A Ghost at the Door (16 page)

‘Ah.’ His position outflanked, Sir Cecil sighed and shook his wattles. ‘I’ve heard his name mentioned. Let us make enquiries. Kathy!’ He turned to the busy room and
summoned a colleague who was part of a group that had gathered around the mantelpiece above an unlit grate. ‘Katherine is the money man around here, knows where everything is buried –
Kathy, my dear, Ali Abu al-Masri. What can you tell us?’

Katherine Pontefract was no more than five foot four, even in heels, which caused her to bounce on the balls of her feet as she spoke as if to gain height and look the others in the eye. Her
eyes were dark and intense, and a little weary, her hair cropped short and a surprising shade of claret. ‘Ali was a great loss to this college,’ she declared in a voice cut from the
working face of a Yorkshire coal pit, and stroking the bridge of her nose with a forefinger as though inspecting for dust. ‘A regular donor and a great authority on Middle Eastern matters.
Perhaps too great an authority, mind, flew too close to the flame. Got himself assassinated, in Beirut, I think it was, about ten years ago, perhaps a little more. One of those interminable
political feuds.’

‘He was a politician?’ Harry asked.

‘Who isn’t in the desert?’ she replied, bobbing. ‘But he wasn’t exactly a politician, not officially. More of a . . . a facilitator, a constructor of networks, a
man who pitched his tent in many places.’

‘Not all of them very welcoming, apparently,’ Harry added drily.

‘It was most distressing.’

‘He was a friend of my father’s. I was wondering if they might have been in business together. Tell me, what business was Mr al-Masri in?’

Pontefract leveraged herself to her full extent with an expression that suggested Harry might have trodden on the most sensitive of corns. ‘I have absolutely no idea. Not the
slightest.’ Her voice was firm, brooking no contradiction, even though Harry didn’t believe a word. ‘It’s enough, don’t you think, that he was an alumnus of this
college and willing to help educate a new generation of young men and women?’

‘As was my father, I believe.’

‘Your father?’

‘Johnnie Maltravers-Jones.’

At the mention of Johnnie’s name she relaxed a little, stopped bobbing. ‘Who was also a generous benefactor. Great pity he’s no longer with us.’

Harry suspected she was talking about his money rather than any social loss. While Kathy Pontefract wittered away, the door of the Common Room opened once more and an elderly man entered. He was
tall, stood out among the crowd, with a long, finely chiselled face and high cheekbones that bore the blush of a life spent facing into the wind. His hair was thick for his age, well cut and
remarkably white; his manner was confident and his blue eyes were alert, taking in everything around him. A colleague reached for his sleeve but the man merely dipped his head politely, moved on,
intent on discovering more challenging game. He was threading his way elegantly through the throng when he saw Harry and his face clouded in bewilderment. Then, with barely half a pause of
hesitation, he crossed directly to him.

‘Harry? Harry Jones? Why, what a coincidence.’

‘No, we don’t believe in such things,’ Sir Cecil declared.

‘I’m sorry, do we know each other?’ Harry asked, mystified.

The other man extended his hand and smiled generously. The grip was firm. ‘My name’s Alexander McQuarrel. I knew your father. And you, too, when you were much younger – about
eight, I think you were, the last time. And recently I met your lovely partner, Miss Laing. Didn’t she mention it?’

Something else he and Jemma hadn’t got round to discussing, it seemed. ‘No. I’ve been away.’

‘Yes, she said.’

And before they could take the matter further they were distracted as the steward summoned them to dinner.

‘Perhaps we can talk afterwards,’ McQuarrel suggested.

‘If you’ve got time.’

‘For you, Harry – if I may call you Harry – I’ll make the time. We have much to discuss.’

‘Is Tamanna coming?’

‘She left a message. She’ll be half an hour late.’

‘And Laurie?’

‘He’s always half an hour late.’

‘Then I suppose we’d better get started,’ the convener, Hayley, said with an air of resignation as she opened her folder.

The small group was seated around an over-varnished bar table in a corner of a South London pub, all teachers from neighbouring schools gathered to form the coordinating committee tasked with
agreeing the arrangements for the Annual Inter-School Water and Waves Festival. There was a time when it had simply been called a swimming competition until some razor mind had decided that sounded
all too judgemental.

‘Hi, J,’ a voice said.

Jemma looked up, startled, as a bottle of Mexican beer with a lime in its mouth was put in front of her and Steve Kaminski slipped into the seat beside her. ‘Steve, I didn’t know . .
.’

‘What, that I’m on the coordinating committee? Would you have returned my phone calls if you’d known?’

‘I’ve been busy. You know what it’s like in a summer term.’ It sounded pathetic, they both knew it, and she reached for the beer. Her favourite brand. ‘You
remembered.’

‘Of course.’

‘That’s spooky. You keep a file or something?’

‘Of course.’

‘You’re kidding!’ she cried in alarm.

He burst into laughter. ‘Oh, J,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t need a file to remember everything about you.’

She couldn’t stop herself from blushing. She bent her head pretending to study the papers in front of her, hoping he hadn’t noticed, knowing he had.

The diners, about twenty in number and all in their gowns, wound their way up a narrow stone staircase until in a single step they had burst upon what to Harry seemed like the
stage of an awesome theatre. The High Table on which they were about to dine stood on a raised platform overlooking a Tudor hall with soaring roof timbers cut from dark oak, ornate ancient windows
that glittered in the evening light and, in the heart of the hall, three rows of age-polished tables. Chattering undergraduates were already seated. It was like a scene from Hogwarts, which even
Sir Cecil would admit was no mere coincidence: this was where the set designers had found their inspiration. The ancient walls of Hogwarts had been covered with portraits of wizards; here there
were monarchs and prime ministers and imperial viceroys and bishops. Despite its pageantry, this place had seen its own share of dark practices. It was where the deluded Charles I had convened his
parliament after being forced to flee London. It was also where, a little later, Cromwell’s victorious troops had stabled their horses as an act of contempt. Yet the ancient customs survived.
The grace, a lengthy one, was delivered in Latin.

Sir Cecil sniffed cautiously at the claret. ‘Your father would have supped better, Harry,’ he declared. ‘In his day the college cellars were renowned. Source it, lay it down,
wait for the right moment. Time was meaningless – until we discovered one of the undergraduates was selling large quantities of our vintage port outside college at one helluva markup. We
encourage enterprise, of course, but there are limits.’

‘What became of him?’

‘The young man? Governor of the Bank of England.’ He shook his head in sorrow. ‘Our fault, of course. We became too indulgent. Too set in our ancient ways. We should have swept
places like this away when we were in government, Harry, don’t you think? After all, how are we to justify it? Oh, a fine history, that I grant, but what has this place achieved
recently?’ He sipped at his claret, seeming still uncertain.

‘Apart from Albert Einstein, of course,’ Katherine Pontefract chipped in, almost as an afterthought.

‘And John Gurdon. The biologist chap. Won a Nobel Prize the other year, didn’t he?’ McQuarrel added.

Sir Cecil waved a languid hand. ‘Auberon Waugh, W. H. Auden, William Walton – but I don’t suppose they count.’

‘The last Archbishop of Canterbury, he was one of ours.’

‘And that Indian fellow who runs Tata Steel.’

‘Going to rack and ruin,’ Sir Cecil concluded.

‘Except for a few Olympic athletes, I suppose. And the chap who worked out the connection between smoking and cancer,’ Pontefract said.

‘Yes, damn him.’

‘Enough!’ Harry acknowledged, waving his fork and smiling. This was clearly a routine they enjoyed. ‘I get the point.’

‘And there was your father, of course,’ McQuarrel interjected, more softly.

‘This place would have fallen down like rotten Cheddar on our heads long ago without people like him,’ Pontefract said. ‘Raise young minds and repair old buildings,
that’s what he helped us do.’

‘I’d never seen him in that light,’ Harry said, struggling with his food; he still hadn’t mastered the art of eating with his arm in a cast.

‘There was something special about those who came here in the sixties,’ Sir Cecil said. ‘What made them different, I wonder? Something to do with the rejection of dreary
postwar conformity, perhaps, the embracing of new ideas.’

‘And each other,’ Pontefract added, arching an over-plucked eyebrow.

‘But it was more than that,’ McQuarrel said. ‘I was a junior research fellow at Brasenose at the time and those friendships weren’t simply struck, they also stuck, had a
habit of enduring.’

‘I don’t think my father had any close friendships,’ Harry said.

‘But you’re wrong, Harry,’ McQuarrel replied. ‘I like to think that I was his friend, and there were many closer than me.’

It was after they were done with dinner and back in the Senior Common Room that Harry produced the photo from his pocket. He laid it on the coffee table around which they had gathered and tried
with less than total success to smooth out the conspicuous central fold. ‘These were some of his friends. I wonder if you can help me.’

‘Damn, but you look just like him,’ Pisani said.

Harry frowned. He was fed up with hearing that. ‘I know who three of these are’ – he pointed to his father, Susannah Ranelagh and al-Masri – ‘but as for the other
four . . .’

‘Why, that’s surely Christine Leclerc,’ Pisani interrupted, stabbing at one of the women in the photo with his finger. ‘Christine Berserk, we used to call her. Hell of a
woman, even in her fifties. Fine features, look at those cheekbones. Unmistakable. Didn’t you ever meet her, Harry?’

He shook his head.

‘The most senior woman in the European Commission, she was. Immensely powerful. Could cut a budget proposal in half at fifty paces.’

‘And now?’

‘Oh, dead and gone.’

Harry’s coffee suddenly tasted intensely bitter. Another one who hadn’t made it. ‘How?’

‘Plane crash. Private jet on her way back from the Sudan on some aid mission. Came down in a freak storm. Don’t you remember? Perhaps not, it was probably before you got into
politics.’

‘And this rather righteous-looking specimen’ – McQuarrel indicated the figure on the far right – ‘is surely another of our old boys, Randall Wickham, the Bishop of
Burton. Yes, give him a haircut and a mitre and a few decades and that’s Randy. See, he’s lost the top of his little finger, bitten off by a Yorkshire terrier when he was a kid. Always
notice that when I see him giving the benediction.’

‘You know him?’

‘Not desperately. He delivers a sermon in the cathedral here occasionally. Enjoys his college port.’

‘Still alive and kicking?’

‘Well, preaching, at least. Retired by now, I suspect.’

‘My father – and a bishop?’ Harry shook his head in disbelief.

‘Forgiveness on tap,’ McQuarrel said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t being flippant.

‘A final drink, J?’ Kaminski asked as Jemma shuffled together her papers at the end of the meeting.

‘For old times’ sake?’

‘Something like that.’

She hesitated. ‘OK.’

He had been full of humour and insight as Hayley the convener had sniffled her way through the agenda and her latest allergy. Steve didn’t deserve unnecessary grief. And he seemed in
excellent shape, the thigh that in the crush had nestled up against hers still rock-hard from his rugby and squash. She remembered everything about his body being gratifyingly solid. That played no
part in her decision, of course, and no part at all in her barely noticing that their final drink had been followed by another. She was relaxing, having a good time. Too good a time. His eyes were
full of music, and mischief. Typical bloody Steve.