Death and the Visiting Fellow Read online

  The dog glowered.

  ‘I forgot,’ said Tudor, ‘you’re not an English dog, are you, Basil? A lesser breed without the law.’

  Basil growled.

  Tudor grinned. He was warming to Basil.

  He had picked up a meat pie in the St Petroc’s refectory. It was hot, tasted faintly of Vegemite and had the same sort of comforting effect on him that he guessed the bone had on Basil. He held it in a thick paper napkin and wiped gravy off his chin reflectively. Basil watched with a suspicion of envy. He also guarded his bone with a baleful watchfulness which conveyed the impression that he thought Tudor might nick it from under his damp black nose once he’d finished with the meat pie.

  Why on earth, wondered Tudor yet again, would Ashley have abandoned a dog like Basil halfway up the mountain? It was totally mysterious. In fact, that was beginning to seem the most plausible motive: a desire to create mystery. The whole affair was some sort of sick joke. His old friend had flipped. Some form of male menopausal dementia had overcome him. He was no longer himself. He was playing some sort of game by Kafka out of Lewis Carroll.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said half to Basil and half to himself, ‘there’s going to be another damn-fool e-mail on the machine.’

  He swallowed the last of the meat pie, walked across to his laptop and switched on, watching irritably as the screen flickered the interminable graphics, hieroglyphs and jargon which it apparently had to rehearse before doing anything useful.

  After what seemed like an eternity, he clicked on to his internet server and was unsurprised to find the legend ‘You have 1 Message’ staring at him from the bottom left-hand corner. He did not have to be the last of the great detectives to guess who it came from. Or who it purported to come from. He clicked again and watched and listened as the computer dialled the local access number with a staccato series of bleeps which merged into a fuzz of static accompanied by the single word ‘Connected’.

  ‘If only,’ he muttered. ‘Connected’ was exactly what he wasn’t. He was profoundly and disturbingly disconnected.

  Hi, Tudor, he read, Sony but I almost forgot. I understand you have already embraced the oenological side of college life but I don know if you’ve clocked the mulled wine competition. There’s a pleasant Petrocian tradition of wassail and mince pies with reedy minstrels and carols on Twelfth Night. Not a tradition at all, of course, scarcely even a habit. Just another effort to persuade the natives that they are still umbilically attached to Mother England. Every year the Fellows compete to see who will have the honour of mixing the negus. I’m rather keen to win this year since the prize has been monopolized by Penhaligon and Jazz Trethewey in recent years but it looks as if Pm not going to be able to be actually present.

  Would you stand in for me, old sport? The recipe and all the spices and so on are all in the top right drawer of the writing-desk in my room. Staircase four in the Tower Block. Just mix in proportion to the wine. Any old plonk will do. A box of Cab Sav or Shiraz for preference. Stick with the formula though – it’s an Oxonian conceit, seventeenth century except for the dried wattle which is an Antipodean touch. Definitely no coarse sugar. The little golden balls are an essential refinement. Your new wine buff friends will tell you the rules and all that. It’s a blind tasting and the Principal decides though all the Fellows have what is called an ‘advisory’ vote. Quaint eh?

  ‘Did I say Lewis Carroll?’ said Tudor. ‘Or did I say Kafka?’

  If the rather arch, half-parody of an ancient Oxford don’s writing style was not Ashley himself, it was a very clever imitation. Tudor was inclined to be convinced. In which case he wished the hell he knew what he was playing at. He supposed he had better check Ashley’s desk. There didn’t seem to be any alternative so he told Basil to stay where he was and went off to investigate.

  He located the Tower Block without difficulty for it was literally named and appeared to be the only tower in the college. It was Victorian Gothic, red brick, five storeys high and surmounted by a Big Bennish clock: a sort of colonial campanile. The rooms were identified in Oxbridge style at the base of the staircase with white Roman numerals followed by the name of the inhabitant. There were no Christian names, merely initials followed by surnames, and there was no way of telling the sex of the various students. Ashley’s room or rooms did not have a number. His legend read Penthouse. Prof. A. Carpenter.

  Tudor, fittish, took the stairs two at a time and arrived on the top floor not remotely out of breath. The door was locked and he had no key but although he was a theoretical rather than practical student of crime and criminals, he did have a reasonable grasp of the basic essentials. A deft manoeuvre with his American Express card yielded an almost immediate dividend and he slipped easily into his friend’s lofty suite. He would, he often told himself, have made a perfectly respectable petty thief. It was a comforting thought especially as university life became more and more cut-throat and penny-pinching. He could sometimes almost envisage a time when crime would come to pay more than criminology.

  The drawing-room or study was bookish and austere, minimally furnished and decorated in a manner which said little or nothing about the occupant beyond the fact that he was happy to go along with whoever was responsible for the design and decoration of the St Petroc rooms. Presumably some sort of domestic bursar.

  The books were evidence of wide professional reading: row upon row of green Penguins, studies of crime fiction by the likes of Keating and Symons, bound volumes of the Strand magazine, a first edition of The Moonstone and then, of course, at least double that amount of real life crime: Capote and Burn, the Yorkshire Ripper, the Moors Murderers, Crippen, Bodkin Adams and endless volumes on criminal psychology, forensic dentistry, the pathology of patricide and what looked like a complete set of the journal of the Royal Institute of Criminal Affairs.

  The desk itself was almost disturbingly tidy: a small desk-jet printer, a jarful of writing utensils, a Sellotape-dispenser, a blotter, a pad of typing paper, a note-pad headed ‘Interpol ’88’ and a pencil sharpener with a crank-handle. All straight lines. No muddle. And a gap where the laptop must have been.

  Tudor smiled. Some things never changed.

  The desk was standard college issue, though don-sized, having three drawers a side and a long narrow one in the middle. It was not as big as the Victorian partner’s desk which Tudor affected at Wessex, but it was big enough to accommodate the sort of mess that Ashley never made.

  There were no locks on the drawers and the top right eased out smoothly enough revealing exactly what the e-mail had said it would. The quantities were a heaped teaspoon of nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon and dried wattle per litre. Also, a sliver of tamarind, an orange and six golden balls. The golden balls were roughly the size of marbles and the label on the packet said they came from a Carthusian monastery in the Auvergne. The prime ingredient appeared to be royal jelly which was often thought of simply as honey but which Tudor knew was a substance secreted by the pharyngeal glands of worker bees and fed to all larvae when very young, but later only to those larvae destined to become queens. Hence royal. It was ambrosial stuff. It was unsurprising to find monks making it, not just because it was heavenly food of the gods but because monasteries often seemed to exhibit apiarian tendencies. Tudor had never heard of anyone putting it in mulled wine but if Ashley was trying to win a competition he could see that it would be an unusual secret ingredient. It would also impart the desired sweetness as well as doing so in a politically correct, organic, non-synthetic manner. Very Ashleyish.

  He smiled despite himself and put the spicy ingredients into an empty plastic carrier bag hanging conveniently from a hook on the bedroom door. Then he gazed around hoping vaguely for clues, but there was nothing. It might have been helpful if there were signs of a struggle or a half-eaten sandwich or a glass of whisky waiting to be finished. But there were none of these things, nothing to say whether the room’s owner had planned to go away at all, nothing to suggest whether he intended to return. Like its
owner it was a room which played its cards close to its chest.

  Ashley had always been like that. Tidy in mind and body and with a strong sense of no-go areas. ‘Keep off the grass’. Tudor realized that the present peculiar circumstances were making him think about his old friend more than he had done since they were students together. Maybe more. You didn’t think about friends when you were at university. You took them or left them, liked them or loathed them. But you didn’t subject them to searching analysis. Girls perhaps. Well, no. Not actually. You agonized about what the girl really felt about you but you didn’t give much thought to the girl’s essential character. In shameful retrospect Tudor had to concede that the nearest most of them had got to understanding the female mind was wondering whether or not the girl would go to bed with them. He sensed that this was more or less reciprocated, but still, in the light of what had happened to the sexes in the intervening years, he was embarrassed by the memories. Genuinely so. He was not an unpleasant person, but no one had taught him anything about women. Like most of his generation he had had to find out for himself. And he was still learning.

  The men you took for granted. Provided he stood his round of drinks, didn’t nick your girlfriend, lent you his essays and notes in moments of crisis, and could make up a game of agricultural tennis and squash, or basic bridge or poker, you didn’t ask much of a mucker or mate. It was astonishing, when you came to think about it, how little you knew about men who were regarded by everyone, including yourself, as a best friend.

  Suddenly he was beginning to think this about old Ashley. Good old Ashley. They were best mates, weren’t they? Had been ever since Miranda had brought them together. But when it came down to it what had they really got in common? Once it had been Miranda. Or, more accurately, not Miranda. Other than that it was blood and beer. Metaphorical blood and literal beer. For most of their adult lives he had been at Wessex and Ashley at Tasmania. Opposite ends of the world. Cards at Christmas; a conference once or twice a year; an occasional learned confabulation to do with forensic dentistry or Sherlockian semantics. It was assumed by themselves and by the world at large that there was much more to their relationship than these flimsy ties. There were bonds that were not articulated. The concept, dignified in the Antipodes as mateship, was not something you discussed. It was a given. A state of mind. Perhaps this was because when you did stop to examine its structure it was so often as a house of cards built on sand.

  Thus did Tudor muse, in the tidy set of rooms on staircase four of the old Tower Block, as he clutched his peculiar bag of sugar and spicy tricks. Suddenly he found himself wondering if the man he assumed he knew better than practically anyone in the world was someone he really knew at all. Perhaps he was about to mull wine for a perfect stranger.

  The thought was oddly disturbing. He didn’t like negus or glühwein anyway. He sighed, and shrugged, and let himself out of a room grown strangely chilly.

  Chapter Eleven

  As part of his visitorship – or was it a residency? – Tudor had been assigned classes and pupils. His first was ‘Meaning and Murder – the socio-political structure of rural crime in the Golden Age’ which, translated out of academic language, meant a study of English crime novels by writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers in – more or less – the 1930s.

  Tudor was pretty good at this though the subject bored him. He wasn’t bored by the books themselves, but he was exasperated by the way in which his fellow academics dealt with them. He tended to think of them as detective stories, where his peers and rivals regarded them as texts.

  The mysterious disappearance of his host had taken his mind off such matters but, as those involved in criminal matters constantly averred, there was life after death. It went on. When you dealt, as Tudor did, with the daily snuffing out of human existence, often in unexpected and violent circumstances, you ran the risk of becoming inured to shock, bereavement and tragedy. For most people, he used to tell his students, death comes relatively seldom before, inevitably and inexorably, it comes for us all. For the average person death comes but once a lifetime but for those of us who have chosen this path of study it comes disturbingly often.

  There were twenty-seven bodies in Room 0731 (b) of the Menzies Memorial Teaching Block, all of them more or less alive. They had that disturbing look of students who were hoping to be able to hang on to his every word. At moments such as this the sexist and probably apocryphal words of Dr Leavis crept unbidden to his mind. Confronted with a Cambridge lecture hall containing a mixed audience, Leavis was supposed to have opened his remarks with ‘Good morning, gentlemen. Ladies, have you got that down?’

  Tudor had no such prejudices about the female sex – rather the reverse. But he did have misgivings about modern students. When he was their age he had taken everything his tutors said with salt – usually much more than a pinch. In this attitude the best of his teachers positively encouraged him. He remembered A.J.P. Taylor on cold, dank mornings in the examination schools arguing with absolute conviction that Germany was responsible for the First World War and then maintaining just as fervently the following week that it was all the fault of the British. Questions, questions: that was what his education was about. Nowadays all anyone seemed to want was answers.

  He sighed out loud and the poised pencils of the ‘Meaning and Murder’ class gave a collective Pavlovian twitch much as he imagined Leavis’s ladies might have done.

  ‘I’m Tudor Cornwall,’ he said, ‘and as you may already have guessed I come from England. I’m English.’

  One or two of the class tittered.

  ‘Now I know,’ he continued, ‘that we have come here to study fiction but I want to begin with the notion that there is no such thing as absolute fiction any more than there is such a thing as absolute fact.’

  Oh dear, he thought to himself, as the writing implements in front of him hovered indecisively above blank paper. He was sowing doubt where he was supposed to be bestowing certainty. But what would criminal studies be without doubt, uncertainty, suspicion and dispute? No conviction, to his mind, was ever wholly safe, no verdict indubitably sound.

  ‘For example,’ he said, ‘I was invited here by Professor Carpenter. Now you see him, now you don’t. One minute he is here and the next minute he is not. Is Professor Carpenter fact or fiction? Is he a figment of our imagination? Or is he as much flesh and blood as you and I? If he is not with us, does he therefore cease to exist? Is his reality dependent upon his physical presence? Or does his absence render him non-existent?’

  He paused and smiled. The class was not happy. They were still, several minutes after his first utterance, completely noteless.

  ‘OK,’ he said, sighing inwardly. ‘How does the Golden Age Mystery traditionally begin?’ He scanned the class with little hope. Some looked blankly back. Others stared at the floor. Surprisingly, however, a hand was raised in the back row. He realized with a stab of something not unlike dismay that it belonged to Elizabeth Burney, the alleged college thief. The tarty alleged college thief.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Elizabeth... how do you think the typical Golden Age Mystery begins?’

  ‘With a corpse, Professor.’

  ‘I’m not a professor, I’m a... well, it doesn’t matter what I am. You may call me Tudor. All of you. All of you may call me Tudor. And yes, Elizabeth is right. The convention of the Golden Age Mystery is that either at or very close to the beginning, we are presented with a dead body, a corpse, a cadaver, a stiff, a carcass. There are occasional exceptions to this rule, but for the time being and as this is a first-year class we will accept that, yes, Rule One of the Golden Age Mystery is a dead body on or around the first page. Corpseless crime, at least in the Golden Age, is a postgraduate area of study.’ The students who had been scribbling assiduously as soon as Tudor had confirmed that Rule One was a Corpse, came to an abrupt and apparently perplexed halt.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He passed a sweaty palm over his greying hair. ‘Joke. Just my little joke.
’ He must not do jokes, he reminded himself. Particularly to first-year students. Particularly abroad. Jokes to first-year students always misfired. Or rather his jokes to first-year students always misfired.

  ‘So, yes. Rule One. A body. Habeas corpus. You must have a body. No, don’t write that down. Habeas corpus means something different. Latin. We’ll come to that later. Rule One. A body. A dead body. However, in a book of this kind, the body is not just dead – it is something else. What else is it apart from dead?’

  He looked round the class again. Elizabeth Burney was looking arch and know-all but she didn’t put up her hand. The others were all struck dumb, though it was difficult to tell whether this was from shyness, ignorance, stupidity or boredom. He must stop being so cynical, he thought, but he had a horrible feeling it was a bit of all four. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let us assume that you are one of the great dames of classical crime literature – Dame Agatha Christie perhaps, or Dame Ngaio Marsh, and under no circumstances to be compared with later mistresses of the genre who came to be rewarded with baronies rather than damedoms, such as Baroness James or Baroness Rendell...’ Oh God, he thought to himself. That’s not even a joke, it’s a knowing remark, incomprehensible to Tasmanian freshers. Oh well...

  ‘Let us simply assume,’ he said, sounding desperate, ‘that you are writing one of these books. You begin with this body but because of the nature of the book you are intending to write, the body in question has not just fallen under a bus or succumbed to a heart attack or even a mysterious illness. Has it? Well, has it?’

  A hand was raised. He knew even before he focused on it that it would belong to Elizabeth Burney.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tell us how this body came to be dead.’

  ‘It was murdered,’ she said, a touch coy. ‘Unlawfully killed by a person or persons unknown.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘good. That is it in a nutshell. We are talking here about murder mysteries and the beginnings of such books are remarkably similar. They open with a body which has been killed in mysterious circumstances. That is the nature of the book. That is, if you like, part one of the formula. It is not enough to begin such books with death. The death concerned must be unexplained and, of course, the purpose of the book is, at least in part, to unravel the mystery. This is why these novels came to be known, colloquially, as whodunnits.’