An Early Grave (27 page)

CHAPTER 44

Latimer College stands amongst those colleges bounded on the west by St. Aldates, on the north by High Street and to the south by Merton Field and Christchurch Meadow. Callum loved the place and had always dreamed of leaving home for university, not so much for the leaving behind of his old life but more for the adventure he imagined in moving to another world. And for a young lad raised on a housing estate, first in Belfast then Liverpool, Oxford was an entirely alien concept. With each year he spent in the city as an under-grad, post-grad and finally post-doc, he felt more a part of its fabric, its tissue, learning to live and breathe with it. He and Tilly once had a conversation arising from her stories of time travel, when they discussed the possibility of re-incarnation, of being born again and again, one soul passing through many human forms. He asked if she ever had a feeling when entering a room, a building or a town that she had been there before even though she definitely had not. She told him it happened many times, but she couldn’t always be certain that she hadn’t seen, heard or read about the place sometime beforehand. Callum explained that years before he had ever come to Oxford, he felt a peculiar affinity for the place, as if he were destined to one day live there. Tilly understood perfectly. She told him that as a child she’d gone to Scotland on holiday with her parents, but inexplicably she already seemed to know so much about Loch Lomond, had a passion for Burns poetry, towering mountains and dark lakes, and she recalled asking for porridge for breakfast when she hadn’t a clue what it was made of. She could never explain where such inclinations originated. Callum felt the same about Oxford. He found himself reading stories and histories on the city long before he ever thought or even dreamed of studying there. At times he felt as though Oxford ran through his genes like a family trait, except that no one in his family had ever been to university, let alone to Oxford. He hated leaving it. He’d once been perfectly happy to see his future well and truly set among the spires and colleges. The death of his wife and child wiped all such notions clean away like a bleached dishcloth on a kitchen worktop.

*

Tara had also loved the place. Her dreams, however, always pointed well into the future, beyond student days, beyond the foundations of a career, to a time when she had a settled life with a husband she adored and children to love and inspire. She didn’t care where in the world she went to realise it. Oxford was a wonderful place in which to picture it, but she believed happiness could exist anywhere. All too soon, however, she realised happiness co-existed with misery; only the proportions of each varied with time and place.

Walking along Merton Street, Callum beside her, she looked beyond the College that gave the street its name to a building similar in appearance, but only in the hue of its stonework, since Merton outdated Latimer by nearly seven hundred years.

‘You all right?’ Callum asked when she stopped suddenly. ‘You don’t look too happy going back to your old College.’

She didn’t answer straightaway but allowed her gaze to linger upon the muddle of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century blocks, cleverly made to look as old as every building surrounding them. But it wasn’t the buildings, or the college, giving rise to her hesitation. It all came down to the memory of one person. She never dreaded revisiting Oxford and Latimer; it was her former life that frightened her, saddened her to the point where she regretted volunteering to accompany Callum on his quest for justice. The face of the man who had broken her heart, who had nearly destroyed her completely, was easy to recall. She pictured it daily, every day since her graduation. When Simon had told her their student days were over, he threw in the words that they were over, too. Callum sought justice for Tilly and Emily. Somehow, for the first time, it occurred to Tara that she needed justice for what Simon had done to her. Dreams and plans shattered by one callous phrase. After Oxford they were to move to London, live together, establish careers, marry and, in a country village, buy a house big enough for a team of kids. Simon helped create the dreams in her, had her believing it all was possible, when the whole time he knew that Tara, in the eyes of his well-to-do family and evidently in him, was merely his student plaything. A little girl with a quirky northern accent would never measure up to his family’s social standing. Their parting was to be as final as a bow to the vice-Chancellor on graduation day. Of course, despite her reluctance in returning, she didn’t for one minute believe that Simon was the type to re-visit his old college, his old stomping ground. After all, they were his words ‘Our student days are over, Tara. Time to start work on the next chapter. Never look back when you’re climbing a hill.’

‘Come on,’ she said at last. ‘Time to get this thing started.’

She took Callum’s arm, and they walked towards the porter’s lodge of Latimer College.

They were allocated rooms on separate staircases on opposite sides of the small quadrangle, its fountain in the centre a memorial statue to the Oxford martyrs of 1555, a small reproduction of the George Gilbert Scott memorial which stands between St. Giles and Magdalen Street. In this case, from within the spire-like monument, water poured from beneath the figures of the three martyrs. On the side of the water bowl the inscription, borrowed also from the actual monument, read ‘
To
the
Glory
of
God
,
and
in
grateful
commemoration
of
His
servants
,
Thomas
Cranmer
,
Nicholas
Ridley
and
Hugh
Latimer
.
’
Changed times indeed that by the Twentieth Century Latimer College not only opened its doors to non-protestants, but also to women.

*

She sat on the single bed, her back against the stone wall, shoes kicked to the floor, her suitcase open beside her. Upon her knee sat a folder containing some of the papers she’d taken from Callum’s box-files. There was hardly a sound, the adjoining rooms unoccupied so far, and little stirring outside apart from the tap-tap of a gardener’s hoe in one of the flower beds. Before leaving Liverpool, in fact, even before she’d met Callum in the park, she’d decided to keep to herself the information she’d received from Assistant Chief Muetzel in Lucerne. She had a name; that was all, but for now she assumed it was the name of Zhou Jian’s killer. The reason for his death, however, remained a mystery. Apart from Latimer College, she could think of no logical connection between Zhou Jian’s murder and the deaths of the other alumni. If she was right about the killer then she must begin piecing together any possible scenarios that might reveal a motive. Setting the folder to the side, she removed two books from her case, Tilly’s novel,
The
Clock
-
tower
and the manual given to her by its author Georgina Maitland. Leafing through this volume she hit on the section of
Live
Your
Life
devoted to healthy eating. Recalling Georgina’s fabulous cup-cakes, she wondered just how healthy they were intended to be. She got to thinking, too, just how healthy was the Maitland-Egerton-Hyde marriage? How had they got around Anthony’s apparent homosexuality?

The people who knew that she and Callum had intended to visit Charlotte were Ollie Rutherford, Georgina and Anthony Egerton-Hyde, and yet Callum persisted with his theory that Justin Kingsley was responsible for the murders. It would be quite a result indeed if he were to show up in Oxford on this weekend. Strangely, he was the only member of that circle of friends who hadn’t actually graduated. He’d staged his disappearing act in his final year. He was not an alumnus of Latimer College.

*

Callum couldn’t help looking forward to meeting up with old friends. At every turn, of course, he saw the sweet smiling face of Tilly. On the brief walk from the car park to the College he pictured her during those years after graduation when many of their friends had moved on, while he and Jian were busy with post-grad projects and Tilly wandered the city streets soaking up inspiration for her novels. She’d taken to some peculiar fashions in those days, gothic in some sense, then new age, a throwback to the sixties with long flowery dresses, floppy hats and flowing locks of brown hair. He wondered now if, in some mystical way, she had been laying down her image for his future, for the time when he possessed only memories of her. Once she was published, after Emily was born and they moved to Shiplake, plainer fashion returned; she wore her hair in a bob, and when at home dressed in jeans and T-shirts.

He stood for a long time peering out of the small lattice window into the quad, watching all come and go. He recognised one or two of the dons, the head porter, Mr Winterburn, of course, and one of the old scouts, Mrs Simms. Several alumni arrived and found their rooms, and for a moment it felt like this was his first day here. How he longed to turn back the clock, to live it all again with no changes, bar the obvious, to have been on time for once, to have reached Tilly and Emily, for the three of them to have been far away when the killer came calling. He gazed at the Latimer Tower with its clock, the strangest part of the college buildings. It looked so quirky set against the traditional pale yellow stone of Oxford; didn’t lend itself to any particular style of architecture that he could identify. Designed through a competition among students, it was a deliberate attempt to set Latimer apart from neighbouring colleges. In this they had been successful, and Tilly had used it as her inspiration for the time-travelling portal in her novels. A determined knock on his door interrupted his reminiscing. When he opened it, Tara stood in a brown half-length raincoat, woollen hat, jeans and high-heeled boots.

‘Fancy a walk?’

Eager for the company, he grabbed his new anorak and joined her downstairs in the quad. She smiled warmly at him, and for the second time that day took him by the arm as they walked, the sound of her heels reverberating around the paved yard.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked, wondering if, by taking his arm, they were to behave as a couple on this weekend with her again trying to suppress the appearance of policewoman.

‘Anywhere you like. I had to get out of that room for a while. Started to feel depressed.’

‘Not reliving good old memories of the place?’

‘That’s exactly what I was doing, but my memories of Latimer are not like yours.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They aren’t all pleasant.’

They passed by Corpus Christi and Oriel on their way into High Street. She seemed content to walk in silence, but he couldn’t help pondering her agenda. In the few weeks since their first meeting, he’d never known her to do something without having set an objective. He surmised it was the way of a detective’s mind, to have a reason for every action and for every question asked. He couldn’t know that she was merely searching for comfort in the city where she’d endured so much grief, on the very day they parted company.

‘Have a good look around,’ she said at last. ‘See if you can spot anyone you know. Someone who’s been missing for a long time. That’s why we’re here.’

They strolled through the streets, browsing the shops, the city throbbing as always with tourists and only a couple of weeks from the student invasion. When they reached Broad Street, she pinched his arm.

‘Why don’t you take me to one of your old haunts? I’ve heard all about the fun and games you had; why don’t you show me where it all happened?’

He stopped and turned to face her. To all passers-by they appeared a natural couple, she dangling on his arm, smiling upwards at his roguish yet handsome face.

‘I could ask the same of you,’ he said. ‘What did you get up to in Oxford that was so bad you never want to talk about it?’

She maintained hold of his arm, her eyes darting nervously as he waited for an answer. Neither one had mentioned the kiss in the park, and now they seemed to be revisiting the situation. For a second she considered telling him her story, but a cool breeze suddenly flowed between them proving a sufficient distraction.

‘Let’s go for a drink,’ she said. ‘I’ll choose the pub if you can’t be bothered.’

She pulled on his arm, and he followed obediently. They headed off towards New College Lane, turned left down a narrow alley, and a couple of minutes later sat comfortably in the Turf Tavern, both of them sampling pints of special cask ales. Callum chose a pint of
Broadside
, while she self-deprecatingly ordered a pint of
Bitter
and
Twisted
. The bar was busy with a lunchtime rush, the aroma of sizzling beef and garlic constantly wafting towards them. They sat on low stools facing each other over a small table. Tara removed her hat and coat; Callum seemed comfortable to remain as he was. It was tempting to slip into a holiday mood, to pretend they were away together, getting to know each other, working towards the moment when they hurry back to her room, pull off their clothes and jump into bed. Each time the mood lightened, she reminded herself of Callum’s circumstances, of what they must achieve on this visit, of the dangers one or both of them might face in finding a murderer and bringing him to justice. It had the same effect as the cold rush of air that passed between them earlier. Warm, cosy feelings needed dousing with a bucket of cold water. Visions of murder had the same effect.