The No. 2 Global Detective (24 page)

‘Quick!' Carpaccia urges. ‘The gangway.'

She gestures with the barrel of a Tokyo Marui M4 R.I.S. automatic rifle that has appeared as if from nowhere and the four detectives run as fast as they are able down the stairs and along the dock, their footsteps ringing loud on the steel mesh beneath them.

‘Nice murals,' says Rhombus, admiring the marbled walls that line the pen.

It is a struggle to get Mma Ontoaste into the submarine but with some pushing she is soon past the hatches and down the ladder, where she and all the others are bathed in the green glow of the submarine's navigation system.

‘Thank God for cocoa butter,' Mma Ontoaste says, rolling her black dress down her thighs.

Carpaccia follows them down the ladder, sealing the conning hatch above her head and dropping down into the galley. There is not much room for manoeuvre but she squeezes past the detectives and seats herself in the captain's chair.

‘There's no reasoning with her when she is in that mood,' Carpaccia, referring to her niece, says. ‘We just have to give her time and space and hope to hell she has not invented some damned software that will take us off course.'

Through a porthole they can see only the black water of the tunnel that Carpaccia tells them will lead them to the James River and from there to wherever they need to go. Carpaccia types some coordinates into an onboard computer and beneath their feet a turbine whirrs and the submarine sinks and jerks forward. They are off.

‘Where are we going?' asks Rhombus. ‘Back to Scotland?'

‘We need to find Nak-ka-khoo,' urges Tom.

‘He could be anywhere, Tom. We do not know where he is and we do not know where to start. Any start we do make might be in the wrong direction. I am not convinced we will ever find him. In fact, I do not see how we might ever find him.'

‘But I think he wants to be found,' counters Tom. There is a pause. Colander does not know what to say.

‘You are good at this, you know, Rra. For a second I believed you and I am beginning to think we ought to find him.'

‘I need to call the Dean or Professor Wikipedia,' says Tom.

‘Too dangerous,' says Captain Carpaccia. ‘We can only make calls when the periscope is up. There is a lot of shipping in the canal and Creepy Lesbian Niece will be on the lookout. There is no telling what she might do if she sees us.'

‘Damn that Creepy Lesbian Niece,' mutters Rhombus. ‘Without my SAS skills we would have been dead in there.'

‘Uh, Mma Ontoaste?' Carpaccia kindly interrupts, her slate-blue eyes glancing up from the screen. ‘Could you sit down towards the back? You are affecting the ballast.'

They can hear water thronging beyond the thin riveted skin as the submarine speeds on down the tunnel and into the James River. Condensation gathers. There is silence in the cabin. No one is comfortable now, least of all Mma Ontoaste, who is squeezed into the back, sitting on a gunny sack and a half a hundredweight of mung beans. After half an hour Carpaccia types a new command into the system and the submarine begins to rise to the surface. The water around them begins to clear and they can see the light on the surface above.

‘Periscope up,' she crisply snaps, pressing a button and swivelling in her chair to intercept two handles as the polished body of the periscope rises from the deck. She snaps down some handles and peers through the eyepieces, left, right, scanning the shipping and the shore.

‘All clear,' she says. ‘You can make your call now. It should work.'

Tom dials the number on his cell phone. The phone in far-off Oxford rings a few times before it is picked up. Tom recognises the voice instantly. Alice Appleton. He has not spoken to Alice since she fainted in the Library.

‘Hello, Tom,' she begins. ‘Long time no see. Where are you? You sound like you are at the bottom of the ocean.'

She is friendly but off-hand and explains that the Dean is on a fund-raising drive, but she is not sure where. This is common, of course. Tom explains what he is after.

‘Nak-ka-khoo?' she says. ‘I've never heard of it.'

‘It's a “he”. He was in the year of '74 at Cuff.'

‘I thought I knew of everyone still alive who had been to Cuff – even that one who solved mysteries in DIY superstores and the trout farmer from Ecuador. I'll have to check the Library. I'll call you back.'

When he disconnects the phone the detectives are looking at him speculatively.

‘So the Dean isn't there?'

‘No. He's trying to raise funds for a memorial statue to Claire Morgan.'

‘Funny sort of detail to include,' Rhombus snorts.

‘Do you think it might be important?' asks Tom.

‘I feel sick,' wails Mma Ontoaste from the back of the submarine. They are moving at 25 knots down the James River now, pitching and yawing as they approach the city Newport News and the ocean.

Tom's cell-phone rings. It is Alice Appleton.

‘I've found him,' she says. ‘His last address was a poste restante in a town called Pond Inlet, in Canada. He's become a meteorologist.'

‘So—?'

‘So he's done nothing. Never written a word. Never solved a case. There just is no crime up there because there are no people up there.'

‘Sounds like Sweden,' Rhombus darkly mutters, but the detectives look at one another significantly. The frustration would be unbearable. If there was no crime to solve, a detective often turned to committing it.

‘You said that that was his last address?'

‘Yes. Last year we sent him an invite to next week's Gaudy Night.'

‘And?'

‘And he's down here as coming.'

‘When is the Gaudy Night?' Tom asks.

‘In three days' time.'

‘Okay. We'll be back.'

‘We?'

‘All of us – Mma Ontoaste, Inspectors Colander and Rhombus and Dr Carpaccia.'

‘Oh, not that poison dwa—'

Tom terminates the call and grins fixedly at Dr Carpaccia.

‘Don't say we are going to have to get there by submarine,' groans Mma Ontoaste.

‘A private plane might have been a better choice,' admits Carpaccia sadly, lowering the periscope and preparing the onboard computer to dive.

‘Chart a course for Oxford, England.'

‘Well,' said the Dean, raising a glass of champagne to Professor Wikipedia. ‘Here's to fund-raising.'

‘Indeed,' replied Wikipedia, raising his own flute, a twinkle in his eye. ‘The process of soliciting money by requesting donations from individuals, businesses, charitable foundations or governmental agencies!'

They were both wearing dinner jackets, standing by the hissing fire in the Dean's study, their academic gowns on coat-hangers hooked over the picture rail. It was seven o'clock in the evening and the alumni of Cuff College had gathered in town to celebrate Gaudy Night. About now, all over town, they would be squeezing their prosperous middle-aged bodies into evening clothes and wondering how one another would look. In an hour the Dean was due in the Junior Common Room to welcome them with more champagne and the first of his speeches imploring generosity.

‘I used to hate the Gaudy,' he said. ‘All those smug bloody alumni coming back and looking at you as if you've somehow aged more than they have. Looking at you as if you've achieved nothing in life.'

Wikipedia disagreed.

‘I've always found crime writers to be rather understanding. Some of them are even envious of us, you know, quietly eking out our allotted span in this quiet spot, while they are at the mercies of the vagaries of market forces and literary whim.'

‘Fashions do change,' agreed the Dean. ‘And it is true some of them are up one day, down the next, but I always feel they are looking at me as if I don't really know what it's like.'

‘And now you do,' smiled Wikipedia. ‘Congratulations are in order.'

Once more glasses were raised and eyes were met.

‘We'll see,' said the Dean. ‘To be honest, I am just glad he's back.'

‘He must have had a rough time?' asked Wikipedia. ‘Being a meteorologist is no fun, I imagine, especially on – Baffin Island was it?'

‘A place called Pond Inlet,' nodded the Dean, pulling a face as if he wished he could unsay something just said.

‘Ah. Pond Inlet,' Wikipedia said, warming to his subject. ‘A small, predominantly Inuit community in Nunavut located at the top of Baffin Island, with a population of more than 1200 people, the largest of the four hamlets above the 72nd parallel in Canada.'

‘That's the one, but please,' said the Dean holding up a hand. ‘I never want to hear another word about Pond Inlet ever again. I don't know why I sent him there in the first place. I just thought it was time for something different from an English village or one of these bloody colleges.'

‘But it was a good idea, wasn't it? An isolated and enclosed community. Lots of atmosphere. Dark at night. Well, in fact dark for very nearly six months of the year.'

‘Yes, but there was simply nothing bad to do except drink too much home-made alcohol and shoot polar bears. I wanted him to be able to solve crimes with reference to snowboot size and that sort of thing. Like Miss Smilla.'

‘Oh, Miss Smilla. Is she coming tonight?'

The Dean shook his head.

‘To be honest, I've never quite been able to forgive her for that strange sex stuff in the bathroom.'

‘Oh yes. When she—'

‘That's the one,' interrupted the Dean. ‘I suppose I should have invited her. She and Nak-ka-khoo could have talked about their feeling for snow.'

‘But his feeling for it is rather bad, isn't it?'

‘Yes. To tell you the truth, I've been a bit worried about him. It seems all those years have made him a bit …'

The Dean shrugged and took a sip of his champagne.

‘Dark?' Wikipedia suggested.

‘Yes. I suppose that's it.'

‘In Western tradition darkness is associated with evil, or evil entities, such as demons or Satan, as well as Hell or, especially in Egyptian mythology, the underworld.'

‘Yes.'

‘It's a concept personified in the character of Darkness played by Tim Curry in a 1985 fantasy film called
Legend
, wherein Darkness took the form of a fifteen-foot-high stereotype of Satan, complete with reddened skin, long horns and cloven hooves.'

The slightest drawing together of those famous eyebrows suggested that the Dean had had just about enough of this sort of thing from Wikipedia.

‘You know, Professor,' he began, ‘sometimes what begins as a character's harmless little quirk can, over the pages of a novel, turn into something really very irritating.'

Wikipedia looked hurt.

‘You're surely not referring to me?'

‘No, no. Of course not,' the Dean said quickly, pouring Wikipedia another couple of inches of champagne. ‘It's Nak-ka-khoo and his endless practical jokes. Ransacking Tom's study like that and then giving him that fright. There's something vengeful about it.'

‘Well, it's hardly surprising,' Wikipedia said, resisting for once the temptation to define. ‘I'd turn bad up there. Still, bringing him down here to murder Claire was genius. A real stroke of genius.'

‘To tell you the truth, Aldous, and this is strictly
entre nous
, it wasn't entirely my idea. He'd joined a circus, you know? The one that sets up on Headington Hill. It's where he learned to do all that acrobatic stuff he does. He was supposed to be taking care of the seals, you know, with pilchards and spinning balls and so forth, but he'd become so used to culling the damned things in Canada that – well, it didn't go according to plan. He wanted to be a snake charmer, you know? But they said there was no call and they threw him out. He turned up here, out of the blue, as it were, without a penny in his pocket.'

‘My God. And whose idea was it get all the others involved?'

‘Ontoaste and so forth? A bit of both, to tell you the truth. I could see it would take years of churning out a novel a year for him to get anywhere and he just hasn't got the patience, the poor thing, and so I was casting around for something really special. He spent all day brooding about his time here – about how successful the others had become. He began carving little voodoo dolls.'

‘Ah! Voodoo, or Vodun in Benin, the term applied to the branches of a West African ancestor-based spiritist-animist religious tradition that—'

‘Yes, that. Eventually I decided I'd better get him out of here. Well, he wouldn't go back to Pond Inlet and you know I always like to get away at Christmas so, while I was looking for cheap flights, the idea occurred to me: why not use my contacts? Take him with me. The idea snowballed from there. You know – he has some pretty unique talents? We had quite a trip – Botswana, Sweden, Edinburgh, of course, for New Year, and then Virginia, and then – well, we've got all sorts of plans for the future.'

‘Your travel agent must have been delighted.'

‘Yes, it took some doing. Said I'd mention him – a chap called Tony at TrailFinders on Kensington High Street – if anything came of it.'

Wikipedia raised his glass again.

‘You're a genius, Dean, an absolute genius.'

‘Not at all, Aldous, not at all. Besides, I could never have done it without you. All that information about that spear got Tom Hurst on his way.'

‘Nevertheless, Dean. Chapeaux. Chapeaux.'

‘Well, you are too kind, Aldous, old boy, but now I had better be off. They'll start arriving soon and I want to make sure that Nak-ka-khoo is ready.'

They unhooked their gowns from the hangers and left each other in the Winter Gardens. The Dean walked briskly across the New Quad to a door in the corner, watched by a puzzled-looking Wikipedia. It was going to be a beautiful, if cold, night and the Dean could see the stars were out already. He opened the door and began the long climb up to Nak-ka-khoo's bedroom on the fifth floor.