The Cambridge Theorem (2 page)

The student bar of St. Margaret's College was crowded and full of smoke and din. In a corner booth sat a young man and a woman, somewhat similar in appearance, arguing. Across the littered bar table from them sat a second young man, listening distractedly to their discussion and nursing an almost-empty glass of beer in his lap. Occasionally he removed a hand from the glass to push the heavy-lensed spectacles up on the bridge of his nose with a forefinger. He sat hunched on a low bar stool.

The woman wore a white shirt, dark jeans and a long, old-fashioned coat that hung open, and leaned accusingly toward her opponent, propping a foot against the table. He slouched backwards in the booth, his hand resting absently on her knee. He had luxuriant black hair which reached the collar of an old blazer, and a strong, handsome face. He wore a red T-shirt and white painter's overalls. He kept glancing over to their companion as if for support. The woman shook a crown of unruly curls at him in exasperation.

The woman wheeled around to the hunched figure and said something he obviously did not hear. She repeated the question and he answered hesitantly, chewing at the corner of his thumb. She gave him a sudden, dazzling smile, her eyes widening behind the round-rimmed glasses. Then she turned again to her combat.

The young man made no response. Unlike his friends he seemed awkward and tense and downtrodden, his light hair unkempt and unwashed, his complexion pitted, a striped jersey that was too big for him, corduroy jeans that sagged at the crotch. He looked down into the remains of his beer and then toward the exit, making no effort to listen for the thread of their argument.

Two other young men suddenly pushed through the crowd towards them with noisy greetings, and the couple in the booth began to make room for them. The non-participant seemed to take this as a cue, gulping the dregs of his beer and standing. He leaned forward and pressed the woman on the shoulder, held up his hand to the man, and edged away from the table, picking up an ancient sports jacket from the floor. One of the newcomers immediately took the vacant stool. The couple in the booth looked at each other, then exchanged a theatrical shrug. Their friend had already left.

The young man stopped and caught his breath in the sudden silence of night, then began skirting the west side of Great Court, passing in and out of the pools of light at the foot of each staircase. He paused and looked across the lawn to the brightly lit porters' lodge, as if weighing a decision, then continued, quickening his step. The illuminated clock-face above the lodge read ten-fifteen.

In the passageway to Second Court a group of singers poured out from the chapel, still rehearsing Easter madrigals, and forced him to step aside. As they passed an inner urgency seemed to take him over, and he covered the last twenty yards to his staircase at an awkward trot. He took the stairs to the first landing two at a time, wheeled left and entered his room. The corridor, lit by a single bulb, was silent, except for the sound of a labored breathing and the muffled fall of a bolt into its metal pouch as the door was locked from the inside.

Inside his room the young man had taken his seat at a desk just inside the door. The room was dark except for a narrow disk of light from a small adjustable lamp above the electric typewriter. He removed a manila file from the desk drawer, placed it beside the typewriter, and then, reaching further in, withdrew a sheet of typing paper. His hands shook slightly as he rolled the paper into the machine, and more noticeably as he straightened the sheet and then hesitated, his right index finger poised over the power switch. He dropped his hand and then carefully placed both elbows on the desk in front of the machine, slowly taking his head in his hands, then running his hands backwards through the limp hair into a clasp at the back of the neck. Then he made a guttural sound, which might have been a sigh, or a grunt of determination.

Nigel Hawken caught his telephone on the third ring. He had been deeply asleep but reacted instinctively. Phone calls after midnight were never good news.

He snapped on the bedside light and stiffened when he heard the voice on the end of the line. “What the hell are you doing calling me here?” he hissed.

“Simon Bowles is dead. He's hanged. I just found him.”

Hawken was horrified. He demanded to know how he had discovered the body, what he was doing visiting a student after one in the morning. The answer almost caused him to panic.

“You wretched man! Are you telling me you have been in the habit of visiting this person for weeks, even months? Why have you never told me?”

“Well, Nigel, I knew it wasn't allowed, that you would be angry.”

“You fool. You bloody fool. What else did you find?”

“Nothing. I panicked and ran back here to the lodge and called you. What am I going to do?”

“Nothing. No one saw you, did they?”

“No.”

“And Alan, no one in the lodge knows of our association, do they?”

“No.”

“All right. Say nothing. Take a day off if you need to. I will pretend this phone call never happened. We'll let the bedder find him.”

“So what should I do?”

“Nothing. You didn't touch anything in the room, did you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Go home. Understand? And Alan?”

“Yes?”

“Never call me at home again. Never. Understand?”

“Yes. I'm sorry. I'm just…I'm very upset.”

He and his wife had slept in separate rooms for years, but he was concerned the call had woken her. He stepped out onto the landing and walked toward the bathroom.

“Who was that, Nigel?” she called.

“That was Sir Felix, my dear, of all people. Completely in his cups. Had no idea what the time was. He wanted to give me the latest gossip about the general election, of all things.”

“He gets worse.”

“He does indeed. Go back to sleep, Gwen.”

D
etective Sergeant Derek Smailes threw the statements down on his blotter in disgust and tilted his chair back to stare at the ceiling. Last year's water leak had left brown stains on the stippled concrete of its surface. The one above his head looked like the map of Australia.

He already knew what would happen to the two juvenile miscreants he and Swedenbank had interviewed the previous week. A judicious call from Chief Superintendent George Dearnley to the head of the bus company, and the charges would be dropped. The two teenagers would be hauled in for a tongue lashing and warned to stay on the right side of the law in future. Although they probably would, he still felt angry.

Acting Detective Constable Swedenbank had not done a bad job with the statements, considering it was a first effort, but Smailes always wondered why police statements had to be written in a foreign language. Policespeak had always irritated him, because no one actually talked like that, except perhaps his father. He often wondered if his father had lived whether he would have derived any satisfaction from his modest success with Cambridge CID. He doubted it. That would have been completely out of character.

Swedenbank came noisily into the office and thrust a lunch box into his filing cabinet. He was a clumsy man with untidy manners and an over-eagerness that he tried to contain around Smailes. He was also one of the hairiest people Smailes had ever met, barely hacking a clearing for his features from the bush that enveloped him. There were dark patches of hair under his eyes that his razor did not reach. Though three years his junior, he looked older than Smailes, with the haggardness of married men in debt. His new tweed sports jacket made him look conspicuously out of uniform. He saw the statements on Smailes' desk.

“Are they okay, Sergeant?” he asked casually

“They're fine, Ted. I don't think you left anything out. Not that they're ever likely to see the light of day in court.”

“Yes, I guessed that,” said Swedenbank, trying to sound rueful. “Pretty upper crust pair, really. No TICs, no juvenile record. Probably just a lark, really.”

When they had been called to the headmaster's study at The Crowe School the previous week to interview the two terrified suspects, Smailes had immediately recognized the older boy as the son of one of the big-time desk jockeys at County Hall. The two boys, day students at Cambridge's minor public school, had been caught by a vigilant conductor using forged bus passes on the trip to school. It had been a minor but potentially damaging fraud, but Smailes was satisfied only the two dud cards had been made. The pair were hardly hardened criminals, and had confessed the whole scheme with little prodding. Smailes had let Swedenbank take them into the secretary's office for statements while the headmaster, an old-timer with academic gown and half-moon glasses, had asked Smailes whom he could call at the Cambridge police station to keep the matter out of the courts. The boys were from good families and had bright academic futures. They were probably unaware of the criminal nature of their actions. Like hell, thought Smailes, but gave him George Dearnley's name anyway.

If Swedenbank had any sense, he would recognize the surname of the older boy and realize the matter would probably be dropped. But he couldn't also know that the County Hall official, whose son had been caught red-handed in a petty crime, was also one of the Chief Super's regular tennis partners, which would settle the matter beyond doubt. Smailes had known George Dearnley all his life, and had played tennis with him regularly as a teenager. The Chief Super had been one of the top amateurs in the county.

Smailes did not tell the headmaster of The Crowe School that he could save his breath. There ought to be some consequences, no matter how minor.

What bothered him as he rocked his chair back onto all fours and gathered the statements was the feeling that the score might have been different had the offenders been ordinary lads from the Comprehensive, as he had been. A kid from a council estate in Cottenham or Histon would no doubt have found himself hauled before the juvenile magistrate, fined, probation, criminal record, the lot. He felt irritated by these thoughts, and turned sharply to Swedenbank, who had the knack of making him feel off balance.

“Yeah, just a stupid lark, I guess,” he agreed. “They were scared shitless enough they'll stay clean. Take these up to Gloria, will you Ted?”

Smailes handed Swedenbank the statements for Dearnley's secretary and saw him stiffen at the insignificance of the task, and probably also at the mid-Atlantic swagger in his voice. He tried to keep the American patter out of his dealings with his fellow officers, because he knew it sounded affected, which it wasn't. It was just the way he talked.

Smailes got up as the ADC left the room and walked to the window. It was mid-morning and he hadn't had a cigarette yet, which pleased him. He could see across Parker's Piece to the green copper towers and featureless modern facade of The Cambridge Arms Hotel. A few loners were out with dogs and a long-haired pedestrian made slow progress towards the hotel, the collar of his donkey jacket turned up against the late March wind. It was Wednesday of the week before Easter, always a bleak time of the year. Over by the central lamppost a Labrador lowered its snout in a charge at a group of seagulls. They wheeled into the air, shrieking. Below him a bread van honked its horn at a bicyclist who was approaching the roundabout too wide.

The sky hung low like a dirty washcloth. He heard a trace of melody in his mind and smiled. Willie Nelson's version of “Blue Skies.” He loved that man's music. He could almost smell the mescal and sagebrush in his songs, which spoke to him of oil derricks and old trucks, an idyll of masculinity where the cowboys wore their heartbreak as proudly as their Stetsons. His proudest possessions were his collection of Western shirts, and in particular his hand-tooled lizard-skin cowboy boots that had cost him almost a week's pay at a fancy London boutique. Sometimes he fantasized showing up for morning briefing in a pigtail and bandana, seeing the Chief Super's face. He smiled sadly at the ordinariness of the morning.

Derek Smailes was a big man with big hands and feet and sandy hair that he combed forward in short waves. This was probably a mistake, as he looked baby-faced already, but he'd never worked out what else to do with it. He had always looked younger than he was, but he didn't mind that, now that he was almost thirty. Thirty, divorced and broke, he reminded himself. He had too much weight on his big frame, which didn't bother him much, although his mother nagged him about the beer and cigarettes. His father had been dead of a heart attack on this side of sixty, she reminded him. He wore the nondescript civilian clothes of policemen everywhere, and expensive shoes. He always bought expensive shoes. They lasted longer.

He felt annoyed by Swedenbank's simple enthusiasm, a quality he had never mastered. It would probably make Swedenbank a better detective than he would ever be, because Derek Smailes acknowledged that for all his ability, he never quite had the gas for the extra mile. Although he was the son of a policeman, he remained an outsider who had never quite learned the policeman's lore, and he was sure his senior officers knew it, including his Uncle George.