Four Thousand Days, page 18
‘Thank you.’ Angela turned up the collar of her coat and Adam linked his arm in hers. ‘I’ll be in soon. Goodnight.’
‘’Night.’
At the front door, they had a quick word with Jenkins, having woken him up, Adam keeping Angela on the lee side, away from any wandering hands. They had the problem of all parties the world over since the first hominid shared a bit of leftover mammoth with his neighbour. How to walk away from someone you have spent the evening with, without seeming rude. But eventually, the small talk petered out and, with gestures as to which way would lead them home, they turned, two to the left, one to the right, into Gower Street.
Reid took a few steps and turned to watch the other two. He would not have said he was lonely, but he missed the company of younger people and watching Angela and Crawford walking arm in arm, his fair head bent to her dark one, her face turning up to his for what he assumed was an illicit kiss, made him feel young again. He smiled; they had it all to come and he hoped that the smiles would outweigh the tears. As he turned to continue his walk back to his hotel, he heard Tom behind him, talking to Jenkins behind the closed doors of the University building. He smiled again. Tom was one of the bad ’uns he wouldn’t mind meeting again. His crimes never hurt anyone, except in the pocket, and he was pleased to see that he had made good. It had been a long time coming, but he had made it in the end.
Turning his collar up and rewrapping his scarf against the cold and foggy night, he set off. The Tambour House Hotel was a step up from his temporary home in Hampton-on-Sea. Instead of the terrifying Mrs Mulvahey there was a rather snooty clerk in attendance at the front desk, the day one being rather the snootier of the two. He pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket after much fumbling with layers of coat and scarf and noted with approval that the night clerk would be on duty now. He had discovered that with the swift application of a florin, he could have a brandy and hot chocolate delivered to his room. He squared his shoulders and picked up his pace; if he didn’t dawdle, he could be there in another twenty minutes or thereabouts.
Angela and Crawford wandered slowly and even more slowly as her front door drew nearer. The evening had been a success until the last few minutes and Angela was beginning to feel a little silly for reacting so badly to finding her essay languishing there. After all, how much did it matter, in the end? She had her degree, she had been taken on to do further research towards yet another and she would be a doctor soon, perhaps, like Margaret Murray. And yet … she snuggled up to the warm body next to her and clutched his arm a little tighter. Was that, when everything was said and done, what she wanted out of life? Was being a wife and mother that bad? Bringing children into the world, teaching them all she knew; that was all right, surely?
Finally, they reached the front door. However slowly you walked, Crawford thought, a destination would be reached eventually. He turned to Angela and pulled her to him. This evening, being invited as a couple, walking home alone in the cold in companionable silence, seemed to be a bit of a watershed. Something had happened, but he wasn’t sure what.
‘Adam, I’ve been thinking …’
Ah, perhaps he knew what now. He had heard those words, not often but often enough, before.
‘What? What have you been thinking? Because I have also been thinking.’ Better to take the bull by the horns.
‘It’s about my degree …’
‘It’s about us …’
‘I don’t want to do it any more …’
‘Will you marry me?’
‘I just want to get married, have babies … pardon?’
‘What?’
And after that, silence.
ELEVEN
Tom didn’t like old Jenkins much, but knew the importance of not annoying the bloke with the key. He had built up quite a nice little sideline in private catering and if you had to argue the toss with the doorman when setting up and clearing afterwards, it became more of a pain than a pleasure. So he passed a few pleasantries with the man, made appropriate noises relating to the neatness of Angela’s face and figure and then, as soon as was politic, made his way out and stood on the step, listening to the bolts being shot behind him.
He worried a little about the Prof. She didn’t often get blindsided and although he thought that probably it was good for her sometimes, her little face in the lamplight when he had looked in to say goodnight was quite heartrending. She needed a good man in her life, not those dusty professors, many of whom had less than academic thoughts about her, he knew. She needed someone to take her out of herself. He smiled to himself; he knew he was the very man, but that it would only happen should hell choose to freeze over. He only had to cross the road and head down a bit, but even so, the night was chilly, so he turned up his collar and wrapped his scarf a bit closer and stepped down to the kerb. There was little traffic at this time of night but he looked both ways, even so. Of Angela and Crawford there was no sign. Off to his right, he could see the stocky figure of Edmund Reid, pacing smartly along Gower Street, just about to turn right into Gower Place. He watched him, almost fondly. Some coppers he wouldn’t piss on if they were afire, but Reid was one of the good ones. Too many of that sort had gone now, leaving the Blunts to rule the roost. Tom shook his head; times were changing with the century and not necessarily for the better, either.
Then, just as Reid turned into the side road, Tom saw something that made him look twice. A dark shadow had detached itself from a portico opposite the turn and was crossing the road, keeping to the shadows where it could. It was hard to tell, in the fog and the dark, who it might be but Tom knew that posture. The slight bend to the back, the hat pulled down, the collar up. The shoulders hunched and the face turned away from any light. Tom stepped down on to the pavement and started up Gower Street at a half run. Reid was being followed, and by no well-wisher either, if he was any judge. Tom felt for the knife roll in his inside pocket; all present and correct. He chuckled, but quietly. Being a cook made ‘going equipped’ a whole new thing; who would have guessed, years ago, that he would be carrying a ten-inch blade as part of his work tools and be on the right side of the law?
He turned the corner and, for a moment, couldn’t see anyone. Then he got his eye in and saw Reid, still stomping along at a goodish pace, considering his little legs. His follower was nowhere in sight and Tom began to wonder if he had imagined the whole thing and it was just some innocent householder heading home with his coat collar turned up against the damp. He skidded to a halt, glad that he hadn’t hailed Reid as he caught up with him. He would have felt a proper Charlie. He turned to go, just as a man leapt out of an area and ran at Reid, knocking him to the ground.
Tom broke into a run, not a trot as before and as he got nearer could hear the thud as the man’s fists landed on Reid’s jaw. Reid was doing his best, but he had been taken by surprise and was winded. He was fighting for breath with whooping sounds and clawed at his assailant as best he could, between blows. What Tom couldn’t hear, though, to his surprise, was any words. He had made up his mind as he had followed the men that the attacker was a disgruntled old lag who had discovered that Reid was back in the manor and wanted to get his own back. In Tom’s experience, attacks of this kind usually came with streams of invective; it was no good beating a man to a pulp if he didn’t know why you were doing it. And if it got you your collar felt the next day; well, that was the price you paid for putting a copper in the hospital. But the man was just punching in silence. That just wasn’t right.
Tom felt as though he were running through treacle, but it was only seconds before he got there, fumbling for his knife roll as he ran. He grabbed the man on top by the back of the collar and hauled him off the fallen detective, leaving the older man rolling on the ground, catching his breath. Tom swung a mistimed haymaker at the other, who he could tell was younger and fitter than either him or Reid, but clearly inexperienced.
Despite the punches, Reid was now on his hands and knees; that many landed by anyone with half an idea of fighting would have half killed a man of Reid’s age and condition. Even so, that youth and fitness was not for nothing. The man twisted out of Tom’s grasp and aimed a sneaky knee which missed Tom’s essentials by a whisker. It was at that point that Tom felt his patience give out altogether. For a bludger to knock a copper about was one thing. For some random rampsman to whale into an elderly gent with the probable intent to rob, that was entirely another. When that same rampsman then tried to knee him in his tackle, it was no holds barred. To add insult to injury, he was wearing a scarf tied tightly round the lower half of his face. Tom didn’t hold with disguise. If you couldn’t go out thieving wearing the face the good God gave you, then you shouldn’t go out at all, in his opinion.
The next knee found its mark and Tom collapsed in a world of pain, his knife roll clattering to the pavement, scattering its contents as it did so. Tom grabbed for the younger man’s leg and brought him down. He held on to a sleeve and reached for a knife. His hand closed round a familiar handle. Damn! It was only the parer, but it was better than nothing. Still seeing the world through dancing lights, he lashed out wildly. He knew he had found his mark, because he heard a hissed intake of breath, followed by running feet.
He rolled over on the pavement and came eye to eye with Edmund Reid, leaning back against the railings of the nearest house, fetching his breath in shuddering gasps.
‘Well, Tom,’ he said at last. ‘Almost like the old days, eh?’
Tom nodded, about all he could manage. Then, ‘I hope your hotel ain’t far, Mr Reid,’ he said. ‘Because I don’t think I’ll be able to carry you if it is.’
‘Carry me, Tom? I’ll carry you if you like.’
Giggling like schoolgirls, from the shock and pain, using each other and the railings to clamber upright, the ex-burglar and the ex-policeman stood there, clutching each other in relief.
‘Hello, hello, hello,’ a voice said, almost in their ears. A bull’s-eye lantern flashed its shafts of light. ‘This is a respectable street, gents. Now, run along before I run you in.’
And the two men, brothers under the skin, limped off, to give the night clerk at the Tambour House Hotel the surprise of his life.
The History department and the department of Archaeology had circled each other for years, like duellists back in the good old days, before there were any rules. Each looked on the other as inferior, an interloper making a mockery of the highest intellectual discipline known to man.
But sometimes, in the search for the truth, the devil drove, and Margaret Murray knocked on the study door of Professor Hilary Mayhew, a man as regius as they came.
‘Hilary,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’
Mayhew stood up, a tall and still imposing figure despite the fact that he looked as though he should have cobwebs trailing from his obsolete Dundrearies. ‘It’s Mildred, isn’t it?’ He was putting his pen away.
‘Margaret,’ she corrected him. ‘Margaret Murray.’
‘Yes, of course. Have a seat, would you?’
She would. And did.
‘How can I help?’ he asked. ‘Some nugget of historical perspicacity which will lighten your darkness?’
‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘I know ancient Rome is a speciality of yours.’
‘Ancient Rome,’ he said, ‘ancient Greece. Byzantium. Oh, and the early Church, of course. We must never forget the early Church.’
‘No, indeed,’ Margaret smiled. ‘I’ve come across a reference in one of my students’ researches, to a first-century troublemaker called Joseph. Can you shed any light?’
‘Troublemaker?’ Mayhew repeated.
‘Turbator.’ Margaret gave him the Latin original.
‘What’s the context?’
‘Something found in an outpost of a Roman fort near Herne Bay in Kent. Specifically, the line was “Josephus turbator ex Judea hic est”.’
‘The troublemaker from Judea …’ Mayhew was translating.
‘Is here.’ She ended the sentence for him.
‘You’re sure the Latin is correct?’ he checked. In his experience, the purest language in the world, and students’ evaluation of it rarely lived up to expectations.
‘Absolutely,’ she said.
‘Well, what do you want to know?’
‘Who this Josephus was,’ she told him.
‘And you’re sure about the date?’ he asked. ‘First century? Later?’
‘First, I am reliably informed,’ she said.
‘Well, Mildred, it’s not likely to be Titus Flavius Josephus. He has no links with Britannia at all.’
‘What about Joseph of Arimathea?’ she asked him.
Mayhew laughed, his cheeks widening and his side-whiskers floating in the draught from his slightly open window. ‘My good woman, this is the department of History, not the Music Hall. Joseph of Arimathea is the product of the deranged mind of William Blake, poet, artist and visionary. There’s a tree in Glastonbury he’s supposed to have planted – Joseph, that is, not Blake. But it’s all legend, Mildred, a fairy story. Surely even an archaeologist knows that?’
Margaret stood up, clearly getting nowhere with this man.
‘Yes, Hilary,’ she said. ‘I knew that. And my name is still Margaret, by the way.’
George Carey Foster was pacing his enormous study, arms locked behind his back as if in irons, his brow wrinkled and his jaw grim. In all his years in academe, he had never known anything like this. He’d known difficult colleagues, obstreperous students, the odd rogue chaplain, but never anything like this. One of his senior department heads, no less, had been … what was that ludicrous police phrase? Interviewed under caution. The next step, which was clear to everybody, was an arrest for murder.
There was a timid knock on the door and a cowed secretary ushered an even more cowed senior department head into the principal’s office. Walter Inkester had lost the dash and fire he usually had; a day and a half in the cells of Scotland Yard had cured him of that. He looked old and haggard, his skin pale and crusty, rather more like a man whose head was barely bobbing above water at Execution Dock.
Foster waited until the lowly woman had gone and Inkester had slunk into a chair before he delivered his broadside. ‘The youngest graduate out of Oxford in years,’ he said, circling the man as he laid out his greatness and his former glory. ‘The Philomena Kardashian Prize for Zoology; the discoverer of the role of ascariasis roundworm in the yak; accolades and plaudits from …’ – and he shuddered as he said it – ‘Harvard and Yale. An emeritus chair when you leave us at the very least. God, man, there was even talk of a knighthood.’
‘I—’ was as far as Inkester was likely to get today.
‘All of it flushed down one of Mr Twyford’s toilets. It can only be a matter of time, Walter, before the Yard comes knocking on your door again. And I have to say …’ – he closed to his man, eyes burning into his – ‘it doesn’t look good.’
‘I—’
‘Yes, well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? Let me play devil’s advocate for the moment.’
Walter Inkester didn’t know that Carey Foster could play anything else.
‘Your wife is having an affair with one of your colleagues …’
‘I—’
‘Don’t give me that tripe, Walter. Of course you knew. The whole wretched business is so sordid. They’re having an affair and you get wind of it. Instead of sorting it out behind closed doors, via a solicitor of repute and discretion, you knock the man’s brains out.’
‘I—’
‘And you didn’t even have the chutzpah to do it in some dark alley. No – you did it here, in Norman’s own room at University College. However this ends, Walter, I expect your resignation by the end of the day.’
‘I—’
‘Oh, it’s too late for all that now.’
There was a sharp rap at the door and Carey Foster broke off his attack. ‘Come in,’ he growled.
A little woman stepped into the room, followed by a much larger man.
‘Principal.’ Flinders Petrie nodded in the man’s direction. ‘You sent for us.’
‘Walter.’ Margaret Murray laid a colleaguely hand on the man’s shoulder. It was the first gentle touch that he had felt in years. He wanted to cry.
‘That’s enough of that, Margaret,’ Carey Foster snapped. ‘I was just in the process of telling Inkester here the appalling opprobrium he has brought to the college.’
‘Why, pray?’ Margaret raised an eyebrow.
For a moment, words failed the principal of University College and one sleeve of his gown slipped off his shoulder. ‘Why, madam?’ he shouted. ‘Why?’ He was turning all colours of the rainbow.
‘George,’ Petrie said quietly. ‘Think of your blood pressure.’
‘I am thinking of the Press headlines!’ Foster bellowed. ‘Have you seen this?’ He held up the first of several papers on his desk. ‘“Lecturer in archaeology found dead”. That’s headline news, above the piece about Kruger doing a runner out of South Africa.’
‘That’s just The Times …’ Petrie dismissed it.
‘What about this? The Mail. “Archaeologist becomes a body”. Another attempt on the Tsar’s life is buried on page three.’
‘Alfred Harmsworth.’ Petrie stood his ground. ‘What can you expect?’
‘The Star.’ Foster waved it in the air. ‘Front page news – “Godless goings on at the Godless Institution”. And on their page three, they’ve got …’ – and he shuddered anew – ‘an advertisement for knickerbockers.’
‘The Rational Dress League believes—’ Margaret felt the need to defend the new fashion.
‘Damn the Rational Dress League to hell!’ Foster thundered. ‘My college – our college’ – his demon eyes raked them all – ‘on the front page of every newspaper in the country, I shouldn’t wonder. God knows what’ll happen when the Illustrated Police News gets hold of it.’
A ghastly silence fell on the principal’s study. In the outer office, the three secretaries who had had their respective ears glued to the door broke away and got back to their typing. Foster did his best to compose himself and sat down for what seemed the first time that day.
