Gifted and Talented (33 page)

‘Hey!’ A pink and yellow bison thrust its unlovely countenance into Anna-Lou’s face. ‘What are you doing?’

Olly’s stomach plunged in terror. He felt sweat – more sweat – break out on his forehead. Were they to be unmasked?

But Anna-Lou remained composed. She removed the camera from her eye and blinked at her aggressor, the picture of innocence. ‘Is only for my parents,’ she said with a heavy Eastern European accent. ‘To show my willage I have vorked as vaiter in important English party vith lords and dukes. You smile for me, yes?’ She maintained her irresistible beam as she said this and, as an amazed Olly looked on, the burly newcomer melted and gurned into the lens.

‘Wow!’ he whispered, after the bison had passed on. ‘That was cool.’

‘But not as cool as this,’ Anna-Lou hissed back. Both of them now turned sideways to avoid a waiter coming towards them with great force behind a trolley. It bore what Olly first thought was a large, angled finger made of ice, but realised as it passed that it was in fact an enormous penis, the area around the member heaped with blackly glistening caviar evidently meant to resemble pubic hair. It was melting in the heat, the trail of water soaking into the parquet showing darkly after its progress. People either side of them started to clap, whoop and roar as it passed; its appearance was, it seemed, a central part of the ritual.

As Anna-Lou’s camera exploded in flashes, the bison in pink and yellow, on the other side of the trolley, gave her the thumbs up.

‘What a picture!’ she gasped, as the penis trundled off.

‘Flash, bang, wallop,’ agreed Olly.

The chandeliers were now turned off and strobing spotlights began to sweep the crowd. The music, which had throbbed faintly before, was now turned up enormously. Fists punched the air. As the chorus approached, the music suddenly disappeared. ‘And it’s Hi, Ho, Silver Linin’,’ roared the crowd into the void.

The eighties wedding disco from hell, Olly thought.

‘Why do people like this always have music like this?’ asked Anna-Lou, raising her camera.

As they passed on, something was barring their way. ‘There’s a man on the floor!’ Anna-Lou exclaimed. ‘People are jumping all over him.’

Someone, Olly saw, was indeed being crushed to a pulp beneath people obeying the strictures of Van Halen.

As his colleague snapped away again, it was left to Olly to alert the dancers that the prone and crumpled form beneath them was a person. ‘Good lord!’ said one of them, looking down in astonishment. ‘It’s Chippy!’

‘More like squashy now,’ Anna-Lou observed as they moved on.

No longer bothering with the niceties of glasses, people were swigging champagne direct from bottles. Not all of it was hitting their mouths. The music had switched to the Sex Pistols and both men and women were jumping up and down, landing uncertainly on a floor slippery and sticky with wine.

Someone cannoned across the floor and, bowling-pin-like, brought down several others. There was a scream to Olly’s side as a hefty woman in stilettos came down on her partner’s foot.

The music changed again. ‘Wo-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh . . .’ began Billy Joel. ‘Uptown Girrrullll . . .’

Isabel struggled to her feet, blinking round in the gloom. The hall seemed to be at the end of the building and no doors led out of it at ground level. A flight of shallow, enormously wide stone stairs led up between fat stone balustrades. Isabel unhesitatingly followed them.

At the top of the stairs a wide landing stretched into shadows punctuated by deep-set doors. They looked like they might lead into bedrooms. Might Jasper be in one of them? Making a stand of some sort? Refusing to take part? Hiding from the horrors downstairs?

It was an encouraging thought; he would be pleased to see her. She pushed the first door open.

The room exposed was huge, shadowy and dominated by a four-poster bed whose enormously tall canopy was draped with dark curtains and topped with black plumes. Dim lamps against the walls near the door illuminated a gloomy painted scene, which seemed to cover the whole room. In it, muscled men on horseback were making off with screaming, naked females. The thought flew through Isabel’s mind that, with such early influences, it was unsurprising that men like Chippy nursed the attitudes they did towards women.

Over the nervous rushing in her ears she could hear nothing but a pounding silence. But now she could hear voices. Coming, it seemed, from behind the curtains of the bed. On the broad, dark-oak floorboards beside it lay a scrunched-up pink jacket, a hastily cast-off blue waistcoat. And a pair of high-heeled shoes.

Isabel shot across the polished floor. In a flash, she was at the bedside and wrenching back the drapes. The padded red interior was lit by a lamp mounted above the pillows. A dark-haired woman and a blond man lay on the counterpane.

Jasper was sprawled on his front over the red bedspread. His head was bent over a small mirror on which rows of white powder were arranged in neat lines. Connecting his elegant nose to the mirror was a small silver straw.

Isabel swayed and clutched at the velvet curtains.

Jasper’s companion now looked up. ‘Hello!’ she said cheerily to Isabel. ‘Want to join in?’

Jasper now lifted his familiar, curly, golden head and stared back at her. It was, she decided afterwards, the absolute lack of shame on his face that angered her more than anything.

She reached for the nearest object, one of the high-heeled shoes on the floor. But in her fury she misfired; it whizzed past its intended target and through the curtains on the bed’s other side. A few second later, there was an explosion of breaking glass.

‘Hurray!’ said the dark-haired girl. ‘I was wondering when the window-smashing was going to start.’

‘Brown Sugar’ had started up now to ecstatic shrieks from the crowd. Olly had seen enough; certainly he had heard enough. He had got the idea. He did not need to see the entire Bullinger Club in their ridiculous uniforms pretending to be Mick Jagger.

‘What now?’ asked Anna-Lou. She had, he knew, got lots of photos of silly people doing silly things. But there was nothing exactly incriminating. And nothing at all of Jasper De Borchy, who had been conspicuous by his absence.

‘It’s all more of the same, really,’ Anna-Lou observed as they reached the wall and looked back at a sea of twisting wrists and shaking heads.

They stood watching, spirits sinking. Must they, Olly thought, return to Alastair with nothing better to show for their efforts than a frozen willy? But even the indomitable Anna-Lou was flagging now, he saw. She looked pale and exhausted and all the amused confidence had gone from her gaze.

The drunken crowd were now shouting along to Meatloaf. It was a sight to depress even the most resolute, which he and Anna-Lou no longer were. The momentum was going, Olly knew. Their drive, their purpose, was evaporating. He had to get it back, fire Anna-Lou up again. Find her something good to photograph. ‘We haven’t tried upstairs yet,’ he pointed out. ‘They might be bonking on the coats.’

‘Or just being sick,’ Anna-Lou groaned as someone nearby vomited copiously on the parquet. With a jaded air, she pulled out her camera to record the event.

She followed him, anyway, as he sidled along the wall to the nearest doorway and out into a large stone hall where a flight of wide stone steps led to the upper level. The bottom of the stairs was flanked by stone posts bearing yet more gargoyles, like the monsters at the gate. Olly felt, briefly, almost sorry for whoever lived here with these hideous objects.

‘Come on,’ he urged Anna-Lou, as he headed up the stairs. Twisting backwards to encourage his colleague, Olly did not see the figure now coming downstairs towards him – rushing, unseeing, right into him.

She was falling, down, into the gloom at the bottom of the stairs. Someone was beneath her, grabbing at her as they rolled over and over, the stair-treads hitting back, knee, elbow.

‘What the hell?’ yelled Olly. The figure had come out of nowhere. It had knocked him completely off his feet. Thankfully, he was only a few steps up; it could have been fatal otherwise. As they lay tangled together on the cold stone at the bottom of the flight, he could see now who his attacker was.

‘Isabel!’ Olly gasped.

‘Olly!’

‘What the hell are you doing . . . ?’ He could hardly speak. The pounding pain of his fall was nothing beside the searing agony of seeing Isabel at a Bullinger event.

He could hear her voice. ‘I’m sorry!’ Isabel was repeating. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

It was, he thought, too little too late. The realisation that she was Jasper De Borchy’s, body and soul, drained the remainder of the fight from him. Olly no longer cared about the
Post
story, his job or anything else. He lay back on the cold, hard stone and stared into the darkness; it seemed an appropriate metaphor for the future.

‘You’ve got a camera,’ Isabel now gasped at Anna-Lou.

‘So?’ Anna-Lou returned laconically, as if she too had given up.

‘First room on the right,’ Isabel croaked. ‘Jasper De Borchy’s snorting coke.’

Then she turned and rushed out of the hall.

It was, Richard thought, one nightmare after another. First Sara Upward catching fire. Then the whole dinner dissolving into chaos. But worst of all – far, far worse – was the news about Amber Piggott.

And now the news from the Bursar that a personal catastrophe had prevented the Chuck Snodgrasses making the plane trip. It seemed that their usual seats in first class had been unavailable on the plane. ‘I think,’ Richard said to his hysterical colleague, ‘that we have to keep a sense of proportion about all this, don’t you? Someone almost died here tonight.’

The bathroom in question had been sealed off. Police tape stretched over the shattered door. Forensics were in there. They were in Amber’s room too. Police tape was stretched across the entrance to the staircase.

But Amber was not dead. The girl who had discovered her had saved her, although it was likely she did not know it. It was after she had – unaccountably – disappeared that the paramedics, continuing her efforts, had extracted the first choking breaths of life.

The Scottish English student, Richard gathered. The one Diana liked so much. ‘Isabel’s the heroine, not me,’ the other girl insisted. ‘She’s the one who insisted we break the door down.’ But where was this heroine of the hour?

It was drugs, the police said. They were still checking which ones. It looked, at this stage, like a mixture of just about everything imaginable. The source was probably the usual one, the one they were unable to trace but whose tentacles seemed to be spreading further daily throughout the city.

Richard was shocked and upset, but ashamed, most of all. How much was he to blame for all this? As Master of the college, was he not in
loco parentis
? Yet, throughout his time here, up until now, he had avoided all but the most essential direct involvement with the students. He had never even spoken to Amber Piggott. Had he reneged on his responsibilities?

Was it his fault, now, that the college was overrun with policemen in hi-vis jackets? Could he have done more to stop life’s frightening and unpleasant side invading this protected environment, this ivory – if concrete – tower?

His suspicion that, yes, he could have, coloured everything at the moment. The disaster of the dinner, even the presence of Sara, seemed unimportant by comparison. He tried to compensate for his perceived neglect by being as helpful as possible to the various people now crowding his office. But inside he had a horrible sense of shut stable doors after horses had bolted. Making everything even worse was his growing and unstoppable wish that Diana was here to help him, with her sweet face and wide, concerned eyes. Instead of Sara Oopvard, stumbling and shrieking about with smoking hair.

Sara, in her own mind, at least, was ably commanding the situation, ordering the emergency services left, right and centre. Inside, she was furious. She had been getting on so well at the dinner, charming all the influential donors on Richard’s behalf. But then all hell had broken loose. In quick succession, someone had grabbed her crotch, her hair had been engulfed in flames and cold water had been thrown all over her head.

What was worse, her sore and half-naked scalp remained on display. No late-night salon seemed to exist in the godforsaken provinces. She had tried all the directories without success. The smoking ruins of her hair were plastered to the streaky ruins of her make-up. What must people think?

Old habits died hard all the same and she was determined to turn even this situation to her advantage. As future wife of the Master of the college, she would seize this cast-iron opportunity to show her mettle in an emergency.

‘I don’t know what everyone’s making such a fuss about,’ she opined loudly to no one in particular. ‘People get gunned down in West London all the time.’

The telephone on Richard’s desk rang and Sara swept it commandingly up. ‘Yes?’

It was the security guard at Richard’s laboratory.

‘You can speak to me,’ Sara loftily informed him. Had any of the preoccupied bodies filling Richard’s office had a second to spare, they might now have noticed Sara’s soot-smudged face change as emotion fought with Botox to produce an expression of subdued but still obvious horror.

‘His
worms
?’ Sara shot a terrified glance at Richard deep in conversation with the detective. ‘Er, I’ll pass it on,’ she stammered. ‘He’s a bit tied up just now. Some hamsters as well, you say?’

‘Your son said he’d left something there when he came before with you, that’s why I let him in,’ the guard stated. ‘Seemed harmless enough.’

‘Milo
is
harmless,’ Sara insisted.

‘Apart from attacking all these creatures with a razor blade, Madam. He’s vandalised all the experiments, as well. Slices of brain all over the lab, there are, Madam.’

At Sara’s appalled gasp, Richard glanced over to her in concern. Immediately, Sara forced her features into a reassuring smile. ‘Thanks so much for letting me know,’ she trilled loudly into the handset, before replacing the receiver and clacking out of the office on her high heels.

Diana was expecting drama at Branston this evening. She was actually expecting to be the cause of it. So to arrive in the staff car park and find it full of emergency vehicles was a shock.

She had passed an ambulance, sirens screaming, a few minutes down the road. Some accident, it seemed.

Fear that Richard was involved froze her heart. Despite the wall he had thrown up, despite the misapprehensions he no doubt harboured about her, despite herself even, the seed of something like love for him had rooted and begun to grow. What on earth was she to do about it? She could almost see the forthcoming confrontation: Sara and Richard together, laughing at her.

Diana parked and got out. She leant for a moment against her battered car, taking deep breaths, gathering strength.

A movement caught her eye. In the glow of the sulphurous car-park security light a figure could be seen: a slightly built woman in high heels and a flimsy dress, a mobile clamped to her ear.

Diana leant forward, astonished. Was she imagining it? But no, if she listened, she could hear the woman talking. Shouting, actually. It was, it really was – Sara Oopvard. But what had happened to her hair?

Sara was bristling with fury as well as shivering with the cold. Milo was not answering his phone. She shoved her mobile into her clutch and folded her arms crossly. What now?

Despair swept over her. She was frozen and largely bald and her shoes were crippling.

And – what was this? Someone was coming. The person she least wanted to see, too. Her great rival, Diana, was crossing the car park towards her.

Distracted as she was, Sara could recognise a change. Diana’s expression was not the conciliatory one of old, the one that could be lied to or shouted down. It was clear that something apocalyptic had happened. Something from which there was no coming back. No one had yet spoken, but Sara could tell that this scenario was terminal.

With an almost romantic longing, now, she recalled the comforts of home. Perhaps, after all, she could survive life without a famous academic for a husband. If she could survive so many nights in social housing, in a non-super-king-sized double bed in a bedroom without an en suite, then she could survive anything. She had learnt that much about herself.

Sara looked at Diana, who was trying to summon the words to start. She raised her hand. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Save your breath. We’re going, Milo and I. We’re leaving. You’ll never see us again. Just let me go and pack our things.’

Diana stood in the security light and watched Sara totter off towards the Lodge. She closed her eyes and let the great sense of calm flood through her. Then, slowly, she walked towards the college.

The foyer of Branston was full of people, students mostly, all in a state of high excitement. Diana did not stop to gather the details. She pressed on into the corridors that led to Richard’s office. Policemen were milling about outside. She pushed through, hardly aware of them. There he was, leaning over his desk, looking grey, exhausted and utterly defeated.

Then he looked up and saw her and the joy that shot across his face went straight to her heart. He was over beside her in seconds. ‘I’m so pleased you’re here,’ he whispered. His strong hand closed over hers, holding it tight. His breath was warm in her ear. ‘Stay with me, won’t you? For ever? I need you, Diana. You’ve no idea how much.’

Isabel was running up the grass verge of the road, in the darkness, under the trees. They dripped on her with a concentrated remorselessness. It felt horribly personal, as if the very heavens were victimising her.

She had been wrong. Pathetically, stupidly, despicably, inexcusably wrong. Jasper had never loved her. He had lied. He had taken her money. He had ruined her life. But much worse than that, he had killed Amber. Isabel had no doubt now that he had supplied whatever she had taken.

The thin soles of her shoes pounded down on the glistening black tarmac. She had made all the wrong choices. Olly, for example. The sight of him here, tonight, had made her want to throw herself in his arms. Dear, sensible, warm, loving, funny, caring, clever Olly. But he had been there with that other woman, the one with the camera. Isabel had missed the boat.

And then there was her work. Professor Green: ‘You’ll be lucky to scrape a third.’

Despair overwhelmed her. She did not deserve to live. The urge to lie down in the road and be crushed by the next passing car was violent and powerful. But what would dying achieve? One dead person was enough.

She was in trouble – lots of it. For running away from Branston and leaving Amber’s body. For rushing off to St Alwine’s, bribing the porters and then hailing a cab she could not afford to take her to the debauched party of a notorious student society. Would she have to go to jail now?

She could no longer think straight, and she could run straight still less. She was heading for Branston but wanted more than anything to run to her mother, the one person who always had, who always could, make everything all right again. But she had been avoiding Mum’s calls.

Isabel was limping and lurching now, sick with pain and self-disgust. Mum had been so proud of her, so loving and supportive. She had been repaid by constant demands for money and the idea that an adoptive mother was inferior compared to a family who could trace themselves back a thousand years.

Isabel was sobbing now. Despicable ingrate as she was, how could Mum want her after this? Let alone love her? She wasn’t even her child in the first place. When she found out, Mum would regret the day she ever saw her. Perhaps she should just run away . . .

As, much later, an exhausted Isabel reeled up to Branston’s entrance, the red digits of the clock blurred and wiggled across her sight. She felt about to die as she stumbled into a foyer so bright she could almost hear it.

Someone within leapt to their feet, but as they rose, Isabel fell. The floor had come up to meet her and Isabel’s fingers were splayed on the carpet. It was warm and dry and she wanted to melt into the red behind her eyes.

‘Isabel!’

Isabel opened her eyes. She rolled over and stared up. Within a halo of blazing strip lights, a face was looking down at her.

Isabel gasped. And yet there was, in this face, none of the censure she feared or felt she deserved. All Isabel could read there was concern.

‘Mum?’

The face nodded. Was it a dream? Isabel asked herself. But no, her fingers were pressed into the gritty pile of the carpet. It was real, if unbelievable.

‘What are you . . . doing here?’

Her mother was kneeling beside her now, hugging her hard. ‘You weren’t answering my calls. And, when you did, you sounded, well, not like you. I had a feeling.’

Isabel’s heart squeezed with guilt. A
feeling.
A maternal feeling. A sixth sense that could only be love. She struggled to sit up, but fell back again.

‘I just knew something wasn’t right,’ her mother went on in her soft Scottish voice. ‘I got here earlier this evening. Got to Branston in the end, you see!’

It was a brave attempt at a joke, but her mouth quivered with the effort to smile and there was no laughter in her eyes. She surveyed the wreck of her daughter with an expression of wild distraction. ‘Look at you!’ She shook her head. ‘Isabel! You’re so
thin 
. . .’

The love and fear in her voice sent new strength into Isabel. She rose up, clung and sobbed into the blessedly familiar shoulder. ‘Oh, Mum. I’m so glad you’re here.’

The arms round her tightened. Isabel closed her eyes and felt her mother’s face against her head, her mother’s voice crooning comfortingly into her hair: ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s all right.’

‘No, it isn’t!’ sobbed Isabel. ‘And it won’t be ever again.’ Mum didn’t know the half of it.

‘Rubbish,’ her mother replied robustly. ‘You’re a heroine, you know. You saved someone’s life.’ She paused, and Isabel felt the body holding hers straining with the effort of holding back volcanic emotion. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ came her mother’s ragged whisper. ‘So proud that you’re my daughter.’