"How do you know there was no secret?"
"Look, Seamus was a homeless dosser. Mentally disturbed."
"Did he give you anything?"
"No. Why would he give me anything?"
"You are absolutely certain he didn't give you anything before you came back for the tea?"
"Certain of it, why?"
"We have a witness who says he saw something pass between Seamus and yourself."
"Witness? What witness?"
"It was the guardsman in his box outside the palace. He was about a hundred and fifty yards away but he says he saw something pass."
Of course. The guardsman. I slapped my brow with my hand, suddenly "remembering." "But yes!" I jumped to my feet, and he did, too. "The explosion drove it clean out of my mind. He gave me a rolled-up scarf. It should still be in my coat pocket."
I walked out into the hall, quite relieved that I'd returned Seamus's Arab headscarf to my coat pocket, and without the exercise book. The detective was very quick to follow me out into the hall. I went for the left pocket of my coat first, then "found" it in my right pocket. "Here it is." I made as if to unwrap the scarf. "What on Earth can it be?"
He reached for it but I was too quick for him and I stepped back.
"You're going to have to give that to me, Mr. Heaney."
"Can't I even look to see what it is? He did give it to me, after all."
"It's evidence. I'm sorry. We might be able to return it to you later."
For one foolish moment I thought about holding it high in the air like the school bully with a satchel, to make the short-arse jump for it. I yielded it up to him.
"Thank you," he said. With that, he returned to the lounge and collected his notebook and pen. It seemed he was done with me.
"Can I go out now?" I asked him.
What was making me fret to go out was my lunch appointment. Somehow I'd made that arrangement with Yasmin, the lovely and intriguing woman from the Museum Tavern, and I still didn't know how or why I'd agreed to it. I wasn't certain what the point of our meeting was. I had a nagging feeling that it was what people tend to call a date.
Whatever, something made me rather nervous when I walked into The Plumber's Arms on Lower Belgrave Street. It's a slightly scruffy little waterhole, but a welcome relief from the wilderness that is Victoria. Half of the regulars in there were probably present the night in 1974 when a bloodstained and terrified Lady Lucan ran in after Lord Lucan had murdered the maid and high-tailed it. Our splendid aristocrats, they don't mess about, do they? The pub is all right but I keep seeing Lady Lucan's ghastly eyes peeping at me.
Anyway, she was there, having arrived early to save a table for us in the busy pub. Yasmin, I mean, not Lady Lucan.
She smiled. She had a glass of red wine on the table waiting for me and it was exactly the same colour as her lipstick. I don't know if this was deliberate. A trick. The light from behind the bar reflected in the wine, and her eyes, too, ran with warm catch-light. Her hair looked different from the time I'd met her in the Museum Tavern: a darker, richer mahogany contrasting with her pale skin. Her pretty dress left her arms bare. One of her exposed arms rested on the copper-topped table. A thin but expensive-looking bracelet glimmered at her wrist, drawing attention to her pale skin and the tiny blue veins at the crook of her elbow.
I sat down and unwound my silk scarf. She looked at me without blinking. Denied the ritual of ordering a drink, I felt it necessary to look away, at the bar, at the pictures on the wall, anywhere. Then I looked back at her and her eyebrow moved, I swear, microscopically.
"Well," I said.
"Well."
"You look lovely," I managed.
"Thank you." She hitched the slender strap of her dress a little higher on her shoulder.
"Have you looked at the menu?" I asked her. Two large cards lay on the table next to her white-skinned and beautifully veined arm. I grabbed one, grateful that it was the folding variety behind which I could hide my face for a moment. When I emerged to express a preference for a baguette, her hand was cupping her chin and she was still smiling at me. She summoned a waiter and ordered a baguette for each of us.
"I'm sorry," I said, "but I can't remember what our meeting is about."
She affected a stifled scream. "Haha!" she went. "Haha!"
I'm not sure why, because my question had been serious. I think. "What I mean is, I can't remember whether it was me who asked you here, or you who asked me."
"I think we asked each other."
"We did?"
"Yes, we did."
She flared her eyes slightly at me, and the gesture reminded me of someone, but I couldn't place who it was. I put the thought out of my mind. She had very mobile eyes: by which I mean that whereas some people's eyes are muddy and flat, hers seemed to be in a kind of constant flickering motion. It made me think of the invisible machine code behind a computer monitor. At least, I preferred to think it betokened a lively intelligence rather than an automaton.
Most of the lunchtime customers around us wore business suits. I asked her where she worked and she told me a little about it. When I asked her how long she'd worked there, she said too long. She obviously found it a boring subject because she kept trying to turn the conversation back onto me. I recognised the trick, and so I kept trying to do the same to her. Every so often while she was talking she would—completely unconsciously—delicately hitch the strap of her dress a little higher onto her shoulder. I don't think for a second that this was deliberate, but this reflex kept drawing my attention to her shoulders and to her neck.
The baguettes arrived. Before taking a bite, I said, "Are you certain you didn't ask me first? To come here, I mean."
"Well, yes, but I was responding to you."
I chewed on that for a moment. "You responded to me?"
"Yes. To the way you looked at me. When we were in the Museum Tavern."
"Excuse me," I said lightly, "but I don't think I looked at you in any particular way. In the Museum Tavern."
"Really?" She was able to match my levity perfectly. "Must have been my mistake."
I cast my mind back to that day. I'm pretty good at disguising my thoughts and feelings, and I'm certain I gave nothing away. Not that there was anything to give away. Except that I do remember finding her attractive, and feeling a stab of envy that Ellis was probably intimate with her, though she couldn't possibly have seen that. Then a nasty thought resurfaced. Perhaps Ellis had asked Yasmin to spy on me. Perhaps she'd been sent to check out the book deal. That would at least explain her unnatural interest in me.
"How's Brother Ellis?" I asked mildly.
"Brother Ellis? I wouldn't know. Haven't seen much of him."
"Really? You don't see him any more?"
"I never was
seeing
him, actually. He was just a friend."
"A friend."
"You don't like him, do you?"
"I'd rather have my ears cut off than have to listen to his poetry."
"As I say: he's in the past."
"And what's in the future?"
She blinked at me. The long, steady blink. "Do you believe people can speak to you without saying anything? That day, in the Museum Tavern. You looked at me and you spoke to me. Without even opening your mouth."
"I did? What did I say? Without opening my mouth."
"Oh, I can't tell you today. I will tell you. But not today."
I laughed. Not a social laugh or a polite laugh, or a let's-oil-the-conversation sort of laugh. It was unforced, a real chuckle, of the type that hadn't been triggered in a woman's presence in years. "Yasmin, you're a strange one!" I said.
"I am. Your glass is empty. Shall we have another?"
The next morning, after Fraser had slept off his bloody nose and I'd snored off my half-dozen pints of beer, I went back to his room. He was up and about. He invited me to inspect the damage I'd done to his proboscis. It had turned a peppery-burgundy hue, but I wasn't in a sympathetic mood. I wanted answers.
"I need breakfast," he said. "Let's talk on the way to the refectory."
The refectory was located in one of the much larger redbrick lodges a few hundred yards further up the Uttoxeter New Road. We had to walk past a Victorian cemetery populated with stone angels and divided from the pavement by black iron railings. Then we had to climb a short hill to get into the all-female building housing the refectory. Fraser walked very fast.
"What was all that about the dog? About someone not liking dogs?" I said.
"Some
thing
," he corrected. "Not someone."
"What
something?
What exactly?"
He coughed into his hand. "I seem to have called something into being."
I glanced over my shoulder. One of the stone angels in the graveyard, wings at half-pinion, hovered behind me. For some reason my voice lowered to a whisper. "Look, you're not making any sense."
He suddenly became angry, but he didn't break his walking pace. "What the fuck do you want me to say? I don't know myself what I've done! What can I tell you when I don't know!"
Some of the other students heading towards the refectory noticed him shouting at me as we turned off the main road and approached the gates of the female lodge. "These rituals," I said calmly, "this chalk on the floor."
"Yes," he said. "I don't know what it is I've done. But the thing I called up. It's still there."
I stopped dead in my tracks, and he did the same. "What?"
"What I said."
I looked hard into his eyes and saw real fear. His irritating bravado was all gone. He looked like what he was: a frightened kid way out of his depth.
A hundred questions swarmed into my mind, all competing to get to the front of the queue. The road to the gates of the lodge suddenly felt like a narrowing gauntlet. In the jostling and the chaos I remained dumbfounded; I couldn't think straight. A few tobacco-coloured leaves caught in a breeze swarmed around my heels. Fraser started to walk on again.
I quickly caught up with him, but we paced the next hundred yards in silence. Finally I heard myself saying, "This thing you called up. What is it?"
"I don't know."
"What does it look like?"
"Shadow. But you sense it more than see it. And a strange scent; there's always a strange smell that comes with it."
We walked through the swing doors into the refectory and took our places in the queue for the canteen. There were other students immediately in front of us as we picked up our plastic trays, and more students filed in line behind us. It was impossible to discuss this further.
I took my plate of greasy bacon and eggs and toast, and filled a mug with steaming grey coffee. There was a tremor in my stomach. Perhaps Fraser had little appetite, too, because he opted for cornflakes. We found a place in the corner but no sooner had we laid our trays on the table than were we joined by another student.
"Mornin', stranger!"
It was Mandy, my girlfriend, a cheery, leggy, hard-as-nails Yorkshire lass. Mandy had a slightly witchy look: long, jet-black hair and swimming-pool-blue eyes, and a stack of silver rings pierced through one ear. She was one of the five girls in the constellation of photographs. Fraser stiffened.
The "stranger" routine was slightly barbed because I hadn't seen her for a couple of nights. "Mandy, this is Charles."
"I've seen you around," Mandy said genially. "What did you do to your nose?"
"Tripped on the stairs."
Mandy quickly lost interest in him and turned back to me. "Where you been hiding?"
Fraser was staring at me. Maybe he was nervous about how much I might tell Mandy. I made an elaborate performance of buttering my toast. "Hiding. Now let me see. Where have I been hiding?" There was a pause. I looked at Fraser, and he looked at me.
"Have you two been smoking, this early in the day?" Mandy said with disgust.
"No," I said truthfully.
She cuffed me playfully on the back of my head: that was her way. "Liar." She was onto something; she just didn't know what. "You're giving each other some pretty far-out spaces if you haven't."
I hid myself behind my breakfast again. After a moment I felt her tanned arm and her silver bracelet laid across my own arm. I looked up and she was smiling at me. At that moment someone dropped a tray of dishes near the canteen serving hatch; an action which for reasons utterly mysterious to me was always rewarded with a loud communal cheer. While Fraser's attention was distracted, Mandy made eyes at me as if to ask me why I was hanging out with him.
But I was unable to respond, and Mandy soon had to leave to make her sociology lecture. As she gathered up her things to leave, she said, "You heard about Sandie English?"
I looked up. So did Fraser. Sandie was one of those girls who was a pillar of the Christian Union student society, but who had dark sexual appetites she kept pretty much secret. "What about Sandie English?"
"You know she had a peanut allergy?"
"I knew that."
"She went to a wedding. Ate a sandwich from the buffet with peanut traces and it killed her."
"What?"
Mandy looked at Fraser. "She was one of William's ex-girlfriends," she said. Then she added, rather unnecessarily, "One of William's
many
ex-girlfriends."
What Mandy couldn't know was that Sandie was one of the girls in Fraser's photo-gallery.
Fraser swallowed. "Happens all the time," he said.
"What?" I challenged. "Being killed by a peanut?" I was shocked. We hadn't gone out together for long but I had met Sandie's parents. They were lovely folk. In fact, I'd liked Sandie's parents more than I liked her. I was trying to think how they would feel. They would be destroyed.
"Sure," said Fraser.
I shook my head. Mandy had to leave so I made arrangements to see her later. Fraser held out his hand to her looking for a handshake, a gesture thoroughly unfashionable amongst students at the time. "Bye. Nice to meet you."
Mandy shook his hand before leaving, but in a way that clearly left her with the challenge of having to decide whether to find a washbasin before attending her lecture.