The silent world of Nicholas Quinn (6 page)

looked at their lips and followed their conversations, as though he were standing

almost immediately beside them. He knew instinctively that some of the words must

have been whispered very quietly; but to him most of them were as clear as if they

were being shouted through a megaphone. He remembered one occasion (his

hearing had been fairly good then) when he had picked up a phone and heard, on a

crossed line, a man and his mistress arranging a clandestine rendezvous and

anticipating their forthcoming fornication with lascivious delight . . .

He felt suddenly frightened as Bartlett caught his eye and walked over, with Sheik

Ahmed just behind him.

'Well? You enjoyed yourself, my boy?'

'Yes, indeed. I—I was just waiting to thank you both—'

'That is a great pleasure for us, too, Meester Queen.' Ahmed smiled his white and

golden smile and held out his hand. 'We shall be meeting you again, we hope so

soon.'

Quinn walked out into St. Giles'. He had not noticed how keenly one of the remaining

guests had been watching him for the past few minutes; and it was with considerable

surprise that he felt a hand on his shou1lder and turned to face the man who had

followed him to his car.

'I'd like a word with you, Quinn,' said Philip Ogleby.

At 12.30 the following day, Quinn looked up from the work upon which, with almost no

success, he had been trying to concentrate all morning. He had heard no knock, but

someone was opening the door. It was Monica.

'Would you like to take me out for a drink, Nicholas?'

ON FRIDAY, 21ST NOVEMBER, a man in his early thirties caught the train from Faddington

back to Oxford. He found an empty first-class compartment with little difficulty, leaned

back in his seat, and lit a cigarette. From his briefcase he took-out a fairly bulky

envelope addressed to himself ('If undelivered please return to the Foreign

Examinations Syndicate'), and extracted several lengthy reports. He unclipped his

ballpoint pen from an inside pocket, and began to make sporadic notes. But he was

left-handed, and with an ungenerous margin, and that only on the right of the closely-

typed documents, the task was awkward; and progressively so, as the Inter-City train

gathered full speed through the northern suburbs. The rain splashed in slanting

parallel streaks across the dirty carriage window, and the telegraph poles snatched up

the wires ever faster as he found himself staring out abstractedly at the thinning

autumn landscape; and even when he managed to drag his attention back to the

tedious documents he found it difficult to concentrate. Just before Reading he walked

along to the buffet car and bought a Scotch; then another. He felt better.

At four o'clock he put the papers back into their envelope, crossed out his own name,

C. A. Roope, and wrote 'T. G. Bartlett on the cover. Bartlett, as a man, he disliked (he

could not disguise that), but he was honest enough to respect the man's experience,

and his flair for administration; and he had promised to leave the papers at the

Syndicate that afternoon. Bartlett would never allow a single phrase in the minutes of

a Syndicate Council meeting to go forward before the relevant draft had been

circulated to every member who had attended. And (Roope had to admit) this

meticulous minuting had frequently proved extremely wise. Anyway, the wretched

papers were done now, and Roope snapped his briefcase to, and looked out at the

rain again. The journey had passed more quickly than he could have hoped, and

within a few minutes the drenched grey spires of Oxford came into view on his right,

and the train drew into the station.

Roope walked through the subway, waited patiently behind the queue at the ticket

barrier, and debated for a second or two whether he should bother. But he knew he

would. He took the second-class day-return from his wallet and passed it to the ticket

collector. 'I'm afraid I owe you some excess fare. I travelled back first.'

'Didn't the ticket inspector come round?'

'No.'

'We-ll. Doesn't really matter then, does it?'

'You sure?'

'Wish everybody was as honest as you, sir.'

'OK then, if you say so.'

Roope took a taxi and after alighting at1 the Syndicate tipped the driver liberally.

Rectangles of pale-yellow light shone in the upper storeys of nearby office blocks, and

the giant shapes of the trees outside the Syndicate building loomed black against the

darkening sky. The rain poured down.

Charles Noakes, present incumbent in the key post of caretaker to the Syndicate, was

(for the breed) a comparatively young and helpful man, whose soul was yet to be

soured by years of cumulative concern about the shutting of windows, the polishing of

floors, the management of the boiler, and the setting of the burglar alarm. He was

replacing a fluorescent tube in the downstairs corridor when Roope entered the

building.

'Hello, Noakes. The Secretary in?'

'No, sir. He's been out all the afternoon.'

'Oh.' Roope knocked on Harriett's door and looked in. The light was on; but then

Roope knew that the lights would be on in every room. Bartlett always claimed that the

mere switching-on of a fluorescent tube used as much electricity as leaving it on for

about four hours, and consequently the lights were left on all day throughout the office

—'for reasons of economy'. For a brief second Roope thought he heard a noise inside

the room, but there was nothing. Only a note on the desk which read: 'Friday pm. Off to

Banbury. May be back about five.'

'Not there, is he, sir?' Noakes had descended the small ladder and was standing

outside.

'No. But never mind. I'll have a word with one of the others.'

'Not many of 'em here, I don't think, sir. Shall I see for you?'

'No. Don't worry. I'll do it myself.'

He knocked and put his head round Ogleby's door. No Ogleby.

He tried Martin's room. No Martin.

He was knocking quietly on Monica Height's door, and leaning forward to catch any

response from within, when the caretaker reappeared in the well-lit, well-polished

corridor. 'Looks as if Mr. Quinn's the only graduate here, sir. His car's still out the back, anyway. I think the others must have gone.'

When the cat's away, thought Roope . . . He opened Monica's door and looked inside.

The room was tidiness itself, the desk clear, the leather chair neatly pushed beneath it.

It was the caretaker who tried Quinn's room, and Roope came up behind him as he

looked in. A green anorak was draped over one of the chairs, and the top drawer of the

nearest cabinet gaped open to reveal a row of buff-coloured file cases. On the desk,

placed under a cheap paperweight, was a note from Quinn for his typist's attention.

But Quinn himself was nowhere to be seen.

Roope had often heard tell of Bartlett's meticulous instructions to his staff not only

about their paramount duty for ensuring the strictest security on all matters concerning

question papers, but also about the importance of leaving some notification of their

whereabouts. 'At least he's left a note for us, Noakes. More than some of the others

have.'

'I don't think the Secretary would be very happy about this, though.' Noakes gravely

closed the top drawer of the cabinet and pushed in the lock.

'Bit of a stickler about that sort of thing, isn't he, old Bartlett?'

'Bit of a stickler about everything, sir.' Yet somehow Noakes managed to convey the

impression tha1t if he were on anyone's side, it would be Bartlett's.

'You don't think he's too much of a fusspot?'

'No, sir. I mean, all sorts of people come into the office, don't they? You can't be too

careful in a place like this.'

'No. You're absolutely right.'

Noakes felt pleasantly appeased, and having made his point he conceded a little to

Roope's suspicions. 'Mind you, sir, I reckon he might have picked a warmer week for

practising the fire drill.'

'Gives you those, does he?' Roope grinned. He hadn't been on a fire drill since he was

at school.

'We had one today, sir. Twelve o'clock. He had us all there, standing in the cold for

something like a quarter of an hour. Freezing, it was. I know it's a bit too hot in here but

. . .' Noakes was about to embark on an account of his unequal struggle with the

Syndicate's antiquated heating system, but Roope was far more interested in Bartlett,

it seemed.

'Quarter of an hour? In
this
weather?'

Noakes nodded. 'Mind you, he'd warned us all about it earlier in the week, so we had

our coats and everything, and it wasn't raining then, thank goodness, but—'

'Why as long as that, though?'

"Well, there's quite a lot of permanent staff now and we had to tick our names off a list.

Huh! Just like we was at school. And the Secretary gave us a little talk . . .'

But Roope was no longer listening; he couldn't stand there talking to the caretaker all

night, and he began walking slowly up the corridor. 'Bit odd, isn't it? Everybody here

this morning and nobody here this afternoon!'

'You're right, sir. Are you sure I can't help you?'

'No, no. It doesn't matter. I only came to give this envelope to Bartlett. I'll leave it on his desk.'

'I'm going upstairs for a cup o' tea in a minute, sir, when I've fixed this light. Would you like one?'

'No, I've got to be off. Thanks all the same, though.'

Roope took advantage of the Gentlemen's lavatory by the entrance and realized just

how hot it was in the building: like walking into a Turkish bath.

Bartlett himself had been addressing a group of Banbury headmasters and

headmistresses on the changing pattern of public examinations; and the last question

had been authoritatively (and humorously) dispatched at almost exactly the same time

that Roope had caught his taxi to the Syndicate. He was soon driving his pride and

joy, a dark-brown Vanden Plas, at a steady sixty down the twenty-odd-mile stretch to

Oxford. He lived out at Botley, on the western side of the city, and as he drove he

debated whether to call in at the office or to go straight home. But at Kidlington he

found himself beginning to get caught up in the regular evening paralysis, and as he

negotiated the roundabouts on Oxford's northern perimeter he decided to turn off right

along the ring-road instead of carrying straight over towards the city centre. He would

call in the office a bit later, perhaps, when the evening rush-hour had abated.

When he arrived home, at just gone five his wife informed him that there had been

several phone calls; and even as she was giving him the details the wretched thing

rang again. How she wished they had a numbe1r ex-directory.

On Saturday, 22nd November (as on most Saturdays), the burglar alarm system was

switched off at 8.30 a.m., one hour later than on weekdays. During the winter months

there were only occasional Saturday workings, and on this particular morning the

building was, from all appearances, utterly deserted. Ogleby was on foot, and let

himself in quietly. The smell of floor polish, like the smell of cinema seats and old

library books, took him back tantalizingly to his early schooldays, but his mind was on

other things. Successively he looked into each room on the ground floor in order to

satisfy himself that no one was around. But he was aware of this instinctively: there

was an eerie, echoing emptiness about the building which the quiet clickings-to of the