Death at the Alma Mater sm-3 Page 3

  He pulled out his personal navigation device, although he knew the way perfectly well. Augie, who had made and conserved his fortune during the dot-com bubble, loved gadgets, and this small new GPS seldom left his side. He punched in the name of the pub he remembered from nearly twenty years ago. Nothing. Maybe it was another victim of the pub closings that were swamping England. More than fifty per week were shutting their doors, he'd read somewhere. The smoking ban and cheap supermarket booze had done for them. It was the real end of the British Empire as far as Augie was concerned.

  Well, there was always The Eagle on Bene't Street. That pub was so famous, so beloved of scientists and World War II buffs, it would be around even if the city fell. Heck, if there were ever any danger of the Eagle's closing he'd buy the place himself.

  He set his steps towards Petty Cury, turning there to walk towards the river. He kept his eyes on the GPS screen, not realizing how this inhibited his ability to see any actual sights. So engrossed in his gadget was he, in fact, that he had collided with Sir James before he knew it.

  "Oh, I say, I'm jolly sorry," said Sir James.

  "Jamie, my boy!" shouted Augie in surprise. Several heads turned to see what the commotion was about. Augie, from the wide open spaces of Texas, where a man was free to yell all he wanted, saw no need to moderate his speech.

  Sir James, hugely affronted at the familiarity (his knighthood was a source of immense pride and had been awarded not before time, in his opinion), smiled somewhat frostily and turned to his wife.

  "You'll remember India, I think," he said, his voice deliberately kept low in the vain hope Augie Cramb would follow suit.

  "Indy!" shouted Augie. He clapped her on the upper arm hard enough to send her flying into traffic; she was just prevented from such a fate by her husband's quick thinking. Grabbing her, Sir James set her to rights. Unlike her husband, India could not be bothered to hide her antipathy: Augie Cramb had always been a buffoon, and while age had not withered him-he had to have put on two stone, and all of it around his middle-custom, she felt sure, would quickly stale his infinite variety.

  "It's my GPS." Augie was explaining now, in excruciating detail, the device he held to within a few inches of James' nose. "It uses satnav-satellite navigation-see? I just love this thing."

  This thang fumed India silently. Oh, my god. To think at one time she had found this prat worth putting on net stockings for.

  "Then you punch in the address, see? And look, it's even got a world travel clock with time zones, a currency converter, a measurement converter, a calculator…" James, to his credit, looked on with every appearance of polite interest. James, who could not insert a battery in the electric toothbrush and had no wish to learn how. That was what servants were for. "I was headed for the Eagle," Augie went on. "The GPS tells me where to turn. You should get one of these things. Tells you where you are."

  "I know where I am," said Lady Bassett.

  "And surely," said James, hesitating, "you remember the Eagle? We all spent many an afternoon there during our wasted youth."

  Augie sighed. "That's not the point. It's that… well you see… I can't miss it this way." Reluctantly, he pocketed the little device. Difficult to explain the thrill of technology to two people probably still wedded to their ABC railway guides. "Why don't you two kids join me for a drink?"

  James and India, fighting to keep the looks of desperate horror off their faces, spoke simultaneously:

  "We're due for drinks with the Master."

  "We're having drinks with the Bursar."

  India gave her husband a subtle stomp on the instep. It would have been bearable if she hadn't been wearing heels.

  "They'll both be there," she finished brightly. "The Master and the Bursar, you see. Dreadfully sorry. Some other time, perhaps." She did not allow her voice to end on an upward inflection that would turn the last sentence into a question. She would have drinks with this ruffian colonist when hell froze over and not before.

  "Sure," said Augie. They thought they were fooling someone but he knew better. The friendlier he tried to be, the more these bluebloods looked down their noses. He didn't get it. Folk high and low were friendly where he came from.

  And it's not as if the three of them didn't go way back together…

  "Sure," he said again. "Catch up with you later." -- "I wonder when it'll be safe to go back. They're everywhere. Including my parents. Could this get any worse?"

  Sebastian Burrows stood at the rear bar of the Eagle. After countless visits he had become oblivious to its history and the golden ambience created by its warm yellow walls. The famed ceiling, its darkened surface scorched with the writing of British and American fighter pilots, went unnoticed and unremarked.

  "Insult to injury, I agree," said Saffron Sellers. She stood behind the bar in jeans, a knee-length T-shirt, and iridescent green eye shadow.

  "You want another?" She indicated the pint at his elbow. "Manager'll never know. He's out somewhere with the missus; they won't be back until business picks up around five."

  "Sure, why not?" Sebastian shoved the glass in her direction. Having a girlfriend who tended bar had its perks. Besides, he wasn't officially in training right now.

  "Have you seen Lexy yet?" he asked Saffron's turning back.

  "Oh, yes. I caught a glimpse," she sighed, expertly pulling his pint. "She's amazing." Saffron had lost the struggle with the knowledge there was something slightly shameful about her avid interest in their distinguished visitor. It was like having a movie idol visit the college. Not that Lexy had ever done anything but be Lexy. She had no discernable talent except for being a lesser member of the minor nobility who happened to be stylish and hugely photogenic. For some people, that was enough. By a little-understood process-little understood even to the reporters and reviewers who followed her every move-Lexy's presence at a restaurant meant years-long success for that restaurant, however marginal may have been the meal she'd eaten there. Her being seen wearing a particular designer's dress spelt triumph for the designer and steady employment for the knock-off designers.

  Sebastian, reading the longing in Saffron's eyes-she was the most transparent of creatures, Saffy-laughed, with a mockery that was not quite gentle in his voice. "She's famous for her hairstyle, isn't she? Why on earth would you care about that?"

  Ruefully, Saffron ran a hand through her own tousled, multi-colored mop-a mop she styled herself, often with a straight razor.

  "You wouldn't understand," she said.

  "Anyway, the parents aren't half in a twist about her being there. What's odd is, I guess I'm sort of related to her. What do you call your stepfather's ex-wife?"

  "I don't think there's a name for it."

  "My mother has a few names for it," said Sebastian. "None of them suitable for printing in a family newspaper. She hates Lexy's being here."

  "It is jolly odd."

  "I wonder if Lexy thinks there's a chance of breaking the pair of them up?"

  Saffron shook her head solemnly: Dunno. What the oldies got up to in the name of amor was beyond her ken.

  Sebastian had his own reasons Lexy, and the other visitors, made him uncomfortable. Just one was the unhappiness Lexy caused his mother, and James-although Sebastian cared less about the happiness of his stepfather. But he liked James, really. For a stepfather, James was all right. Like all old people, James tried too hard to get Sebastian to like him, asking about his studies and his professors and trying to show an interest. But James, had he but known it, didn't have to try quite so hard. He seemed to make his mother happy. That was good enough for Seb.

  Besides, James wasn't stingy. Sebastian had to give him that. All Seb ever had to do was ask, and money would flow into his bank account. If he asked for a fiver, James would hand over a hundred-pound note. It drove Sebastian mad, actually-he didn't want handouts, although sometimes he had no choice. It was bribery, besides. Seb knew that: Here's a hundred, now go away. But like most young people, Sebastian wanted to be ind
ependent, not relying on money from the wrinklies. Money like that always came with strings attached. He was hoping very much at this moment his independence day wouldn't be far off.

  "… It's brilliant," Saffron was saying. "You're a genius, Seb."

  Sebastian hoisted his pint, acknowledging the compliment.

  "Working like a charm so far."

  Saffron's attention was distracted just then by a new customer. She hadn't seen or heard him come in, treading lightly in an expensive pair of trainers. Now he sat patiently at a far corner table, some old guy wearing a weird shirt with pointed pockets and mother-of-pearl buttons-the kind of pockets that snapped shut instead of buttoning in the normal way. A cowboy shirt, like she'd seen on the telly. Howdy! He wore an enormous belt with a buckle the size of a tea saucer. This had to be an American. Jeez, they grew them big over there. He was taller than Seb, who was well over six feet.

  "Shhh," she said to Sebastian.

  She walked over to see what Matt Dillon wanted.

  BLOCKED

  Portia De'Ath was working on her thesis. At least she sat, pen in hand, surrounded by books, notebooks, papers, and other tools of the academic trade. On one side of her desk sat a laptop, its cursor blinking balefully, like the countdown-to-doomsday screen in an old science-fiction movie.

  "Psychopathy," she read aloud portentously from her notebook, "as a predictor of violent criminal recidivism among the various age groups of a prison population has been shown to be… Shown to be correlated with a tendency… A tendency towards and documented history of…"

  She threw her head down on the desk and, after a moment, tilted it slowly to glare at the clock on the wall.

  Oh bugger, bugger, bugger it. I don't even know what I'm saying anymore. Her thesis topic-basically, the reasons old lags became and remained old lags-had all seemed so important to her at one time. Now she cursed the hubris that had made her think she had something to contribute to the academic discussion. With a deadline bearing down, she could barely summon up the interest to finish the thesis, let alone remember why she'd started such a long, painful, and expensive process in the first place.

  What on earth was wrong with her? She had her heart's desire. The basics: food, clothing, shelter. The esteem of students and colleagues-well, most of them. A sense of self, hard won though it had been. The success of her novels, bringing both satisfaction and financial reward. And now, the man with whom she was, without question, going to spend the rest of her life. The gods having their little senses of humor, they'd sent a policeman, no less. She and her policeman had met, in fact, over a murder in Scotland. Hardly a propitious beginning. But very quickly she'd known, without second-guessing the knowledge, without a shred of reflexive self-doubt: This was it.

  She had returned from the mystery conference in Scotland, had a break-off dinner with Gerald, and then she'd waited to hear from Arthur St. Just, the Cambridgeshire DCI who had run off with her heart. And waited. Feeling more like a conceited fool each day, she'd waited.

  Breaking it off with Gerald had been the right thing to do, and inevitable in any case. That was all right. But… where was St. Just? That detective with the burning eyes, as she'd come to think of him. The man whose integrity seemed to surround him like a force field, compelling her to reexamine all her preconceived notions about the police. She found him absurdly attractive, like a matinee idol of the thirties, his face all craggy planes and angles, the kind of face that photographed so well in black and white.

  What now? she had wondered. Was she to be reduced to blockbuster, bodice-ripper prose?

  But she couldn't have been wrong. She knew she had not misread the signs, misheard the words. She'd begun keeping a journal, so unique had it been in her experience to long for the sight of another human being in this way. She felt she'd go mad otherwise, for she wasn't the type of woman to confide in girlfriends. Then she'd torn up the journal, afraid of its discovery.

  And so she'd waited some more, "focusing" on her thesis. And then, a little over three months ago, and one week after her return (it had seemed no less than two years), a handwritten letter had arrived on embossed notepaper: Would she do him the honor of having dinner with him at St. Germaine's? She should have known. Arthur St. Just was an old-fashioned man. No phone calls for such in important occasion: no less than a formal invitation would do. He'd arrive on time with flowers, wearing his best suit and aftershave, driving a newly washed and hoovered car.

  She'd played hard to get for all of three minutes, then she'd dialed the number he'd provided.

  After that, with very little fuss or soul searching, Portia had settled into their relationship, although settled was the wrong word. Rather, she quickly had reached a near-constant state of ease and contentment. There was no drama between them, and no cause for it. She knew he would appear when he said he would. There was no angst. He loved her with a clear, unwavering, forthright, and simple intent, which she soon reciprocated, likewise without reservation.

  Smiling at the thought, she pulled the manuscript of her latest DCI Nankervis novel from the right bottom drawer of her desk. Her mystery writing, she knew, served as an escape from the opaque, brocaded prose of her dissertation, and from anything else that might be troubling her. Time and again her mind returned to her inspector, working his way through a complex investigation in the jagged peninsula of England known as Cornwall. It was all far more engrossing-and more solvable-than the high rate of recidivism. She was stymied, she knew, by her belief that she had to present an elegant solution to the problem in some kind of thundering, resounding conclusion-some humane and all-encompassing answer. That there was no real solution to all the ills of society she had become more and more convinced, the more she researched the mind-numbingly tedious and long catalog of essentially fruitless research, which always seemed to conclude with the sentence: "More research is needed." Ah, well, it kept the academics employed. "The poor you will always have with you," Jesus had said, and Portia wondered if he weren't quite correct about that. He may as well have added, "And crime, too."

  She reread her pages of the day before, and then began writing a scene where her detective was interviewing a suspect in a restaurant in Cornwall. He was supposed to have conducted this interview in the suspect's home, but as Portia could think of no reason the suspect might offer to cook the detective a meal on the spot, or any reason he would trust the suspect enough to eat it, she felt a restaurant scene was called for. She had DCI Nankervis order roasted scallops with a vermouth sauce, slow-roasted lamb flavored with rosemary, fried zucchini, and scallion-potato puree. For the pudding course, a Tarte Tatin.

  Not surprisingly, when she put down her pen and paper an hour later it was because hunger had derailed her train of thought. Dinner tonight in college might be better than the norm, she thought, given the arrival of the weekend guests and the Master's desire to impress; but also given the usual low standard, that might not be saying much. The vegetables would still be boiled to a consistency suitable for a toothless baby, and for pudding there would be something involving tinned fruit, as if summer had never arrived.

  Portia's natural gourmet tendencies had been brought into full play by the poor choices available in college. She had a tiny kitchen in her college flat, from which she had managed to coax some miraculous results, the most memorable to date being Peking Duck, which duck had hung in her window to dry forthree days one winter as part of the process of producing the famously crisp skin. (She had daily expected a knock on the door asking her to remove the duck but no knock had arrived.) She kept a wine rack in her front hall closet stocked with the best vintages she could afford; she had once macerated fruit for fruitcake under a chair in her sitting room. Her supervision students had kept remarking on the wonderful smell, not knowing it was coming from underneath them.

  Perhaps a quiet Indian takeaway in her room would be the better option than dining in Hall, she thought now. Tomorrow night, the big gala dinner to which the Master had invited her-nay, c
ommanded her to appear-might be marginally better, but the college "chef," as she was now called, would still be in charge, so how much hope was there, really, for a lean portion of meat not disguised by a vile Mystery Sauce?

  Now thoroughly famished, thesis completely forgotten, Portia wandered off down the corridor to retrieve a power drink she'd left in the common refrigerator, praying it would still be there. They had a food thief in college-several, probably, so she knew the chances were against her. But-she checked her watch-the college bar would be open now. She could buy something to bring back to her room, enough to carry her over until she could get to the shops.

  She was in the area of the college designated for use by unmarried Fellows-a relatively modern add-on, circa 1780, connected by a long corridor to the main building. The circa 1980s, Gulag-style dormitories for the undergraduates, of no architectural distinction whatsoever, were tucked firmly behind a screen of trees, well away from the main building. The youngest students, who called it Cell Block Nineteen, were roundly encouraged to stay there, where they reigned in squalor, according to the Bursar, like wild monkeys surrounding the main compound. But their Junior Combination Room was in the main building.