by David Lodge
‘Who?’ Ralph says.
‘We don’t know as yet, sir.’
‘What’s the evidence then?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say, sir,’ says Detective Sergeant Agnew. He is a tall, big-boned man in his thirties, with a moustache that curves down at the ends to give him a permanently lugubrious expression, wearing a navy-blue blazer and a blue shirt with a plain tie. He speaks with a local accent. ‘This is part of a wider investigation into a ring of people exchanging and distributing illegal material,’ he says. ‘We believe one of them works here. Would you have any idea who it might be?’
‘No. None at all.’
‘No member of your staff who has shown any interest in such material at any time?’
‘Not that I can think of. Of course I don’t suppose there’s a single person in the country with access to the Internet who hasn’t had a look at a porn site at one time or another. It’s natural human curiosity.’
‘There’s nothing natural about the stuff we’re concerned with, sir,’ says Detective Sergeant Agnew.
‘That’s my point. One of the postgraduates organized a sort of competition last year, to see who could find the rudest picture on the Internet that you didn’t have to pay for . . .’ Ralph laughs at the recollection, but Detective Sergeant Agnew doesn’t crack a smile. ‘It was just a laddish prank. But some of the women in the Centre complained to me about it, so of course I put a stop to it.’
‘Who was that, sir?’
‘Jim Bellows, but I’m sure he’s not involved in child pornography. The pictures I saw were of adults. Very well developed adults, one might say.’ Again Ralph tries and fails to raise a smile from the policeman.
Detective Sergeant Agnew writes the name in his notebook. ‘We’ll check him out,’ he says.
‘I’m sure he’s not the man you’re looking for.’
‘Probably not, but we have to follow any lead. We can’t check every hard disk in the building.’
‘God, no. It would bring the Centre to a grinding halt.’
‘Though you could, if you wish, eliminate yourself from our enquiry, sir,’ Detective Sergeant Agnew says.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘If you would allow me to check your own hard disk.’
‘Well, I don’t know . . . Have you got a warrant or something?’
‘What I’m suggesting would be entirely voluntary, sir.’
‘I see . . .’ Ralph frowns and thinks for a moment. ‘Seems to me I’m in a double bind here. I don’t see why I should, on the other hand if I don’t, you’ll think I’ve got something to hide.’
‘It’s up to you, sir.’
‘There’s a lot of confidential information on my computer.’
‘Naturally confidentiality would be respected.’
Ralph thinks for a moment. ‘Well, all right. Go ahead.’
‘Thank you, sir. But I won’t bother you just now.’
‘Oh. I thought . . .’
‘Who’s your chief administrator of systems, sir?’
‘Stuart Phillips.’
‘Is he trustworthy?’
‘Completely, I would say.’
‘Of good character?’
‘Absolutely. Married to a teacher, they have two children. He’s a bell-ringer for his church, I believe. Runs marathons for charity. Leads a scout troop.’ DS Agnew, who has been nodding approvingly, suddenly stops nodding. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned that,’ says Ralph.
‘Why not, sir?’
‘Well, I suppose it makes him a suspect, doesn’t it? Frankly I wonder they can get anybody to be a scoutmaster these days. Actually Stuart’s the salt of the earth.’
‘You were right to mention it, sir. You can’t have too much information in this game. I’d like to meet Mr Phillips. D’you think you could get hold of him now?’
Ralph gets through to Stuart Phillips’ extension and is told he just left for home. Detective Sergeant Agnew says he will come back next week to examine the Centre’s systems and will need Stuart Phillips’ assistance.
‘Are you going to take him into your confidence?’ Ralph asks.
‘That depends,’ says Agnew. ‘I have to meet him first.’
A provisional meeting is arranged for the following Wednesday, since Ralph will be in hospital on Monday and Tuesday.
‘If you discover anything, you will tell me immediately won’t you?’
‘Certainly, sir,’ says Agnew.
‘Only it could be very damaging to us in PR terms.’
‘Of course, if an offence has been committed, and an arrest is made, it will become public knowledge.’
‘Well the longer that’s deferred the better,’ says Ralph. ‘We’re mounting a big international conference here next weekend.’
‘I doubt whether there will be any major developments before then, sir,’ says Detective Sergeant Agnew.
‘How was your day?’ Carrie asks, when Ralph gets home.
‘Don’t ask,’ he says. ‘Whatever Henderson says, I need a drink.’
‘Better not, Messenger,’ says Carrie anxiously.
‘One drink is not going to kill me,’ he says.
‘Well, all right, just one,’ she says doubtfully. ‘I’ll fix it for you. What would you like?’
Ralph considers. ‘You used to make a mean dry martini,’ he says.
‘You know, I haven’t had a dry martini in years,’ Carrie says. ‘I’ll join you.’
29
EENIE, MEENIE, MYNIE, mo . . . testing, testing . . . It’s Sunday afternoon the ah, 25th of May, and I’m in the Abbey Hospital in Bath. I was almost glad to be admitted here yesterday, to get away from the Centre, from home, from Email, faxes, telephones . . . there’s a phone beside my bed, but not many people know about it . . . to get away before I received any more unpleasant surprises. The Abbey seemed like a port in a storm, a haven of tranquillity . . . an ideal place to hole up in for a few days, to get my breath back and get on with some work. I brought a lot of books with me and my IBM Thinkpad. Good name, that . . . Unfortunately the reason I’m here was the most unpleasant surprise of all, and it’s been difficult to concentrate on anything else.
I can’t complain about the accommodation. I’ve got a room to myself, air-conditioned, with a big picture window overlooking the landscaped car-park . . . fitted carpet on the floor . . . Impressionist reproductions on the walls . . . a high-backed armchair, in which I’m sitting at this moment . . . two upright stacking chairs for visitors, and a coffee table. A TV mounted on a wall bracket. A state-of-the-art hospital bed that goes up and down and tilts and jack-knifes in the middle if required. An en-suite bathroom with shower and loo . . . It’s as good as a four-star hotel room, except that you can’t hang a Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob. Nurses and ancillary staff are popping in and out all the time to take down details or check your pulse or your temperature or your blood pressure or bring you food or just to ask you if everything is all right. Everything always is all right. Except you.
Just now, there’s a pause in the activity. It’s visiting hours . . . So I got out the old Pearlcorder. I don’t know why exactly . . . but since I’m not going to have any visitors I thought I might as well talk to myself, and I can be reasonably confident that I won’t be interrupted by some nurse barging in for an hour or so . . . They’re remarkably good-looking nurses, mind you, and kitted out like a wet dream, in tight-fitting short-sleeved uniforms of blue and white poplin . . . with broad black belts and sheer black stockings. Somehow you know they’re stockings and not tights. It’s all part of the four-star service . . . Nurse Pomeroy is particularly fetching. Blonde tresses, peaches-and-cream complexion, a perfect smile, great tits I bet under the starched uniform bib . . . and if what’s underneath her skirt is as shapely as what you can see below the hemline, well . . . Nurse Pomeroy has been very friendly and attentive. She’s seen me on television and regards me as something of a star . . . In another mood I might fancy my chances with Nurse
Pomeroy, there’s a saucy gleam of invitation in her eye sometimes . . . but the fact is that my libido is on hold at the moment. Ever since O’Keefe uttered those seven little words, ‘You’ve got a lump on your liver,’ I’ve lost interest in sex . . . In having it, that is, I doubt if you ever stop thinking about it . . . I think about sex, therefore I am . . . I tried to force myself to make love to Carrie the second night after her return from California, but it didn’t work. She was very understanding . . . I haven’t even tried anything with Helen since my medical saga began. If the lump turns out to be malignant I may never have sex again. A depressing thought . . . But at least I can say I went down with guns blazing, in our remarkable three-week affair . . . Except for the very last time, when I was impotent. Pity about that.
It’s not sexual appetite which is bugging me at the moment, it’s ordinary appetite . . . I’m on a special low-residue diet of tasteless pap. They’re gradually emptying my intestines so they can have a good look round on Tuesday, and I feel hungry all the time. At lunchtime I could smell the roast beef on the food trolley being wheeled along the corridor to other patients in this wing, a mouthwatering aroma . . . it seeped under the door and my starved senses picked it up. How I craved for a generous helping, with golden brown roast potatoes and lashings of gravy poured over the Yorkshire pud. Of course in principle I don’t eat beef now, but when you’ve got a potentially malignant lump on your liver, the million-to-one chance of catching CJD doesn’t seem a very pressing concern . . . if I’d been allowed to eat a normal lunch I wouldn’t have gone for the poached salmon or the vegetarian lasagne but straight for the beef. I happen to know the full menu because it was thoughtlessly given to me by an orderly this morning. Must stop thinking about food.
I’ve tried to feel the lump myself, but without success . . . I have to restrain myself from poking really hard, in case I do some damage. It doesn’t hurt . . . which isn’t necessarily a good sign . . . Cancer of the liver is often painless in the early stages. But it’s strange to be possibly in mortal danger, and not to feel anything except a little indigestion . . . Even that’s gone away with the low-residue diet. ‘A vital organ,’ O’Keefe said . . . I read somewhere that the ancient Assyrians thought the liver was the seat of the soul. Interesting. The Egyptians thought it was the heart and the ancient Greeks the lungs, I think . . . and Descartes thought his soul was in his pineal gland . . . but the Assyrians plumped for the liver, though they can’t have had a clue what it was for, metabolically speaking.
The sun is shining brightly outside, bouncing off the windscreens of the visitors’ cars . . . the women look as if they’ve arrived for a wedding, getting out of the cars in summer dresses, grasping bouquets of flowers . . . I wish now I hadn’t discouraged Carrie from coming today. I feel somewhat orphaned without visitors. She and the kids will be at Horseshoes, sunning themselves in the garden after lunch. Don’t let’s think about lunch. Not Helen though, she told Carrie she had too much marking to do. Not the real reason, of course . . . She’s edgy about meeting Carrie again, a mixture of guilt and rivalry I suppose. I can’t say I’m sorry. Who knows what might have happened if they’d been alone together this weekend, talking about me? Suppose Helen had a sudden impulse to confess all? Jesus.
The past week, unpleasant as it’s been, has made one thing clear to me – I want to stay married to Carrie, whatever the result of the tests . . . The old cliché that these things bring a couple closer together turns out to be true . . . Looking back, I’ve been very stupid, fooling around with Marianne, then getting seriously involved with Helen . . . I broke my unspoken contract with Carrie, no affairs on her home ground. If she found out, God knows what she might do . . . Fortunately Helen will be leaving Gloucester soon. But in the meantime I must take great care to keep things on an even keel.
Trouble is, I’m afraid she may be falling seriously in love with me . . . She was in a highly emotional state the other evening. In hindsight it was a mistake to ask her to help me top myself if the worst comes to the worst. It was something I’d been thinking about, and it just came out, without premeditation. I was almost thinking aloud. It’s important to me to consider all possible eventualities and to have plans ready to meet them as they arise, it gives me a sense of being in control of my life . . . But it’s all hypothetical . . . abstract . . . Being a writer, she has a vivid imagination, she immediately sees herself in some lurid scenario, and gets upset . . .
On the other hand if things turn out well, I’m afraid she’ll want to go on with the affair . . . Well maybe, when she’s moved back to London, we might see each other occasionally, but it would be better to let it die a natural death . . . not the happiest of metaphors . . . It was great while it lasted, it was some of the most exciting sex I’ve ever had . . . but I don’t want to give Carrie any reason to suspect what went on between us while she was away . . . There’s enough risk she’ll find out from other sources. I think Emily has her suspicions . . . the way she looked at me that evening when I said Greg couldn’t sleep over . . . maybe she heard something, quiet as we were, on the nights when Helen stayed . . . or maybe it’s just female intuition . . . And then Sir Stan and Viv calling at Horseshoes when we were upstairs in the bedroom . . . something in the tone of his voice on the phone the other day suggested he didn’t believe my story about having gone for a walk. I wonder if there were any clues that Helen was with me . . . Something belonging to her left on the passenger seat in my car . . . a jacket, a scarf? I can’t remember what she was wearing that day, dammit . . . Of course if Stan has any suspicions, he wouldn’t pass them on to Carrie . . . but Viv might, out of female solidarity, or just mischief-making . . . One way or another I fear I’m no longer the VC’s blue-eyed boy, what with the Horseshoes episode, and the row over Donaldson’s honorary degree . . . and now this pornography business on top of everything else.
That was a tense moment, on Friday afternoon, when Agnew asked if he could check my hard disk . . . It was a difficult one, and I had to make my mind up quickly . . . there’s no child pornography on my disk, no porn of any kind . . . I’ve surfed the porn sites on the Web occasionally, but only at home . . . so I had nothing to fear on that score . . . But what I do have on my office computer are the transcripts of all my experimental monologues and journal entries . . . with lurid details of my relationships with Helen and Marianne and lots of other compromising personal material . . . seeing Emily in the bath, for instance . . . I didn’t relish the idea of Detective Sergeant Agnew fishing around in those files . . . But then I thought to myself, he’ll be looking for images, not text . . . and if I refuse to cooperate, he might get suspicious . . . and if he has to get a warrant to examine my disk he’s going to look at it much more thoroughly than if I agree to let him check it out now . . . So I agreed – and he let me off the hook . . . Perhaps it was just bluff, perhaps he had no intention of checking the disk there and then . . . perhaps the fact that I agreed was enough to eliminate me from the enquiry . . . crafty bastard . . . After he’d gone, I thought about deleting the sensitive files, but what would be the point? You can never completely remove data from a hard disk, short of destroying it . . .
As to the fuss about Donaldson’s honorary degree . . . who fed the student rag with the information about our links with the MoD? It must be somebody with access to Senate papers . . . and a motive . . . Jasper Richmond, for instance . . . If Oliver has been talking about what he saw in the car-park at Sainsbury’s, Jasper might be trying to get his revenge . . . Or could it be somebody in the Centre itself? Could it conceivably be Duggers? He was never keen on our contracts with the MoD – muttering about the Official Secrets Act undermining academic freedom etc., etc., though really he was just jealous of the amount of dosh I’d managed to raise, none of which would be going to his team of postdocs . . . But would he sabotage his own institution? I wouldn’t put it past him . . . if there were such a fuss that I was forced out, say . . . or, more likely, resigned in disgust . . . then he would step int
o my shoes, or so he might think . . . he would rather be head of an impoverished Centre than number two in a thriving one . . . I hope he doesn’t find out why I’m having these tests . . . I can just imagine the little thrill of expectation it would give him . . .
I’m getting a little paranoid . . . but it’s been a trying week, one damn crisis after another . . . just when I could have done with some peace and quiet to get ready for the conference . . . which reminds me of another little potential problem stacked up in the sky, waiting to land . . . Ludmila Lisk . . . All I need now is a Czech groupie following me around at the conference . . . cosying up at every opportunity to reminisce about our romantic night in Prague . . . getting up Carrie’s nose . . . and conceivably Helen’s too . . . If everything goes wrong that could go wrong in the coming week I may find myself diagnosed with terminal cancer . . . fought over publicly by three women . . . threatened with divorce by one of them . . . the Centre exposed in a porn scandal . . . its research funding cut . . . my status damaged . . . my enemies triumphant . . . Of course if the first of these possibilities turns out to be the case, none of the others will matter very much . . . or for very long. Which is perhaps why I feel surprisingly calm . . . The thing to do is to take defensive action where one can, and stoically await the outcome where one can’t.
30
TUESDAY 27TH MAY. Messenger is having his tests today. I called him yesterday evening to wish him good luck. I’d spoken to Carrie earlier, so knew she wouldn’t be with him. Apparently he told her he didn’t want any visitors at the hospital during the preparation days. I suppose it makes him feel less like someone who is ill. Carrie is going over to Bath today to be with him when they get the results of the tests, and to drive him home afterwards. The wife’s part. He said he would try and phone me this evening to tell me what happened, but it would more likely be tomorrow, from his office. He doesn’t like to call me from home in case Carrie should pick up the phone on another extension and hear us talking. He doesn’t have a mobile – says he would never have a moment’s peace if he did – so we can only speak when he’s in his office.
