‘God damn it.’
‘It is such a waste,’ Mrs Phear said. ‘And I believe she was really a virgin, too.’
‘The little bitch. Was ever anything so unlucky? What happened?’
The woman shrugged. ‘I made her ready for him. I went up to the house for more candles, and she asked me to put a nut or two in her mouth before I went. And when I came back she was as you see her. She’s still warm.’
Jesus straightened up, though his eyes lingered on the girl’s face. ‘It’s as if someone smothered her.’ He looked quickly around the room.
‘I locked the door behind me,’ Mrs Phear said in a flat voice. ‘She choked on a nut, that’s all. The footboy was in the lobby all the time and saw no one. Is he trustworthy?’
‘He’s nothing but a child. He heard nothing?’
‘The walls are thick.’
Candle in hand, Jesus moved about the room. Mrs Phear waited, with hands folded and eyes cast down.
He pointed at the ceiling, to the great room above. ‘I cannot afford to disappoint Frank Oldershaw. Not him of all people.’
‘I suppose he would not take the girl like that?’
‘What? Dead?’ He stared at Mrs Phear.
‘I told you, she’s still warm.’
‘Of course he would not.’
‘But would he notice?’
‘Dear God, ma’am, yes – I think he would. He’s not so far gone. Besides, that’s where the sport of it is for them, the struggle. Believe me, that’s what they brag about afterwards in their cups. That and the blood on the sheet.’
‘Are you sure it cannot be contrived?’
Jesus shook his head. ‘Not the struggle. And not with her face like that. I tell you, it would not answer.’
Mrs Phear kneaded the hem of her cloak. ‘So do you tell him he must wait?’
‘He’s mad for it, ma’am. He’s not used to being crossed. We cannot cool his ardour with a Barnwell drab even if we could lay our hands on one at this time. When can you find me another such as this?’
‘In a month or so, perhaps. Even then it would not be easy. Not so soon after this.’
Jesus said, ‘He’s worth more than the others put together. But I cannot tell him she’s dead. I must say that she was terrified at the prospect before her, and stole away in the night.’
‘There’s another difficulty,’ Mrs Phear said. ‘What do we do with – with that?’
Jesus turned and looked back at the white body on the white bed. Suddenly time accelerated. Event stumbled after event in a disorderly rush. He heard a raised voice outside and footsteps. The door handle turned. He tried to reach the door, to hold it shut, but the bed and the dead girl were in his way. Mrs Phear whirled towards the sound with surprising speed but her skirt snagged on the corner of the table and the door was already opening before she had freed herself.
Frank Oldershaw was swaying on the threshold. His face was red and his waistcoat was unbuttoned. ‘Ah, there you are, Philip,’ he said. ‘I am on fire, I tell you, I cannot wait another moment.’ He caught sight of Mrs Phear and her unexpected presence made him falter. But he was too drunk to stop altogether and the last few words tumbled from his mouth in a dying whisper. ‘And where have you hidden my sweet little virgin?’
This body was found in Jerusalem on the morning of Friday, 17 February. The sun had not quite risen. The college gardens were filled with a grey half-light, which made it possible to distinguish the broad outlines of things, but not their details. It was very quiet.
The man who discovered the corpse was called John Floyd. But he was known to everybody – sometimes even to his wife – as Tom Turdman. He was as brown as his name, and a finder of unwanted trifles, discarded memories and excreted secrets.
Jerusalem occupied eight or nine acres of ground. The college was surrounded on three sides by a high brick wall upon a mediaeval base of rubble and dressed stone, and on the fourth side by the principal buildings. The walls were topped with rows of spikes. Behind the chapel, the Long Pond stretched in a curve towards the south-east. It was fed by a stream that the friars had culverted under the walls long ago, before Jerusalem was even thought of. On the far side of the pond were the Fellows’ Garden and the Master’s Garden. Most of the town lay some way off on the other side of the irregular huddle of college buildings.
The only sounds were the clack of Tom’s overshoes, wooden pattens, and the trundling of the iron-rimmed wheels of his barrow on the flagged path. He visited four colleges: Sidney Sussex, Christ’s, Jerusalem and Emmanuel. He preferred to work in winter because he was paid by volume, not by the hour, and the smell obliged him to visit more frequently in the summer. He worked for a retired corn chandler whom the undergraduates called the merchant of shit. His employer derived a modest income from selling scholarly manure to farmers and gardeners.
This morning Tom was now so cold that he could hardly feel his hands. He had just emptied the Master’s privy, never a pleasant task, and wheeled his barrow along the flagged path at the back of the Master’s Lodge, which was unexpectedly productive. The path led to a gate, which the head porter, Mr Mepal, had just unlocked for him, and then over the Long Pond by way of an intricately constructed wooden bridge. The barrow wheels rumbled like muffled thunder on the wooden planks. He turned left towards the little boghouse the bedmakers used, which was modestly tucked away on the far side of the college gardens.
The path ran close to the pond in the shadow of a great tree. In the greater gloom under the branches, Tom slipped on a patch of ice. He fell, measuring his length on the stones. The barrow toppled on to the frosty grass and discharged at least half of its stinking cargo on the bank. The shovel, which had been balanced on top, slithered into the water.
Panting with cold, he righted the trolley. He would have to clear as much as he could of the filth, and hope against hope that rain would wash the rest away before anyone noticed it. But the shovel was somewhere in the pond, and he could do nothing without it. Surely the water near the bank could not be very deep? He took off his brown coat and rolled the sleeves of his shirt above his thin, pointed elbows. He was about to plunge his hand into the water when he saw a large, dark object floating among the shards of thin ice a yard or two from the bank.
At first he thought a sheet or a shirt had fallen into the pond, for the east wind had blown strongly during the last few days, often coming in savage gusts. The following instant he thought of a more interesting idea – namely, that the floating thing was a cloak or gown discarded by a reveller during some drunken prank the previous evening. He had retrieved caps and gowns from cesspits on several occasions and either restored them to their owners or sold them to a dealer in second-hand academic dress.
Tom Turdman thrust his right arm into the freezing water. He whimpered as the cold hit him. To his relief, his fingers closed around the shaft of the shovel. All this time his mind was partly distracted by the risk of Mepal’s vengeful anger if he discovered what had happened, a risk that grew with every minute’s delay.
The sky was becoming paler. But the goddamned tree blocked so much of the light. He straightened up and stared at the thing in the water. If it was a cloak or gown, it held the possibility of substantial profit.
He held the shovel in his other hand and leaned low over the pond. He stretched his arm towards the thing that lay just beneath the swaying surface. Water seeped over the lip of one of the pattens and trickled into the cracked shoe beneath. He tried to hook the shadow with the shovel, but it danced away. He leaned out a little farther. The patten slipped in the mud.
With a shriek, Tom Turdman fell forward. The cold hit him like an iron bar. He opened his mouth to scream and swallowed pond water. His feet flailed, seeking the bottom. Weeds curled around his ankles. He could not breathe. He flung out his arms. He was now desperate to keep afloat, desperate to find a handhold. As he began to sink again, the fingers of his right hand closed around a bundle of rotting twigs, each of them with something unyielding at its core. At the same moment his feet sank into mud, and the mud seemed to receive him in its embrace and draw him deeper and deeper into it.