‘Sorry to bother you at the labs,’ she said, apprehensively. ‘But it’s important.’
‘My research is pretty important,’ Richard said tersely. He hoped this was not about that straggle-bearded English don and his inappropriate internet representation again. Or yet another Branston student missing tutorials. What else could he do about it? He had agreed only this morning with a clearly exasperated Gillian Green that Amber Piggott would not be returning after the Christmas break.
That particular effort to raise Branston’s profile had, Richard reflected bitterly, been a catastrophic failure. As, no doubt, the forthcoming alumni dinner would be. To which, as things stood, Diana was still coming.
‘Master, I’m afraid it’s rather bad news. The police have been in touch. They suspect that someone at Branston is dealing.’
The words, rather than the dreary delivery, made Richard wake up. ‘Dealing? Drugs, you mean?’ He closed his eyes tight shut, willing it not to be true. A college head’s worst nightmare. As if he didn’t have enough on his plate.
‘I’m afraid so, Master.’
Was it his fault, Richard asked himself. Had he not been sufficiently vigilant? But Branston students, Amber Piggott and a few other bad apples excepted, had always seemed serious and hardworking. Amber again excepted, there were no rich dilettantes. They hadn’t seemed the drugs type, whatever that type was. Of course, it could be any type.
‘Are they sure?’
‘They’re still trying to build the full picture, I gather. There’s not enough evidence at this stage to justify a full search of the place, although that might come.’
‘Something to look forward to then,’ Richard said with heavy irony. But, even as he put the phone down, he felt guilty. It wasn’t the poor woman’s fault. She was only the messenger.
All the same, he had not spoken so snappily for some time. But he had not needed this, not after the Diana business. He felt heavy and weary. And cold, suddenly. The old disenchantment with life had seeped back, like a chill, into his bones.
He found himself wondering, as of old, what exactly he was doing here at Branston. Meetings with recalcitrant students, fundraising dinners, drug dealing. None of it was what he had signed up for. It had seemed so different when he had talked about it to Diana – almost fun, that immersion in college life. She, for her part, had talked eagerly about the students. He had, sucker that he was, even had a glimmer of her as the Master’s wife. Walking, therefore, straight into the trap Sara Oopvard claimed had been set.
He had escaped it, anyway. Dodged the bullet. Hadn’t he?
He pushed to the back of his mind the spark that had leapt between Diana and himself. It had been a moment of madness, some stray synapse; it meant nothing. He would avoid all women from now on, although there was that damned dinner with Diana, of course. How was he to get through that?
He could hear, once again, Sara Oopvard’s sibilant voice. Her tones adhered to his brain-folds like Velcro. Part of him – the scientist in him – wondered whether, under laboratory conditions, it might be visible:
‘Diana said to me, “Sara, he’s a sitting duck. Got my name all over him. A world-renowned academic, Master of a college and, would you believe it, a widower!”’
Richard put his head in his hands and groaned.
Sara was not one to let the grass grow under her feet. She hated grass. In the old days, when she employed the same gardeners as the Queen, she had them yanking out handfuls of the horrid encroaching green stuff.
She had penetrated the Master’s portals, and that was no mean feat. She had quickly decided that it needed a makeover: a few uplighters and sofas. A few clicks on Ralph Lauren Home and all would be well. They’d also need new phones.
Unplugging them all from the wall, she had deplored their being nasty, bog-standard grey BT ones, not the witty, zebra striped, retro trimphone ones she had introduced at home. Former home, she reminded herself, savagely. Richard’s mobile, which she had confiscated without his knowledge, needed upgrading too. It wasn’t even an iPhone.
All that was the easy part. And she had done the hard part too, or most of it.
To have turned the chaos of the evening to her advantage, as she had, was possibly her finest hour. The mental effort it had involved was exhausting. And yet Sara had slept badly that night on the Master’s lumpy spare mattress. Her disquiet was born of ambition; she had a long way to go yet and had lain awake scheming into the early hours, bent on consolidating the victory.
Her opportunity had not been long in coming. She had, once Richard had left for the labs, lost no time in plugging the telephones back in. Should Diana call, Sara would be immediately able to inform her that she had been replaced in Richard’s affections. Indeed, she was anticipating doing so with pleasure.
A call from a woman duly came, but it was not Diana. It was someone called Flora, and about a dinner she was organising in the college. Flora was writing out place cards and wished to check the spelling of the name of the Master’s guest. ‘Oh,’ she said, when Sara told her. ‘It’s changed.’
‘Indeed it has,’ Sara agreed, a satisfied smile curving her gleaming, blood-coloured lips.
‘Upward, you say? As in onward and—?’
Sara put her right and then, smiling, replaced the receiver. She paced about for a while, savouring her triumph, and then decided it was about time she went to visit the labs. Now she was to share his life – and there was no question that she was – she must share Richard’s interests. It was certain to raise her in his estimation.
Some half hour later she swung her large white four-wheel drive into the small, tree-fringed car park before the elegant thirties façade of the neurology department. The car park was full apart from one empty slot, marked with a wheelchair.
‘You’re parking in a disabled space,’ a youth clutching armfuls of folders pointed out as she eased herself from the car in her tight jeans and stilettos.
Sara gave him a withering look. ‘So?’ she flung back. ‘There’s no one disabled using it. Is there?’
Tossing her hair, she stalked towards the laboratory entrance. She felt supremely confident. She clacked up the wide stone steps into the laboratory’s Art Deco foyer. The security guard behind the desk looked up from texting on his mobile phone. ‘I’m here to see Professor Black,’ she informed him loudly.
She spoke with such authority that the security guard, who was young and new, assumed that this was the eminent female neurologist down on the visitor list that morning. One of his colleagues, noticing her name, had made an approving remark about long hair and trendy clothes. The guard picked up the telephone. As always, it took a while to track Black down.
Sara tsked, shifted from teetering foot to teetering foot and rippled her nails along her folded arms.
Eventually the guard got through. ‘Professor Black? Lady to see you.’
Richard, annoyed at another interruption, glanced in irritation at the clock. He had a visitor later that day, but was not expecting anyone now.
Then the thought that it might be Diana hit him like a lightning strike. She’d come to explain everything! All his doubts fell away and he felt flooded with a happy relief. Full of hope, he rushed out of the room, tapped his feet impatiently before the lift and then, once it had juddered with agonising slowness to the ground level, pushed open the heavy brass doors into the foyer.
‘Richard!’ Sara exclaimed, clacking forward over the marble. ‘Darling!’
The professor, casting a glance of absolute astoundment at the guard, who shrugged and held up his hands, now found himself dragged into Sara’s arms and soundly air-kissed on both sides. It was just at that moment that a pair of Richard’s students entered the foyer, stared in amazement and nudged each other.
‘Way to go, Prof,’ said the more daring of them.
Richard
felt Sara taking his arm. ‘Now. We need to talk diaries.’
‘Talk what?’
She fixed him with a glassy beam. ‘Someone called Flora just called. About a dinner.’
Richard stared at her. A feeling of dread was squeezing him from within and not entirely because of the impending alumni event.
‘I told her that I’d be delighted to come with you. It’s on Saturday, of course.’ She made an insinuating gurgling sound in her throat. ‘But I’ll be happy to stay on until then, to help out.’
‘Er . . .’ Richard said. He felt behind in some way, an unusual and unpleasant feeling for him. He was normally the one ahead of the field.
But Sara had turned on her heel, was pushing at the inner double doors leading to the labs. ‘You must show me round your place of work! I absolutely insist!’ she was exclaiming. ‘I want to know everything about you! Now that I’m staying!’
Diana’s trowel lay desultorily at the side of her. She had been digging fitfully for some time but now abandoned all pretence of work. The tight feeling inside her had twister tighter in the course of the past hour. Now she felt so constrained she could hardly breathe and there was, she knew, only one way to relax it. She must see Richard face to face.
She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes remained before it was time to get Rosie. Not enough for a full confessional, but she could make a start. Her pretext, she decided, would be to check the Saturday college dinner was still on. As she straightened and began to gather her tools, Diana felt better already. After all the hesitating and worrying, definite action was a relief.
She headed for the Lodge. No guarantee that he would be there of course, but she could always leave a note. Approaching the familiar grey concrete block, Diana felt again the tightening in her stomach. How would he receive her? Nervously she tucked her hair behind her ears and wished she had spent a few moments arranging her face. Such had her hurry been to get here that she probably still had smudges of soil on her nose.
The path before her was bordered by bare-branched beech hedges, behind which was a small car park. As Diana hurried along, she heard a vehicle swinging into it with a screech of brakes and a spray of gravel. She glanced involuntarily through the twigs.
The vastness and the whiteness was enough. She did not need the personalised number plate. Diana stood immobile while, within her, feelings of cold horror fought a sense of inevitability. Sara Oopvard had not gone home after all. She was here, at the Master’s Lodge. Diana swayed for a second or two. Even in the solid footings of her wellingtons, she felt suddenly that she might fall.
‘Hey!’
The voice exploded into her thoughts and made her jump. Her scattered senses failed to identify it. Forcing her strained features into a semblance of normality, Diana turned slowly.
‘Heard the news?’ Sally panted up to her, grinning, her arms bearing a pile of scrunched towels. She had evidently just come from the Lodge.
‘What news?’ Actually, Diana could guess, but she needed the time to compose herself, the better to control her reaction.
‘Some woman’s moved in with the Master. Arrived last night, they say.’ Sally’s eyes were bright with agitation. She shook back her golden curls and leant forward, dropping her voice. ‘I’ve not seen her,’ she added with a confidential giggle. ‘But the inside of that house is a real tip. Clothes everywhere. Underwear. Make-up all over the bathroom.’
Diana’s eye, sliding down to the towel pile in Sally’s arms, snagged on a bright red lipstick smudge. Her vision blurred and her self-control gave a violent lurch. ‘Is that right?’ she said tightly.
‘Dreadful state!’ Sally was fairly crackling with vicarious excitement. ‘And she’s totally mutton dressed as lamb, they say. Someone saw her going out this morning. Long hair. Leather trousers. Really high heels. Not the sort you’d think the Master would go for. But, according to Flora, she’s going with him to the dinner on Saturday.’
Diana could not speak.
‘Ooh,’ Sally was gasping at her watch. ‘I’m late. Must dash. See you later,’ she sang. ‘Have a lovely evening.’
Olly could scarcely believe it. At last, a breakthrough. Life had come to feel like a dark pit in whose bottom he was languishing. But now a window had opened in the blackness above and through it, fluttering down into his eager fingers – or into the text message part of his mobile – had come a job interview!
The Post was a new paper, so new that it had not been launched yet; its address, an industrial estate on the outskirts of town. They had advertised for an investigative journalist. It was hardly the Guardian, but it was a start, especially as the Post wanted to see him so quickly. Immediately, in fact. Now.
‘Get you!’ teased Dotty when Olly descended in the shiny suit, which had failed to bring him luck in so many previous interviews. David, admittedly, had offered him the run of his crumpled, don’s wardrobe, but Olly had tactfully turned him down. He felt he would rather take his chances with the unfortunate suit than appear before a prospective employer in baggy-kneed tweeds and jackets with holes in the elbows.
As Olly buttoned himself into his own suit, he hoped today would be an exception to the unlucky rule. Possibly, if he didn’t see Hero. He remembered his interview with the Hagworthingham Chronicle; her withering remarks might have been what jinxed it, not the suit.
But Olly had seen little of Hero lately. She rarely appeared downstairs, at least not in daylight hours. It seemed she foraged at night, like a rat; according to Dotty, the kitchen looked as if a bomb had hit it every morning when she came down.
And Olly had been out a lot, in search of work, while Hero had been in, avoiding it. Although Dotty had reported a sighting outside, in actual daylight, with the vicious poodle that intermittently hung about the place. Hero and the poodle had struck up a friendship, Dotty said, clearly surprised and hurt that her daughter loved a dog – a mean dog at that – and not her own devoted mother. Yin and yang, Olly had said, to cheer Dotty up. Black and white. Goth and poodle. Dotty had not so much as smiled, however.
She seemed, Olly thought, to have lost all hope where her daughter was concerned. As had David. Olly wondered whether he should step in, but every time he summoned the will to tackle Hero about her attitudes, he never followed through with any action. He told himself that this was because he felt it was the family’s business. Deep down, however, he knew he was afraid. Hero might bite him, like the dog.
‘Good luck!’ Dotty called encouragingly now from the sitting room as he passed the door. He smiled guiltily back at her.
On the bus, his excitement returned, even to the point of him jiggling in his seat. More than once, the grim-faced old lady in front turned to favour him with a belligerent stare. Olly didn’t even notice. To ask him for interview, he was thinking, staring unseeing through the murky bus windows, the editor must have been impressed with the features ideas he’d sent. Very impressed, given the command that he present himself instantly.
Olly was especially proud of the suggestion that he become a living statue in the shopping centre for the day. Seeing Sam had given him the idea; the experience would make an amusing piece. The fact that he could return to his job afterwards and Sam had to return to his polystyrene plinth the next day was, Olly uncomfortably decided, a bridge he would cross when he came to it.
He wondered what the editor was like. His name was Alastair Cragg, a most suitable one for an editor, Olly felt. It had an indomitable, unyielding, seeker-after-truth sort of ring to it, and was, of course, Scottish – self-evidently a good thing.
The bus ground up the road out of town, past new office buildings with cheap green glass fronts and new hotels that were indistinguishable from the offices. People were going in and out of both, no one looking very enthusiastic, and Olly felt a novel sense of his own enormous good fortune. The job he was going for was no boring grind, but bot
h absorbing and exciting. He had no doubt that he would be good at it – if, that was, he was given the chance; but that looked likely. Why else ask for his immediate presence? It was very gratifying, especially as most other job applications had resulted in no acknowledgement whatsoever.
Yet, for all his optimism, Olly could not help his thoughts drifting to Isabel. They did so several times a day and even more frequently at night. His anger and indignation had been replaced by a nagging, growing worry. Why had she not yet seen through Jasper de Borchy? She was neglecting her work, too. He knew this because David was one of her tutors and he had waited whenever her group was due, duster in hand, heart in mouth, polishing madly on the stairs. But when she failed to turn up not once but twice, a faint inner alarm bell rang. That Isabel – the normal Isabel – would deliberately miss a session was out of the question. She was committed, enthusiastic. Or had been.
He felt shy about asking David about it, and David evidently had problems enough with his teaching career. The beleaguered tutor had been poring, in depressed fashion, over a list in the kitchen when Olly came in one day.
‘Of course,’ he was muttering, ‘that ridiculous Piggott woman’s being sent down. But I had thought better of Isabel.’
‘Isabel?’ Olly had been reaching for the teabags when he heard it.
‘Haven’t seen her for weeks,’ David muttered. Olly would have asked more but the doorbell rang and David went to answer it, as Hero no longer performed even this small service for her parents.
While he was out of the room, Olly paused by the table. The list David had been looking at contained the names and home addresses of his students. There was Isabel’s, in Scotland. Quick as a flash he took out his mobile and keyed the details in.
Now, on the bus, Olly wondered why. Some journalistic instinct, he concluded. Or perhaps a protective urge. At the very least, at some stage, he could send her a postcard.
The industrial estate that the Post was on was of a different vintage from the new glass ones he had passed on the way. It was a sprawl of damp-stained and rotting concrete and seemed largely deserted. The building he was to report to was easily identifiable because it was one of the few with cars outside, and not many at that.
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