The women, on the whole far better looking than the men, wore fancy dress too. A maid in fishnet stockings was raucously applying a feather duster to the thinning hair of her accompanying swain. A girl in a red leather bondage outfit, complete with chained cap and studded gloves, was hanging unsmilingly on the arm of a languorous youth in a monocle. A woman in a flapper costume, drawing on a long black cigarette holder, was ignoring the male hands feverishly groping her bugle-beaded breasts. The hands belonged to a porcine type with several shining chins.
The woman with the cigarette holder had her mind on other things. Like a spider snatching its prey, she extended one long-black-gloved arm and grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing tray. She tipped it back in one.
Olly’s fear he would be spotted as an interloper was fading. And, as Alastair had predicted, Anna-Lou had passed muster; a lot of the men here were unusually tall. The crowd, anyway, was in no state to notice anything much. The noise was increasing. Everyone was yelling.
‘Unbelievable,’ Anna-Lou shouted from behind. ‘They sound like a jungle.’
‘More a farmyard,’ Olly returned. His ears were full of people braying like donkeys or whinnying like horses.
Champagne bottles popped like gunfire and intimate items had started flying through the air. A youth before Olly slowly peeled a G-string off his nose before looking carefully at the label. A red lacy garter whirled over Anna-Lou’s head. Bras shot past like double-headed comets. A pair of leopardskin-print cups of a particularly generous size described a graceful trajectory over the crowd.
It was the perfect photo opportunity and, right on cue, Olly could see one of Anna-Lou’s hands reaching back into her hair. She pulled round the camera and raised it to her eye.
‘Hey!’ A pink and yellow bison thrust its unlovely countenance into Anna-Lou’s face. ‘What are you doing?’
Olly’s stomach plunged in terror. He felt sweat – more sweat – break out on his forehead. Were they to be unmasked?
But Anna-Lou remained composed. She removed the camera from her eye and blinked at her aggressor, the picture of innocence. ‘Is only for my parents,’ she said with a heavy Eastern European accent. ‘To show my willage I have vorked as vaiter in important English party vith lords and dukes. You smile for me, yes?’ She maintained her irresistible beam as she said this and, as an amazed Olly looked on, the burly newcomer melted and gurned into the lens.
‘Wow!’ he whispered, after the bison had passed on. ‘That was cool.’
‘But not as cool as this,’ Anna-Lou hissed back. Both of them now turned sideways to avoid a waiter coming towards them with great force behind a trolley. It bore what Olly first thought was a large, angled finger made of ice, but realised as it passed that it was in fact an enormous penis, the area around the member heaped with blackly glistening caviar evidently meant to resemble pubic hair. It was melting in the heat, the trail of water soaking into the parquet showing darkly after its progress. People either side of them started to clap, whoop and roar as it passed; its appearance was, it seemed, a central part of the ritual.
As Anna-Lou’s camera exploded in flashes, the bison in pink and yellow, on the other side of the trolley, gave her the thumbs up.
‘What a picture!’ she gasped, as the penis trundled off.
‘Flash, bang, wallop,’ agreed Olly.
The chandeliers were now turned off and strobing spotlights began to sweep the crowd. The music, which had throbbed faintly before, was now turned up enormously. Fists punched the air. As the chorus approached, the music suddenly disappeared. ‘And it’s Hi, Ho, Silver Linin’,’ roared the crowd into the void.
The eighties wedding disco from hell, Olly thought.
‘Why do people like this always have music like this?’ asked Anna-Lou, raising her camera.
As they passed on, something was barring their way. ‘There’s a man on the floor!’ Anna-Lou exclaimed. ‘People are jumping all over him.’
Someone, Olly saw, was indeed being crushed to a pulp beneath people obeying the strictures of Van Halen.
As his colleague snapped away again, it was left to Olly to alert the dancers that the prone and crumpled form beneath them was a person. ‘Good lord!’ said one of them, looking down in astonishment. ‘It’s Chippy!’
‘More like squashy now,’ Anna-Lou observed as they moved on.
No longer bothering with the niceties of glasses, people were swigging champagne direct from bottles. Not all of it was hitting their mouths. The music had switched to the Sex Pistols and both men and women were jumping up and down, landing uncertainly on a floor slippery and sticky with wine.
Someone cannoned across the floor and, bowling-pin-like, brought down several others. There was a scream to Olly’s side as a hefty woman in stilettos came down on her partner’s foot.
The music changed again. ‘Wo-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh . . .’ began Billy Joel. ‘Uptown Girrrullll . . .’
Isabel struggled to her feet, blinking round in the gloom. The hall seemed to be at the end of the building and no doors led out of it at ground level. A flight of shallow, enormously wide stone stairs led up between fat stone balustrades. Isabel unhesitatingly followed them.
At the top of the stairs a wide landing stretched into shadows punctuated by deep-set doors. They looked like they might lead into bedrooms. Might Jasper be in one of them? Making a stand of some sort? Refusing to take part? Hiding from the horrors downstairs?
It was an encouraging thought; he would be pleased to see her. She pushed the first door open.
The room exposed was huge, shadowy and dominated by a four-poster bed whose enormously tall canopy was draped with dark curtains and topped with black plumes. Dim lamps against the walls near the door illuminated a gloomy painted scene, which seemed to cover the whole room. In it, muscled men on horseback were making off with screaming, naked females. The thought flew through Isabel’s mind that, with such early influences, it was unsurprising that men like Chippy nursed the attitudes they did towards women.
Over the nervous rushing in her ears she could hear nothing but a pounding silence. But now she could hear voices. Coming, it seemed, from behind the curtains of the bed. On the broad, dark-oak floorboards beside it lay a scrunched-up pink jacket, a hastily cast-off blue waistcoat. And a pair of high-heeled shoes.
Isabel shot across the polished floor. In a flash, she was at the bedside and wrenching back the drapes. The padded red interior was lit by a lamp mounted above the pillows. A dark-haired woman and a blond man lay on the counterpane.
Jasper was sprawled on his front over the red bedspread. His head was bent over a small mirror on which rows of white powder were arranged in neat lines. Connecting his elegant nose to the mirror was a small silver straw.
Isabel swayed and clutched at the velvet curtains.
Jasper’s companion now looked up. ‘Hello!’ she said cheerily to Isabel. ‘Want to join in?’
Jasper now lifted his familiar, curly, golden head and stared back at her. It was, she decided afterwards, the absolute lack of shame on his face that angered her more than anything.
She reached for the nearest object, one of the high-heeled shoes on the floor. But in her fury she misfired; it whizzed past its intended target and through the curtains on the bed’s other side. A few second later, there was an explosion of breaking glass.
‘Hurray!’ said the dark-haired girl. ‘I was wondering when the window-smashing was going to start.’
‘Brown Sugar’ had started up now to ecstatic shrieks from the crowd. Olly had seen enough; certainly he had heard enough. He had got the idea. He did not need to see the entire Bullinger Club in their ridiculous uniforms pretending to be Mick Jagger.
‘What now?’ asked Anna-Lou. She had, he knew, got lots of photos of silly people doing silly things. But there was nothing exactly incriminating. A
nd nothing at all of Jasper De Borchy, who had been conspicuous by his absence.
‘It’s all more of the same, really,’ Anna-Lou observed as they reached the wall and looked back at a sea of twisting wrists and shaking heads.
They stood watching, spirits sinking. Must they, Olly thought, return to Alastair with nothing better to show for their efforts than a frozen willy? But even the indomitable Anna-Lou was flagging now, he saw. She looked pale and exhausted and all the amused confidence had gone from her gaze.
The drunken crowd were now shouting along to Meatloaf. It was a sight to depress even the most resolute, which he and Anna-Lou no longer were. The momentum was going, Olly knew. Their drive, their purpose, was evaporating. He had to get it back, fire Anna-Lou up again. Find her something good to photograph. ‘We haven’t tried upstairs yet,’ he pointed out. ‘They might be bonking on the coats.’
‘Or just being sick,’ Anna-Lou groaned as someone nearby vomited copiously on the parquet. With a jaded air, she pulled out her camera to record the event.
She followed him, anyway, as he sidled along the wall to the nearest doorway and out into a large stone hall where a flight of wide stone steps led to the upper level. The bottom of the stairs was flanked by stone posts bearing yet more gargoyles, like the monsters at the gate. Olly felt, briefly, almost sorry for whoever lived here with these hideous objects.
‘Come on,’ he urged Anna-Lou, as he headed up the stairs. Twisting backwards to encourage his colleague, Olly did not see the figure now coming downstairs towards him – rushing, unseeing, right into him.
She was falling, down, into the gloom at the bottom of the stairs. Someone was beneath her, grabbing at her as they rolled over and over, the stair-treads hitting back, knee, elbow.
‘What the hell?’ yelled Olly. The figure had come out of nowhere. It had knocked him completely off his feet. Thankfully, he was only a few steps up; it could have been fatal otherwise. As they lay tangled together on the cold stone at the bottom of the flight, he could see now who his attacker was.
‘Isabel!’ Olly gasped.
‘Olly!’
‘What the hell are you doing . . . ?’ He could hardly speak. The pounding pain of his fall was nothing beside the searing agony of seeing Isabel at a Bullinger event.
He could hear her voice. ‘I’m sorry!’ Isabel was repeating. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
It was, he thought, too little too late. The realisation that she was Jasper De Borchy’s, body and soul, drained the remainder of the fight from him. Olly no longer cared about the Post story, his job or anything else. He lay back on the cold, hard stone and stared into the darkness; it seemed an appropriate metaphor for the future.
‘You’ve got a camera,’ Isabel now gasped at Anna-Lou.
‘So?’ Anna-Lou returned laconically, as if she too had given up.
‘First room on the right,’ Isabel croaked. ‘Jasper De Borchy’s snorting coke.’
Then she turned and rushed out of the hall.
It was, Richard thought, one nightmare after another. First Sara Upward catching fire. Then the whole dinner dissolving into chaos. But worst of all – far, far worse – was the news about Amber Piggott.
And now the news from the Bursar that a personal catastrophe had prevented the Chuck Snodgrasses making the plane trip. It seemed that their usual seats in first class had been unavailable on the plane. ‘I think,’ Richard said to his hysterical colleague, ‘that we have to keep a sense of proportion about all this, don’t you? Someone almost died here tonight.’
The bathroom in question had been sealed off. Police tape stretched over the shattered door. Forensics were in there. They were in Amber’s room too. Police tape was stretched across the entrance to the staircase.
But Amber was not dead. The girl who had discovered her had saved her, although it was likely she did not know it. It was after she had – unaccountably – disappeared that the paramedics, continuing her efforts, had extracted the first choking breaths of life.
The Scottish English student, Richard gathered. The one Diana liked so much. ‘Isabel’s the heroine, not me,’ the other girl insisted. ‘She’s the one who insisted we break the door down.’ But where was this heroine of the hour?
It was drugs, the police said. They were still checking which ones. It looked, at this stage, like a mixture of just about everything imaginable. The source was probably the usual one, the one they were unable to trace but whose tentacles seemed to be spreading further daily throughout the city.
Richard was shocked and upset, but ashamed, most of all. How much was he to blame for all this? As Master of the college, was he not in loco parentis? Yet, throughout his time here, up until now, he had avoided all but the most essential direct involvement with the students. He had never even spoken to Amber Piggott. Had he reneged on his responsibilities?
Was it his fault, now, that the college was overrun with policemen in hi-vis jackets? Could he have done more to stop life’s frightening and unpleasant side invading this protected environment, this ivory – if concrete – tower?
His suspicion that, yes, he could have, coloured everything at the moment. The disaster of the dinner, even the presence of Sara, seemed unimportant by comparison. He tried to compensate for his perceived neglect by being as helpful as possible to the various people now crowding his office. But inside he had a horrible sense of shut stable doors after horses had bolted. Making everything even worse was his growing and unstoppable wish that Diana was here to help him, with her sweet face and wide, concerned eyes. Instead of Sara Oopvard, stumbling and shrieking about with smoking hair.
Sara, in her own mind, at least, was ably commanding the situation, ordering the emergency services left, right and centre. Inside, she was furious. She had been getting on so well at the dinner, charming all the influential donors on Richard’s behalf. But then all hell had broken loose. In quick succession, someone had grabbed her crotch, her hair had been engulfed in flames and cold water had been thrown all over her head.
What was worse, her sore and half-naked scalp remained on display. No late-night salon seemed to exist in the godforsaken provinces. She had tried all the directories without success. The smoking ruins of her hair were plastered to the streaky ruins of her make-up. What must people think?
Old habits died hard all the same and she was determined to turn even this situation to her advantage. As future wife of the Master of the college, she would seize this cast-iron opportunity to show her mettle in an emergency.
‘I don’t know what everyone’s making such a fuss about,’ she opined loudly to no one in particular. ‘People get gunned down in West London all the time.’
The telephone on Richard’s desk rang and Sara swept it commandingly up. ‘Yes?’
It was the security guard at Richard’s laboratory.
‘You can speak to me,’ Sara loftily informed him. Had any of the preoccupied bodies filling Richard’s office had a second to spare, they might now have noticed Sara’s soot-smudged face change as emotion fought with Botox to produce an expression of subdued but still obvious horror.
‘His worms?’ Sara shot a terrified glance at Richard deep in conversation with the detective. ‘Er, I’ll pass it on,’ she stammered. ‘He’s a bit tied up just now. Some hamsters as well, you say?’
‘Your son said he’d left something there when he came before with you, that’s why I let him in,’ the guard stated. ‘Seemed harmless enough.’
‘Milo is harmless,’ Sara insisted.
‘Apart from attacking all these creatures with a razor blade, Madam. He’s vandalised all the experiments, as well. Slices of brain all over the lab, there are, Madam.’
At Sara’s appalled gasp, Richard glanced over to her in concern. Immediately, Sara forced her features into a reassuring smile. ‘Thanks so much for letting me know,’ she tri
lled loudly into the handset, before replacing the receiver and clacking out of the office on her high heels.
Diana was expecting drama at Branston this evening. She was actually expecting to be the cause of it. So to arrive in the staff car park and find it full of emergency vehicles was a shock.
She had passed an ambulance, sirens screaming, a few minutes down the road. Some accident, it seemed.
Fear that Richard was involved froze her heart. Despite the wall he had thrown up, despite the misapprehensions he no doubt harboured about her, despite herself even, the seed of something like love for him had rooted and begun to grow. What on earth was she to do about it? She could almost see the forthcoming confrontation: Sara and Richard together, laughing at her.
Diana parked and got out. She leant for a moment against her battered car, taking deep breaths, gathering strength.
A movement caught her eye. In the glow of the sulphurous car-park security light a figure could be seen: a slightly built woman in high heels and a flimsy dress, a mobile clamped to her ear.
Diana leant forward, astonished. Was she imagining it? But no, if she listened, she could hear the woman talking. Shouting, actually. It was, it really was – Sara Oopvard. But what had happened to her hair?
Sara was bristling with fury as well as shivering with the cold. Milo was not answering his phone. She shoved her mobile into her clutch and folded her arms crossly. What now?
Despair swept over her. She was frozen and largely bald and her shoes were crippling.
And – what was this? Someone was coming. The person she least wanted to see, too. Her great rival, Diana, was crossing the car park towards her.
Gifted and Talented Page 35