Tom Hurst stopped on Sjuzet Bridge to put his suitcase down. He fumbled in his pockets for his cigarettes and his lighter and he lit himself a Marlboro, just as he had done a thousand times before, standing in that exact spot. It had been a while ago now, though, and he had not been back since the trees were in full leaf and there had been tourists in pastel shorts, noisily punting themselves along the river below him. Today the air was cold enough that his smoke and his breath were indistinguishable, and when he leaned over the wooden balustrade and peered at the black water below, he could see that it was veneered with a sheet of rough ice. He took a few more drags on his cigarette. He noticed that his hands were shaking and his heart was racing. Tobacco or excitement? He could not suppress a smile.
Beyond the canal the snow lay in thin patches on the manicured lawns of Cuff College and the weeping willows along the banks of the canal looked skeletal.
He had wanted to walk to the College from the station, for old times’ sake, but the sight of the taxi rank had persuaded him otherwise. The driver took him the long way round and Tom said nothing until they were passing the war memorial on Launcester Street, five minutes from the College gates, when he asked to be dropped off. The driver hadn’t been surprised.
‘Cuff College is it, mate?’ he asked in the mirror. Tom nodded. ‘Going back then are you? It’s what they all want. They all want to be dropped here so they can walk the last few yards themselves. Something about that place.’
The driver gestured down Musgrave Street,1 crowded with overhanging medieval houses, towards the College. Tom paid his fare and the driver pulled away with an ironic salute, leaving him standing there for a moment under the shadow of the languishing soldier, dusted today with snow crystals and verdigris. He read the inscription again, although he knew it by heart:
As through the field he walked alone,
By chance he met grim Death,
Who with his dart did strike his heart,
And rob him of his breath.
Doggerel, of course, but nonetheless.
Tom shivered suddenly, the cold penetrating his coat, and he set off briskly up the deserted street. Not much had changed since he had been a student. The tailor was still there, closed today, as was the solicitors’ office, but a branch of an American coffee chain had ousted The Olde Tea Shoppe. Thank God for that, he thought. He could remember the taste of the Tea Shoppe’s over-brewed tea as if he had drunk it only yesterday, and the stale buns and the condensation that fogged the window and dripped from the ceiling. How many hours had he spent in there, he wondered. He could recall Margaret – probably not her real name, but at the time, who cared – the woman who waited on tables, always with that plaster on her thumb, invariably dipped in whatever you were about to eat or drink. She was Scotch, almost needless to say.
It was strange how memories of life at Oxford seemed universal. Everybody had them. One had only to mention a word such as ‘scout’ or ‘parkin’ or ‘Encænia’ and mouths would start to water in reminiscence. Tom could recall scaling Magdalen tower before dawn one May Day and feeling it sway as the bells began to peal. The strange thing was that he knew he had never done any such thing.
Cuff College: alma mater of all the great literary sleuths, as well as most of their sidekicks and, occasionally – and this was the equivalent of getting a third – the friends of the genius detective with whom the ordinary reader could identify. Sometimes the villains too, of course. It was a neo-Gothic building of honeycoloured stone, handsome and not too pretentious, built in landscaped grounds hard by the river. A central quadrangle was surrounded by rooms for the undergraduates and Fellows, but it was the library that made it the institution it was. The library held every crime-fiction book ever published in any language and was a Mecca for plagiarists. The College ran courses in the summer for authors seeking refresher courses, or those from other genres who wished to experiment without committing to crime fiction forever.
As Tom stood on the bridge – named after the term for the narration of a detective story – he found himself recalling his first visit to Cuff College, when he had been an undergraduate hoping to follow his father, and his father’s father, in the Genre. He had been welcomed that time by the Admissions Tutor: a balding man with a handsome pair of moustaches and a strong but not immediately placeable European accent. The man had asked a few questions about Tom’s father, of course, and his father’s father, just as Tom had hoped he might not: his father had been one of the stars of the Genre, exciting great expectations, until he had jumped genre and taken up writing Romantic novels under the name of Violet O’Shaughnessy. Nothing had been the same since.
Still, after a pause the Admissions Tutor had stood up and offered Tom his hand and a place in the class of ’97.
Tom’s most recent interview had taken place just a few weeks earlier, after an envelope made of dense cream card had landed on his parents’ mat, the handwriting immediately urgent. It was a summons to an old-fashioned club off Pall Mall in London. The Dean would be in town for a day and might Tom be interested to meet him to discuss a post at Cuff College? He had replied in the affirmative, hardly able to believe it, and three days later he met the Dean – a tall, slim man with the extravagant eyebrows of an emperor penguin and an emerald-green smoking jacket with frogging on the lapels – in the Morning Room, by the fire, under a portrait of Wilkie Collins. The room was all leather chairs, thick carpet, table lamps and mahogany panelling. A sherry and a mince pie each.
‘Such a great man,’ the Dean had trilled, a long-fingered hand gesturing to the portrait above them. Tom had nodded, his mouth dry, small talk not being his stock in trade. A silence had followed. The fire was uncomfortably warm on his legs and he thought he could smell damp wool beginning to singe.
‘You are right,’ said the Dean, after an awkward second. He drew a hand through his thick grey thatch and Tom noticed – as he had studied to – a vein flickering in the older man’s temple: a sign of strain, perhaps? Or the early indications of a future embolism? The Dean’s pale gaze flicked around the room before settling back on Tom. He smiled unconvincingly.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Now, where were we, hmmm? Ah! Yes. The fact of the matter is – the fact of the matter is that we are—’
And here, hardly started, he gave a shiver and bit his lip.
‘—we are anticipating a vacancy.’
The vacancy turned out to be Junior Tutor in Transgression and Pathology – Tran and Path. Tom could hardly believe it. Such vacancies were rare and, as a rule of thumb, filled internally by someone with some experience in the genre. This was a chance that he could hardly have dared wait for. To Tom, mired in depression after Serena’s death, and the trial that had followed, it was the chance to start again.
‘Your students are the usual mixed bunch. One or two with genuine promise. Others – well, you’ll see.’
They agreed terms and three months’ probation. Two lectures a week, five undergraduates to supervise to start with and a paper to write by the end of the academic year if he wanted to renew his tenure. But the Dean was distracted and hardly seemed to care one way or the other. Two things immediately puzzled Tom: the first was the vacancy.
‘An illness,’ explained the Dean, in careful cadence, holding Tom’s eye as if to dare him to ask another question. ‘We thought it would be temporary, over in a few months, you understand, but these things run on. You know how it is.’
Tom had wondered at the phrase ‘these things’ but was anxious to get on to the other question: why him? There were thousands more able and better qualified than he.
‘A recommendation, my boy,’ replied the Dean, finding once again the ability to twinkle.
From whom?
‘Our librarian.’
Tom squinted.
‘A Miss Appleton,’ the Dean declaimed, letting the words echo grandly around the room. ‘A Miss Alice Appleton.’
‘Alice Appleton?’ Tom blurted. ‘Alice is working in your library?’
The Dean nodded, a smile playing around his lips. Alice Appleton. For a second Tom was winded by the sound of her name, and there was a sharp heat in his chest. Alice Appleton. He had not heard it spoken aloud for more than a year now, but it had never been far from his mind.
Alice Appleton.
He took one last pull on his cigarette before carefully grinding it out on the rail. He flicked the stub into the river and watched it melt through the ice with a hiss.
1. For the purposes of this book I have put Seaton Street as running parallel between Pilton Place and Andover Street, behind Colchester College.