Grantchester Grind

'Not vot I meant,' said the woman. 'I vant your age.'

Purefoy stared at her. Something was terribly wrong now. Her accent changed from relatively normal if upper-class English to something he had only heard before in movies featuring KGB interrogators. He glanced past her into the room. Mrs Ndhlovo's clothes were scattered on the sofa and an empty suitcase was lying open on the floor. 'Now look here-' he began, but the woman interrupted him.

'Mrs Ndhlovo has disappeared,' she said. 'Do you know where she has gone?'

'Of course I don't,' said Purefoy. 'I wouldn't be here if I did, would I?' Again the feeling hit him that whatever was going on made no sense. The woman's accent had changed once more. It was distinctly English.

'But you could identify her body?'

'Body?' said Purefoy, horribly alarmed. Within a very few minutes he had been assailed by the conviction that he had come to the wrong address, had met a total stranger who seemed to have been expecting him and who had then changed from talking normal English to something guttural and who had now switched back to English with a question that implied Mrs Ndhlovo was dead and if she hadn't entirely disappeared was in such a mutilated state that it required an old acquaintance to identify her. 'Body? You don't mean…'

'How often vere you intimate viz ze voman? You vere her loffer, ja?'

'Jesus,' said Purefoy, and clutched the side of the doorway for support. The beastly woman's changing accents, not to mention the appalling implications of her questions, had him reeling. And now she had taken him by the arm and was dragging him into the room. Purefoy Osbert clung to the doorway. 'Look,' he squawked. 'I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't a clue-'

'Ah, that was what I was waiting for. Clue,' said the woman. 'We rely on these little mistakes in cases of this sort, Dr Osbert. You said "Clue. "'

Purefoy Osbert's hand left the doorway partly as a result of the woman dragging him but far more because she had just called him Dr Osbert, and had added to his sense of utter horror by speaking about cases of this kind and clues. He staggered into the room and leaned against the wall. The woman locked the door and pocketed the key, then, with a distinctly sinister movement which involved keeping her eyes on him, sidled across the room to the bedroom door and shut that too.

'Sit down,' she said. Purefoy remained standing and tried to marshal some reasonable thoughts. They didn't come easily. In fact they didn't come at all. 'I don't,' he tried to say, only to find that his voice wasn't responding properly, It sounded extraordinarily high-pitched and tiny. He tried again. 'How do you know my name? And what's going on? And why are Mrs Ndhlovo's clothes all over the place?'

'I said sit down,' said the woman. She pulled a chair from Mrs Ndhlovo's desk, turned it round so that its back faced Purefoy, then straddled it, showing a good deal of leg in the process. Purefoy Osbert crept away from the wall and sat on the arm of the sofa.

'Right. Now then, Dr Osbert, I want you to start at the beginning and tell me in your own words how you first became acquainted with Mrs Ndhlovo.'

From the arm of the sofa Purefoy eyed her and tried desperately to think. It was almost clear to him that he was either in the presence of some sort of plainclothes police person or, since she was apparently alone and had multiple accents, most of them foreign, a member of a secret intelligence service. Either way she was alarming. 'How do you know my name?' he asked in an attempt to get some bearings.

'You will answer my questions,' she said. 'I am not here to answer yours. If you are not prepared to cooperate with me, I will have to call my assistants.' She glanced significantly at the door into the bedroom.

Purefoy shook his head. The woman was bad enough without any assistance. He looked miserably round the room at all the familiar African ornaments and knick-knacks Mrs Ndhlovo had decorated it with, but they gave him as little comfort as her clothes and the empty suitcase. 'I just met her at the University,' he said. 'In the Common Room or the Canteen. Somewhere like that.'

The woman reached across the desk for a notebook and opened it. 'We have reason to believe that is not the truth,' she said. 'You attended her evening class on Male Infertility and Masturbatory Techniques in Room Five in the Scargill Block. The excuse you gave at a later date was that you mistook it for a lecture on Prison Reform in Sierra Leone.'

Purefoy Osbert swallowed drily. This was infinitely more awful. The woman shut the book and put it back on the desk. 'That is what happened,' he admitted. 'It was a genuine mistake.'

'The following week you returned. Would you please explain why?'

Purefoy looked round the room again and tried to think of a suitable answer. 'I just-' he began and stopped.

'You just what? You just wanted to learn how to masturbate?'

'No, of course not,' said Purefoy angrily. 'This is insufferable.'

'Insufferable? How you mean insufferable?' said the woman, lapsing into middle or eastern European English again. 'Like you don't suffer from von Klubhausen's Syndrome mit der hairy hands?'

'Jesus,' said Purefoy, breaking out into a cold sweat and beginning to think, in so far as he was able to think at all, that he was going mad. The next question convinced him.

'Tell me, Dr Osbert, tell me about your interest in clitoral circumcision. Have you ever had any experience of it personally?'

'What?' Purefoy shouted, and for a moment it looked as though the woman hesitated herself. 'What did you say?'

'You heard me,' she snarled. Answer the question.'

'Personally?' yelled Purefoy. 'How the fuck can I have had any personal experience of female circumcision? I haven't got a bloody clitoris for God's sake.'

'Yes, zere is zat,' the woman admitted switching to Lubianka 1948. 'Afterwards, of course not, but before…'

'Afterwards? Before?' yelled Purefoy. 'Any time I couldn't have a clitoris. I'm not a woman.'

'You think not?' said the woman doubtfully. 'To go to evening classes on Clitoral Stimulation and Female Circumcision and you're not a woman? We can see about that at a different stage of the investigation.'

Purefoy was about to say she could see about it now, but he thought better of it.

'So,' said the woman, 'when did you last see Mrs Ndhlovo alive?'

Purefoy Osbert felt sick. The significance of that 'alive' had not been lost on him. 'You mean she's dead?' he stammered.

The woman stood up. 'You should know, Dr Osbert, in what condition she was when you last saw her. Was she alive, Dr Osbert? Or was she already…All right, I will rephrase the question.' She stopped and said nothing for half a minute. It seemed longer to Purefoy. Like half an hour. 'Well?' she snapped at him suddenly. 'What is your answer to that?'

Purefoy blinked. 'To what?' he asked shakily. 'You said you were going to rephrase the question.'

'Rephrase the question, Dr Osbert? Why should I do that?' Purefoy's fingers tightened on the back of the sofa. It was the nearest he could get to keeping a grip on reality. Whatever he was involved in didn't begin to have anything real about it. To make matters worse, he thought he could hear someone sobbing at the back of the flat. 'I don't know why you said you were going to rephrase the question,' he said. 'How could I know? I didn't even know what question you were talking about.'

'Very clever,' said the woman. 'Your evasive technique is psychologically interesting. You have evidently prepared yourself for just this sort of interrogation. And the flowers are not without significance. You brought them as an indication that you did not know what had happened. Is that it?'

'I didn't. I brought them for Mrs-'

'Not true,' snarled the woman, her pale eyes glinting behind the spectacles. 'Not true. It is time you were brought face to face with the facts.' She got off the chair and moved towards the door into the bedroom, and for a moment Purefoy's hopes rose.