Engleby (20 page)

I had hoped that Townsend might intercede on my behalf, but he seemed hypnotised by the activity around us. When Peck addressed him, he was deferential.

‘Very well, Inspector. Certainly.’ Then he tried to establish his superiority with some donnish phrases: ‘Do by all means proceed. I’m quite sure the means are proportionate to the end.’

Peck looked at him as though he was mad.

Eventually, after we’d stood around for about two hours, Peck called off the search and the officers all gathered at the door.

‘Right,’ said Peck to Townsend. ‘This staircase is out of bounds until further notice. You’ll have to find rooms for the other students until we’ve finished.’

‘How long will that be?’

Peck looked at the pathologist. ‘Two days at least.’

‘I shall tell the Senior Tutor at once.’

We walked through Clock Court and on to the main gate.

‘Goodbye, Inspector. Good luck with the investigation,’ said Townsend, risking a light irony now that all seemed safe.

‘We’ll be back at seven in the morning,’ said Peck, not returning the winsome smile. ‘Tell the porter.’

When they’d gone, we went to the domestic bursar’s office and sorted out which college guest room I could live in till they’d finished with mine. Then we went back to the porters’ lodge to sign a book and get the key.

Outside, looking over Front Court, I said to Townsend, ‘I feel a bit anxious about all this. Could I ask you to—’

‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ said Townsend tightly. He looked at his watch. ‘Oh dear. Supervision.’

He ran away over the lawn in the middle of Front Court (only Fellows were allowed on the grass, but I’d never seen one run before); he cantered pretty quickly, as it happened, with a high-stepping action, till he vanished in the shadows of the Hawksmoor cloister.

That night I went to the Kestrel, but my headache was so bad I couldn’t enjoy it, and I had to go back to my guest room, where I listened to the radio. I tried to do some work, but it was hard to concentrate. I looked in on the TV room, where I’d seen Robin Wilson’s performance, but there was nothing worth watching. I ended up in the college bar, not a place I normally go outside Folk Club. I once worked a shift on the bar with Dave Carling when Brian, the professional, went home at nine. After we’d shut up at eleven, Dave and I stayed behind and drank a shot of every drink on sale. By midnight the only ones we hadn’t got through were gin and Newcastle Brown. So we did them together in a half-pint mug, and that’s not a mixture that I’d recommend.

The bar was full of amateur drinkers with halves of gassy keg bitter, playing table football and smoking No. 6. It wasn’t fun.

When I got back to my guest room, on the ground floor of Dr Woodrow’s staircase, oddly enough, I felt detached from what was going on. I began to inspect the surfaces of the room closely, though I felt alienated by their texture. Wood, cloth, Formica, carpet, enamel.

It was a little like that time in Izmir. I felt I was beginning to unravel. It was as though all the molecules that made the entity known as ‘Mike Engleby’ had been kept in place by some weird centripetal force – which had unaccountably failed. Now those particles were flying outward into chaos.

I suppose all human ‘personalities’ are at some level makeshift or provisional, but it’s unusual to feel oneself come apart in such a molecular way.

The next forty-eight hours were bad. I was taking four of those blue ten-milligram pills a day as well as some Tuinal I’d found in my sponge bag. Yet I’d still hardly slept.

Eventually, Peck and his men cleared out of my staircase. I didn’t immediately return but stayed an extra night in the guest room so Mrs Lumbago could get in and tidy up the mess they’d left. She was indignant about this extra work, even though she’d had three days off completely.

Peck came to see me one last time before he left the college and moved his inquiry on to . . . To somewhere else. Hopeful Hall. Lucky Dip Alley. The lounge bar of the Bow at a Venture. Or even to Oxford, for all I know, home of lost maids’ causeways.

‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ I asked.

He was standing in front of the restored Procol Harum poster. ‘I’ve seen enough,’ he said. ‘This inquiry is not over, Mr Engleby. You never close a case like this.’

He was more disturbing now that he was being polite, oddly enough. When he shouted at me he had just reminded me of Chief Petty Officer Dunstable in a factitious rage on the Chatfield parade ground. This seemed sincere and powerful – and he was, after all, more than twice my age.

‘We never give up. Jennifer was a young woman who was much loved by her parents. One day you might understand that, if you ever have kids of your own.’ His voice suggested he thought this unlikely.

‘To lose a life at that stage,’ he went on, ‘when she had it all before her. It’s a very serious crime. The public and the police think the same way on this. It’s as bad as they come.’

He looked round my room as though one final glance might yield a clue that four officers over three days had failed to dig up.

‘One day,’ said Peck, doing up his coat, ‘we’ll discover what happened to Jennifer Arkland. I promise you that.’

‘So you do think she’s dead.’

‘Yes, I do. I’m sure of it.’

He looked so sad then that I had to look away.

When I turned my eyes back to his face, he was staring at me.

I met his gaze, and for five or ten seconds we looked one another in the eye without speaking.

‘If it’s not me,’ he said eventually, ‘it’ll be my successor. The files, the paperwork, the notes will all be left meticulous. Marked up, indexed, cross-indexed. And you, Mr Engleby, are going in the file marked “Unhappy”.’

‘
Tu quoque
,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘You’re going in my unhappy file, too.’

He didn’t say anything else, he just brushed past me and went loudly down the wooden stairs.

I moved back completely into my room. They’d done a pretty good job of putting it all back together. The first thing I did was put my hand up the chimney and double it round on to the ledge. The dope was still there.

Next, I clattered downstairs to the bathroom on the half-landing and climbed on to the toilet seat. I was confident the diary was safe, because otherwise I would have heard about it. I dropped my hand over the top of the ironwork and down into the dusty crack. I felt the the crinkled polythene and the book inside.

I ought really, I thought, to find a better hiding place, though in some ways where better than the obvious? Wasn’t there some corny story about someone hiding a brooch by wearing it? Also, where better to hide it than a place that had just been done over for three days by the cops?

What I ought
really
to do, I thought, was return it to Jen’s parents. But I didn’t want to do that till the heat had died down a bit.

There was also a slight ethical problem. The book was private. It was bad enough that I’d given way to temptation, but it was clear she particularly didn’t want her parents to read it. ‘Can’t bear even to imagine how upset he would be’ she’d written at the thought of her father knowing about her private life.

So behind the cistern was the best place for the time being; then maybe I’d take it back to Reading in the vacation.

Over the next few days I began to feel a lot better. Although I knew Peck was free to come back any time (there was obviously no double-jeopardy rule in interviewing) there was something in his tone that made me think he’d got no questions left to ask.

Had he checked my movements? Did they find Steve in Christ’s or Corpus – Steve I was supposed to have talked to at the party? ‘And how did Mike Engleby seem that night?’ Did they ask the porter what time I got in? Not that he’d have the slightest idea; he didn’t keep a log or anything. I didn’t care; it didn’t matter. I was going to be left alone.

All the clothes the police had taken were returned, minus a couple of things, but I didn’t chase them up. It was no worse than the average return from a service wash in the launderette.

Term ended, and during the vacation I saw a lot of Julie, whose work was ‘showing promise’ at school. My mother was only working three days a week at the Waverley; she’d got some sort of infection in the wound after the hysterectomy and it had taken a lot out of her. Jules said they thought at one time she had septicaemia and that she was going to die.

She looked old and worn down. I did a week’s work in the paper mill and gave her most of the money. She found it hard to grasp what I was saying when I said I was going into the Foreign Office. ‘Is that abroad then?’ she asked. I think maybe she thought I’d still be working for the paper mill, but in its foreign office.

I did a fair bit of Nat Sci work. There wasn’t much else to do in Trafalgar Terrace. Stellings, who lived in London, said he might be in Reading one day and if so he’d look me up, but mercifully he didn’t.

I’m back in Clock Court and it’s warm. The trees are in leaf. It’s that time of year when you find you don’t have the right clothes on so you’re always peeling off, and then you’re suddenly cold again.

People have forgotten about Jennifer Arkland. At the Sidgwick Site and all over town they’ve taken down the Missing posters.

It’s worse than when they were up. At least her face was there before. She was, if not alive, present. Now you look at the plate glass of the gown shop on the corner of St Mary’s Passage and King’s Parade and where her eyes used to be it offers just a blank view on to college scarves and ties in different colours. Through the window of Fitzbillies cake shop you can now see sponges and éclairs. In my old Greek restaurant you can make out the potted palm and the greasy fan uninterrupted by a picture of that laughing girl in Tipperary.

The sight of ties and cakes and palms is bought at a price. Their presence is her absence, and it’s ubiquitous.

The air on King’s Parade is lighter. People are laughing at the outdoor tables by the river at the Anchor. She’s gone.

In the warm spell, they’ve started punting on the river. Finals are coming, and she won’t sit them. She’ll never get her youknowwhat.

She’s gone. Doesn’t matter how many times you say it, because it never fully registers.

She’s gone . . .

I went for my interview in London yesterday, in Carlton House Terrace, a big Nash building, scruffy and echoing inside. A secretary with fat legs and glasses made me wait. There were three others. We were told not to introduce ourselves; but to me they were Francis, Batley and McCain: nervous, dim, their own group. It was as though I was caught in a loop of time. Woodrow had told me to wear a suit and I’d bought one from the Oxfam shop near the University Arms.

I was interviewed in a room overlooking the Mall. It was completely bare except for a desk, two chairs and a man in a chalk-stripe suit. It seemed formulaic, barely more than checking my identity. You get used to this sort of thing as a student. You haven’t yet done anything, so you just present and re-present your initials and your home address and your exam results and hope they please.

The man, who never told me his name, then gave me ten pounds for travel expenses. ‘You can blow it all on taxis or go by bus and keep the change.’ He gave me an address in Knightsbridge, where he said a doctor was waiting for me. I had a fair amount of cash on me from a Glynn Powers subcontract, so I took a cab in Pall Mall.

The doctor was not from the Benbow-Vaughan school. He had a gold watch chain, silver-blond hair and a smooth manner. He didn’t examine my crotch by torchlight, squeeze my scrotum or tell me to stop drinking; he merely listened to my chest, looked in my eyes, ears and mouth and took a history. Diabetes? No. Tick. Heart disease? No. (I didn’t want to drag my father into this.) Tick. He wrote on a pad with a shiny fountain pen. I couldn’t think what his bill would be but felt sure it would be in guineas.

When I left, he handed me a piece of paper with another address on it, this time near Hyde Park. I hadn’t done anything like this since Julie’s tenth birthday treasure hunt.

This time there were four or five men at a table, again in an otherwise empty room. They looked like a convention of private school geography teachers. They asked me hypothetical questions.

‘If you’re on a train, do you always notice who’s in the compartment with you?’

Depends if I’m sober. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘If you find yourself alone in a foreign city, what do you do?’

‘I buy a map, walk around to orientate myself and go to a museum or a bar and try to make friends with some local people.’

Alternatively, I might score some high-grade hashish in the market square, find a hotel room, take back a litre of duty-free and watch television. When had I last been in a foreign city on my own anyway? Istanbul? And more on the way home. Split, Ljubljana, Venice, Geneva, Paris. I couldn’t remember what I’d done in any of them. I do have these blanks.

An old-fashioned telephone on the table started to ring. The bald man answered it in a language I didn’t recognise, then passed the receiver to me.

Someone was speaking to me in French. No one had done that since Mug Benson in the dry run for the O-level oral. (The board examiner himself, in our one-to-one, had been happy to chat in English.) Had Woodrow overcooked my ability as a linguist? I said ‘
très bien
’ quite a bit and gave a short speech about who I was and where I came from that I still remembered, word-perfect, from Mug’s revision group. Then, while I was still on the front foot, I put the receiver down and pushed the telephone back to the bald man.