Orkney Twilight (40 page)

‘Who are those blokes in the funny penguin suits?’ he asked.

She squinted at the gathering flock of black-swathed figures. ‘Might be the Bullingdon. Might be the Assassins.’

He raised a quizzical eyebrow.

‘Dining clubs,’ she said.

‘What’s a dining club?’

‘It’s a sort of secular secret society.’ She groped for a better explanation. ‘Junior freemasons. A trade union for toffs.’

‘Are there a lot of toffs here then?’

‘Yes. I somehow seem to have ended up in the worst college for that. They only started admitting women a couple of years ago and they haven’t exactly embraced us with open arms.’ She shrugged. ‘Apparently this college has produced more prime ministers than all the other colleges combined.’

He took an Instamatic camera out of his anorak pocket, aimed it down into the quad and snapped, the flash briefly lighting up the night sky.

‘What are you doing that for?’

‘Never know when it might be useful to have a photo of a future prime minister up your sleeve.’

‘Well, if you really want the money shot, you should come out here later tonight when they’re running around, pulling each other’s trousers down and exposing their bottoms to all and sundry.’

‘Is that what the Bullingdon do then?’

She nodded. ‘They go to a restaurant, get pissed and smash the place up. Then they come back here and perform stupid rituals like trying to knock a golf ball from this quad into the next one and dropping their trousers. And when they are bored with that, they go on the rampage. They shattered most of the quad’s ground-floor windows the other week.’

‘But that’s criminal damage. What did the college authorities do about it?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Boys will be boys, especially if their parents are stinking rich or a member of the aristocracy. You’ve got your law-abiding citizens, your criminals, your stirrers, and your upper classes who make the rules in the first place so they don’t really have to worry all that much. So yes, the authorities turn a blind eye. Just like they ignore the graffiti.’

‘I noticed the chalk all over the walls. “Women belong in the home not the house.” What’s that all about?’

‘The house is the nickname for the college. It’s their idea of a joke.’

She stuck her hand in the brown paper bag of cherries she had purchased in the covered market, dropped one in her mouth and then spat the stone out so it flew in an arc before plunging out of sight over the edge of the roof.

‘What happens if my cherry stone hits someone on the head?’ she asked.

‘You get ten points,’ he said. ‘Twenty for an Assassin and thirty for a member of the Bullingdon.’

He grabbed the bag and peered inside. ‘I reckon there’s enough left to wipe out the lot of them.’

She pointed her finger at Tom. ‘Your country needs you.’

He put a cherry in his mouth, spat. She took another, sent its stone hurtling into the air. It landed short. She sighed. ‘It’s no good anyway. You know what they say. An heir and a spare. Even if we manage to do away with this lot, there’ll be another wave to take their place. We’re doomed.’

She leaned back against the chimney, felt the rough surface of the bricks through her thin overcoat and stared disconsolately at the collection of dark figures clustering on the library steps like a flock of black birds. A murder. A storytelling.

‘What really bugs me about them,’ she said, gesturing with her arm across the quad, ‘is that they are the men who in ten years’ time will be preaching the value of the free market to the rest of us. We’re done with the age of science and now we are heading for the age of greed and those are its prophets. And soon they’ll be out there, peddling their fertility myth to the rest of us, insisting that if we believe in the invisible hand we will have limitless prosperity. Life without death.’

Tom raised a bored eyebrow, idly sent a few more cherry stones flying over the parapet.

She decided to carry on regardless. ‘I mean, look at them, everything they have they’ve inherited. How do they square inherited privilege and wealth with free markets? How do they square free markets with the force needed to make them move? The only invisible hand operating here is the shadowy hand of the secret state doing the dirty work behind the scenes, fixing the unions, squashing protesters who step out of line, trying to have a quick grope while no one is looking, making absolutely certain that people have no choice other than to take the shitty jobs for pathetic wages in the stupid companies that make profits for their parents to cream off and use to pay their school fees.’

‘Talking of the secret state,’ Tom said casually. ‘Do you miss your dad?’

She pursed her lips, irritated with herself for making a tactical error, giving him an opening. She had tried very hard to avoid this conversation, vainly hoped that respect for the recently bereaved might restrain his urge to interrogate.

She took a deep breath. ‘Well, it’s hard to know whether I miss him. I mean, he hasn’t been gone that long. And he wasn’t around that much when he was alive. So, in a funny sort of way, it’s the same as it always was – he’s disappeared somewhere without telling anyone where he’s going and we have no way of contacting him. I’m still half expecting him to turn up; materialize from nowhere with a swagger, a whistle and a wave of his hand, to tell me I don’t know my arse from my elbow.’

She smiled as she remembered Jim. And she thought then that what she really missed was the double-edged reassurance of his presence, the sense of danger letting you know you were alive, the lack of certainty, the doubts about what was real, what was cover, the feeling that he was more reliable, more trustworthy than the people who played it straight. Because in her heart she knew that truth was little more than fool’s gold and there were no solid facts in this world, only stories and cover-ups, and if you scraped the surface all you would find were more strange tales and sleights of hand and anyone who thought differently was living in a land of make-believe.

‘What exactly did happen anyway?’ Tom asked.

‘I told you – he was killed in a car crash. The morning we came back from Orkney, driving home from the station.’

‘He looked pretty much alive when I left.’

‘And then he sat in the car, drove across Vauxhall Bridge, swerved into a brick wall and died. That’s how death happens. One minute you are alive. The next minute you’re not. You don’t necessarily receive three months’ written notice.’

‘It’s hard to see why he might have swerved the car early on a Saturday morning when there wasn’t much traffic about.’

‘There was a lorry involved. And he had a high level of alcohol in his blood.’

‘Yes, but that was probably the normal state of your dad’s blood and I never saw it impair his ability to function. Did someone do him in? Did someone mess with the car? Tamper with the brakes or something like that?’

‘No.’

‘What about Shinkolobwe?’

‘What about it?’

‘You’ve no idea why he mentioned it?’

‘No.’

‘So you don’t think it was anything to do with his death?’

‘No.’

He persisted. ‘Why weren’t you in the car with him?’

She sighed. ‘Liz asked me to go and collect a book from Foyles. So I took the bus into town.’

She spotted a ladybird edging along the hem of her overcoat. She tried to persuade the insect to crawl on to her finger. ‘Aphid eater,’ she said. ‘Mass murderer.’

He watched her for a moment, toying with the bug. And then he shuffled closer, whispered. ‘Do you think it was your mum?’

‘What?’

‘Do you think Liz was involved in it somehow? Persuaded Roger the Todger to do the dirty deed?’

Sam snorted. The ladybird lifted its red wing coverings and flew away.

‘It’s a plausible hypothesis,’ said Tom. ‘Domestic, most common form of murder. Jim was an unfaithful, dodgy undercover cop with a drink problem. Who could blame Liz for wanting him out of the way? Roger the Todger couldn’t stand him, obviously had his eye on your mum, wanted revenge for being humiliated by Jim over the
Ulysses
punch-up, so wouldn’t take much persuading. Liz gave Roger the details of the train and made sure you were out of the way with the Foyles’ errand. He fixed the brakes. There must have been dozens of men out there with a grudge against Jim. Roger the Todger knew that even if foul play was suspected, it would be hard to identify him among all the other blokes from Jim’s undercover life just waiting to get him, a crow in a crowd.’

‘I don’t think it was Roger,’ she said.

Tom nodded his head slowly. ‘Well, I suppose even if it was Roger,’ he said. ‘You’d still have to explain the gun.’

Her head swivelled sharply. Her eyes met his. ‘Gun?’ she said. ‘What gun?’

‘The gun I found that night in Nethergate when I was in Jim’s bedroom. The one that was in the drawer of his bedside cabinet. Small. Black. Handgun.’

She didn’t blink. ‘Oh. That gun.’

She reached for the bag of cherries, pulled it up to her face, peered into the bottom of the bag. Jesus. Jim had been so careless at times. What had he been thinking? Leaving his pistol in his bedside cabinet in a holiday cottage? Madness. She stuck her hand in the bag, rustled around. Lifted her head up. Dropped a plump black cherry in her mouth.

‘That must have been Jim’s starting pistol,’ she said indistinctly as she squashed the juice out of the fruity flesh in her mouth.

Tom cocked his head to one side.

‘Jim had this starting pistol he wasn’t using any more,’ she said. ‘So he was going to give it to Bill. Because Bill is the chair of the local athletics club at Stromness.’ She spat the cherry stone towards the edge of the roof. It missed.

‘It had Walther engraved on the side of it,’ Tom said.

She picked another cherry. ‘So?’

‘So, Walther is a manufacturer of firearms. James Bond carries a Walther.’

‘Does he?’ She hadn’t realized that. ‘Yes, but James Bond is a made-up character. Fiction.’

‘And Walther is a real-life maker of handguns. Fact.’

She tilted her head back a bit this time, aimed towards the sky. The cherry stone followed a satisfying trajectory – beautiful arch, up and over. ‘Maybe Walther is a maker of starting pistols too,’ she said.

‘Maybe,’ he replied.

She focused on the Assassins in the far corner of the Quad; one of them was waving a golf club above his head and another was baying like a bloodhound. She grabbed the ends of her plimsolls in her hands, pulled the tips towards her.

Tom eyed her shrewdly. ‘Go on. Tell me what you know about Jim’s death.’

‘I’m going to write it all down,’ she said.

‘Show me when you’ve written it.’

‘Why?’

‘I could help you with it.’

‘I don’t need your help. And anyway I can’t show you.’

‘Why not?’

‘Thirty-year rule. State secrets.’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Your secrets are safe with me.’

‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘I’m a journalist.’

He put his hands behind his head, sagged back against the chimney.

‘What are you going to do with it then?’

‘I’ll write it and sit on it for thirty years. Or else I’ll sit on it for thirty years and then I’ll write it.’

‘You’ll make it up. You’re incapable of telling it straight. You’ll end up covering for him. You’ve always covered for Jim.’

‘I’ve given up covering for Jim,’ she said. ‘The dead don’t need any help holding on to their secrets.’

She relit her reefer with the Zippo, dragged a deep lungful of smoke. Coughed. Cleared her throat. ‘How’s your job going anyway?’ she asked.

‘It’s okay.’

‘So are you investigating the dark and dirty deeds of the burghers of Manchester?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What are you doing then?’

‘I’m writing the showbiz column.’

‘What’s that involve?’

‘It’s like a gossip column that tells people bits of news about the local celebrities.’

Sam tried not to look disapproving. It didn’t work. ‘Celebrity is the opium of the masses.’ She waved her spliff in the air. ‘I might be a pothead but you’re a dope-pusher. Are there any celebrities in Manchester?’ She started sniggering.

‘You really are a southern snob. How about you? How’s the history going?’

‘Okay.’

‘And what are you going to do after that? What can you do with a history degree?’

‘Dunno,’ she said. ‘Join the civil service maybe.’

‘That’s a bit boring.’

‘Not necessarily. I could apply for the Foreign Office. Become a third secretary, something like that.’

‘Not sure that would suit you. It seems a bit too… respectable.’

‘I can be respectable when I want to be.’ She stubbed her spliff on the roof felting. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s not really me.’ She stared over the Deanery Garden to the meadow and the Thames beyond, wrapped her arms around her knees. ‘I have been thinking about taking a post-grad course in archaeology.’

He groaned. ‘Oh God. Ancient ruins and High Priestesses.’

She ignored his comment. ‘What are you doing next Thursday anyway?’

‘Not sure. Why?’

‘Fancy coming with me to Stop the City?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Protest against the might of the military-financial complex. London. Could be a laugh.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said.

She shrugged, glanced at her watch.

‘Why do you wear your watch on the inside of your wrist?’ he asked.

‘Habit.’ She twisted it round to the front. And then she twisted it back.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and find something to eat. I saw a van selling kebabs parked just up the road when I walked down here from the station.’

‘I’m not eating that crap. It’s not proper food.’

He punched her on the arm. ‘Chip off the old block.’

She jumped up, disturbing a trio of magpies that had been playing on the far roof edge. She watched them flapping, chattering and chasing each other round and round, spiralling into the night and off, far away. She smiled to herself, skipped over to the open skylight, turned, waved her hand dismissively at Tom, stepped backwards through the hatch, like a coney down a rabbit hole. And disappeared from view.