The Company of Fellows (22 page)

“
Ad fontes,”
he chided himself.
To the
sources!

The electronic
data storage Tommy had culled from Shaw’s things reflected the
length of time the professor had been working on
The Anticipation of Gifts
. As well as a couple of flash drives, several CDs, and a
pile of floppies, there were two or three old 5 inch disks. Tommy
was intrigued by these, but he knew he would probably have to go to
a professional data retriever to find out what was on them, and
getting someone else involved was something he was very keen to
avoid. No, it was Shaw’s voice he had struggled to find.

His
voice
. The flash drives, maybe there were
some audio files, some dictation, possibly. He sat at his desk in
front of the new laptop and plugged in the first stick. It was full
of image files, pictures of religious art to judge by the titles,
which seemed to be listed by church name, city, figure depicted,
and pose.

He put the
second stick into the USB and waited for the menu to come up. There
they were. Sound files.

“
Good evening,
Professor Shaw,” Tommy said to himself. “What have you got to say
for yourself after all this time?” Tommy glanced at the file
titles. There was plenty of Wagner by the look of it. There was
“Tristan”, “the Tristan chord1”, along with 2, 3, 4, and 5, and
what appeared to be snippets of Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of
the Gods. A few were more obviously promising. Tommy tried
first love,
which seemed
from the file size to be little more than a fragment.

Before he
clicked the mouse over the play button, Tommy closed his curtains
and turned out the light. He smoothed his hands over the basalt
smelling stone and filled his nostrils with whatever oils they
could draw out of his skin. Then he lit a single tallow candle and
sat back in his chair. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing;
the only sensation he allowed himself was the dull dark red of the
single flame that he watched from behind his eyelids. He placed
himself back in Shaw’s study, sitting across the room from him, a
copy of his latest chapter on his knees and a pen in his hand ready
to take down what was said.

Without
opening his eyes he clicked the mouse and watched as the sound
transformed itself in front of him into Shaw’s lips, and expanded
into his face and then the whole man sitting across from him, the
playful lilt of his hands mirroring his soft middle tones with
groundnotes of something that was impossible to place.

We all
remember the first time we fall in love. We remember the exact
instant it happened. For most of us it is the only time we will
ever make a choice that we know we will keep as long as we live. Of
course, sadly, few of us ever will keep it. But that is the feeling
of first love. I choose this one. I choose this and only this for
the rest of my life. A choice made once and never reneged
on.

Tommy felt
that he was looking into Shaw’s eyes long after the file stopped,
trying to see behind the half mischief and half charm. Trying to
work out if he had ever heard Charles say the phrase, or whether he
had just, for a moment, fallen into step with him when he met
Clarissa Sansom.
A choice made once and
never reneged on
. What had Clarissa’s
choice been, he wondered? Sansom or the life she lived with him?
And what was Shaw’s first love? His career? Haydn? Becky? Carol? He
opened his eyes when he thought her name and scrolled down to the
file he knew he had to open.

He opened the
curtains again, snuffed the candle and turned on the light. For
thirty minutes he sat at his desk, his thoughts empty save for the
sound of his blood smashing at the artery walls and every
self-defence alarm in his head screaming at him to stop. Finally he
took a breath, shook his head, and clicked the file called
trepanning.

The primary
practical problem is that of resistance, or give, both within the
armature and within the skull itself.

The quality of
the sound was fuzzy. Shaw’s voice was lighter and higher than it
was on the previous recording. This had clearly been transferred
from an analogue recording made some years ago. Tommy nodded dully
to himself. He did not need to go looking for the image of Shaw’s
carefully measured drawing to see its details in perfect clarity in
front of his eyes.

The numerous
cross supports and holding devices should suffice to solve the
mechanical issues. These will also diminish the particular problems
envisaged as arising from the pliability of the early infant skull.
In order to eradicate the problem completely, the trepanning blade
will need to inscribe a circle around a holding pad that is able to
stop the skull from depressing, perhaps using small barbed hooks.
Measurements and tensions in the metal should be such as to produce
around 95% resistance. It is important that the infant remains
conscious throughout the procedure and that a certain fraction of
the motion it generates whilst struggling against the procedure
remains. All of this of course is irrelevant if one overlooks, and
does not adequately cater for, the obvious fact that death will in
all probability be instantaneous upon first usage, so that timing
must be split second perfect.

Crackle. The
sound stopped.

____

32

Tommy could
feel the bile rising from his stomach. He thought he was about to
be sick and reached for the vial of lavender absolute, opening it
and snorting it like an amyl nitrate popper. His nostrils burned
and his head was seared. He wanted to block everything out but he
knew that he mustn’t, not for Becky, and not for his own sanity.
Sooner or later the dark thoughts would have to come. So it was
much better just to lash himself as fast as he could let them
come.

Questions
would come later. With them would come answers, and with the
answers would come harder questions, that were about the future and
not the past. But if he allowed the humid cloying fug of the air
that was heavy with electric and damp to clear, then the answers to
those would come as well. For now the thoughts must come as they
decided, raw and unprocessed, freeform and dark.

In the safe
cold cotton of his lavender filled room they came. Tommy couldn’t
recognise sounds in them, or shapes or smells. They were
pre-sensual, primal foldings on the cortex, disquieting
disturbances that shivered in arcs through the sweat.

He lay
absolutely still. The tremors had gone. His limbs were motionless
and his skin was dry. His heart was slow and the haze in his head
had lifted. He opened his eyes. Sensations came easily now. Sights,
and sounds, smell, and touch, and the sicked-up taste of the pit
they had come from, a place with no lights and no doors, no
corridors left that led in, and none he knew of that led
out.
A city somewhere, somewhere outside
the grey-blue room. Cars and screams and laughing, jokes being told
between friends outside. Something smooth in his hand. A bottle,
nearly empty. A rank smell. Stale drink, not coming from him. Stale
sweat and piss and cum etched into the cracks in the sheets and in
the walls, and the burning sour syrup of spewed-up smack. Feet
pushing against something soft. Skin. Long streaky slicks of skin
that might have been legs, might have been a woman’s legs but were
too thin for him to tell. Skin hanging from sad naked bones, a belt
hanging from her arm just above the needle. Fumbling to put on
clothes that were littered all around the room. Music in the room
next door, Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead. No idea how he got
here, no idea if he would get out. Friends still screaming outside
and he wanted to scream but he couldn’t. Belt twitching, head
turning, eyes looking up from under dyed red hair, mouth opening,
lips trailing crusted spittle, “Tommy.” Running. Running through a
city, rain pounding off the tarmac, invisible in the clubbers and
the lovers, the hooligans and johns, and the police. “Tommy.”
Getting louder.

“
Tommy.” A
woman’s voice directly in his ear.

Something
smooth and cold in his hand.
He looked.
His phone. He checked the screen, “Em?”

“
Shit, Tommy,
you sound awful. Are you OK?”

“
No,” he said,
too frightened by what he’d seen to ask himself whether he should
be letting her see his weakness. “No, I’m anything but OK.
You?”

“
Yeah, me too.
But you know what would make me start to feel better?”

“
A large glass
of something very rough?”

“
That’s the
one.”

“
What time is
it?” Tommy asked.

“
It really
must be bad. It’s 4 in the afternoon, Tommy.”

Tommy blinked.
She was right. It was light. His cotton shone white and clean, the
paint on his ceiling was ocean-clear petrol blue. It was still day
and the city and the screams were receding already. “OK,” he said.
“Where do you want to go?”

“
Parks?”

“
Parks sounds
great. See you by the cricket pavilion in half an hour. Bring a
bottle. I’ll bring a couple.”

____

33

The University
Parks, and the meadows beyond, were a vast tract of green land in
central Oxford straddling the River Cherwell, that headed north to
the gentle flood plains of Godstow and south through Magdalen Deer
Park. One of its biggest attractions was the cricket ground that
nestled in the middle of it. Touring test teams would often begin
their stay England with a match against the Combined Universities
team in the Parks. Tommy remembered coming to watch the West Indies
play one summer, their lower order batsmen using students’ picnic
cloths on the boundary as target practice. By September the
university season had been over for a long time, and the ground was
marked out into tennis courts.

This time
Emily didn’t pretend she hadn’t seen him coming. He could see her
waving a hundred metres or so away with one hand, the other
cradling a wine bottle. He lifted a pair of melamine cups in reply.
She was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and a pair of faded jeans. It
had been well over 10 years since he had seen her dressed
informally. He felt himself breaking into an involuntary
smile.

She held up
the bottle of retsina as he approached. “Started already,” she
grinned. “Sorry.”

“
Plenty more
here,” he said, swinging a duffle bag off his shoulder. “And a,
well, semi respectable way to drink it.”

Emily shared
the remains between his bright magenta melamine cups. “So what’s
shit in your life today?” she asked.

“
Depends who’s
asking.”

“
Me, Tommy,
me’s asking.” Emily emptied her mug and Tommy set the foil cutter
on a new bottle.

“
And who’s
‘me’, Em? Me, an old acquaintance; me, a friend; or me, DCI
Harris.”

“
Fuck, you’re
suspicious.”

“
I didn’t say
I wouldn’t tell, though, did I?” he said. “I just wanted to know
whom I’d be telling.”

Tommy looked
into her eyes. She was nowhere near tipsy, which for the amount
she’d had in what can have been a few minutes at most was quite
impressive. It obviously wasn’t something she’d never done before.
He thought of Knightley and wondered when it would catch up with
her face. Maybe it wouldn’t. He was pleased to see that she still
gelled her hair into little inch-long random blonde
spikes.

“
OK, Tommy. Me
is an old acquaintance who figures you’re probably the only friend
she’s got who really knows what she’s talking about.”

“
I hope I can
help.”

“
I was at the
JR last night,” she said. In a way Tommy was glad that she seemed
to have forgotten she was supposed to be asking him about his day.
He didn’t think it was a good idea to tell her too much for a whole
host of reasons. Not wanting to get emotional in the presence of
his ex, and not wanting to let on what he was up to in front of the
detective who’d decided Shaw’s death was suicide were high on that
list but by no means exhaustive. “A doctor shot himself,” she
continued. “Stephen Knightley, the obstetrician who just happened
to deliver Becky Shaw. I know you went to see him yesterday a few
hours before he died.”

“
Yes, I did.”
OK, he thought. Keep the answers short. Just in case this is part
police work as well as crying on a friend’s shoulder.

“
And I know
you know the Shaws.”

“
Yes I
do.”

“
And you kind
of know Reverend Sansom.”

“
Mm. Is this a
list of suspects?”

“
No. There was
nothing suspicious about Knightley’s death. Let me rephrase that.
To use the cliché, we’re not looking for anyone else in connection
with Knightley’s death.”

Her eyes were
beginning to fuzz over, but Tommy could see enough, “Did he leave a
note?” he asked. He didn’t actually know the answer to this, of
course.

“
Yes.”

“
Well, as
you’re sitting in the Parks with your ex, to whom you probably
feel, how did you put it all those years ago – a mixture of anger
and contempt, instead of with your husband, I’m guessing this is
something you can’t speak about with David. And as Knightley was an
obstetrician shot at his place of work that’s about where the
guesswork ends.”