Oxford Blood

  'Gatecrashers!' pronounced Saffron with pleasure. 'The serious fun starts once dinner is over. In fact that is the only real fun of a Commem, gatecrashing it. Rochester's security is hopeless - anyone can get in if they want to - but St Lucy's is a good challenge: you can swim across the river, carrying your clothes in a plastic bag, I did that to Magdalen one year. On the other hand they're wise to the river. St Lucy's roof might be better: where it touches the botanical gardens; the chapel is too steep. There's a rumour that they're going to use hoses on the roof, which makes it even more fun. Added to which there's another rumour that Nigel Copley's brother was in the SAS, so that they're going to use SAS methods, or borrow the SAS on an amateur basis to keep out gatecrashers - which makes it even more fun, and more of a challenge. In fact I rather think I'll have a go—'

  Jemima stopped.

  'Saffron, whatever your plans are, you can gatecrash Buckingham Palace for all I care, but don't tell me. I've got a programme to make. In short, this is where we part. Do I make myself plain? If I see you, I don't acknowledge you. It's Falstaff and Prince Hal, only you're Falstaff and I'm Prince Hal.'

  'I know thee not, young man?'

  'Precisely.'

  'You knew me.'

  'I did. And you knew me. Very lovely it was. Goodbye, Saffron.' She kissed him on the cheek, then turned and crossed the road to St Lucy's.

  Saffron called something after her: Til be there. It's a promise. Meet you at Pond Quad at dawn. A definite rendezvous.'

  Jemima looked back. He was waving and blowing a kiss.

  'See you,' then she called back: 'Take care!' It was her last sight of Saffron, vanishing back up Long Wall in the direction of Rochester.

  20

  Dancing in the Quad

  As soon as Saffron was gone, Jemima was caught up totally in the concerns of Megalith Television, beginning with the filming of Kerry Barber's extremely visible demonstration, which straddled in front of the great mediaeval archway gate of St Lucy's. The effect, in view of the fact that Kerry Barber and his fellows were wearing T-shirts, jeans, baggy trousers and suchlike whereas the revellers visible inside were in formal evening dress, was to give the impression of peasants demonstrating against their feudal lord. The demonstrating peasants included not only Jack but an older woman, chic in khaki dungarees, whom Jemima guessed to be Kerr)' Barber's admirably teetotal wife Mickey. Then there was a girl Jemima dimly recognized and only pinned down later as Magda Poliakoff, she who had given evidence at the Bim Marcus inquest.

  'All this,' said Jemima to Guthrie Carlyle happily, 'is going to look very good on our programme.' There was a brief interval while two would-be gatecrashers, both male and rather small, were unceremoniously evicted from St Lucy's.

  'I told you it was no good saying you were from the Observer,' Jemima heard one say to the other indignantly. 'Who cares about the Observer at a Commem?'

  'You said you were from the Daily Mail and you got slung out too,' hissed back his companion. 'On account of the fact that there are eighty or ninety people from the Daily Mail there already.'

  Then Megalith, in the guise of Guthrie and Spike Thompson, were able to set to in earnest and film some splendid shots of Kerry Barber's banners - most of which mentioned the price of a Commem ticket -ONE HUNDRED PIECES OF SILVER was the most effective - in contrast to the plight of the Third World. The rain made it even more effective.

  Jack Iverstone was unaccustomedly tense during his brief interview on

  camera with Jemima - with a background of St Lucy's, plus a banner reading ONE NIGHT'S FUN FOR YOU, ONE YEAR'S FOOD FOR THEM. Either he was suffering from anxiety about his father or else the medium of television had robbed him of his habitual ease of manner. Jemima was relieved when the interview was over. Jack vanished, possibly depressed by his performance, and did not rejoin the demonstration. Then Megalith was able to move inside the defended portals of St Lucy's and mingle with the lawful - or mainly lawful - crowds as they danced sedately to the new Glenn Miller, jived to the new Boy George, swayed to the people who once met a man who met Bob Marley, twisted (and shouted) in Luke's Disco, admired (and cat-called) at the strippers of all four sexes or repaired to the Junior Common Room for the sake of the advanced videos. Or simply vanished into the sitting-out rooms for the sake of wine or women, song being freely available outside in all varieties.

  In all of this Jemima never spared a thought for Saffron. She was busy, doing a job, if not the job for which she had been sent into the world, at least a job which she enjoyed doing. She talked to Fanny Iverstone (who looked very pretty in her Brown's dress) and to Poppy Delaware (whose dress, at least by the time Jemima met her, was foiling down, but she also looked very pretty in it or out of it). She did not talk to Muffet Pember (whose partner had cut his hand on some glass, thus convincing Jemima that Muffet, or at any rate her partner, was in some peculiar way accident prone).

  She found the Gobbler, preparatory to interviewing him, only he was in the pond under the statue of St Lucy's at the time, consuming gulls' eggs on a plate as the fountain played on his fair and foolish face. So the programme had to be made without the spoken views of the Gobbler on being a Golden Kid. There was only this striking illustrative shot of the Gobbler at play which many people afterwards thought was the finest shot in the whole film, and a still version of which was used on the cover of the TV Times and a whole host of other magazines but for which the Gobbler's parents, who turned out to be Very Important, were still trying to sue Megalith Television long after Golden Kids had picked up the last of its many inevitable awards.

  All of this was to come. Jemima and camera picked their dainty way past rather a lot of people who had just been or were just going to be sick, particularly as the evening progressed, but the cameras avoided all of that, unlike the sight of the Gobbler at play. For one thing it was not really very socially relevant or as Spike Thompson sagely observed: 'Who needs Golden Kids losing their Golden Dinners out of their Golden Gobs? What's happened to the smashing bird in a red dress who promised to dive into the pool starkers once we get that fat boy out of it?'

  Copulating couples were however not utterly ignored. As Spike observed to Jemima: 'This might be a witty voice-over situation for you, my love.'

  'Sex in, sick's out,' was the way Guthrie Carlyle summed it up.

  In the early hours of the morning the rain stopped and the fireworks went up into the night sky.

  For the first time Jemima, gazing at them restlessly - she hated fireworks in principle as dangerous and wasteful yet found them irresistible - thought of Saffron. She wondered if he had indeed tried to gatecrash St Lucy's and if he had succeeded. There had been no sign of him. Of those she knew, Jack Iverstone had never reappeared, and Fanny Iverstone, glimpsed early on looking rather flushed in her Brown's dress dancing in Luke's Disco, had long since vanished.

  At about two o'clock a great cry went up in Pond Quad: 'Ahoy there!' Then: 'They're on the roof!' Then to the delight and excitement of all those lucky enough to be inside St Lucy's, two figures in black hoods and darkened clothing were glimpsed on the sloping roof of St Lucy's chapel. The invaders' situation looked perilous enough already, but then the firehoses began to play upon them. Although some of those at the Ball also got drenched - 'Oh fuck off!' shouted an indignant girl of elfin appearance wearing a sprigged muslin crinoline, when the water sprayed her - it was thought by the rest to be a small price to pay for the fun.

  The invaders slid ignominiously down the roof.

  Saffron? Jemima rather hoped not.

  It was only later that she learnt that the so-called invaders had actually been security men, the recriminations about the hosing down afterwards being so violent as to lend some credence to the theory that they were out-of-hours SAS men.

  It was not until the dawn, a luminous dawn, with mist rising off the river, and the first intrepid revellers climbing into the punts, reckless of the rainwater, and the pretty skirts - or perhaps they were sufficiently dishevelled
anyway - that she began to wonder seriously where Saffron was.

  Jemima leant her head on Guthrie's shoulder.

  'Breakfast, my love? You look as if you could do with kidneys, bacon, sausages, kedgeree, scrambled eggs, and whatever is the rest of the menu which I have in my pocket. Spike's going to take some shots of the river now the boats are out. He doesn't need you anymore. Then an overall picture of the aftermath.'

  St Lucy's was beginning to look like a battlefield, as recumbent bodies, the survivors, lay about, sleeping, unconscious, twined round each other. Bottles were everywhere. Somewhere one of the bands - or was it Luke's Disco? - was still loyally playing.

  'No thanks, I have a previous engagement. I think I'll wander off Jemima looked again at the scene of mayhem before her, more like Dutch peasants at the kermis, than anything more classically graceful - no shades of Poussin here.

  'I wonder who won this battle? And who lost?'

  'We won it. Megalith Television won it,' said Guthrie smugly.

  'There seem to be a great number of losers.' Jemima pointed to the inert bodies, corpses as they seemed, strewn around them. 'One wonders whether some of these will ever wake again.'

  I must look for him, she thought. Then: Saffron - he broke his promise. Why? Did he fail to gatecrash after all? Then with more urgency: Saffron: why didn't he come?

  For the first time since she had parted from Saffron, she thought of the possible dangers to him in this great Oxford night of rout. Where were all those who might wish ill to Saffron? Where for that matter was Saffron himself?

  At Rochester College, there was the same feeling of the battle lost and won, the same slightly morbid impression of corpses, as Jemima, now wrapped in a vast Chinese shawl against the cool of the morning, stepped her way through the quad to Staircase Thirteen. She had received, with Saffron, a pass to leave Rochester and return: finding she had lost it, Jemima expected the man at the gate to raise an eyebrow; instead she was waved on with a resignation singularly at variance with the paranoia recently exhibited at St Lucy's. If security was the standard by which a successful Oxford ball was rated, no wonder Rochester's was considered to be inferior.

  As she clambered up the high winding stone staircase, Jemima wondered if she would find Saffron too in some kind of passive state of post-revelling (and post-coital) contemplation. Perhaps he had merely gone quietly back to bed after leaving her at St Lucy's. Or perhaps he had found other possibilities for enjoyment at Rochester . .. Nevertheless the sense of unease which had oppressed her since dawn at St Lucy's became stronger as she reached the top of the stairs and saw that Saffron's door was open. She noticed that several of the other doors on the staircase were shut (although Proffy's on the ground floor was for once open; perhaps he had finally gone home to Chillington Road, having sufficiently slaked his appetite for lobster and champagne).

  Jemima went into the room. It was empty. She went through into the tiny bedroom and stared. Saffron was lying on the bed, dressed in his white evening shirt and black trousers, only the white tie had been undone and lay loosely round his neck. His eyes were shut. One sleeve had been rolled up. Otherwise the resemblance to the body of Tiggie was uncanny.

  Jemima ran forward and supported his head, realizing as she did so, that Saffron, unlike Tiggie, was breathing; his body was warm. But the pulse, when she felt it, was very faint.

  'It's not true!' she cried aloud and started to pull at Saffron's body, slapping his cheek, tugging at his shoulders. Once Saffron's lips opened a little but otherwise there was no movement. He was in a coma, a drug-induced coma, Jemima recognized that only too well. The question was, how did she reverse it? What should she do, now, immediately? Did she dare leave him and fetch help? After that, she would work out how on earth he had got himself into that coma.

  'Saffron,' she said aloud again. 'Saffron! Wake up, Saffron, you've got to hear me.'

  There was a very faint noise behind her. Jemima realized for the first time that she was not alone with Saffron.

  She whirled round. There standing in the doorway of the tiny room, watching her and blinking slightly in his usual mild manner behind the black-rimmed spectacles, stood Professor Mossbanker.

  'Profry,' she began, 'thank God. We've got to get help. Will you telephone - you've got a telephone downstairs? We've got to save him—'

  Then she stopped. She saw that in his hand Proffy was holding a syringe.

  'You found that?' she questioned, still feeling confused. 'What are you doing here, Proffy?' she said in a stronger voice. 'What are you doing with that syringe?'

  ‘I didn't expect you to be here,' Proffy spoke with an odd kind of detachment. 'Why did you come?'

  ‘I came back,' Jemima spoke urgently, 'and thank God I did. And now we've got to get help, we've got to save him.'

  'Oh you'll be able to save him all right.' Proffy continued to speak in the same casual tone. 'If you think he's worth saving, that is.'

  Then Jemima for the first time fully understood.

  'You!' She hesitated and then said in an uncertain voice: 'You - the murderer?' Jemima took a step backwards. She was not sure at the time whether it was a protective move towards Saffron or a defensive one on her own account.

  'Precisely. Rather an unexpected discovery on your part, I fancy.' Proffy spoke in his familiar rapid unemphatic tone; he continued to stand there blinking behind his spectacles. He might have been congratulating - or reproving her - on some slight matter of scholarship. Then he put down the syringe and removed his spectacles. For a moment his eyes, his whole visage, looked naked and rather innocent. Then she realized how cold his real manner was, had perhaps always been behind the friendly bumbling veneer.

  Jemima felt an instant of pure panic. Proffy had tried to kill Saffron or was preparing to do so. He had - she grappled with the thought - killed poor little Tiggie. Her thoughts went further back as she struggled with the implications of it all: he had probably also killed Bim Marcus. Proffy: a double murderer. A would-be triple murderer. Was it likely that he would now spare her?

  Yet Proffy still made no move towards her. In a way his stillness, his air of ease, was more sinister than if he had displayed openly the violence which must lie within him. She supposed that she ought, nonetheless, to prepare herself for self-defence, some kind of defence. She was tall and quite strong: Proffy was on the other hand, if a lot older, a lot taller and a lot heavier. On his own testimony he was a killer, even if the weapons he had chosen hitherto had been secret ones.

  Jemima took a deep breath.

  'Why?' she asked crudely. She had some vague memory that hostages were supposed to engage terrorists in conversation in order to defuse a violent situation. Even stronger was her obstinate desire to know the truth - if it proved to be the last thing she ever found out.

  'Why?' replied Proffy, twisting his heavy spectacles in his hands. 'I suppose I thought the world would be well rid of him.'

  'Wasn't it a case of being well rid of – them!’ To her own ears, Jemima's voice sounded distinctly tremulous. Above all, she wanted to give an impression of calm authority.

  'Ah yes, them. So you worked that out. Very good, very good.' There was the same surreal atmosphere of academic congratulation.

  'The deaths of Tiggie and Bim Marcus. Aren't I right? Wasn't it all part of the same—' she hesitated again. 'The same plan,' she finished.

  Proffy ignored the question.

  'Why?' he repeated, instead. 'Why indeed? A long story, a long story from the past. But not, I think, the story you anticipated, Jemima Shore Investigator. My impression was that you were altogether too carried away by other aspects of it all ... Ah well, it doesn't matter now.'

  Proffy put his spectacles on again and gazed at her. 'You look frightened, I see. Not surprising I suppose under the circumstances. All the same, no need to be frightened, no need at all. It's over, all over.'

  'Why?' demanded Jemima desperately.

  Proffy continued to consider her. 'Yes, I daresay
the enquiring mind ought to be encouraged. In theory if not in practice. Since it no longer matters to me, I will indulge myself - and you - by explaining. We might go downstairs.'

  Much later, Proffy said to Jemima: 'While you're waiting for the police I think you'd better let me have the syringe.' He blinked at her one last time. 'I shall go outside. I've always been fond of parties, you know. Give my love to my wife and—' he stopped. Then: 'Eugenia' he pronounced. It was not quite clear whether he was aware of his surprising triumph in getting the names the right way round.

  Outside in the College, once the sun was fully up - too late for the ball, it was going to be a beautiful day - strong and competent men in the shape of the porter's workforce, started moving purposefully about. Plates and glasses, innumerable bottles, were collected and packed away, from innumerable suppers, breakfasts, in tent and quad, arcade, staircase and endless sitting-out rooms. It was now time to persuade the few last revellers of Rochester that the Ball was now well and truly over. As Jemima had suspected, one or two of the bodies, whether single or entwined with each other, were extremely reluctant to awake, and even more reluctant to move. One in particular was hard to rouse, the dark head sunk on the chest, a body lying in the corner of the big tent in the main Rochester quad.

  'Come along, sir, come along. Time to go now, sir. Come along.'

  The porter shook the recumbent reveller by the shoulder without effect and passed on to the next body.

  Twenty minutes later there was a call from one of his associates. 'Fred -can't seem to get any reaction out of this one. Out for the count.'

  The head porter called back: 'We'll put him to bed, then. If he's one of ours.'

  'Fred, come over here will you. I don't like this. He's - well he's cold. Quite cold.' There was a new urgency in the voice. 'Who's cold?'