The Oxford Fellow

By Kenneth Cameron

A crime novel featuring a former lawman turned novelist and sleuth, whose latest investigation takes him into the murderous rivalries of academic life.
 
When Denton hears there’s a fellow missing from Oxford, it takes him a while to grasp that “fellow,” in this instance, means some sort of academic character, and not, you know, a fellow. A bloke. Never mind: He’s happy to set off for Oxford and poke around. He imagines a holiday, a peaceful sojourn among the hushed libraries and the famous dreaming spires. It will be so different from frantic, filthy London, muscling its way into the twentieth century . . .
 
Turns out, those dreaming spires hide nightmares as wicked as anything in the city's back alleys. He stumbles in particular into the web of vicious rivalries otherwise known as the School of Archeology, with hatreds rooted in the famous discovery of the ancient city of Troy. Grisly suicides, terrifying curses, threats of eye-popping violence—it’s the stuff of penny dreadfuls. No wonder the fellow has disappeared; Denton wouldn’t mind following his lead and hopping a train back to London.
 
Praise for Kenneth Cameron’s Denton series:
 
“Fine plotting and distinctive characters.” —Publishers Weekly

“Sure to appeal to readers who love historical mysteries intertwined with edgy interpersonal relationships” —Library Journal
 
“Cameron paints a striking portrait of London, and Denton is a hero whose unheroic side only makes his character more appealing.” —Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781631942990

Book preview

CHAPTER

1

Denton felt boredom like a kind of sickness, a gloom that pushed down on him as if it were a coffin lid. He had felt it for weeks; he had fought it with restless busyness, rowing his boat on the river, shooting his parlour pistols in the attic until the air was thick and choking with black-powder smoke, lifting dumbbells until the muscles of his arms shook. And he had walked the length and breadth of London, always carrying this sickness with him. This day, he had walked the length of the Fleet from Blackfriars to Kenwood House—never seeing the river, which was as silent and invisible as a secret grudge because it was buried down there under the bricks and stone and dead dogs and rubbish—and noted places that had once been famous and now were lost: Battle Bridge, where Boadicea was supposed to have fought the Romans, now under the road near King’s Cross railway station; Bagnigge Wells and St Pancras Wells and Black Mary’s Hole, all clear springs that had once gushed up near the now-suppressed river and later been turned into cesspools before being buried in their turn by history’s junk—railway lines and suburbs. He got to Hampstead Heath in the rain and looked around for the river and, finding it as only a trickle that soon vanished through a grating, felt worse than when he had started, and went home.

He let himself into the high-ceilinged entry hall that he had first hung with big pictures of things like hairy cattle to try to make it look smaller; now, it had only a couple of prints and a standard lamp and a chair, and it looked like a waiting room for something unpleasant. Once in, he found that he was being stared at by a large, stooped, battered-looking man who was trying to pull on an alpaca jacket. Denton said, ‘It’s only me, Fred.’

‘If you’d’ve rung, I’d’ve opened the door.’ Fred sounded both vague and tense, as if he were concerned about something that was happening somewhere else. Fred had been a bare-knuckles prize fighter and then the doorman in a rather classy whorehouse, the place where Denton had met him. Formerly alert, he had gone downhill—memory, speech, understanding—so that now, mostly to give him a little income, he was Denton’s door-opener.

‘It’s my house, Fred. I have a key.’

‘I thought you wanted me to open the door.’ Fred looked behind himself as if he expected somebody back there to contradict him.

‘When the bell rings, Fred. I didn’t ring the bell. It’s all right; you’ll get the hang of it. Atkins in?’

‘Ain’t seen hide nor hair.’

Denton went up the stairs; Fred disappeared into his own room at the back of the hall. Denton collapsed into a green armchair beside a cold fireplace. He felt too listless to light a fire. Anyway, it was summer.

‘You busy?’ It was Atkins, looking around the door from below stairs as if he were still Denton’s servant.

‘Do I look it?’ Denton was down on his spine in his green velvet chair, his head on the chair back, feet thrust out. ‘Fred said he hadn’t seen you.’

‘Fred’s losing his buttons. Thought you might be composing.’

‘Composers compose. Writers gnash their teeth and worry about the next book.’

The long room served him for parlour and reception room. Rain-soaked light came in from the window at the street end and faded as it penetrated deeper; by the time it was halfway down, the room was almost dark and the objects there—a doorway, a porcelain stove, a stair, Atkins—more or less invisible. Beyond that, near darkness struggled with feeble light coming from a window at the back. The sound of rain was clear on the windows, muffled on the roof, distant on the street below where a horse’s hooves thudded like dull blows.

‘I’m not intruding, then.’ Atkins came into the room.

‘I’m glad for the interruption. Truth is, Sergeant, I’m off my nut from nothing to do.’

The small man came farther in, then all the way. ‘It’s the missus, isn’t it?’ He dropped his buttocks into a chair opposite Denton’s. ‘Miss her, you do.’ ‘The missus’ was Janet Striker, Denton’s never entirely loving lover.

Denton—novelist, American in London, outsider—stretched. ‘Don’t call her the missus.’

Atkins stared into the cold fireplace. ‘Funny how when I was your servant I did anything that came to hand to get out of it, and now I’m out of it and it’s like I don’t have no life at all and those were the golden days.’

‘You want to be a servant again?’

‘Can’t. Too much water over the bridge. You’d have me back, would you?’

‘Atkins, you still do half the things you did when you were a servant—you nag me about my clothes, you fetch us meals every night or three …! Well, don’t you?’

‘Nostalgia. For the what-you-call-it—nostalgia de la booey.’ He sighed again. He stood, jammed his hands into the pockets of a pair of bespoke grey trousers. ‘Are you happy, General?’

‘Not just now, no.’

‘Well, neither am I! And we’ve both got the world in our fists! With you, it’s the missus—a dream of a woman that lives mostly in the house behind, all the advantages of companionship and none of the woes of marriage! With me, it’s the film business—I’m making money, I’m independent, and I’m miserable because they’re trying to force me to become richer and famouser.’ Atkins had stumbled into the making of ‘actualities’ for the burgeoning motion-picture business and had succeeded too well. Now, it seemed, he was at a crux. ‘Makes you wonder if you was ever happy in your entire life.’

Sympathetic as he was, Denton didn’t want to talk about unhappiness just then. He said, ‘I have to go out soon.’

‘I know, I know, dinner at the Simpsons’. Want me to lay out your clothes?’

‘You’re not my valet any more, Atkins!’

‘Well—for old times’ sake. That nostalgia again, isn’t it?’ He started back up the room towards the darkness and the stairs. ‘And that son of yours is coming from America, don’t forget that.’

Denton sagged into the chair again. ‘How could I forget?’

Atkins narrowed an eye. ‘That suit could use a bit of a press, if you don’t mind me saying. I’m out of that business, but they do a nice job at the presser’s around on Marchmont Street. Don’t let it go too long, General.’

Denton was not a general and never had been, nor a colonel nor a major nor a captain. He had been a temporary lieutenant for a few weeks after the American Civil War because he had been the last noncom in a Union prison camp when the acting commandant—himself a captain—had wangled permission to go home. Denton had become a temporary lieutenant and the acting commandant, and he had hung on until ordered to close the camp. Atkins, on the other hand, had been thirty years in the British Army, most as a soldier-servant, the last ten as a sergeant. Taken on as Denton’s servant, he had begun calling Denton by various military titles, depending on his mood of the moment: Denton’s rank went from general to lieutenant as his servant thought better or worse of him. It showed a certain hostility in Atkins—the urge to himself be a sergeant major, at least, Denton thought. Now he was a rising captain of industry.

Denton was thinking of these things as he stood that evening in a drawing room, waiting to be called to dinner. Atkins had hit on a truth: they weren’t master and servant any longer. Yet Atkins still lived downstairs in Denton’s house, although the relationship had been easier for both of them before. Denton had expected that Atkins’s rise would free both of them, but it seemed not to have done. Truth was, Denton didn’t want a servant, never had, disliked telling another man what to do, but now he paid Fred to answer his door because he didn’t want to do it himself. And Atkins didn’t want to be a servant, but he didn’t enjoy the burden of success, either.

The dinner bell rang. Denton gave his arm to a stout woman in what seemed to be mourning black and led her in. The formalities of English dinners had finally come clear to him, but he usually avoided going out if he could. He wondered why he was here on this night, realised he had accepted the invitation out of the same accidie that had sent him walking up to Hampstead.

The food appeared. Next to him, the stout woman droned on about the responsibilities of being some sort of attachment to the court. Denton spooned up soup, moved bits of fish around a plate, said ‘Hmm’ and ‘Yes, indeed’ and ‘That must be very tiring.’

Then his eyes met those of a young woman across the table.

She was not ravishing, but she was good-looking, with a long, intelligent face of the sort seen in some eighteenth-century portraits. Earlier writers might have written of ‘very fine eyes’ as a way of not mentioning the long nose. Denton didn’t care about the nose; his own was gigantic. Now, the young woman looked up (as if she had been already looking at him, he thought) and met his eyes. They both looked away, then both looked back. She blushed, then smiled.

Denton smiled.

‘Quite outrageous,’ the woman on his right said. ‘I told them that there were grooms for that.’

‘Exactly,’ Denton said. He looked across the table. The young woman smiled again.

So it went through rare roast beef and savouries and sweets. Denton had turned to the woman on his left at the appropriate point; she had proved taciturn and said little except ‘Mmm’ and ‘Ah,’ and ‘Just so.’ She put the burden of talk on him with the observation that an author’s life must be intriguing—everybody knew that Denton was an author—and thus caused him to trot out his standard author-blather while she pretended to listen and concentrated on her food, which she seemed to really enjoy. Denton, not listening to his own spiel, spent a lot of time looking across the table and finding a gratifying response from the young woman.

He thought, I’m susceptible. Because of Janet’s absence. He thought, I mustn’t let anything happen. But it was pleasant.

After the females withdrew, he took part in masculine talk over strong wines and nuts and wondered how soon he could leave. When a wrangle about Campbell-Bannerman got out of hand, the host stood and suggested in a hopeless voice that they join the ladies. Denton took a final sip of the quite good port and stood. As he turned around to walk to the WC, a large man stepped into his way and grinned at him.

‘Sorry,’ Denton said, ‘I was just—’

‘I shan’t keep you a moment, Mr Denton. If you’ll permit me, I’d like to introduce myself.’ The man was both tall and broad, bearded like the new king, not yet as fat but headed that way. He had a tall man’s habit of turning his head down as if he were forced always to speak to shorter people; in fact, Denton’s eyes were on a level with his. The stranger’s face was rather red from the port and he looked quite jolly, as if, whatever the host feared about joining the ladies, he had great hopes for it, himself. He said, ‘My name is Ifan Gurra.’ He beamed.

They shook hands. Denton said, ‘Now—’

But Gurra held his arm. ‘I should like to introduce you to my fiancée. Would you be good enough to allow that?’

‘Ah, mmm—yes, of course, but I have to—’

‘Splendid!’ Gurra whacked him on the shoulder as if they were old pals. ‘I shall see you in the drawing room, then! Ha-ha! Wonderful!’

Denton made it to the WC without embarrassing himself, but it was a near thing. In the anteroom after he was done and relief had flooded him like the flush of whisky, a sallow man was lighting a cigar. He said in a glum voice, ‘I wonder why I keep coming to these affairs. I didn’t hear an intelligent word spoken all evening.’ He offered Denton a cigar. ‘They say the business of empire is done at dinners in Eaton Square. Don’t believe it. A lot of over-age women showing off their tiaras and looking like used loofahs. Am I offending you?’

Denton realised that the man was drunk. He said, ‘Maybe you ought to take it easy on the brandy.’

As if he hadn’t heard him, the man said, ‘Next thing you know, some woman’s going to sing. It’ll be awful—absolutely awful. I shall stay in here just as long as I can.’ He sniffed and leaned against a china sink and looked at his reflection in a mirror. ‘Not looking too marvellous myself.’

Denton went to the drawing room and, after a word with the hostess, was seized by the man who had called himself Ifan Gurra. ‘This, Mr Denton, is my fiancée—Esmay Fortny.’

It was, of course, the young woman who had been flirting with him across the dinner table.

Denton had several thoughts at once: that Gurra was besotted with the young woman; that Gurra was older than she; that he didn’t entirely like Gurra, perhaps out of jealousy; that she was less besotted than Gurra was; that Denton was on dangerous ground because up close she was even more attractive to him than with the safety of a table between them. He took comfort in the protection of being old enough to be her father, although that seemed pretty thin armour if a man was thinking of making a fool of himself.

‘I have read some of your books,’ she said in a low voice. She didn’t say ‘all your books’, words that gave the impression—always false, as Denton had found—that all his books had got read. Credit her with honesty as well as allure, then. ‘And I know your history.’

There it was, then: there was only one part of his history that other people knew, the only one they cared about—he had once been a killer. Long before, he had been for a few months the marshal of a tiny settlement in Nebraska, and he had shot several men who had wanted to rob the bank. He hated that he had done it. He still had nightmares about it. He carried it like a railway sleeper across his shoulders. And he knew with sudden gloom that it was the reason she was being introduced to him.

‘How nice to meet you, Miss Fortny. I think we saw each other at dinner.’

‘I’m afraid I was rather froward. I so wanted to speak to you, Mr Denton.’

Denton tried to smile. She would have some tale of woe to tell him, he knew, the end of which would be that she would want him to help her out. It was what people always wanted. He had been a peace officer for three months, a novelist for twenty years, but it was always the peace officer they wanted. He said, ‘Any man would be grateful for a reason to speak to you, Miss Fortny.’ He glanced at Gurra, who went right on beaming. Gurra wanted the world to share his joy in having Esmay Fortny. Gurra, now he thought about it, was rather an ass.

She turned her head a little towards Gurra and said, ‘Would you give us a few minutes, please, Ifan?’

‘Of course! But surely, this isn’t the place to—’

‘I shall be the judge of that, Ifan.’ She smiled at Denton. ‘If, that is, you would give me a few minutes, Mr Denton?’

There was no way to say he wouldn’t, and anyway, he thought that spending a few minutes with her would be better than anything else on offer. He would tell Janet, of course. Make a story of it. Oh, Janet, dammit!

The man with the cigar had been right: a woman was about to sing. Esmay Fortny led him into the shadow of a potted plant and said, ‘There is something I should like to ask you to do for me, Mr Denton.’

Of course there was. He felt her allure begin to fade.

The singer began to sing. Denton couldn’t tell Schubert from Victor Herbert. He said, ‘Miss Fortny, before you begin, I—people sometimes, in fact rather often, approach me with … problems … because of something they’ve heard I did long ago. I really don’t … I’m not very good at—problems. Other people’s problems. Not even at my own.’ He tried to make a joke of that last. It didn’t go down well.

She was a serious young woman. Also a self-possessed one. She didn’t even smile. She said, ‘I know that you have at times dealt with crimes. You have worked with the police.’

‘I’m not a detective, Miss Fortny!’ It was a cry from the heart.

‘Of course you’re not. I’ve already tried a detective, and he was useless. I think that because you write novels, you are a man of imagination. Are you not?’

He managed to say, ‘I write fiction. I suspect you’re talking about something real.’

They were quite close together. He got a whiff of champagne from her lips; he hoped she didn’t get worse from his. The singer was whooping unintelligibly about something, probably love, which tended to get that sort of treatment. She frowned and turned away as if the music hurt her ears and walked to a doorway, turned back and cocked her head to show that he should follow her.

He found that they were in a small library or writing room or something of the sort. She said, ‘My problem is very real. It is horribly real. Will you help me?’

He wanted to say no. He didn’t, of course.

‘It’s about my father.’

‘Yes?’

‘He disappeared. I want to find him.’

‘Disappeared could mean a lot of things. Has he …?’

‘Vanished! He simply vanished. One day he was in our house, and then … he was gone.’

‘Have you been to the police?’

‘The police were called in immediately, and then the London, the Metropolitan Police, as well!’ She bent across the table. Her eyes were really very fine. ‘Scotland Yard!’

‘In London?’

‘Oh, no. Oxford. I ought to explain, oughtn’t I. My father was—is—a senior fellow at Exeter College. He is a most distinguished man, probably I daresay the greatest man in his field in the British Isles, certainly, and perhaps in Europe. Men of my father’s importance do not simply vanish, Mr Denton!’

It was intriguing to see her so passionate: her face flushed, her eyes wide, her lips quivering. Gurra was a lucky man. Denton said, ‘When did this happen, Miss Fortny?’

‘Eleven years ago.’

Denton looked at her as if he had been whacked between the eyes. He suppressed a shout of ‘Eleven years ago! Are you off your head?’ and flailed around in his brain for something to say. He came up with the limp remark that eleven years was a long time.

‘A long, long time, Mr Denton. My mother suffered torments. I suffered, though I was only a girl. My sister, who was too young to understand at the time, has suffered since. The loss of a father is terrible for any child, Mr Denton!’

He was not so sure of that. He had enlisted in the Union army at fifteen to get away from his own father. He thought now that if his father had disappeared, he’d have cheered. But the thought sobered him, got rid of the gobsmacking, and he said, ‘Where is your mother now?’

‘She died last year.’ This was said in a hushed voice.

‘I’m sorry. And your sister?’

‘She has been at Roedean, and out of term with me.’

‘And where is that?’

‘At our house in Oxford.’

‘The same house where your father …?’

‘Yes, yes, the same, of course! My mother insisted. She believed he would return. I wanted to move away, but she wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘And you live there now.’

‘I have lived there, but I have just put it up for sale. We are in fact in the process of removal. It’s dreadfully tedious.’

‘To London?’

‘I’ve taken a flat for us at eleven, Half Moon Street.’

‘Mmm. Forgive a crass question, Miss Fortny, but, mmm, Half Moon Street …’

‘Is quite dear, I know. Ifan has already pointed that out. I don’t care.’

‘Let me ask a very crass question, then. You’re here because you wanted to tell me all this, I suppose because you think I can do something about your father—is that more or less right? Then I’ll ask my very crass question—do you have the money?’

‘I can pay you whatever you demand.’

‘Not for me! Good God!’ She looked startled, then hurt. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Fortny, but I don’t mean money for me! I don’t take money, except from my publisher. I mean, do you have the money for things like flats in Half Moon Street?’

‘I do. I just came into it when I turned twenty-one.’ She smiled. ‘Last week.’

‘As your father’s heir?’

‘And my mother’s.’

So Gurra is getting money with the bride. Something more than love involved? Denton said, ‘Your father was a wealthy man, then.’

‘He had made investments. My mother inherited, as well. I don’t know how else one makes money.’

‘I wouldn’t think an Oxford fellow made pots of it doing whatever fellows do.’ She looked a bit cross, shrugged. He said, ‘What does your fiancé do?’

‘He’s a senior fellow at Jesus. Why?’

He said, ‘So eleven years ago, your father disappeared. The police investigated; they called in Scotland Yard and they investigated. And nobody found anything. And recently—when, a year ago? Six months ago?—you hired a private detective. Two months ago, fine. And he took the money and found nothing. Mmm? And what is it you think I can do?’

‘Find my father.’

‘Miss Fortny!’ Denton scratched a bushy eyebrow. ‘I should be flattered, but I’m dismayed. I can’t call up spirits from the vasty deep.’

‘My father isn’t a spirit! He’s very much alive. I feel it.’

‘Ah, you feel it, well … yes.’

‘Ifan agrees! He believes Father is alive, too.’

‘What’s his evidence?’

‘A calculation of the likelihoods.’ She looked combative now, eyes wide, nostrils flaring, breath coming faster. ‘A scientific calculation.’

‘What’s Gurra a fellow in?’

‘He isn’t a fellow in anything! His speciality is anthropological research. He is famous for his field work!’

Denton took a turn to a window and back. He looked into a little fireplace, which was spotless and decorated with a paper fan. He said, ‘I don’t see how I could help you.’

‘I was afraid you’d say that!’

‘Then why did you ask me?’

‘Ifan said it was worth a try.’

‘Was asking me his idea, then?’

‘He says you’re the best man in London.’

‘Were all those glances across the dinner table his idea, too?’ Denton realised as he said it that he was smarting from an older man’s misconstruction of a young flirt.

‘Mr Denton!’

‘Look—your loss is real, Miss Fortny; I don’t mean to diminish it or you. But the idea that I could find a man who’s been missing for eleven years is …! After all this time, with all the people who’ve already tried—it’s fantastic.’

Tears trickled down her cheeks. She said, ‘I miss him so much.’

Denton stared at her. He said, ‘And Ifan? Does he miss him so much, too?’

Her voice was almost a whisper. ‘My father was Ifan’s mentor—a second father, almost.’ She looked aside. ‘Ifan comes from very humble beginnings. His own father was … absent. My father took him under his wing at university—really made him what he is. Ifan would give everything he has to bring my father back.’

Everything he has. How much was that? Denton wondered. He said, ‘Was asking me Ifan’s idea?’

She shook her head. ‘Ifan was the last person to see my father alive. He feels responsible.’

‘Then why didn’t he ask me himself?’

She shook her head. ‘I suppose he thought I might have … I might do a better job of it.’

‘Use your allure, you mean. You have allure by the pailful, Miss Fortny; he was right about that. Now, don’t get your dander up—’

She was flushed again, her back straight, her eyes narrowed in anger. ‘I think we have both said whatever there is to be said, Mr Denton. I have told you what I want and how deeply I feel about it, and you have refused me. I had hoped for better from you.’

She swept out, leaving a trail of patchouli that perhaps he was meant to follow. He didn’t.

Denton was temporarily well-off. It was the first time in years that he hadn’t felt hounded by the need for money. Now, he missed the hounding; it seemed better in retrospect than this empty mind and the feeling of uselessness.. Atkins had a purpose and a goal; Janet had her legal work and a passion. He had, so far as he could see, nothing much at all—except a ridiculous request to find a man who had been missing for eleven years.

It was only a few minutes since Esmay Fortny had turned her elegant back on him. He was walking the streets of Mayfair, relieved to have escaped the dinner party, inhaling the scents of a London summer night. The rain had ended; the streets might have been washed, they smelled so dustless, so clean. Young people were laughing past him in evening clothes; carriages and a number of motorcars were heading towards lighted porticoes, disgorging more white ties and jewels. He heard music for dancing, from one doorway a suggestion of ragtime.

His last book, Worship Street, had started off as a failure: the publisher hadn’t believed in it and so hadn’t pushed it; the reviewers had mostly stared at it as if it were a suspect holy object from a crank sect (it was about religion); the public hadn’t bought it. Then as a joke he’d given his editor a small book of stories called Minor Horrors. His editor was convinced that Denton was a horror writer, even though Denton kept writing books that weren’t about horror. So he had written first one, then a second, then a whole batch of whimsical stories about famous creatures—Mary Shelley’s monster, Stoker’s Dracula, a werewolf, the Lamia—in the modern world, in which they had no place and no power. Frankenstein’s creature had become a childish moron in an Eskimo village; Dracula was an impotent old roué living under house arrest in Istanbul on a diet of goat’s blood and oysters; the werewolf complained about his ‘monthlies’ and the cost of haircuts. His editor had hated it but the publisher had thought it good fun and put it out in a small edition. It had been snapped up and had gone back for a second, then a third and fourth printing; it had sold to Germany, France, Serbia, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the United States and most of South America, pulling Worship Street in its wake. Suddenly, Denton had no debts and a fat bank account.

And here he was, with nothing to do. And nothing to write. Full-pocketed and empty-headed.

He swore out loud. A passing young man in dinner clothes smiled and said, ‘Hear, hear.’

There was nothing to go home for—no Janet, no work, too early for bed. He turned his steps south and west towards Oxford Street and then Regent Street and made his way down to the Café Royal. He was sated with both food and drink, but he wanted to sit among people he liked, and where better than this haunt of touts, artists, prostitutes and shady characters?

He ordered himself a glass of claret for form’s sake and then sat, silk hat still pushed back on his head, grinning at nothing. Then frowning at something—Miss Fortny’s tale and her allure. He felt again an older man’s resentment at having been falsely flirted with, the jade.

‘Finishing a night of carouse, or just starting?’

Denton knew the voice, didn’t even need to turn his head to see the face. ‘I hoped I might find you here, Harris. Got a question for you.’

‘Buy me a drink and I’ll give you ten minutes of brilliant conversation, then I have to be off.’ Frank Harris dropped himself into a chair opposite Denton. He was an editor of magazines, never the same one for very long; he seemed to know everybody and everything, was the perfect man to bring a question to. ‘I’m late, myself. Usually here by nine, sozzled by ten. I shall have to stir my stumps.’ Harris looked around as if the green-and-gold caryatids, the decorated ceiling, the cynical waiters were new to him. ‘What’s your question?’

‘What’s your poison?’

‘I ordered at the bar as I came by.’

A waiter was approaching with a whisky bottle and a glass. Denton said, ‘I’m not buying you the whole bottle.’

‘You’re one of the idle rich these days, Denton; why shouldn’t you?’ Harris watched as the waiter poured. ‘I hear there are Chinese coolies who carry copies of Minor Horrors in their kimonos.’

‘Chinese coolies wear pants. I used to see them in California. I think kimonos are what you find on suburban matrons.’

‘I prefer them off suburban matrons. Quite nice, suburban matrons, in fact. Have I told you about the wife in Wimbledon who—’

‘Yes.’

Harris sighed. ‘You’re a prude, Denton. It doesn’t go with your legend.’ He drank off the whisky and poured himself more.

Denton said, ‘Fortny.’

‘Is that an American curse word?’

‘It’s a name. A man.’

Harris focused his eyes more or less on Denton’s. He was already not quite sober, hardly something new. ‘Fortny,’ he said. ‘Scandal? A whiff of the nasty?’

‘Oxford. The university.’

‘Aha!’ Harris grinned. ‘That Fortny!’

‘What do you know about him?’

‘Um-mum-mum-mum …’ Harris looked towards the bar, eyes slitted. ‘Nine days’ wonder in the press back before the Queen went to her Maker. Disappeared, didn’t he? Off the face of the earth, as they say—gone to the Valley of Lost Things. Why do you ask?’

‘Somebody wants me to find him.’

‘Ah. Bit of a job, that. Been gone a long time—ten years? No, eleven—I remember, because I was editing Household and Heritage and couldn’t find a way to make the story appetising for our female readers. Mag was mostly about how to manage the hired help without paying them a decent wage. Who wants to find him?’

‘Tell me more about him.’

‘The absent Fortny? Oh, let’s see—a bit of a notable, for something or other. Dug things up. In fact—I remember him now—he’d been at Troy with Schliemann, and some of that rubbed off on him—hoard of Priam, all that. Of course, it was all a bit of a sell; Schliemann wasn’t above finding a helmet over here and combining it with a sword he found over there and saying he’d found the arms of Achilles. But quite dazzling to a young Englishman, I’m sure. Schliemann married a Greek girl, you know, as much to grease the wheels with the Greeks as to have something to do in the tent o’ nights. Fortny may have learned something from that, too.’

‘He married a Greek?’

‘No, he married an heiress. Much-approved move in academic circles. Daughter of a chap who made something a bit infra dig.’ Denton had never studied Latin, was sometimes lost among men who had had to soak it up as boys. However, he’d heard ‘infra dig’ enough to know it had something to do with being below the salt. Harris was running on. ‘He manufactured trusses or pos or something—no, it was beer! He was a beer baron. Ha! But the money was perfectly good, so Fortny was able to travel and dig and make himself famous. Why do you care?’

‘You know a hell of a lot, Harris.’

‘Snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. I remember everything I read or hear. As much a curse as a benefit, but it’s part of my genius. Do you know, I know more about Shakespeare than any man in England?’

‘You tell me practically every time we meet.’

‘Well, one needs to underline these things. I published a piece just the other day on the need to emphasise our good qualities so as to preserve our mental health. Not yours and mine, but those of chaps suffering from gloom and chronic phlegm. Whisky?’

Denton shook his head. ’Tell me what you remember about the disappearance.’

Harris held the whisky up to the light, smiled at it. ‘As I wasn’t there, this is all from whatever I read in the popular press. The gist of it was that this Fortny disappeared—poof, little puff of smoke, drum roll, no more Fortny. Left no letter, gave no warning, simply translated himself to the astral plane. Police found nothing. No trail of blood, no bones in the cellar, no newly plastered wall in the nursery. No boyfriend for the wife. Had a couple of kids, they did, but too young to be interesting. There was something about a train. Maybe he’d been seen buying a ticket, something of that sort. Came to nothing.’

‘Could he have simply walked out and started a new life somewhere?’

‘Well, this was a fairly notable personage, as such things go in Oxford. Pretty cushy life, you know—adoration of undergraduates, envy of your colleagues, other people’s wives on call. And his wife’s money. Not a life you’d walk out on easily.’

‘Foul play?’

‘Of course, that’s what everybody was waiting for. Juicy murder story. Nothing in that direction, as I remember.’

‘Enemies?’

‘All academics detest each other. We journalists are Christian saints by comparison. If Oxford dons were Italians, there’d be blood on the common-room floor every morning. So of course he had enemies, but I can’t remember anything juicy. Sorry.’

‘Who might know something?’

Harris shook his head. He was on his fourth whisky; his eyelids looked as if they’d been rouged. ‘Can’t remember the name of any of the hacks who covered it. Probably anonymous. It was that sort of story—simply fizzled. You could look at the old papers, but I can’t believe you’d find much I haven’t told you.’

‘The encyclopedic Mr Harris.’

‘The very one.’

Denton stared at the table, thought about having another glass of wine, learned from Harris’s example that he shouldn’t.

Harris said, ‘You’re not being particularly sparkling.’

Denton folded his arms, leaned back. ‘I was thinking. I have a friend at Scotland Yard.’

‘Are you threatening me with arrest?’

‘About Fortny.’

‘Why such interest? It was judged hopeless a decade ago. Go write a book if you’ve nothing to do. Who’s after you about Fortny, anyway?’

‘His daughter.’

‘Ah!’

‘She’s twenty-one.’

‘Many women survive to that age with their looks intact. Is she alluring?’

As that was the very word Denton himself had used, he frowned. ‘She’s engaged to a man name Gurra.’

‘Sounds like an island off the coast of Scotland. Gurra, noted for its mists and fermented haddock. Peculiar name. Well, I take it that the girl has hooked you. Eh? Eh? What then of the astonishing Mrs Striker?’

‘She hasn’t hooked me; in fact, I turned her down. Although I think there’s something off about it.’ He stood. ‘People don’t just disappear. They go, or they’re taken, or they’re there all the time and mistaken for something else. Thanks for the information.’

‘Thanks for the whisky.’ Harris belched. ‘It was quite good.’ The bottle was empty, and it would appear on Denton’s bill.

CHAPTER

2

Denton walked home and was getting ready to go to bed when Fred appeared in the doorway of the long room and, swaying side to side, then resting a shoulder on the doorway, mumbled, ‘There’s somebody to see you.’

‘At this hour? Does he have a name?’

Fred looked puzzled. He looked at his right hand, discovered he had a calling card in it. He held it out. ‘Got a beard.’ He swayed in the other direction, got the support of the doorway on that side and muttered something that sounded like ‘familiar type’, or could have been ‘familiar tyke’, or perhaps something that made sense only to Fred.

Denton looked at the card. Ifan Gurra, BA, MA, Oxford, Sci. Doc., Munich. ‘Oh hell.’ He thought he’d left all that behind him in Mayfair.

‘Didn’t look that bad.’

Denton debated telling Gurra he wasn’t at home. He hated lying and he hated hiding behind words like ‘not at home’ when of course Gurra would know by now that he was home. But it was late. Denton, however, recognised bull-headed determination: if he didn’t see Gurra now, the man would turn up tomorrow. ‘Oh, show him up.’

In the old days, Atkins would have been asked to rustle up something edible for the guest. No point in asking Fred for that. ‘Is Atkins downstairs?’

‘Out. Film business, he said.’ Fred winked, rather a production. ‘Business a blonde girl and that little car of his.’ He winked again. Quite horrible.

Denton said, ‘Show Mr Gurra up, then.’

‘Thought I might make my way over to the Lamb.’

‘Let’s deal with Mr Gurra first.’

Fred turned about with only a little difficulty and started down