The Dining Hall of Cuff College is a splendid room, longer than it is wide, with a high, ribbed ceiling from which chandeliers hang on long chains. The walls are punctuated with heavy oil portraits in baroque frames and the dark wood panelling is etched with faded gold letters to mark long-since-forgotten academic or sporting success. At one end of the room, under a stained-glass window that shows Cain murdering Abel, a high table is raised on a dais. Below this are two further tables, each more than 30 foot long, filled that night with the brightest and the best in detective fiction, including most of the Americans who had come over on scholarships, the Swedes and all the other more marginal characters at work in the Genre today. The din of conversation and chink of china and cutlery was constant. Waiters darted up and down the lines of men and women, all in their finest, serving what was roundly agreed to be execrable food and indifferent wine.
The Dean sat at the top table, with a very large female police commissioner from Manchester on one hand and a glamorous forensic scientist from Montreal on the other. He was laughing at a joke he had made and taking compliments on the very fine speech he had just delivered in the Junior Common Room.
‘So, Dean,’ purred the forensic scientist whose name – something like Tempura (but no one would be named after a type of batter, surely?) – the Dean could not get the hang of. ‘Where is the hero of the hour?’
‘Ah! Nak-ka-khoo? He is over there. Talking to a publisher.’
They studied the scene. Nak-ka-khoo did not look like a terribly graceful dinner companion: he was a stranger to conversation and he had spent long enough in the tundra to know that you eat when there is food, starve when there is none, and so he was forcing food and wine into his mouth, his eyes all the while resolutely bolted to the cleavage of the dark-haired woman sitting on the opposite side of the table. Nak-ka-khoo was a wolfish-looking man, with long dark hair and a sallow, closed face. His body was somehow ill-suited to the constraints of a bow-tie and dinner shirt.
‘Oh, he looks charming,’ murmured the woman, not for a second meaning it. ‘I hear he can skin a polar bear in less than a minute?’
‘Yes. It is just one of his party pieces,’ the Dean agreed. ‘He is also a talented snake charmer. He can do it with just an ocarina and a dab of Vaseline.’
‘But he can’t speak English?’
‘Not very well,’ admitted the Dean with a sigh. ‘That has held him back, I must say, and made him rather frustrated.’
The Dean had hoped any Nak-ka-khoo adventures would be translated into English, of course, but he had timed it badly; just as soon as there was an appetite for foreign detective fiction among general readers, the Crime Writers’ Association had barred translations from their awards. The Dean would now have to teach Nak-ka-khoo English if he was ever to get the Golden Dagger he so coveted.
The Dean took a sip of his wine and speared a slice of watery courgette on his fork. Further down the table was Alice Appleton, looking, the Dean thought, very fetching in some dark-blue dress that showed off her shoulders and what he could only think of as her upper chest. She was listening to Wikipedia banging on about something.
‘A chicken can be hypnotised too, you know,’ he was saying, his mind obviously very much on Nak-ka-khoo. ‘By holding its head down and continuously drawing a line along the ground with a stick, starting at its beak and extending straight outwards in front. It’ll remain immobile for anywhere between 15 seconds to 30 minutes, continuing to stare at the line.’
‘Really?’ asked Alice, genuinely interested. ‘How on earth did they discover that?’
‘Well, the first known reference to it was in 1646, in Mirabile Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae by a man called Athanasius Kircher, but how he found out about it – well, I suppose one might have to read his book, but you know – who can be bothered? Hello. What’s this?’
At that moment Tom Hurst and the other detectives came through the door at the other end of the room. They stood in an untidy group.
‘It’s Tom!’ cried Alice, flushing slightly. ‘He made it.’
The top table went quiet. The Dean stood up, his pale face clenched, his eyebrows drawn. His eyes flicked from Tom and the detectives to Nak-ka-khoo. Conversation and hubbub at the tables petered out until there was silence. The Dean had no need to tap his glass to attract attention, but did so anyway.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am that tonight we have with us, by some amazing feat of navigation, not to mention—’ and here the Dean was genuinely lost for words ‘—all the other things, none other than four of our most successful alumni from, I think, the class of ’74.’
He introduced the detectives and there was a ripple of respectful applause. Tom Hurst led them between the tables until they reached the top table.
‘Dean,’ began Tom, ‘I know who killed Claire Morgan.’
There was a gasp of taken breath all around him. Claire Morgan’s murder had been on everybody’s lips.
‘Oh yes, dear Claire. So much missed. But surely this can wait until tomorrow, Tom? Don’t want to cast a shadow over the Gaudy, do we? Why don’t you all sit down? Have a drink.’
‘I should say that the murderer is in this room.’
There was another collective gasp. Nak-ka-khoo, unable to understand English, had no idea what was going on and was yet to appreciate just who the detectives were or what they were saying. He was forcing a chicken breast down his mouth.
‘He sure is, Dean,’ Carpaccia started, jumping in front of Tom, swinging her rifle about carelessly. ‘When I was examining the bodies of the chickens so senselessly slaughtered in Florida, I noticed a powdery residue that glittered coppery under Electron Microscopy. It turned out to be resident in a particular brand of talcum powder that you can only buy on the internet. By getting Creepy Lesbian Niece to hack into the internet company’s records, I discovered that the talcum powder is regularly ordered by a man who has the Canadian hand-made moccasin slipper franchise. Now his slippers are made from the pelt of a particular kind of beaver that only lives north of latitude 66° 33’ 39’—’
Wikipedia jumped to his feet to say something.
‘Not now, Aldous, really,’ snapped the Dean. ‘Mma Ontoaste, you seem the most sensible. What on earth is going on here?’
But Mma Ontoaste was not listening to the Dean. She had left their party and approached one of the long tables, where she dragged a small man in a slightly shabby dinner jacket to his feet and was shaking his hand with such enthusiasm it was as if she meant to yank it off.
‘Clovis Andersen,’ she was laughing. ‘How I love your book!’
Clovis Andersen was blinking nervously and his face was gripped in a glassy smile. He could not get away.
‘But, Dean,’ continued Rhombus, ‘I discovered a piece of paper that described ritualistic killings of ptarmigan by men who wore tweed plus-fours and had all been at school with one another. On the back of it, in tiny letters, was the name of the Scotch Minister for Canadian Affairs, written in blue-black ink, the same sort of ink that they use on the release forms at HMP Barlinnie. I had DS Shortbread poke about a bit, because I couldn’t do it myself, on account of being in the frame, and I discovered that a thriving rat run exists, involving Canadian giant squid ink, chip suppers and NAZI GOLD, but that’s not all—’
Then it was Colander’s turn to butt in.
‘Don’t listen to the officer from Scotchland, Dean, or the pseudo-forensic scientist from Richmond, Virginia. Neither of them know what they are talking about. I am not sure I am taking this investigation the right way here either. It could be anything. Let’s be honest, none of us really know anything. Perhaps we should call a meeting? Can I have a cup of coffee? In fact, I don’t like the look of him. I bet he is a threat to our children. I am going to slip into my tracksuit now and shoot him in the head until he is quite dead.’
‘Hold me back someone, or I’ll kill the Swedish bastard!’ bellowed Rhombus. No one moved to restrain him.
Colander blinked.
‘Everyone knows you are secretly Welsh,’ he said, and that was enough. Rhombus leapt at Colander, his arms outstretched, hoping, it seemed, to tear him apart. Even from where Tom was standing, this did not look like the sort of tactic that the SAS might teach anyone. There was some pushing and shoving. Both men were red-faced, flapping and slapping at each other and springing in the air like some modern dance routine. Rhombus took a kick at Colander, catching him on the knee. Colander squealed and ran at Rhombus, catching him off balance and crashing back into the table behind. The women screamed and scrambled aside, the men fending the writhing bodies off with stiff arms.
‘Tom! Stop them!’ Alice cried. Tom didn’t know where to begin. He pulled Rhombus’s Tam-o’-Shanter off his head and slapped him with it, but the men were too intent on the fight. Meanwhile the Dean had caught Nak-ka-khoo’s eye and the Eskimo was pushing his chair back, having finally understood the need to get away.
‘Now! Grip my grits, you two stop that wrestlin’, you hear?’ cried Carpaccia, swinging the machine gun round and pointing it at the ceiling. She let loose a quick burst of gunfire that had two immediate effects. The first was to stop the fight instantly, but the second was to snap a link in the chain that held the chandeliers in place. There was a staccato rattling above their heads as the chain flew through the eyes holding it in place and the chandelier dropped sharply to catch the fleeing Nak-ka-khoo a sharp and, as it later turned out, fatal, blow on the head. He staggered a step and then crumpled headlong across the table as the rest of the long chain came crashing down, covering him in heavy links of antique iron.
‘Nak-ka-khoo!’ cried the Dean, enraged with pain. He ran and hauled the chain off the young man’s body and was in time to feel Nak-ka-khoo’s last breath before he died.
‘Now look at what you’ve done, you bloody fool,’ he snapped at Carpaccia. ‘You’ve killed him! Killed off the best detective in the land, a man who learned the art of snake charming at the feet of the great Baba Gulabgir—’
‘Ah,’ started Wikipedia. ‘Baba Gulabgir, or Gulabgarnath, became the Guru of snake charmers; legendarily teaching his disciples to revere snakes, not fear them as they—’
‘Aldous,’ cried the Dean. ‘For the love of God, will you for once just SHUT UP?’
‘But, Rra,’ intoned Mma Ontoaste. ‘A great detective does not need to do all those things. A great detective needs only intuition and a few very simple problems that anyone with any sense could sort out in seconds.’
‘Oh, Christ! I’ve just about had enough of your horseshit.’
It was not a wise thing to say. Mma Ontoaste caught him by the hair at the side of his head and lifted him so that he was dancing on tiptoes.
‘Call the police,’ he yelped.
‘Surely not before we find out why he killed Claire, though?’ asked Rhombus, wiping a bloody lip from the fight. ‘I mean, I know why he killed her, of course, but for dramatic effect and all these people will want to know.’
He pointed at the guests, managing to include in his gesture Colander, who looked like he might attack him again at any moment. The guests knew the form detective fiction is supposed to take and there were nods all round, and even the Dean agreed that some kind of explanation was necessary.
‘I’ll tell you,’ panted the Dean. ‘Just so long as you put me down and that fucker over there – Aldous fucking Wiki-fucking-pedia – doesn’t interrupt.’
Aldous promised. Or pledged, rather.
‘It was foolproof,’ began the Dean. ‘A simple plan to eliminate the opposition. Nothing illegal about that. I was going to get enough clues together so that Tom here would round up every detective working in the Genre today and have them working on the same silly case. By the end of it there would be a band of 30 or 40 of you travelling by bus all over the world. Meanwhile Nak-ka-khoo would clean up in the vacuum. All your crazy serial killers, compulsive bed-wetting murderers, lunatic flesh-eating mummy’s boys, stalker vampires and werewolves would have been his to catch. I had a deal! A publishing deal!’
The Dean dropped next to the dead body of Nak-ka-khoo and hammered his fists on the ground, his body wracked by sobs. Sobs for what might once have been, but now would never be.