The Company of Fellows (4 page)

“
So what can
you tell me about her?”

“
Well, she’s a
great speaker. Even if most of what she says is total
bollocks.”

Emily laughed.
That was a fair description of a large proportion of the people
they met who worked at the University.

“
From what I
gather,” Rosie continued, “she’s regarded as a pretty high flyer.
Apparently she wrote some groundbreaking book on junkies in
Manchester’s Chinese community when she was in her mid
twenties.”

“
So that would
be just before she had her daughter,” said Emily, scratching the
numbers together from the titbits her team had thrown her about the
Shaws. “Just before the divorce.”

“
Maybe he was
jealous that she turned out to be a bit more than a trophy
wife.”

“
Maybe he was
just another dick who left his wife holding the baby,” said Emily,
irritation evident in her voice. She could feel her blood pressure
creeping up. She didn’t think about children often. As infrequently
as she could at any rate. But when she thought of the jerks who got
to be parents when she and David couldn’t be, it made her furious.
She got out of the car and shut the door a little more firmly than
was really appropriate in the circumstances. Pull yourself
together, she thought. You don’t want to let your feelings colour
your judgment of this woman, or her marriage.

At least a
slight annoyance was better than the sinking, blood-draining,
stomach-cramping sickness she usually felt as she stepped up to the
door of a bereaved relative.

The door
opened and Emily found herself looking at a teenage girl who was
holding a small kitchen knife in one hand and a packet of baby
sweet corn in the other. The girl was smiling at her as though she
hadn’t a care in the world. She had seen that look through
just-opened doors so many times. She couldn’t remember ever seeing
it on the way out.

“
Hi,” said the
girl, standing there without moving. She flicked a piece of her
fringe out of her eye with the tip of her knife, revealing an inch
of black roots under the harsh red dye. She still didn’t seem to
have registered anything. She didn’t even seem as worried as Emily
would have expected if she and Rosie had been Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I wonder who she thinks we are, Emily thought.

“
Becky
Shaw?”

“
Mm,” the girl
nodded, still smiling.

“
I’m Detective
Chief Inspector Emily Harris. This is Detective Sergeant Rosie Lu.
Is your mother in?”

Becky
scrutinised their badges. “Yeah, come in.” She motioned for them to
follow with the hand that was holding the corn. “We’re just making
dinner”.

Perhaps she
knows it’s something bad and her head has shut down in denial,
Emily thought. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the reaction she normally
got from teenagers. Most teenagers who weren’t shouting the odds
about their rights or telling her to “fuck off outa my face” forgot
the bravado and went back to being obedient little kids when they
saw the badge. Then again most of the teenagers she spoke to
weren’t chopping stir fry with their mothers.

The cottage
was laid out very traditionally, at odds with the crisp, modern
décor. The kitchen was down a corridor, behind the reception room.
Emily followed Becky, shoes clanking on the blonde wood; as she
looked at Becky’s rolled-down socks she tried not to think what
kind of mess her heels were making of the floor. On the inside it
was the kind of place that makes you nervous, the kind of house
where everything was both expensive and fragile, and where any mark
would stick out like a boil. The pale spearmint walls were
decorated with occasional pieces of Chinese calligraphy framed in
black. By the door was a round maroon lacquer table with a display
of honesty and bamboo in an asymmetrically curved white
vase.

Dr Haydn Shaw
was in the kitchen. She still hadn’t looked up when Emily first saw
her. She was working away at something in a giant stone pestle and
mortar. Emily waited for a moment, wondering if she should allow a
few more seconds of normality before she delivered the blow that
would scar their lives; wondering when they would next have any
normal time. Then again, the Martha Stewart perfection of it all
was making her nervous. Or maybe there was just a part of her that
couldn’t handle normal. The part that had been attracted by Tommy,
she thought, surprising herself that his name came up so
easily.

“
Dr Shaw?”
said Rosie. Emily snapped back to alertness.

“
Hello.” Haydn
put the pestle and mortar down and rinsed off her hands under a
giant swan-necked tap. If she was apprehensive then Emily couldn’t
sense it.

“
It’s the
police, mum,” said Becky, before they could introduce themselves.
“Detective Chief Inspector Harris and Detective Sergeant
Lu.”

“
Death or
handcuffs?” Haydn said completely evenly. So evenly that Emily
wondered if she was on lithium. Whether they both were, come to
that.

“
Is there
somewhere we can sit down, Dr Shaw?” said Rosie.

“
It must be
death then,” Haydn concluded. “Who is it? Let me guess. It’s
Charles.”

“
Dr Shaw.”
Emily reached out a hand and turned her shoulder to try and get
Haydn to the sitting room. Or somewhere she could sit down. If the
nonchalance is because she’s in shock, she thought, then she’ll
faint and smash her head on one of those thick, expensive granite
worktops any moment.

“
It is
Charles.” Haydn sat down on a barstool. “What happened? Did the
goose liver and truffles finally set up an impassable picket line
in his aorta?”

It began to
dawn on Emily that perhaps this wasn’t shock or denial but absolute
blind indifference. “We think Professor Shaw was
poisoned.”

“
Someone’s
killed Dad?” said Becky.

“
I’m sorry,
Miss Shaw, we think your father killed himself.”

“
Mum?” Becky
looked at her mother. As though she wants to ask permission to be
sorry, thought Emily.

“
It’s OK,”
said Haydn, holding out her hand to her daughter. “It’s OK.” Becky
stood behind her mother, one hand on her shoulder, the other in her
hand. Emily watched her shuffle closer as though for warmth, and
close her eyes as she felt her mother’s clothing against her own.
She wondered when the last time was that the Shaws had had any
contact. She felt irritation building again and had to swallow it
down.

“
What makes
you think he killed himself?” Haydn asked.

“
We found a
note,” said Rosie. “It wasn’t signed, but it seems to be his
writing.”

“
I’m afraid
I’m going to have to ask you some questions, Dr Shaw; Miss
Shaw.”

“
Of course,”
said Haydn.

“
Is that OK
with you, Becky?” Emily asked, pointedly, but by now the smile had
returned to Becky’s face.

“
Of course it
is.”

“
The note was
rather cryptic. It said
There’s nothing
left to wait for
. That was
all.”

Haydn was
already laughing before Emily could ask if it meant anything to
her.

“
I’m sorry?”
Emily said, aware that by now her annoyance was showing in her
voice. Fortunately Rosie was obviously aware too, and took a step
forward as though to indicate that she would take over for the time
being.

“
Well, my
ex-husband certainly wrote that. Dear Charles,” said Haydn,
“devoted his career. No, he devoted his life to
waiting.”

“
I don’t
understand,” said Rosie.

“
My husband,
Sergeant Lu, was a theologian. An ethicist. He was paid to teach
people about right and wrong, if you can imagine anything quite so
absurd. Strictly in the theoretical sense, thank God.”

This isn’t the
first time this invective has been wheeled out, I’ll wager, thought
Emily. It had the whiff of polish about it, and Emily wondered if
Dr Shaw rehearsed it every time she met someone new. Or whether she
just practised it to herself as she lay in bed.

“
His area of
speciality was pleasure,” Haydn continued. “What gives us pleasure?
How can we increase the pleasure something gives us? Should we
allow or deny ourselves pleasure? His big idea, if you can call it
that, was that the greatest pleasure comes from the things we wait
for longest. He essentially spent his whole career trying to
justify his predilections, old wine and seduction, the only two
things he ever cared about.” Haydn stopped for a moment.

Emily wondered
if she had physically shivered, or if she had only felt the ice
jumping in her spine. It was as though Haydn was pausing for
dramatic effect before delivering a punch line.

“
It all boils
down to the Tristan myth,” Haydn continued. “A cliché as old as his
so-called idea.”

“
The what?”
Emily asked, no longer bothered whether or not she let her
irritation show.

“
Tristan and
Isolde, Chief Inspector Harris. It’s a story that goes back a
thousand years. It’s the story of a love that cannot be fulfilled,
a desire that can only be consummated in death.”

“
Wagner wrote
an opera about it,” Rosie chipped in, surprising Emily
again.

“
Indeed,
Detective Sergeant Lu. The point is that you spend your whole life
yearning for someone, build yourself into a frenzy, to the point
where your body and soul are about to burst and then you die
together in an almighty climax that brings your whole life to a
grand apotheosis.” She paused again. “It’s about never getting
round to having a fuck because you’re worried it’ll be a let
down.”

“
Did your
husband have many affairs, Dr Shaw?” Emily asked curtly.
Old wine and seduction.
There had been empty wine glasses by Charles’ hand. Emily
went over the image in her head. There were bottles on the table.
Two bottles. One larger, one smaller. One was French; she wasn’t
sure about the other one, but she remembered that the label had
said it was from the 1970s.
Old
wine
.

“
I was one of
many,” said Haydn. “Some of them were his students; some of them
weren’t. He was pretty indiscriminate, but they were always top of
their year in whatever their subject was, and they were never, for
all his charm and importance, a pushover.”

Old wine and
seduction
. Emily put the words together
with Professor Shaw’s beautiful house and the feast laid out where
she had seen the body, and she began to form a picture of Charles
Shaw the sensualist. No wonder they got divorced, she
thought.

“
And where
were you this afternoon between two and four? I’m sorry, I have to
ask.” She wasn’t sorry at all.

“
We were
here,” said Becky, and Emily felt herself flush. She had allowed
herself to get so wrapped up in Dr Shaw that she had forgotten
about her daughter. She wondered how often that happened when
people met the Shaws, and regretted her tone. “We were getting
antsy, waiting for the rain to stop so we could go for a
run.”

“
Thank you. I
think that’s all for now,” said Emily, wondering how quickly she
could wrap this up. “I really am sorry.” She looked over Haydn’s
shoulder to Becky who smiled back. It was the same smile she had
worn when she answered the door. She’s right on the cusp of
adulthood, Emily thought. A year from now and that coldness will
make you as callous as your mother. A year ago and it would have
made you another rather sad victim. But now, sometimes you’re one,
and sometimes you’re the other, and I’ll bet even you don’t know
which is which.

Emily sat back
down in the car and looked at Rosie. There was no need to say
anything. They both knew what the other was thinking – what the
hell kind of family were the Shaw women?

There was one
thing they both knew did need saying. Emily wondered who would say
it first when Rosie spoke. “Drink?”

____

4

Evening
service at St Saviour’s Chapel was fuller than it had been since
the students went home three months earlier. Members of the Senior
Common Room, who would normally rather smash their port glasses and
chew on the pieces than be seen at anything as irrational as a
religious service, had gathered like pack dogs, ostensibly to pay
their respects to Professor Shaw. In truth they had, of course,
come for the same reason swarms of human beings form in any
workplace: gossip.

They left
disappointed. Reverend Dr Hedley Sansom, the Warden of the College
himself, had spoken. Then again his name had already been on the
rota. There was absolutely nothing for them other than an
announcement of the forthcoming Memorial Service. An invitation for
that would appear in their pigeonholes tomorrow morning
anyway.

Standing
amidst the pillars at the chapel door, Dr Sansom shook the hands of
the congregation one by one, annoying them further by slowing down
their exit and cutting short their drinking time before dinner.
This may well have been his intention. He had no reason to curry
their favour any longer. He had already announced that he would be
retiring at the end of the year although he hadn’t yet found
anywhere he particularly wanted to go. This had irritated the
senior academics immensely, especially the ones who had wanted the
job when he was appointed. Many still hoped their names might be
thrown into the ring at some stage in the future. This meant they
couldn’t afford to be seen to be resentful, which irritated them
even more. Being Warden of St Saviour’s should be the pinnacle of
anyone’s career. Coveted for a lifetime, it was a post usually
prised away from the incumbent’s hooked grip only by retirement (at
as late an age as family pressure and the onset of dementia would
permit) or death. But Sansom was leaving aged 53, with at least 15
good years ahead of him, as though it had been just another step on
the ladder. And not even a step on the way to anything. They would
have hated it, but if he was going to Harvard they could at least
have understood it. But he was retiring so that he could look
around for something else, casual as anything. They seethed behind
their rictus grins.