The Company of Fellows (8 page)

“
So you’ve
come about Charles,” he said, pouring himself what looked like a
glass of guava juice. Emily was surprised. It was hardly the sweet
sherry she associated with heads of Oxford colleges.

“
That’s
right.” She left the space blank, giving him time to fill it before
she led his thoughts in any particular direction.

“
It’s
terrible, of course; he was one of our brightest stars.” Sansom
sipped his juice. He was clearly going to be as helpful as he
decided to be and no more. He certainly wasn’t going to do her job
for her. Sometimes she wondered whether academics were hired for
their ability to be bloody minded just for the fun of it. Well,
she’d play for a moment, see if she couldn’t get him to tell her
something without her having to ask him a leading
question.

“
We think he
killed himself.”

“
So I
heard.”

She wondered
how he’d heard. They certainly hadn’t told the press yet. Haydn
Shaw, possibly; then again in a place like Oxford there were
probably fewer people who didn’t know than did.

There was a
knock at the study door. “Come in,” said Sansom.

A small, neat
lady put her head around the door. She looked at Sansom; then she
looked at Emily. “I’m sorry to bother you, dear,” she said. “I
thought I heard the door and wondered if your guest would like
tea.”

“
Would you
like tea?” Sansom relayed the message, as though Emily would have
been unable to hear the initial request.

“
No, thank
you,” she said to the woman, who retreated and closed the
door.

“
My wife makes
the most incredible pastries. If you’d come in the afternoon you
could have had some,” he said.

Wife? What
kind of wife has to knock on her husband’s door? she wondered.
Maybe the Shaws weren’t the only weird family in Oxford after all.
“Professor Shaw’s death,” she nudged.

“
What would
you like to know, Chief Inspector?”

This was a
battle of wills she clearly wasn’t going to win. “Do you have any
idea why he might have wanted to kill himself?”

Sansom put his
glass down and steepled his hands. “Nothing springs to mind,” he
said after a pause.

“
Was he
unhappy at all?”

“
Unhappy? I
don’t know that Charles was ever what you could describe as happy.
His home life, well I’m sure you know about his separation from
Haydn and the daughter he never saw, but I’d hardly have said he
was depressed about it; certainly not suicidal.”

“
Was there
anything else?” she asked. “Was there anything more recent that
might have affected him; anything to do with his career
perhaps?”

Sansom’s face
seemed to light up as though he had suddenly remembered something.
“Well, he was moving to Harvard, joining the brain
drain.”

Emily looked
at him questioningly.

“
I’m leaving
too,” he clarified. “I’m not quite sure where I’m going yet, but
Charles knew where he wanted to go. He was heading over the Pond to
the land of free speech.” He chuckled sarcastically. “And large
paycheques.”

That was very
interesting, thought Emily. From what Rosie had told her on the
phone just before she got here the planned move wasn’t as definite
as Charles had made out; anything but, in fact. Clearly the news of
his rejection hadn’t filtered through the grapevine yet, but from
what the Warden said it would certainly have been a blow. To the
Professor’s ego, if nothing else.

“
And Professor
Shaw was excited about going?”

“
Cock-a-hoop
would be a suitable phrase, I would have said.”

“
Thank you, Dr
Sansom,” said Emily, getting up to go.

“
That’s quite
all right. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more help.”

You’ve been
plenty of help, thought Emily; although I’m sure you didn’t mean to
be.

____

11

The roof of
the top floor study sloped sharply down on one side leaving half of
the room like a burrow-hole. It was both a storeroom for the rarest
and most beautiful things that Tommy put in clients’ homes, and his
own sensual sanctuary. It was everything that the claggy, grey-lit
streets of an English town with its screeching youths, its chugging
engines, and incessant clang of works are not. It was somewhere he
could close his eyes and transport himself to the fragrant smells
of the spice bazaar in Istanbul, run silks and cottons across his
face and his feet that took him back to Calcutta or Shiraz. In its
own way it was as much of a frenetic melee as the roads outside,
obeying no principles of design, exhibiting no one style, having no
distinctive groundnotes, no strong accents. But this room had
nothing to do with fashions or rules. It was a cradle of
sensations, a swaddling gown built on no principle other than the
ability to take him somewhere else. Half the time this sensual
shrine seemed so perfect that most people could never begin to
aspire to it, and he knew how very lucky he was. The rest of the
time he knew it was his prison. He was an invalid, as sure as if he
were missing a leg, and these things, these escape mechanisms, were
the oxygen tank he had to carry everywhere with him just to
survive.

He had lined
one wall, free from Chinese vegetable-dyed embroideries, or African
hangings with their myriad scorched mineral colours, with shelves
made out of planks of ovangkol wood, the edges of which shone like
tiger’s eye in the candlelight. The floor was a black canvas of
wenge wood that was darker than ebony. It had been highlighted
painstakingly and absolutely sparingly with an occasional pool of
hand-enamelled tiles in the delicate geometric patterns of Islamic
art, no two the same.

At the far
end, by the window, Tommy sat at his giant desk, which was built on
the root formation of a baobab tree, sliced off and surfaced with
oak that had been inlaid with veneers in the pattern of a
Mandelbrot Set fractal. It was a sampler of every wood and shell
and semi-precious stone he sold. On the desk was a rosewood bowl,
the kind that held the counters in the ancient Chinese game of go.
It contained an ellipsoid piece of basalt that had been rubbed
slick like oil in Tommy’s hands. Alongside it was the row of
extracts and absolutes in their tiny phials that he blended from
time to time and rubbed into the stone. Now the stone glistened
with a fresh blend of jasmine, cedar, lavender, and ylang ylang
that Tommy had fixed in a droplet ambergris that was cut from a
piece washed up on the West African shore.

Tommy had his
nose in his hands, sucking the sebaceous residues into himself,
steadily slowing his heart. He was excited, but he knew that
adrenalin was the manic depressive’s most insidious enemy precisely
because it was so alluring and empowering. It made you do stupid,
impulsive things, and many manic depressives were diagnosed only
when they ended up in hospital or prison. Like Tommy.
Stupid and impulsive like stealing a hundred
grand from a dead man
, he thought. No,
that wasn’t impulsive. He hadn’t decided yet whether it had been
stupid; but he was fairly sure it wasn’t theft.
He is able to provide all you need
.
Tommy wondered how much of the money Professor Shaw had asked
Charteris to give him, and how much the lawyer had demanded as a
fee for his unusual errand; he wondered how urgent his mission must
have been for Charles to agree to such a sum. Maybe Charteris had
intended to alter the proportions in his favour. Almost certainly
not, he thought, detecting in himself for the first time a flicker
of guilt. This wasn’t just a puzzle, and John wasn’t just part of
an enigma. He was someone Tommy had known once, someone who had
treated him well for all the bookish gaucheness of his early
twenties. Tommy realised that he didn’t even know if Charteris had
had a wife, a family; a mistress, perhaps, who had been promised
£100,000 when he died to see her good.

No, Tommy
thought. It was right to remember John, but not now. Now there was
another dead person who needed Tommy’s attention more. Not to
mention the living. Tommy’s nostrils flared and the jasmine brought
him back to the happiest places in his memory.
Green tea in a tiny Zen garden in the centre of Tokyo, taxis
and buses humming only a few metres away, a monorail suspended
magically just above him, but all the movement unreachable in this
little pool of stillness. A terrace in Seville, tendrils of jasmine
laced over a trellis, cosseting him on every side.

He had the
stack of Shaw’s printed papers in front of him. It seemed like the
easiest place to start. The publications that were intact had dates
or issue numbers. Those that had been cut or torn out were
meticulously labelled in the top right corner with the source,
article title, author, page number, and date. He had arranged them
in chronological order, trying for now to take as little active
interest in the content as he could whilst he did so in order to
let any ideas slip up on him.

Once he’d
finished it was a small pile, only a couple of inches high. It
comprised abstracts of journal articles, pages from monographs,
newspaper clippings, a couple of screen prints of web pages, and
several pages clipped or torn from cultural magazines and auction
catalogues. As he had hoped, there was nothing at this stage that
gave him any real sense of Shaw’s big idea. It was far better to
look at material without being told what to make of it. He would be
far less likely to miss any clues that Shaw himself had failed to
spot.

Top of the
pile, the earliest publication, from 1989, was a brief abstract
outlining an article called
The
Anticipation of Gifts
, by a Bulgarian
theologian, Dr Krista Markova. It was from the proceedings of a
conference that had been held in Sofia in 1987. The article was
about the way icon painters in the Greek Orthodox religion saw
their art as a way of compensating people for Christ’s delay in
returning to collect the blessed. Some of them apparently believed
that their work was the embodiment of the first fruits of the
Spirit that Christ had promised the Church it would enjoy until he
came – a little taste of heaven here on earth, a spiritual amuse
bouche. Some artists, it seemed, conveyed this idea in colour
symbolism. Tommy imagined hundreds of worshippers looking up at the
painted ceilings of their churches and catching a glimpse of
celestial blue, suddenly being transported into the presence of God
and realising how transitory their problems were. How much more
useful than food, he scoffed. Or vaccines. Then he laughed to
himself. How different really were these escape mechanisms from his
own little glimpses of heaven? He looked at some of the pictures
tied to the paper with a treasury tag, appreciating just how
important beauty was in people’s lives, how much more than the
luxury it was often made out to be.

He proceeded
through more articles, some of which were about the Holy Spirit,
some of which were about religious art, most of which were about
neither. As he reached the beginning of the 1990s, around the time
the art and culture market was going stratospheric, there were
several pages torn out of Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction
catalogues, from London and New York. They were taken from
specialist sales devoted to fine art, furniture, antiques, and
wine. Shaw had attached notes to many of these detailing the prices
the lots actually fetched. Uniformly the auction house figures were
vast underestimates of the voracity of a market fuelled by
stockbroker bonuses, coke-fuelled competitiveness, and a whole new
generation of buyers looking for another bubble to pump for profit.
In a few instances the sales exceeded by a factor of ten the
already-inflated estimates.

Tommy
inevitably spent longest with the wine. His eyes lingered over the
enlarged photos of old dark bottles and frayed labels as though he
was gazing at erotic art. There were cases of the finest wines ever
made side by side with some of the early garagiste obscurities –
wines so called because they were produced in such small quantities
that they were often literally made in garages. In the 1980s and
1990s, during the financial boom of Margaret Thatcher and Gordon
Gecko, the commodities market in wine had been as frenetic as oil
or sugar or precious metals or any of the other traditional objects
of speculative desire. A killing was there to be made if you bought
right, and to a community that lived by the law of supply and
demand it was obvious that for something to be the best buy it had
to be the rarest. So overnight tiny new producers like Chateau Le
Pin in France and Screaming Eagle in California sold their wines
for more than the oldest, finest producers in the world who
happened to be unlucky enough to produce their exquisite liquors in
larger quantities. No matter that no-one knew what the drink would
taste like after 4 years, let alone 40, when presumably it was
intended to provide for people’s retirement.

Tommy skipped
past these parvenu curios, and came to rest on the classics. This
wasn’t good wine, the kind you can pick up for £10 from the
supermarket; nor the exceptional wine you can get for £30 or £40
from a wine merchant for a very special anniversary; nor even the
once in a lifetime fine wine you can find at the best stockists in
London for a few hundred pounds. These were the complex, unctuous
nectars that had been adding layer on layer of richness and charm
for decades, like a lacquer worked on for months by a Japanese
master craftsman, and would carry on doing so for decades to
come.