Grantchester Grind

35

It was morning and Purefoy and Ingrid lay in bed late. 'You're wasting your time here, Purefoy darling,' she said. 'You aren't going to find out anything more and even if you did what could you do about it? They're all so old.'

'I just want to know what actually happened.'

'The truth, is that it? Is that really what you want to find out? Because if it is, you'll be wasting your time. They are never going to tell you.'

'Perhaps not, but I still want to know where Skullion is. He's not at any of the hospitals or nursing homes in Cambridge, and that night he spoke about the Park. He threatened the Dean that if they sent him to Porterhouse Park, he'd tell me he murdered Sir Godber. And then three days later he suddenly disappears and hasn't been heard of or spoken about since. The next thing they've chosen a new Master who is as rich as Croesus. That wasn't a coincidence I don't believe that for a moment.'

They got up and went out for coffee at the Copper Kettle.

In the Council Chamber the Praelector laid down his pen. He had been thinking about writing his letter of resignation. He had achieved his purpose and the Council had accepted his nomination of Edgar Hartang as the new Master. The other Fellows had left and only the Dean and the Senior Tutor remained behind. They were neither of them in a good mood.

'On your own head be it,' the Dean said. 'God alone knows what sort of monster we're landed with, but we'll have to cope with the man as best we can.'

'We've had such men before. It was either that or bankruptcy. In any case I shan't be here to see it,' said the Praelector. 'I am resigning.'

'And not before time,' said the Senior Tutor bitterly.

'I agree. I have hung on uselessly for too many years now. It is time for younger, more talented Fellows to take over.'

'And do you intend to stay in Cambridge and occasionally dine in Hall?' the Dean asked with a little malice.

'No. I have a niece in Chichester and there is a pleasant guesthouse nearby. I had always thought of going there. But I daresay the Park will suit me well enough. I shall see the term out, that is all.'

They went out into the spring sunshine, conscious that an era had ended. The Dean and the Senior Tutor were thinking of their own futures. They had no wish to stay on and watch the changes that were coming. Even now in the Bursar's office Ross Skundler was busy installing the screens and electronic equipment that he insisted were essential. His appointment had been one of the conditions laid down by Schnabel. 'He was invaluable to you in the past,' he had told Hartang at their last interview at the Transworld Television Centre. And he had nothing to do with any of this. Forget the past. You are Master of Porterhouse and a free man.'

'Free fuck,' said Hartang.

'And I wouldn't use that sort of expression. As a respected member of the Establishment you've got to moderate the force of your language.'

'I'm not there yet,' Hartang said, but already in his mind he was. He'd been up to Porterhouse and seen the place for himself with Schnabel and Bolsover and while he hadn't liked the look of it, he knew there was no safe alternative. In fact he had paid two visits, on each occasion without his wig or the dark blue glasses and dressed in a very quiet suit.

But before that he had had a visit from four people, two men and two women, who had very tactfully handed their cards sealed in envelopes at the reception desk for Mr E. Hartang's perusal only. They had also arranged for Schnabel, Feuchtwangler and Bolsover to accompany them. The legal team had looked suitably subdued. They recognized Intelligence when they saw them.

'You've got your legal advisers here, Mr Hartang, so that you don't feel under any pressure to answer questions you don't want to or which you feel might incriminate you,' the older woman who had blue-rinsed hair had explained very politely. 'We just want you to know that.'

Hartang knew better. Like they were telling him the lethal injection wouldn't hurt one little bit.

But he had known a lot more than that and the one thing he knew most clearly of all was that he wasn't going to walk away from this situation except by telling them what they had come to hear. Schnabel and Feuchtwangler had tried to intervene as a matter of form, and Hartang had had to tell them to lay off. They didn't know the score. Not that he put it like that. He had simply said that he didn't require their presence and he had business to do with the two men and the two ladies, no problem. Cooperation for protection. And when the lawyers had gone, he had made only one request: that when they found all the information he was about to give them they would have found it from the persons he had already chosen for that role. All those persons, though he didn't say this, had expressed intentions so violently antipathetic to him that he had had to take certain precautions about intruders and so on. Agree to that simple request and they could have every micron of information he possessed, though not by word of mouth. He wasn't going to talk but they would find what they had come for on computer files composed under such electronically secure conditions that even the most sophisticated devices could not pick up the signals from the CPU. Again he didn't give them the full explanation any more than he intended to give them every scintilla of information he possessed. That might come later if they kept to their side of the bargain and allowed him time and opportunity to cover himself with safety and protection. Again he didn't say this but then he didn't have to. They knew it and, provided he gave them those files and what was on them met their need for arrests and satisfactory verdicts, that was fine with them. They said they understood his requirements and, after some slight delay during which Hartang left the office and went elsewhere in the building to fetch the disks, they went away.

A week later Schnabel arrived to say that the Mastership of Porterhouse was his for the asking.

On his first visit he had been treated with solemn courtesy by the Fellows and shown over the College. He had been reassured by the revolving spikes on the walls and the barred windows which were, they told him, to prevent intruders climbing in. He had found the Crypt under the Chapel rather more disturbing.

'This is where the Masters are buried,' the Dean had told him as they went down the steps. Hartang had surveyed the stacked coffins with distaste. He had expected proper stone sarcophagi, not this higgledy-piggledy arrangement of wooden boxes. Still, if the Crypt lacked orderliness and the Chapel was impossible to visit because of the scaffolding and the plastic sheets, something about Porterhouse lent credence to Schnabel's assurance that as Master he could shed all connections with his own past.

Even Hartang couldn't see Mosie Diabentos or Dos Passos sending contractors into these ancient courts to blow him away. Like rubbing the Archbishop of Canterbury out in Westminster Abbey. There had been only one moment of unease when they were being shown the Combination Room by the Head Waiter. 'This is where the dons take their coffee after dinner,' he'd said.

'Dons?' Hartang whispered hoarsely to Schnabel. 'You never said nothing about dons being here. Who are the dons for fucksake?'

'Not that sort of don. It is Cambridge slang for the Fellows of the College. Like the Dean and the professors and so on.'

'And I'm the top don?'

'You are the Master. They won't even call you Mr Hartang. They will address you as Master. It is a great honour.'

'Five hundred million of honour, Schnabel.'

'So it's your pension fund out of petty cash, Master. Look at it that way.'

Hartang looked at it a great many ways, but his mind had already been made up for him. He still had Transworld Television Productions and he would never be poor. All the same, as he waited in his bleak suite in Docklands he regretted the days when he could telephone someone on the other side of the world in the dead of night and talk and the someone would listen dutifully to whatever he had to say and their fear would reassure Hartang that he had achieved power. That was out of the question now. They, the ubiquitous 'They', would pick up the call and even with the scrambler would know every word he was saying and analyse even his most guarded statements. He knew it just as surely as he knew his various names were being pronounced in police interrogation rooms in Rome and Palermo, New York and Los Angeles and in towns in South America by men who wanted to finger him just as he had fingered them. They couldn't, of course, because the computer disks had been found in a garden in Colombia and the death of Dos Passos had been announced in the papers and on television. He was said to have died in a car crash after a week in custody. On his way home after such a short time being questioned in Bogota Dos Passos has a blowout? And the disks with all that info were in his garden. Just went to show you couldn't trust nobody…anybody, these days.

There was another question that obsessed him. Whoever had set this thing up had known precisely what they were doing. There hadn't been anything accidental about it. They had seen Kudzuvine coming and had used him because he was a cretin and by using him they could get to Hartang. He didn't doubt that for a moment. And they had targeted Hartang himself because it suited more ends than one: they'd taken him because he knew the source, the sums and where the money went which no one else, but no one else, knew. For why? Because the information, all the information, was in his head or so broken into completely unconnected pieces that no amount of putting figures together by the most sophisticated computer, one doing sixty billion calculations a second like the Cray they were said to be developing, would be able to find the answers. Because it wouldn't recognize any conceivable pattern. Or even if it found the patterns-and for all he knew it might could-the pattern itself wouldn't make sense, wouldn't be recognizably, different from all the other patterns it came up with because the numbers it needed weren't there to be fed into it. Only in the multiple mnemonics of his own mind were the connections to be found and when he died or got Alzheimer's the full picture would fade with him. He'd got the idea from a crazy in an automotive dump outside Scranton looking for the meaning of life. That was what he had said, 'It's got to be here, the meaning of life,' and he'd picked up a hub-cap and laughed. 'Could be this is it. Could be, couldn't it?' And Hartang had agreed that the meaning of life could be a hub-cap from an old Hudson Terraplane they didn't make any more. Yeah, that crazy had shown him the way to hide what needed to be hidden in the confusion of calculated madness.

So 'They' had targeted the right man and had 'taken' him, and in return he had given them enough of what they wanted without giving everything away. But who had 'taken' him? Who had set this trap up? Had to be a government agency. Couldn't be anything else the way they treated him nice. Scary just the same, being treated that nice. No use worrying himself sick.

Edgar Hartang turned on the tape recorder and began his elocution lesson again. Got to remember to speak properly. Got to learn to keep the 'fucks' and 'shitsakes' out.