Caroline Minuscule (3 page)

Hanbury looked at Dougal reflectively. ‘That's very interesting. Have a cigarette.' He pulled out a packet of tipped Caporals.

They both had one. Dougal inhaled the pungent tobacco with relief; he hadn't noticed how much he wanted a cigarette. The conversation lapsed: the second round will start in ninety seconds, thought Dougal. What was going through Hanbury's mind? He was probably a murderer and knowing that made him, Dougal, some kind of an accessory after the fact. If Hanbury was trying to incriminate him, he was taking a great many unthinkable risks in order to – what? – how did this conversation groom Dougal for the role of culprit? The simple answer was that it didn't. The only conclusion that Dougal could see, not that it seemed a plausible one, lay in the one common link between himself and Gumper – knowledge of the Carolingian period. But it was unbelievable that someone should be killed for that knowledge – and that the killer should risk discovery by immediately approaching another source.

His own reactions puzzled him, too – he should be running for the police, or at least away from here, instead of having an amicable drink with a person who he had every reason to suspect was a murderer. He was scared, yes, but the fear was of the vicarious sort induced by a good horror film – no, it was more real than that. In a way, he supposed, the most frightening thing was the absence of any revulsion towards the act or the man who had done it. If he was going to be honest with himself, his predominant emotions were curiosity and a muted but noticeably euphoric sensation of excitement; the latter, no doubt, was not entirely unconnected with a pint of Young's on a recently emptied stomach.

Hanbury was massaging his fingers, Dougal noticed, as if the process gave him pleasure. He had well-kept hands – long and graceful, with none of the wrinkles or brown spots of age; the nails were large, square and obviously carefully manicured. He stroked his hands as if they were a cat on his lap – Dougal found it vaguely disturbing.

Hanbury spoke again, almost apologetically: ‘You look rather older than the average student.'

It took Dougal a second or two to catch the question mark which dangled unobtrusively from this remark; Hanbury wanted some background information, but was trying not to be too blunt about it.

‘I'm twenty-nine. I was left a little money by an aunt last year and decided to do another degree. Or do some work towards one, anyway.'

‘No grant? How very self-sacrificing!'

Five years ago Dougal would have blushed; now he just blushed internally. ‘Not really. I'd been away from education for seven years and I thought it would make a change.'

‘What had you done before then?' Hanbury was openly curious and it surprised Dougal: why should it matter? It was, in any case, a question he disliked answering.

‘Oh, this and that. The sort of things which don't make up a nice curriculum vitae. I travelled abroad quite a lot; worked in a library; drove a minicab.' All true, if misleadingly selective.

It was time to take the offensive. ‘How about you? What do you do for a living?'

‘Jack of all trades,' said Hanbury with a smile. Something told Dougal that he disliked the question as well. ‘At present I suppose you could say I'm in the lost and found business. Gumper was helping me look for something, but he backed out at the last moment . . . between you and me it caused a great deal of inconvenience. My employers were paying him very adequately for a small service – all quite above board, though perhaps not the sort of thing one need mention to the Inland Revenue – and he had accepted their terms, and they his. Mutually beneficial. Then he started being difficult. He was a greedy man, you know.'

Dougal did know; he could imagine cupidity blinding Gumper to all other considerations. It wouldn't have been greed alone, though – Gumper had liked to make himself felt, to stamp the world around him with his image.

‘Really very silly,' Hanbury continued. ‘I don't think he realized the sort of people my employers are. They tend to react rather sharply to threats of any kind.'

React with a well-dressed executioner
, thought Dougal;
when in doubt, garotte
. He would be finding it increasingly difficult to take the conversation seriously, were it not for the silent witness of its seriousness which lay in a first floor room less than a mile away.

‘Of course' – Hanbury pulled his right earlobe reflectively – ‘it is rather awkward for my employers. Gumper was doing a small but important piece of work for them. And, as you say, the literary aspect of the Carolingian era is a relatively obscure field. Which brings me to the reason that I asked you for a drink. I wonder if you would be interested in doing it in his place?'

Silence fell between them again. Dougal appreciated the leisurely pace at which Hanbury was conducting the conversation. The man was staring into his glass, now, as if he found its contents absorbing. He wasn't rushing it, despite the urgency which the events of the past hour predicated. Dougal's mind grappled with the choice: it was an impossible one – how much of a security risk would Hanbury consider him to be if he refused? Would acceptance lead to something more dangerous than being an accidental accessory to murder? He blurted out, ‘Look, what's all this about? I can't decide without knowing a little more.'

‘My employers had asked Gumper to transcribe a page of a medieval manuscript. He was to have done a translation as well, and to have assessed its date and provenance and so forth. He had already said that the script was Caroline Minuscule. A very straightforward job for someone in your line of country. Not so easy if you don't know a serif from an ampersand and haven't the time to find out.'

‘I presume the reason for all this is none of my business?' Dougal was talking to himself as much as to Hanbury, but the latter nodded. Well, it was easy enough to think of reasons, after all – maybe Hanbury worked for a fence who had been offered a valuable stolen manuscript and wanted a discreet expert opinion on it, though Dougal hardly felt he had reached that status. It was odd, nevertheless – surely there couldn't be much of a market for stolen medieval manuscripts, unless of course the hypothetical fence had a private buyer already in mind, one who wasn't overscrupulous.

Hanbury said, slowly and quietly, ‘You have my word that there's no risk here at all – for yourself or anyone else. And, in return for quick, reliable work, my employers are willing to pay very generously. In cash. Ten-pound notes.' He was looking at Dougal's tatty leather jacket as he spoke and it was as if he had added, ‘And you look as though you need some money too.'

It was the detail of ten-pound notes which decided Dougal. It made the whole thing possible, no longer an academic speculation. He asked what sort of amount Hanbury's employers might have in mind (to have merely asked ‘How much?' would have jarred in the circumstances).

‘Twelve hundred,' replied Hanbury. ‘Cash on delivery with a small retainer in advance – plus a bonus for speed, perhaps. Would you be able to drop everything and concentrate on this for a day or two?'

Dougal nodded. He hardly heard the question. The idea of getting 1,200 pounds for a couple of days' work swam like a seductive mirage in his mind. He owed his landlady two months' rent. His aunt's money had somehow reduced itself to double figures. His credit cards were on the verge of changing from flexible friends to implacable usurers. Amanda was an expensive luxury.

His thoughts swerved away from the question of Hanbury's motives, from the lengths his employers were willing to go in order to get what they wanted; it was none of his business and, if it was, it lay in the province of his conscience which he had always found to be an obliging, biddable organ. It would help no one to bring the spectre of morality into this.

Despite what Hanbury had said, there must be a risk, but he couldn't for the life of him see where it was; a reasonable degree of caution should prevent the police from linking him with Hanbury, even supposing they succeeded in identifying the latter as Gumper's killer; Hanbury's employers were obviously dangerous – but surely they would only get unpleasant if, like Gumper had done, he started trying to cheat them. If he did an efficient job, why should there be any danger?

He looked across at Hanbury. ‘Okay, I'm interested. What would I be working on – the original or a photograph?'

‘A photograph, I'm afraid. We don't have the original.'

Yet
, thought Dougal. Aloud, he said, ‘That shouldn't matter too much if it's a reasonable reproduction.' A question which had been troubling him all the time they had been in the pub, worrying him somewhere below the level of conscious thought, suddenly found words which insisted on being spoken. ‘Look, why did you take the chance? I know I didn't rush off to the nearest phone when I . . . when I saw it, so you might trust me from that point of view, but I don't see why you took the gamble that I had the same sort of skills as Gumper. Wasn't it a hell of a risk?'

Hanbury smiled and Dougal realized that the man was actually enjoying himself, and boggled at the thought that someone could extract pleasure from juggling with dangers. Hanbury only slightly dispelled the illusion by saying, rather in the manner of Holmes to Watson: ‘The risk was minimal, in fact. Gumper and I had a little scene, you see, during which he was unusually informative. Towards the end anyway. He told me that he had given the photograph to one of his students, who should be returning it this week. He mentioned your name. One imagines he would have checked what you had done – presumably he wanted to avoid the donkey work. The very fact that you went to see Gumper suggested you knew something about the subject – paleography is hardly a popular option, I thought. Then, as you came out of his room the second time, you were carrying your briefcase – I could see through the crack of the door of the seminar room – and the initials WD were clearly visible on it. It seemed reasonable to assume that you were you, as it were.'

Dougal laughed. ‘Gumperish to the very end,' he said and then realized that he must sound flippant; but perhaps it didn't matter for surely the ordinary etiquette of death would be inappropriate here.

D
ougal went west with rush hour crowds, his mind preoccupied with the necessity of establishing an equilibrium between the memory of Gumper and the reassuring presence of 200 pounds in his wallet. Like an automaton, he changed on to the District Line at Hammersmith and got off at Turnham Green. With his eyes half-closed he walked down to Chiswick High Road, where habit drove him into an off-licence. He bought a bottle of Veuve Clicquot – might as well do things properly – half a bottle of brandy and some angosturas. The Scot who managed the place with a grim disregard for the convenience of his customers scratched his red beard, leant his great belly against the counter and said: ‘Having a party, are we? If you're going to mix those, you'd be far better off with sparkling wine.' Dougal was too tired to think of an answer. He took the clanking carrier bag and left the shop, banging his thigh on a monolith constructed of beer cans on the way out. A dry Scottish chuckle followed him out into the night.

Amanda lived on the other side of the High Road, the side nearer the river. You could sense its great grey presence a quarter of a mile away, and even see a tiny square of water, framed by buildings, from the window of Amanda's room. It was a room with a view, she said, which presumably explained why the Polish landlord felt obliged to charge so much rent for it.

The house was semidetached and had seen far better days. Amanda had a large room at the back of the house on the first floor. The door was open and he went in. Amanda wasn't there, which sent a wave of desolation over him. He felt an infantile urge to scream, ‘It's not fair!' But the room was as welcoming as ever. It was large, dimly lit and cavernous; there were plants everywhere – they hung from the ceiling, crouched on the floor and occupied most of the available surfaces between the two. A gas fire – of the old-fashioned type where, if you stared long enough, it was easy to see glowing Oriental palaces – hissed light and warmth. Dougal liked the carpet best of all – it was Persian, comfortably shabby, with a dark blue pattern on a red background.

There was a step behind him. He swung round to see Amanda standing in the doorway looking simultaneously cross and beautiful; she was one of the few people he knew who could combine the two.

‘Hullo, love,' he said, aware of relief oozing out of him like sweat. ‘Where have you been?'

‘In the loo. Some bugger's gone and blocked it again. With the
Daily Telegraph
.'

The other tenants of the house were a source of endless irritation and interest to her, according to their sex. Amanda was generally on terms of mute hostility towards the women, which occasionally burst into sporadic verbal warfare when Amanda's record player was thought to be too loud, or when old Mrs Middle, to whom the sweet and sickly smell of death had clung for years, had allowed her portly marmalade pussy to defecate in the bath once more. The male inhabitants of the house, however, venerated Amanda and she returned the compliment by sending them to the doctor when they were ill and disentangling their emotional problems with the clinical competence of a heart surgeon.

On the whole, Dougal reckoned that Mrs Middle was the most likely culprit for the lavatory, but he wisely held his tongue and changed the subject by letting his carrier bag clink suggestively.

He left his own news until they were sitting on two large cushions in front of the fire. Amanda made champagne cocktails with swift efficiency, talking of what she had done today. She did freelance work for publishers – her father was managing director of a firm – and had read a couple of tedious manuscripts.

Dougal found her words almost as reassuring as the alcohol. A part of him had been secretly afraid that the whole world had shifted away from normality at five o'clock this evening, that the earthquake within his own life was merely an insignificant tremor emanating from a more general cataclysm; it was pleasant to find the fear groundless, even if it was the kind of fear which he couldn't admit to himself.