The Company of Fellows (18 page)

“
It is when I
have any clients.”

“
And you don’t
at the moment?”

“
Not any new
ones, no. I’m too busy looking for murderers and drinking coffee
and beer with 18 year olds.”

“
Which is why
I called,” she said. “Coffee.” It didn’t appear to be a question.
“How exactly do you make your money, by the way, Tommy? I don’t
think I’ve actually seen you design anything yet.”

“
When I have
clients, they pay very well,” he answered, which was true. Possibly
not by their own standards, the record producers and Formula One
impresarios, but by anyone else’s. Not that he was sure much of the
time exactly why he needed the money he had, what it was that money
gave him, other than guilt that he spent most of his life feeling
worse than the mass of people that had so much less than he did.
“That’s something I wanted to talk to you about as it
happens.”

“
What? You
want me to pay you? Like a PI?”

“
No,” said
Tommy. “I want to know how your dad made his money.” He thought of
the piles of notes in his kitchen drawer, of the vast cellar under
Number 37, of the priceless antiques and the classic cars in which
Shaw had cruised the streets of Oxford. The money had been
bothering him. He needed a clean laptop, a little bit of petrol and
maybe a new cummerbund if he was going to be hanging around St
Saviour’s for very long; possibly some economy flights to wherever
to speak to Shaw’s colleagues, but £100,000? And Shaw must have
realised that Tommy was hardly penniless himself. He had begun to
wonder if the Professor really had intended the cash for him. It
was a bit too late to go to the police now, though.

“
Meet me at
the Kings Arms in half an hour?” said Becky. “I don’t know, by the
way,” she added. “He’d been rich as long as I can
remember.”

“
Your mum
never said anything about it?”

“
No, and for
fuck sake don’t start asking her. See you.” Becky hung
up.

Tommy
wondered. As far as he could see, Haydn Shaw had money and a few
expensive things, but hardly the limitless wealth Shaw would have
needed to fill Number 37. If Charles Shaw had been rich as long as
Becky could remember, then either Haydn was sitting very discreetly
on a fortune, or there was a tiny window after the divorce when
Charles made his money. He would dearly love to know which. It was
a shame Shaw’s lawyer was dead.

*

“
Thanks for
coming last night,” Becky said. She had already fetched them both a
double espresso. So much for keeping the heart rate down. “Mum
appreciated it. The Sansoms are tiresome. Well, you saw
that.”

“
More like a
well-rehearsed stage act than dinner guests,” said Tommy, although
he had a feeling there was more to the Sansoms’ double act than the
desire to keep up appearances.

“
Yeah. God,
imagine being a fly on the wall when they’re on their
own.”

“
I doubt you
spend much time on your own when you’re head of an Oxford college.
So what did you want to see me for?”

“
Do I have to
want to see you for something?” Becky asked. Tommy looked at her
fire engine red hair with the sun flaming behind it. The blonde
roots were showing almost a centimetre. He thought she was slowly
falling into disrepair. Maybe it was a good job. If he didn’t feel
sorry for her then going round in endless circles like this would
have made him told her to get lost long ago. He thought of what
she’d been through and regretted it as soon as he thought
it.

“
Well, it
depends how quickly you want me to get on with finding your
father’s killer,” he said, doing his best to hide any
exasperation.

“
I appreciated
you coming too, you know.”

“
Thank you. I
enjoyed it. Your mother cooks beautifully.”

“
My mother
does everything beautifully,” she said. “as I’m sure you noticed.”
She waited before adding, as if as an afterthought, “Sorry, it’s
none of my business.”

Damn right
it’s not
. It wasn’t the first time she’d
brought the subject up.
Was she trying to
get him to be a surrogate father or something?
he wondered

“
Becky.” Catch
her whilst she’s still feeling guilty, he thought. “You might be
able to help me with something.”

“
I’ll
try.”

“
Your mother
said the Warden’s first wife, Valerie, had died. When she said it,
she seemed upset. Do you know why?”

“
Yes.” For a
moment Tommy could see doors shutting somewhere behind Becky’s
eyes. He couldn’t tell if it was something conscious or unconscious
that had closed them. “Valerie and Hedley wanted to have children,”
she said. “But they couldn’t. From what I can gather it never
threatened their marriage, but it broke Valerie.” Tommy listened
intently, as captivated by the sounds coming out of Becky’s mouth
as the meaning they conveyed. The words were mature, emotionally
rounded, but the voice was completely flat, as though she were
reading an autocue in a foreign language, “When mum was pregnant
with Carol and me, the Sansoms stopped seeing her and dad. When I,
we, were born she had a breakdown. When dad left mum it was the
last straw. She couldn’t bear the thought that mum and dad, who
couldn’t stand the sight of each other, got to have a child when
she and Hedley couldn’t. Mum thinks she blamed her for getting
pregnant; you know, some kind of primordial female jealousy?” Tommy
remembered the flatness in Emily’s eyes when she’d said that she
and David couldn’t have children and thought perhaps he did
know.

“
But maybe,”
she continued, “Val didn’t blame mum, she blamed dad for leaving
her, for being no kind of a father at all. Anyway, she got so low
that Hedley thought about giving up work completely. When she got
out of hospital he made sure that if he couldn’t be, someone else
was with her every second, just in case she tried to hurt herself.
Apparently they used to have cleaners in constantly. At the time he
never told anyone why. People around college thought she was mad
and he had OCD. Anyway, one day the cleaner, a Chinese woman, left
early, before Hedley got back from the library. He got home to find
her with her head in the oven.”

Tommy gripped
her hands between his, as much for his sake as hers. He thought of
the inside of his room at the Warneford, of the comfort and the
friendliness, of the things designed to take your mind of the fact
that you were being held prisoner with no trial and no appeal. “How
did it affect your parents? Did they know at the time that Valerie
blamed one of them?”

“
Dad was long
gone by then, on sabbatical at the Sorbonne. Mum. Well. I haven’t
got a fucking clue. Hedley told her years later, after he came
back. She talks about it, but it’s as though she isn’t there, you
know what I mean?”

Tommy looked
into her eyes and saw nothing. “Yes.”

“
She says
Hedley blames her for his wife’s death, that that’s why he left
Oxford.”

“
She’s wrong
about that.”

“
I know. I
don’t think he told her to make her feel guilty. I think it was
just for information.” Tommy finally saw something behind her eyes
as she spat out the last two words: contempt.

“
Has it ever
affected how she treated you?”

“
Not at all,”
she said, and Tommy had a feeling that it was true.

“
So tell me
about Becky Shaw.” Tommy leaned back and poured his espresso down
his throat, his hair falling chaotically back over his
eyes.

“
Changing the
subject?”

“
One hundred
percent.”

“
Thank God for
that,” Becky grinned. “There’s only so much intense you can take
without cracking up. So what do you want to know?”

“
Everything.
Anything. Hobbies, plans, gap year, boyfriends, girlfriends,
teenage stuff.” When she smiled her cheeks rounded out and her eyes
glinted, and he could believe that she was a normal teenager, far
away from the crusted world of Oxford and all its
secrets.

“
Fuck, Tommy,
you sound like an uncle.”

“
Well, I’m old
enough.”

“
I guess you
are,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of it like that. Well, no
boyfriends at the moment, or girlfriends. You’ve seen the extent of
mum’s radar for that already. Plans? Fuck knows. I am on a gap
year, though. I spent the summer in Eastern Europe.”

“
Which would
explain the hair.”

“
Yeah. I’d
been planning to get a job but I decided to take off. You know,
spoilt rich kid, why work when I cold bum around and drink cheap
beer?”

“
Where did you
go?” Tommy remembered the excitement of following the collapse of
the Soviet Union on the news during his first year in college, when
Becky was still a baby. He loved the old East and the childhood
memories it conjured up, of the news, of TV shows like Threads that
had scared a generation half to death, of James Bond and
bookshelves filled with his father’s old John Le Carré novels. Now
he went there regularly on business, and it was as simple as
hopping on the Eurostar to Paris. There was a whole class of
customer that went mad for communist chic, just as Eastern Europe
was westernising, and sourcing authentic products was getting
harder.

“
Most places,”
she said, leaning forward and uncoupling her hands from his so she
could use them to elaborate. “Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, Bulgaria…”

She jumped as
Wagner started to pound out of Tommy’s pocket.

“
I bet I know
who that is!”

“
I bet you’re
right,” said Tommy, looking at the screen.

____

26

Tommy hadn’t
expected to hear from Emily again. He wondered if the police had
reopened their investigations, but he would have found out before
now if they had. For a moment, as he watched Becky pull away on her
scooter up South Parks Road the possibility flashed through his
mind that he had been set up and hung out to dry all along, but
there had been nothing in Emily’s voice to suggest that she wanted
anything except to have a drink after dinner. Maybe she had changed
so much that he could no longer tell. He didn’t think
so.

It was still
only 12 when he left Curry’s with his new laptop, and he didn’t
feel like going back to the flat. He’d rather keep his mind clear.
He’d kill some time by walking up to the John Radcliffe rather than
getting the bus, but at his slowest that would take three quarters
of an hour. He headed out along the High Street, stopping on
Magdalen Bridge to watch the end of season tourists punting in the
autumn sun. Tuesday’s storms seemed a world away as he watched the
leaves, still green from summer, dripping over the banks of the
Cherwell.

Just over
Magdalen Bridge the roundabout known as the Plain headed out of
town to the east. Travellers who avoided turning right to St
Hilda’s College or next right past the school and college buildings
of the Iffley Road, and the stadium where Roger Bannister broke the
four minute mile, could choose to leave Oxford via the bohemian
chic of the Cowley Road, with its Asian and African-influenced food
shops, or the urban hipness of St Clements with its wine bars and
fish restaurants. The former would take them to the old Cowley
motor works, now regenerated thanks to the success of the new Mini.
The latter was the main artery out towards the M40 and London, via
Headington and most of Oxford’s hospitals, including the John
Radcliffe. And the Warneford, the hospital that specialises in
psychiatric in-patients, Tommy’s home for several weeks in the
middle of his life.

Tommy spent an
hour in Oisi Master on St Clements having a long sushi lunch. Then
he took a detour round Morrell Avenue that took him past the
Warneford. It helped him to stand at the crossroads with Gypsy Road
and see the secure accommodation where he had spent a month in
recovery. It helped that he could look through the anodyne curtains
and feel nothing. He had felt nothing then, either, he reflected,
but in a very different way, and only thanks to large doses of
lithium.

The Women’s
Health Centre was at the top of the vast John Radcliffe complex,
which was built on a steep hill leading up from the flood plain of
Marston. From its place in the high grounds of Manor Park, at the
top of the hospital, a wooden bench afforded Tommy a perfect view
of the main car parks and the entrances to all the buildings. He
called to make sure Dr Knightley hadn’t come in early, and sat down
with his new laptop on his knees. There was still an hour before
Knightley was due to arrive; closer to two, thought Tommy, before
he actually would. It was time to start learning how to
wait.

Tommy imagined
that he was reading a book. He trained his eyes away in the
distance and scanned, taking in huge gobbets of information at a
time. His eyes moved exactly as they would if he were speed-reading
a novel. Eyes, he knew, took in nothing as they actually moved
(unless, that was, they were reading something that was also
moving). In order to take in information they had to be stationary
in relation to their object. Contrary to appearances super readers
actually moved their eyes almost instantaneously between an evenly
spaced series of static points, giving the impression of constant
motion, rather like a biathlete retraining their sights in between
rifle shots. Because their eyes were trained to take in such broad
areas of information, using primary and peripheral vision
simultaneously, sometimes only 2 or 3 of these sighting points were
needed to soak up every detail on a page of text. Tommy was able to
take in the whole JR site, including its car parks, using just
three eye positions. He moved over them again and again and
again.