The Company of Fellows (33 page)

Clarissa
opened the door in a few seconds. Tommy imagined her sensing the
footsteps outside, putting whatever she was doing neatly aside
wherever she was, and timing her walk to the door so that she
arrived just in time to open it without having to hesitate.
Like a Spanish waiter with a lighter.

“
Tommy, you’re
not well,” she said as a statement of fact rather than a question.
She took his elbow and eased him inside.
Like a Spanish waiter herding tourists to their seats.
“You need a drink. Strictly no caffeine and
strictly no alcohol.” If only it were that simple.

“
Good
afternoon, Clarissa. I think you might be right,” he said, sticking
as close to the truth as possible. “I’ve been better. I’d love some
lime juice if you have any.”

“
As a matter
of fact we do. Listen,” she leaned closer. “Don’t let Hedley get
you carried away. He’ll be excited to see you. He can’t stand the
Chapel crowd, and now he’s leaving he’s like a puppy that’s seen
its owner put his coat on waiting to go walkies. You’re about the
only person I’ve seen him enjoy talking to these days.”

Except
you
, Tommy thought. He could still see
that there was a genuine tenderness there, something that didn’t
need to be spoken. Perhaps even she didn’t see that it was
there.

“
What are you
two up to like a couple of schoolboys with their paws in the tuck
shop?” Hedley called out from the stairs, smiling
broadly.

“
Like a pair
of spies in a John Le Carré novel,” Tommy echoed. Hedley the
consummate politician, he thought. There hadn’t been a twitch on
his face, but there something in his iris for a split second,
reflecting a little less light from the chandelier, that gave him
away.

“
Shall I bring
drinks up to the drawing room?” asked Clarissa.

“
Yes, please,”
Hedley said. “Come on up, Tommy.”

Tommy looked
around the shelves in the drawing room. It was instinctive now. He
was programmed to look for the Bibles, look for the New
International Version. There were none here, he noted, but there
wouldn’t be. This was the public area. There would only be old,
beautifully bound family Bibles.

“
You look
tired, Tommy.”

“
I’m
exhausted.”

“
Not that kind
of tired. You should put your spade down and stop digging for a
bit.”

“
I can’t.”
Tommy took a sip of the lime that Clarissa had placed by his side,
making barely a whisper with her shoes.

“
I know. You
also look like a kid who’s caught his sister kissing the
disreputable neighbour.”

“
Did you ever
wonder what happened to her?” Tommy said.

“
To Carol? No.
I knew I wouldn’t find anything good.” His grave look told Tommy he
knew that he wasn’t going to be left to his ignorance. “I assume
your digging has unearthed something.”

“
Yes.”

“
It’s not good
news is it?”

“
No.”

“
What are you
going to do with it, Tommy? Haydn and Becky think Carol died when
she was born. Carol’s dead. Charles and Stephen are dead. No-one’s
in the dark about the basic facts.”

“
Justice has
been served, eh?” said Tommy. “And there’s no need for people to
see that it has been?”

“
Exactly.”
Hedley poured himself another cup of green tea. He was worried.
Part of it is certainly for me, Tommy thought. I wish I could tell
how much of it is for him. Here we go.

“
What if
justice hasn’t been fully served?”

Hedley put his
tea down. Tommy sensed real surprise.

“
I don’t think
Shaw and Knightley were the only ones involved in Carol’s death,”
Tommy said.

“
Evidently so.
How did you reach that conclusion? Where have you been?”

“
I’ve been to
Spain. Charles had Carol with him out there.”

There was no
reaction.

“
She wasn’t
with him when he left,” Tommy continued. “Someone else took her.
Someone who did something terrible to her.”

“
No.” Hedley’s
fingers were drumming on the arm of his chair. Furrows were opening
and closing in his brow. “No, that can’t be right.”

“
I’m afraid it
is.”

“
How do you
know?”

“
I don’t think
I’m going to say. Just like you made me promise. I don’t have
forensic proof. Not yet”

“
But you
know?”

“
I believe
so.”

That seemed to
be reason enough. Sansom nodded slowly to himself. Tommy watched
the blinkers coming on as though he were in a reverie, turning
ideas around, having a look at them from all sides.

“
Does anyone
else know?” said Sansom eventually. The blinkers had come off and
the tip of a concerned steeple played around his bottom
lip.

“
Not
exactly.”

“
What are you
going to do?”

“
I haven’t
decided yet.”

“
What’s going
to make your mind up?” Sansom asked.

“
You’ve just
worked that out, I think.”

“
Yes.” Sansom
was distracted, his gaze floating around the room without alighting
anywhere. He was trying to hide his thoughts, Tommy figured,
raising his background anxiety like he would if he were attempting
to beat a polygraph. “And if this someone turns out to have killed
Charles, in your best belief, or if someone else killed him because
they knew what he’d done. What then?”

“
I’m afraid I
think that would be for Becky to decide.”

For the first
time Sansom looked as though retirement really was the best thing
for him. He looked old, looked as though Val’s death was coming
back to hit him with its full weight and work was no longer the
sanctuary from it that it had been. He was back in his dream, his
fingers tapping against his teeth, nodding slowly to himself as
though he knew that Tommy was right and wished that he weren’t.
Tommy wished he could tell why, but knew that the door was closed.
For now.

____

51

Tommy was
exhausted as he drove back up Bane’s Avenue. The Oxford air was
choking, even after the dustbowl of Andalucia. Gases hung in the
high pressure over the marshes on which the city stood. Confiding
in Sansom had been a risk, but it was a risk he was sure it had
been worth taking. He was hiding something. Tommy was certain of
that now.

The poison
still bothered him. How had someone got Shaw to drink water laced
with warfarin without spitting it straight out? How did they know
he would even drink water when he had fine wines laid on? And what
was the feast for anyway? Perhaps he’d never know the answer to
that, although it struck him that it wouldn’t be out of character
if it were just a quirk. Did Shaw know the killer was in the house
or had they planted the poison and snuck out? It wasn’t difficult
to creep in, after all. The door was always unlocked. Except that
someone locked it after Tommy left and before Emily arrived. He had
assumed that was Becky. Maybe it wasn’t.

He checked all
three doors before going in. Nothing looked disturbed. No windows
were out of place. He turned the key in the side door. For a moment
he wondered if he should go in SWAT-style, back to the door, cover
the corners, secure the staircase blind turn by blind turn.
Probably a little melodramatic, he thought, and opened the door,
picking up the post from the mat, closing the door behind him, and
flicking through the raft of catalogues and junk mail. Everything
was postmarked, and everything in flimsy see-through
wrappers.

His bed felt
wonderful, but he knew that if he let himself relax into it no
alarm would rouse him before morning, so he picked up a phone and
speed dialled Becky.

“
Hey,
stranger.”

“
Hi,
Becky.”

“
Whatcha been
up to?”

“
Lots of
travelling.”

“
Get
anywhere?”

“
Yeah.”

“
Do you know
who killed Dad yet?”

“
Not yet,” he
said. He could visualise the disappointment on the other end of the
line. There was only one bit of news she wanted to hear. “I made
progress, though,” he added, although he knew that wasn’t enough.
He decided to change the subject “So how was the
funeral?”

“
Low key.” No
invitations had gone out in the Gazette. There had been no notices
on the Faculty website, no circulation of old
colleagues.

“
Any
unexpected faces?”

“
No.”

“
I suppose
Hedley gave the eulogy?”

“
Such as it
was. You know, loyal servant of the college, much missed by family
and friends, we’ll all miss his famous parties, that kind of
stuff.”

“
Sounds better
than Ellison’s shmoozing.”

“
Miles.”

“
Need to talk
about it?”

“
Yeah, but not
today. I’m exhausted. I think I’ll get an early night. Do you want
lunch tomorrow?”

“
Sure. Meet me
here.”

I’m exhausted
too
, he thought as he sat up.
Mustn’t let myself sleep yet, though. Need to get
ready to see Rosie
.

Tommy thought
about working out but decided it probably wouldn’t be safe lifting
hundreds of kilos in his condition. He took a shower, rather than a
bath. Lying down and hot water was a combination too conducive to
sleep. As he towelled himself down he was aware that he was playing
his conversation with Becky over in his head. He knew she’d said
something important but he had no idea what.

He got dressed
slowly, into a black cotton T-shirt and black chinos, old army
issue jackboots and a leather jacket. He made himself a big
cafetiere of Columbian dark roast. He wished he did drugs. A few
lines would sort him out. No, he wished he was 20 again. That was
the surefire way never to get tired. The sudden rush of caffeine on
an empty stomach make him feel queasy but using food to settle him
would send him straight to sleep. Best go for a walk to keep
himself occupied before he picked Rosie up.

He headed
downstairs, one step at a time, at a gentle walk. The thick cream
envelope smiled up at him from the tiles. That’ll kill some time,
he thought, his mind too fuzzy to register fear. Whether it was
tiredness or whether he knew it would be wiped clean, he picked the
envelope up in his fingers and took it upstairs. He laid it on his
desk and slit it open with his abalone shell letter opener. He was
already more awake.

He shook the
envelope. No disfigured Bibles, just a sheet of matching cream
paper. He held it up to the light. The watermark was Conqueror,
passable correspondence paper, but available from any level of
stationery store from Staples upwards. It hardly narrowed things
down. The writing was disguised and in ordinary black felt tip. It
didn’t look as though enough pressure had been applied to leave an
imprint on anything underneath, and the back of the thick paper
revealed that the ink hadn’t soaked through, so there was no point
looking for marks on people’s desks. Tommy guessed the lack of
blotches meant the author was calm when they wrote it, had it all
planned out and didn’t let the pen linger on the sheet; but that
was probably amateur quackery. It was much more likely he’d find
out who it was by good old-fashioned legwork, and much more likely
still that events would overtake it all and he’d find the killer
first and get the letter-writer by default. Or that the killer
would find him.

He stared at
the paper in front of him with its mixture of capitals and lower
case:

LeT hER rEst.
LEt thEm All reST.

He played
around for a while, tried separating out the capitals from the
lower case, but everything seemed to be random. He looked for
anagrams. There were a few words, but nothing that made any
sense.

He couldn’t
work out whether or not it was a threat. He felt sure that the
first letter had been, and this was in the same kind of envelope.
But the tone wasn’t threatening. If anything it was concerned. But
concerned for what? For whom? For Becky and Haydn? For Knightley
and Charles? For Carol? Or for the writer? He wished he could see
the person past the words. He could read people as well as he could
read text. Now he wished he could read text as well as he could
read people.

____

52

It was time to
go at last. His conversation with Becky was still niggling away at
him as he got back into the Renault. He knew that it almost
certainly wasn’t sensible to drive, but he wasn’t going
far.

He parked up
in the Ewert Place car park at the back of Rosie’s flat, near north
Oxford’s only swimming pool, and checked his heart rate as he
walked round the corner. It wasn’t racing but it was definitely
raised. A slight expectant sweat had formed at his temples. That
was good. Then again it was probably the coffee. No, the feathering
on the inside of the wall of his gut was more than
caffeine.