, Rra. For a second I believed you and I am beginning to think we ought to find him.’
‘I need to call the Dean or Professor Wikipedia,’ says Tom.
‘Too dangerous,’ says Captain Carpaccia. ‘We can only make calls when the periscope is up. There is a lot of shipping in the canal and Creepy Lesbian Niece will be on the lookout. There is no telling what she might do if she sees us.’
‘Damn that Creepy Lesbian Niece,’ mutters Rhombus. ‘Without my SAS skills we would have been dead in there.’
‘Uh, Mma Ontoaste?’ Carpaccia kindly interrupts, her slate-blue eyes glancing up from the screen. ‘Could you sit down towards the back? You are affecting the ballast.’
They can hear water thronging beyond the thin riveted skin as the submarine speeds on down the tunnel and into the James River. Condensation gathers. There is silence in the cabin. No one is comfortable now, least of all Mma Ontoaste, who is squeezed into the back, sitting on a gunny sack and a half a hundredweight of mung beans. After half an hour Carpaccia types a new command into the system and the submarine begins to rise to the surface. The water around them begins to clear and they can see the light on the surface above.
‘Periscope up,’ she crisply snaps, pressing a button and swivelling in her chair to intercept two handles as the polished body of the periscope rises from the deck. She snaps down some handles and peers through the eyepieces, left, right, scanning the shipping and the shore.
‘All clear,’ she says. ‘You can make your call now. It should work.’
Tom dials the number on his cell phone. The phone in far-off Oxford rings a few times before it is picked up. Tom recognises the voice instantly. Alice Appleton. He has not spoken to Alice since she fainted in the Library.
‘Hello, Tom,’ she begins. ‘Long time no see. Where are you? You sound like you are at the bottom of the ocean.’
She is friendly but off-hand and explains that the Dean is on a fund-raising drive, but she is not sure where. This is common, of course. Tom explains what he is after.
‘Nak-ka-khoo?’ she says. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘It’s a “he”. He was in the year of ’74 at Cuff.’
‘I thought I knew of everyone still alive who had been to Cuff – even that one who solved mysteries in DIY superstores and the trout farmer from Ecuador. I’ll have to check the Library. I’ll call you back.’
When he disconnects the phone the detectives are looking at him speculatively.
‘So the Dean isn’t there?’
‘No. He’s trying to raise funds for a memorial statue to Claire Morgan.’
‘Funny sort of detail to include,’ Rhombus snorts.
‘Do you think it might be important?’ asks Tom.
‘I feel sick,’ wails Mma Ontoaste from the back of the submarine. They are moving at 25 knots down the James River now, pitching and yawing as they approach the city Newport News and the ocean.
Tom’s cell-phone rings. It is Alice Appleton.
‘I’ve found him,’ she says. ‘His last address was a poste restante in a town c
alled Pond Inlet, in Canada. He’s become a meteorologist.’
‘So—?’
‘So he’s done nothing. Never written a word. Never solved a case. There just is no crime up there because there are no people up there.’
‘Sounds like Sweden,’ Rhombus darkly mutters, but the detectives look at one another significantly. The frustration would be unbearable. If there was no crime to solve, a detective often turned to committing it.
‘You said that that was his last address?’
‘Yes. Last year we sent him an invite to next week’s Gaudy Night.’
‘And?’
‘And he’s down here as coming.’
‘When is the Gaudy Night?’ Tom asks.
‘In three days’ time.’
‘Okay. We’ll be back.’
‘We?’
‘All of us – Mma Ontoaste, Inspectors Colander and Rhombus and Dr Carpaccia.’
‘Oh, not that poison dwa—’
Tom terminates the call and grins fixedly at Dr Carpaccia.
‘Don’t say we are going to have to get there by submarine,’ groans Mma Ontoaste.
‘A private plane might have been a better choice,’ admits Carpaccia sadly, lowering the periscope and preparing the onboard computer to dive.
‘Chart a course for Oxford, England.’
Part VI
Another Gaudy Night
1
A conversation by the fire …
‘Well,’ said the Dean, raising a glass of champagne to Professor Wikipedia. ‘Here’s to fund-raising.’
‘Indeed,’ replied Wikipedia, raising his own flute, a twinkle in his eye. ‘The process of soliciting money by requesting donations from individuals, businesses, charitable foundations or governmental agencies!’
They were both wearing dinner jackets, standing by the hissing fire in the Dean’s study, their academic gowns on coat-hangers hooked over the picture rail. It was seven o’clock in the evening and the alumni of Cuff College had gathered in town to celebrate Gaudy Night. About now, all over town, they would be squeezing their prosperous middle-aged bodies into evening clothes and wondering how one another would look. In an hour the Dean was due in the Junior Common Room to welcome them with more champagne and the first of his speeches imploring generosity.
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