Grantchester Grind (17 page)

Outside on the landing the Senior Tutor and the Praelector looked at one another in
amazement. Even Dr MacKendly was astonished. Dr Buscott put a fresh reel on the tape
recorder.

‘I wouldn’t have believed it possible,’ said the Senior Tutor. ‘I’m not even sure I
believe it now.’

‘Believe what?’ asked the Praelector, who had found the whole episode incredible
himself.

‘Believed the Bursar had it in him. I’ve always thought him such a weedy little runt and
what’s all this about the douche bag? I don’t understand.’

But the Praelector didn’t reply. He was wondering what exactly was in the Bursar and
how they were going to use the evidence Kudzuvine was providing. Even Skullion, sitting
behind them, listened with interest. He’d particularly admired the way the Bursar had
insisted that Kudzuvine call him ’the Master, emphasis the’ and not a Quasimodo
update, whatever that was.

The Dean was feeling a lot better when he came down to breakfast next morning. He had
bathed and shaved and had slept very well and he was looking forward to his porridge and
bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade and coffee. But as he crossed the Court to the Hall he
was conscious that something was badly wrong with the Chapel. It was surrounded with iron
scaffolding and even from the middle of the Old Court lawn he could see that the roof was
tilted at a most unusual angle. Evidently the roof timbers had been giving trouble.
They should have been treated years before but the Bursar had said there wasn’t enough
money in the College bank account for anything but the most essential repairs. That was
typical of the man. Parsimonious to a degree. Well, he would have a word with him, and not
a very nice word either. But that would have to wait. The Dean wanted his breakfast. He sat
down and was astonished when, even before he had begun his porridge, the Senior Tutor
spoke.

‘It is absolutely vital that we have a meeting this morning,’ he said. ‘You and me and
the Praelector. My rooms ten o’clock.’

The Dean looked shocked. It was an unspoken rule at Porterhouse that no one talked at
breakfast. A ‘Good morning’ grunt was permitted but that was all. The rest of the meal was
eaten in silence. Something had to be very seriously wrong for the Senior Tutor, a
stickler for tradition, to have spoken as he had. The Dean nodded rather irritably and
said nothing. His porridge was getting cold. But when the Praelector arrived and
whispered the same message with a significant look at the Senior Tutor, the Dean knew
there had to be a major crisis. Something truly terrible had happened. For a moment he
stuck to tradition but the strain was too much for him. ‘Has…has the Master passed on?’ he
whispered.

The Senior Tutor shook his head. ‘Worse than that, much worse,’ he said. ‘Can’t talk about
it now.’

‘I should hope not,’ said the Dean and went back to his porridge. But his enjoyment of
the first decent breakfast he had had for some weeks had been spoilt. He couldn’t even
concentrate on his bacon and eggs. He dreaded to think what they had to tell him. Even the
damage done to the Chapel could hardly warrant such extreme talk. The College could
always get a grant to pay for the repairs. The Chapel was an important architectural
monument and English Heritage would be bound to put up the money. It was with the deepest
sense of foreboding that the Dean finished his coffee and went outside into the clear
sunlight. He was followed almost immediately by the Praelector and the Senior Tutor.
‘Now, what the devil is all this about?’ he demanded.

‘It’s all the Bursar’s fault–’ the Senior Tutor began but the Praelector, who, it
seemed to the Dean, had changed in some important respect during his absence, stopped
him.

‘The matter is far too serious to start apportioning blame,’ he said, ‘and frankly I’m
not at all sure we should be seen to be discussing the matter in public’ They went straight
to the Senior Tutor’s rooms where Dr Buscott had set the tape recorder up and had shown the
Senior Tutor how to change the reels.

For the rest of the morning the Dean listened with mounting horror and astonishment
to the account, given in the main by the Praelector who seemed the better informed and
certainly the more rational of the two, of the extraordinary events that had caused the
crisis. He listened with even more astonishment to the recording of the Bursar’s two
interviews with Kudzuvine.

Only when it was finished and he had asked for something stronger than sherry,
preferably a whisky and soda, was he able to speak himself. ‘You mean to say this
unutterable swine Whatsis-name is closeted with Skullion in the Master’s Lodge? The
bloody man should be behind bars,’

‘Exactly my opinion,’ said the Senior Tutor. ‘But for some reason I cannot fathom
the Praelector here seems to think it is to the advantage of the College that he remain
in the Master’s care.’

‘Care? Care?’ said the Dean, who couldn’t for the life of him see how an elderly man in a
wheelchair could possibly be said to be in any position to take charge and keep under
control a man who on his own evidence had almost certainly murdered people and had
undoubtedly been present when other people were murdered.

‘Skullion seems to exercise some peculiar influence over the man,’ the Praelector
told him. ‘It is quite remarkable to watch the creature’s reaction when the Master wheels
himself into the room. I believe certain snakes have the same effect on their prey. In any
case I have gained the distinct impression that Mr Kudzuvine prefers to remain in the
Lodge rather than return to the tender care of Mr Hartang. As far as I can gather from his
garbled mutterings, and I must say his syntax leaves a great deal to be desired, he
regards the College as the safest form of sanctuary.’

‘He can regard it how he damned well likes,’ said the Dean. ‘For my part I want him out of
Porterhouse and into the hands of this filthy gangster Hartang and his shredder as soon as
possible. I sincerely hope he dies a slow and painful death.’

But again the Praelector asserted his new-found authority. ‘I think we should think
this matter out and not take any precipitate action we might later come to regret.’

The Dean was baffled, and so was the Senior Tutor. ‘What on earth are you talking about?
Regret? Precipitate action? These filth come in here and wreck the Chapel and think they
can buy the College so that this monster, this drug dealer Hartang, can use us–how did that
swine put it?–as another turtle shell. And cover his arse, will he? I’ll cover the
bastard’s arse if he so much as sets foot anywhere near the College. And what did he say
about our eating habits?’

‘I think he said we devoured…like Japanese vultures after Lent or something,’ said the
Senior Tutor.

‘Actually he said Sumo-wrestling vultures been on hunger strike,’ said the
Praelector. ‘I must say I found it a very striking simile at the time. Most
extraordinary way Americans have of using words. I shall never be able to look at black
pudding in quite the same light again. Though why he should suppose you can catch AIDS from a
sausage I cannot for the life of me imagine.’

‘What I don’t understand is why he keeps on about rubber douches and forced feeding,’
said the Senior Tutor.

‘I can’t understand a single damned thing. Not one. Not a single damned thing,’ the Dean
shouted. And what’s with–bugger the swine, I’m beginning to talk like him. What in God’s
name has happened to the Bursar? He sounded quite terrifying. Not that I blame him, of
course, but he seemed to have gone out of his mind.’

‘I think you’ll have to ask Dr MacKendly about that,’ said the Praelector. ‘He gave him
some sort of upper, I believe the name is. Unfortunately the after-effects are rather
the opposite, an extreme form of lower.’

‘Serve the idiot right for getting us into this mess,’ snarled the Dean. ‘I want a word
with Master Bloody Bursar.’

The Praelector looked doubtful. ‘I should go easy on him,’ he said. ‘He’s not at all well
and his mental state leaves a great deal to be desired.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said the Dean.

The saw precisely what the Praelector meant during lunch. The Bursar suddenly
refused a very choice pair of chops on the grounds that he was damned if he was going to eat
the Lamb of God. The Dean eyed him warily. The Bursar was clearly a very disturbed person
and not the mealy-mouthed creature he had been.

The Chaplain, however, took up the issue. “That is a very interesting doctrinal
point,’ he said. ‘Now in the Communion Service we are asked to eat the body of Christ and to
drink his blood. That is what our Lord prescribed at the Last Supper.’

‘Lunch,’ said the Bursar, toying curiously with a knife.

‘Lunch?’

‘The Last Lunch,’ the Bursar snarled. ‘If you can have a Last Supper, why the hell can’t
you have a Last Lunch?’ There was an uneasy silence for a moment but the Bursar hadn’t
finished.

‘And anyway there’s a world of difference between having a sort of biscuit put on ones
tongue and munching one’s way through a plateful of mutton. And what’s the mint sauce
for?’

‘The mint sauce? My dear chap–’

‘I’ll tell you what it’s for,’ said the Bursar lividly. ‘It’s for covering up the taste
of the Lamb.’

The Chaplain nodded. ‘Something of the sort, yes,’ he said, ‘though frankly I think it’s
going too far to smother a chop with mint sauce. A chop always tastes better on its own or
with fresh peas…’

‘Not that lamb. The Lamb of God, for Chrissake,’ the Bursar shouted. ‘The mint sauce
takes away the taste of…’

‘An interesting point that,’ the Chaplain mused, when the Bursar himself had been
taken away.

‘Which one? They none of them held any interest for me,’ said the Dean. And I didn’t much
like the way he kept emphasizing his points with that knife.’

‘The one about the Last Lunch,’ said the Chaplain, ‘or even a Last Dinner. Supper has
always struck me as a rather insubstantial meal, more of a snack really. Still, if you’re
going to be crucified, I don’t suppose you want anything too heavy.’

‘Christ,’ said Dr Buscott in disgust.

‘Precisely,’ the Chaplain went on. ‘We’ve just been talking about Him. A most peculiar
chap, I’ve always thought. I’ve often wondered what he’d have done in life if he had come up
to Porterhouse as an undergraduate.’

‘He might have come in handy to do something for the Bursar. It’s going to take a
miracle to get him back to sanity,’ said the Senior Tutor, and helped himself to one of
the chops the Bursar had refused.

At the other end of High Table Purefoy Osbert and the Librarian sat eating
quietly.

‘Do they always behave like that?’ Purefoy asked.

‘They’re always very odd but I’ve never seen anything like that before,’ said the
Librarian. ‘But then the whole place seems to have gone mad lately. Funnily enough the
Bursar has always seemed the mildest of them all.’

‘And who is the small round man with the red face?’

‘That is the Dean,’ the Librarian said. ‘The small angry looking man. Not someone you
want to cross, especially when he’s in a nasty mood, and by the look of him he’s not in a
very nice one now.’

‘And who is the tall thin old fellow?’ Purefoy asked.

‘That’s the Praelector. He’s not a bad old chap. Very old but relatively scholarly for
Porterhouse,’ the Librarian said. “The dimmest of the three is supposed to be the Senior
Tutor, but I’m not sure he’s half as ignorant as he pretends. It’s always difficult to
know with the Senior Fellows. They are perpetually playing games and pretending to be
complete fools and never to do any work and then you find they regard you as an idiot
because they’ve taken you in. But all Cambridge is a bit like that. I call it a
“Put-You-Down Town”. Everyone is so bloody competitive. Not that I’m bothered, because
the Librarian is only a sort of honorary Fellow in Porterhouse and I very seldom dine
in. But as the Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow I’m afraid they’ll expect you to and
they’ll put you through it. It is what they call your Induction Dinner.’

However, for the moment the Dean was far too preoccupied to notice Dr Osbert. It
wasn’t only the Bursar’s state of mind that bothered him. In fact that was the least of his
worries. Something about the Praelector’s manner, and the fact that he was obviously
more in command of the situation than the Senior Tutor whose emotions were leading the
way, led him to suspect that the Praelector saw more profit for the College in what had
happened than was immediately obvious. He would have to have a quiet talk with the
Praelector on his own.

At the Transworld Television Productions Centre in Dockland Hartang was trying to
get Karl Kudzuvine on his own. ‘Get me K.K.,’ he told Ross Skundler in tones that, had
Kudzuvine heard them, would have made sure he wasn’t gotten at all easily. The first long
letter from Waxthorne, Libbott and Chaine, Solicitors, 615 Green Street, Cambridge,
jointly composed by both Mr Retter and Mr Wyve and personally addressed to Edgar
Hartang, was not the sort of missive he liked receiving. It set out in numbered
paragraphs the list of complaints against Edgar Hartang and Transworld Television
Productions in details that covered several pages and requested an early response to
their suggestion that in order to save very considerable costs and attendant
publicity he pay the sum of twenty million pounds as part payment for the damage done to
Porterhouse College buildings and the mental strain placed upon Fellows and
undergraduates about to take exams alike.

‘Twenty million pounds? Is someone out of their fucking minds? I told Kudzuvine to buy
in the fucking place, not smash it to the ground,’ he screamed at Skundler who was having to
stand in for Kudzuvine and take all Hartang’s terrible anger. ‘I go to Bangkok a few days
and when I get back I find this. Do I need a demand for twenty million pounds sterling?
Like holes in my ass I need it. And where the fuck is Kudzuvine?’

‘Nobody seems to know, sir,’ said Skundler, regretting what he had said about K.K. being
up shit creek and needing to paddle. He was nose-deep himself now. He had approved the
Porterhouse accounts and by proxy the validity of the scheme. ‘He just hasn’t come back to
work since he went up there with the team, sir.’

‘Team? What sort of team? Some fucking demolition one like a wrecking crew? They take a
bullfuckingdozer with them? Well, where is he?’

‘I’ll try and find out some more information, E.H.’ Skundler said, sidling towards the
door.

‘You won’t,’ said Hartang in tones of unmistakable menace. ‘You will stay here and tell
me what has been going on while I’m in Bangkok.’ He lowered his voice to a terrifying
whisper. And don’t say you don’t know, Skundler.’ Behind the blue glasses the eyes seemed to
shred Ross Skundler already. Only when someone was going to die did Edgar Hartang speak
with such clarity.

‘All I know is Kudzuvine got the Professor to invite him to make a video of Porterhouse
College Sunday and Kudzuvine went to Cambridge–’

‘Tell me something I don’t know, Skundler. Like who is the Professor? Don’t I know
Kudzuvine went to Cambridge? Twenty million pounds I know too.’

‘Professor Bursar, sir, the one you…Kudzuvine found for you at the fund-raising
seminar on account he seemed dumb as dogshit…’

‘Dumb as dogshit? Twenty million pounds may be dogshit to you, Skundler, but dumb it
ain’t. Speaks volumes. I don’t like what I’m hearing.’

Skundler liked it even less. He wasn’t just on the hook now, he was being reeled in. Fast.
‘This Professor Bursar, you saw him, sir. He came to lunch Wednesday twelfth, twelve
forty-five with you. You remember?’

‘You asking me a question, Skundler? Are you asking me a question? Because if you are,
I got an–’

‘No, sir, Mr Hartang,’ said Skundler who didn’t want to hear the answer. He knew it. ‘I’m
just reminding myself the details and just how dumb he seemed. I mean real stupid.’

Hartang’s mind went back to the occasion. Ate like a pig,’ he said involuntarily, and
went into spasms. When he had finally got several pills into his mouth and had washed
them down with mineral water, he corrected himself. The pig phobia was subdued by
another thought. He was being stung to the tune of twenty millions by some broken-down
professors. ‘Grotesque,’ he muttered, meaning the Bursar. ‘Gets his suits from the
Salvation Army, thrift shop, some place like that. But dumb he ain’t.’

‘No sir, I guess not,’ said Skundler, wishing to hell he could avoid mentioning the
Bursar’s next visit with the ledgers.

‘Don’t guess, Skundler. Tell it like it is.’

‘So I told Kudzuvine we had to see the print-out on account we needed to know their
financial situation. Like we’re not buying a pig in a poke. Jesus, Mr Hartang, you all
right? I mean you want me to call the medication team?’

Hartang shook his head–or it shook him. Everything about him shook for a minute and beads
of sweat broke out on his face. When he finally pulled himself together again, his voice
was shaky but his meaning was unmistakable. ‘I am all right, Skundler. You use that word
again and you aren’t. Next time I’ll be putting a long-distance through.’

Skundler tried to swallow. His throat was desert-dry. He knew Hartang’s long-distance
calls. Like ‘Fax me Death’. ‘The Professor brings these ledgers, sir, like…like they’re from
before printing.’

‘Yes, they would be,’ said Hartang. ‘Ever know a fucking ledger had printing in it?
Because I haven’t. Not in a lifetime doing accounts I’ve ever seen a ledger that’s been
printed in.’

‘No, sir, I didn’t mean that. I meant like they were way back. Used quills and all. I said
to the Professor’

‘Skundler,’ said Hartang very quietly and eyeing him through slits, ‘Skundler, are you
out of your fucking little mind? Or are you trying to tell me you are way off your trolley?
Because I don’t believe you. I don’t believe one lousy fucking word you are telling me. You
are lying, Skundler. And I don’t like liars one dead cent. I used to like you, Skundler.
Skundler’s one of the team, I said.

‘Not now. Not now you tell me they still use quills to do the books at this Porterhouse
College of yours.’

‘I didn’t say that, Mr Hartang, sir,’ Skundler managed to get out, ‘I said like they used
to. I said to the Professor, “Do you still use quills?” And he said’

‘Yes, we use quills is what he told you. Like they got a million fucking geese running
round they can rely on. No way, asshole. You’ll be telling me next they don’t do double
entry even.’

Skundler seized a final opportunity. ‘They do, sir. But with figures that bad nothing
coming in and it is all out I don’t know why. I said to the Professor–’

‘I’ll tell you why, Skundler. I’ll tell you. Because that fucking Limey shit in the shiny
suit like hand-me-downs was pegging you to the ground for the fucking ants to eat. He try
and sell you any equity in a New fucking Jersey gold-mine too? Because if he did, you
bought. As sure as shit you bought. Well, you and Kudzuvine have bought me twenty million
sterling’s worth of trouble.’ He pressed a button underneath the huge glass-topped desk.
‘Get me Schnabel, Feuchtwangler and Bolsover. And fast,’ he shouted. Skundler hurried
towards the door. ‘Not you, Skundler, not you. I want to enjoy your company a little
longer. Not much but just a little. Okay.’ He paused and the lizard eyes studied Ross
Skundler. ‘Want a drink, Ross?’ he asked. ‘Because I sure as hell do. And I don’t drink.’

‘Yes sir, I could do with one.’

‘Well, you’re not getting one. Now get me the Chivas Regal. Where you and Kudzuvine are
going you’ll have plenty to drink. Like fathoms.’

Skundler crossed to the major bar and fetched the Scotch and one glass. They rattled on
the desk top when he put them down.

Edgar Hartang was reading the letter again. He wanted his lawyers’ opinion and very
fast indeed. It looked real bad to him. Like he’d been screwed.