‘Maloney’s can probably be confirmed by his professor,’ the detective said. ‘One of my senior detectives is going out to the chemistry laboratory right away. Which leaves Antony Caesar Pitt with the alibi most difficult to confirm. I’m going to the Westhay Club myself to see if it can be corroborated.’
‘I’d like to come with you,’ I said.
‘Of course.’
‘I’ll go to the chemistry laboratory, if you don’t mind,’ Neill Heller Caesar said.
Touche, I thought. We swapped the briefest of grins.
Unless you knew exactly where to go, you’d never be able to locate the Westhay. Norfolk Street was an older part of Oxford, with buildings no more than three or four storeys. Its streetlights were still gas, rather than the sharp electric bulbs prevalent through most of the city. The shops and businesses catered for the lower end of the market, while most of the houses had been split into multiple apartments, shared by students from minor families, and young manual workers. I could see that it would be redeveloped within fifty years. The area’s relative lack of wealth combined with the ever-rising urban density pressure made that outcome inevitable.
The Westhay’s entrance was a wooden door set between a bicycle shop and a bakery. A small plaque on the wall was the only indication it existed.
Gareth Alan Pitchford knocked loudly and persistently until a man pulled back a number of bolts and thrust an unshaven face round the side. It turned out he was the manager. His belligerence was washed away by the detective’s badge, and we were reluctantly allowed inside.
The club itself was upstairs, a single large room with bare floorboards, its size denoting a grander purpose in days long gone. A line of high windows had their shutters thrown back, allowing broad beams of low winter sunlight to shine in through the grimy, cracked glass. Furniture consisted of sturdy wooden chairs and tables, devoid of embellishments like cushioning. The bar ran the length of one wall, with beer bottles stacked six deep on the mirrored shelving behind. A plethora of gaudy labels advertised brands which I’d never heard of before. In front of the bar, an old woman with a tight bun of iron-grey hair was sweeping the floor without visible enthusiasm. She gave us the most fleeting of glances when we came in, not even slowing her strokes.
The detective and the manager began a loud argument about the card game of the previous evening, whether it ever existed and who was taking part. Gareth Alan Pitchford was pressing hard for names, issuing threats of the city licensing board, and immediate arrest for the suspected withholding of information, in order to gain a degree of compliance.
I looked at the cleaning woman again, recalling one of my lectures at the investigatory course: a line about discovering all you need to know about people from what you find in their rubbish. She brushed the pile of dust she’d accrued into a tin pan, and walked out through a door at the back of the bar. I followed her, just in time to see her tip the pan into a large corrugated metal bin. She banged the lid down on top.
‘Is that where all the litter goes?’ I asked.
She gave me a surprised nod.
‘When was it emptied last?’
‘Two days ago,’ she grunted, clearly thinking I was mad.
I opened my attache case, and pulled on some gloves. Fortunately the bin was only a quarter full. I rummaged round through the filthy debris it contained. It took me a while sifting through, but in among the cellophane wrappers, crumpled paper, mashed cigarette ends, shards of broken glass, soggy beer mats, and other repellent items, I found a well-chewed cigar butt. I sniffed tentatively at it. Not that I’m an expert, but to me it smelled very similar to the one which Antony Caesar Pitt had lit in the interview room. I dabbed at it with a forefinger. The mangled brown leaves were still damp.
I dropped the cigar into one of my plastic bags, and stripped my gloves off. When I returned to the club’s main room, Gareth Alan Pitchford was writing names into his notebook; whilst the manager wore the countenance of a badly frightened man.
‘We have them,’ the detective said in satisfaction. He snapped his notebook shut.
I took a train down to Southampton the following day. A car was waiting for me at the station. The drive out to the Raleigh family institute took about forty minutes.
Southampton is our city, in the same way Rome belongs to the Caesars, or London to the Percys. It might not sprawl on such grand scales, or boast a nucleus of Second Era architecture, but it’s well-ordered and impressive in its own right. With our family wealth coming from a long tradition of seafaring and merchanteering, we have built it into the second-largest commercial port in England. I could see large ships nuzzled up against the docks, their stacks churning out streamers of coal smoke as the cranes moved ponderously beside them, loading and unloading cargo. More ships were anchored offshore, awaiting cargo or refit. It had only been two years since I was last in Southampton, yet the number of big ocean-going passenger ships had visibly declined since then. Fewer settlers were being ferried over to the Americas, and even those members of families with established lands were being discouraged. I’d heard talk at the highest family councils that the overseas branches of the families were contemplating motions for greater autonomy. Their populations were rising faster than Europe’s, a basis to their claim for different considerations. I found it hard to believe they’d want to abandon their roots. But that was the kind of negotiation gestating behind the future’s horizon, one that would doubtless draw me in if I ever attained the levels I sought.
The Raleigh institute was situated several miles beyond the city boundaries, hugging the floor of a wide rolling valley. It’s the family’s oldest estate in England, established right at the start of the Second Era. We were among the first families out on the edge of the Empire’s hinterlands to practise the Sport of Emperors. The enormous prosperity and influence we have today can all be attributed to that early accommodation.
The institute valley is grassy parkland scattered with trees, extending right up over the top of the valley walls. At its heart are more than two dozen beautiful ancient stately manor houses encircling a long lake, their formal gardens merging together in a quilt of subtle greens. Even in March they retained a considerable elegance, their designers laying out tree and shrub varieties in order that swathes of colour straddled the land whatever the time of year.
Some of the manors have wings dating back over nine hundred years, though the intervening time has seen them accrue new structures at a bewildering rate until some have become almost like small villages huddled under a single multifaceted roof. Legend has it that when the last of the original manors was completed, at least twelve generations of Raleighs lived together in the valley. Some of the buildings are still lived in today — indeed, I grew up in one — but most have been converted to cater for the demands of the modern age, with administration and commerce becoming the newest and greediest residents. Stables and barns contain compartmentalized offices populated by secretaries, clerks, and managers. Libraries have undergone a transformation from literacy to numeracy, their leather-bound tomes of philosophy and history replaced by ledgers and records. Studies and drawing rooms have become conference rooms, while more than one chapel has become a council debating chamber. Awkley Manor itself, built in the early fourteen hundreds, has been converted into a single giant medical clinic, where the finest equipment which science and money can procure tends to the senior elders.
The car took me to the carved marble portico of Hewish Manor, which now hosted the family’s industrial science research faculty. I walked up the worn stone steps, halting at the top to take a look round. The lawns ahead of me swept down to the lake, where they were fringed with tall reeds. Weeping willows stood sentry along the shore, their denuded branches a lace-work of brown cracks across the white sky. As always a flock of swans glided over the black waters of the lake. The gardeners had planted a new avenue of oaks to the north of the building, running it from the lake right the way up the valley. It was the first new greenway for over a century. There were some fifty of them in the valley all told, from vigorous century-old palisades, to lines of intermittent aged trees, their corpulent trunks broken and rotting. They intersected each other in a great meandering pattern of random geometry, as if marking the roads of some imaginary city. When I was a child, my cousins and I ran and rode along those arboreal highways all summer long, playing our fantastical games and lingering over huge picnics.
