Pleasure and a Calling (14 page)

‘Hello? Hello? Yes, it’s here. I have it.’

She sounded so pleased to be helping me, I fell in love with her all over again.

‘You’ve saved my life,’ I told her. ‘I’ll come straight down.’

‘No problem at all. It’ll be behind the desk.’

Sweat poured off me. The taste of the bitter chocolate lingered in my mouth. I waited. After ten or fifteen minutes Abigail’s assistant rounded the corner carrying a striped paper bag. I waited till she’d gone in then watched for the switchover. They spoke briefly as she handed the bag to Abigail, who then vanished into the room marked ‘Private’.

Now I walked into the library and retrieved the jacket.

And I was gone, across the road, up the hill, walking quickly until I reached my flat. I changed my clothes and drove to Raistrick Road. This was as good a time as any, with Abigail safely at the library for the rest of the day. I parked as near as I
dared to the house, though the chances of being challenged were slim. There was no Neighbourhood Watch. It was a main road populated mainly by students, who came and went and minded their own business. My heart was booming. But as I approached the door I felt the fear. Perhaps the fear was there all along and I had pushed it to the back of my mind in the rush of triumph and escape. But now it rose again. The fear, of course, was that this was not the key. That the key to this house would never have been hidden away in Abigail’s backpack – that the key to this house had been in her purse, which I had seen with my own eyes when she gave her assistant money for a sandwich. I knew now as I had then that this was not the key. I inserted it into the mounting plate and tried to turn it, hoping to feel the mechanism shift and fall.

It might have been set in stone.

I
AWOKE ON MY COUCH
at first light with Abigail’s velveteen hairband curled in my hand, strands of her dark wiry hair twisted into the fabric. I fell in and out of sleep, as if in the grip of a fever, images of Abigail and Sharp rising and falling in my mind. At nine I forced myself to get up. I shaved and showered and called Wendy to say I would be out for the day.

But doing what? There was no point following Sharp to and from work. It would only end in my sitting outside the house in Raistrick Road simmering with desire and hatred. For a while I sat among the cabinets and drawers in my back room. I had neglected my filing and maps – the work that was so vital to the smooth running of things, and which always gave me so much satisfaction. I collated photographs and notes. I downloaded files from my phone, used the printer. I loved the effort of having everything on paper, tied up, tangible, accessible, classified. But I couldn’t hold focus. What I needed was another strategy, I thought. I needed Abigail to see for herself what kind of man had cheated his way into her bed. He was no Cambridge lecturer, that was for sure. That was the place to start. I thought of the card the
woman in Warninck’s had read out and after some deliberation called the university’s faculty office.

The woman who answered had no knowledge of a Dr Sharp. ‘Let me just check our records.’ I heard her in the background consulting colleagues, then she came back on to the phone. ‘There
was
a chap called Douglas Sharp, two or three years ago, but he wasn’t on staff, he was a postgraduate student.’ She paused as if looking further. ‘It’s possible he taught one or two classes.’

‘Do you have a forwarding address?’

‘Just one moment.’

Off she went again, but then after a minute a man picked up the phone. ‘I gather you’re asking about Douglas Sharp. May I ask what this is about?’

‘Yes, of course, thank you. This is his brother. I’m trying to track him down. I’m afraid there’s an illness in the family and I need to let him know.’

‘I see. But I’m afraid he left the college some time ago. I really have no idea where he might be now.’

‘But he was studying there?’

‘He was a PhD student. What did you say your name was?’

‘Sharp.’

‘Of course. Brothers, you say?’

‘We’re not very close. He doesn’t keep in touch. But our mother is seriously ill. You said he left some time ago.’

‘Perhaps I could ask his supervisor to call you.’

‘That would be kind. What’s his name?’

‘
Her
name. Greening. Professor Greening.’

‘Obviously, it is quite urgent …’

‘Of course.’

I gave the man a fictitious number and then hung up.

Something was afoot. I waited an hour then called the porter’s
lodge and asked to be put through to Professor Greening’s office. ‘She might have been trying to call me,’ I said. ‘The name’s Sharp.’

There was a beat of uncertainty. ‘Douglas Sharp?’

‘This is his brother.’

‘I see. One moment, sir.’

I was in luck. She was busy, but on a break. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help. Your brother had rooms here at the college, but left no forwarding address. I sympathize, of course, but as you may know, he left under a cloud – and, I might add, in a hurry.’

‘So he didn’t finish his doctorate?’

‘I should say not. You might conclude, if only from the newspaper reports, that that was very much a diminishing option. And we do have discretionary powers. He brought the college a great deal of unwanted media publicity. Let’s leave it at that.’

‘But what happened?’

She paused and then sighed. ‘If you don’t know, I have probably already said too much.’

‘The porter’s lodge seemed to remember him.’

‘As well they might.’

‘And this would be what – two years ago?’

‘Just over three years ago. I really can’t add more. But good luck with your search.’

I didn’t yet know what I was looking for, but I had an inkling where to look, and within half a minute was logging into the
Cambridge News
online archive. A search for ‘Douglas + Sharp’ produced zero results, but after five minutes the name of the college served up a feast worth waiting for: ‘Brawl at College Dinner over Don’s Sex Trysts with Student’.

The ‘don’ description was over-egging it, but this seemed to be the report in question: in a nutshell, the story of a furious
Muslim father who arrived late in the day all the way from Glasgow with two equally furious companions, possibly brothers, demanding to speak with the man – an English adult in a position of trust – who had made his daughter, an undergraduate under the man’s tutelage, pregnant in her first term at Cambridge. It was not made clear whether the wrongdoer – unnamed and downgraded to a junior lecturer in the story – was actually available to meet his accusers. It transpired only that there was a fierce argument between these men and the head porter and his assistant that quickly flared into a scuffle, drawing in a number of academic staff arriving at that hour in full regalia for a college dinner. Their intervention, intended to calm matters, understandably made things worse, the suspicion being that one of their number was actually the defiler himself, though there was no evidence that he was even in the city. Fists flew, blood was spilt, a crowd gathered (several witnesses were quick enough with their camera-phones to capture one of the dons bleeding vividly down his white frontage, possibly from a punched nose), the police were called, arrests were made and a ‘long-bladed weapon’ was recovered at the scene. Charges were made and, reportedly at the behest of the university authorities, dropped.

The outrage of the violence was compounded with lurid details gleaned from the girl’s acquaintances, revealing twice-daily lovemaking sessions between the ‘thirtysomething Don Juan’ and the eighteen-year-old he had met and seduced at a literary reading at a bookstore in town. The man, thought to be studying for a doctorate in English, had taken the girl, a teetotaller, to a wine bar. Once, the couple had been seen together in a punt on the Cam.

There were links to subsequent opinion pieces on the dangers for first-year female students, the university’s failure to screen
casual teaching staff with access to vulnerable young adults (though in fact he had not been the girl’s lecturer at all) and the general betrayal of ethnic and working-class undergraduates by ‘unthinking and unrepresentative elites’. Final mention of the scandal consisted of a brief report that the miscreant had been removed, reportedly for some ancient but occasionally revived offence of ‘moral turpitude’, and the supervision agreement on his research thesis formally rescinded. The fate of the disgraced girl was not divulged.

So how did it end? Had she been put to death by concerned relatives as punishment for dishonouring the family name? Were her father and brothers still theoretically in pursuit of Sharp? It occurred to me that I could tip them off if only I knew who they were. But perhaps they had let bygones be bygones. The girl might still be at Cambridge right now, foetus long aborted, happily ensconced in a higher-rated college with full no-strings bursary and furiously revising for her finals having learned a valuable lesson in life and moved on.

Don’t we all do that?

I
HAD ERRANDS TO
run that I’d been neglecting: rubbish for the recycling bins, shirts for the laundry, a suit for the dry cleaner’s. I drove to Fairley, a sprawling neighbourhood at the edge of town where I sometimes had keys cut. Here was an estate of affordable housing, a big supermarket and parade of local shops – newsagent, pharmacy, bookie, aquatic supplies, hairdresser, fried chicken franchise. I deposited my garbage and laundry and sat in the supermarket café with coffee, juice and toast. The events of the previous day – its high adrenalin rush and crashing disappointment – were only now swimming back into focus. All I had to show was the trophy of Abigail’s hairband, a memento to hold close to my cheek like a saint’s relic.

I took out my phone and ran through the video I had made of her phone’s contents at the library. The light was dim, but most of the numbers in her directory were legible. ‘D’ for Douglas, of course. Home – her landline at Raistrick Road – Mum, Solicitor, Work. Other London numbers, mainly girls’ names, were probably friends. Her photographs included a series from what looked like a girls’ night out, two or three of an older woman
– her mother, I guessed – holding an old ginger teddy bear, and there was one of the author she had admired at the reading at Warninck’s. There were two of Sharp: one with a chalkboard menu behind him and the other, presumably at Abigail’s house – which of course made me want to kill him even more – with the ginger teddy in his lap. Disappointingly, there were none of Abigail herself.