by Dan Holloway
Typical of grand town houses, the dining room was one of the two large, high-ceilinged spaces at the front of the house saved for formal entertaining. A walnut veneer table, running almost its whole length, dominated the room. Against the wall a linen drape converted a mahogany chest into a serving board. On it was a vast silver platter. From the uncongealed gloss on the glistening meat, the Professor’s body must still have been as warm as the food.
____
2
Tommy put his phone down and waited for the ambulance. At last he had the time to go over the Professor’s letter that he’d filed away in his head earlier. Like many speed readers, his recall was almost perfect.
Dear Tommy,
How is poor portly John? He really should take more care of himself. These things come back at one in old age, if one makes it that far. Still, you will find, I am sure, that he is able to provide all you need to help you.
You were never going to make an academic, you know. You shouldn’t give it another thought. You should enjoy the time your well-paid dabblings give you and let go of the guilt I’ll wager still holds you back. I wouldn’t ask you to put the time to good use, but I would hope that you put it to use of some kind. I believe that I have found a way to help you do that.
Tommy, someone is trying to kill me, and I want you to find out who it is. I think the key to the answer is in this box.
I want to ask you one more thing. Take care of my daughter. She is my whole life’s work, the only work of which I am proud. Finally, let me offer you a word of advice that you won’t listen to now. Keep it filed somewhere inside that recalcitrant mind of yours. Do not become one of life’s meanderers. It is not a terrible thing to snake through life accreting pleasures, but you are still young enough to learn how much greater those pleasures are for which you have had to wait. My advice is this. Learn the value of projects.
Regards as ever,
Charles Shaw
There was no time to go through the letter in his head; not consciously, anyway. Looking out of the windows he could already see the pulses of cobalt from the emergency vehicles playing against the storm clouds. There was a police car as well as an ambulance.
He shook his head. There was no time to look, but he was sure he’d tucked the R-Kive box safely inside the wardrobe. The bell chimed. Tommy went down the main stairs to the front door. He never used it on a day to day basis, only when he was showing clients around the rest of the house that he used as showrooms. The white carpet on the stairs was immaculate. What was he doing worrying about dirt at a time like this? he chided himself. Just how caught up in his own tiny world had he become?
He opened the door and looked at the warrant card. “Hello, Off…” He looked up at the DCI’s face. His precious white carpet sucked the blood out through his feet. “Em?” he said. He was looking straight at Emily Harris, the first woman he had ever loved; no, the only woman he had ever loved.
“Hello, Tommy.” Laughter lines opened up around her eyes. Tommy guessed she must have known where she was coming, and enjoyed the element of surprise she had on him.
“How are you?” he said, at a loss for anything better
“Happy. I’m happy.” Emily smiled, politely this time, not spontaneously. She hadn’t changed at all. Short for a police officer, she had the same cropped blonde hair she’d had as a student. Tommy wondered if she still gelled it into spikes when she wasn’t on duty. He looked down and saw the wedding ring just before she put her hand in her pocket.
“Come in.” He took her up to the top floor and into the sitting room. He pointed her to one of the Barcelona chairs but she stayed standing.
“Tommy, was the gentleman dead when you found him?”
“Charteris,” he said, stalling his answer. “His name’s John Charteris. He was a solicitor. I used to do some reception work for him. Yes, he was dead.”
Emily looked at him quizzically. “You’re sure?”
“He wasn’t breathing. I mean he was, I could tell, he was dead.”
“Do you have any idea why he came to see you?”
“No. I hadn’t heard from him since I stopped working at the solicitors’.” That was the truth. Telling it felt easy.
“And when was that?” she asked.
“1995, when I started my business.”
“Where were you this afternoon before you came back and found Mr Charteris?”
“Fellers’,” he said. That was true as well. He’d stopped at Oxford’s most famous butcher on the way home and picked up a grouse, for which he’d made sure to get a receipt. He knew that Emily wouldn’t think there was anything strange about that. When he was in my first year, Tommy had been lucky enough to have a kitchen next to his room. He’d often cooked her dinner with meat from Fellers’. Not that she’d ever appreciated good food. Her usual reaction to a gourmet dinner had been to lecture him not to be profligate with his grant.
A loud cough from the doorway announced the arrival of a young Chinese woman in black leather jacket and trousers. She was holding a see-through evidence bag, dull against the shine of her clothes. Emily beckoned her over and she whispered something in the DCI’s ear, her long, glossy black hair framing Emily’s short blonde bob. Emily took the bag from her sergeant and looked at it intently. She whispered behind her hand and passed the bag back.
“Detective Sergeant Lu,” said the woman, reaching into her jacket pocket with her free hand and pulling out her warrant card.
“Tommy West.” He thought he had seen something in the DS’s eyes but it was too quick to be sure. Did Emily talk about him to her sergeant? He didn’t know whether he liked the idea or not.
“Mr West, it would appear that the dead man…”
“John Charteris,” Emily completed.
“It would appear that Mr Charteris was bringing you a letter.”
Tommy already knew what was in the bag, but he made sure to look surprised.
Do you have any idea why a solicitor would hand deliver a letter to you in the middle of a storm?”
“No, none at all. What does it say?”
DS Lu handed him the see-through evidence bag. Someone had opened the letter already. Obviously no-one thought this was murder, Tommy surmised. He blinked to moisten his eyes; then he read the letter again for show, moving his eyes along the lines with an occasional back-skip as a normal reader would.
Dear Thomas,
forgive Johnny’s intrusion, but one of the perks of being a paying client of a fat, rich solicitor is that you can choose what they do for your money. That said, it is on legal matters that I wanted to contact you. I had been planning to leave you some of my finer wines in my will. I always thought that you would appreciate them more than the unworldly intellectual freeloaders I spend most of my time with these days. Now I am thinking of moving to America – the call of the partisan campus is almost too much to resist – and I don’t think 60 year old claret flies well. I’ve cased some up for you. Please feel free to collect it any time. When you do, now that you (no offence) are out of my will, I would like you to witness the new one. Do me a favour and explain this to jovial John. He may not charge me another flat rate phone fee if you tell him face to face.
I hope designing agrees with you. It suits your aesthetic sensibilities much more than academia.
We’ll catch up soon.
Ta Ra for today,
Charles Shaw
“Who’s Charles Shaw?” asked Emily.
Tommy wondered if she had forgotten everything about her time at college, or whether she was just trying to read him for a reaction.
“He’s the Professor of Ethics. You must remember him. Long grey hair, pony tail, walks around college like someone from the court of Louis XVI.”
“My DPhil supervisor,” he added. He didn’t know if she’d kept up with his life after she left college. He’d tried his hardest to keep up with hers, but he’d lost track, no, he’d lost the patience and the desire to be constantly reminded of his past mista
kes, soon after she joined CID.
“Did he talk to you about his will?” asked DS Lu.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought he’d have a will. Certainly not when I knew him. He’s too sure of his invincibility.”
“When you knew him?”
“I haven’t seen him for 12 years,” Tommy explained. He wondered if he should say any more; how much did Emily know about that last time he saw Professor Shaw? At the party. When he’d broken down. How much did it matter? He decided it was best to be as truthful as possible without going into details. “When I finished studying.”
“OK,” said Emily. Tommy sensed she was about to make her exit, and he hoped she wouldn’t.
“It’s good to see you again, Em”.
“Yeah. Is this where you work during the day?” she asked, looking around at the sample books and box files. “If I need to speak to you again.”
“Yep, when I’m not swanning around the homes of the great and the good.” Tommy handed her a business card from a pile on the mantle.
“Thanks. Goodbye, Tommy.”
“’Bye. Do you want me to…”
“No, I can find my way out.”
*
The storm was gone, replaced by the thicker grey of night. The flashing blue of police lights had given way to the dull toxic orange of the city. Tommy listened to Wagner because Emily hated it and he needed to be reminded of her faults. He sat in the black leather Barcelona chair in his minimalist sitting room, cradling a large glass of Armagnac.
He had met Emily at St Saviour’s when he was 17 and she was 18. He was studying Theology, she Law. They’d both loved art, both loved books, and films. And they both had deep convictions about God. She knew that he was her all-powerful, loving Father. He knew there was none. Wearing the blinkers of teenage love they had put their differences aside, and their debates became part of the foreplay.
After a while Tommy had asked her when she would sleep with him. She had told him she wouldn’t until they were married. He’d said that he couldn’t wait any longer. He had made sex the proxy for a whole spectrum of incompatibilities. He’d known then that this had consigned him to the moral low ground. He knew now that he was still lying there.
For the next term they’d each lived pretty much alone, avoiding friends and colleagues. Tutors had called both of them in for worried pastoral chats, but both of them were bright enough that missing a term’s work made no dent in their first class degrees. After a while Tommy began to flit between people he knew would say yes. Emily stuck to the safety of friends she knew would never ask.
They hadn’t spoken since, but he remembered every detail of her. For half an hour he cried. Then he thought about her as she was now. He thought about her at home, with her husband. He thought about them eating and laughing. He wondered if she’d have got the call when Professor Shaw was found, and what she would make of the suicide note.
____
3
“Wine, D!” Emily called down the corridor. She hung up her coat and fell into the soft sky blue sofa.
“There you go.” David handed her a big stem of Sauvignon Blanc and sat down next to her.
Emily pressed the remote and Eastenders came on.
“You’ll never guess who called in a body today?” She sipped her wine.
“Who?”
“Tommy.”
“The Tommy?”
“The same. Looks like he runs some kind of fabric company.”
“So?” asked David.
“So?”
“So did he do it? So what was it like to see him? So should I be worried you’re going to see him again?”
“No. I didn’t really notice. And no.”
David put his arm out and Emily nuzzled into him. She closed her eyes and breathed in the clean smell of fabric conditioner from his shirt. She was happy. Life was comfortable and uncomplicated, but never boring. David was kind and clever and he adored her. He made her feel safe. That he couldn’t have children was the smallest thing that she hardly thought about. Most of the time. They had none of the issues she’d had with Tommy. There was none of the point proving, no pressuring her into things before she was ready, and none of the childish melancholy romanticism.
Soon Emily’s breathing was steady and even, with a gentle sleeping purr. Her mouth twitched at the corners.
“You look like a collie dog chasing rabbits in its sleep,” David whispered. “My little collie dog.”
Emily smiled in her sleep.
“What the…” she started, rubbing her eyes as she worked out that her mobile was ringing.
Three minutes later Emily put the phone down. “OK, forget what I said. Yes, I’m going to have to see Tommy again. Seeing Tommy was creepy. And how the fuck do I know if he did it.”
David winced. He always did when she used that kind of language, which she knew she did too much when she was working. Maybe she picked it up from Rosie.
“The guy Tommy found dead on his doorstep was a solicitor. He was delivering a letter from Tommy’s old tutor. Now the tutor’s dead.”
*
The village of North Hinksey threads its way on one street through a tree-lined flood plain. It feels like the middle of nowhere but the Oxford ring road runs alongside only a hundred yards away, and you can reach it by a quarter mile footpath just down the main road out of town from Oxford railway station. In the centre is the Fishes pub, opposite a thatched house where nineteenth century hippy Ruskin put Oxford’s callow young artists to hard labour for the benefit of their creative talent. Old English country cottages surround a carpeted green. One of these belonged to Haydn Shaw, where she lived with her and Charles’ daughter Becky.
Emily waited in the car for a moment. Breaking the news of a death was a strange part of her job. It wasn’t like the poor guys in uniform who shuffle between the houses of the relatives of car crash victims. Her job permitted her to be dignified and respectful, but never to lower her head to allow someone the privacy of that awful initial moment before years of social conditioning kicked back in. It was her job to look into their eyes, eyes that were alive with possibility when they peered around the door; but sometime between seeing her standing there and hearing the words, the eyes would wipe blank like one of those kids’ magic writing boards. Emily had to look because in every case she worked there was someone for whom the news wasn’t a surprise. She lived in hope that one day she would catch something – or the lack of something – in their eyes that would tell her who. Not that she had ever seen anything yet; but still she made a cold, objective study of the moment of revelation, and doing so made her sick every time.
What would she catch this time? There had been a note but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a killer. And if this was more than a suicide then perhaps this first contact was the one chance she had to gauge a killer’s reaction before the shutters went down.
“Another academic,” said Emily, preparing herself. “Precocious family.”
“She’s an expert on China,” said Rosie.
“I’m impressed.” It had been inevitable from the moment they met that Rosie would become Emily’s best friend. At 26 Rosie was still to all intents a Bohemian student. She lived in a rented flat, plastered the walls with posters, and still got in trouble with the landlord for using blu-tack. Most nights she ate out of some kind of plastic container. She was also highly intelligent and extremely well read; not that she would ever admit to it. The sharpness and learning gave Emily a point of contact with her. The carefree lifestyle was something Emily could never imagine. It was the perfect cocktail of similarity and difference that made their friendship as well as their working relationship a success.
“I went to a talk she gave at Waterstone’s,” Rosie explained.
Emily raised an eyebrow.
“About how Hong Kong expats were faring in their new British home.” She smiled. Rosie had come to Britain with her parents in 1997, when she was 17, just before the handover of power to Chin
a. Emily found it hard to imagine her living anywhere but her grungy flat in Oxford. She couldn’t remember Rosie ever mentioning her old home other than in passing.
“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.
