‘I used to hate the Gaudy,’ he said. ‘All those smug bloody alumni coming back and looking at you as if you’ve somehow aged more than they have. Looking at you as if you’ve achieved nothing in life.’
Wikipedia disagreed.
‘I’ve always found crime writers to be rather understanding. Some of them are even envious of us, you know, quietly eking out our allotted span in this quiet spot, while they are at the mercies of the vagaries of market forces and literary whim.’
‘Fashions do change,’ agreed the Dean. ‘And it is true some of them are up one day, down the next, but I always feel they are looking at me as if I don’t really know what it’s like.’
‘And now you do,’ smiled Wikipedia. ‘Congratulations are in order.’
Once more glasses were raised and eyes were met.
‘We’ll see,’ said the Dean. ‘To be honest, I am just glad he’s back.’
‘He must have had a rough time?’ asked Wikipedia. ‘Being a meteorologist is no fun, I imagine, especially on – Baffin Island was it?’
‘A place called Pond Inlet,’ nodded the Dean, pulling a face as if he wished he could unsay something just said.
‘Ah. Pond Inlet,’ Wikipedia said, warming to his subject. ‘A small, predominantly Inuit community in Nunavut located at the top of Baffin Island, with a population of more than 1200 people, the largest of the four hamlets above the 72nd parallel in Canada.’
‘That’s the one, but please,’ said the Dean holding up a hand. ‘I never want to hear another word about Pond Inlet ever again. I don’t know why I sent him there in the first place. I just thought it was time for something different from an English village or one of these bloody colleges.’
‘But it was a good idea, wasn’t it? An isolated and enclosed community. Lots of atmosphere. Dark at night. Well, in fact dark for very nearly six months of the year.’
‘Yes, but there was simply nothing bad to do except drink too much home-made alcohol and shoot polar bears. I wanted him to be able to solve crimes with reference to snowboot size and that sort of thing. Like Miss Smilla.’
‘Oh, Miss Smilla. Is she coming tonight?’
The Dean shook his head.
‘To be honest, I’ve never quite been able to forgive her for that strange sex stuff in the bathroom.’
‘Oh yes. When she—’
‘That’s the one,’ interrupted the Dean. ‘I suppose I should have invited her. She and Nak-ka-khoo could have talked about their feeling for snow.’
‘But his feeling for it is rather bad, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. To tell you the truth, I’ve been a bit worried about him. It seems all those years have made him a bit …’
The Dean shrugged and took a sip of his champagne.
‘Dark?’ Wikipedia suggested.
‘Yes. I suppose that’s it.’
‘In Western tradition darkness is associated with evil, or evil entities, such as demons or Satan, as well as Hell or, especially in Egyptian mythology, the underworld.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s a concept personified in the character of Darkness played by Tim Curry in a 1985 fantasy film called Legend, wherein Darkness took the form of a fifteen-foot-high stereotype of Satan, complete with reddened skin, long horns and cloven hooves.’
The slightest drawing together of those famous eyebrows suggested that the Dean had had just about enough of this sort of thing from Wikipedia.
‘You know, Professor,’ he began, ‘sometimes what begins as a character’s harmless little quirk can, over the pages of a novel, turn into something really very irritating.’
Wikipedia looked hurt.
‘You’re surely not referring to me?’
‘No, no. Of course not,’ the Dean said quickly, pouring Wikipedia another couple of inches of champagne. ‘It’s Nak-ka-khoo and his endless practical jokes. Ransacking Tom’s study like that and then giving him that fright. There’s something vengeful about it.’
‘Well, it’s hardly surprising,’ Wikipedia said, resisting for once the temptation to define. ‘I’d turn bad up there. Still, bringing him down here to murder Claire was genius. A real stroke of genius.’
‘To tell you the truth, Aldous, and this is strictly entre nous, it wasn’t entirely my idea. He’d joined a circus, you know? The one that sets up on Headington Hill. It’s where he learned to do all that acrobatic stuff he does. He was supposed to be taking care of the seals, you know, with pilchards and spinning balls and so forth, but he’d become so used to culling the damned things in Canada that – well, it didn’t go according to plan. He wanted to be a snake charmer, you know? But they said there was no call and they threw him out. He turned up here, out of the blue, as it were, without a penny in his pocket.’
‘My God. And whose idea was it get all the others involved?’
‘Ontoaste and so forth? A bit of both, to tell you the truth. I could see it would take years of churning out a novel a year for him to get anywhere and he just hasn’t got the patience, the poor thing, and so I was casting around for something really special. He spent all day brooding about his time here – about how successful the others had become. He began carving little voodoo dolls.’
‘Ah! Voodoo, or Vodun in Benin, the term applied to the branches of a West African ancestor-based spiritist-animist religious tradition that—’
‘Yes, that. Eventually I decided I’d better get him out of here. Well, he wouldn’t go back to Pond Inlet and you know I always like to get away at Christmas so, while I was looking for cheap flights, the idea occurred to me: why not use my contacts? Take him with me. The idea snowballed from there. You know – he has some pretty unique talents? We had quite a trip – Botswana, Sweden, Edinburgh, of course, for New Year, and then Virginia, and then – well, we’ve got all sorts of plans for the future.’
‘Your travel agent must have been delighted.’
‘Yes, it took some doing. Said I’d mention him – a chap called Tony at TrailFinders on Kensington High Street – if anything came of it.’
Wikipedia raised his glass again.
‘You’re a genius, Dean, an absolute genius.’
‘Not at all, Aldous, not at all. Besides, I could never have done it without you. All that information about that spear got Tom Hurst on his way.’
‘Nevertheless, Dean. Chapeaux. Chapeaux.’
‘Well, you are too kind, Aldous, old boy, but now I had better be off. They’ll start arriving soon and I want to make sure that Nak-ka-khoo is ready.’
They unhooked their gowns from the hangers and left each other in the Winter Gardens. The Dean walked briskly across the New Quad to a door in the corner, watched by a puzzled-looking Wikipedia. It was going to be a beautiful, if cold, night and the Dean could see the stars were out already. He opened the door and began the long climb up to Nak-ka-khoo’s bedroom on the fifth floor.
He was trying to think when he had ever felt more pleased with the way things were going. Wikipedia was right. He was brilliant. When he had first created Nak-ka-khoo, all those years ago now, he had been slightly too avant garde for his time, he could see that now. Out of place among all the procedurals and, of course, very foreign. Putting the boy through Cuff College had cost him dear and the long years afterwards, when no publisher in the land, not even Canongate, had been even slightly interested, had been dispiriting. Now though, now that he had brought Nak-ka-khoo down from that Godforsaken island and had him leave all those bafflingly inane clues all round the world so that Tom Hurst and those swollen-headed morons would stumble upon them, now that he had done that, the Dean was being bombarded with offers from every cash-rich publisher in the land. Six figures! And all that bloody respect he would earn.
He allowed himself a long peal of laughter that echoed across the New Quad, all the way to the New Library, where Alice Appleton sat with her head bowed over a book. The air around her still smelled of damp wood where she had scrubbed at the stains of Claire Morgan’s blood. She looked up an
d shivered. It had sounded like a hyena.
2
Landfall …
On the River Thames between London and Oxford there are no fewer than 32 locks, and piloting a submarine through each of them is not easy, even with the help of the obliging lock-keepers. It had taken Captain Carpaccia and the four detectives just three days to cross the Atlantic, following the Gulf Stream all the way from Richmond, Virginia, in the USA, to Land’s End in England, but now, as they powered their way up the Thames past Sonning, it looked like they might be late for the Gaudy.
It had been a fraught journey. Just as they had crossed the Laurentian Abyss in the North Atlantic Ocean, Captain Carpaccia explained that Creepy Lesbian Niece was incapable of letting her go, and while the submarine they were travelling in was a hi-spec super-sub, capable of 100 knots an hour, Creepy Lesbian Niece had a hi-hi-spec super-super-sub, capable of even higher speeds.
‘And hers is panelled in cherry wood, inside and out.’
This unwelcome news had haunted the crew all the way to the point where the Thames becomes the Cherwell, but by then Carpaccia had whipped all but Mma Ontoaste into shape and by the time they rose out of the turgid waters at Magdalen Bridge, morale was high.
‘Oh, Rra,’ said Mma Ontoaste, addressing Tom. ‘It has come back to where it all began. Imagine how much time and money you would have saved by being paraplegic and unable to travel.’
‘Or if you had been eight months pregnant,’ suggested Rhombus.
‘Or in an iron lung.’
‘Or a coffin.’
Despite the time that had passed since he had learned that Nak-ka-khoo had murdered Claire Morgan, Tom was still not yet in the mood for this sort of banter. He was exhausted from the effort of keeping the detectives apart and had come to the point where he did not really care for them or the case or, in fact, anything very much. He was in the grip of black nihilist rage. He could see that from the very outset he had been played with, and that perhaps a more experienced detective, or a disabled one, or a pregnant one, or even a dead one, might not have so enthusiastically pursued all the conclusions to which he had jumped.
He wondered if he ought to have kept notes on what had happened. After all, this was something that he could write up and turn if not into a bestseller, then into something at least. He studied his companions again, wondering what made them so special.
There was Mma Ontoaste, with apparently limitless reserves of compassion, bush tea and cocoa butter, as well as those cursed Botswana skies, of course, but now, after a few days under water, she looked sunken and depleted. She had not had a drink in days and had lost kilos. She had reacted the worst to their sub-aquatic confinement and had been snappish and ill-tempered ever since Captain Carpaccia had rationed her to one piece of toast at breakfast.
Meanwhile, Colander was happy doing logic problems from a back copy of The Puzzler magazine, wetting the tip of a blunted navigation pencil and filling in the answers without any trace of the hesitancy and morbid self-doubt that usually characterised his investigations. He too had lost weight and was even whistling a happy tune.
DI Rhombus, being a Scot, was used to the lack of sun and the cramped and noisome conditions. He had kept himself busy trying to recall all the goals scored by (or, more trickily, against) the Scotch national football side in World Cup competitions. With no privacy on the sub, he had been unable to Dwell on his Time in the SAS and, although he had tried to suggest that crime writers were really frustrated rock stars, Tom had only had to mention PD James to stop him taking that line too far.
And if Captain Carpaccia had been strangely muted and thoughtful, Tom put it down to the responsibility she had shouldered as captain of the SS Stalker. It occurred to him that perhaps she would be happier being the captain of a pleasure cruiser or maybe the unelected head, or fuehrer even, of a small but mightily well-armed boutique nation-state, rather than an implausibly tetchy mortician with an inquisitive streak.
‘Stand by,’ ordered Carpaccia as they approached the wharf by Magdalen Bridge, deserted now, with the punts neatly stored for the winter.
‘DI Rhombus, throw a line, will you?’
‘A line? You mean a joke?’
‘Rope. Tie a rope onto a bollard so we can tie up.’
Rope. Old rope. It was then that it really struck Tom. That was their genius: their ability to recycle rope. It was the same old rope every time, wasn’t it? Braided and plaited, bound and knotted in subtly different ways, but ultimately always the same piece of rope, the same personal piece of rope that they had started with, uncoiled, re-coiled, twisted and woven in different ways. It was this secret, this shared knowledge, that gave them all this grumbling pleasure in each other’s company.
The submarine docked with a gentle bump and Colander, first out of the hatch, lowered the gangway from the conning tower and held it steady as Mma Ontoaste led them onto dry land. It was dark and the air crisp and almost too sharp to breathe after the fug of the submarine. For a moment they looked like five drunks, staggering along Musgrave Street, too hurried to take the time to let their sea legs acclimatise to the dry land. Ahead of them were the flambeaux in sconces in the wall of the façade of Cuff College, lit to celebrate the Gaudy.
‘My God, it has hardly changed at all!’ puffed Colander. ‘Or perhaps it is we who have not changed?’
Tom could almost hear Rhombus rolling his eyes at this remark. The two men had bickered on the trip over, but had never come to blows – possibly because Mma Ontoaste had withdrawn her favours from both and slept in her own chaste berth next to Captain Carpaccia. Mma Ontoaste was used to solving such awkward problems.
The porter stepped from his lodge to say something to them as they crossed Sjuzet Bridge, where, it seemed years ago now, Tom had stopped to finish his cigarette.
‘What’s all this, then?’ he started, but stopped and stared open-mouthed. It occurred to Tom only then that although they had grown used to the sight of one another, to others they might look unusual. With the exception of Carpaccia – who was wearing a full naval outfit in keeping with her rank as captain of a submarine – they were still in full Highland fig and looked terribly drunk.
Carpaccia had been half expecting the porters to stop her and throw her out of the College, as they had done all those years before over the missing adverbs and the case of the misunderstood thesaurus, and so she had her trusty Tokyo Marui M4 R.I.S. automatic rifle at the ready. The porter stepped back into the warmth of his lodge and let the door shut quietly behind him.
3
Unexpected guests …
The Dining Hall of Cuff College is a splendid room, longer than it is wide, with a high, ribbed ceiling from which chandeliers hang on long chains. The walls are punctuated with heavy oil portraits in baroque frames and the dark wood panelling is etched with faded gold letters to mark long-since-forgotten academic or sporting success. At one end of the room, under a stained-glass window that shows Cain murdering Abel, a high table is raised on a dais. Below this are two further tables, each more than 30 foot long, filled that night with the brightest and the best in detective fiction, including most of the Americans who had come over on scholarships, the Swedes and all the other more marginal characters at work in the Genre today. The din of conversation and chink of china and cutlery was constant. Waiters darted up and down the lines of men and women, all in their finest, serving what was roundly agreed to be execrable food and indifferent wine.
The Dean sat at the top table, with a very large female police commissioner from Manchester on one hand and a glamorous forensic scientist from Montreal on the other. He was laughing at a joke he had made and taking compliments on the very fine speech he had just delivered in the Junior Common Room.
‘So, Dean,’ purred the forensic scientist whose name – something like Tempura (but no one would be named after a type of batter, surely?) – the Dean could not get the hang of. ‘Where is the hero of the hour?’
‘Ah! Nak-ka-khoo? He is over there.
Talking to a publisher.’
They studied the scene. Nak-ka-khoo did not look like a terribly graceful dinner companion: he was a stranger to conversation and he had spent long enough in the tundra to know that you eat when there is food, starve when there is none, and so he was forcing food and wine into his mouth, his eyes all the while resolutely bolted to the cleavage of the dark-haired woman sitting on the opposite side of the table. Nak-ka-khoo was a wolfish-looking man, with long dark hair and a sallow, closed face. His body was somehow ill-suited to the constraints of a bow-tie and dinner shirt.
‘Oh, he looks charming,’ murmured the woman, not for a second meaning it. ‘I hear he can skin a polar bear in less than a minute?’
‘Yes. It is just one of his party pieces,’ the Dean agreed. ‘He is also a talented snake charmer. He can do it with just an ocarina and a dab of Vaseline.’
‘But he can’t speak English?’
‘Not very well,’ admitted the Dean with a sigh. ‘That has held him back, I must say, and made him rather frustrated.’
The Dean had hoped any Nak-ka-khoo adventures would be translated into English, of course, but he had timed it badly; just as soon as there was an appetite for foreign detective fiction among general readers, the Crime Writers’ Association had barred translations from their awards. The Dean would now have to teach Nak-ka-khoo English if he was ever to get the Golden Dagger he so coveted.
The Dean took a sip of his wine and speared a slice of watery courgette on his fork. Further down the table was Alice Appleton, looking, the Dean thought, very fetching in some dark-blue dress that showed off her shoulders and what he could only think of as her upper chest. She was listening to Wikipedia banging on about something.
‘A chicken can be hypnotised too, you know,’ he was saying, his mind obviously very much on Nak-ka-khoo. ‘By holding its head down and continuously drawing a line along the ground with a stick, starting at its beak and extending straight outwards in front. It’ll remain immobile for anywhere between 15 seconds to 30 minutes, continuing to stare at the line.’
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