The Company of Fellows (11 page)

“
I thought
you’d want to read it straightaway.”

“
That was very
thoughtful.” That didn’t seem to be a rebuke.

Tommy had
already pushed the T-shirts off his desk. He could feel himself
being sucked back in. He couldn’t help asking. “What did you think
of it?”

There was a
slight pause. “It’s complete,” said Shaw.

“
Thank you.”
Tommy had never heard his supervisor praise anyone’s work. He
wondered for a second if the hesitation he heard might have been
jealousy, but the idea was ridiculous

“
No, Tommy.
Thank you for letting me read it.” The voice was as clear and sharp
as ice. And as cold. Tommy shivered as though the Professor’s words
had fallen down his spine. “Good night.”

“
Good night,”
said Tommy, but the line was already dead.

Tommy went
back to bed, but any possibility of sleep had long gone.

THURSDAY
SEPTEMBER 6, 2007

____

14

Waking in
David’s arms, Emily turned and looked up at him sleeping, lids
closed over his bright blue eyes, short dark hair ruffled over the
creases in his forehead. She let herself be guided by the slow
rhythm of his breathing. Gentle lift and fall; his chest tautened
against her breasts and then relaxed. She pressed herself against
him, her stomach moving with his; pressed her lips against his,
just enough to wake him slightly; hooked her leg around him,
kissing harder. A gentle moan from him as she slid herself on top
of him, pushed him slowly inside her.

The police
was the perfect career for Emily. She had satisfied both her
intellect and her parents by going dutifully through college, but
the thought of the Job had promised her just the right mix of brain
stimulation, social contribution, career progress, and adrenalin.
So far, as her ambition and sharpness had carried her up through
the ranks of the CID, she hadn’t been disappointed.

Emily met
David at St Adlate’s, Oxford’s largest evangelical church, shortly
after she joined the police. They had sat together in the pews;
after a month or so they began to look around for each other. Soon
they were going for coffee after church, then dinner. It wasn’t an
instant romance, and it wasn’t like many of their friends’ church
marriages, with their short crushes, short engagements, and
desperate dash for the bedroom. They were friends for several years
before Emily realized one night that there was a reason why she
always wanted to go to David’s after church, why she always called
him if work was going badly, why she always wanted him to know if
it was going well.

She had never
been more nervous, dodging the knife as she chopped the peppers,
and drinking most of the wine meant for the sauce. How do you tell
someone you’ve known so long that you love them? With Tommy it had
been clear within hours, and there had been no asking. With David
there were so many possibilities: the first kiss, marriage even;
the end of her closest friendship if it went wrong; disappointment,
evenings that were empty again; meeting a whole new group of
people; having to relearn how to hope.

She’d never
found so many things to do in the kitchen. There were garnishes to
prepare, cheeses to grate, dressings to mix, plates to check for
smears. She’d never had so many things to get up for during dinner.
She had glasses to refill, salt and pepper to change, music not
right, lighting too high, too low. She got up to take the pudding
plates out. After coffee there would be nothing left for her to do.
She shouldn’t really have coffee anyway her heart was going so
fast. Her hand was shaking, the fork sliding across the plate.
David’s hand suddenly on top of it, his other hand behind her neck,
pulling her head down and onto the firmness of his lips. It was as
though he had read her mind.

“
Coffee?” she
purred.

“
I love you,
E.”

“
Hmm. I love
you too, D, but if I’m ever going to get to work I need a very big
caffeine hit.”

“
Let me get
it,” said David.

“
I need to
start getting the oxygen to my head.” She smiled and swung out of
bed.

Now she was as
nervous as she had been all those years ago. She paced around the
kitchen, but her mind was made up. She had to go and see Tommy and
get some kind of handle on what her gut feeling was telling her
about him. This time she hoped that David couldn’t read her
mind.

____

15

Tommy woke
with a start to the sound of his phone. Instinctively, he reached
to his pocket, but his hand hit something soft. Becky was still
asleep, her head fixed to his thigh. He slid himself out from
underneath her with his hands. His muscles spasmed as the blood
rushed back.

He pressed
redial. “Em?” He paced up and down the room, shaking the blood back
into his leg.

“
Tommy?” A
sleepy voice came from the chaise longue.

“
Good morning,
Tommy. Company?” said Emily.

“
Mmm. Hey,
dozy, fancy coffee?” asked Becky

“
Yeah,
company.” Tommy rubbed his eyes, still trying to piece together
exactly where he was.

“
Tommy, is
that Becky Shaw I can hear?”

He wasn’t sure
why, but he had a feeling that Becky, just woken up, wasn’t the
best thing for Emily to have heard. “Yeah, that’s Becky.” He
thought he could hear raise her eyebrows down the phone.

“
I didn’t know
you knew her.”

“
I don’t,
didn’t. Not until last night.” It really wasn’t sounding any
better. “I wanted to pick up the wine, and I wanted to give my
respects to Charles’ family, so I found them in the phone book. I
assume that’s OK. Picking up the wine, I mean.”

“
Tommy, I
really don’t care. Actually, that’s why I wanted to see you. Are
you free in half an hour?”

“
I can be,” he
said

“
Good, I’ll
see you in the King’s Arms coffee shop.”

Tommy went
down to the kitchen where Becky was already grinding coffee beans.
The smell floated on top of the staleness, dragging the house back
to life, and Tommy with it.

Charles’
kitchen often surprised guests who knew his reputation as a cook.
Many of them had vast black granite breakfast bars and extractor
hoods more like docking stations at home. Charles’ cooker was
indeed vast, with 8 gas hobs, but only because sometimes he needed
to use all of them; and the two American fridges had no gimmicky
ice-making gadgets – for ice, Charles relied solely on an
old-fashioned pick and block, and the little moulds that he
sometimes commissioned to be hand made. The worktop was a slab of
Veneto Rosso marble with a stack of plastic chopping boards that
were colour-coded for hygiene and function rather than for
impressing visitors. Charles kept the really impressive items in
his kitchen out of sight in the drawers. He had a set of
carbon-steel knives that his adoptive father’s grandfather had used
during a career in the great kitchens of the Habsburg empire; and
his ingredients, culled from every corner of the globe, produced
unimaginable aromas every time he opened a cupboard.

“
Do you want
me to take you home?” Tommy asked.

“
No. I’m going
to clear up a bit. Was that your ex?”

“
It was DCI
Harris, yes.”

“
So just how
ex is she?”

“
Ex enough for
me to be happy to tell you everything she says when I’m
back.”

“
Don’t take
this the wrong way, Tommy,” said Becky. “But I need to spend some
time alone here. Can we leave it for today?”

Tommy wondered
if she was unhappy about Emily because she was his ex, or because
she was a policewoman. He decided not to push it. He had to get on.
He didn’t have time to see Becky through her teenage mood swings.
As soon as he thought it he felt guilty. She had a far more
legitimate reason to be happy than petulance.

“
Of
course.”

“
I’ll meet you
at Elgin Tower tomorrow morning,” she said. “Before the memorial
service.”

“
Yeah. I’ll
see you tomorrow.”

Tommy loaded
the wooden cases into the back seat of the car and strapped them in
with bungees. As he shut the back door he felt arms around him and
turned round. Becky held her head against his chest then reached up
and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks, Tommy” she said, and went
back inside.

Perhaps she
thought she had been too hard on him the same as he felt he’d been
too hard on her. Perhaps there were things she wanted to tell him
but thought she couldn’t, the same as there were things he couldn’t
tell her. He was fairly sure there was no perhaps about that. For
God’s sake, he needed to know everything she could tell him. She
was the one pushing him to find her father’s killer, wasn’t she? He
didn’t know whether to be touched or pissed off at her.

He laid the
cases down on the slate floor in his wine room. It was as far from
the thud of the gym as he could get, with its customised racks and
perfectly calibrated temperature and humidity control. There was
just enough time, he thought, to check the wine. He’d been patient,
but he couldn’t wait any more. He wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe
part of him wanted to see for sure that his hunch had been right.
That Charles really had left Tommy his best wine. That he hadn’t
drunk it. Part of him just wanted to see the bottles face to
face.

He cut through
the police tape that held the lid on. He didn’t know quite what to
expect inside, and wondered if there was any real point in taking
so much care. The bottles he saw laid carefully on their side
confirmed that there was. There they were at the top. The labels
faced upwards on the two bottles that mattered. One was the 1947
Chateau Cheval Blanc. The other was smaller. It had the
unmistakable elongated neck of the bottles used for Tokaji, and
that’s what the label confirmed. The 1864 Tokaji Eszencia was one
of the finest – perhaps only the legendary 1811 Tokaji was greater
– wines ever made.

For centuries,
probably dating back to a remark made by Louis XIV, Tokaji Eszencia
has enjoyed a reputation for having magical healing properties.
Much of the mythology had to do with the way in which the wine was
made. The Tokaji-Hegyelja, a small hill in the vicinity of Mád in
eastern Hungary, enjoys a micro-climate that shrouds it in morning
and evening mist. This climate infects the grapes with
botrytis cinerea,
the
fungus also known as noble rot that shrivels the grape and
concentrates the sugar. This is the same fungus that sweetens the
grapes of many of the world’s greatest sweet wines.

In the rare
years when whole crops fall prey to the infection, vignerons bottle
tiny quantities of Eszencia, made in a way that is unique to this
one tiny hill. They pick the rotten one by one over the days or
even weeks, putting them in huge baskets called puttunyos. They
wait patiently as gravity takes its course inside these containers.
As the grapes settle, the weight of those at the top presses down
on the diseased skins of those below, bursting them so that the
sugary pulp within oozes out. Eventually, before the grapes have
ever seen a press, a few drops of this honey-coloured syrup reach
the bottom of the basket where they trickle out to be sealed away
in oak. The sugar is so concentrated that this liquid ferments to
no more than 2 or 3% alcohol because, and even then only after
years or decades. Finally it is poured into tiny bottles and sold
as Eszencia. Even at this stage its journey is only just beginning.
The few litres that are ever made of this wine improve for decades,
the best for hundreds of years, and are so prized they will pass
between the great cellars of the greatest houses in the world,
outliving dynasties and even empires before they are
drunk.

Tommy touched
the glass, just for a moment, not long enough to warm its contents,
and wondered who had weighed the bottle in their hands before him,
deciding whether it would be ready for state banquets or jubilee
celebrations; reluctantly putting it back and waiting. He knew that
the last person to do so was Charles Shaw. And he knew that Shaw
had been content to put the bottle back. Could he really have done
that, left it there, and opened a bottle of something lesser with
his last ever meal? Of course he couldn’t. He could only have been
murdered.

*

The Kings Arms
was one of the busiest pubs in Oxford. It was situation on one
corner of the crossroads overlooking the Bodleian Library, Hertford
College, and Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre made it one of
the city’s finest viewing points. Tommy saw Emily sitting at one of
the benches outside in her sunglasses, leaning over a capuccino. He
watched her from the steps of the Science Museum. It was good to
have a moment to get used to the sight of her again. For all she
had the same hair, the same smile, she was very different from the
student he had known. He looked at the way she sat in her grey wool
trouser suit with its whetstone-sharp creases. She had always been
confident and ambitious, never gauche like the other students. Now
he got the impression of someone who had reached their journey’s
end as he watched her taking in the fag-end of the summer tourists.
Wherever she had set out to go in her life, she had got there. Now
she was enjoying watching the rest of the world rushing to find its
path whilst she sat sipping coffee.