Death at the Alma Mater (18 page)

NEEDLES AND HAYSTACKS

St. Just let himself
into his flat, where the air was stale from his brief absence, and as he stood, taking in the uncluttered space, he felt himself begin to relax. The hallway of the flat led directly into the sitting area, a cozy spot that encouraged reading by the fireside, or gazing into space, and generally offloading the cares of the day. His sister had seen to all of it, employing a man named Jim and his entourage one year as a surprise birthday present. St. Just had endured a surreal four weeks of being grilled as to his preferences, quizzed about his tastes, and gently interrogated with regard to the colors to which he was drawn. It was as close to being professionally psychoanalyzed as he would ever come, St. Just imagined, and probably far more beneficial.

He flipped the switch that managed the room’s recessed lighting. Deerstalker was still at the neighbors’ being fed and worshipped while St. Just was away, a common arrangement given St. Just’s erratic schedule. He’d have to collect the cat later; everyone, perhaps including Deerstalker, would be well asleep now.

He wondered anew why he kept a pet, although “kept” was never the operative word with cats. Nor was “pet.” Often, days or even weeks would go by without his setting eyes on Deerstalker, only to be met on his return with that cat-patented You again? look, followed by a dismissive turn of that regal little skull. It wasn’t as if Deerstalker were angry with him about these absences. That would imply a personal rather than a business relationship, and the business they were in together required simply that Deerstalker be housed and fed according to his own exacting standards.

Deerstalker was one of the few emissaries from the animal world that did not immediately fall under St. Just’s spell, or at least, pretended not to. Although he would on occasion allow St. Just to pet him, their “together time” was strictly rationed. Apparently lulled to sleep, he would suddenly leap from St. Just’s lap and run from the room as if remembering an urgent engagement, only to reappear when he chose, hours later, without apology or explanation, or even a passing glance.

Shrugging off his jacket, St. Just scanned the headlines in the days-old newspaper on the sofa. Another screed of paranoiac vitriol from the Middle East, and more double-speak from Russia. Another child gone missing—thank God, on someone else’s watch, but weren’t they all on our watch? Another august British institution gone bankrupt. The newspapers lately had been full of photos of stockbrokers shouting across trading room floors, or with eyes cast heavenward, hands clasped on foreheads. For all St. Just knew, these were old photos trotted out for every bounce in the markets, although recent news had been unusually bad.

His eyes retreated from these tales of mayhem and carnage to his artist’s pad, opened to a half-finished pastel drawing of Portia. He couldn’t quite capture the light in her blue eyes; he’d made a mess of it with repeated attempts and would have to start over. Something about being too close to one’s subject, he thought, grinning. He was tied to her like a hawk tethered by mews jesses, a fact he accepted not with resentment but gratitude and not a little fear, for his love for Portia was bittersweet—to him, the risk of loss would always be the flip side of the happiness coin.

He started to tear up his poor effort, but found himself reluctant to actually destroy the page that held her image. He flipped instead to the page where a picture was emerging of the Chief Constable, who was a beautiful woman of strong facial structure, he had to admit, despite her off-puttingly trendy social beliefs. There, he felt he’d caught the light of fervor in her eyes, almost exactly. It was a look not unlike Hermione Jax’s.

He stopped to reheat some soup and bread, and after this small meal, he poured out a brandy to sip while he worked. An hour later he started to pour out a second brandy, then decided that might be a brandy too far. Still wide awake, he picked up his copy of Baudolino from the side table. He was starting to believe the book was cursed. He could never get past chapter three because a case always interrupted him at right about that point, as Baudolino was telling his story to Niketas. By the time St. Just got back to the book, he’d have forgotten some of the salient details; he felt he had to take a good running start at it by beginning again at the first chapter. Maybe if he just kept reading … Dutifully, as clouds scudded by outside his window, he sat in his easy chair and began reading again. At chapter three, his mind began to wander, wishing himself with Portia. And his eyes closed in sleep.

–––

The next day, early, he returned to St. Michael’s College and went up to Portia’s rooms. She was in the second court where they kept the Fellows who chose to live in college (stored them, Portia insisted was a better term). But her set of rooms was large and featured an Oriel window. When away from her, he pictured her sitting there like a princess in a tower.

Ordinarily, she might have stayed with him in his flat the night before, but as she was involved in a murder investigation—again—there was no question of that: She was, in theory and officially, at least, a suspect. The few times he had stayed in her rooms in college had not been a success—she had a single bed, for a start. He had long before, and with unseemly haste, asked her to move in with him, but that trial balloon hadn’t flown.

“We’ll live together when we’re married,” she’d said.

“And when will that be?” he’d asked, suddenly stung with hope.

“I don’t know. When I’ve finished my thesis?”

Seeing the look on his face, she’d quickly and penitently added, “I’m going to be married to you for the rest of my life. Since I plan to live a very, very long time, I want to enjoy, to savor, if you will, my last time as a single woman. I’ve been single for thirty-five years, you know. Hard to give that up. Not that I’m planning any wild adventures. But if I want to stay in bed ’til noon writing my novel, that’s what I’ll do. If I want to go up to London on the spur of the moment, I will do that. I may have a private film festival one weekend, watching old movies like Rebecca, and weeping over How Green Was My Valley, and analyzing old episodes of Inspector Morse. All of that will change once we’re married”—and here she held up a hand to still his protest—“no, it’s changed already, and you know it has. I can’t make a move but that I want you in my plans, as a key part of my plans. Once I’m one half of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur St. Just, it will be ‘worse.’ Wonderful, but worse. This is nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the fact that we met and my world changed overnight. Give me time. Just a little.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t understand—he understood too well, and so reluctantly accepted what she told him. They’d be together soon enough. This day he drank her excellent coffee and, after a brief chat, left her to resume the investigation. Sergeant Fear was waiting for him downstairs.

“We’ve told them to stay clear of their rooms so we can have a proper search,” he informed St. Just. “And the Master’s given us a diagram of who was in what room. Shall we start with the victim’s room?”

But they soon found themselves lost in one of the labyrinthine passages of the college. After ten fruitless minutes, they were forced to ask the way of one of the few students they came upon. She introduced herself as Saffron.

Even though it was edging on High Summer, Saffron wore large, suede, fur-lined boots, suitable for competing in the Iditarod, offset by a pair of shorts so tiny St. Just had to closely husband his eyes, fixing them firmly on her face as he asked her the way back to the rooms being used by the guests. Fear blushed a deep red and stared at the ceiling.

She’d done something strange to her hair, which, fortunately, gave St. Just something to stare at. It was pinned, twisted, and spun into random coils, finally falling down about her neck in pink-and-blue-tipped tendrils that matched her eye shadow. Her lips were painted a matching blue.

She nodded. “They’ll be in the Rupert Brooke.”

“Interesting choice of name. Had he some connection with the college?”

“None whatsoever. A former Master was an admirer: ‘The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick / My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew / I must think hard of something, or be sick … ’ From ‘A Channel Passage.’ Quite the worst subject for a poem one can imagine, is it not? We had it in the sixth form. It was the boys’ favorite.”

She led them through a corridor of Harry-Potterish aspect, past strange and fusty exhibits of rocks and shells and stuffed creatures—likely donated cast-offs of former members—to what had been Lexy’s room during her short stay at the college. The multi-colored young woman named Saffron left them there.

Lexy’s room was much as St. Just had expected, an explosion of frilly, expensive clothing, including no fewer than five pairs of shoes. The room itself featured a large bay window overlooking First Court, with a view across the court to the staircases leading up to the sets of rooms opposite.

“Five pairs of shoes for a weekend visit?” asked Sergeant Fear.

“Either she liked to be prepared for anything or she couldn’t make up her mind.”

The air in the room held the smell of her flowery perfume mixed with the lighter scent of her cosmetics—the face powders and rouges and the various unguents no doubt meant to keep her forever young. Death had beat these elixirs to it: She would forever be thirty-eight; she would forever escape the dreaded Four-Oh birthday.

St. Just turned to face the mystifying display of containers and jars on top of a makeshift dressing-table—it appeared she had commandeered the nighttable for this purpose, propping up a handheld mirror to apply her makeup. The two policemen stood stolidly surveying the wide-ranging tools of artifice. St. Just crossed the room to open the door of the cupboard. It seemed she had only bothered to hang one or two items; the rest spilled in ripples and foams of satin and lace from an expensive set of luggage left open in the middle of the room. A magazine of the glossy gossip-and-fashion variety lay open to an advertisement for shoes—someone, presumably Lexy, had used an eye crayon to circle three styles of interest. On the page opposite the ad was a photo of a young blonde woman, evidently inebriated, being lifted out of the gutter outside a London nightclub. Today’s role model.

“SOCO’s been through all this, of course, but I wanted a look for myself,” St. Just told Fear. “They found traces of drugs in her suitcase, were you aware? Traces, but no drugs. They think prescription, not street, but we’ll know more later. Let’s have a closer look at that door.”

The door into the corridor bore the clear marks of having been jimmied from the outside. The lock still functioned, but barely.

“So she was telling the truth about that, unless for some unfathomable reason she staged the break-in herself,” said St. Just.

He turned and stared about him at the room, willing it to give up its secrets. But it seemed to be no more than what it was: a room temporarily and briefly occupied by a woman whose real life was lived elsewhere. He remarked as much to Sergeant Fear.

“We’ll need someone in London to have a look at her home, talk to her neighbors.”

“On it,” said Sergeant Fear.

Geraldo’s room, next door, was the masculine equivalent to Lexy’s—the yang to her yin: flashy, expensive clothing tossed casually about, as if a manservant would appear any moment to deal with it all. Similar to Lexy’s room, there was no reading material to speak of, not even a men’s fashion magazine. The room itself was smaller, but otherwise identical. Geraldo possessed, if anything, more jars and bottles of unguents than Lexy. Sergeant Fear picked up a jar, read the label, and snorted.