The Company of Fellows (6 page)

The Jericho
Café on Walton Street was only a few hundred yards from Tommy’s
house. It was a favourite hang-out for bohemian students and north
Oxford’s melange of environmentalists, artists, and thinkers.
People in baggy jumpers and berets spun out coffees whilst they
read scripts, committee papers, and paperback philosophy. The small
deck-floored room at street level slipped down to a large dimly-lit
cellar.

Tommy picked
Becky out at once as he carried two espressi downstairs. She was
sitting with her right foot pulled up onto the chair, fiddling with
the frayed fabric of her jeans. A flop of dyed red hair fell over
her pale skin. The moment he saw her he shivered, just as he had
done standing over John’s dead body. Something was pushing at a
trapdoor in his head but he had no idea what.

Becky stood up
when she saw him coming. She was wearing a white T-shirt pulled
tight over her wiry frame with the slogan Tag Slag splashed across
her chest in pink.

“
Hey, Tommy.”
He put the coffees down in case she was going to shake his hand but
she kept her hands in her pockets and sat back down. Then she took
them out and began playing with her hems again.

“
Hey.”

“
Look, Tommy.
Fuck the lot of this. Someone killed my dad. I know that.” She
paused “And I know you know that, too.” She paused again. “That’s
what you called about, isn’t it? Or did you want to meet up with a
stranger for small talk?”

“
I don’t do
small talk.” Tommy looked around, holding the smell of his
espresso.

“
Nor do I.”
She smiled. Tommy smiled back. “The day before he died,” she said,
“dad said he was going to get in touch with you.”

Tommy said
nothing.

“
He said you’d
go straight to see him.”

Tommy raised
an eyebrow.

“‘
He couldn’t
wait for a rare steak,’ is what he actually said.”

Tommy grinned,
then he checked himself. It felt wrong to be laughing with someone
who’d just lost her father. Maybe it was just her way of
coping.

“
So if he
didn’t get in touch with you, you probably wouldn’t have called me.
And if you went round and had a nice little chat, and it happened
to be mentioned in passing that you might look me up, I’m pretty
sure you’d have got my mobile number from him, not called me at
home where you could just as easily have got hold of my
mother.”

“
Hmm.”

“
So I reckon
that means you went round and he was dead.”

“
And that
would make me a suspect in a murder case.” He supposed he’d known
this was true from the start, but it was only as he said the words
out loud that he really understood them. It was the kind of
dissociation from the reality of risks and consequences that he
knew all too well. Intuition was fine, but he still had to tread
very carefully until he knew more about Becky, and about her
father. Besides, right now his intuition told him it was OK to be
nervous.

Becky laughed.
“Dad knew someone was after him. He thought you were his best
chance of finding them. You might be a suspect to the police, but
not to me.”

Which wasn’t
much of a comfort. “Unfortunately,” said Tommy, “if he was dead
when I went to see him, he didn’t get to tell me any of this. Or
anything about you.”

“
You know me
already, Tommy. You can read people as quickly as you can read
books. Dad told me all about the way your mind works.”

He wondered
exactly how much the Professor had told her about the way his mind
worked; and the times when it hadn’t worked. “Great.”

“
Heh heh. Go
on, Tommy. Tell me what you can see.” She bent her shoulders over
the table and eyeballed him like she was waiting for a Tarot
reading at a fair. “Should I cross your palm with silver?” she
laughed. “Or just buy you a coffee some time?”

“
OK,” said
Tommy. “Here’s my best reading of the text.” He paused. This wasn’t
comfortable. He had always been able to empathise with people. He
couldn’t explain it but he knew it was nothing preternatural. He
guessed it was just noticing body language, the tone of someone’s
voice, how they dressed, what they chose off a menu. Nothing more
than attention to detail really – exactly like a fairground mind
reader’s so-called second sight. It gave him an uncanny ability to
transform a client’s room into the exact realisation of what they’d
always wanted but never imagined. Outside of work, though, he
didn’t see many people. Just a few close friends, hardly the social
whirl of old. Now he was supposed to look into this girl’s eyes and
perform his juju cold. It felt like the light was being shone
inside him. “I can tell that your father loved you,” he
said.

“
I loved my
dad too, you fuck.”

“
Like I said,
I can tell that your father loved you. I can tell you’re bright,
but then with your genetics that’s a no-brainer.” He paused.
“There’s something in you that’s totally alien to society’s norms,
but I don’t think you know what it is.” He stopped again. She
didn’t fill the space. “And I can tell that you’re really pissed
off that your mum and dad split up. But I haven’t worked out which
of them you’re pissed off at. That’s it, not very much.”

“
OK, then.”
Becky sat up straight and put her feet on the floor. She flicked
her hair and steepled her hands. “What do you want to
know?”

“
I want to
know why, if you think your dad was murdered, you’re speaking to me
and not the police.”

“
Well, Tommy,”
she began. “Suppose I’d been somewhere with lots of people when he
died. Or suppose people didn’t know I was angry that he cut my mum
off dead and left her to bring me up on her own straight after my
twin sister died. Then, I suppose, I might have wanted to persuade
the police to look more closely.”

Tommy made a
mental note of the information about the twin sister. “And how
angry were you with him?”

“
These days?
Not much really, but that’s not what people remember, is it? I’ve
seen quite a bit of him recently. Mum doesn’t know. I’d like it to
stay that way,” she added hurriedly. “We were starting to get
close. Fuck it, Tommy, I was just getting him back and now he’s
dead.”

“
So basically
you’re not going to the police because you don’t want your mum to
find out you were seeing your dad? Don’t you think it’s gone beyond
that?”

“
What the fuck
do you know?” She didn’t raise her voice, didn’t break from her
steepled hands. If she had recomposed herself when she carried on
there would have been no way of knowing. “As well as that, of
course, I wouldn’t want to get anyone else in trouble either if
they’d gone in the house after dad was killed and they hadn’t
called the police.” She looked at him. Tommy didn’t flinch. “Well,
whatever,” she shrugged. “Dad said if you couldn’t work it out
no-one could.”

“
Let me have a
think.” Tommy smiled.

“
You don’t
need to think, Tommy. You’ve already decided what you’re going to
do. Are you going to tell me what it is?”

“
Well,” said
Tommy. “How about supper tonight?” He wanted to go home and
catalogue the papers in his head. “I’ll tell you then.”

“
OK,” she
said. “Meet me here at half six.”

Tommy jumped.
Wagner, Siegfried’s funeral march, reverberated through the room.
He looked at the screen on his phone. “It’s my ex-girlfriend,” he
said.

“
Lovely,” said
Becky.

“
Emily Harris.
DCI Emily Harris.”

____

8

“
So, any
thoughts during the night about the delightful Shaw women?” asked
Emily, gulping her coffee between words.

“
Thoughts like
whether one of them was capable of murdering the Professor?” said
Rosie. The truth was she hadn’t had any thoughts on the subject at
all. She’d got home shortly after 11, managed to fetch a few
locusts from the fridge for Chris, her pet chameleon, and within
ten minutes she’d been spark out.

“
It would be
great if you had.” Her boss didn’t sound hopeful, but Rosie caught
something she didn’t often see in Emily’s eye. Maybe it was too
much coffee, but Rosie would have sworn it was something akin to
malevolence. It was something she rarely saw in her devoutly
Christian boss, and she didn’t know if it made Emily seem more
human or whether it scared the bejesus out of her.

“
Sorry,
boss.”

“
Never mind.”
Her face was hopeful, but Emily’s body language was resigned. It
was certainly a coincidence that the man’s lawyer should turn up
dead the same day he did, and the guy’s home life clearly wasn’t
all sweetness and Norman Rockwell, but the house they’d visited
last night didn’t feel like a murder scene. Yes, the banquet for
one was eccentric, staged even, but so was the rest of the house.
There was no sign of forced entry, or an argument; no one else’s
fingerprints, no sign that another person had been in the house for
a long time. No, this reeked of the pointless banality of
suicide.

“
So do we
carry on looking?” asked Rosie.

“
Yes we carry
on looking.” There was steel in Emily’s voice. “The letter Shaw
sent to Tommy West said he was heading to the States. That doesn’t
fit with suicide.”

“
Want me to
check on it?”

“
Later. I
don’t think our American friends would appreciate a call just yet.
I’d like you to go back to his house, look through his study, see
if you can find anything about his plans. I’m going to speak to the
Warden of St Saviour’s to see what he knew about his colleague’s
career progression.”

Emily got up
from her desk and began walking to the coffee machine. She didn’t
make eye contact once. Rosie knew exactly what that meant, and why
Emily was sending her to do the donkey work in the Professor’s
house. It meant she wanted to be alone; and that meant she was
going to go and see her ex, Tommy West. Tommy was the great
unspoken in Emily’s past. What Rosie knew about him from Emily was
that he’d been her first love, and that he’d dumped her. What she’d
inferred from Emily’s all too Christian silence about the details
was that he’d acted like a total shit, and royally screwed her
up.

For all that
she was nearly ten years younger than Emily and a grade her junior,
Emily’s religion and generosity gave her an unworldliness that
brought out the maternal in Rosie; and perhaps the fact that Emily
had never been able to have kids of her own meant that she’d never
lost her own childish vulnerability. For years Rosie’s protective
side had fostered the image of Tommy as some kind of monster, but
the lonely, rather ordinary man she’d met last night didn’t match
the image. Then again, they’d hardly met under the most normal
circumstances.

“
What are you
waiting for,” said Emily sharply, returning with another coffee
that was already half empty. This wasn’t the time to push
things.

“
On my
way.”

“
SOCOs have
long since finished. You’d better pick up some spare keys from the
college porters.”

*

Rosie loved
old Oxford houses that seemed to leak books from the cracks in
their decaying plaster. She’d never been to university. There had
been no need. She’d always known she wanted to be in the police,
like her father and grandfather had been in Hong Kong. But the mix
of books and solitude made her feel totally at home.

Professor
Shaw’s was a typical academic’s study, a cross between a bombsite
and a fly tip.
It might look like it’s a
mess, but I know where everything is, and that’s what
matters
. That’s what people who lived like
this always said. From the number of times she’d watched them
foraging for a vital piece of paper with all the desperation of a
bear emerging from hibernation and finding its larder still buried
under snow, she knew this was a lie.

Somehow she
had a feeling that Professor Shaw would be different. It was true
that everything looked a mess; but the dinner he’d laid out for
himself had been beautifully ordered. She had a feeling he wasn’t
the kind of person to leave work half done. All of which meant
there had to be some kind of order underlying the chaos. Either
that or he was murdered after all.

She stood in
the doorway and tried to get a feel for the way he had used the
room. There were piles of papers on every surface – the coffee
tables, the desk, the sofa, most of the chairs. It was a fair bet
most of them had been there for months and were irrelevant. If she
could figure out which they were she could save herself hours. She
looked at his desk. There was a clearing for his iBook but no more,
and a couple of journals had spilled onto the white case. She made
a note to herself to take the computer with her.

Rosie tried a
technique she often used. She walked out of the door and down the
corridor. She imagined herself tired from a day giving lectures,
seeing students, straining her eyes in the library. She thought of
the iBook, partially covered, and realised that Professor Shaw
didn’t use it to take his daily notes. She tried to feel a folder
under her arm, with its pages of scribblings.