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The porter nodded, shrewd eyes examining Jem’s face. ‘Very good, MrKite.’
Jem made himself walk out at a casual pace, like any gentleman of leisure returned to the scene of his youth. He stopped to take in Front Quad—the impeccable lawn, the great old shading oaks, impossibly youthful students wandering by, and the whole quad dominated by the library. The winter sun was already low in the sky, and its rays coloured the ancient stone warm butterscotch.
It was beautiful, and gracious, and its familiar elegance put a hard lump in his stomach that made him feel for a moment as though he might be sick.
Jem forced himself onwards to the open gateway at the far right corner of Front Quad, next to the Master’s lodgings, and went through to Bascomb Quad. Most of the quad’s building was administrative. The only accommodation was Bascomb Stair, a narrow building three floors high overlooking what was farcically called Bascomb Wood: thirty slender, crowded beeches in a small patch of ground.
Jem had never actually been in Bascomb Stair before: it was reserved for visitors. He was glad of that. He wouldn’t have wanted to stay in a familiar room.
The climb up the steep and narrow stairs to the second floor was as tiresome as stairs always were. Jem set his teeth and plodded up, and let himself in to a small room. Bare walls, narrow bed, a chair, a desk, a faded and slightly stained rug. It felt like home.
He dealt with his few clothes and sat on the bed, breathing deeply against a feeling of worry that was not very far off panic. What insanity had made him imagine he, an entirely unqualified clerk, could solve a decade-old mystery by returning to the scene of the crime? What if Anselm’s believed he intended to revive that old and terrible scandal?
What would Nicky think?
There was a small mirror above the sink. Jem didn’t want to look into it because he knew what he’d see. A little man with a pain-marked face, looking older than his thirty-one years, brown hair already sprinkled grey, eyes of that indeterminate colour his mother had called hazel. Nothing wonderful. Nothing remarkable. Nothing at all.
What would Nicky think, he wondered again, and this time it hurt.
He sat on the bed, contemplating his hands, for a few moments more. Then he got up, and made his way downstairs, out and along the path that ran by Bascomb Wood, round the back of the walled Master’s Garden, and into the formal gardens. The lawn looked bare, its fringe of shrubbery dead and brown. He limped resolutely along to the double garden gates at the end, then turned.
Summoner Quad stood proud in front of him, the pale stone of the solid Georgian buildings glowing at the top, already stained by reaching shadows at the lower levels. Toby had died in the right-hand ground floor room; Jem could see his window on the end wall. He’d hopped out of or into it, over the low sill, so many times. It ought to be open; the weather ought to be summer; Toby ought not to be dead.
The quad was mostly empty since it was ten to four and many undergraduates would be in tutorials or lectures still. A few black-gowned figures hurried by, none of them casting more than a cursory glance his way.
Jem went to the opening of Thirty-One and looked in. Toby’s door was shut. It wasn’t the same door; that had splintered under the force of a porter’s shoulder.
He stood all the same, as though the closed door of an undergraduate’s room held any answers, then he turned on his heel and went out into the quad again.
A long, low archway separated Summoner from Old Quad. It had been built at the same time as Summoner Quad, but in a dramatically Gothic style with gargoyles to match Old Quad’s hunched medieval walls. Nicky had called it the Bastard Arch.
Jem stood there, waiting till the chapel clock chimed four with its familiar clamour, and then came out into Old Quad. The name board in Thirteen told him DrRook had Room Two, the right-hand ground-floor room. Jem retreated, and waited where he could just see into the entrance of Thirteen, until a powerfully built youth emerged, looking somewhat dazed.
Jem gave it a few minutes in case Nicky came out or another student went in. Neither happened, so he approached, chest heaving hard.
He was going to see Nicky again. After everything, after how they’d parted, after ten wasted years in which Jem had dwindled to a shadow of himself. After Toby’s murder.
I think it was Nicky, because he loved Toby, and Toby was hateful to him.
Someone resented Toby enough to kill him ten years ago, and that person has a great deal more to lose now.
He didn’t want to do this. He wanted to run again, away from Oxford, except he had nowhere to run to.
Or he could knock on the door, and see Nicky again, and demand answers to the questions that had ruined his life, of which ‘Who killed Toby?’ was just one.
He rapped at the door labelledDrRook.
‘Yes!’ Nicky shouted from the other side of the door, the truncated greeting absurdly familiar. Jem turned the handle and went in.
It was a don’s room. The old-fashioned arsenic-green wallpaper was barely visible for the bookshelves that covered every available vertical surface. Books formed a knee-high border wall and made towering heaps on the desk. There were no pictures on the mantelpiece, no knick-knacks, nothing but books, and a chair by the fire, and a long-limbed, fair-haired man in a grey tweed jacket and spectacles scribbling irritably on a sheaf of paper that he held on his knee.
‘If you’ve returned to beg for mercy, MrJefford, spare me,’ he said without looking up. ‘Isaidhave it done by tomorrow morning, and I prefer not to repeat myself.’
Nicky had become one ofthosetutors. Jem wasn’t even surprised. He cleared his throat. ‘Hello, Nicky.’
Nicky’s writing hand stopped dead. He looked up, a frown forming between his eyes, and his mouth dropped open. ‘Jem?’
‘Me.’
