Dry Bones Read online

  And that’s true (in a way!) because as the bursar he does no teaching, and his research is now more of a hobby than a disciplined journey of discovery.

  I glance down at my gin and tonic, and can feel George’s eyes boring relentlessly into my skull.

  ‘Should the thing you’re investigating – whatever it is – have already been reported to the police?’ he asks.

  Damn it, George – that’s just too good a guess!

  I look up, and stare him straight in the eye.

  ‘Are you asking me if there’s been some criminal act committed that I should have told you about?’ I say, choosing my words as carefully as I’d choose my steps if I was walking across a minefield.

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m asking,’ George says.

  I hold my gaze steady.

  ‘If there has been any sort of criminal act committed, George, then I promise you that I’ve seen no evidence of it,’ I say firmly.

  Nor have I, because by the time I got to examine the medieval ventilation shaft, both the bodies had been removed by university scientists and were residing in the labs across the park.

  George holds his pint pot up to the light. ‘There seems to have been quite a lot of evaporating going on,’ he says.

  Translation: if you buy me another beer, I’ll do what you want.

  I take the glass off him, and as I do, I try to hide the fact that I have just released a gasp of relief.

  It is later that the guilt starts to set in. Though I have not actually lied to George, I have gone out of my way to avoid telling him the truth, and I hate myself for it because he is both a friend and an ex-lover. But Charlie Swift needs me to do this, and he is not just a friend, he is the friend I have been searching for all my life.

  I would lie for Charlie, I would cheat for Charlie, I would prostitute myself with the entire Oxford United Supporters’ Club for him.

  I can’t say with absolute certainty that I would kill for him – but I hope that I would.

  SIX

  7 October 1974 – Afternoon

  It occurs to me, as I’m walking back from the Bulldog to St Luke’s, that Britain is a clearly divided nation, and that division is not between north and south, nor east and west. Neither is it the division between men and women, or the rich and poor, though both these things have been important in the past (the Suffragette Movement and the Jarrow Crusade, to quote just two examples) and will almost certainly be important in the future.

  The real division at this particular moment in time, it seems to me, places middle-aged southern farmers and Midlands coal miners (not to mention Scottish ship builders and London city clerks!) on one side of the great divide – and my generation squarely on the other. And what is this Grand Canyon of attitudes and philosophies? It is a six-year period in our national history known simply as the Second World War.

  The war, as I see it, was the most traumatic event that ever occurred in most people’s lives. It called for bravery and sacrifice, and sometimes brought forth greed and cowardice instead. It was a glorious time and a terrible time. And we – my generation – missed out on it by being stupid enough not to be born until it was nearly over!

  And so we see the tears in the eyes of people watching old newsreel film of VE night in Trafalgar Square, and we sort of understand why they are crying and wish that we could cry over ancient history, too.

  I’m not sure what’s set me off up this particularly twisted alley of speculation. Maybe it’s a gut feeling that the two stiffs in the air vent would never have been there, had it not been for the two outbreaks of madness across the Channel.

  Whatever the impetus, when I see Mr Jenkins standing outside the porters’ lodge, the first words that come to my mind (and are allowed, by a lack of self-discipline, to escape through my mouth), are, ‘What kind of war did you have, Mr Jenkins?’

  He thinks about it for a while, then says, ‘It was twelve months of boredom while we were training in England, three hours of absolute terror when we landed on the beaches in France, and then nearly four years of disgust and despair as I saw first-hand what war can do to innocent people.’

  I find his words simple and sincere, and feel both touched and humbled by them.

  ‘I hope you didn’t mind me asking,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t mind at all,’ Mr Jenkins assures me. ‘If you don’t ask, you’ll never know, will you?’

  ‘Mr Jenkins is a hero – and he’s has got a medal to prove it,’ says a voice from somewhere behind me.

  I turn to look. The speaker is a big man in his fifties with pale yellow hair. He has large eyes which are not exactly blank, but certainly suggest a lack of any real awareness, and these eyes are set in a podgy face with several double chins. His porter’s cap is at an angle which is awkward, rather than jaunty – and he wears the rest of his uniform as it were a potato sack tied in the middle with string. I know his name is Lennie Moon, but it suddenly occurs to me that in all the years I’ve been coming to the college, I’ve never got this close to him before.

  ‘Tell her, Mr Jenkins,’ Moon says excitedly. ‘Tell her that you’ve got a medal.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be much need for me to tell her now you’ve told her yourself, Lennie,’ Mr Jenkins says, and though his words are firm – and perhaps a little censorious – they are not unkind. He looks down at the other man’s hands and says, ‘What have you done with our boat, Lennie?’

  The big man looks down at his hands, too.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbles. ‘Honest, Mr Jenkins, I don’t know.’

  ‘You do know, Lennie – you’ve just forgotten,’ Mr Jenkins says. ‘Let’s see if we can get you to remember, shall we?’

  ‘All right,’ Lennie says reluctantly.

  ‘When we were talking this morning, we both thought it would be a good idea to take the boat down to the river for a test run. Did you do that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did you get as far as putting it into the water?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did you take the remote control out of your pocket, so you could make the boat do what you wanted it to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’

  Lennie puts his hand in his pocket, and it’s obvious that his fingers are touching the boat’s remote control. The look which crosses his face could be one of indecision, but then again, it might simply be confusion.

  ‘There were these two lovely little puppies playing on the riverbank,’ he says, and as he’s speaking, a happy smile is slowly replacing his disturbed expression. ‘They were chasing one another. It was so funny.’

  ‘And when you looked around again, the boat had gone?’ Mr Jenkins suggests.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That would be the current, wouldn’t it, Lennie – carrying the boat down the river? We’ve talked about the current before, if you remember.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Jenkins,’ the big porter replies, almost in tears. ‘I’m really so sorry.’

  ‘It’s partly my fault,’ Mr Jenkins says soothingly. ‘I shouldn’t have let you do it on your own.’

  ‘I lost our boat,’ Lennie wails.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Mr Jenkins tells him. ‘I can always build us another one.’

  ‘But it took you weeks to make!’

  ‘And I had fun making it – just as I’ll have fun making the next one,’ Mr Jenkins says. He checks his watch. ‘And now, Lennie, I really think it’s time you went home and had a rest.’

  ‘I can’t go yet,’ Moon says worriedly. ‘It’s not time. I have to wait until it’s time for me to put my card in the magic pinging clock.’

  ‘Give me your clocking-in card, and I’ll do it for you, Lennie,’ Mr Jenkins tells him.

  ‘And … and I have to wait for Mrs Lucy,’ Moon says, agitatedly.

  ‘Ah, I’d forgotten that,’ Mr Jenkins admits. ‘You see, you’re not the only one who can forget things, Lennie, I can, too.’


  ‘You can, too …’ Lennie repeats, obviously overawed at the thought that the Great Man shares his failings.

  ‘Why don’t you go into the lodge, Lennie, and see if you can find anything nice on the television,’ Mr Jenkins suggests.

  Lennie nods, then seems to have remembered something he wanted to say earlier, and turns to me.

  ‘Mr Jenkins isn’t the only man to have a medal from the war,’ he says proudly. ‘I’ve got one, too.’

  ‘Is that right?’ I reply, feeling, even as I speak, that of all the possible replies I could have made, this is probably the worst, yet still unable to come up with anything better.

  ‘Yes,’ Lennie says. ‘I got it …’

  ‘Lennie!’ Mr Jenkins says, in a voice which, it seems to me, is uncharacteristically loud and sharp.

  ‘Yes, Mr Jenkins?’ Lennie says – and it’s obvious he has picked up on the dissonance, too.

  ‘Do you remember what we agreed when we talked about that medal, Lennie?’ Mr Jenkins asks.

  The big porter frowns, but I can tell he is only imitating the outwards signs of thinking he has observed in others, without even beginning to initiate the inner mental process himself.

  ‘No, I don’t remember, Mr Jenkins,’ he says finally.

  ‘Think about it,’ Mr Jenkins urges him.

  ‘I can’t … I …’

  ‘We … said … that … you … shouldn’t … talk … about … the … medal … to … people … because … it … might …?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Because … it … might … what?’

  ‘Because it might make them angry!’ Moon says, in a sudden burst of revelation.

  Mr Jenkins smiles encouragingly.

  ‘That’s right, Lennie, it might make them angry.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Jenkins, I forgot.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mr Jenkins says, his voice soothing now. ‘You go inside and watch television until Mrs Lucy comes. And if anybody turns up and wants something doing, tell them to call back later. Got that?’

  Moon nods. ‘Yes, Mr Jenkins.’

  ‘Good,’ the head porter says. ‘I’m about to make my daily rounds, Miss Redhead. Would you care to walk with me?’

  ‘I’d be delighted,’ I tell him.

  As we walk across the quad, Mr Jenkins says, ‘I hope I didn’t sound too harsh back there, but people who actually have been awarded medals for displaying great courage can get quite offended when they hear Lennie pretend that he has one. I don’t know why they should – they can see what he’s like as well as you and I can, but the plain fact is that they do – and so, in order to avoid any unpleasant scenes, I’ve told him never to talk about it.’

  ‘He was right about you having being awarded a medal in the war, though, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he was right about that,’ Mr Jenkins agrees, with some show of reluctance.

  ‘Can I ask what medal it is?’

  We go under the archway and into the Fellows’ Quad, where Charlie Swift has his rooms.

  ‘The war has been over for nearly thirty years now,’ Mr Jenkins says. ‘There are some veterans of it who still like to refight their old battles, but I’m not one of them. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really matter what medal I was awarded – or even if I was awarded a medal at all.’

  ‘If I had been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, you certainly wouldn’t catch me being so quiet about it,’ I say.

  ‘How do you know it was the Distinguished …?’ Mr Jenkins begins. Then he smiles and says, ‘That was a trick, wasn’t it?’

  ‘In a way,’ I admit.

  ‘Tell me how it works.’

  ‘It’s really just a case of applying what you know about a person to any given situation,’ I tell him. ‘Now, from observing you over the years, I’ve reached the conclusion that you’re a rather modest man. That doesn’t mean you don’t take your talents seriously – I’m sure you do – but you don’t particularly like being in the spotlight. Am I right?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he concedes.

  ‘Now if you’d been awarded a minor medal – for example, the Military Medal – I don’t think it would have bothered you to say so. But to admit that you hold the DSM – the second highest medal you can hold – would seem a little like bragging to you.’

  Mr Jenkins’s smile has become a grin.

  ‘I see now why you’re in so much demand as a private detective, Miss Redhead,’ he says.

  If only I was!

  ‘So how did you earn your medal?’ I ask.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I’d really like to know.’

  Mr Jenkins shrugs. ‘It was during the Battle of the Bulge,’ he said. ‘We thought we’d have a pretty clean run through the Ardennes, but the Germans suddenly launched a counteroffensive which took us completely by surprise. My platoon was ambushed and pinned down by some German infantrymen, I killed them and my platoon got away. And that was it.’

  ‘You make it sound like nothing.

  ‘I wouldn’t exactly say that, but it was certainly ordinary enough. Things like that were always happening, and I thought no more about it until word came down the line I was to be awarded the DSM. I didn’t want it, because it would involve going back to England and having my photograph taken for the papers, but my company commander said I should accept it on behalf of all our fallen comrades, so that’s what I did.’

  We are in the Master’s Garden now, and I can see Mr Jenkins running his eyes carefully over every bush and plant in the garden.

  ‘That one needs replacing, that could use more fertilizer, that just needs a bit of love and care,’ he says, pointing out various plants to me.

  This isn’t, strictly speaking, his job, but I’m not going to be the one to tell him that.

  ‘I didn’t realise that Lennie Moon was … was a bit …’ I begin, branching out into a new subject.

  ‘You didn’t realise he was a bit backward?’ Mr Jenkins says, apparently unwilling to leave me floundering there.

  ‘Yes, that is what I suppose I meant,’ I agree.

  ‘He’s not backward in the sense you might think – which is that he was born that way.’

  ‘That was what I was thinking,’ I admit.

  ‘Lennie was taken on as a porter shortly after I was,’ Mr Jenkins says. ‘He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer – that was obvious to Mr Gough at the time – but back then, running the college involved a lot more manual work than it does now. We needed someone who was big and strong to do things like stoke the heating boilers with coke every morning, and Lennie was more than happy to do any job Mr Gough chose to give him.’

  ‘Go on,’ I say – because there is obviously more.

  ‘The bursar who we had at that time wasn’t … how shall I put this? … he wasn’t very keen on spending money,’ Mr Jenkins says.

  I laugh.

  ‘Has there ever been a bursar who was keen on it?’ I ask.

  ‘Probably not,’ Mr Jenkins concedes, ‘but he was worse than most. We called him Mr Scrooge, behind his back. Anyway, there was quite a lot of equipment that needed replacing, but he always said that times were hard and we’d just have to make do and mend.’ He pauses. ‘One of those pieces of equipment that needed replacing was a long ladder.’

  ‘And Lennie fell off it?’

  ‘It was more a case of it collapsing below him. It was a longish fall, and when he hit the ground, he landed head first.’

  ‘He sustained brain damage?’ I guess.

  Mr Jenkins nods.

  ‘That’s right. He was like a child again, and the specialist who examined him said it was permanent. Mrs Moon, his mother, went to see a solicitor, to ask what compensation she was entitled to, and the solicitor had a meeting with the bursar. Together, they came up with a deal. Actually, they only thought they came up with it – the original idea was Mr Gough’s.’

  ‘What kind of deal was it?’

  ‘Lennie had
two choices: he could either take a lump sum then and there – and if he did that, the college had no more responsibility for him – or St Luke’s would guarantee to employ him until he reached pensionable age.’

  ‘And he decided on the latter?’

  ‘It was his mother who did the deciding. And don’t go pulling a face, Miss Redhead—’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ I say – and realise that I probably was.

  ‘… because seen from her point of view – and from Lennie’s – it was exactly the right thing to do.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘I am. People were crying out for a job – any job at all – back in the thirties, and here he was being offered a job for life. Besides, the compensation seemed quite a lot of money at the time, but it would all be long gone by now – and then what would Lennie do? And though he sometimes isn’t able to pull his weight around the college, he can still be quite useful.’

  ‘So useful that you send him down to the river to play with boats you’ve made together?’ I ask, not without a trace of mischief in my voice.

  ‘Some days, the only work that needs doing is the sort he can’t handle,’ Mr Jenkins says in such a serious voice that I start to feel guilty about my temporary frivolity. ‘But he’s a good lad, and none of the porters object to carrying him, by doing a little more than their fair share.’

  ‘Does he still live with his mother?’ I ask.

  ‘No, she died a few years ago. After her funeral, we found him a nice little bedsit on the Banbury Road.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘We were all on the lookout for a place, but it was my missus who found it and helped him move in.’

  ‘How does he manage, living on his own?’

  Mr Jenkins shrugs. ‘He gets by well enough. He can perform most simple operations, as long as they’re carefully explained to him – and we’re all prepared to chip in and help when things get too difficult, just like we are with his job.’ He pauses for a moment. ‘There are some of us who remember him before the accident, you see – and a more willing, helpful and unselfish lad you’d never hope to find.’

  We wheel around, and walk back to the porters’ lodge. Looking in through the door, I can see that Lennie Moon is sitting down, and a woman is bending over and talking to him.