The Company of Fellows (32 page)

“
Adios.”

“
Adios.” They
embraced each other for almost a minute and Angel returned to the
dance.

Tommy headed
back to his hotel room and logged on. He paid over the odds to book
a ticket for the first flight back to England in the morning. He
decided that it was worth trying to get the four or five hours of
sleep that were left for him to take, so he showered quickly and
lay down, ordering a wake-up call for 6. It had certainly been a
fruitful trip, he thought. Probably he’d had his suspicions all
along, but now he couldn’t keep the sickening truth of what had
happened to Carol from reaching into his consciousness any
longer.

Who was worse,
he wondered? There’s a thought experiment for you, Professor Shaw.
The man who gets his ultimate, once in a lifetime pleasure from
performing sex acts on a newborn child, or the man who sells him
the child to do it on? This was about a convenient medium for
pressing the right sensory buttons. A medium that happened to be a
baby. And it was about years of planning, which was what made it
worst of all.

He had to
console himself that now he knew who had done that planning; and he
knew that somehow the smiley he’d drawn in his notes was Shaw’s way
of letting him know. He wondered if that was what someone thought
worth killing for. It was certainly a stronger motive than many
murderers have. The problem was that it could be a motive for
almost anyone who knew what it meant.

What Shaw and
Ellison did was to objectify another human being completely. What
sickened Tommy to the pit of a stomach that had too much beer and
croquettes in it was that that was how he had to treat her too. He
had to think about the situation calmly. He had to ask questions of
it; questions like who does this give a motive to if they found
out? Questions like who did find out? He owed it to the living
daughter to find whoever killed her father, whatever kind of a
father he had been to Carol. And that meant he couldn’t afford to
think about Carol as anything other than a clue. Not yet. He had to
promise himself he would do something to make it up to her later.
If he walked away from this now, or if he cracked up, Becky’s life
would be fucked for sure. If he found her father’s killer it would
be fucked to, but there was a one percent chance she’d rebuild
something in time. The one percent he had to cling to.

He stopped
fighting the sickness, let himself throw up and at least get
something out of himself.
That’s all I can
do now, Carol. What a pathetic mess. I’m so, so sorry.
And within a minute his body had taken enough and
shut down to sleep without the quietest whisper of a
dream.

____

49

Emily’s eyes
looked for something to fix on in the grey blue dark. The absolute
silence of the dark, not even broken by a gentle snore. He doesn’t
even snore, she thought. She couldn’t even get mad at him for that.
She laughed. Something had turned over in the engine of her soul
and she was no longer interested in getting mad at him. She studied
his shape, leached of contours in the grey. That was a good place
to start, she thought. An outline of David drained of shape and
colour, something to fill in and build on. Much of the happiness
was still there in the lines, the shapes. Much, but not all. It was
better than nothing; a start. No, it was better than that. It was a
good solid base camp.

She stroked
his forehead as he slept. He was a deep sleeper. That wouldn’t
disturb him. Sometimes she could get up and play with the books on
the shelves, make toast, bring it back and eat it and he wouldn’t
break the rhythm of his breathing. This was good practice, she
thought, as her hand performed the mechanical action. She knew that
this was affectionate, the kind of intimacy that makes a marriage
work. That she couldn’t feel it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It
just needed bringing back to the surface.

When she woke
she found her head nuzzled into his chest and smiled. It was a good
fit, she thought. That was something good already.

“
Want
pancakes?” she asked as David’s eyes began to twitch.

“
Pancakes on a
Thursday, what’s the occasion?”

“
Today,” she
said, kissing his smooth, slightly boyish chest, “is I want to make
pancakes for my wonderful husband day. Didn’t you see it on the
calendar?”

“
I think I
must have missed it. So, is it just pancakes you want to make for
your husband, or is it pancakes and syrup and Italian coffee?” He
messed her hair and smiled.

“
It’s also
don’t be cheeky to your lovely wife or you’ll be making your own
day.”

“
I’ll settle
for pancakes and a kiss then”

She eased
herself up his body, feeling his skin beneath her, and kissed him,
her eyes open, taking in his eyelids, closed in enjoyment. He looks
comical, almost ridiculous but not in a bad way, she thought. She
wondered how many people notice that about their partner. It was a
nice detail, a detail to hang onto. Something she knew about him
that no-one else did, something else that gave them
closeness.

By the time
she had finished beating the batter in the kitchen she was
exhausted. This was something she had to do, but it was something
that was going to make her very tired, and she would need lots of
breaks. She’d probably more than get her money’s worth from her
Phoenix membership. It would be worth it, though. It would be worth
it. Wouldn’t it?

THURSDAY
SEPTEMBER 13, 2007

____

50

Tommy had
parked in Stansted’s short stay, and he was back in his car almost
as soon as he had touched down. It felt good to be back under the
cover of the Renault.

He could
already feel his hands starting to shake harder as the distance he
had temporarily put between himself and Oxford shrank. There was no
time to worry about that now. It was time to turn the phone on and
see what was waiting. There was no voicemail, just a couple of
texts, one from Rosie, one from Becky. Business first, he thought;
leave himself something to look forward to. That sounded like Shaw
speaking, he told himself, scrolling down to Rosie’s name. So what,
he thought, scrolling back up. Why should he try and second guess
the man in everything he did. He was sick of having his life
dictated. He wanted to get Becky’s message out of the way, so he
would.

Hi. Funeral
sux. Find wot u need & come back soon. Need my safety
valve

B

He wondered if
he’d ever see a smiley again without feeling an acid wrench deep in
his craw.

Fortunately
she’d been OK about him missing the funeral. Well, as OK as she
could make herself be. Which was worse, he wondered? An extra day
of pain at the end of the process because he’d gone to the funeral,
or an extra day’s pain at the funeral and an extra day of time to
begin to recover from the truth? He’d probably made the choice for
him more than for her, which didn’t feel great; then again
depression forces a certain amount of selfishness onto you,
otherwise you simply wouldn’t survive; and then you’d be no use to
anyone.

He took a deep
breath and exhaled Becky out of his system for the moment. Then he
hit Rosie’s name.

Miss u b safe
xxx R

He smiled and
felt the Spanish heat dissipating from inside him. He hoped she
liked the tiles he’d asked Angel to bring and had cradled in his
lap all through the flight. He dialled her shortcut on his
mobile.

“
Hey, you!” It
was great to hear her voice.

“
I’m back
on
terra firma
Britannica
,” Tommy said. “Spain was much
quicker than I thought it would be.”

“
You just
wanted to get back to me.”

“
I have a
feeling you’re right. Want dinner?”

“
Yeah.”

“
In or
out?”

“
That’s a big
fat bastard of a question,” she said, and he could picture her
teeth grinning through her dark crimson lipstick. He thought of
those lips on his and closed his eyes. He had one reason to be very
glad he was nearly home. “If I say
in
I’m boring and needy. If I
say
out
I’m
getting tired of being alone with you.”

“
I was
thinking more, in and you get better food and better company; out
and you get the full three courses and no break for washing up. How
about I come round at 7 and surprise you. Don’t put anything on,
I’ll dress you for what I’ve got planned from scratch.”

The phone went
dead. Tommy had to take small, shallow breaths. He was experiencing
things he hadn’t felt for a long time; since Em, perhaps, perhaps
not even then. Was it more than just a crush, than hormones pent up
too long in the stiff tweeds and pseudo manners of the overpaid and
the overbrained? Was it more than simple lust? On a different level
altogether, he thought.

Tommy knew
exactly what lust was like. It was like a cable cut loose in a
storm, snaking and sparking, and lashing out at anyone who got in
its way. It was a hunger that took you over and made you crave
satisfaction, doing anything and everything to bring relief. It was
a less extreme version of the madness kept hidden behind the dull,
dry, witless door into Ellison’s mind. This was different. No, it
was the same in every way but one. It had an object, only one. This
one and no other. It was the darkest separation anxiety leaked out
of the body along pathways of aching pain. The pain of not being
with her.

He texted
Becky before he set off,
call you this pm.
Back in England. Getting close but things I need to do.
L8er
.

The M40 was in
benign mood and even after stopping several times for long coffees,
Tommy was back in Oxford by lunch. That still only gave him a few
hours to get himself together before he’d promised to collect
Rosie. He needed a shower badly to get rid of the filth it felt as
though he’d picked up in Spain, but he also needed to speak to
Becky. Most of all he needed to go back to St Saviour’s.

Hedley Sansom
was the one person who’d admitted knowing that Carol hadn’t died
the night she was born. Tommy needed to find out exactly how much
more he knew. His enmity for Ellison was tangible. Was that because
Ellison had taken the lazy option in life and staid in his
comfortable tenure? Was it because Ellison was just plain
objectionable? Or was it because Sansom knew what he had done?
Would that have given him a motive to kill Shaw? Tommy hadn’t
thought the Warden had principles that deep but he and Clarissa had
surprised him at lunch by their pleasant intimacy with each other.
Maybe he would surprise him on this as well. Tommy certainly wanted
the opportunity of watching his reaction to what he had to
say.

It was a
dangerous thing to do, he knew. If Sansom believed that Ellison had
killed Carol, who knows what he would do? More importantly, who
knows when he’d do it? Tommy knew he shouldn’t hang Ellison out to
dry until he was absolutely sure what happened. There were so many
reasons, from the fact that if he was wrong his line to the truth
might jam up forever, to the hurt that he would inevitably bring to
Jane and her children. But there was one thought stronger than all
these, one thought that drove him on: he couldn’t hold on much
longer.

He paced
around. He wanted to shake his head and make it work properly. This
was what the anti-depressants had felt like, he remembered. They
took away the despair, but they also took away the elation, drained
the world around him of its beauty, rendered it flat and empty.
This was the same. He couldn’t let himself break down, couldn’t let
himself lose the plot completely and hurt someone he loved. He
turned the phrase over in his head, “someone he loved,” Rosie, the
woman he loved. He thought how it had felt yesterday as he realised
the truth of the words whilst sitting in the Plaza in Jerez, the
whole world drenched in sun, drenched in heightened colour. It had
felt rich and delicate and exquisite and full of the possibility of
every kind of sensation.

Now he was
back in Oxford and doing everything he could to cling onto his
sanity for just long enough, it felt like a statement, a piece of
something he knew to be true like the day of the week, but with
little connection to what made it true. Little, but just enough to
make him want more. He had no choice but to let go of the peaks and
troughs of feelings, to walk a pace or two inland from the cliff’s
edge. If he didn’t it would have only been a matter of days, even
hours, before he cracked. But the price he paid was the turning of
a dimmer switch in his head. It had turned down his
emotions.

It had also
turned down his sharpness. He hoped that Tommy at 60% was still
smarter than anyone else at 100. That was another fact that he knew
in his head was true even if he could feel no evidence in the slow
clicking over of the cogs inside his head.

He smiled at
the porter on the way through Martyr’s Gate and headed around St
Saviour’s’s unfinished cloisters that were beginning to take on the
colours of autumn sun and lose the bleached summer coldness. The
quad felt empty. Tourists were tailing off during the week since
children had returned to school, and the new batch of students had
yet to arrive. Tommy almost thought his knock would echo around the
walls.