The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  She had never been more nervous, dodging the knife as she chopped the peppers, and drinking most of the wine meant for the sauce. How do you tell someone you’ve known so long that you love them? With Tommy it had been clear within hours, and there had been no asking. With David there were so many possibilities: the first kiss, marriage even; the end of her closest friendship if it went wrong; disappointment, evenings that were empty again; meeting a whole new group of people; having to relearn how to hope.

  She’d never found so many things to do in the kitchen. There were garnishes to prepare, cheeses to grate, dressings to mix, plates to check for smears. She’d never had so many things to get up for during dinner. She had glasses to refill, salt and pepper to change, music not right, lighting too high, too low. She got up to take the pudding plates out. After coffee there would be nothing left for her to do. She shouldn’t really have coffee anyway her heart was going so fast. Her hand was shaking, the fork sliding across the plate. David’s hand suddenly on top of it, his other hand behind her neck, pulling her head down and onto the firmness of his lips. It was as though he had read her mind.

  “Coffee?” she purred.

  “I love you, E.”

  “Hmm. I love you too, D, but if I’m ever going to get to work I need a very big caffeine hit.”

  “Let me get it,” said David.

  “I need to start getting the oxygen to my head.” She smiled and swung out of bed.

  Now she was as nervous as she had been all those years ago. She paced around the kitchen, but her mind was made up. She had to go and see Tommy and get some kind of handle on what her gut feeling was telling her about him. This time she hoped that David couldn’t read her mind.

  ____

  15

  Tommy woke with a start to the sound of his phone. Instinctively, he reached to his pocket, but his hand hit something soft. Becky was still asleep, her head fixed to his thigh. He slid himself out from underneath her with his hands. His muscles spasmed as the blood rushed back.

  He pressed redial. “Em?” He paced up and down the room, shaking the blood back into his leg.

  “Tommy?” A sleepy voice came from the chaise longue.

  “Good morning, Tommy. Company?” said Emily.

  “Mmm. Hey, dozy, fancy coffee?” asked Becky

  “Yeah, company.” Tommy rubbed his eyes, still trying to piece together exactly where he was.

  “Tommy, is that Becky Shaw I can hear?”

  He wasn’t sure why, but he had a feeling that Becky, just woken up, wasn’t the best thing for Emily to have heard. “Yeah, that’s Becky.” He thought he could hear raise her eyebrows down the phone.

  “I didn’t know you knew her.”

  “I don’t, didn’t. Not until last night.” It really wasn’t sounding any better. “I wanted to pick up the wine, and I wanted to give my respects to Charles’ family, so I found them in the phone book. I assume that’s OK. Picking up the wine, I mean.”

  “Tommy, I really don’t care. Actually, that’s why I wanted to see you. Are you free in half an hour?”

  “I can be,” he said

  “Good, I’ll see you in the King’s Arms coffee shop.”

  Tommy went down to the kitchen where Becky was already grinding coffee beans. The smell floated on top of the staleness, dragging the house back to life, and Tommy with it.

  Charles’ kitchen often surprised guests who knew his reputation as a cook. Many of them had vast black granite breakfast bars and extractor hoods more like docking stations at home. Charles’ cooker was indeed vast, with 8 gas hobs, but only because sometimes he needed to use all of them; and the two American fridges had no gimmicky ice-making gadgets – for ice, Charles relied solely on an old-fashioned pick and block, and the little moulds that he sometimes commissioned to be hand made. The worktop was a slab of Veneto Rosso marble with a stack of plastic chopping boards that were colour-coded for hygiene and function rather than for impressing visitors. Charles kept the really impressive items in his kitchen out of sight in the drawers. He had a set of carbon-steel knives that his adoptive father’s grandfather had used during a career in the great kitchens of the Habsburg empire; and his ingredients, culled from every corner of the globe, produced unimaginable aromas every time he opened a cupboard.

  “Do you want me to take you home?” Tommy asked.

  “No. I’m going to clear up a bit. Was that your ex?”

  “It was DCI Harris, yes.”

  “So just how ex is she?”

  “Ex enough for me to be happy to tell you everything she says when I’m back.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Tommy,” said Becky. “But I need to spend some time alone here. Can we leave it for today?”

  Tommy wondered if she was unhappy about Emily because she was his ex, or because she was a policewoman. He decided not to push it. He had to get on. He didn’t have time to see Becky through her teenage mood swings. As soon as he thought it he felt guilty. She had a far more legitimate reason to be happy than petulance.

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll meet you at Elgin Tower tomorrow morning,” she said. “Before the memorial service.”

  “Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Tommy loaded the wooden cases into the back seat of the car and strapped them in with bungees. As he shut the back door he felt arms around him and turned round. Becky held her head against his chest then reached up and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks, Tommy” she said, and went back inside.

  Perhaps she thought she had been too hard on him the same as he felt he’d been too hard on her. Perhaps there were things she wanted to tell him but thought she couldn’t, the same as there were things he couldn’t tell her. He was fairly sure there was no perhaps about that. For God’s sake, he needed to know everything she could tell him. She was the one pushing him to find her father’s killer, wasn’t she? He didn’t know whether to be touched or pissed off at her.

  He laid the cases down on the slate floor in his wine room. It was as far from the thud of the gym as he could get, with its customised racks and perfectly calibrated temperature and humidity control. There was just enough time, he thought, to check the wine. He’d been patient, but he couldn’t wait any more. He wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe part of him wanted to see for sure that his hunch had been right. That Charles really had left Tommy his best wine. That he hadn’t drunk it. Part of him just wanted to see the bottles face to face.

  He cut through the police tape that held the lid on. He didn’t know quite what to expect inside, and wondered if there was any real point in taking so much care. The bottles he saw laid carefully on their side confirmed that there was. There they were at the top. The labels faced upwards on the two bottles that mattered. One was the 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc. The other was smaller. It had the unmistakable elongated neck of the bottles used for Tokaji, and that’s what the label confirmed. The 1864 Tokaji Eszencia was one of the finest – perhaps only the legendary 1811 Tokaji was greater – wines ever made.

  For centuries, probably dating back to a remark made by Louis XIV, Tokaji Eszencia has enjoyed a reputation for having magical healing properties. Much of the mythology had to do with the way in which the wine was made. The Tokaji-Hegyelja, a small hill in the vicinity of Mád in eastern Hungary, enjoys a micro-climate that shrouds it in morning and evening mist. This climate infects the grapes with botrytis cinerea, the fungus also known as noble rot that shrivels the grape and concentrates the sugar. This is the same fungus that sweetens the grapes of many of the world’s greatest sweet wines.

  In the rare years when whole crops fall prey to the infection, vignerons bottle tiny quantities of Eszencia, made in a way that is unique to this one tiny hill. They pick the rotten one by one over the days or even weeks, putting them in huge baskets called puttunyos. They wait patiently as gravity takes its course inside these containers. As the grapes settle, the weight of those at the top presses down on the diseased skins of those below, bursting
them so that the sugary pulp within oozes out. Eventually, before the grapes have ever seen a press, a few drops of this honey-coloured syrup reach the bottom of the basket where they trickle out to be sealed away in oak. The sugar is so concentrated that this liquid ferments to no more than 2 or 3% alcohol because, and even then only after years or decades. Finally it is poured into tiny bottles and sold as Eszencia. Even at this stage its journey is only just beginning. The few litres that are ever made of this wine improve for decades, the best for hundreds of years, and are so prized they will pass between the great cellars of the greatest houses in the world, outliving dynasties and even empires before they are drunk.

  Tommy touched the glass, just for a moment, not long enough to warm its contents, and wondered who had weighed the bottle in their hands before him, deciding whether it would be ready for state banquets or jubilee celebrations; reluctantly putting it back and waiting. He knew that the last person to do so was Charles Shaw. And he knew that Shaw had been content to put the bottle back. Could he really have done that, left it there, and opened a bottle of something lesser with his last ever meal? Of course he couldn’t. He could only have been murdered.

  *

  The Kings Arms was one of the busiest pubs in Oxford. It was situation on one corner of the crossroads overlooking the Bodleian Library, Hertford College, and Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre made it one of the city’s finest viewing points. Tommy saw Emily sitting at one of the benches outside in her sunglasses, leaning over a capuccino. He watched her from the steps of the Science Museum. It was good to have a moment to get used to the sight of her again. For all she had the same hair, the same smile, she was very different from the student he had known. He looked at the way she sat in her grey wool trouser suit with its whetstone-sharp creases. She had always been confident and ambitious, never gauche like the other students. Now he got the impression of someone who had reached their journey’s end as he watched her taking in the fag-end of the summer tourists. Wherever she had set out to go in her life, she had got there. Now she was enjoying watching the rest of the world rushing to find its path whilst she sat sipping coffee.

  For a second he felt a thump of sadness hit him in the stomach. He had mapped his life out even clearer than she had hers. He had almost got there then smack, he got ill and that was it. Fifteen years later there she was, at rest, at ease, at home. And he was still just part of the white noise that went on around her. Enough navel-gazing, he said to himself. Time to get on.

  “Hey,” he sat opposite her. “Should I get one too, or is this a flying visit?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Fancy another one?”

  “Yeah, I’ll have an Americano, please.”

  “So,” Tommy said on returning, scissoring his legs over the slatted bench without spilling the coffees. “You wanted to see me.”

  “I asked to see you,” Emily corrected.

  “Mmm.” Tommy smiled.

  “We’re not looking for anyone else in connection with Professor Shaw’s death. I thought you’d want to know.”

  Tommy took this in. Perhaps for a moment his subconscious considered challenging her; but the thought never made it any further.

  “So he killed himself?”

  “We think so, yes. With rat poison.”

  “Did you say yesterday it was in his wine?”

  “That’s what we thought, yes. But it turns out it was in his water.”

  Tommy thought about it. Whoever killed him obviously wasn’t totally stupid. They’d given themselves a fighting chance of having Charles’ death written off as suicide. And it appeared to have worked – in the police’s eyes at any rate. Then again the police didn’t exactly have all the evidence. He suddenly felt uneasy, tried to scan the milling tourists for anything amiss. Had the killer known that the police wouldn’t get the whole picture? Did they know Charles had warned Tommy? He didn’t want to think what it would mean if they did. Get a grip, he said to himself, hoping Emily hadn’t sensed his distraction.

  “That sounds more like the way he’d kill himself than poisoning his wine,” he said.

  Emily spooned the froth from her Americano. “So what did you see, Tommy?”

  “Sorry?”

  “When you were looking at me from behind the entrance to the Sheldonian. What did you see?”

  Tommy felt a wave of relief that the conversation had moved on. “Aside from a shrewd detective?” He smiled. “I saw someone happy with where they are.”

  “I am.”

  “You and your husband,” he said, sensing her stiffen and kicking himself that he had raised the subject as soon as the words left his lips. “Do you have children?”

  “No,” she said. “No, we can’t.”

  Idiot. He kicked himself. Why was it he could mix effortlessly with people from any class or background, charm them, make them feel like royalty even, but Emily could still make him act like a klutz.

  “What about you?” she said. For the second time he was glad she’d rescued the situation by changing the subject. “Are you happy with where you are?”

  “Well,” he said. “I’ve learned not to beat myself up when I’m not.”

  “I heard about your breakdown,” she said, as though that was what he meant.

  “I think everyone must have done. I’m better now,” he added, knowing that like an alcoholic this was something that would never be more than partly true. “If you’re wondering about Becky,” he added, “she’s going to need a friend over the next few weeks. That’s all it is.” As though that’s what she had meant.

  “I really don’t care.” She looked as though she meant it. He felt a twinge of disappointment.

  “It’s good to see you, Em, you know. You look good.”

  “Assuage your guilt to see me happy does it?” He could tell what her eyes looked like under her glasses. It was a look he’d known well. A look that said There, I know you don’t like it but I’ve hit the nail on the head, haven’t I? “Sorry,” she said. “That’s not fair.”

  It was probably more than fair, he thought. “Do you want to have lunch some time?” he said, knowing it would be god to go before he said anything else stupid. Or before she hit the mark again. “Your husband as well, of course.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I don’t know that I’ve always given you the best reviews to David.”

  “David.” He played with the name, put it to the featureless face he had imagined in the gym.

  “I might give you a call some time for coffee, though.”

  “That would be good,” he said.

  “Yeah, it would. Goodbye, Tommy.”

  He was relieved as she swung her legs out from the bench. “Take care, Em,” he said, but she was already on her way.

  Tommy swilled his espresso round and chugged it back. He watched the parties and the walking tours jostling on Catte Street, snapping the replica of Venice’s Bridge of Sighs that connected the buildings of Hertford college on their mobiles, peering into the rotunda of the Radcliffe Camera library, unaware that the people they could see inside were probably only American high school kids rip-off summer course. He wondered, after a while, if Emily was lurking somewhere watching him, trying to get a handle on the new image of him as he had done with her. He wondered how different it would be from the old one.

  ____

  16

  Tommy needed to bathe before sitting down with Shaw’s papers again. Somehow just the thought of them made him feel dirty. He followed his bath with a long coldwater shower. Maybe he thought it would close his pores and keep out the rankness.

  He sat in his study in the evening cool, wearing only a light cotton galabiyya. Pages of Professor Shaw’s handwritten notes flopped across his desk. Tommy wanted to read through them and feel some kind of pattern emerging from them, just as the Professor had done. He wanted to know exactly what ideas had formed in Charles’ mind. Just what was it that was in his head that had made someone want to kill him? Wh
atever it was, it had grown there like a cancer out of the papers he had left Tommy. Maybe it was there in plain sight. Somehow he thought it wasn’t; not if Shaw had needed him to find it.

  He began looking. Many of the themes he found were familiar. There were references to art, to the depiction of the Holy Spirit, to the Madonna and Child, the murder of the innocents. There were references to the production of art, to the process of writing, to the long loving care of the painter, inevitably to the craft of the wine grower. Other references were to contemporary events and modern culture: the James Bulger murder, the separation of conjoined twins (with extracts from the script of David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers), the declining birth rate in parts of Europe. Children, Tommy thought. That’s what all these things had in common: children. There were historical and sociological references too: the age of consent to sex and marriage, the history of arranged marriage, the use of children as soldiers, schooling ages, attitudes to paedophilia.

  Tommy could feel the outlines of pictures in his head. He wondered if they were the same ones Shaw seen. It made him feel like a student again. He forgot why he was looking, lost, after all this time, in the enjoyment of thinking.

  As ideas flew freely through Tommy’s head he felt as if they were blowing the dust away from parts of his brain he’d kept in storage. Like an old, cranked engine, he felt synapses flare into life that had been dormant for over a decade. They felt like old friends coming back from a very long holiday. He desperately hoped that this time they would stay; but as soon a he thought it, he realised that perhaps he had already gone too far down a very dangerous road. It was time to pull back. Thinking was intoxicating, but look where spending too much time alone in his head had got him before. Sure he had to tap into that part of his brain, but this wasn’t about showing what he was capable of. This was about finding out why his old supervisor was dead. And the answer wasn’t hidden in the recesses of Tommy’s past. It was hidden in the papers on his desk. And those papers were about children. It was hardly an original subject. He wondered what original twist Charles had put on it.