The Company of Fellows (3 page)

Emily looked
at him quizzically. “You’re sure?”

“
He wasn’t
breathing. I mean he was, I could tell, he was dead.”

“
Do you have
any idea why he came to see you?”

“
No. I hadn’t
heard from him since I stopped working at the solicitors’.” That
was the truth. Telling it felt easy.

“
And when was
that?” she asked.

“
1995, when I
started my business.”

“
Where were
you this afternoon before you came back and found Mr
Charteris?”

“
Fellers’,” he
said. That was true as well. He’d stopped at Oxford’s most famous
butcher on the way home and picked up a grouse, for which he’d made
sure to get a receipt. He knew that Emily wouldn’t think there was
anything strange about that. When he was in my first year, Tommy
had been lucky enough to have a kitchen next to his room. He’d
often cooked her dinner with meat from Fellers’. Not that she’d
ever appreciated good food. Her usual reaction to a gourmet dinner
had been to lecture him not to be profligate with his
grant.

A loud cough
from the doorway announced the arrival of a young Chinese woman in
black leather jacket and trousers. She was holding a see-through
evidence bag, dull against the shine of her clothes. Emily beckoned
her over and she whispered something in the DCI’s ear, her long,
glossy black hair framing Emily’s short blonde bob. Emily took the
bag from her sergeant and looked at it intently. She whispered
behind her hand and passed the bag back.

“
Detective
Sergeant Lu,” said the woman, reaching into her jacket pocket with
her free hand and pulling out her warrant card.

“
Tommy West.”
He thought he had seen something in the DS’s eyes but it was too
quick to be sure. Did Emily talk about him to her sergeant? He
didn’t know whether he liked the idea or not.

“
Mr West, it
would appear that the dead man…”

“
John
Charteris,” Emily completed.

“
It would
appear that Mr Charteris was bringing you a letter.”

Tommy already
knew what was in the bag, but he made sure to look
surprised.

Do you have
any idea why a solicitor would hand deliver a letter to you in the
middle of a storm?”

“
No, none at
all. What does it say?”

DS Lu handed
him the see-through evidence bag. Someone had opened the letter
already. Obviously no-one thought this was murder, Tommy surmised.
He blinked to moisten his eyes; then he read the letter again for
show, moving his eyes along the lines with an occasional back-skip
as a normal reader would.

Dear
Thomas,

forgive
Johnny’s intrusion, but one of the perks of being a paying client
of a fat, rich solicitor is that you can choose what they do for
your money. That said, it is on legal matters that I wanted to
contact you. I had been planning to leave you some of my finer
wines in my will. I always thought that you would appreciate them
more than the unworldly intellectual freeloaders I spend most of my
time with these days. Now I am thinking of moving to America – the
call of the partisan campus is almost too much to resist – and I
don’t think 60 year old claret flies well. I’ve cased some up for
you. Please feel free to collect it any time. When you do, now that
you (no offence) are out of my will, I would like you to witness
the new one. Do me a favour and explain this to jovial John. He may
not charge me another flat rate phone fee if you tell him face to
face.

I hope
designing agrees with you. It suits your aesthetic sensibilities
much more than academia.

We’ll catch
up soon.

Ta Ra for
today,

Charles
Shaw

“
Who’s Charles
Shaw?” asked Emily.

Tommy wondered
if she had forgotten everything about her time at college, or
whether she was just trying to read him for a reaction.

“
He’s the
Professor of Ethics. You must remember him. Long grey hair, pony
tail, walks around college like someone from the court of Louis
XVI.”

“
My DPhil
supervisor,” he added. He didn’t know if she’d kept up with his
life after she left college. He’d tried his hardest to keep up with
hers, but he’d lost track, no, he’d lost the patience and the
desire to be constantly reminded of his past mistakes, soon after
she joined CID.

“
Did he talk
to you about his will?” asked DS Lu.

“
No,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have thought he’d have a will. Certainly not when I
knew him. He’s too sure of his invincibility.”

“
When you knew
him?”

“
I haven’t
seen him for 12 years,” Tommy explained. He wondered if he should
say any more; how much did Emily know about that last time he saw
Professor Shaw? At the party. When he’d broken down. How much did
it matter? He decided it was best to be as truthful as possible
without going into details. “When I finished studying.”

“
OK,” said
Emily. Tommy sensed she was about to make her exit, and he hoped
she wouldn’t.

“
It’s good to
see you again, Em”.

“
Yeah. Is this
where you work during the day?” she asked, looking around at the
sample books and box files. “If I need to speak to you
again.”

“
Yep, when I’m
not swanning around the homes of the great and the good.” Tommy
handed her a business card from a pile on the mantle.

“
Thanks.
Goodbye, Tommy.”

“’
Bye. Do you
want me to…”

“
No, I can
find my way out.”

*

The storm was
gone, replaced by the thicker grey of night. The flashing blue of
police lights had given way to the dull toxic orange of the city.
Tommy listened to Wagner because Emily hated it and he needed to be
reminded of her faults. He sat in the black leather Barcelona chair
in his minimalist sitting room, cradling a large glass of
Armagnac.

He had met
Emily at St Saviour’s when he was 17 and she was 18. He was
studying Theology, she Law. They’d both loved art, both loved
books, and films. And they both had deep convictions about God. She
knew that he was her all-powerful, loving Father. He knew there was
none. Wearing the blinkers of teenage love they had put their
differences aside, and their debates became part of the
foreplay.

After a while
Tommy had asked her when she would sleep with him. She had told him
she wouldn’t until they were married. He’d said that he couldn’t
wait any longer. He had made sex the proxy for a whole spectrum of
incompatibilities. He’d known then that this had consigned him to
the moral low ground. He knew now that he was still lying
there.

For the next
term they’d each lived pretty much alone, avoiding friends and
colleagues. Tutors had called both of them in for worried pastoral
chats, but both of them were bright enough that missing a term’s
work made no dent in their first class degrees. After a while Tommy
began to flit between people he knew would say yes. Emily stuck to
the safety of friends she knew would never ask.

They hadn’t
spoken since, but he remembered every detail of her. For half an
hour he cried. Then he thought about her as she was now. He thought
about her at home, with her husband. He thought about them eating
and laughing. He wondered if she’d have got the call when Professor
Shaw was found, and what she would make of the suicide
note.

____

3

“
Wine, D!”
Emily called down the corridor. She hung up her coat and fell into
the soft sky blue sofa.

“
There you
go.” David handed her a big stem of Sauvignon Blanc and sat down
next to her.

Emily pressed
the remote and Eastenders came on.

“
You’ll never
guess who called in a body today?” She sipped her wine.

“
Who?”

“
Tommy.”

“
The
Tommy?”

“
The same.
Looks like he runs some kind of fabric company.”

“
So?” asked
David.

“
So?”

“
So did he do
it? So what was it like to see him? So should I be worried you’re
going to see him again?”

“
No. I didn’t
really notice. And no.”

David put his
arm out and Emily nuzzled into him. She closed her eyes and
breathed in the clean smell of fabric conditioner from his shirt.
She was happy. Life was comfortable and uncomplicated, but never
boring. David was kind and clever and he adored her. He made her
feel safe. That he couldn’t have children was the smallest thing
that she hardly thought about. Most of the time. They had none of
the issues she’d had with Tommy. There was none of the point
proving, no pressuring her into things before she was ready, and
none of the childish melancholy romanticism.

Soon Emily’s
breathing was steady and even, with a gentle sleeping purr. Her
mouth twitched at the corners.

“
You look like
a collie dog chasing rabbits in its sleep,” David whispered. “My
little collie dog.”

Emily smiled
in her sleep.

“
What the…”
she started, rubbing her eyes as she worked out that her mobile was
ringing.

Three minutes
later Emily put the phone down. “OK, forget what I said. Yes, I’m
going to have to see Tommy again. Seeing Tommy was creepy. And how
the fuck do I know if he did it.”

David winced.
He always did when she used that kind of language, which she knew
she did too much when she was working. Maybe she picked it up from
Rosie.

“
The guy Tommy
found dead on his doorstep was a solicitor. He was delivering a
letter from Tommy’s old tutor. Now the tutor’s dead.”

*

The village of
North Hinksey threads its way on one street through a tree-lined
flood plain. It feels like the middle of nowhere but the Oxford
ring road runs alongside only a hundred yards away, and you can
reach it by a quarter mile footpath just down the main road out of
town from Oxford railway station. In the centre is the Fishes pub,
opposite a thatched house where nineteenth century hippy Ruskin put
Oxford’s callow young artists to hard labour for the benefit of
their creative talent. Old English country cottages surround a
carpeted green. One of these belonged to Haydn Shaw, where she
lived with her and Charles’ daughter Becky.

Emily waited
in the car for a moment. Breaking the news of a death was a strange
part of her job. It wasn’t like the poor guys in uniform who
shuffle between the houses of the relatives of car crash victims.
Her job permitted her to be dignified and respectful, but never to
lower her head to allow someone the privacy of that awful initial
moment before years of social conditioning kicked back in. It was
her job to look into their eyes, eyes that were alive with
possibility when they peered around the door; but sometime between
seeing her standing there and hearing the words, the eyes would
wipe blank like one of those kids’ magic writing boards. Emily had
to look because in every case she worked there was someone for whom
the news wasn’t a surprise. She lived in hope that one day she
would catch something – or the lack of something – in their eyes
that would tell her who. Not that she had ever seen anything yet;
but still she made a cold, objective study of the moment of
revelation, and doing so made her sick every time.

What would she
catch this time? There had been a note but that didn’t mean there
wasn’t a killer. And if this was more than a suicide then perhaps
this first contact was the one chance she had to gauge a killer’s
reaction before the shutters went down.

“
Another
academic,” said Emily, preparing herself. “Precocious
family.”

“
She’s an
expert on China,” said Rosie.

“
I’m
impressed.” It had been inevitable from the moment they met that
Rosie would become Emily’s best friend. At 26 Rosie was still to
all intents a Bohemian student. She lived in a rented flat,
plastered the walls with posters, and still got in trouble with the
landlord for using blu-tack. Most nights she ate out of some kind
of plastic container. She was also highly intelligent and extremely
well read; not that she would ever admit to it. The sharpness and
learning gave Emily a point of contact with her. The carefree
lifestyle was something Emily could never imagine. It was the
perfect cocktail of similarity and difference that made their
friendship as well as their working relationship a
success.

“
I went to a
talk she gave at Waterstone’s,” Rosie explained.

Emily raised
an eyebrow.

“
About how
Hong Kong expats were faring in their new British home.” She
smiled. Rosie had come to Britain with her parents in 1997, when
she was 17, just before the handover of power to China. Emily found
it hard to imagine her living anywhere but her grungy flat in
Oxford. She couldn’t remember Rosie ever mentioning her old home
other than in passing.