The Riddle Of The Third Mile (2 page)

‘We all know, though, don’t we,’ (it was one of the other members) ‘that sometimes it’s a bit hit-and-miss, the questions we set, I mean-especially in Greek History.’

‘I set the questions,’ interrupted the dissident, with some heat. There’s never been a fairer spread.’

The Chairman looked very tired. ‘Gentlemen. We’ve had a long, hard day, and we’re almost at the finishing-post. Let’s just-’

‘Of course he’s worth a viva,’ said one of the others with a quiet, clinching authority. ‘I marked his Logic paper-it’s brilliant in places.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said the Chairman. ‘We fully take your point about the history paper, Dr Browne-Smith, but…’

‘So be it-you’re the Chairman.’

‘Yes, you’re quite right. I
am
the Chairman and this man’s going to get his viva!’

It was a nasty little exchange, and the Logic examiner immediately stepped in with a peace proposal. ‘Perhaps, Dr Browne-Smith, you might agree to viva him yourself?’

But Browne-Smith shook his aching head. ‘No! I’m biased against the fellow-and all this marking-it’s been quite enough for me. I’m doing nothing else.’

The Chairman, too, was anxious to end the meeting on a happier note: ‘What about asking Andrews? Would
he
be prepared to take it on?’

Browne-Smith shrugged. ‘He’s quite a good young man.’

So the Chairman wrote his final note: ‘To be vivaed by Mr Andrews (Lonsdale), 18th July’; and the others began to collect their papers together.

‘Well, thank you all very much gentlemen. Before we finish, though, can we just think about our final meeting? Almost certainly it’s got to be Wednesday 23rd or Thursday 24th.’

Browne-Smith was the only one of the panel who hadn’t taken out his diary; and when the meeting was finally fixed for 10 a.m. on Wednesday the 23rd, he appeared to take no notice whatsoever.

The Chairman had observed this. ‘All right with you, Dr Browne-Smith?’

‘I was just about to say, Chairman, that I’m afraid I probably shan’t be with you for the final meeting. I should very much like to be, of course, but I-I’ve got to be… Well, I probably shan’t be in Oxford.’

The Chairman nodded a vague, uneasy understanding. ‘Well, we’ll try to do our best without you. Thank you, anyway, for all the help you’ve been-as ever.’ He closed the thick, black volume in front of him, and looked at his wrist-watch: 8.35 p.m. Yes, it had been a long, hard day. No wonder, perhaps, that he’d become a little snappy at the end.

Six members of the panel agreed to repair to the King’s Amis in Broad Street; but the seventh member, Dr Browne-Smith, begged leave to be excused. Instead, he left the Examination Schools, walked slowly along the High, and let himself through the back-door (‘Senior Fellows Only’) into Lonsdale College. Once in his rooms, he swallowed six Paracetamol tablets, and lay down fully-clothed upon his bed, where for the next hour his brain blundered around uncontrollably in his head. Then he fell asleep.

On the morning of the next day, Thursday, 10th July, he received a letter. A very strange and rather exciting letter.

Never throughout his life-almost sixty-seven years of it now-had Oliver Maximilian Alexander Browne-Smith (with an “e” and with hyphenation) MC, MA, D. Phil., really come to terms with his inordinately ponderous names. Predictably, in his prep-school days he had been nicknamed “Omar”; and now, with only one year before his University appointment was due to be statutorily terminated, he knew that amongst the undergraduates he had acquired the opprobrious sobriquet of “Malaria”, which was not so predictable and very much nastier.

It was some small surprise to him, therefore, to find how quickly he had managed to bring himself to terms, in a period of only a few weeks, with the fact that he would quite certainly be dead well within a twelvemonth (‘At the very outside, since you insist on the truth, Dr Browne-Smith’). What he did not realize, however, as he walked on to Platform One at Oxford Station, was that he would be dead within a shorter period than that so confidently predicted by his distinguished and expensive consultant.

A very much shorter period.

As he made his way to the rear end of the platform, he kept his eyes lowered, and looked with distaste at the empty beer cans and litter that bestrewed the “up” line. A few of his University colleagues, some from Lonsdale, were fairly frequent passengers on the 9.12 a.m. train from Oxford to Paddington, and the truth was that he felt no wish to converse with any of them. Under his left arm he held a copy of
The Times,
just purchased from the station bookstall; and in his right hand he held a brown leather briefcase. For a fine, bright morning in mid-July, it was surprisingly chilly.

The yellow-fronted diesel snaked its slow way punctually through the points just north of the station, and two minutes later he was seated opposite a young couple in a non-smoking compartment. Although an inveterate and incurable smoker himself, one who had dragged his wheezing lungs through cigarettes at the rate of forty-plus a day for fifty years, he had decided to impose upon himself some token abstinence during the hour-long journey that lay ahead of him. It seemed, somehow, appropriate. When the train moved out, he folded
The Times
over and started on the crossword, his mind registering nothing at all on the first three of the clues across. But on the fourth, a hint of a grin formed around his slightly lopsided mouth as he looked down again at the extraordinarily apposite words: ‘First thing in Soho tourist’s after? (8).’ He quickly wrote in ‘stripper’; and with more and more letters thenceforth making their horizontal and vertical inroads into the diagram-grid, the puzzle was finished well before Reading. Then, hoping that the couple opposite had duly noted his cruciverbalistic competence-if not the ugly stump of his right index finger, chopped off at the first joint – he leaned back in his seat as far as his longish legs would allow, closed his eyes, and concentrated his thoughts on the very strange reason that was drawing him to London that day.

At Paddington he was almost the last person to leave the train and, as he walked to the ticket barrier, he saw that it was still only 10.15 a.m. Plenty of time. He collected a Paddington-Reading-Oxford timetable from the Information Bureau, bought a cup of coffee at the buffet, where he lit a cigarette, and looked up the possible trains for his return journey. Curiously enough, he felt relaxed as he lit a second cigarette from the first, and wondered vaguely what times the pubs-and clubs-would be open in London. 11 a.m. perhaps? But that was a matter of no great moment.

It was 10.40 a.m. when he left the station buffet and walked briskly to the Bakerloo line, where, as he queued for his ticket, he realized that he must have left his timetable in the buffet. But that was of no great moment, either. There were plenty of trains to choose from, and he’d made a mental note of some of the times.

He could not have known, of course, that he would not be travelling back to Oxford that night.

On the tube he opened his briefcase and took out two sheets of paper: the first was a letter addressed to himself, amateurishly typed but perfectly literate-a letter that still seemed very strange to him; the second was a more professionally typed sheet (indeed, typed by Browne-Smith himself) comprising a list of students from Oxford University, with the names of their colleges appended in brackets, and the words “Class One,
Literae Humaniores”
printed across the top in bold, red capitals. But Browne-Smith glanced only cursorily at the two sheets through his bifocal lenses. It appeared that he was merely reassuring himself that both were still in existence. Nothing more.

At Edgware Road he looked up above the carriage-windows, noting that there were only two more stops, and for almost the first time he felt a flutter of excitement somewhere in his diaphragm. It was that letter…
Very
odd! Even the address had been odd, with the full details carefully stated: Room 4, Staircase T, Second Quad, Lonsdale College, Oxford. Such specificity was rare, and seemed to suggest that whoever had sent the letter was more than usually anxious for it not to go astray-more than a little knowledgeable, too, about the college’s geography… Staircase T, Second Quad… In his mind’s eye, Browne-Smith saw himself climbing those few stairs once more; climbing them, as he had done for the past thirty years, up to the first landing, where his own name, handprinted in white, Gothic lettering, still stood above the door. And immediately opposite him, Room 3-where George Westerby, the Geography don, had lived for almost exactly the same time: just one term longer than himself, in fact. Their mutual hatred was intense, the whole college knew that, though it might just have been different if Westerby had ever been prepared to make the feeblest gesture towards some reconciliation. But he had never done so.

Via the ziggurat of steep escalators, Browne-Smith emerged at 11.05 a.m. into the bright sunlight of Piccadilly Circus, crossed over into Shaftesbury Avenue, and immediately plunged into the maze of roads and alleyways that criss-cross the area off Great Windmill Street, Here abounded small cinemas that featured films of hard, uncompromising porn, with stills outside of nudes and semi-nudes, vast-breasted and voluptuous; clubs that promised passers-by the prospects of erotic, non-stop nudity; bookshops that boasted the glossiest, grossest magazines for paedophiles and buffs of bestiality. And it was along these gaudy streets, beneath the orange and the yellow signs, past the inviting doors, that Browne-Smith walked slowly, savouring the uncensored atmosphere, and feeling himself inexorably sucked into the cesspool that is known as Soho.

It was in a narrow lane just off Brewer Street that he spotted it-as he’d known he would: The Flamenco Topless Bar: No Membership Fee: Please Walk Straight Down.’ The wide, shallow steps that led from the foyer down to the subterranean premises had once been carpeted in heavy crimson, but now the middle of the tread resembled more the trampled sward of a National Trust beauty spot at the height of a glorious summer. He was walking past, but there must have been some tell-tale hesitation in his step, for the acne-faced youth who lounged just inside the doorway had spotted him already.

‘Lovely girls in here, sir. Just walk straight down. No membership fee.’

‘The bar is open, is it? I only want a drink.’

‘Bar’s always open here, sir. Just walk straight down.’ The young man stepped aside, and Browne-Smith took his fateful step across the entrance and slowly descended to The Flamenco Topless Bar.
Facilis descensus Avemo.

At the foot of the stairs further progress was barred by a velvet drape, and he was wondering what he should do when a seemingly disembodied head poked through a gap in the middle of the curtain- the head of an attractive young girl of no more than nineteen or twenty years, the hazel eyes luridly blued and blackened by harsh mascaras, but the senuous mouth devoid of any lipstick. A pink tongue completed a slow circuit round the soft-looking mouth, and a pleasant voice asked simply and sweetly for only £1.

‘There’s no membership fee; it says so outside. And the man on the door said so.’

The face smiled, as it always smiled at the gullible men who’d trodden those broad and easy stairs.

‘It’s not a membership fee-just admission. You know what I mean?’ The eyes held his with simmering sexuality, and the note passed quickly through the crimson curtain.

The Flamenco Bar was a low-ceilinged affair with the seats grouped in
alcoves a deux,
towards one of which the young girl escorted him. She was, herself, fully clothed; and, after handing her client a buff-coloured drinks list, she departed without a further word to her wonted seat behind a poor imitation of a drinking-man’s bar, whereat she was soon deeply engrossed in her zodiacal predictions as reported in the
Daily Mirror.

It seemed to Browne-Smith, as he struggled to interpret the long bill of fare, that the minimum charge for any semi-alcoholic beverage was £3. And he was beginning to suspect that the best value for such an exorbitant charge was probably two (separate) half-glasses of lager-when he heard her voice.

‘Can I take your order?’

Over the top of his glasses he looked up at the young woman who stood in front of him. She was leaning forward, completely naked from the waist upwards, her long, pink skirt split widely to the top of her thigh.

‘The lager, I think, please.’

She made a note on the pad she held. ‘Would you like me to sit with you?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘You’d have to buy me a drink.’

‘All right.’

She pointed to the very bottom of the card:

Flamenco Revenge- &
marriage of green-eyed Chartreuse with aphrodisiac Cointreau.
Soho Wallbanger-z
dramatic confrontation of voluptuous Vodka with a tantalizing taste of Tia Maria.
EastemEcstasy –
an irresistible alchemy of rejuvenating Gin and pulse-quickening Campari. Price: £6.00

£6.00!

‘I’m sorry,’ said Browne-Smith, ‘but I just can’t afford-’

‘I can’t sit with you if you won’t buy me a drink.’

‘It’s so terribly expensive, though, isn’t it? I just can’t aff-’

‘All right!’ The words were clipped and final, and she left his table, to return a few minutes later with his first small glass of lager, setting the meagre measure before him with studied indifference and departing immediately.

From the alcove behind him, Browne-Smith could hear the conversation distinctly:

‘Where you from?’

‘Ostrighlia.’

‘Nice there?’

‘Sure is!’

‘You’d like me to sit with you?’

‘Sure would!’

‘You’d have to buy me a drink.’