“What I don’t understand, sir,” Naylor was saying, “is what he’s doing with someone like this-what’s her name? — Sally Oakes? I mean, I know there’s nothing wrong with working in the Virgin Megastore, but that’s all she does, and on top of that she’s…”
“Young enough to be his daughter,” Resnick finished for him. “It isn’t unknown, Kevin. Older men and younger women, young women and older men.”
“I know, sir. But take a look at the others. A fifty-year-old Anglican deaconess and this one, a Local Studies librarian who spends all her spare time clambering over rocks in the Peak District, and the manageress of one of them posh clothes shops along Bridlesmith Gate.” He wrinkled his nose, perplexed. “There’s no pattern to it.”
“Likes variety, the professor.”
Naylor pushed two sheets of typing paper, sellotaped together, across Resnick’s desk. “Look here, sir. Eighteen months, four different women, each of them he takes out at least three times.”
“Sally Oakes, five,” observed Resnick. “That’s the most.”
“He’s not waiting until he’s through with one…”
“Or they’re through with him…”
“Before he’s on to the next. Look at the way they overlap.”
“With Oakes threaded through the middle, neat as you like, once every, what, six weeks?”
“Just about, sir.”
Resnick sighed and leaned backwards, taking the chair on to its rear legs. “The last time she saw him was between two and three months back.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why nothing more?”
“She told him she didn’t want to see him again.”
“She told him?”
“Yes, sir,” said Naylor positively.
“Did she say why?”
“Got a regular bloke, sir. Didn’t see any way she could go on meeting the professor.”
“Did she say how he took that?”
Naylor’s eyes darted quickly away. “No, sir.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t worry.” Resnick stood up and walked round the desk. How long was the gap between Sally Oakes finishing their intermittent relationship and the first murder? Without working it out exactly, Resnick figured it would be somewhere in the region of six weeks.
“Well done, young Kevin,” he said. “You’ve done good work. Next thing, I think we should go and have another chat with Sally Oakes.” And he turned away to avoid the most excessive of Naylor’s blushes.
The lecture room was steeply sloped, with curved rows of bench seats and writing surfaces focused upon a blackboard, a screen, twin easels peppered with a flourish of names in many colors, a podium. The room was three-quarters fulclass="underline" students whose pain of comprehension showed on their faces, those who wrote continuously, others for whom the briefest of notes sufficed; a balding young man with acne and an Aran sweater spent the whole hour designing an intricate spider’s web with the finest of art pens; a girl, redheaded, front and center, kept her eyes closed, an expression of bliss on her face.
Patel’s attention seldom shifted from Doria.
The professor’s technique was to speak in moderate tones from the podium, referring from time to time to a stack of five by three cards, each one moved to the bottom once used. This was interrupted again and again by a sudden swirl towards the matching easels, a name writ large across an A1 sheet, left for several moments before being torn away, screwed into a ball and hurled aside. Lists of books and articles that had been on the board when the lecture began were pointed at, prodded, underlined, extolled as essential. At inconsistent intervals, Doria deserted the podium to sit on or lean along the front bench, his delivery becoming more familiar as he dispensed anecdotes about the Late Quartets of Beethoven, the solos of Thelonius Monk, stories by Borges, Karl Schwitters, the pervasive influence of Brian Clough upon English football in general and the Forest midfield in particular.
Along with the others, Patel enjoyed these, laughed and at the same time struggled to understand their relevance.
Once, moving swiftly away from one of these brief alightings, Doria allowed his hand to brush against the red hair of the student seated in the middle. Patel could not see her face clearly, could only imagine that, if anything, it became more blissful.
“Remember, for Derrida, ‘writing’ has a special meaning. For him, it denotes ‘free play,’ that part of any and all systems of communication which cannot finally be pinned down, which are ultimately undecidable. Writing, for Derrida, does not codify, it does not limit. Rather, triumphantly, wonderfully, it displaces meaning, it dismantles order, defies both the safe and the sane. It is,” Doria sang out, one arm aloft, “excess!”
The last word echoed from the ceiling before fading to a slow silence. Seats went up, students shuffled out. At the podium Doria was reassembling his note cards into sets and placing each within a different-colored envelope.
Patel’s head was buzzing. He looked at the top sheet of his pad, at phrases he had written down because they had struck him as important without clearly understanding why. It had been exhilarating, as he imagined skiing must be, diving beneath the Barrier Reef.
The girl with red hair had thanked the professor softly for his lecture but if he heard her then he gave no sign.
Patel was one of only three or four students dawdling behind. He was almost at the bottom step and heading towards the door when Doria’s voice stopped him.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you at these classes before.”
“No,” said Patel with deference. “No, that’s correct.”
“You are not taking one of my courses?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Another in the department, perhaps?”
“Mechanical engineering,” said Patel hopefully.
Doria was looking at him keenly, smiling now with his eyes. “I have long argued for a less rigid approach to inter-disciplinary studies,” said Doria with a tone of regret. “Alas, breaking down such rigid barriers…” He smiled at Patel suddenly. “What we want is a deconstructive approach to the formalism of the academic syllabus, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes,” said Patel. “Yes, I would.”
He was conscious of the professor’s eyes watching him to the door and he made himself turn, careful to take his time. “Thank you for the lecture, Professor Doria. It was really interesting.”
Doria made a short bow of the head and shoulders and Patel left the room.
Thirty
“What’s the coffee like?”
Kevin Naylor looked beyond the T-shirts and the cassettes towards the cafeteria. “No idea, sir.”
Resnick walked closer: it looked like a Gaggia machine to him. “Where does this Sally work?”
Naylor pointed towards the basement. “Chart albums, all the rock stuff, it’s down below.”
“Have a word with the manager, manageress, whatever, get the girl a break. We’ll talk over there.”
He ordered a double espresso, which caused some confusion, and carried it to a table by the far wall. The cafeteria was raised up above the rest of the floor, spacious; there were green plants and video screens and if you could shut your ears to the inanities of the in-house DJ it was pleasant enough.
The coffee wasn’t as strong as it could have been, not as strong as at the Italian stall in the market. They were probably using the wrong beans. He had almost finished it by the time Naylor appeared with Sally Oakes: even when you’ve got no clear expectations, thought Resnick, it’s possible to be surprised.
For a start she was slight, her black T-shirt and jeans seemed to hang from her by default; he knew her age, nineteen, but he hadn’t expected her to look it. Her light brown hair was cut in a fuzzy stubble that suggested it would fold back against the hand like fur. There was a silver stud, shaped like a star, in her left nostril, a chunky bracelet of ornamented black leather round her left wrist.