Waking Caliban

by Mike Cartlidge

  “You’ll excuse me if I looked a little taken aback, Mrs Roden,” I said. “I hadn’t realized-”

  “It’s OK.” She sat down again. “I’m a lot younger than Robert, of course.”

  I leaned against the mantelpiece, facing her. “The accent’s American, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said. She gave me a shy glance, as though it embarrassed her to talk about herself. “My folks are from Boston. I came to England as a student a few years ago. I won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, you see. That’s where I met Robert, at the university.”

  Chantelle’s voice was as expressionless as her appearance. “You telling us you a literature scholar, Honey?”

  She stared at Chantelle for a moment as though she was surprised to hear another American accent. “I was a student of literature rather than a scholar. I met Robert at a faculty party and we just clicked.”

  “A meeting of the minds?” I couldn’t get the picture of her and Roden straight in my mind. They made Beauty and the Beast look like matching love-birds.

  “I guess you could say that,” she murmured. I was struck again by the contrast between the demure way she talked and dressed and something in her manner that spoke of earthier instincts. She leaned back slightly in the chair and I realized it was the way she moved that created the less-than-chaste impression: her body poured itself into each new position in a way that reminded me of a lioness stalking an antelope.

  “You got children?” Chantelle asked her.

  Her eyes dropped again. “We haven’t been blessed.”

  I frowned. “How did you did you find out about me? And where to find me?”

  “Erwin Bakst mentioned to me that you’d been with my husband before he disappeared. As for where you live: I didn’t need to be a detective to find that out. Your address is in the phone book.”

  Fair point, I thought. “When did you last hear from your husband, Mrs Roden?”

  “Call me Miranda.” She looked up and suddenly seemed close to tears. “We last spoke on the phone, just before he picked you up to drive to Stratford. Since then, I’ve heard nothing from him. I’m very worried. He normally calls me every day when he’s away. ”

  “And how do you think I can help you, Miranda?”

  “You haven’t heard anything from him?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Mr. Bakst told me that you were going to try to find him…”

  “The police are trying to find him,” I said.

  “But you are going to Stratford…”

  “I said I’d go back to see if there was anything I could do.”

  She was quiet for a minute, thinking. “I heard about that that awful killing…You can’t imagine that was connected with Robert’s disappearance?”

  “It would be stretching coincidence if it wasn’t.”

  “That’s terrible,” she whispered. “Those poor men…”

  “I know. One of them was a friend of mine.”

  I suppose my tone was less than sympathetic and she bent her head again, apparently overcome with emotion. I looked at Chantelle, who was watching her closely. I guessed she was less than impressed with her countrywoman’s performance but then Chantelle wasn’t one to warm easily to other women.

  After a few moments, Miranda looked up, her eyes damp. “So you have no idea at all where Robert might be?”

  “None at all, I’m afraid,” I told her.

  “Do you think someone took him against his will?”

  “Logically, it’s either that or he decided to lose himself.”

  “But why would he have done that?”

  “I have no idea. Has he ever done anything like this before?”

  She shook her head. A tear ran down her cheek and Chantelle pulled a tissue box from the desk and handed it to her. After a few moments, she recovered her composure. Pushing a stray lock of hair behind her ear, she leaned towards me. “Mr. Hastings, I want you to do your best to find Robert and make sure he’s safe.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  “I’m prepared to pay you extra. We’re not a wealthy couple, you understand, but-”

  “Mr. Bakst is already paying my agency.”

  “Still…” She reached for her handbag again.

  “It’s not necessary. I don’t need to be paid twice.”

  “I understand. But will you please, please, keep me informed? I’m so worried...”

  “If I find anything out, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

  She pulled a pen and a small notepad from her handbag. Tearing a page from the pad, she wrote something down and handed it to me. “It’s the number for my mobile. Please call me if you discover anything. Any time of the day or night, it’s fine.”

  I took the paper from her and told her again that if I discovered anything, she’d find out about it. When she asked if she could have my mobile number, I scribbled it down on the bottom half of the sheet of paper and tore off that piece to give to her.

  She stood and I walked her to the front door. If she registered the sounds of merriment coming from the salon, she gave no sign of it. On the step outside, she turned back and laid her hand on my arm. I held my breath, conscious of the press of her flesh on mine. Her eyes flickered over my face as if she was searching for signs of emotion. “Thank you,” she breathed, “for being so kind.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet.”

  “I know. But you will. I can tell.” She smiled at me for the first time. It was a hell of a smile, as if each component, the upturned lips, the slight dimpling of her cheeks, the minute wrinkles that formed around her eyes, had a different emotion to convey. She was at once sad and wistful, reserved but worldly, the abandoned wife and the funny, innocent girl. I looked away, down the darkened street, to cover my thoughts.

  “Do you want me to hail a cab for you?”

  She shook her head, her hair swinging about her chin again. “I brought my car. It’s parked just round the block.”

  “I could walk you there.”

  She gave me another smile, different from the first, as though she had a complete repertoire, one for each occasion. This one was almost coy, like a teenage Scarlet O’Hara teasing a beau. “I’m sure I can find my way to the end of the street without mishap,” she said.

  She turned and walked away and I stood on the doorstep, watching her until she turned the corner.

  ***

  For once, when I went to bed, I took a sleeping pill: the shrink I’d once seen had given me an open prescription but I kept their use to a minimum. As I waited for sleep, my mind started its old trick, parading the days of my life before my eyes, inviting me to take my pick of pain and regret.

  I told myself to change the subject and it wasn’t hard to move my thoughts to the more recent memory of Miranda Roden. The thought of her being married to the charming Professor was almost as upsetting as it was puzzling.

  It was only as I became drowsy and random thoughts began to insinuate themselves that I remembered Bakst mentioning the name ‘Sadler’ and recalled where I had heard it before.

  Chapter 7

  Isbey called my mobile the next morning and told me that he wanted me to work as part of the team of investigators he was sending to Warwickshire to try to pick up Roden’s trail. He wasn’t too happy when I told him that, thanks to my hired car and an early start, I was already on the outskirts of Stratford. We had a brief discussion about whether I should wait for my agency comrades to catch up with me and how long it was going to take to get the whole team organized. I told Isbey I wasn’t going to wait, he expressed admiration for the old military system of courts martial and summary executions for soldiers who didn’t follow orders and my mobile went dead when I drove under a railway bridge.

  I don’t claim to be in the same investigative class as my ex-policemen colleagues but I had worked out a rough plan of attack. As my mobile came back to life and the clock ticked past 8.30 A.M., I began a series of calls to Oxford University. The various
administrative staff I spoke to couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me anything about Professor Roden, other than that he was on a sabbatical. Finally, in desperation, I told a clerk in one of the Registrars’ offices that he was missing and I was calling on behalf of his worried wife.

  There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. “His wife, you say.”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “She’s worried about him and-”

  “And you’re a friend of the family?” he asked.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  There was another pause before he replied and then, rather rudely, I thought, cut the connection.

  ***

  When I arrived in Stratford, I parked the car outside the Almoner’s Arms and strolled to a local shop to buy an assortment of the morning’s newspapers. The press were still running stories on the deaths of our men but had nothing substantive to add to their previous day’s reports. If the police had made any progress, they weren’t sharing it with reporters.

  I returned to the hotel. The lobby was unchanged even down to the dust on the ancient suit of armor and the bored expression on the face of the clerk on the front desk. I leaned on the counter and asked him if he remembered us checking in the previous week.

  The man’s ratty eyes flickered up and then went back to the sports pages of the tabloid he was reading. “I think I do, sir.”

  “The man who was with me? Dr Roden? He wanted you to let him know if a message came in for him.”

  This time, he didn’t even bother looking up. “Did he, sir?”

  I opened my wallet and slipped a ten pound note over the picture of a well-endowed topless model. The clerk slid the note under the page and, this time, gave me something close to his attention.

  “So, did any message ever come in?”

  “I think it may have done, sir,” he replied. I suspected he cunningly used his slow Warwickshire drawl to hide an even slower mind. “It’s hard to be sure. We’re very busy here.”

  This time, I slid a twenty pound note across the model’s thighs. The clerk’s eyes flickered downwards and I swear he licked his lips before leaning forward and repeating his magic act with the money. His hair, I noticed, was thinning on top and liberally seasoned with dandruff, like rock salt on dried seaweed.

  “I remember now,” he said. “A fax came in for a Mr. Sadler the day after you checked out.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I got Mr. Roden’s mobile phone number off his registration form and gave it a ring.”

  I figured he wouldn’t have got anywhere with that approach. It was something I’d tried myself as, I’m sure, had the police. “You got the message service, right?”

  “I left a message and someone called me back a couple of hours later.”

  I leaned further over the counter and read his name-badge. “So, Dan? Who called you? And what did they say?”

  “I guess it was Mr. Roden who called.”

  “Would you have known his voice?”

  “I couldn’t say for sure. I only heard him talk a couple of times and you meet a lot of people in this job. Whoever it was, they said they’d send someone round to pick up the fax. Some young lad came in about an hour later and took it away.”

  I reached for a check-in form and started to fill out my address line while I thought. “Do you remember what the fax said, Dan?”

  Dan scratched his head and a thin flurry of dandruff drifted towards the desk. “I don’t really know what it was about. I suppose it looked a bit interesting, given where we are.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Stratford,” he said slowly. “We’re in Stratford.”

  I resisted the urge to reach across the counter and throttle him. “I meant, why did the fax look interesting?”

  “It looked like a bit of a Shakespeare play. Old, you know? Why, you interested in it?”

  “I could be.”

  He turned the page of the newspaper and began to scrutinize a photograph of a female Russian tennis player. I dropped another twenty. “The thing is, I found it so interesting I took a copy of it, just for my own…”

  “Interest,” I supplied.

  “Yeah.”

  “So why was it interesting?”

  He opened his left hand like a magician at a children’s party and looked down at my fifty pounds as if he was surprised to see it. “I’m trying to remember. Honest I am.”

  ***

  The photocopy ended up costing me a hundred pounds and, when I got to my room and examined it, I figured I’d likely been stung. I wondered whether Dandruff Dan actually kept a wee pile of the things to flog to gullible tourists. I’d have felt a bit more confident if he’d still had the cover page that supposedly came with it – at least then I’d have the originator’s fax number – but he claimed to have thrown it away.

  I sat on the bed, turned on the lamp and examined the paper again. Although I knew little about Shakespeare beyond school-days performances of the plays and occasional films and articles since, the page in my hand looked like a particularly bad forgery. It was a hand-written frontispiece for a play, but it was no play I’d ever heard of. The title ‘Love’s Labors Wonne’ was printed across the top of the page. I knew there was a play called ‘Love’s Labors Lost’, which made this an unusually dumb rip-off. Under the title, the page contained what looked like a cast list under the heading ‘DRAMATIS PERSONAE’ and I read it idly. The list of names began:

  Ferdinand, King of Navarre. (Burbage)

  I was sure I knew the last name. Burbage, I thought, was a famous actor in one of the theater companies from Shakespeare’s time. There were other names in similar style:

  Frederick, Longaville & Amiens, lords attending on the King. (Hemings, Phillips, Dyke)

  Boyet & Mercade, lords attending on the princess of France. (Beeston & WS)

  I wondered if the ‘WS’ was meant to be Will himself. The list continued:

  Don Adriano de Armado, a fantastical Spaniard. (Condel)

  Dull, a constable. (Will Slye)

  Costard and Touchstone, clowns. (Will Kempe & Tho Pope)

  Corin, a page. (Lowin)

  The Princess of France (Cooke)

  Rosalind & Celia, ladies attending on the princess. (Smith & Rondel)

  Jaquenetta, a country wench. (Miller)

  That was it. No sign of where the paper had come from or who was responsible for its production. I shrugged and, placing it on the bedside table next to the lamp, started to unpack my overnight bag. When I’d put my tidily-folded underclothes into drawers – army habits die hard – I picked up the sheet of paper again and, folding it in half, slid it between the covers of my half-read book on the Norman Conquest. I left the book on a table next to the bed and, leaving the room, took the lift back down to the lobby.

  When I sidled back up to Dan, the dandruff-laden receptionist listened to what I had to say and then looked at me as if he was concerned about my sanity. The banknote folded in my hand reassured him, though. After a moment, he shrugged and picked up the phone.

  Chapter 8

  The boy stood out, even among the ragtag band of tourists and commercial travelers in the lobby of the Almoner’s Alms. He paused by a mirror and I watched as he pulled the hem of his replica Chicago Bulls shirt over his low-slung jeans and checked that each spike of his over-gelled hair was correctly out of place. Satisfied that he was the coolest fifteen-year-old in Warwickshire, he sauntered up to Dan the receptionist and leaned over the counter to speak. I propped the newspaper I’d been reading under the arm of the dusty suit of armor and stood up in time to see Dan hand him a folded-up piece of paper. The boy turned to leave and Dan glanced at me and winked like a cartoon spy.

  Outside, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. The sky was heavy with clouds and the only sunshine was miles to the north of the town. Along the street from the hotel a group of tourists milled around, hunching over maps and conducting lengthy conversations while standing three-deep acro
ss the sidewalk. I elbowed my way through them and managed to stay twenty or thirty yards behind the boy as he headed up Haig Street and turned into Neal Avenue. Abruptly, he doubled back. I gazed into a shop window until he’d gone past, wondering if he’d spotted me. He didn’t look nervous, and I figured either he was following orders or he shared Dan’s secret service aspirations. I turned after him just as he disappeared into the crowds in the pedestrian precinct of Henley Street. I pushed past shops and Olde Worlde pubs, caught a flash of red shirt, saw him heading off down a quieter street to my right, made the street in time to see him turn into a narrow alley. I jogged to its entrance and peered slowly around the corner.

  The passageway was narrow and paved with uneven cobbles, the ancient brickwork of its walls relieved only by dusty windows and recessed doorways. Halfway along, the boy was offering up a one-handed greeting like a kid on a New York cop show. The man in front of him ignored the greeting and grabbed the piece of paper in his other hand. The man was turned away from me and I took in the gray slacks and tweed jacket, the arrogant set of his shoulders as he smoothed out the paper and gazed down at it. He must have been puzzled, seeing as it was a photocopy of a page from the Stratford phone directory. I stepped around the corner of the alley and walked towards them, my nose wrinkling at the smell of stale urine and tomcats. “I’m sorry about the little deception. I thought it was time we had another little chat, Dr Roden.”