Who Donne It? The Ken Hill Case (A UEA Murder Mystery)

 

Who Donne It? The Ken Hill Case.

A UEA Campus Murder Solved by Linguistics 

Preface

This story is a work of fiction and any resemblance to characters living or dead is coincidental. 

It does however have a real historical setting. The University of East Anglia (UEA) in the 1970s was not known as the University of Esoteric Abbreviations for nothing.  The Schools of Study were housed in one continuous half mile building, from High Arts down through Fallen Humanities to Low Sciences. EAS was the School of English and American Studies, embracing Literature, Linguistics, Critical Theory, Semiotics, Philosophy, Psychology and History. EUR was the School of European Studies, which studied the Literature, Language and Thought of Europe (the place of Ancient Greece and Rome though present in a substantial Library section feeling less assured in its courses than in Oxbridge and the Redbricks: this was a University for the Space Age.) SOC – a huge Faculty - was Sociology, which included Economics and, if not the unrelieved hotbed of Marxism that it, and its red under the bedfellow traveller EAS,  appeared as in the tabloids, was certainly  not a comfortable place for members of the largest but then relatively less activist student society (the Federation of Conservative Students) to be. ENV, MAP, BIO and CHEM were Environmental Sciences, Maths & Physics, Biology and Chemistry. Only the smaller FAM (Fine Arts and Music) had its separate area and DEV (Third World Development Studies) had its - literal - field of studies just off campus. 

The EAS Prelims course in 1975 included a comparison of  “Reflections on the French Revolution” Edmund Burke’s 1790 book attacking revolution with its counter argument “The Rights of Man” by Thomas Paine, of Thetford, Norfolk, (one of countless Norfolk  notables with a UEA study block named after him/her.) 

'Operation Julie' was a genuine police operation.

 

Prologue

Mummy told stories that made you feel safe and Daddy told stories that made you laugh (and sometimes that made you wish he would just keep to the story instead of doing all the over-acting and funny voices just when you were tired and wanted to sleep) but the story she remembered all her life,  and which blazed in her dying moments, was Auntie’s.  

Once upon a time, there was a sweet little girl whom everyone loved. But no-one loved her more than Auntie. (Or actually, Grannie, as the girl would learn, after a struggle with the insistent hard-faced teacher at infant school, and with a slight shock of betrayal and loss.) Auntie – Grannie- gave the sweet little girl the best birthday gift a girl ever had. It was a little red hood that nestled on her dark hair and made her feel special and it fitted perfectly. As red as a robin, it was, and exactly like that good and merry outlaw Robin Hood who lived free as a bird among the trees. Except that Robin’s hood was green and hers was red.

She would never wear any other hat, not even to school, and because of this became known as Little Red Cap. 

One early morning Mummy said, “Red Cap, your auntie is ill and needs feeding up. Here’s a nice piece of meat and a bottle of wine, take them to her quickly before she gets up. But don’t run in case you fall and break the bottle and when you get there don’t forget to say ‘good morning’ and don’t look about in all the corners.

“Yes, mummy.”

Auntie lived deep in the woods, half an hour from the village. Red Cap was half way through her journey under the trees when she met a Wolf. Knowing nothing of the malice of wolves, she was unafraid.

“Good day Little Red Cap!” cried the Wolf, looking at her wickedly with his great eyes.

“Hallo Wolf!” said the innocent girl.

“What brings into the woods so early?”

“I’m going to my Auntie’s.”

“What’s that under your apron?”

“Meat and wine for Auntie, who is ill and needs feeding up.”

“And where does Auntie live?” asked the Wolf.

“Another fifteen minutes deeper into the woods. Her cottage stands under three great oak trees, near some nut bushes. You can’t miss it.”

And I won’t thought the wolf. But then he thought how much tastier the fresh tender flesh of the little girl would taste than the scrawny skin and bone of the old woman. The little girl would be a dainty to sweeten the larger dish. I must act craftily so that I may snap her as well. 

He said, “Why don’t you look about you? Lift your eyes from that narrow path. The forest is so beautiful! Look at all the pretty flowers growing around you. Listen to the merry music the birds are making. You walk as if you were going to school. Open your eyes and see!”

So Little Red Cap did. And she saw how the sunbeams danced and glanced through the trees and how the splendid flowers bloomed. And she thought, “I will take Auntie a nosegay of flowers to make her feel better. It is still early: I have plenty of time.” So she plunged into the forest and looked for flowers but once she had started she did not know how to stop. She kept running deeper and deeper into the forest in search of more and ever more beautiful flowers. 

The Wolf, however, loped straight to Auntie’s house and knocked on the door.

“Who’s there?” asked the old lady.

“Only Little Red Cap bringing you meat and wine. Please open the door,” replied the Wolf.

“Lift up the latch,” cried Auntie. “I am too weak to get out of bed.”

So the Wolf lifted up the latch and the door flew open and he jumped straight onto the bed without another word and gobbled the old lady up. Then he put on her clothes and tied her cap over his head, got into bed and drew the covers over him.

*

All this time, Little Red Cap was still gathering flowers and, when she had plucked as many as she could carry, she remembered her Auntie. She made haste to the cottage door. She wondered at the wide open door and when she got into the room she began to feel very ill. “How sad I feel! I wish I had not come today.” But she made her voice cheerful as she said “Good morning Auntie!”

There was no answer so she went up to the bed. She drew back the curtains and there lay Auntie – as she thought - with her cap drawn down over her eyes and looking very fierce.

“Oh Auntie what great ears you have!”

“The better to hear you with,” came the reply.

“And what great eyes you have!”

“The better to see you with.”

“And what great hands!”

“The better to touch you with.”

“But Auntie what great teeth you have.”

“The better to eat you with!” These words were hardly out of his mouth when the Wolf made a spring out of bed and gobbled poor little Red Cap up.

*

As soon as the Wolf had satisfied his appetite, he grew very sleepy, lay down in Auntie’s bed and began to snore. A woodcutter who happened to be passing by heard and thought, “How loudly the old woman snores! I must see if she needs anything.”

So he came into the cottage and saw the Wolf lying there in Auntie’s bed. “What! Have I found you here at last, you old devil.” And he took his aim with his axe and struck such a blow that he cut the Wolf clean in two. 

And out of the dead Wolf’s belly sprang Little Red Cap and Auntie Jane.

“And did they live happily ever after?” she would ask.

“Of course they did” smiled Auntie, tucking her up and kissing her forehead affectionately.  “Time for sleep now.”

 

Chapter One

"When I Have Donne, I Have Not Donne."

As soon as he saw the body, he knew it was Lucy. His face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale.

Hardly a body. A skeleton with bits of decayed flesh and hair; face crushed under 45 years of concrete. The relics of a Laura Ashley dress; the remains of a 1970s handbag, a dead exam timetable, a rotting student card. Lucy Sky. That warm, bright, head-screwed on, heart in the left place, buzzing worker bee just off the ziggurat walkway in C01 1 Norfolk terrace, five floors above and two blocks across from his. Two homes with but a single heart. His other half, his soul mate, his earthed angel. His ‘heart of a heartless male world.’ 

He'd buried her. Now here she was, a present tense of grisly decay. And he'd just been heartily sick behind some bins.

The young, sharp-eyed DCI was studying him hard. "DCI Ken Hill, thanks for coming in. DCI Michelle Waveney, Norwich CID. My colleagues call me Shelley.”

Colleagues, not friends, he noted. And no wedding ring. Married to the job, I expect, as any woman who gets this high up a career mountain tends to be. And she’d need to be better than the average male who gets there. She’s certainly made DCI faster than I did. This could be tricky.

Prison shades were closing over his memory lane; a Fall over his May-morning walkway deja vu. It was no longer 1975, except in his head. He was sour and 60-odd not sweet and 20. Life was a congested parody of what it had been and so was the campus. There was new build in every remembered space. It was - well, not his UEA. 

"Glad to help, Shelley," muttered the UEA alumnus. “My colleagues call me all sorts of things but Ken will do.” Two hours ago, he'd been glad to play truant from his beaten West Norfolk track and escape through the rolling contours of a breckland, undisturbed by the sea, where time seems to stand still, into this surprise day off at his old alma mater in the firm’s time. Now, after seeing the remains of Lucy, he wished he was back chasing clever criminals in the mean streets around Lynn's dockside, under the signature grain silo, the white tower of his local-but-never-home town.

"Lucy’s parents besieged Norfolk police for most of the 80s, Ken. DCI Wally never convinced them she was just a missing person. She was their pride and joy. You want to tell us how a future-dreaming girl, loved by all, ended up under a concrete pillar?" 

"Not loved by all." He fought to keep his voice steady. "Someone didn’t like her." 

"Or she didn’t. Didn't UEA have a high campus suicide rate?" 

"The second highest after Essex."

"You knew her." It wasn't a question.

There were things Ken had to keep buried. "I didn't." 

"Care to explain then why she has your DNA all over her?"

“What?”

"I'm afraid we haven't been entirely honest with you, Ken. We said we wanted a consultant with personal experience of 1970s UEA, which we do. But we also found a DNA match on the database we keep against policemen accidentally contaminating a crime scene. You."

"Any other DNA on her apart from mine?"

"You know I can't tell a suspect that, Ken."

"You think I'm a suspect?"

“Well…”

"All right, you can’t tell a suspect. But you can tell a colleague, ‘Shelley.’ A colleague with two very strong motivations to solve this."

"I might believe you if you hadn't lied about not knowing her." Shelley was nevertheless curious. "One motivation is to clear your name. What's the other?"

Ken looked down at Lucy’s remains and the decades of emotion welled. " I denied her to you for a very good reason. Which I can't remember.”

 “Great! That’s helpful.” Shelly rolled her eyes.  

“Yes. I knew her, like Adam knew Eve. But believe me I'm the last man on earth who would kill her. Let me help you find the one who did."

*

A tense working day later, they were driving home in Ken's car through the Norwich rush hour. Shelley, because of a feeling in her gut she would never have been able to defend in a court of law and a look in his eye that police are guided by more often than the law can recognise, had decided to give Ken a week. But she wasn’t comfortable about it. "After that, you’ll be helping us with our enquiries in a different way." 

‘And you already are,’ she thought. She was directing him to the Premier Inn near her own riverside apartment. She was going to book him in there, Keep An Eye. Find out everything there was to know about DCI Ken Hill.

"You think I killed her because she rejected me? ‘Hell hath no fury like a young man scorned?’"

"William Golding! We did that in the Sixth Form."

"Oliver Goldsmith.”

Damn. 

“Don’t worry. I’m from that brief golden age when they fast-tracked graduates into the Force: they’d noticed the crooks were getting cleverer than us. Then the Revolution shuddered to a counter-revolutionary halt and they started recruiting any Plod as long as he denied Society and could out-kick a miner. Now, as a Government minister told me recently, you have to be blonde, petite and able to arrest the repeat jailbird you’re escorting to A & E while completing the appropriate risk assessment." 

Is he flirting with me or attacking me?' his fellow DCI wondered. Or both at once - it wouldn’t be the first time in her experience of colleagues.  "It’s called multi-tasking, Ken. And staff cuts.”

“Do I look like a man who kills because a woman escapes him?”

Shelley looked at the haggard face and red-eyed stare, trying not to show her unease. "Well actually, yes. Did she dump you?"

"Dump! That word wasn't in our lexicon, Shelley. We weren't possessive about love. We didn’t privatise our lives like you Thatcher’s children. You have to understand the spirit of the age, all those space-age walkways and concrete abstractions that have made you giddy all day. UEA was built for star gazing.  We spent half our lives with our heads in the clouds; the other half trying to retrieve the thoughts we left up there. Lucy and me weren’t an ‘item’; a sale; an investment of emotion.  Our first kiss wasn’t a business contract up; it was a lovers’ leap into the unknown from the top of an Ivory Tower--” 

“A lover’s leap?”

“-letting in the orange tequila sunrise after talking the night away."

Oh please, thought Shelly. "And, what about after the last kiss? After she'd been a bit too 'free' with her free love…"

"…Was when I pushed her off the five-storey roof onto the foundations of the new Rocket Science Block." 

Shelley’s blood ran cold. If this was the confession, she’d rather it wasn’t happening here in a confined space without witnesses.

Ken snorted. "Is that your MO?!"

Shelley snapped. "So whodunnit, if not you? At lunch – if you can call that student fuel carbs-on-carbs in a wrap of carbs in a chattering goldfish bowl, ‘lunch’- you said it was Damien Rapier, the Vice Chancellor. Then you said it was his fury-wife Laura. Ten minutes ago it was 'The Girl Who Was Never There'!"

"Or it could have been Lance, the lady killer. Or The Girl From EUR. And you obviously think it was me. And DCI Wally, as far as he thought at all, thought it was Lucy herself unable to face that ultimate twentieth century question 'Is There Life After EAS?' Before he decided she was just a Missing Person rather than a murder. So that's seven suspects with the motive and opportunity to send her flying. Eight if you Wallies still think she killed herself. And it's ‘Did it’, Shelley, not 'Done It'. Didn't they teach you grammar in your Comprehensive?"

"The streets were my University, pal. We can't all get paid three years of dole money for reading a few books!"

"Let’s drop the working class heroism, shall we? Have you ever tried reading 18 inches of paperback Dickens and 3 volumes of Freud as your study guide to him on top of The Complete Works of Chaucer and Das Kapital over the Easter vacation? It drove me mad. And if DCI Wally had been a bit less blasé about 'bloody students running away from the real world at the end of the course' and done his job of looking for her in 1978, we might have found Lucy 45 years sooner than now! "

"The light's green, Ken."

Ken gave the Chelsea Tractor beeping him behind a Lynn wave - both fingers - and shot forward. 

She dangled a line. "Now we have a body, you’re a suspect. So Wally's suicide theory actually lets you off the hook. Why won't you buy it?"

"I lived with her for almost 3 years, most of them communally. Her favourite quote was, 'The philosophers have interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.' When she, me, Lance, the Girl From EUR and the Girl Who Was Never There set up together at Lilburne Windmill, Lucy sailed in with a pink house sign renaming it ‘Loveland’. Damien- our Marxist dialectical materialist landlord - with the emphasis on materialist - who lived in the basement penthouse with Laura - tried to object, Lucy just smiled away his resistance. Even the postman laughed. Lucy made a lot of people feel happy like that. She would never have topped herself. She was at home in the world and her own skin. That's what I loved about her." He could feel the horror rising again suddenly, remembering what her skin was now.  “I’m going to have to stop the car.”

“Next right and we’re there.”

Ken swerved, skid-parked, and retched with a metaphysical intensity out the door. When he’d finally done, he accepted the bottle of water which Shelley, eyeing him curiously, offered.

“You’ve surely seen a dead body before. Are you always as bad as this?”

“No. But you didn’t know Lucy.”

Or kill her, thought Shelley as she booked him in.

“This hotel is worse than a prison,” moaned Ken as he accessed his room and into bed.

You’ll find prison a lot worse than this, pal, thought Shelley.

 

Chapter Two

Donne To Death

Ken had perked up a good deal by the next morning. The prospect of a full week in his county’s one ‘Fine City’ ‘helping Norwich police with their enquiries’ on full pay was very reviving. Especially in the company of a smart and engaging young female DCI. And they were going to his first UEA lecture in 50 years. The shadow of Lucy condemned him to a certain amount of self-recrimination for feeling like a May morning when what remained of her May days was on some slab somewhere. But there was also the relief of it all finally coming out after nearly five decades. And anyway, anything was better than a normal Monday morning shift back in Lynn. The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast.

And now, after an impressive police drive through the big city rush hour as a passenger in Shelley’s SUV, the condemned man had sleep-walked from a walkway down a flight of steps to a Lecture Theatre whose dim depths he’d last plumbed with Lucy. He was now standing in its wings watching their old adviser Dr Damien (now Vice Chancellor) Rapier, giving his annual celebrity lecture on John Donne - "POSITIONING THE FEMALE, A GRAMMAR OF POFT-MEDIAEVAL FEXUALITY…" - in his trademark cravat and high collar dinner jacket. As advertised on the posters all over campus.  

The academic’s toothy smile made Shelley squirm. "Who's the twat in the tux?"

Ken didn’t answer. She swung round on him curiously. After looking so in such unexpectedly apple-cheeked health over his Full English and Dexedrine-strength coffee at breakfast, Ken had now gone pale again, bloodless face studying his old alma pater with a disturbing intentness.  “What’s up Ken, seen a ghost?”

“   ‘I have seen the futures-sucking of village maidens’,” he muttered. “‘in its Lecture Theatre basements; its ziggurat fortress tops; its drowsing seminar towers; its midnight study bedrooms: all over UEA Castle.’”

“Ken?” 

“’Abstract Concrete’. My first piece for ‘Phoenix’, the student newspaper in 1975. It’s a ‘real’ newspaper called ‘Concrete’ now. ‘Phoenix’ was more of a student rag and I’d made an unlikely impression on its star reporter at a transcendental meditation meeting. Mina was a third year femme fatale from Bermuda, which established my unlikely reputation on campus as a bit of a Leonard Cohen. I woke up with the poem one morning and it sounded deep which was my only guide back then. Mina said it reminded her of a creepy EAS ‘Lecherer’ she’d had in a Comp Lit taster in her first term; so she published it in their ‘Test Your Faculty’ feature.”

“And did your readers guess who it was?” asked Shelley, looking at Damien.

“No. Even I didn’t guess until much later. But she knew already.”

‘The futures-sucking of village maidens.’ The cloudy phrases of Ken’s long-ago riddle chimed with Shelley’s own present first impression of Damien - and with the only part of her ‘A’ level course she’d really enjoyed. ‘The Gothic’. She followed Ken’s gaze back to the Vice Chancellor. “Ha! Give me one guess what his nickname was in your day?”

They stared. ‘Dracula’ was in full flight…."The epitaph the poet chose for the grave he shared with his wife Anne, was 'John Donne, Anne Donne, Undonne….'” (A girlish titter, off) 

Shelley couldn’t take her eyes off him. 

The Great Linguist fixed his eye on a row of admiring girls and delivered his flourish like a billowing cloak.  “Donne’s epitaph seems to laugh but conceals a lament about how his career had been f-"  

Shelley upstaged him mid-sentence, showing her warrant card, "Dr Rapier?" Her voice echoed eerily around the lofty under-space. Everyone turned to her. It was a lot more dramatic than she’d intended. (Had she actually said “Count Dracula?”)

Dracula went into his pantomime; threw his hands in the air towards his audience in mock despair. "Alas, my young angels, we are un-Donne!”

A pen or two dropped; student blocks slipped from laps; laptops hummed, keyboards paused untapped. Ken scanned the rows of unformed mostly female faces, all surely so much more young and tender than he remembered himself being when he’d been here.  Or were they? He recognised the strain, the paleness with hours of moonlit wandering through texts for something that clinched whatever argument Rapier had started with them.  And he saw in them his own long-forgotten unworldliness; the doe eyes; the soft skin beneath the glaze and sharp practice his first month on the beat had baked there. 

‘Dracula’ spelled it out. “I fear our assault on Donne's paradoxes is Donne for the day. Foiled by the agents of bourgeois realism!”

“I’m really not interested in your-” began Shelley.

‘Dracula’ all but leapt in the air. “Oh WPC Plot isn't interested in Donne's law-breaking grammar. Of course she isn’t! She wants a normal past, present and future. She wants to know what happens, what happens next and who donne it!”

There was applause, which the Lecturer acknowledged with a mock flourish and which mystified Shelley. “That’s exactly what I am interested in, Sir.” (What else is there?) “This is a criminal enquiry!” She was irritated beyond her normal professionalism by this flying above the law; and also at Ken’s silence. She snapped “You can play your word games with the little girls later.”

The students left. Ken noted their down-dressed T shirts, jackets, hoodies, trainers, lost-sheep fleeces, label jeans and haircuts – casual but good quality - and their educated voices buzzing with the excitement of this 'police raid.' We were scruffier, hippier, unhealthier, iller-shod, more of a Salvation army counter culture, he judged. A clutch of groupies- young, pretty - lingered in the wings, for Damien to sign "Donne To Death” the latest edition of his celebrity Course Reader. Shelly noted one in what looked like a trouser suit without the trousers – perhaps she’d forgotten to put them on – a look not lost on Ken.

"The Seventeenth Century still has legs then," he observed. 

"Sorry, do I know you?" Ken noticed the mist of spray from Damien’s rubicund lips– the red so vivid in that ancient face – revealed in the projector lights. Still rather OCD about his compromised immune system since Covid, he winced as some found his mouth. 

He wiped it. "I’m DCI Ken Hill. You were my adviser from 1975-1978. I came up when your class of '72 hippies were still spraying ‘Sous le pave, la plage’ onto the breezeblocks in red paint and you were still preaching don't trust anyone over 21." 

"Ah yes!" Damien said fondly. "The slogan of the Left Bank in the May Days of '68. (looking at Shelley and translating as if to a student who ought to know) 'Under the pavement, the beach'. UEA paved the way to that beach. Over a bourgeois golf course, as it happens, much to the chagrin of the Norwich bourgeoise.” He turned back to Ken. “Did I tell you that as well?"

"Yes. And before I left, the Sex Pistols were screaming 17'Never trust a hippy.'" 

"The dreaming white concrete of UEA was built to withstand slogans like that. Naming, like all other linguistic acts, is a struggle for power. At school, they called me 'the Serpent of Eton'. At Cambridge, it was 'Judas of Christ's.'  In 1962, the great and good of Norwich, grieving for their lost golf course, called our Ivory Tower of Wisdom a concrete jungle. And they still do. Let them." His teeth glinted white in the dark lecture theatre. “It is a Castle of Gno-”

Shelley exploded. "It’s a concrete bloody jungle in which one of your charges fell to her death!"

Silence. The vast theatre hummed, at the base of its sunken stairs. It felt like a tomb.

"While your own career has done nothing but rise," added Ken quietly.

"What?"

"You haven't noticed the crime scene officers outside, the press, the sobbing parents?"

"I've been tied up with a student... Who was he?”

“Nice try.” 

Rapier twitched his thin lips into a semiosis of dismay. “Oh… you mean the Sky girl? So you’ve found her at last?" He noticed with irritation his clutch of groupies dispersing, Celebrity Course Readers unsigned. 

Ken growled. "Her remains were recovered under the abandoned Rocket Science annexe; by a digger raking out foundations for your new Real World Training Block.”

Only two of Damien’s fan club remained. The one who’d forgotten to put on her trousers and a quietly dressed Indian girl looking extremely anxious. “Rocket Science, yes. I taught Marx, Freud and Donne there before the rebuild.”

“I remember. And Lucy took the course too. Only I remember it as Marx, Freud and Jung.”

“Did I say Donne?  Freudian slip, sorry. I meant Donne.” He stopped looking at the two girls and met Ken’s still-accusing gaze. He shook his head and enunciated with an effort, like one overcoming a fork-tongue. “I mean –Jung.” 

“Easier Donne than said eh Professor? And from what I remember, Freud might call Lucy’s remains ‘the return of the repressed’."

Damien answered, as if already rehearsing his official speech at the funeral. "Lucy lives forever in her May Days, in the deep structure of UEA. She is the eternal Left Bank digging the Sorbonne pavements and throwing them at old de Gaulle. The concrete abstraction. She fell in that noble cause." His voice dropped to a hiss. " And if I have failed to support only one novice through five decades of revolution, that’s not a bad conversion rate. And unless my memory fails me, it wasn't me placed at the crime scene back then but the boyfriend. It’s the boyfriend you should be interrogating. Now, if you'll excuse me" - he glanced at the lone figure waiting in the wings (The quietly dressed Indian girl had gone)- "I have a tutee to tute."

*

'Tute,' thought Ken. I remember that. All Literature-knowing adult Damien quoting Donne into Lucy's laughing tutee-eyes instead of mine, 'You are all States and all Princes I. Nothing else is...' 

Marooning me – next to her…  but feeling his adult… …adulterous …footsy… marooning my fool’s Paradise all the way back onto my teenage wasted I-land, a part of no main. Ungoverned. A law unto myself…

*

“Ken!”

“Sorry. Remembering something…. What were you saying?” 

“I’m saying ‘thanks’ for stepping in there in the Lecture Theatre! Finally!” 

Present tense ‘am’ to my past ‘were’. Cleverer than she knows, thought Ken.

Shelley was scaling one of a hundred concrete steps. She was doubly annoyed that he hadn’t supported her attack on ‘Dracula’ and when he did, he had completely taken it over. Men! And no doubt this old school Plod would identify her discomfiture in the face of Damien’s Clever Dicking as some ‘girl thing.’ She was too twisted up with these thoughts to notice how horribly out of breath – and rattled - Ken was.  Ken, struggling in turn to conceal his breathlessness, was unhappy about showing weakness in front of one of these fast young policewomen. 

Back in the day, his own day, he had bounded up these very steps towards those arrogantly under-taught seminars on Romanticism and Revolution with Jimi Blake the Maharishi-haired tutor who’d originally made him his unconditional offer. A tutor absent (plotting his novel and his visiting Lectureship abroad) even on the occasions he was physically there. Like the French Revolution, Romanticism was better in its early stages. 

He plodded another step and muttered “how like a young roe I was… not so much a man seeking what he loved as one who fled the thing he feared…” 

“What?”

“Sorry. Talking to myself. ‘A habit of the old’!”

*

Shelly reached the door of the ziggurat penthouse and whistled. "So this was Professor Dracula's castle on campus?"

"Laura's now, if she still teaches here."

" She does. They’re both ‘Emeritus’ professors whatever that means and get this as their campus base, except she won’t have him near her so they have to timetable separate occupancies. Not bad, considering they also own a His and Her mansion on the Playing Fields of Eaton, the top floor and first floor for her, the ground floor and basement for him."

“He always gravitated to the nether regions. Did you say Eton?”

“Eaton, with an ‘a’. Near the old Norwich Grammar School.”

“Ha! They no doubt tell their students the Class War was won on the playing fields of Eaton.”

“Very punny, Ken. You lead off this time.”

Shelley knocked. An angular woman with a tired face that retained a memory of its youthful beauty opened the door. 'A faded rose,' thought Ken. ‘A fierce intelligence embittered by experience.’

"Laura Rapier?" led Shelley, after a pause when Ken didn’t.

"Who wants her?"

"DCI Michelle Waveney. This is DCI K-"

"If it's about the discovery of that slut Lucy Sky, firstly, no I didn't push her off that roof; secondly  yes, I wish I had because I'm glad she's dead; thirdly, no, I don't know who did but I do know it wasn't Damien; fourthly, if  you ever do find who did please thank them for me; fifthly, you won't be able to put my husband at the scene because he was dress shopping in Norwich with me but don’t let that stop you trying, he deserves every evil turn he gets; sixthly, please get your foot out of my door; and seventhly-"

And seventhly! How that brought it all back. Ken pondered the likelihood of your cop in the street holding a conversation with a list in their head that got as far as “seventhly.” ‘Can I go that way Constable? No! Firstly, it’s private property… etc etc… and seventhly why would I be standing here otherwise! - especially at her age when Ken himself forgot the firstly before he got to the thirdly. 'Still the incisive academic,' thought Ken, 'the light under Damien's bushel.' 

Ken swigged from his water bottle, took a breath to speak and exploded into a choke. Shelley gave him a worried glance. Ken raised a hand behind him that signed ‘carry on’ while his brain contemplated a life that wasn’t going to. 

Shelley took him at his ‘carry on’.  "She was sleeping with your husband, Ms Rapier," Shelley grunted, keeping her foot well in the door.  "That's quite a motive."

"Ha! In that case, you'd have 50 years of murders on your hands. He could deflower a convent lily just by talking poetry to it with his forked tongue. He did me, when I was a student at Cambridge. They don't call him the Cunning Linguist for nothing."

The Cunning Linguist! Ken, who had finally stopped choking, choked again.

Shelley policed her laugh better than Ken. " … You know we can't put you on the roof after 45 years, Mrs Rapier. But we can put this very nasty note from you in your bag." Shelley showed her. "I'LL KILL YOU, YOU BITCH."

"Don’t equate the signifier with the signified, detective. If looks could kill you’d be locking up a lot more people up than do, including for the looks you’re giving me now, and HOW the looks I gave her after HER good looks at Damien killed my marriage DIDN’T kill her has given me enough material for an entire career in Semiotics. Which boils down to I'LL KILL YOU, YOU BITCH was a sign that I wasn’t actually going to. However much they conveyed the wish.”

Silence. 

Her tone changed. “She was the first.  The first one he fell for. And he's been falling ever since. Still trying to recover that lucid fresher I was in The Summer of Love." 

“Any chance of getting that in plain English?”

She resumed her former sneer. "That’s as University Plain English as it gets, detective, but if you want it in baby talk: that note was just words. To frighten her off. Words were the only weapons I had. And like words always do, they failed me. And now if you don't mind,” -  she kicked Shelley's foot away -“I have a seminar to prepare on Semiotics.”

She slammed the door shut.

Ken croaked (still feeling that he might) "Now I wonder what she ‘signs’ by that?" 

 

Chapter Three

Getting Donne 

Dr Damien Rapier, the new, young, unfallen, angel-haired Dean of English and American Studies, fresh from Eton and Cambridge, where he'd left Classics for dead, addressed the breathless, loon-panted class of 1974: "Welcome to the University of East Anglia.  Here you will receive a liberal education in the humanist and interdisciplinary tradition of Erasmus, rather than any narrow vocational training. Here you will rotate unfenced fields of discourse. Fields with no sacred cows. Here you will learn to subvert all grammars, all bourgeois categories. I hope you will ignore every reading list and follow your own bent. Our University motto, like that of Norfolk, is 'do different' and our EAS philosophy is 'don't grade me. I'm not an egg.' So take that copy of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier you didn’t have time to read because 'it wasn't on your A level cramming course', park yourself under a tree by the river and read read read… Roll up, turn on and tune in, The Times They Are A Changin’ and we are putting Bob Dylan on the Poetry paper this year. And, of course, don’t forget to join Poetry Soc. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.."

An intense Lennon-lensed scholar near the back whispered into the wide female eyes next to him. "I thought that was the Secret Police!" 

The wide eyes laughed. "According to the prospectus, there are Five Finals papers on set subjects in 1977, so I'm not sure we should quite abandon ourselves. The only Do Different is that they count your coursework as well.”

Dr Rapier reached his consummation. "ABANDON YOURSELVES! DIG UP THE GOLF COURSE! SOUS LE PAVE, LE PLAGE! OPEN THE FLOODGATES OF HEAVENLY KNOWING!"

“I'm Lucy Sky, by the way, from Cambridge."

It was the moment he'd dreamed of since he was 12 years old. She was The One! They shook hands, laughing shyly at the formality. "I’m Ken Quixote."

"Quixote? From…?"

*

From the loneliest room in the Universe, sitting on an achieved, unconditional offer he couldn’t refuse and a 'deferred place.' A deferred gratification which UEA would teach him was the emblem of the middle classes. Better than the never-gratification of the class he came from. The family he'd been exiled from the day he realised they wanted and  thought he was someone else. Years – in some ways a whole lifetime - before they refused on principle to pay the ‘parental contribution’ to his grant just because they’d got on ‘a little bit better than the rest of the estate’ and been refused a council grant to convert the pigsty out the back into a stable for his sister’s pony, but certainly confirmed by that farewell attempt to clip his wings, that last miserable reflex to lock down his sails. Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife. And take a new surname. Quixote. When he had the money and time (back then he had the second, later he had the first, but he’d never had both at once), he’d make it official. Meanwhile he’d tell this girl it was his name because that’s who he really was. Ken Quixote. 

Grammar School was his way out of nowhere. It gave him the scent of knowledge.  His gap year plan was to escape the Sancho Panza kiss of pig-ignorance and follow the hippy trail to India. He got as far as Yarmouth. 

Not so much a gap year. More of a black hole. A bitter winter bargain basement benefit-financed sub-let (from a student called Barney happily shacked up with his girlfriend) heated only by candles, Songs From A Room, After The Goldrush, the Who's Teenage Wasteland and that Barclay James Harvest gatefold with Galadriel on it.  Hanging around the town’s students for nine months, even dating one – if walking the out of season seafront, listening to her voice and guitar not quite matching the records and sipping weak lemon squash in her student hostel room with three other arts girls can be called dating - but never actually entering their sacred temple doors of learning. And, like the dinner table to which his older, cooler flatmates actually attending their final year at Yarmouth college did not invite, he never got laid.

Instead, he haunted the Public Library, waited for the Gates of Eden to open and devoured its University of Esoteric Abbreviations anything-but-abbreviated prelim reading like Don Quixote at full cock on a rampant stallion.

"Nowhere," he said.

*

That evening, Ken suggested he and Shelley treat themselves to a proper restaurant.  "On me," he said. 

After Shelley walked out of his first suggestion - a lugubrious Lebanese Ken remembered fondly from student days but which now seemed to be staffed by lobotomised psychopaths - she found herself at Batman's, the American burger place (very avant garde - in 1975) where Ken had had his first date with Lucy. His First Date full stop. His First Date exclamation mark; single quote, dot dot dot; speech mark; comma; semi coma; colon, dot dot dot, dash.  

Here nothing had changed. The tablecloths; the décor; the menu; the drinks (tequila sunrise); the playlist (Eagles); the diners (now fat, grey haired and in their 70s) the staff (ditto); the galloping inflation (prices, self-importance, fizzy beer, carbs). 

“May I have my burger well Donne?” said Ken, for old time’s sake.

“All our burgers are extremely well done!” snapped the offended waiter.

Shelley, who was going to ask for medium rare, decided not to bother. 

They lingered over the Blue Nun. (asked to recommend “a medium dry white”, the waiter had offered large, extra-large or a bottle.)  "I remember my first bus to UEA, from Castle Meadow up those city streets and avenues to the campus. I arrived at the Gate of UEA like the Don Quixote I played in our cancelled Sixth Form production. A boy in a golden wood looking up through Lennon lenses at the dreaming concrete.  It span around me like a flight of angels, a windmill of dreams. Each of the sails was a placard. SOUS LA PAVE, LA PLAGE. ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE. REVOLUTION NOT SOCIOLOGY. HISTORY IS BURKE."

Shelley picked some undercooked corn on the cob from her teeth. 

"I was walking on air. Very thin air..." His mind took him back up the daily space-walk.  Not just the five flights of fantasy steps from E05 11, my basement base, up to the Starship Library and space age lecture theatres. Not just the abstract concrete walkways that were suspensions of disbelief over service roads, monastic 'refectories' and The Street (shops, laundrette, banks, bar) but still only half way up the Ivory Tower roof. Not just the concrete Ivory Tower's multi-storey Learning Curve accommodated in one giant zig-zag from High Arts down to High Sciences and all the post-modern gradations in between… 

Shelley sucked the tiny mint imperial you got free with the enormous bill. "I-"

"…Not just the Administration Building marked COUNCIL HOUSE that always felt like it was in Rivendell and might house the Council of Elrond. Not just the lifts shuddering up to vertiginous top-floor EAS seminar rooms. Not that only. It was the breathless stares into giddy space walled with glass and eyes as I conjured the courage to speak. And the breathless air of concrete abstraction everywhere."

Shelley was studying the Chevrolet which appeared to have crashed through the wall from 1970 (a hardware store next door.) "I-"

"At the Undergraduation Party, I was hanging on to my corner like I might fall any moment. But when Lucy comes over and laughs 'Hi Ken Quixote, what's a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?' it's like, she's the angel who can teach me to fly."

Shelley eyes rolled. Men. Birds. Bird talk. … She tried to interrupt Ken's eternal present. "Wait a minute, Did you say 'Ken Quixote?-"

 

"At first term-end, she takes me home to her parents’ palace in Cambridge for Christmas. I’m not saying I was from a deprived background: I’d seen cutlery before. Just not that much cutlery. Her dad wanted to know where his daughter's little Ken friend was on the political spectrum and I said I wasn't on it. The first thing her mum said to me, smiling, was 'I don't mind where you are on it (though she did) as long as you're not vegetarian.' Which, of course, back then I was.”

Shelley was intrigued. “What made you stop?”

“It’s a long story-”

 “Give me the short story.”

“When millions of wage slaves were being robbed the world over and capitalist farmers were shooting rabbits to bring me my cereals, it felt like an indulgence; like my petit bourgeois stand on a bowl of brown rice wasn’t going to change anything. It was different when I was a transcendentally meditating hippy, thinking that I could change the world by changing my consciousness of it. That started to a bit feel self-centred. Also, instead of the wispy hippies I’d been meditating with, I was now trying to keep up with lean activists on marches who either worked in factories or did their best to look, eat, drink and smoke No. 6 like they did. It no longer felt revolutionary to get high on vegetables.”

“You thought you could get high on vegetables?”

Ken sighed. “And transcendental meditation. You kept yourself apart from blood, booze and drugs and that tuned you in to a natural high, to God. Maharishi’s argument was that if just one per cent of the world did that, global consciousness would be lifted. Just a smile would lighten everything as Lennon put it. I was still a starry-eyed Lennonist then. Like him, the Leninism came later and, unlike him, I went all the way. And back. He was always inclined to Imagined Nutopias rather than armed struggles demanding more meat for the workers of the world.”

“What did Lucy’s mum say when you said you were vegetarian.”

“She was very nice about it. She puréed me some soup from actual vegetables – I was too polite to tell her that real soup came from a tin.  It was delicious. I was introduced to garlic, olive oil, real coffee and Marxism for grownups."

"What does ‘Marxism for grownups’ mean?" 

"That they actually owned some of the private property they wanted to abolish. Unlike students who’ve got nothing to lose but their bike-chains anyway.”

“In theory anyway. Would her parents have been quite so keen when the lumpen proles moved in on their champagne socialist garden party?”

Steely Dan came over the speakers, like a shot of 1970s neo-stalgia.

“No, no. Their Marxism linked it all together for me – made the abstract concrete, linked my working class roots to University; linked me and Lucy in bed to me and Lucy marching with a red banner on the front line of history. They reversed Marx's 'phantasmagorical projection of human essence' opiate of the masses take on religion. Brought that heaven back to Earth. Back at UEA, I followed Lucy’s wing-beat out to the Outside Left and we talked about killing the pigs and hanging the rich from the lampposts.”

“You mean Terrorism. Robbery with Violence. Murdering the agents of law and order. Damage to Private Property. Treason. In a word, capital crimes.” 

“If you take the capitalist’s word for it, yes. We called it Revolution. And the nearest I got to actually doing any was punching a guy dressed as a Viking who tried to barge through our picket line at the Golden Star for a pint of ‘Wife Beater’s Bitter’ and knocking out one of three coppers at Grunwick’s  with a sweet left hook for kicking a little guy in glasses across the road just for trying to get workers rights for some female Asian wage slaves who had to put their hands up if they wanted to go to the toilet.”

“You assaulted a police officer?”

“Says Piggy Plod missing the real crime. Yep.  Shortly before running from the Special Patrol Group, the real agents of ‘law and order,’ who came down the road, heaving cars out the way, and chased me for doing so. And believe me I was still running six months later. But it was worth it, to feel part of Lucy’s exhilarating new world order. It was like riding the sails of a windmill, grinding bread for the starving workers and a new world from the old.”

Shelley thought it sounded a bit grim and suspected behind his rose-tinted memories of Lucy he did so too. Basically, after years of dreaming about it, the lovely revolutionary Lucy had done him. Today, they’d say he’d been ‘radicalised.’ “And how did you go about achieving this new world order when you weren’t assaulting cops and picketing wife beaters?”

“We waged class war on the Burkes in the History department (apart from the ones who included “The Essential Left, “Mill, Somebody and Marx”” and “Reflections on the French Revolution” in their reading lists, painted ‘Burkes’ over the UEA History Department entrance at 3 in the morning – sat on the extreme left of seminar rooms taking up a conspicuous  group position in the hope it would make my foth-holdings feel less exposed (it didn’t) – vertiginously conscious of the fourth floor plate glass window - scared to death and never more alive - read EP Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class” from cover to cover with annotations through my first December vacation, more as preparation for arguing with my working class Tory uncles and Daily Mail mother over Christmas than for Dickens, Blake and Shelley, while working as a Christmas postie - and generally painted the town Red. I shouted abuse at monuments and got into such an anxiety state about adding my weedy student frame to the physical opposition to National Front marches that I forgot my words and shouted ‘you silly twerps’ at their Nazi ferocity instead of the approved slogan and reported a policeman’s horse to its owner for crushing some of my comrades. I think even the Mountie was bemused let alone some of the party thugs fighting for love and peace at my elbows. To be honest, I’d have been happier asking a copper the time than ‘smashing’ the bourgeois state or shooting a capitalist up against a wall when the time came. And I suspect that, under all her ardour, Lucy was the same. All we really wanted was for the whole world to have a room in her father’s mansion."

Shelley drained her tequila sunrise and moved on to Blue Nun. "The first bloke I-"

"It was a whirlwind romance that kept whirling. Friends to live for. A love to die for. New learning. Platonic reflections on the river. All-seeing Library windows. Illuminating manuscripts. Half a league of Alfred Lawn Tennyson parkland. Paradise in 320 Norfolk Acres. End without week. Amen."

“Until it wasn’t.”

"I know. It’s a Lennonist fantasy. Love’s young dream. Eden without the fall. Norfolk without the mean streets you and I have to police.”

“…. And only a fool would say that,” sang the playlist, stealing her thunder. Steely Dan’s retort to Lennon’s utopian Imaginings.

She refined the point. “It’s a Fool’s Paradise. To be enjoyed while it lasts. But not for fifty years afterwards.”

He lowered his voice. " Do you know what the last unfallen act in the Garden of Eden was?”

‘Enlighten me.”

“It’ll surprise you. Genesis 2. 25.”

“Oh God, you’re as bad as my dad. ‘They were rubbish once Peter Gabriel left’.”

“Your dad’s right on. But I mean the Bible. ‘Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.’ The subtle serpent rears its wicked  head immediately after that and so, despite what many a Puritan would have you believe, and as that ultimate Puritan John Milton actually points out in Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve were romping around the Garden their birthday suits – Eve’s described in epic centrefold male fantasy splendour among the blossoming bushes in all her naturist gardening glory  - and bonking each other senseless in their bed of roses after evening Prayers every night. This is BEFORE the Fall! Why do the tabloids  use Sin as a synonym for Sex? It means Error; being conned. The Fall was never about Sex and yet the entire history of Christianity tells us it is.”

If this WAS a come on, it’s the undisputed epic of the genre, thought Shelley. She drained her glass of Blue Nun and poured them both another. It isn’t a come on though. What IS it? The prelude to a confession?

“But my Fool’s Paradise as you call it never was. The sex was murder. I winced when she touched me. After all that teenage solitary, it was all too real, my ‘I’ too pent up to let go. And one night, in my sleep, I tried to strangle her."

Shelley resisted the urge to dive into her handbag for her Dictaphone. And she checked her memory of the safe word she’d seen in the Ladies for IF YOUR DATE GOES WRONG AND YOU NEED HELP GETTING HOME. That at least had changed since the 70s. Of course the professional thing would be to disappear to the Ladies again now and call for back up but that would blow her cover – not just with Ken but with her colleagues. And she didn’t relish the banter she’d get at the station ever afterwards. ‘What’s the difference between Cressida Dick and a great detective?’ ‘The Dick.” ‘What’s the difference between Shelley Waveney and a great detective?’ The wet knickers when she does anything off the books.’  

It was bloody unfair. There was nothing ‘professional’ about this particular strategy anyway: she was following a hunch and, admittedly against her usual practice, she hadn’t shared it with anyone. Doing things by the book kept you safe – and she invariably did that - but throwing the book out of the window and following your instincts after it did sometimes got you results. She knew that too. But it wasn’t safe. She kept her voice light. “And how did your Eve respond to that bit of trouble in Paradise?” 

“Interesting you should call her that. Eve- the Universal Mother. Blamed for everything. Lucy and I were both a bit suspicious of the EAS Freud Squad who taught every author we studied like dreams to analyse; formal incantations of the discontents beneath civilisation; the ritual semi-articulations of the subconscious; if only because Freud, like Genesis, seemed to blame Mother for everything.”

“I thank my mum for everything. We’ve always been mates.”

“I was the opposite. My soul mate Lucy was the mum I’d never had. But we resisted Freud as a bourgeois self-indulgence, an establishment-invested distraction from the real struggle, a worrying at discontents that would disappear as soon as capitalism did.”

Shelley snorted. “Tell that to the Chinese. And the Eastern Bloc before them.”

“We weren’t Stalinists. We’d read too many of Orwell’s essays to fall for that one. We were Lennonists. Our Revolution hadn’t happened yet.  We wanted Literature to be coded critiques of capitalist culture; the workers’ Paradise in prophesises; revolt embedded in literary patterning of language. Every time they gave us a Freud Squad view – of Donne, say, or Dickens - we’d counter with a Lennonist conspiracy theory.”

“At least you knew your own minds.”

“That was the trouble. We didn’t really. We looked like a couple of storm troopers for the Revolution but we were just babes in the wood. We were putting our own problems on hold, until After The Revolution, but they were all still there. What WAS going on down there below the chastity belt in our unconscious? What subtle slithering serpent was leading us up the Garden of Eden Path to a great fall while we were trying to organise a fair production, distribution, and exchange of apples. Why was my gut telling me I was scared absolutely shitless of opening the study bedroom curtains of a morning let alone trying to argue it into being a better place? Why did I want Lucy to mother me? Why was I getting nightmares about raping the Tory girl on Lucy’s corridor in the communal kitchen or wanking into her posh bra when she left it on the radiator or of being given a sports car and a plush flat to shack up with her in Chelsea by her capitalist dad. In the king size bed and ruling class silk pyjamas of which I would read her John Donne and then be Donne to heavenly death all night by Lucy – it was Lucy now not the Tory girl – or maybe both at once - and sing Lennon “I guess nobody ever really Donne me, ooo you Donne me, you Donne me good” as she got me dressed for infant school which was also a UEA seminar room where I would give a brilliant and nerveless class paper on John Donne and afterwards be surrounded by groupies begging for my autograph like Damien was  yesterday. And why did I dream I was strangling Lucy and then wake up to find I was.”

Shelley interrupted fiercely, in that purely female tone that nurses, headmistresses and sometimes even potential rape victims can unleash like a crack across the goolies. “She should have got out of that bedroom like a bat out of hell.”

Ken winced. “Lucy didn’t though. She… joked-”

“Joked! Jesus. I’d have-”  

“Ah but we all know what Freud says about jokes- (Shelley didn’t). She joked that what I’d just done in my sleep was a classic case of ‘Macbeth hath murdered sleep.’  And then I got this prickly feeling across my back I always get in moments of sexual honesty and confrontation as she asked me why my unconscious – or rather some buried ‘Me’ I was unconscious of – or both at once - had wanted to kill her.” 

*

"'Freud would say you wanted me dead,” Lucy teased, rubbing her throat gingerly, looking a little less at ease than she sounded. 

“Marx would say we need a bigger bed,' he teased back, with that historical materialist blend of Karl and Groucho he always affected in moment of crisis. “This monk-sized bunk was not designed for lovers.” 

Lucy kissed him. “Love is just a kiss away,” she said, really believing it.

They made love. The second time that night. Crashing a cymbal through a glass darkly and keeping half the corridor awake. Ken still couldn’t quite let go but, he fancied, thanks to her warm acceptance, it was just a little easier and less quivering and painful than before. Lucy let go with her usual explosiveness, screaming and beating the wall. Afterwards, they enjoyed the sleep of the dead. Which is more than could be said for the unsettled freshers in the various rooms around them, listening in on their passion in an agony of craving.

*

Shelley resisted the temptation to look more Freudened than she was. “So what does Freud say about jokes?”

“You really haven’t heard?”

Piss off, dickhead. Shelley affected a coy wide-eyed subservience. “Perhaps you’ll mansplain it to me?”

“I was only joking.”

“Ha!”

“Freud says that jokes are how we release true feelings our superego isn’t happy about having without having to own up to them.”

“Like when a man says he was only joking?”

“Very funny.”

“Or when a sexist says it’s only banter?”

“Or a racist. Not quite. Though I agree with the distinction. Banter is when the lads at Lynn Station call me Sherlock and mock me for going off into my home woods and playing a bodhran like Sherlock Holmes played a violin.”

“So you really do do that? I thought my lads at the station were joking me.”

“I do. It helps me concentrate. And it works. It’s affectionate banter because they know I often come back with the breakthrough they couldn’t find themselves. What a racist calls banter is about as affectionate and respectful as a lynch mob.”

“I get that. But that’s not what Freud means when he says a joke isn’t just a joke?”

“No. Freud is describing the civilised person who mocks but isn’t quite comfortable with the feeling it masks. The racist is quite comfortable with being sub-civilised. The liberal who jokes about race or sex is trying to handle fears and irrational prejudices, lusts and animal drives, he wishes he didn’t have. Lucy was genuinely afraid of me after I tried to strangle her in my sleep but like me she was trying to laugh it off as a joke. Because otherwise…”

“Otherwise?”

“Otherwise everything she believed in – marching with me at the front line of history into the worker’s Paradise – well, it was all just bollocks.”

“What about you? Knowing you had that murderousness in you?”

“The id, as Freud calls it.”

“The Hyde inside Dr Jekyll?” She was thinking of Damien.

“A very good way of putting it.”

Shelley tried not to feel quite as flattered as she felt. He’s a Clever Dick who tried to strangle a woman in his sleep. Why should I care if he praises me?

“That unconscious strangle worried me to death. We both wanted to deny it. We both knew I’d done it and at some level that meant I – or some part of me - wanted to do it. But it also really didn’t feel like…me. The real me wasn’t like that. It wasn’t me.” He laughed. “It wasn’t me as the guilty schoolboy always says!”

Shelley didn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny. She realised she’d been holding her breath ever since he’d conjured that picture of his big hands at Lucy’s throat. 

*

Lucy read the poem Ken showed her. He’d invited her back to E05 11 for a mug of tea after a Prelim seminar (they were in the same group, Prelim Group N, along with Lance) and she was intrigued by the colourful posters of Maharishi and the centrefold of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band and Jimi Hendrix blu-tacked to the walls. The bookshelves stacked with ‘too many books’ (as Juan the previous guest had described it) many of them poetry, art and music texts and studies from the period of the Romantic Revolt 1770-1830 but also some ventures into metaphysical poetry and his beloved ‘A’ level copies of ‘King Lear’, DH Lawrence (‘Sons and Lovers’ – but he had collected and read ‘The Rainbow’ ‘Women In Love’ and all the others as well) and Browning, plus the ‘War and Peace’ box set he’d got for his last home birthday. Too many books? Anyone would think we were at a University, thought Ken. The same walls as Lucy’s E01 1 were rendered a different, psychedelic universe, a different Revolution, by this rainbow of books and posters and hippy albums, so different from her bookcase of Marxist classics, English Civil War Studies, Shelley’s poetry and posters of rather sober depictions of the workers’ struggle. Orwell’s masterpiece, though, his ‘Collected Essays’, they had very much in common. For Ken, Orwell was why he hadn’t joined and never would join Communist Party Soc; for Lucy it as why she had joined TUF Soc (The Trotyskyist Unpopular Front.) 

But Lucy loved the room. A boy’s room with his popstar hero posters and his dozen rock albums (Beatles, Stones, Dylan, ‘Fill Your Head With Rock’, Barclay James Harvest, Genesis, Hendrix, Leonard Cohen) filed against the wall. (Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ was playing.) His ongoing vegetarian curry in its pan on the desk and his teapot. And his evident lifestyle choice of books and records before clothes and anything beyond basic soap. (The fisherman’s smock he was wearing was well past its wear-by and badly in need of a wash.)

She was less of a music fan and she didn’t go to University discos herself – she was no dancer and she despised the trivialising seduction rituals perpetrated by the likes of Juan; in fact, while hardly a prude she had more than enough of the Puritan Radical in her to despise the disco as a ‘fanny factory’ where no meaningful conversation can occur between the dancers – “What is your position on imperialism?” “Anything but the missionary position darling” – and at some deep level she shared the Methodist apprehension that sex standing up might lead to dancing… But Ken was telling her that he’d annoyed a girl at last night’s Feminist disco (The Girl Who as Never There) by quipping that dancing was a way in which women – or at any rate their armpits - can achieve liberation so, if not exactly appropriate, his conversation was hardly trivial. And then, after putting on ‘Blood on the Tracks’, he showed her a poem he’d written about his LCR disco experiences – part of a lyrics-only ‘album’ called ‘Love Songs From A Dressing Room’ and including a ‘track’ called ‘Lady Midnight’ about - and dedicated enigmatically to - “M” (all very Leonard Cohen) with a cover based on a box of UEA bar matches in his study bedroom - which as well as marking him out as more interesting than any other fresher she’d met so far – ‘revolutionary’ in a very different way from her - made her wonder what it might be like to sleep with him….

Watch me dance, baby,

Watch me kick off these shoes,

These are the steps

I pretended to use.

Watch this hat, baby,

Over both eyes

Watch how it tips

A wink to the wise.

Watch this shirt, baby,

Torn to the heart,

This is how love

Strips us of art.

I've worn the pants, babe,

But love's split the crutch,

I really have nothing

But what you can touch.

Now you see, baby,

How do you react?

Now you see what's behind

My disappearing act?

A monastery built

Out of concrete abstractions

For courtly lovers,

This College of Young Ones,

With nights tolling in

Along vertigo walkways,

Freshers' Balls

And red-bedded maydays (m’aidez)

On his knight’s velvet sleeve 

The lady-killer’s

Savaged heart unseen is

As crude as the miller’s.

I've worn the armour,

L’amour’s pierced the heart,

Unhorsed and outlanced

In a sensitive part.

Now you see, baby,

How do you react?

Now you see what's behind

My disappearing act? 

*

“I wasn’t sure who ‘I’ was anyway, Shell. I never have been. In my first term, before Lucy, I’d just started doing all these super-confident things like dancing wildly with girls at discos and ‘going back for coffee.’ It took me a long time to realise that the dance and the coffee were both codes… When Lance and his sleazy rival Juan danced with ‘chicks’ – and by dancing I mean tiny thrusting movements from the hip over a shoe shuffle as they blew hot air over their partner’s necks - it was to get a ‘come up for a coffee’ which meant a shag. For me, after all those years locked up inside myself, the dance (and even the coffee) was the shag; and when as occasionally happened the girl wasn’t put off by my Mick Jagger routine around her handbag and the lack of a smooch and still ‘invited me back for coffee’ I always took it literally and left her holding the mug. Much to her chagrin. More unconscious wounding on my part. Meanwhile Lance and John were ‘smooching’ their way into their seventh girl of the week-”

“Smooching?”

Ken laughed. “It was the slow body-contact dance you did when the DJ put a slow number on, usually after a sequence of rockers the male dancers treated as a warm up. The slow dance was the sign to make your move, grab the girl and move round the floor in slow grinding circles.”

“Musical petting. We get that a lot.”

“I never did it. I was always too sweaty from my Jagger routine. Juan and Lance and a few members of RUGSOC had this league table of fucks which they actually published. Not just how many but with ranking comments like ‘four faults at the first jump” By November Lance was already on 21 conquests and Juan on 20. Everyone wondered who’d win by the end of the year.”

“Who did?”

“Lance. He got 69 not out, a boundary-clearing thick edge six ahead of Tim Nice But Dim.”

“What happened to Juan?”

“Juan after being the life and soul of that particular rutting party and dominating seminars with his endless decoding of texts as sexual innuendoes (“It’s all double entendres,” he said in his camp Yorkshire accent of every line of every text, reductively boring the pants off everyone present by the end of the third week, (in some cases literally.) He mysteriously disappeared off campus and was never seen again. I once asked Lance if he knew where he'd gone and there was something odd about his answer. He said he didn’t know with that very blank face he got when he was concealing. It was such a funny moment, I joked ‘You’ve killed him haven’t you?”

“No such thing as a joke,” quipped Shelley. 

“Exactly,” whispered Ken. 

Ken’s eyes looked murderous again. Shelley glanced at the bar to make sure she could get there, panicked an awful moment when she just couldn’t remember the safe word; then relaxed as it came back to her. Funny how the mind works in panic situations. Or doesn’t. Get a grip, Shell. This is work. You’re trying to find out about him and Lucy. Ask him about Lucy. “So - did you and Lucy ever get over the strangling incident?”

“Interesting use of the adverb-conjunction-pronoun-interjection-adjective ‘So’. Or perhaps in this case you’re using it simply as a false filler. Unless you really are suggesting that Juan’s death conjoins to Lucy’s. Or my relationship with her.”

Fuck, thought Shelley. 

“Hmm. Did Lucy ever get over being in bed with the midnight strangler? Let’s see. Next day, she said let's get off the campus for a bit. We need to get you out of yourself.” Ken signalled to the waiter for another bottle of Blue Nun and poured it to the brim when it came. 

“Shouldn’t you let it breathe?” asked Shelley, thinking of Ken’s hands at Lucy’s throat.

“It’s white.”

“Yeah, I know, but…” Shelley put her hand over her glass but he filled it anyway. 

Ken sank his in one gulp and poured another. The Blue Nun was certainly talking now. “No matter how very New a University UEA was, it was hard to shake off the monastic origins of academe, especially with all its mediaeval trappings, its ‘doctors’ of learning; study bedroom cells; same sex cloisters; bookshop posters of Latin script and southward vistas of round tower flint churches, farms, time-slip lanes in what looked like a schoolbook of the mediaeval farming system. Plus of course we were in a sort of suspended seclusion from the working modern world, at a time when most of our contemporaries were starting jobs and careers and getting their unworldliness knocked off. On the campus, it was like we were back in the middle ages and on the front line of the space age at once and, when we saw Norwich city centre, we tended to take that bubble of mediaeval unworldliness with us.  I’m not saying that ordinary working folk don’t sense it as well – all cities have their day and that day continues to haunt it. In Bristol, it’s the Eighteenth century, gracious architecture with the blood of Africa in its cellars; in Cardiff it’s the Coal Age, fabulous fairy buildings with the blood of coalminers in its cellars. In Norwich, it’s the medieval heyday. But if you’re in Norwich for work or shopping or insurance or to get your car fixed, you’re less likely to sense the mediaeval past-present than if you’re living in a monastic seclusion like we were. A monastic seclusion with state of the art central heating  and monks and nuns rutting each other’s asses off, true, but somewhat removed from the material world nonetheless. By the way is there a Significant Other in your life?”

“What? None of your business! And what’s that got to do with-”

“I thought not. You need a partner to support your high flying career and raise your family, what we used to call a wife, but no-one’s interested.”

“Cheeky sod. And I’m not gay if that’s what you mean.”

“Exactly. You’d have much more chance getting a wife if you were. Not many blokes will take the old-fashioned wife role.”

This was so exactly Shelley’s experience, she wondered for a moment if he’d been stalking her. But then she noticed some real sympathy in his eye and asked, “What about you?”

“ ‘Cheeky sod. None of your business!’”

She laughed playfully. “Except it actually is. My professional business. We know you never married. But is there an S.O.?”

“Professional business? How is that relevant to my case?”

“If there is an S.O., I’d guess we’d like to ask her if you’ve ever repeated the midnight strangler routine.” 

“Hmm. An O occasionally, yes. But never an S.” He looked rueful, swigging his Blue Nun. “There was only ever Lucy.”

40 years! A life sentence! This was so desperately sad that Shelley had to stop herself reaching out a human hand onto his. She coughed, “So you and Lucy would bus into town and…”

“We rode into town atop the regular double decker, The Universe City of the Future disappearing behind us into city outskirts and timeless heathland. We weren’t drivers like Lance so we were used to waiting at bus stops and letting time and life go by the bus window without fretting about it. And I think if detectives took public transport instead of their private car racetrack, we might even have time to mull our cases over properly stop chasing our tails so much.”

“I think you might be romanticising the Big State 70s Ken. That was Wally’s day.”

“Did Wally take the bus?”

“He famously drove a Ford Cortina as long as his dick. Right up the asses of anyone who got in his way.”

“I rest my case.”

“What if Wally had taken a bus he might have had time to think?”

“Or talk to someone who could. That ride into town was 20 timeless minutes back through the 60s new build estates; the Edwardian parks; the Victorian suburbs, elegant mansions along the wide high roads giving on to the warrens of smaller red brick red roofed two up and downs; the mix of Georgian build and modern glass nearer the centre and then that famous flinty medieval city wall.”

Shelley knew this from her early days on the beat. ‘Is that the famous mediaeval city wall, officer?’ ‘Yes, sir, the longest remaining intact in England outside London.”

“Then you were inside the mediaeval heart of the city; ancient churches; winding narrow streets and lanes, the memory of when mediaeval Norwich was England’s second city and a European centre as well. We walked hand in hand around Norwich's Saxon market, novices under its soaring Norman Castle, down to its sublime Norman Cathedral, feeling ready to tour its 52 churches, 365 taverns and all its mediaeval present like some married monk and nun. In the Cathedral cloisters that first time, excited, young and with a girlfriend, I started declaiming 'Life like a dome of many coloured glass, stains the white radiance of Eternity-.' 

"'Until Death tramples it to fragments,'" said Shelley.

"That's exactly what Lucy said!" said Ken. "Do you know the author?"

"My namesake. The Sixth Form never let me forg-”

"It was 'A' level poetry I'd bruised my brain trying to understand. 'Shelley- a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.' And now here I was with this beautiful woman at my side living it. Making the words flesh. For the very first time."

"What about Mina?" 

"Mina and I only ever flirted with it. We courted, necked, petted, all those pre-60s words for skirting around the-”

“Please don’t tell me you were still waiting for ‘The Right One’!”

“I actually think I was. It was all very well swanking around the campus with a hot date – if you can call it a date when you don’t go anywhere - but when she got you in her room on her own, Mina was terrifying. Love bites! Hot breath on my neck! Always on top. Coming on like she wanted to eat me. I was fighting her off half the time! The one time we actually went all the way, I still didn’t, if you follow my meaning.”

Shelley tried not to. “So Lucy was your ‘First’.”

“In every way. First proper date ever. First restaurant. First step into that – adult? middle class? - world I’ve lived in ever since. First proper kiss. First love. When Lucy first brought me here, she had to translate the menu, explain what a 'starter' was, order all the courses, pay the bill and leave something she called a tip. The only social moré I knew was to open the door for her as we went out. We took train trips to Ipswich like they were kiddies holidays without your parents nagging you. She knew the world a lot better than me. I was utterly lost. But it was the only time in my life I knew where I was going.”

He called for a brandy and sank it.  "After the all too brief honeymoon period, the ‘courtship’ we stopped dating and having fun days out and shacked up in each other’s identical rooms. A shame really. We even bought identical anoraks which amused a few people on campus. And, eventually, just before I gave up transcendental meditation and  signed up for her kind of Revolution instead, I got there. It took me until June of the first year but then - oh what a night - under the hot stars, in a vast wheat-field by the river…”

“You tried to strangle her again?”

 “What? No! I finally let go. After that, I believed in this world as devoutly as any martyr ever believed in the next. And every other weekend, we demonstrated it on the streets of London." Ken laughed." We were making the world safe for young lovers."

"Oh Ken please." Her phone buzzed. A text.

"We were young, Shelley. Don and Donna Quixote charging the giants of capitalism. And it was our First. Weren’t you ever young like that?

"No." She read the message. "They've traced your old friend Lancelot Knightly. To a school in Spain. The British School of La Mancha!”

“WHAT?”

She studied the text. “Blimey. He’s done well.”

“He was always going to, despite his Gentleman’s Degree.  If anyone could make a top of the range sports car career out of a 2:2, it would be Lance. Don’t tell me, he’s the Head of Linguistics.”

“I won’t because he isn’t. He's the Director of the flipping School!”

 

Chapter Four

Perplexities Over Donne

They ambled back to the Premier Inn along the River Wensum and through the May heat of Norwich by night. He was thinking of his own future-dreaming Norwich May Days of ’78 which at the time had seemed a million years from the authentic Paris ones of a decade earlier but which from the perspective of a Norwich now as far from it as the First World War had been then, a Norwich post-Thatcher, post-Society, post-mortgage, post-truth, post-news, post-responsible parking, post-civilisation, post public transport, post-joint accounts, post-Left, post-Post Office, post-millennium, post-postmodern and probably post all of those as well, made May ’68 and May ’78 look like the same State-funded student radical revolution, the same future present. But then anything from an enormous distance will look closer together. He lost his footing on a kerb – part drunkenness, part elderly stiffness.A  passing van nearly hit him.

“Careful,” said Shelley, alarmed.

“I’m always like this when my osteopath goes AWOL. I rang her emergency number yesterday but she wasn’t there - I had to leave a massage.”

He exploded in giggles. She shook her head and smiled.

He wobbled off the kerb again as more cars sped by and she had to leap forward to catch him, letting him go as soon as it was safe to do so. He affected a James Bond swagger, the verbal accompaniment slightly compromised by not being able to say ‘seven’ without an h after the s and not because he was channelling the way Sean Connery says it. (Some tic of the Gaelic tongue in transhlation or is he just permanently pished? wondered Ken) “Care to join me Double 0h 7? We could shign in as Ken and Barbie.” 

Silence.

“Just kidding.”

“You know what Freud says about jokes,” joked  Shelley. “I’ll start calling you Lance if you don’t watch it.”

“Touché….” Ken finally regained his balance on the pavement. “So he’s the Director of a Biritishsh Shchool in Shpain! Lance always did aim high. I hated him for it, at firsht."

"Why?" She watched some students snogging on the bridge.

"Well, for starters, when we met in our Prelim group, he had a shports car; a drinksh cabinet; a portable TV; a wardrobe of sharp shirtsh and ironed jeansh (which he later gave me) a book  account with Heffersh; a league table of filliesh in tow with reportsh on their performansh  ('4 faultsh at the firsht jump') and- ”

"Yuk. And you told me that before."

"A Mr Shmooth act that wiped the floor with sheminar room and dishco alike, deshpite the fact he wash a plodder at both. He wash everything I washn't."

"But opposites attract?"

"Yeah.” Ken realised somewhat belatedly he’d fallen for the old booze ruse, getting your target (and he was the target) drunk while actually only pretending to do the same. It was a sobering thought and like many a drunk in the ‘one over the eight’ days before scientific breathalysers had replaced tongue twisters and walking a chalk line, he shook his head, took a violent breath of night air and forced his mouth to behave. “Lansh – Lance - was a convincing public speaker, swinging a room packed with ten thousand students slightly to the left, including me, applauding wildly, until my comrades pointed out the reactionary platitudes he’d thrown them, the uninterrogated certainty of the second rate left. He’d get the right result with the wrong argument, like when he got the Student Union to vote funds for the local trades council by referencing the previous debate ‘if we can support the Angolan workers in their struggle, then surely we can look after our own!’ (wild applause) Lucy looked appalled. From that Prelim group on, she’d always preferred me. I was brilliant; incompetent and tongue-tied in a hushed seminar room of eleven, eight of whom stopped listening when I couldn’t nail my torturous argument to its visionary cross, the other three a fellow travelling Lucy, a frowning professor and a rapt Lance hanging on my every word. I laboured under the delusion that having a party line to argue and hide behind would save me from the existential terror of declaring my own individual heart and soul in public. I might as well as drawn a target with ‘shoot me’ on it because while my party line was always an intense Lennonist crypto-version of the whatever cryptic thing the Leninist cadres were saying – as was anything else I said for that matter, even buying milk from The Shop -  it was still sufficiently recognisable as bolshy tub-thumping to earn the reflex deaf ear and bite of an adder sniffing a Red under the bed. It would have been better to come out from behind the Red line and fumble towards what I myself thought and felt about a poem without that smoke screen because fumbling towards what I myself thought and felt and believed in my bedrock was what I was always doing behind the smoke anyway. But ‘coming out’ would have meant risking the scorn, or envy, or anger or hatred or ultimately, and definitively, just the mere disagreement – the otherness- of others.”

Shelly got the last bit. “That’s well put. I suppose if you’d-” 

“Lansh- Lance- never over-complicated things like that or gave people too much to think about; his signature peroration was ‘and thirdly.” Like an old vicar, he told the audience the three things he was going to say; then he told them the three things; then he told them that he’d just told them. He was by no means that plodding Head of PE who rises through a relentless series of Headships to be the Director of Education for a County by a mixture of personal bullishness and a tunnel vision up his own Trump-Johnson self-conceit through the china shop he was leaving in his wake-”

“Do you mean that guy they-”

“But he wasn’t the absent minded professor tortured with any self-doubt either. In our first year Lance was already wowing the Union as President of Inside Left when I was still too scared to join The Transcendental Meditation Society. But his shmoothness was the smoothness of a scar.”

Once again, Shelley had been finding his argument hard to follow until that last sentence.  She wondered if that was why Damien and Ken and those girls in Damien’s lecture were so hooked on Donne. That furious working out to a thought so brilliant you could almost hold it in your hand. The smoothness of a scar. She’d met – and ego-massaged - a few Lances in her time.

“I published a secret haiku about him in ‘Truth’-”

“Truth?”

 “The University poetry mag.”

“Ha. Not ‘Pravda’ then.”

“Not unless there was a Russian language version. It went like this:

‘Scar-smooth this lady

-stabber, savaged heart unseen 

on the well-groomed sleeve.’ 

And it was the true Lance, all the more because he didn’t recognise himself  (‘You’ve really captured that poser,’ he said). He didn't want his privileged background. When he offered you one of his King size ciggies, he gave you the whole packet. He drove me to Yarmouth once in his sports car as a sentimental journey cum proper University student revenge return and treated me to a King Size fish and chips and it was one of the happiest days of my life. Yes really. Like the later reunion day we spent in his second year escape bunglow out at Costessey smoking weed and watching a huge orange sunset over the winter farms beyond the city limits, the gap through the hedge of our lives, the Holy Grail Light beyond the Forest, just before he came back to Loveland. Lance was always the perfect gentleman with my miners' and transport workers’ son-neighbours on the EO5 corridors who shut him out by thickening their dialects whenever he joined us (until his classy midfield management and assists –  including the one for my 30 yard goal of the season into the top left hand corner  - won us the football tournament.) And after all the frilly fillies from private schools he bedded, it was The Girl Who Wasn’t There- t' daughter of a factory worker from t' Leeds - he brought home to our commune. He was like those hero-captains in the first world war literally dying to be loved by the men he loved (and led to their deaths) – and he was loved, notably by me - leading us over the top through barbed wire, artillery smoke and a barrage of machine guns waving a gentleman’s Luger 9mm P08.”

“Sorry you’ve lost me.  The Girl Who Wasn’t There? A Luger 9 mm P08? Deaths?”

“Sorry, I do that. Forget to show my mental workings. I’ll tell you about her and the popshot she took at Lance later. My point for the moment is, Lance was the Lancelot du Lac of romance materialising as an English gentleman in a realist narrative.”

This sounded like another thought you could grasp in your hand and even smell like a rose if it weren’t for the foreign words, including the ones that only sounded like ones she knew -  ‘romance’ for instance. “I’m even more lost now.  She copied his French pronunciation. Who’s ‘Lancelot du Lac’?”

“King Arthur’s captain and Guinevere’s champion! Call yourself a Briton. Don’t you even know our national legend?”

Shelley did both, actually. “Oh you mean Sir Lance-a-lot.” She said it the English way, with a t. “But you said ‘Lancelot’ like he’s French.”

“He is. Very. As are the English nobility, Normans and Angevins. Nobles. Gentles. Even those words are French. And like his namesake in Arthurian legend (a courtly Celtic-Norman legend by the way, not a commoner’s Saxon like Robin Hood) my Lance’s whole life was a redemptive suicide mission. He hated his gentry background – very much including the parents who’d given him his name - with its lady-killing and privilege; he was ‘killing’ those ladies as a way of killing his class. He wanted to die a hero at the head of the common people, with ladies in his wake, like Byron. If I was Don Quixote of the commons, a poor fool released from at best a life wasted on some agricultural workers union to tilt at phantom UEA giants that were really windmills in the kitchen sink socialist realist armour I’d brought from West Norfolk, he really was Castiglione's ideal courtier - a gentleman farmer's son, on a genuine high horse, carrying his lady’s favour into the jousht at the end of history.”

“The end of history?” Tilting at windmills?” Shelley didn’t recognise the literary reference but she strongly suspected there was one. Once again, it was like a foreign language – or worse, her own that she just didn’t speak well enough.

Ken laughed bitterly. “These days the nearest I get to tilting at windmills is chasing round Lynn’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital car park -  I make full use of the building believe me - with the full bladder they’ve insisted I have on arrival still looking for a parking place five minutes after my appointment, yelling obscenities up at that wind turbine outside-”

“I’m completely lost now, Ken. Aren’t knights supposed to be chivalrous to the ladies? Lance wasn’t protecting or championing ladies. He was stabbing them -!”

“Yesh -Yes! Like I keep telling you. As a way of killing his class self.”

“Tell that to the Judge pal! And to me it sounds more like he’s punishing them for the passionate way he feels about his men!”

“Ah Shelley. That’s reductive. Those first world war captains were heroes -”

“Rupert Brooke wasn’t, according to our English teacher-”

“That’s an awful way to teach that poem. ….”

“We were 16, not children. And I got that from a critic not the teacher. Miss Fairfax used to have to go to the stock cupboard and pretend to get a book whenever she taught Owen. Her voice was already wavering on ‘What passing bells for these who die as cattle’ and she was sobbing like a girl long before ‘To children ardent for some desperate glory…’ I’m not saying those captains weren’t heroes who led their men with a courage and conviction beyond anything I’ve ever been faced with. I get the need for the British to have a narrative vision of our best selves. I’m talking about Lance. I’m not sure you can assume his lady-killing self-hatred was about his class. It might be about his sexual orientation. He sounds like the kind of guy - at bay in the kind of society - who wouldn’t be at ease with anything left of heterosexual. It’s classic. Cold-porking endless women to prove he doesn’t secretly prefer men.”

“Hmm.” Ken pondered, watching the river flow and thinking seriously about throwing himself in. It would be an easier way out than trying to distil his mental conceits enough convince this austere young colleague. “I really don’t think so but OK let’s not rule it out. You know where La Mancha is?"

"Sunny Spain, yeah."

"Don Quixote country. But ‘Lancelot I’m every inch a gentleman but I don’t want to be a gentleman’ Knightley wouldn't go there to pretend his donkey was a high horse. That’s what I was doing at UEA but he’d do the opposite. He'd pretend his high horse was a low ass.”

Shelley struggled to penetrate this overdone conceit. The whole conversation was like trying to work out that poem Damien was lecturing on yesterday. Why didn’t Ken just come out with it? Why didn’t Donne just tell the woman he loved her? Where did all the self-conscious cleverness, all the linguistic foreplay, get you?  “Like the Cambridge spies?"

“I think that trio of Soviet heroes were still living the lives of English gentlemen even when they were out to pasture in the Worker’s Paradise, ordering their made to measure Cambridge shoes c/o the Kremlin. I just meant Lance is a highly successful ‘gentleman’, multilingual, cosmopolitan, at ease in every social situation and every personal challenge, who underneath all that global composure has actually zero personal security or dependable relationship. At the deepest level, he trusts no-one, loves no-one, lets no-one in and wouldn’t know his ash - ass - from his thoroughbred shtallion.”

Well you’d know because you’re certainly talking out of yours thought Shelley. She wouldn’t get anything more out of Ken this evening.  Not anything that made sense anyway. Time to move onto a closing sequence. "He's a complicated fellow, this Lance of ours. Every inch the gentleman he doesn’t want to be but also playing that every inch a gentleman to get to the top of a private school to, what, kill the gentleman class, no doubt including its ladies? And yet genuinely chivalrous towards you and… this working class ‘Girl Who Was Never There’. He sounds…schizoid.”

"We're all schizoid, Shelley; multiple personalities, sides, drives, opposites:  it’s just some of us manage the schizophrenia more ‘sanely’ – keep all the conflicts more or less under one roof - than others.  I just meant we should nag away at his contradictions, try to pull him apart.”

Shelley finally understood something Ken was saying.

“You mean Good cop/ bad cop. Yes, I think we’d manage that opposition very well."

Ken laughed, “The eternal binary.” He noted, with concealed pleasure that she was including him in the trip to Spain. “I assume you’re the bad cop?”

“Oh yes. You can bring him down off his high horse and I’ll bring him down off his low ass.”

"Suits me, detective.  Every Don Quixote needs a Sancho Panza to do his donkey work." 

"In this case DCI Hill, I'm the Don and you’re the donkey.  And I’m off home to pack a bikini. You can book the flights."

He smiled at her repressed excitement, " Panda Cars to Batmobiles, eh. Who said pigs can't fly? And you’re too pissed to drive home.”

“Yes, Dad!”

“I’ll get Deception to call you a cab.” 

“Deception?”

He sniggered sleepily. “You know, like the Hotel California. (She did: her dad was an Eagles nut). ‘You can check out any time but you can never leave’.” He yawned, “Sorry, I’m totally Donne in.”

She found it difficult to get up.

“Or you could always stay…” He yawned again.

*

It wasn’t the worst moment of her career: the sense of her entire MO coming un-Donne at the hands of an old geezer she’d had under her control all day. Of being out-Donne by a suspect; date-raped on duty while attempting to work a case off the books like the big boys. And at the same time she was confused and  humiliated and actually rather offended that Ken was yawning while he did it! Am I that minor a catch?

*

Fortunately, the moment was short lived. “What do you mean, ‘Stay’?” Her shout woke him up, and also released a flow of warm blood into the glacier that had seized her.  

“I mean stay in the hotel,” he said, puzzled. Just a kindly old veteran worried about a colleague getting home. “You don’t want to be the cop that gets done for drink driving – or, more to the point, for killing somebody.”

Just an overdose of Donne, alcohol and listening to Ken and then the shock of what “or why don’t you stay?” can mean when it doesn’t mean what it says – not GHB, ketamine or rohypnol after all.

*

She called Reception and booked the room next to his. “It was the only one available,” she explained. He was already asleep in his chair and snoring like a pig so he didn’t answer. 

She went down in the lift for the key.

“No baggage?” smirked the handsome young clerk.

“My motto…” said Shelley.  

After they’d Donne… and the clerk had gone back downstairs to his official work – she gave him a satisfactory on the approval sheet for room service but he would have scored about four out of ten on Juan’s 1970s scale; and nothing at all on the scale of the John Donne she fished out of her handbag and pored over afterwards, craving sleep.

Licence my roving hands, and let them go,  

Before, behind, between, above, below. 

O my America! my new-found-land, 

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d, 

My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie, 

How blest am I in this discovering thee! 

To enter in these bonds, is to be free; 

Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

“To enter in these bonds, is to be free.” The conceit of the man! And yet it was another of those thoughts you could pick up and smell like a rose. It was a complete illogical contradiction but that’s why it rang so terrifyingly, metaphysically true in the silent, thick curtained night of this hotel room. She got up and stood looking in the mirror. 

DCI Michelle Waveney. In a Premier Inn shower robe because she had no pyjamas. With her prime suspect DCI Ken Hill through the looking glass on the other side of a Premier Inn wall. 

DCI Michelle Waveney: DCI Ken Hill. Mirror opposites. Binaries in one place.

Female/male; young gun/old school; coming up; going down; pragmatist/utopian; cop/suspect/promiscuous/celibate; Earthed/Heaven-held. Divided by a wall between two centuries; DCIs adjacently roomed in two different millenniums. Empty Shell and Memory-Full Ken: a paradox yoked together like one of Ken’s beloved metaphysical conceits; in a John Donne poem you had to think your ass off to understand and feel but boy did you understand and feel it then. DCI Michelle Waveney and DCI Ken Hill: the complete antithesis of each other. But… both sleeping alone in a Premier Inn in a provincial city on a Thursday night. 

What the mirror reverses it also reflects. 

Chapter Five

“My Face in thine eye; thine in mine appears.”

Lucy checked her image in the glass. She could have done without Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ playing on the shop radio from the heights of the current charts, but it was a thrilling moment nonetheless. She could hear the murmur of ordinary Saturday morning shoppers through the flimsy partition doors, the rustle of other Laura Ashley dresses being tried on in the cubicles either side of her. The distinction in Norwich (not counting all the old people over 21 she didn’t really see) was not so much between town and gown as between Seventies chic (an oxymoron) and Student Scruff. And apart from her and Ken, waiting for her to come out - and The Girl That Was Never There in the shop doorway but not coming in- there wasn’t much Student Scruff in here.

Lucy was stunned by the elegant stranger gazing back at her and she looked forward to see the impact it was going to have on Ken. She laughed  at the thought of his round-eyed gape at her through his Lennon specs. Ken knew less about clothes than she did, which was saying a good deal. His grant was short of hers, its parental contribution (smaller than hers) absent, and he had spent the first term at UEA in a fisherman’s smock he believed you never had to wash and some tight constantly splitting loon pants he’d bought with his first holiday job wages in 1973, patched and repaired so often they could have appeared in a Tudor drama as a passable imitation of a codpiece. The last and only woman he’d gone clothes-shopping with before – and it was an excruciating memory – was his mother, forcing some non-flared trousers on him, along with the 1940s short back and sides haircut, in 1970; and since then he’d bought everything from jumble sales or stolen them – like the bus conductor’s livery he was wearing now - from work.  Even his friend and transcendental meditator James, thin as a rake and perpetually attired in a hotel porter’s jacket he’d stolen from his job in Weymouth, got a painfully negotiated tenner a month ‘pocket money’ as his parental contribution. But Lucy, while at least dressed in clothes her mother had bought her, was as far from being a smart dresser as she was from being a virgin.

Their mileu was the seminar and bedroom rather than the Student Union bar and disco. They met in a seminar and cut to the chase: the four hundred yards of parkland to his bed. Their first meeting had been less a date –- more a fusion of scarecrows who progressed from first kiss to first fuck to first shacking up in the time it takes for a conventional couple to finish their first drink or dance. Like her, in her unflattering lady-jeans – jeans over-generously tailored for female contours and missing the whole girl-on-a-motorbike uni-sexy point – (in short, not being jeans) he had a hippy lefty suspicion of materialism (fashion, beauty, pop) and protested against it with jumble sale fervour. His anti-capitalist revolution at that point was mainly channelled into subversive one liners in ‘Phoenix’: (“Try Boots No 2: it’s shit”) or his strangely stirring poems in ‘Truth.’ What Ken in his hippy transcendentally meditative way called free love and described (quoting Leonard Cohen) as a fine mist that covers a hill without ever possessing it, Lucy had codified from her readings in Lenin’s “Marriage, Private Property and State”: but as both of them were all in all to each other at the moment and funded their unisex dressed equal division of labour shared cooking-sewing-washing-shopping lifestyle funded by a student grant from the State, the distinction hardly mattered.  When Lucy had ‘set her cap’ at Ken, it was capless and relied on naked eyes and her centre-parted tide of long dark hair and even then it had needed Lance to broker the deal by conveying for her (a) that Lucy wanted to go out with him (b) that it wasn’t true that you didn’t need to wash fisherman’s smocks and then (c) supplying him with a wardrobe of vintage shirts that the new ‘down with the working class’ Lance no longer required. 

Now all was changed utterly and a terrible beauty was born. Lucy gasped. Who was this new beauty in the mirror? Was her reasoned and passionate feminism compromised by this sex-objectification or was there an admittedly double-edged power in it she could use for the cause? Had she sold out to the commercialised sex-stablishment of sex-ploitating bourgeois fashion?  Or was she just getting free of the Puritanism her mother had inherited from her Maiden Aunt Jane? Mother and Jane were always talking about women’s liberation – was this not her own personal liberation? Who says she shouldn’t celebrate her body just because sexist men couldn’t handle it? They should grow up. The next time she made a Revolutionary speech on the floor of the Student Union Meeting, she would make the Young Conservatives (another oxymoron) look like the old farts they were and the ordinary left look soft and everyone else look stupid. 

Or they would when she had replaced the ‘passion-killers’ her mother had sent her up to University in, knowing her daughter’s eye for the lads – and in one mother-befuddling case, for a rather predatory girl - currently sticking out through the chest and haunches of the delicate Laura Ashley dress like a double chastity belt. She took off the dress and scrutinised them – salmon-pink gym drawers half way up her stomach; a granny bra the colour of old semolina. She was just musing on the come-to-bed lingerie she would buy for the new dresses when with a shock she heard Damien’s nasal voice intoning some ritual academic witticism outside. 

Without quite knowing why, or even wondering what he was doing there, like some neophyte obeying Her Master’s voice, she slipped the new dress back on and threw open the curtain.

It was quite an audience. First, she was aware of Ken’s relief – from the consternation of a youth surprised by his University tutors in a dress shop with no apparent lady companion. Second, that Daimen was not alone and that the smart, sharp, immaculately dressed Doctor Laura’s critical eyes fell immediately to the unflattering under-ruffles spoiling the lines of the dress. Bitch, Lucy thought, mentally swapping their underwear. I’ll show you. Third, Ken’s relief had fused into gobsmacked admiration of New Lucy, pride that he was with her and regret that his misted perpetually dismantling nose-sliding NHS glasses wouldn’t allow him to focus. Fourth, charismatic subtly smirking all-powerful, but not quite all-knowing, Damien was giving her an all-penetrating stare (not lost on Laura).

“So this is where you do your essays?” quipped Damien, down a mock-disapproving Cambridge-sneer nose. A subtle heat seemed to come off him; his hairy hide visible under his open collared squash shirt. An animal magnetism that was only slightly disgusting. Laura snorted and pointedly turned her attention to a rail of more expensive dresses.

“Yes,” Ken quipped back, basking in the glow, like a wannabe star pupil with his hand up, not realising the question wasn’t for him. “  ‘If ever any beauty I did see/ Which I desir’d, and got, t’was but a dream of thee.’ But then we’re all trying to escape from the dressing room mirror of late capitalism.’” It was Ken’s usual genius inside an idiot trying to think himself out. But he needn’t have bothered. Lucy and Laura were otherwise occupied. And Damien ignored him.

As Lucy – struck as if by lightning by the unusually fierce male gazes upon her –turned back nervously to gather up her casts-offs, like some flabby outgrown skin, and received a double jolt in the mirror. One, her beloved scruff Ken was quoting Donne at his most romantic-but-all-the-more-metaphysical for it, teaching you about Plato as he took you to bed and really Donne you. And two– perhaps it was the angle of her vision– Damien had no reflection at all.

 

Chapter Six

Donne Quixote

'El Director.' Shelley read the notice on the open door. The office was empty and its burly occupant was petulantly clearing out a locker along the corridor outside. Ken stayed out of sight in the shadows cast by the strong sun. 

The school was a subdued hum of sun-slowed mid-morning activity, the plate glass windows of the air-conditioned rooms hammered into submission by the heat outside; the empty ones without air conditioning  still life studies in white heat; the playgrounds, paths and lawns deserted. You could see for miles in that brilliant light and you could hear a pin drop in that white silence. The shuffling of papers and objects in the locker was the only jarring sound. Shelley coughed, calling him in carefully rehearsed Spanish, ‘El Director’

"Si?" Lancelot Knightly slammed his locker – which failed to click shut - and swung round. 

The attractive figure he saw filling his open doorway was colder, paler, taller, harder, sharper, solider, blonder and markedly less accommodating than the secretary who usually materialised there, dark and glowing and radiating her unobtrusive eagerness to please. He checked out the shapeless blouse and flowery skirt and knew at once Shelley was English. He should have guessed from that polite yet imperious, insinuating cough. Well at least she’d avoided the national livery of baby pink and beige. He translated 5his ‘Si’ dismissively, barking the word like a Colonel Blimp impersonator. "Yes?" 

"DCI Waveney, Norfolk police. I’m here about the Lucy Sky case."

 

"Ah yes. Saw it online. I've been expecting you. Come through to the office and sit down. DS…?

" DCI-

 “Sorry. Forgotten your name.” 

“…Waveney." 

His bark got louder. “I know that! I meant your first name.”

Shelley was disarmed. “Michelle.”

Ha! Ken recognised the old RAF trick, doubtless inherited from his father, pretending you hadn’t forgotten both names and procuring both in the process. But this was also the UEA old boy who (to Ken appallingly) had separated his music into (A) the LPs that represented the radical soundtrack of his generation for listening to with friends like Ken and  (B) a small shelf of cassettes catalogued as “Seduction 1” ; ‘Seduction 2” etc etc (up to Seduction 17) for regaling ‘the ladies’. He’d got the DCI to reveal her first name straight away like she was taking off a layer of clothes; just like he used to do over four decades with all those lady-kills at the disco. Love-15 Lance.

Lancelot looked the young detective up and down. Shelley felt his male gaze, its penetration and heat like the Spanish sky, paradoxically conveyed though very cold blue eyes. She shivered at the possibility that he was Lucy’s murderer. She rallied though; met his up-and-down stare with one of her own, then did the same to his office. " You’ve done well, sir." 

Lance looked away out of the window. "Oh don’t be fooled by the sunny exterior: it's no picnic managing a staff of expats in a land that's had forty years of Franco on top of five centuries of the Inquisition." 

"Still an easier gig than Leytonstone Comp though, sir, eh?" She checked her phone. "Where you reported your Aston Martin vandalised in the staff car park in 1982?"

15 all.

"By a deprived student to whom I’d been giving extra lessons, yes."

"Is that why you left the country in such a hurry?"

"Good God no, I left because it was the 80s. I was tired of that dictator defending a frozen rock from reality."

Ken wondered if Shelley would fall for it. She frowned, “Galtieri?"

"Ha! I mean Britain under The Wrought Iron Lady. The Industrial Wasteland under Barrenness Thatcher selling us down the Thames to the City fat cats. A girl like you would be too young to remember. The rich were sucking the blood of the poor while four million poor were told to get on their bikes and look for one job." 

 

"The poor are always with us, sir. Whining for hand-outs, nicking our wages, feeling entitled to knife their envy into a shiny bonnet or a sleek back. If you worked the mean streets like I have to you wouldn’t be so inclined to idealise them."

Lance laughed, a hacking sound without merriment. "I went to Grammar School and University with boys from the mean streets. Orphan souls like us weren't trained to serve capitalism but to criticise it. "

"Meaning you were born with a gentleman farmer's spoon in your mouth, stabbed him in the back with it and then retrained to do a sell-out job in a prvate school like this?"

"UEA didn't train us for anything, Michelle. We studied Language like the monks studied the Word. UEA may be famous for teaching Creative Writing as a branch of Business Studies now but back then they didn’t so much teach us how to sell our souls as to wonder if we have one…”

Ken waited for the old rhetorical flourish.

It came. “And, if we have a soul, how to find it’.”

Shelley rolled her eyes. "I'm more interested in the bodies, sir. Lucy Sky's for instance."

It was the red rag to the machismo bull. Lance flirted his mane of thinning curls.  "Well, private parts were public property in her Loveland…"

"What does that mean?" countered Shelley.

Lance was on the backfoot for the first time. "The windmill bathroom wasn't that discreet. What was a gentleman to do? She flirted with me the whole time!"

"You mean you betrayed your friend with her and it was the woman's fault!" 

The ball’s in your court, Lance.

"She tempted me and I fell, if you like."

"And that's why you killed her?" snapped Shelley. The ruthless unreturnable serve.

Silence.

"To bury your guilt?"

Silence. 

Shelley was elated was surprised. Was this it?  This easy? She could hardly believe it. Her plan to recruit Ken to the investigation, to give him enough rope to hang himself, had brilliantly come off, even if she’d had a hunch it would lead to Ken himself. A confession! Where was Ken with the cuffs? “Lance Knightley, I’m arresting you for the murder of Luc-”

"I didn't murder her!" wailed Lance. A spasm of agony suddenly flickered across his face. Nearly fifty years of passion melted the ice blue stare. "Look, I screwed her, OK, in my best friend's bed. I’m not proud of it. But it didn’t mean anything. It was just the Judas kiss." 

Silence. 

Shit, thought Shelley. She’d given Ken enough rope to hang himself and Ken had somehow got Judas to hang himself with it instead. Only not for Lucy’s murder. 

Lance crumbled. "Oh hermano mio, where are you?" 

Ken came in out of the shadows and from his investigation of Lance's locker. And instead of cuffs, he was holding his old UEA comrade’s heavily annotated UEA copy of The Collected Works of John Donne and a small trowel. Lance howled and fled the room. A moment later she saw him driving off in his enormous SUV.

"Game to love. Well Donne Shelley," said Ken. "And now - we get to the broken heart of the case."

What the fuck is going on here? thought Shelley.

 

Chapter Seven

All Donne

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

         The sun is spent, and now his flasks

         Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

                The world's whole sap is sunk;

The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,

Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

         For I am every dead thing,

         In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

                For his art did express

A quintessence even from nothingness,

From dull privations, and lean emptiness;

He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,

Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;

         I, by Love's limbec, am the grave

         Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood

                Have we two wept, and so

Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow

To be two chaoses, when we did show

Care to aught else; and often absences

Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)

Of the first nothing the elixir grown;

         Were I a man, that I were one

         I needs must know; I should prefer,

                If I were any beast,

Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,

And love; all, all some properties invest;

If I an ordinary nothing were,

As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun

         At this time to the Goat is run

         To fetch new lust, and give it you,

                Enjoy your summer all;

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this

Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

 

Chapter Eight

Ill Donne

"What am I looking at?" asked Shelley.

"Lance's 1975-annotated Donne.  'A Nocturnal on St Lucy's Day, being the shortest day.' Or rather on Dr. Rapier’s celebrity UEA lecture about it."

"Bit creepy, that it's Lucy's name."

"It made his. His first book 'DONNE HIS WIFE - THE FEUDAL POSSESSIVE. Exhuming the grave humour and marital death-bed under Donne's epitaph' got him his Senior Lectureship."

"Not my usual bedside reading."

"It was certainly Laura’s. He bedded her with it at Cambridge. The paperback (like the later TV version) was called 'John Donne, Ann Donne, Undonne' and made him famous. He comes to UEA on the back of it as the bright new young James Dean of Studies, with his star-pupil-now-rising-lecturer wife on his arm.”

“And…?”

“And meets another adoring fresher, Lucy, just as his wife's star fades."

“The star of Laura’s career fades?”

“Oh no. She’s always been as brilliant, just not as noticed as him. The Joni Mitchell to his Bob Dylan. What faded was the very thing that turbo-charged her early career: the star of her youth and beauty. Her star in his eyes. Until it fell.”

"So he looks around for another one. I've heard this one before. 'The difficult third album, the young man is no longer the new thing; he needs an injection of fresh blood; the good life's gone, he's lost in a dark wood, besieged on all sides …'"

"Dante’s Inferno, exactly. I’m impressed you know it.”

Shelley didn’t but decided not to let on.

“ Lucy lights him up again. She's in love with his knowledge. She's lucid in class and her essays. She (unlike the point-scoring  seminar soap-boxing Burkes and Juans) actually reads the texts, adores his brilliance, hangs on his every word. And he's in love with her name. Lucy- Light. The sainted Light that 'dies' at the winter solstice but will be reborn. What do you notice about the underlines?"

Shelley felt like an A level plodder picked on in class and resented it. She looked furiously. " They're all about Death."

"No. They're all about un-Death.  After 45 lines of not being, the last word, heavily underlined, is 'IS'.”

He’ll be telling me to SHUT UP LEWIS in a moment.

“And look at Lance's annotations.  'Shift to active case at the end and to the positive after I am none. The dead Lucy is alive and enjoying.' That doesn't interest you?"

"No, Morse, because I've seen her relics and she isn't.” She walked to the window of Lance's air-conditioned office and looked out on the plate glassed sunshine of Spain. She'd caught the sun and felt like a lobster in an aquarium. She noticed Lance’s black SUV sliding back into the carpark. “I'm more interested in what Lance has to do with the case, if he didn’t kill her-”

“He’s coming back to tell you he Donne it.”

“What?” Shelley really did feel like a PC plodder now. “But I thought he didn’t!”

“He didn’t - and he knows he didn’t – but, deep down in his guilt-stricken subconscious, he is absolutely convinced he did. He was going to drive up into those mountains but he realises he’s can’t escape. He’s not going anywhere until he’s resolved that paradox.”

Her shoulders rose in an unconsciously defensive shrug. "Ken..."

"Always trust a hunch you’re ashamed of, Shell. Basic Freud squad training. Come on, out with it."

"I don’t think you want to solve this case."

"What?"

 

"We're going round in circles, like that bloody windmill of yours. You're like a car at a crossroads looking for a crime scene that can't take any of the roads on the signposts because you're already there. If it was Lance, why don't we arrest him? If it wasn't, why are we here?"

El director came back in, the tears dried away, the mask back in place. Ken turned on him. “Buenos Dias, senor. Soy el DCI John Dunne. Estoy ayudando a DCI Waveney con sus consultas.”

“Very good. You’re DCI John Dunne. You’re helping DS Waveney with her enquiries. The good cop to her bad. In a terrible Spanish accent. And, as I’m sure she’s told you, I still remember enough of my mother tongue to abandon the pantomime and do as even the students of Spain are required to do on these premises – conduct our communications in English.” 

Was it just a pantomime Shelley wondered? Was some message passed there that only she wouldn’t hear? Something in that unnecessary Spanish sentence he’d been obsessively rehearsing to himself in his headphones on the flight over. Something in that ridiculously indicative alias. John Dunne!  

She watched for a flicker of concealed recognition from Lance but saw none. As Friends Reunited proved, people grow into strangers. Bodies fatten (Lance’s had surely ballooned from its 70s svelteness) and age. Even eyes, those windows of soul, change, acquire shutters, die. Had 45 years buried everything too deep?  Unless. Was Lance hiding from Ken? Or Ken from Lance? Or both: was this bloody restricted code of theirs a way of disappearing out of her ken up their shared UEAness?  She felt her hackles and shoulders rise.

"Shelley has a hunch you're a red herring to catch a mackerel, Lance. But every civilised face hides a crime, wouldn’t you say?"

"Ha ha! The Sigmund Freud case. You can’t pin that on me." Lance honked it down his nose like a hood in a Chandler detective story, but it sounded more like a student revue sending up Damien Rapier. 

“Enough of the boys’ games,” Shelley snapped, like a tetchy matron. Jesus, she’d be telling this high-powered Director he was letting himself, his school and his immaculate trousers down in minute.

Shelley suddenly considered another possible murder pairing. Never mind this artisan-gentry/opposites-attract conceit of the Ken and Lance twins. What about Lance and Damien? Posh boys playing at Revolution with worker’s real lives. Plenty of those at the top of the Labour Party, and all points left. Shelley wouldn’t put Lance ‘playing Mephistopheles to Damien’s Satan’ past this smooth Latin-trousered bastard. ‘If the Revolution demanded it’.

Unless of course, Mr Smooth really was what Ken said he was. His smoothness the smoothness of a scar. Just an orphan soul, a boy hardening a heart that had been broken and wearing a mask of man-of-the-worldliness in a stage play that had become his real life; an agent so deep under cover, he had forgotten his original identity and purpose. In that case, Rapier was the snake Lance was only playing. 

Or had Lance and Laura at some point bonded over their mutual disillusion with the “Cunning Linguist”? Strange that they had both used the phrase. Were those two in cahoots? Should she be looking at a possible conspiracy not of Damien and Lance or Ken and Lance but Lance and Laura? Had Lance and Laura murdered Lucy together and tried to implicate Ken? Was that why Ken was out here, sails whirling, putting Lance’s story through the mill?

She backed the hunch. “This isn’t a Chandler novel, Knightley. Stop taking the piss and give us the truth.”

Lance continued in his own voice.  "I came back in good faith to tell you…” 

“Yes?”

She watched his mind change, his face changing with it, another self appearing there. “Look, I really am rather pushed -."

"Not as pushed as Lucy was," snapped Shelley. "Do I have to remind you this is a murder enquiry?"

"No,” said Lance. “But…”

“But?”

"But Lucy was pushed off the roof by a disappointed idealist. And, unlike everyone else in Loveland, except Damien Rapier, I had no idealism to disappoint. I was older, a man of the world. I’d been divorced. I moved the real world leftwards, made Student Union speeches that carried the floor not just the Tiny Trots. It was me the police monitored, me they followed home, not Quixote Ken and Lucy. The cops were such Wallies; they even confiscated a golf trowel from my student pigeonhole once and when I told them it was a 'sextant' - 'for digging graves' - they believed me!  While Lucy and her Galahad played May King and Queen at the still point of their turning bloody windmill, I was the one who did all the donkey work of finding the place, fixing it up and renting it. From rack-renting Comrade Damien, the great dream-dealer. Who for my pains later called me in his reference 'a velvet jacket with no heart on the sleeve, well worthy of his gentleman's degree'- bloody nerve, he was the Eton boy; I went to a State Grammar School!  He cost me a IIi with his judgement on my coursework."

"Which was?" 

Lance reeled it off, the brand burned into his brain. “A second class mind - a smooth surface shining with everything he's been taught but no actual depth' of his own."

"Ah but still waters run deep, Lance," said Ken. "Still waters like yours run as deep as England. Tell us about that day by the river."

 

"So we know about the river do we?…”

 Shelley tried to break their infuriating restricted code. “We?”

“Just an expression, detective. But, on linguistic reflection, you’re right what do we mean by ‘we’?” Lance winked at the other male in the room. “We’ll make a Cunning Linguist of her yet, won’t we detective?”

That bloody ‘we’ again. And hang on - ‘Cunning Linguist again too!’ And why isn’t Lance asking Ken’s name? He made such a big fuss about getting mine. If he knows him, but is pretending not to, he should question that John Dunne!

She looked at Ken. “‘Cunning Linguist?’ That’s an interesting phrase. Now where have we heard that lately?”

“Kenning Linguist? It was just the nickname we-”

“Cunning.”

“What did I say?”

“‘Kenning’.” 

Silence.

“As in divining knowledge,” added Ken helpfully.

Silence.

Lance blinked. “Sorry. Slip of the tongue. I meant ‘Cunning’.”

Shelley pounced. “It’s a Freudian slip then. Because we’ve given ourselves away, haven’t we, old boy? Something playing on our mind, Lance?”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about.” 

“OK I’ll spell it out for you. Laura Rapier, who is so full of repressed secrets she probably wears a Freudian slip under her dresses, said “The Cunning Linguist” to us outside her UEA penthouse about Damien. How would you have heard that exact expression unless someone who was there told you? And the only people there were me – and I haven’t told anyone - Laura herself… and…” She looked at Ken.

“…Me,” said Ken, a little reluctantly, sensing the chink in the attack. 

“So how did you know the phrase?”

“You’re not serious! The Cunning Linguist is just a dirty joke from the 70s. It’s what we used to call Damien and his sleazy brand of -.”

“No such thing as just a joke, Lance,” said Ken. “And the other students called him Dracula.”

“Ken and Lucy and the others may have. Scared-attracted like the romantics they were. As I’ve already told you, I was older and more cynical. I called him the Cunning Linguist.”

Shelley recalculated quickly. “All right. You said ‘So we know about the river.’ We’ll make a cunning linguist of you. Let’s start with that. Who knows about the river?”

“You two, the police, presumably. I think what I mean is you seem know a secret I thought was mine and…”

“Yes?” Whose secret? Ken’s? Lucy’s?  “Exactly who and how many are this ‘we’?”

All right." He sat back. "Five - ”

“Five!?” (What?!)

“The Five of us are skinny-dipping off the bridge into the swift Yare current, our ankles tickled by reeds, whooping like characters in a Lawrence novel: Me, Lucy, Ken, The Girl From EUR and, vividly present in all her auburn pre-Raphaelite splendour, The Girl Who Was Never There. She certainly was that day. One of a Fab Five diving for the diamonds sparkling on the surface. The surface is so smooth, we’re all reflected there, a band of Lennons and Lucies in the sky. I’m still pretending that I’m with The Girl from EUR….”

The face (and mind?) changed again. Shelley watched it happen, fascinated.

The ‘other’ Lance, The prestigious, disgruntled Director, went on. “We all flirted with EUR but the ludicrous thing about the UEA system was that although serious EAS mainsters like Ken and Lucy and at that time even me, did quite a few EUR or COMP LIT courses because English Language and Literature is obviously part of European civilisation, all part of a thing called Christendom, but no EUR course equipped you a single wit for your EAS Finals paper whereas American Lit, which I for one regarded as an easy option – that’s why I did it - and which Ken and Lucy avoided for that very reason in favour of ‘Madame Bovary’ or Tolstoy or ‘Le Roman de la Rose’ -  very much and very arbitrarily did - hence ‘English and American Studies…”

“You were pretending to be with the Girl From EUR,”  Ken interrupted before Shelley’s bad cop version of the same impatience, “but…?” 

The face and mind changed again. “I’d had a semi-serious fling for a while with The Girl From EUR partly conducted in sexy French, Italiano and Hispaniola, and, though she’d been seduced by my gift of tongues, she was beginning to sense the lack of depth under my smoothie surface, the inability to distinguish her Inferno ass from her Purgatoric elbow let alone her Paradiso lips, and I was moving on before she caught me out, and my faithless eyes are darting like kingfishers to Lucy. I dive. I come up for air and there she is naked as Eve in the cornfield.”

The burly elderly Director of a prestigious English school now looked like the little boy lost he always really was. “It’s the biggest shock of my life, like I’m exploding out of myself into a cosmic gnosis, of Everything. Nothing before or since comes anywhere near that Bliss.  But it’s forbidden knowledge, forbidden bliss. And it’s indescribable, beyond all words, unless you’ve known and felt it yourself.”

“Try me anyway.” This was the Case, right here.

“It’s just words! I’m transfixed, wonderstruck. ‘Her hair shines like gold in the hot morning sun.’ ‘Her curves are like Cupid's bows.’ I can't breathe. Even I'm ready to believe now she could walk on water like her Don Quixote Galahad-visioned boyfriend told me she did. But, in the murk under the reflection…" Lance's face darkened.

Ken leaned forward. "What is it? What do you see?" 

"The wreck of a Victorian bridge, a jagged industrial kracken. Right where we’d been diving."

“You mean anyone of you could have been spiked through the head at any moment,” gasped Shelley. 

“By a Victorian ruin, yes.”

“The wreck of Empire,” mused Ken.

“I know health and safety wasn’t invented back then in the suicide bombing 70s but why weren’t there signs warning you off?”

“Oh there were signs. DANGER DO NOT SWIM. NO DIVING OFF THE BRIDGE. Our parents had grown up lobbing Luftwaffe bullets at bombed walls to make them go off. We used to lob jam jars full of firework-gunpowder into bombfires loaded with eighty industrial tyres. We didn’t have soft play areas. We had hard play areas. We’d walked miles home from school through crowds, across main roads, on railway bridge walls, through barbed wire and down lonely lanes. We hitch-hiked hundreds of miles to festivals. Health and safety signs weren’t for obeying! They were challenges. Invitations to derring do. And once we’d got through all these childhood perils unwrapped in cotton wool, scarred but mostly unscathed and glowing with the frisson of it all to that University river, we just used to amuse ourselves by decoding the signs. NO DIVING OFF THE BRIDGE. An apparent statement about the absence of bridge diving,  a perfect totalitarian world where diving off the bridge just does not happen, which conceals the killjoy telling you not to.”

Ken noted the sign above Lance’s bald head NO FUMAR (NO SMOKING) and smiled fondly.

Lance was in full flow, “Which negative also of course implies the positive ‘Dive off the bridge’ with it. Tell a boy not to and he will.”

“Which explains why 93% of all British murderers are men,” snapped Shelley. 

“And 75% of them white,” added Ken. 

 “Is that why you fucked her, Lance?”

Ken added. “Is that why you murdered her?” (Nice move, thought Shelley.)

“Because you were told not to?” rasped Shelley.

“Because all the signs said No?” nailed Ken. (He’s actually quite good, thought Shelley. If not exactly good cop to my bad.)

Lance exploded “FOR THE HUNDREDTH TIME, I DIDN’T MURDER HER! I MURDERED A FRIENDSHIP. I MURDERED A TIMELESS PAST, A PERFECT PRESENT AND A ROSY FUTURE. I LOST EVERYTHING. 

Ken asked very quietly, “Even Lucy?”

“ESPECIALLY LUCY FOR GOD’S SAKE. AND I DIDN’T KILL ALL THAT BECAUSE SOMEONE TOLD ME NOT TO. I DID IT BECAUSE IT’S HOW I AM. HOW ALL OF US ARE. WE HAVE EVERYTHING AND WE FUCK IT UP.”

Silence.

"A lot of rage under your smoothness, isn’t there, Lancelot?” observed Ken.

Lancelot. That restricted code again, thought Shelley.

A caressing, familiar, fond, shared, secret exchange of a pet name, shutting me out. There must be a name for that chummy bigging up.  A diminutive? No, the opposite.  I’ll check with His UEA-ness later.

Ken’s tone hardened slightly. “What was it like being the river-serpent in that Eden?" 

"I wasn’t the serpent. I was Adam in all his naked pride and glory heading for a fall. The serpent was Damien, if anybody." Lance shivered.

Shelley’s ears pricked up. She felt dizzy among all this sun-splashed student nakedness on the river bank. There were some high jinks at Hendon but … "Damien was there as well?”

“And Laura.”

Jesus, thought Shelley. So much for in loco parentis. Didn’t that Society have any rules at all?

“He still is there, isn’t he Lance?” whispered Ken, assuming good cop again. Or maybe something a lot closer than good cop. Confederacy. Complicity.

Lance is on the riverbank, all the defences of experience washed away, not just the relative experience he already had over the others even then but all the deadening confirmations of his absolute pessimism since. His eyes are un-shuttered, the eyes of the youth he had been once, the lost youth which that day by the river had raised momentarily from the dead Gazing without defence or fear or guile into the lovely flowing ever present noon light Eden saw play, God’s recreation of the new day… 

And into the eyes of Lucy, his dewy Eve.

Until… slowly… remorselessly, his gaze begins to darken towards horror. "Damien is standing in the sun. A shadow watching us from the bank with the sun behind him, like some pampered rock star. His shadow is casting doubt over us, making us all suddenly conscious of our nakedness. He takes off his clothes and we feel ashamed, callow, childishly undermanned by his big hairy hide. But he's blind to everyone except Lucy. And Laura is watching him with death in her eyes."

“Death?” queried Ken.

“Does Laura undress as well?” asked Shelley jarringly, louder than she intended, seduced from the real point of the story by a prurient irrelevance; then immediately wished she hadn’t. She sensed Ken’s involuntary groan of disappointment. 

Lance shook away the golden memory – and its Damien demise - like a swimmer shaking water from his hair. He was off the hook. "But there never was an Eden to lose in my book. As The Iron Lady said ‘there is no such thing as Society. There are individuals and there are families.’ I say there are sibling rivals and families you have to get away from."

But Ken wasn’t beaten yet. “And once-in-a-lifetime friends?”

Lance gave him a warm look, smiling. “And once-in-a-lifetime friends.”

Ken continued. "You and 'Sir Galahad' stayed close? Even after the Fall?"

"As close as you and I are now. Brothers in learned folly. Damien never bothered to teach us that the deep structure of our being isn’t a priori the truth. We spent three years digging into Marx’s economic base; Freud’s unconscious id, Chomsky's primitive base-grammar. But it’s the transformations into our surface structure – the enriched compromised complicated utterances we make – that make us human."

Silence. 

“Human? That word covers a multitude of sins. You’re using it like it means ‘civilised’ Ken.”

“Well if it doesn’t mean that, if ‘civilisation’ doesn’t make us more human, then-”

Shelley felt like she had grip on this spinning windmill of case at last. "I can tell when you’re lying, Lance, because your lips move. You pushed her off the roof to bury your guilt at betraying your friend. Then you buried yourself in a job abroad. Didn't you?"

Lance’s calm answer took the wind out of her sails. "No. That isn't what happened."

"So what did happen?"

"Only the boyfriend can tell you. Why don't you ask him?"

Shelley glanced at Ken. "We can't find him."

Ken looked at him hard. "Would you recognise him, after all this time?

Lance returned the look and held it now. At last, Shelley caught a flicker of something.  A knight's fidelity. A love stronger than murder. "Not if he didn’t want me to."

 

Chapter Nine

Much That May Be Said For Donne.

Shelley and Ken were admiring their reflections in each other’s Ray-Bands. The Mediterranean shone like a blue lagoon. The sand was hot white gold. The wine and talk was flowing. 

“Read me that poem you wrote about Damien for the student rag again.”

“The Ballad of the EAS Rider.”

“Did your readers recognise him this time?”

“Oh yes. And judging by the final essay grade he gave me, the only time I slipped below a 2:1, he did too. I think you should put that fact in your case files along with the poem. I’ll sing it to the original 1978 tune if you like.”

“What’s the tune?”

“Bar Bitching by the Stranglers.”

“Nice. Go on then. I dare you.”

A few heads turned as Ken went full punk (ie looking like he wanted to kill someone).

 

“Twisting round my hair in knots,

Twisting round your neck with thoughts.

My oh my, you have to agree

Certain issues of poetry

Can’t conceive of a harmony.

I’m twisting pastoral flowers into your face.

I’m twisting your kind of thinking into place.

I’m twisting…

Listening to you plum for choice

Between degrees of passive vice.

‘There’s much that may be said for Donne.’

I am the outside world come in,

Butchered hands and axe grinding,

OPEN YOUR ’ED AND LET ME IN!

I’m twisting pastoral flowers into your face.

I’m twisting your kind of thinking into place.

I’m twisting….

Your rich aesthetic literariness

Is like the lush grass on a grave.

My oh my I’m rotten through

But life moves through and it’s sick – of you.

I’ll thrust you off me and trample you.

I’m twisting pastoral flowers into your case

I’m twisting your kind of thinking into place.

I’m … Terminating this debate!”   

Not just Shelley but a waiter and the table next to them were joining in the chorus by the end. Ken had a pleasing light baritone, a convincingly comic cockney accent and a rhythmic sense pogo-trained in the mosh pits of punk so he drew applause and laughter from the diners – a mixture of ex pats and holiday Inglese pulled in by the ghastly esplanade posters of baked beans and sausages outside and of canny Spaniards not put off by them because they followed the scent of the sea-salty catch-fresh sardines cooking smokily on the beach next to the kitchen and also knew by repute that as long as you avoided the deep-fried menu del Full English you could get the best Spanish paella in La Mancha here. A waiter brought him a complimentary brandy de Jerez as the whistling, whooping and table thumping finally calmed down. 

Ken drank it all in, well pleased with himself.. "Still missing Poirot's in your beloved Norwich Lanes?"

"Only the Belgian beer." Shelley sipped her Sam Miguel and chewed over delicious mouthfuls of Spanish rice, chicken, chorizo, tomatoes, fish, green beans and peas in a lip-smacking garlic and saffron marinade and purred. “What does Paella mean – or do you Linguists only analyse your own language?”

"It means 'for her'.  It's the Sunday meal when el hombre cooks for his wife, takes over the kitchen to say thank you for the week, chucking in everything he can lay his hands on."

"As men do. Like it makes up for everything.”

A very pleasant couple of hours – the hours since grilling Lance – evaporated at once into the hot air. Ken stopped smiling. “Bit harsh. You thought I wouldn’t know the Spanish and I do. You didn’t fancy the everything-at-once food and wished yourself back in Poirot’s for something more familiar over a titillating starter, steak and frittes, Death by chocolate and a Tia maria while you tell everyone how you solved the murder - and you’ve loved it. And now you’re throwing the Sunday hombre’s honest kitchen thank you back in his face.” 

“Doubtless after he’s spent the rest of the week charging machismo windmills and jousting with other hombres while she cooks and cleans his house for him.”

“You’re not that keen on men are you?”

“I’ve had a few issues with them patronising my career.” Her tone was dark.

“More fool them and well done for proving them wrong. But I’m not one of them. Am I?”

Silence.

“Am I?”

“We-ell… I have been listening to you for five days so far, chucking in everything you can lay your hands on and stewing it over, mansplaining what's what about everything. Wanting me to worship the sun that shines out of your UEA-ness. And where's it got us?"

He waved an airy hand like a wand. "Here. Enjoying Spanish sandcastle magic instead of our normal Plod."

She  looked wistful. "Yes, tonight we have our castle in the air. But tomorrow, we fall back to earth with a bump in Norwich. The week I gave you to crack the case is nearly up. So if you’re ever going to just tell me what the hell it’s all about, now is a good time."

"If I told you that, darling, I'd have to kill you."

"That's not funny." She looked round at deep-fried Spaniards posing like toreadors at the bar for castanet-caressing flamenco women, and wondered how to order coffee. 

"Café con leche, dos!" Ken called.

Her mouth fell open. "Blimey, you really do speak the lingo as well. You're the reverse image of your old Linguistics tutor. He just makes a foreign language of English."

"Oh UEA Linguistics has its uses. It's how I solved this case."

"What?"

Ken inserted a slice of lemon into his mouth and made his teeth protrude like Damien's. "I can explain it in no time. Lucy's remains are past continuous -'life is shrunk.' He adopted Damien's sneer. Not to mention present perfect - 'th' hydroptic earth hath drunk whither-'"

"Very clever, Dr. Death. But completely-?"

"Beyond your ken," quipped Ken, still in Damien's voice. 

"And getting back within our Ken..."

Ken became Ken again. "You made the case active when you called me in. Agreed?"

"OK."

"Now if I say 'I pushed Lucy' that's called the active case. If I say 'Lucy was pushed by me' it's the passive case. What's the difference?"

"I don't know, your UEAness."

"Yes you do."

Shelley willed her 'tired and emotional' brain to recover those long-buried French grammar lessons on Tuesday afternoons with Mademoiselle. "The subject of the first is you and makes Lucy an object. The subject of the second is Lucy and makes an object of you."

He pointed at her. "Brilliant! Now which one tells you whodunnit?"

"… 'I pushed Lucy' does…   No, they both do… Only 'I pushed Lucy' emphasises it more. 'Lucy was pushed by me' being at the start focuses on her, perhaps even sort of blames her a bit, like she started it. But even that way round I still know who pushed her. You. You dunnit."

Their Ray Banns mirrored each other. Shelley felt a sudden chill, wondered if she’d gone too far. With that double meaning. With the machismo risk-taking. With this entire double-dutch investigation, beaching herself in Spain with a very wayward colleague who was also a suspect or at the very least a witness. Yes, she had told the Super what she was doing now, finally convinced him it was a genuine lead, but he and a back-up team were 500 miles away in Norwich.

"Exactly. But if I just say 'Lucy was pushed' what then?" 

Shelley tried not to show how relieved she was that, after the pause, Ken appeared to be taking her word ‘You’ as a pure exercise in geeky Linguistics not as a personal accusation. "You’re not giving away whodunnit."

"Exactly. That's called agent deletion. I am the deleted agent." 

"Sounds like a spy novel."

"It is. Language is power, Shelley. And espionage. Most of what we say every day - or rather the way we say it - is a spy novel. Why did we ask 'Would it be possible for you to pour me a little more wine when you have a moment please?' when we mean 'Fill my glass. Now!'

She filled it. "Because it’s civilised. It keeps the brutal fact of one human being subordinating another at a civilised distance."

"Especially important when the subordination is actually in reverse. Like Manuel our magnificently deferent hotel receptionist asking, 'what was the name please?' as if from some politely distant past instead of now.  And his command (the imperative case) - 'tell me your name' - becomes a question (the interrogative case) because you’re supposed to be a class above him at that point. He’s supposed to be your servant, ‘serving’ you. It’s this holiday return to the aristocratic age the hospitality industry stages every day.  Paying money to pretend we’re the knights and ladies hiring him to re-enact like some mediaeval pageant in what is really his castle. But he’s actually in charge. He’s the owner.”

“Or at the very lowest level of the industry working for that owner and playing the owner’s game against us for a slave wage.”

“True but either way the grammar he uses camouflages all of that. Grammar is power politics, an endless class struggle, underwriting our social laws and behaviours. But sometimes, in a rebel class or an individual genius, it breaks those laws and subverts those behaviours. Look.”

He handed her the Donne with its faded pencilled 1975 annotations. "Look carefully at Lance's lecture notes on Donne's grammar. Lance labels the grammar 'law-breaking. It is. The grave of all that's nothing  breaks the law of logic because it cancels itself out. Grave of Something, of Anything, is its Death. But the Grave of Nothing  is what?”

Shelley thought hard through the cumulonimbus cloud of vino blanco. “Life”

“Yes! So the deep structure of Donne’s I am the grave of all that's nothing  is -'I am.' Alive. Resurrected."

"But …what are you saying? That Lucy isn't dead?" Shelley frowned.

 “I wish. That’s what Wally said but Lucy is dead forever, alas. We’re not Wallies and we’ve seen the body; you’ve read the forensics. It’s HE who’s saying she isn’t dead."

"Who? Wally? Donne? Lance?"

"Damien, ya Wally! The poem was academic at first. A hypothesis waiting to happen. Then Damien made his name by it, with his famous book on it, rose in the world . And now he lectures every new cohort with it. He can’t leave it alone. Why?”

Shelley blew out her lips, defeated. “You tell me.”

“Because his deep structure knows he killed her. But his conscious mind doesn’t.  He's buried with her.”

“But you said that about Lance.”

“Lance is nowhere near as intellectually lucid and brilliant as Damien. He’s the second class fiddle to Damien’s Satan. The Dunce to Damien’s Scotis. He jst feels guilty. Damien IS. It’s The 'Sigmund Freud Case' all over again.”

“Er… The 'Sigmund Freud Case'?” 

"Yes! Not knowing on the surface what's driving you deep down. But revealing it in surface codes. Compulsions. Tics. Lectures. Damien's in denial. He keeps unconsciously lecturing everybody that Lucy is alive because deep down he’s telling us he killed her!"

Lucy looked into Ken’s excited face, the strained gentle eyes. I want to believe him, she thought, because Damien feels like the worst kind of wrong ’un and if he killed Lucy it would have been for his own self-interest whereas if Ken killed Lucy it would be because he loved her – which is a tragedy - but if Ken thinks this is the way to prove a case, or clear himself, he’s mad. He’s mad anyway, with grief or regret or something. If Damien is bad enough to have dunnit, Ken is certainly mad enough.

She tired to talk him down a bit. "Abstractions, Ken. We need concrete evidence."  

But, despite herself, Shelley cast forensic eyes over the Lance buried in the notes he’s made of Damien’s lecture on his 1975 set text as if reading for clues at a crime scene. Her long holiday-varnished finger pointed out a section in particularly hurried, wispy, surely indecipherable pencil. "What does that bit say?"

Ken, perhaps with the benefit of having been at the same lecture, or perhaps reading into it what he wanted to see, could decipher Lance's spidery toddler-tween pencil and did so aloud. "'Every negative carries the positive within it. The shadow implies the substance. The deep structure of Satan is God. (=Paradise Lost) But Donne is showing this in the deviant surface grammar of his paradoxes- I am none.  I am every dead thing.' Like a secret agent revealing undercover secrets through a code."

Shelley made a face. "You mean that thing you said before, a negative is a positive in disguise? So if you make a statement ' I didn't kill her. I wasn't there' at some deep level you’re somehow saying you did and you were?"

"Well, yes and no. The 'I' in your sentence is definitely saying I didn't and I wasn't. But imagine it as a sensational tabloid headline. "KEN DENIES HE KILLED HER." It gives the reader the idea he did.  The innocent does not make that statement at all. Unless-"

"Unless we bring him in."

"Or them." Ken smirked. 

"…Them?" 

"If he’s a double agent, there's two of them."

"What?"

"Both of them deleted by that surface structure 'Lucy was pushed.'" 

“If that’s a joke, it’s not funny.”

“If it’s a joke, it’s not a joke, as we say in the Freud squad.”

Shelly slammed the table with her half empty glass. “If it’s not a joke, you’re half way round the bend and I’m sick of chasing you. And, if it is, in the middle of a murder enquiry, it’s not funny.” She became formal. “Either way, I’m now formally charging you with wasting nearly a whole week of police time.”

“But it’s a breakthrough. We now know we’re looking for someone who’s actually someone else; whose deep structure is the direct opposite of who they are on the surface! Find that person among our suspects and we have our murderer. And we can start by eliminating everyone who actually is who they are.”

“Like who? Is anybody? Is Dr Laura the opposite of who she is on the surface? And what would that be exactly? She’s told us she hated Lucy and is glad she’s dead which is hardly a cover up.  Is The Girl Who Wasn’t There – who we’ve never found? Is the Girl From EUR - currently being interviewed in Leeds? Shall we ask her your Quixotic abstractions rather where she was and if she dunnit or saw it? I’m sure DCI ITV Banks would think that was hilarious. Is Dr Damien really Dr Jekyll just pretending to be Mr Hyde? And therefore the murderer because he’s nice underneath!? And what about Lucy herself? Was she really the morning star of the Revolution standing in the Garden of Loveland with her arm aloft like some Statue of Liberty, Egalite and Fraternity – as she appears on the surface - or the suicide thighs seduced by Damien’s dark arts underneath? The only person nailed by your abstraction is Lance Knightley and we’ve seen his entire double act now and while his worse half brought down your Camelot like his namesake in King Arthur, it also made a compelling case for not being Lucy’s murderer. I think he knows who dunnit and is covering for him. So that just leaves you. Are you the double agent Ken? Policeman on the surface; murderer underneath?

“No.”

“Which of course means Yes underneath, according to your bloody Freud Squad and all the rapists who used to escape the rap by claiming the same thing. It’s just brilliant abstractions, Ken! We can’t arrest anyone by abstraction. As you know by a long experience. We need material witnesses. Concrete evidence. Facts.”

“Not in this case. It was concrete that killed her.”

“Enough. Ken Hill, I’m-”

“Don’t put me under arrest, Shelley, I told you I’ve solved the murder – I just need the rest of the week you gave me to get you your evidence.”

Shelley shook her head. “And you can get that in two days? Why should I believe you?” 

“We’re here alone in Spain. Wouldn’t I have run by now? And I’m coming back with you now. Why would I do that? I can give the murderer and enough to put them away. But, if you stop me being a free agent, I can’t complete the sentence.”  

A long pause. Shelley weighed the damage done to her reputation already against the slim high-risk high reward chance of redemption, the remote possibility that this eccentric old cop might still prove her crazy hunch right. And he was coming back of his own free will, so she wouldn’t actually be losing him. She could say she was just humouring a backet case, giving him enough rope to hang himself.

“All right. Two days. Max. And then you’re off the case and a charge of wasting police time will be the least of your worries.”

“You won’t regret it. And I told you not to call me Max.”

“Don’t push it, Ken.”

 

Chapter Ten

We Have Donne That Which We Should Not Have Donne…

DC Len Wade met them at Norwich airport but instead of taking them to the station, he drove them through a shower of rain and a succession of green and pleasant avenues towards Lilburn Mill, a large fictional Windmill on the River Yare in Cringleford, on the southern outskirts of Norwich. 

Len slid into a cheerful fifth along the brief stretch of the A11. “So how did it go out there, ma’am? Get anywhere with Knightley?”

“Up a Garden of Eden path and along a riverbank populated by all seven of our suspects naked as a baby’s bottom but as to which of them actually dunnit, we got absolutely nowhere. Twice,” snapped Shelley. “Which Ken here will no doubt tell you is somewhere.”

“Absolutely,” said Ken. “Like ‘Waiting For Godot’ with a God at the end. Turn off here.”

Len wondered what was going on between his colleagues. He wasn’t getting the enthusiastic response he expected for the new lead either.

Lilburn Mill was an exotic sight, towering above a residential area past some villa-sized houses and local shops. Originally built in the Seventeenth Century as a thriving flour mill in the bread basket of England, the windmill was enormously extended and mechanised to meet the greater demands of the Victorian era. 100 feet sails struck via a chain pole driving enormous French burrstones, two flour mills and a jumper. It had endured a leaner period grinding animal fodder, housing German prisoners of war and only resuming its former glories as a flour mill in 1920. It finally ceased flour production in 1965, just as the dreaming white concrete of UEA was admitting its first students a mile up Bluebell Road; and was then used as a grain store.  That’s how in 1970 two newly appointed young UEA lecturers, with brilliant reputations gained at Cambridge snapped it up and converted it into the hippy Paradise. Their idea was to live there themselves on the converted ground floor and surrounding mill buildings and cover costs – they didn’t use the word ‘profits’ – by renting out its second, studio third and attic floors to UEA students as communal accommodation. This was still the great lost age of the working class – the Beatles, Twiggy, Mary Quant etc etc - so there was plenty of Sociology on the stairs but the third studio floor became a favourite with a ‘better class’ of student doing FAM. (Fine Arts and Music,)

"The elderly spinster who occupies it now, a Miss Jane Apple, contacted us while you were in Spain. She-”

“So the old hippy’s renting his dream home out to an elderly spinster now!? Ha!” Ken laughed. “No more chasing young love up the winding stairs!”

“Rapier doesn’t own it anymore. He sold it to Miss Apple at a considerable profit to fund some brutal stock market deals in the 80s. She’s found something buried there and wants to talk to you. She says it’s vital information about the case."

"The usual nutter?"  

"She wouldn't be the only one," snapped Shelley in the back. “Like certain little grey Poirots who think you can lean back on a  restaurant chair and solve Murders by Linguistics.”

Len concentrated on driving. Ken stared out the side window. The skies cleared as they entered the drive and a pleasant English sun came out. The trees looked incredibly green after Spain. The lawns fresh as a 16C Pastoral, its economic base and eruptive pre-Civil War tensions of Elizabethan society sleeping like the quiet grave below; the flowers as understated and homely as a welcome home kiss.

They found Miss Apple in the garden digging in roses. In Ken's time, the student 1970s, the windmill had been an overgrown wasteland, its sleeping-beauty tower ascending from jungle a good place to write his love-laborious essays on Tennyson's "Maud, Marianna and Morte D'Arthur." Come into the Garden Maud! If you can find your way through the brambles and nettles.

 It would of course have been bourgeois, a betrayal of the Revolution, to employ a gardener. Laura occasionally offered them the price of a night out to do some digging in the garden, clean the place up a bit. He remembered their poster of topless festival goers in their so called gardener’s shed with its headline: DIG IT.  Ha! The only Winstanley-type digging they'd done – apart from one crazy April day when he single-handedly scythed and hooked an entire plot of jungle bare-backed and basking in a heatwave and Laura’s Memsahib admiration and ended up in the Medical Centre with sunstroke and grade 1 sunburn over his winter-white flesh -  was bedding in the cannabis plants in the derelict summerhouse. ‘Loveland’ by name but as different from John Milton’s Paradise in nature, gardened with puritanical fervour by those industrious Adam and Eve innocents in the infancy of the world, as Heaven is from Limbo. If Digger-work made the windmill-wings of Loveland go round, then whatever Lance, the Girl Who Was Never There, the Girl From EUR and Absent Lucy were doing there made it go flat. It was all they could do to stick a hand into the stagnant blocked well of six weeks’ unwashed dishes around in the sink to find a bowl to rinse out for their breakfast.

Fast forward half a century and Lilburn Mill was now a well-established, well-maintained Alfred Lawned Tennyson garden with handsomely restored outbuildings and looked like some nice old maid’s dream of pre-Rolling Stones England.  

"Welcome to England before we lost the Suez canal," quipped Len, who got his history from the Daily Mail.

"Paradise Regained. As funded by Thatcher's closing down sale," retorted Ken through his hangover.  

“Any worse than the Sewage Canal your lot made of it?” growled Shelley through hers. 

Len regarded them both curiously. 

Miss Apple told them she’d had the period range put in and replaced the stained steel and warped plywood with enamel, granite and oak. Ken took her word for it. He'd never actually seen the previous sink under its pollution of piled up student plates. That Lucy dream home that Ken built. Miss A made them loose leaf tea in delicate bone china. Shelley was charmed. Len looked around uneasily for the security of a tea bag and mug.

Above the sink, there was a framed embroidered text. It was headed THE TRUE TEACHER. 

"Who doesn’t that remind me of?" asked Ken. Shelley didn’t answer in case his question was rhetorical but assumed he meant Damien. 

Ken was reading it as Miss Apple recited it behind him. 'The true teacher divines the waters of Righteousness. And his life is a Revelation."

Ken turned to meet two visionary pools. Miss Apple's eyes. She only seemed to be talking to him. “It’s by a Seventeenth Century divine”

“It’s a lovely thought,” said Ken politely.

“Yes. It helps to purify the most unpleasant atmosphere left here by the previous owner.”

She knows I was here, thought Ken. How? But Shelley’s rejoinder modified the thought and the question.

“The previous owner being Damien Rapier?”  Shelley was business-like.

“Yes indeed.”

“You’ve got something to tell us about him?”

“And to show you, yes.” She had prepared a tray laden with tea, toast, homemade apple jam and cakes.

Please follow me up into the drawing room.”

Her 'drawing room' (the first floor of the windmill) seemed more spacious - and a lot more centrally heated - than its student bombsite days when it served as Ken’s bedroom. Ken looked for the signature hole in the plaster above his makeshift bed - after that night the EUR Girl burst in and hurled a heavy hash tray at Lance as he and Ken were smoking along to Lou Reed’s ‘Street Hassle’ for the first time. Like he still went to the ghost of his Snettisham woods home fridge which he’d moved in a kitchen refit two decades ago. Of course, the EUR girl’s jagged hole was now a long-since professionally smoothed and respectably wallpapered wall. Civilisation and it discontents. Miss Apple had mounted a framed portrait of some ancient worthy above the absent hole. She saw him looking. “Gerrard Winstanley.”

Ken recognised him now from a well-thumbed text he’d consulted for telling quotes during his epic coursework for his “17C Language, Literature and Thought” course in 1977. The never quite Donne course for which he’d got his usual not quite First and had been re-doing for himself ever since. “Ah yes, leader of the 1643 Diggers.”

“Leader of the world's first modern communist party,” she primly corrected him. “Unless you count the Early Christians. She recited by heart a sizeable chunk of St Luke’s page-turning sequel to his best-selling Gospel, ‘The Acts of the Apostles’ then noticed the faces watching her. “Oh dear, I hope I’m not being tiresome."

“Not at all.” Ken smiled. And he meant it. 

Shelley wished Len had come upstairs to enjoy this. The last three old maids they’d interviewed sported serial mantlepieces of coronation mugs with drooling pictures of the royal family; a series of repressive texts from the Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and an exhibition of golliwogs. Miss Apple’s was a very different England from Len’s; a very different tradition from the one he read about in his newspaper.

As she and Len two sat down and divided up the fruits of the tea tray onto three plates, Shelley read the liberation theology framed below the Winstanley picture. 'We have declared our reasons to the world why we have begun to dig upon George hill… Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?'

"I see you admire the True Levellers, Miss Apple,", patronised Ken – and winking at Shelley - with what he imagined would be his unexpected expertise. "I studied Winstanley's use of the transitive case at UEA."

Then misreading the old lady’s blank look, he translated “Act now. DO IT.” 

"He was a direct ancestor of my father...”

It was Ken’s turn to look blank. Winstanley’s Heir!

“…And so of course, of my niece. Lucy's mother.”

Shelley, her brain engaged, her mouth open and a cake half way to her mouth, gaped. This was Lucy’s great aunt. “Really Miss Apple? Did you know your great niece well?”

“I was her favourite aunt.” She chuckled. “‘Radical Aunt Jane’. I recognised the dissenting spirit in her from an early age. She was a rebel with a sharp wit but a good heart. That’s the Complete Set of Jane Austen I gave her on the shelf for her fifteenth birthday. She  spent her holidays with me and, oh goodness, we had our little adventures; our little campaigns against local injustices. Of course as she grew up in those permissive Seventies, I began to seem a bit of a fussy old Puritan but, as I tried to explain, the Puritans were anything but conservative and without them much of the Radical progress now established as modern Britain would never have been.  I gave her the Austen when she was studying ‘Sense and Sensibility’ for O level – I believe they set it for A level now and the students complain it’s too hard for them – and she devoured the whole set in a month. Laughed and cried her way through all the pride, prejudice, persuasion, poise, precision and passion and then read them from the beginning all the way through again: exactly the right finishing school for a young woman’s heart. She even wrote like Austen herself for a while. But I’m afraid, at A level, the dishy young teacher she preferred rather drowned her in an exclusive tide of the Romantics and DH Lawrence so Austen got cast as the austere Augustan bogey woman and when dear Lucy went up to University, she left her beloved set behind with me. A pity. It may have done her good to have some reins for all that galloping passion of hers.  But she did remember there was more real romance in one Puritan following Cromwell’s calvary charge for a new England, a new Heaven and new Earth as her noble ancestor did, than in all the cavalier reactionaries holding on to their loot in those Good King Charles fairy stories about royal escapes and hiding up royal oaks. A royal escape to further tyranny, closing the presses and stopping people thinking for themselves. She never lost that sense. And she inherited our ancestor’s get-on-with-it realism as well. Winstanley called a spade a spade and used it to dig a new Paradise while other Radicals were arguing over what they meant by 'Eden.'" 

Shelley couldn’t resist a glance at Ken at this. Ken gave her a ‘fair cop’ grimace in return. Miss Apple sipped her tea. 

Shelley was intrigued by the existence of a significant relative - with this lucid insight into the victim - which seemed to have passed Wally by. She began to feel less sceptical about Miss Apple. “You mentioned that you had some inform-” 

"Now I mustn't waste your time and I will doubtless express myself very badly but I wondered if in your ruminations you'd considered the history of Lilburn Mill itself?"

"You think that's important?"

"Oh yes. The windmill is the tipping point of the whole Murder. It points the Way. Angels' wings. No, how stupid of me. I mean sails, don't I? Or do I, I wonder? Oh dear I am expressing myself very badly, but a debauched Cavalier blew up himself and his country mansion here during the Civil War. He'd been using it as a magazine for a planned royalist uprising in Norwich, which of course was quite ridiculous of him as Norwich was a citadel of Puritanism at the heart of East Anglia’s Parliamentarian stronghold - he'd lost the plot, like King Charles before him and Donald Trump after him - but hotheads are always apt to miss the obvious. But you mustn't. Indeed no.”

Shelley frowned. “But how does the windmill point the way to the … the solution of your niece’s Murder?” 

“Great niece. Though I was closer to her than her own mother and father in some ways. You could say I was her spiritual mother,  if that means anything to you. If we’d been benighted Catholics instead of dissenters, I’d have been her godmother.”

“Shelley persisted. Thank you for that clarification. And how does the windmill point the way to the-”?

“To our beloved Lucy’s Murder. ‘ The blue eyes were wide in wonder. “But my dear isn’t that obvious?”

Ken was standing under the bookcase furtively checking the Jane Austen – and yes, there it was, inscribed ‘to dear Lucy, on your fifteenth birthday’ in an upright maiden lady-hand and with ‘Lucy Sky, aged 15’ in an unformed swirl Ken hardly recognised below it. The pre-Ken Lucy!  

Ken wondered why Lucy had never mentioned her beloved Aunt Jane, not even during those times they were staying with Lucy’s parents in Cambridge.  Why hadn’t they ever visited her? Had Aunt Jane been as important to Lucy as the old lady seemed to think? Or was their ‘special relationship’ of old and new radicalism just some senile delusion, even a sublimated crush the old maid had nursed in her ancient breast? Ken suddenly felt her heaven-blue eyes on him as if she could read his thought and blast such a reductive heresy to hell…. On the other hand, Ken might have just forgotten Lucy’s mentioning her. He’d forgotten an awful lot lately. “What IS obvious, Miss Apple?”

“When the Children of the Red Dawn lived here, calling it Loveland, they were all studying Revolution of course - so dangerous for children to be led astray in that freethinking way by teachers who say one thing and live quite another. Making them believe they are the angel Abdiel rebelling against Satan while being actually recruited by Satan to the devil's party without knowing it. Music might well be the angel-language of love and founded on what they called ‘rock’ but under all those drug-addled albums of well-meaning wailing and wooing and wishing their windmill hummed with a different tune and on a very different rock; the death song a wicked and still very present 17C Cavalier suicide. Its wicked ghost hated and hates the English Revolution as much in Lucy’s day as it did the first time. Under cover of all those turntable Revolutions, that ghoulish subtle music turned them all in ever decreasing circles emphatically against each other; and for their narrowest meanest selves. And it is, I am afraid, that fundamental presence of Evil – Evil which I have been sent here to elucidate – rather than a mere capital crime that you have failed to divine. I hope that's now clear."

A mere capital crime! Ken and Shelley exhaled a breath they’d been holding since the beginning of Miss Apple’s speech. The atmosphere in the room had become suffocatingly intense and the diminutive and innocuous Miss Apple had somehow expanded into a truly terrifying presence.

"Not really, Miss Aghhh what the F-?” Shelley’s  unladylike expletive was lost in a terrifying CRASH below.  

“Bloody hell!” yelped Ken. 

“Oh dear, The colander has fallen off the shelf again.” Miss Apple made to get up.  But she was pre-empted by Ken's reaction. He started to howl. His mouth was like the mouth of hell.

*

BOOM! So loud and frightening the roots of his being seemed unhinged. He couldn’t place it. Where in the world was it? In the Windmill or outside? Now or in some present past? Did it strike his inner or his outer ear?  Was it from another world entirely?

BOOM!

It came from below. He would face it; whatever worldly or supernatural foe it might be. He descended the ladder to the basement kitchen. He drew a breadknife from the drawer, grabbed some ludicrous protection for his head from imminent masonry or attack – a colander – and ludicrously tied Lucy’s vest abandoned on the long-cold radiator, around his bicep. His absent lady's favour. In case the foe was supernatural rather than simply unhistorically materialist, he muttered the Hail Mary he’d learned from James’s Catholic girlfriend Rosa along with the spooky white magic of a Catholic Mass. He hurled himself towards the impossible-to-place boom. 'Guarde la dama!'

Silence. 

Had it come from Damien’s basement adjoining theirs then? Although frankly there could be Pandemonium going on the other side of that thick Windmill wall or all he would hear. 

BOOM from above- from the very bedroom he'd just vacated! 

Oh God.

BOOM! Unfathomable. The BIG BANG at the end of the world. But which end? He could not believe his ears, believe anything. He nerved himself through the bedroom entrance to face whatever terror, abstract or concrete, lay within… 

*

Shelley was staring at Ken fascinated. He gaped back at Shelley with black hole eyes. He had stopped howling now but didn’t look like he knew where he was. 

He was broken; soon they would break his story too. She called Len to join them. That made it two sane people against two off the scale loonies.

Miss Apple did not seem the slightest put out. She enquired of Shelley, “I haven’t made myself clear?”

*

Ken was ‘keening’ a poem.

“Fleetwood Mac are singing of crystal vision;

I’m mourning the death of teenage romance:

A girl, the short-term long vacation dance

Of abstract concrete and revolution;

Oil’s in crisis: my mind’s in sick rotation;

My heart feels nothing of the sudden lance

That smashed its Jericho walls, selling punks

My student sub-let of love’s ancient mansion.

Next door, a Shell garage sleeps: I don’t, haunted

By absence – hers, mine – the hell-thunder                            

Of vacuum; chase a ghost through every room,

Armed with a Marxist crit. of Roundhead texts

And a cavalier prayer on lips struck dumb

By Apocalyptic explosions of doom.”

Len came up just in time to witness the sestet, carrying the colander he’d found in the basement. He froze to the spot at the sight of Ken doing his King Lear routine. “Everything OK Ma’am. I heard a crash.”

*

"Er…Not really clear, Miss Apple," said Shelley.

"Oh dear, well then let me put it more simply. I believe you have been investigating Lucy's murder as the Fall of Eve. Whereas in fact it is the Fall of He Who Tempted Eve." 

Shelley looked into the blazing eyes of the old maid and wished she hadn’t. Light seemed to radiate from her kindly old face. Shelley all but whimpered. "And who might that be?"

"Lucifer."

Shelley felt a chill she didn’t believe in – just as she didn’t believe in the Devil – but she felt it almost stop her heart beating nonetheless. The room seemed to have darkened. Len wondered if he’d wandered into a Dennis Wheatley novel.

And still that blaze of light, surely an optical illusion, coming from the old lady’s face. "'How art thou fallen from heaven, Oh Lucifer, son of the morning.' The morning star, the most brilliant angel, second only to God.”

“He was like Lucy once. Then-”

“One fatal kiss, Moi - one evil I-dea, the 'I' in 'I love you' - brings him down. After which he is merely the anti-God."

"The shadow of his former self," whimpered Ken. “Drawn to the Lucy he was, acting on her like an evil genius.”

"A Negation who appears as beautiful as his children but whose true face, which the wise see, is a venomous snake. Whose angel body and wings, which the wise see, are the body and wings of a fly, maggoting in dead flesh; flourishing in faeces. ”

"Now of whom does that remind me?" said Ken, old school grammatically putting the object before the subject and the death cart before the white horse.

Actually it reminded Shelley of Ken because she’d remembered a Hendon lecture on Criminal Psychology by some famous police doctor which referenced Freud in a very different way from Ken.  He’d started by addressing the common unease with the infamous Oedipal complex: what you’re saying deep down I want to shag my mum? Give me a break. She’s 50 and she’s got a face like the back of a bus.  That got a laugh. But then he went on to look at the less well-known other half of the complex. That, deep down, you – like Oedipus before you- want to kill your dad.  And he pointed out something that lodged somewhere in Shelley’s mind and burst into her consciousness now. King Oedipus was given the former King’s Murder as a cold case to solve which if he solved it would stop the plague that was destroying his land.  Oedipus relentlessly hunts down the killer, even when warned by a wise blind trans he would be a lot better off not knowing, and in the final harrowing act of the drama the great star detective-king finds out that the humiliatingly lowest of the low, dregs of the earth plague-breeding murderer, the pride before the fall guy, fallen from dizzy heights head first into the filth, was no-one but he, himself. That was Ken, she was sure of it. He was hunting himself, nagging away at memories, old associates, haunting old places, interrogating clues at the scene of his own crime. He was so fond of his Freud Squad unconsciousness and his jokes that weren’t jokes and all the time he was chasing himself as the joke was on him. So Shelly’s own answer to Ken’s question, even if it was rhetorical, was ‘Ken’. But for the moment – until she got her hard evidence and/or a confession - she flattered him with the answer he wanted. "Damien." 

Miss Apple slightly unbalanced Shelley at this point by agreeing with Ken. “Damien, oh indeed yes.” 

Shelley looked at her. This was a complication. “You’re personally convinced Damien Rapier killed your niece?”

“Oh yes. Murder is always about character. The character of the victim. And of the murderer drawn to her character by his.” 

“It’s also about Plot, Miss Apple. Motive, opportunity, cause and effect, forensics, what actually happened.”

“Oh it’s about Plot most of all. Because plot tests and unravels character. Most characters would be good if things didn’t happen to and around them. Any of us can become a murderer in a moment if plot unravels us enough. Even you, law-guarding detectives. Which is why we must be vigilant against Evil plots, and Evil devices acting on our desires. This is why we puritans don’t just love and worship and paint and sing and act out the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible. We aspire to practice them.”

“We’ll bear all that in mind. Thank you for your time.” 

A pleased Miss Apple gathered her thoughts and gloves and secateurs and a few other items she had absent-mindedly taken out of her handbag during her recent speeches and stood up. She gave them a piercing smile "Now, I am afraid I need to fulfil my flower duty at the chapel. But I do think you two would make a lovely Adam and Eve." And with that she went out to her garden.

“Which two did she mean?” laughed Len.

Miss Apple’s old lady chirruping and business-like reversion to chapel gardener had almost banished the Satanic atmosphere. Until they noticed the look on Ken's face. 

“Ken?”

*

BOOM from the second flight room above.  Lance's. Ken climbed, listened for the agitation of a fellow knight errant within, the relief of a terror shared. But Lance snored on. 

CRASH! Blowing off the top of Loveland. Which is the hedonist dome where The Girl Who Was Never There lived. Our Room At The Top is the servants' quarters,'  she joked. Before she lost the faith and stopped talking to her housemates at all. Ken climbed two flights to that poster of chic Paris the Girl From EUR had on her door - she would leave them for her EUR placement soon, become as absent as the Girl Who Wasn’t There;  always something a bit this-worldly about EUR, even in joint seminars like Critiques of Culture. Ken listened at her door.  A door that no longer let anybody in. 

BOOM. The top floor, definitely.

He flew up the final steps. The Man On The Stairs Who Wasn’t There. He could hear ghoulish sounds. He put his ear to the door, then pulled it away quick – so loud. Then gingerly put his ear back. Wailing. So The Girl Who Was Never There IS THERE! Like the Man on the Stairs Who Wasn’t. After all these months. The Girl Who Was Never There wailing with her demon lover. Like banshees. 

How are they making the BOOM?

Ken and Lucy had frequently kept everyone awake all night in their room at the (broken) heart of the mill, the still point around which the Earth had moved, making the love that rocked the windmill and rolled out its wings. Now  The Girl Who Was Never There and her Disco To Be Gee Or Not To Be Gee were doing that and Jilted Kenwas the Hobbsian atom in a hostile universe those freshers back at the ziggurat had once been. BOOM!

He knocks. Tentatively – on the heavy oak and metal door. He’s coitus interrupts after all – simply not Donne - but he’s also terrified out of all Loveland agreements. Out of all his wits. 

It sounds dead loud in that dead of night. Like a roll of thunder. But the wailing inside continues, begins to rise to a climax.  

He knocks again. He THUNDERS at the door. 

They can’t or won’t hear him. He remembers through his fear that she stopped liking him a while ago, said she’d never liked him actually and that he can stuff his commune because it’s just another dictatorship only with Ken and Lucy as the tyrants. Also, he remembers The To Be Gee Or Not To Be Gee is very possessive about The Girl Who Was Never There – he was never part of the commune and is full of bourgeois notions. Ken desperately misses The Girl Who Was Never There. They were like the perfect brother and sister at first, a perfect revenge on our own dysfunctional families and siblings and a joy to share with. 

BOOM. Where? Half way up. The empty heart of the Windmill again.

CRASH. BOOM. Yes, it was coming from the vacuum at the heart of the mill, the aborted Revolution, the one room he could not face. His and Lucy’s voided ex-space. He descended, repeating in his immaterialist-materialist confusion the opening sentence of  The Communist Manifesto ("A spectre is haunting Europe…") like a demon-defying rosary. 

He stood, Edgar Allan Poe-faced, for what felt like an hour. Then, finally-! Don Quixote to the heart of the dark Tower came! Glad of any end as long as end there might be. He roared in...

An empty room. 

Lucy’s books, Joni Mitchell LPs, dresses, unslept half of their bed, the black hole presence of her absence. Nothing else. Only himself.

Nothing to face. Nothing, face to face. 

Nothing. 

 

Chapter Eleven

Have Donne

Shelley read the poem she'd found on Ken’s bedside table. He had recovered from what he called his ‘turn’ and was singing in the shower, a lot more cheerfully than the Ken in the poem: 

I am haunted with love as with history, loss,

Oh Lucy, my love, I miss you.

The poetry I wrote you, cathedral glass

In your eyes’ bright amazement of blue.

Communion of lives we built together

In the clasp of the stones that stand.

The old ruin, our achievement, claims forever

This lonely, lonely mill, with relics and remains.

The thin page it was typed on was yellowing with age. Imperial typewriter font. Old sellotape stained the edges. It was obviously a fragment torn long ago from some keepsake album. She felt touched. A long dead Ken was speaking – not wisely but too well, not cunning-linguistically (the portentousness; those juvenile repetitions of ‘love…love’’ and ‘lonely, lonely’) but his mind un-Donne -and from the broken heart rather than the clever Dick he'd been waving at her all week. 

Could the red hand that wrote this of Lucy really have killed her? 

Lucy - 'awakened from the dream of life' – could tell her. If only Shelley could ask her. 

‘Tis we, who lost in stormy nothings, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife

Invulnerable nothings.’

Footsteps, quick.

"What are you doing, Shell?" Ken's detective's voice.

She'd returned his poem just in time. But she looked guilty. "Just looking in to see where you were, Ken. Are. Our Premier Inn dinner is served!”

A pause. Once again, she felt very alone with him in a confined space without immediate witnesses. “Ken?”

“Chef no doubt recommends the red herring…" Ken answered sardonically. 

Was he having a go? “How d’you mean?”

“…well Donne,” he laughed. 

She relaxed. Just one of Ken’s endless conceits. 

But he frowned at the bedside table drawer, not quite closed, as they closed the door went out to the stairs.

*

It was their last night, under the stars. They took the third bottle up onto Ken's balcony, overlooking the river. He seemed more open, reckless actually, since his encounter with Miss Apple. Howling your head off as you re-experience a life-defining trauma will do that. His eyes remained haunted, even as he necked the wine that made them dance. Shelley followed her usual technique, part detective, part female—defensive, of letting the male boor quaff most of it while appearing to share it with him. Ken wasn’t as fooled as she thought but then he didn’t care.

“Lance used to do that as well”

“Lance? Do what?”

“Let me get smashed on my own while appearing to make a joint of it.”

Shelley took a gulp of wine. “I’m not.”

“It was how he kept control.”

“Of what?”

“Of himself. The situation. Us.”

Shelley impersonated a girlish laugh, knowing how suggestible a drunk can be. “I’m not. I’m not even thinking of the case, Ken.” She sipped more wine. “Lance controlled you all?”

“He could never control Lucy.” Ken’s voice changed, went deadly quiet but still reminded Shelley of that recent howl from hell at Loveland Mill. He was quoting a poem she vaguely recognised. 

“She lived alone and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be

But she is in her grave and oh!

The difference to me.”

“John Donne?”

“Oh dear Shelley, no. Much nearer, though nowhere near as mawkish, as your namesake. It’s from The Lucy Poems.”

“Yours?”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. What DID you study at A level? It’s Wordsworth, a set of masterpieces of romantic feeling all the more powerful for their classical self-control.”

Shelley counter-attacked. “But why that now when you’re talking about Lance and control and Lucy. Are you saying that is what Lance failed to do. Control his feelings about Lucy? Or control Lucy herself?”

“He couldn’t control either her or his feelings about her. She was the one girl who pierced his heart, overwhelmed his fortress. It was more the rest of us he controlled. including himself, and Julie.”

“Julie? Who the hell was Julie?  One of those girls you never name? The Girl Who Was Never There? The Girl From EUR?”

“Operation Julie.” Ken poured another full glass and downed it. “Lance and I worked on it.”

“Operation Julie!” Shelley gasped. 

Ken - Ken - had been undercover on one of the biggest anti-drug ops of the 70s! She suspected he probably wouldn't remember what he was saying in the morning. But she absolutely had to. She poured him another glass, pretended to check her phone, switched on the voice recorder and returned it ‘carelessly’ onto the table behind the bottle. “Go on.”

"Operation Julie was on its last legs when Lance and I joined. We didn't like to tell the top brass that the Revolution was dead already - that it was the amphetamine-stoked punks they needed to watch now, especially the ones waving Union Jacks and Sid Vicious knives and yelling me me me me me me me. But they were still terrified of the last smoke signals of the love-summer dreamers, post-deconstructing the dog eat dog they knew. We went as ordered to rural West Wales and watched yesterday's in-crowd make LSD while the Norwich punks pogoed on the hippies’ graves."

He filled another glass. "The next time I looked, it was The Haties. Love and peace was out. Thatcher with her punk hairdo and handbag was in. The new Government hatched its long-laid plan to roll back the 60s with a Right Wing Coup. Having helped bust the hippies, the Blue Meanies now wanted Lance to help infiltrate the unions. 

"But it was a twist too many. Two faces always suited him; three 'outed' his true one. Working for Operation Julie, he only betrayed Lennonism, which he never trusted anyway. Working for Operation Margaret, even as a triple agent, would set him against Leninism, his unrequited self-abnegating love affair with the working man. He warned his contacts in the steelworkers (too late) and the miners what was coming, then left the Force, his double agency deleted by the Official Secrets Act - they couldn’t expose him without exposing themselves.” 

“And went into education?”

Shelley ‘casually’ checked that the recorder was working and out of Ken’s eyeline. She kept her trembling hands out of sight. 

Ken slurred on. "Yes. It looked a good move at first - the old lefty-hippies were no longer at the back of the class. They were at the chalk-face now, writing the curriculums and the exams.  Making lesson plans out of their old album covers and teaching the heart-lyrics printed on the gatefold sleeves. The Right was in free fall. The Left was ready to fly again. Not like now, when the only alternative politics is comedy, just laughing to scorn how badly the expensively educated upper class twits are running their reproduction of the 1880s.  When Arthur Smith stood for President of the UEA Students Union in 1977 and jumped up in between two speeches from serious Lefties, in green satin boxers and sang a calypso under tropical lighting called “Please Don’t Vote Me For The President” which brought the house down and would have won him the Presidency as previous joke candidates had (in the pre-Trump days when this only happened at the UEA rather than the USA in what the happy hippy winner called “a massive mandate for madness”); except Smith pleaded with everyone to vote for the Broad Lefty (which they did). When asked his position on Thatcher and then on Abortion he said he would insist on the Iron lady having a compulsory abortion. I suppose the only reason Paul Whitehouse wasn’t standing as well is that they didn’t want to split the It’s All A Joke Anyway So Let’s Let The Establishment Run Everything And We’ll Just Laugh At Them All The Way To Their Robbing  Our Bank vote.  

“No, these were the days 1980-1981 in living memory of long periods of Labour ‘There IS A Society” Government rule that ordinary people had a sense of a Society which they might help to lead and shape, rather than just hive off as much of the crumbs as possible in vans with their name on. One where these blue meanies wanting to privatise the public roads and empty the villages so that they could park their Range Rovers outside their second holiday home and then moan that the road was impassable and blame that on someone else was a fever dream of the libertarian Right. And, like Arthur’s plea not to vote for the alternative comedian but for a serious alternative, it was going to win. But then something unexpected happened.”

Shelley knew this one. “ The Falklands.” 

"When Thatcher turned the momentum of that imperial war on to the Enemy Within - everybody outside the City's vicious circle of trust - Lance openly defected. He moved to Spain and started a Free Gibraltar campaign. The only thing that bothered him was letting me - his 'old comrade in arms' - down. He said 'Thatcher's sold the soul of England for the Falklands and our independence for Reagan's agreement to look the other way. Now any Redneck in the White House can make a poodle of us from here until the Last Trump. She's broken the manufacturing heart of Britain so there's no longer a labour movement to betray.' Of course I said we should keep the faith, by which I meant Lennonism, and he meant Leninism, but it was just words, the ritual emotion of the busted. I shouted at him for the whole of a drunken evening before I noticed he hadn’t answered a single point I made. He was gone. 'Have done,' he said, and he did. He emigrated. We lost touch...

“I stayed under cover, in the Force. I still had a murder to solve. Lucy’s. But it was a murder without a body. So I solved every case but my own. I worked within our underfunded, institutionally classist, racist, sexist, self-serving system, trying to be a good cop. I spent half the time having my promotion applications turned down by superiors who found me 'truculent and abrasive' and the other half wanting to kill Wallies who said the promotions I did get were because… I was a… fast-tracked… ‘UEAnus’ …’ ”

“Ken?” 

“Zzzzzzz…”

Shelley caught Ken's glass just as it fell from his hand. She hauled him in from the balcony onto his bed and let herself out. 

She had a restless night. The bright red figures on her clock crawled. The stars blazed. The Wensum flowed by.  She woke up at 12.46, 1.23, 2.56, 3.09, 4.04. Ken was other side of one thin wall. Too close for comfort. 

At last she slept.  

Ken filled her dreams. He had Jesus hair, and a drug-crazed eye. "Hey, Shell, Lucy and I made up at the End! And we were on top of the world. Happy as the Beatles getting back and England retaining the World Cup. We were going to build Jerusalem in England's green and peasant land again. But then someone pushed her off the end of UEA."

"How do you know?"

"I was there."

"You were there."

"Yes."

 

"And you saw the murderer?"

 

"I AM THE MURDERER."

"You’re the murderer! I knew it!" Shelley's phone flew over the balcony and into the abyss Lucy had flown into. "You pushed her! … And now you’re going to push me! You’re mad! Help! HELP!"

"Help? NO!” Ken had become John Lennon in that farewell Beatle movie on the roof, voice hard, Beatle-ex-ing bespectacled eyes nasty. “This is 'Don't Let Me Down." 

She felt thin air beneath her feet… 

 

Chapter Twelve

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls

She woke up screaming. It took a long time to remember where she was. 

Even as she fumbled for her phone, knocked over her glass of water and saw the red figures on that demon clock - 6.15 -  she was still falling off that nightmare roof. 

And then she realised with exquisite relief that she wasn’t. Light was glowing behind the heavy red curtains, like that Donne poem about the Sunne rising on morning-after lovers, and she heard the chambermaids bringing their reassuring objective detached narrative of teas and papers along the corridor. Even so, that ‘real world’ refused altogether to come back. Getting out of bed was like stepping out into that nightmare thin air. Her shower felt like the one in Psycho. And when she’d finally washed off the sweat, shaken off the terror and dressed for work, she couldn't find her phone. The phone on which she’d recorded his legitimate under-cover duplicity (Operation Julie) and his illegitimate double agency for the Revolution.

She went next door, knocked loudly and asked Ken to check if she'd left it on the balcony. There was a pause. He called back through the door that it wasn't there. 

She didn’t eat much of her granola breakfast.

An hour later, they were by the other Norwich river - the Yare - at the campus. Their phones told them they were in Cringleford. Their eyes told them they were in heathland, amid picturesque reeds on a soft muddy bank, studying a bridge over untroubled water. Some other sense told Shelley they were at the crisis. “Looking for clues at the scene of the crime,” explained Ken. 

"They'd only just started building that Broad in my day," said Ken, moving like an old hack into his Working Class Hero soap opera. Except it wasn’t just a soap opera now Shelley knew now he’d been a revolutionary working undercover in the police since the late 70s - knew but couldn’t prove to anyone without her phone - and that she (and Lucy) seemed to have blundered off the pages of a cold case Murder through a Ghost Story into what was beginning to look like the marsh of a Spy Novel. 

They watched two swans swim across the delectable surface of the Broad, all smooth grace on the surface, graceless commotion below – a very serene, supremely detached, impeccably academic Broad (albeit with real mud, real currents  and real dangers, as the warning signs against swimming on the various jetties and fishing docks made clear) with climate measuring instruments and art installations set in acres of grass and trees and buildings named after East Anglian pioneers and visionaries – Elizabeth Fry, Julian, Tom Paine, Margery Kempe – in a sort of distillation of all things Norfolk only without the tacky tourism.  

“Let’s break for coffee,” suggested Ken.

“What sit with a thousand yapping students?” 

Ken laughed. “Nearer 17,000. Except they’re not all here at once. But we can go over there.” Ken pointed to the Sainsbury Centre. “It’s more grown up there – or perhaps I mean grown old.” 

They moved off. "They started building it the year I left. We protested against its supermarket capitalist intrusion on Academe.”

“Are you going to protest now?”

“Only if the coffee isn’t good, which it will be.” They moved across the park. “We played football there, the other side of the Broad. There were all these working-class kids on full grants then, from all over the country, the first of their families to get to Uni. It's just a finishing school for the rich now.”

“But your beloved Comrade Lucy was rich wasn’t she? And Lance?”

“Not quite like that. Lucy went to State School and her parents were teachers not bankers. Even Comrade Lance did, a very good ‘voluntary aided’ grammar school. But The Girl Who Was Never There and The Girl From UEA and my other best mate James and Rosa his Basildon Essex girl and me were the daughters and sons of people who wouldn’t know an elaborated code and the language of power if it was delivered in their ‘Daily Mail’. If our parents said “I farm 100 acres in Berkshire” it would mean that they actually dug it with their own hands not that they owned them and employed wage slaves to do it for them. If they got a management job because they were better at the work than the idlers in charge, they’d do it for a month and then ask if they could “go back on the tools” with their old workmates.”

“Afraid of responsibility and individual enterprise you mean?”

“They’d never been taught it. It didn’t feel like real work or a real communal enterprise to them. Wilson’s Labour government wanted to get the sons and daughters of those sort of people, the people who had actually man-handled the guns off the Nazis and been war-trained and promoted to sergeants and officers on ardour and merit rather than the clueless toffs who inherited it as entitlement, running the country as well as those not every numerous members of the  ‘officer class’ worthy of the name who were already doing it.  UEA was one of the places that used to Do Different in that way. Nowadays we’re back where we were. 7% of GCSE pupils are privately educated and go on to make up 30% of Oxbridge – 32 at Oxford, 28 at Cambridge – who then of course go on to run the country.”

Yep. He’d know those figures of course. Still working under cover for the Revolution. 

“When I was here they used to invite the 7:84 Theatre Company into Lecture Theatre 1 to make the point that 7% of the British population owns 84% of the nation’s wealth. Puts a different complexion on our robbery stats don’t you think?”

“Sounds like a great night out.”

“It was, actually. Music, jokes, light shows, send ups of rock-buck hoovering Jagger hippy-howling ‘I want some fucking Peace’. One sketch was about a left-wing activist who applied to ‘the Guardian’ to be a radical campaigning journalist. (Ken’s unlovely crypto-comrade Punchy Patricia scoffed contemptuously in his ear of ‘The Guardian’ as having ‘a few wet liberals’ on its staff – as if being a wet liberal was worse than being an honest Nazi - who occasionally get beaten up by the Right and then spew some pseudo-revolutionary sentiments as a result but who can’t be relied upon to provide a coherent steely-eyed programme for ‘smashing the State’…) When they didn’t want her, she applied to ‘The Times’ to be a …campaigning journalist. When ‘The Times’ didn’t want her either, she applied to ‘The Beeston Daily Mail’ to be a… journalist.” Ken laughed at the memory.

“Not sure if that’s a joke, Ken. It’s a bit too serious.”  

“Another was a typical Welsh Labour MP responding to party workers despairing that Parliament was institutional capitalism and that ‘Revolution was the only way to build a fairer society’ with ‘Revolootion? We can’t ’ave Revolootion?  We’d lose the middle class voot.’ We laughed. And it made you think as you laughed. I applied to Cardiff because of this irrational romance I’ve always had with Boudicca, King Arthur, and even amused them in the interview enthusing about my Iceni roots. But Old Cardiff wasn’t a hippy alternative University culture at all. It was buried in the past. And so was that Welsh MP. There may be some Celtic hippy fringes and a long tradition of welfare socialism and an excellent Exam Board but I don’t see Welsh harps and witch hats leading any Revolution anytime soon and that 7:84 actor playing that Welsh MP nailed that conservatism, that materialism, in the old industrial heartlands that the Stalinists will tell you are the engines of Revolution. It was the laughter of self-liberation, of relief. It was one of the few relaxing nights me and Loose had during our non-stop International Service in the Class War. It was only when Lucy stopped coming to their shows that the fun went out of it.” 

 “Ken, it’s time to move on. Let go this lost Revolution stuff going round and round and round in your head? Why not stop burying yourself in the past?”

Shelly immediately regretted her choice of phrase. 

Ken had a ghastly flashback to the moment Shelly showed him Lucy’s remains last week. 

He swigged some water from the bottle she handed him. “Because life isn’t moving on. The nation’s going back. The Old School is back in power and even if they were all brilliant statesmen or even all just competent or even just trying to serve the common cause and the greater good – which these self-serving entitled Westminster village idiots certainly aren’t -  that would still be too narrow a class to draw the talent to do it from. People who’ve had to queue and struggle and work hard and fight develop qualities, develop brilliance – you see it all the time in sport which is disproportionately lower class, or otherwise unprivileged–  it’s why Tim Henman never got to be Andy Murray -  not to mention non-white, people who don’t assume being Prime Minister is a job they can do in their spare time while they let their servants tackle the catastrophes they’re causing and their nannies walk their dogs."

Shelley was frowning as they entered the Sainsbury Centre, ordered coffees and found a place to sit. She tried to remember the accents she’d heard on campus. She couldn’t speak for the Chinese, African and Arab ones but the white ones hadn’t all been upper and middle class by any means. “There’s still working-class students at UEA, Ken. It’s not like the Government stops them coming.”

“Except they do. When I was here, under a Labour Government who believed I should be, there were full grants, parental contributions for the better off and NO TUITION FEES AT ALL. Imagine that. You’re not telling me that it’s as easy for someone who knows they’re incurring tens of thousands of pounds of debt over the rest of their working lives just to come here as it is for the lucky ones whose Mummies and Daddies pay it off to start with?”

“Wasn’t that a Labour Government policy?”

“The biggest betrayal of the soul of Labour in history, yep. The grave of everything Lucy and I marched for. New Labour buried us when we were still cheering Blair’s private-schooled chino-trousered landslide after 18 years of Thatcherism. But the real Tories have danced on that grave and added a few tons of tuition fees since.”

“It’s just practical finance, Ken, a way of paying for all these new Universities. What is it now? 50% of the population in Higher Ed. You’re still looking at the world through rose-tinted spectacles.”

“And you’re looking at it through the tabloids. I saw through Lance’s Leninist lenses a long time ago. I don’t romanticise the Red Wall. That long hot summer before I came up to UEA, I worked on a Norfolk potato picking gang run by a boss from Leicester saving to move to The White Man’s Paradise-”

“Australia?”

“South Africa. Before they grew out of Apartheid. Let’s hope he ended up on the sharp end of a Truth and Reconciliation committee. He would have been happier on an 18C slave plantation but he did his best to recreate one in the killing fields of North Norfolk. We got 10 pence for filling a 100 weight bag with potatoes dug out of the earth with your fingers and carting it to the truck and I did that all day every day for six weeks. You were supplied with 20 bags and when you ran out of bags, they paid you £2. If your back could stand any more, they supplied you with another 20 bags. And so on. There was always a race between a couple of the fanatics to fill 50 bags in a day. There were also the blistering days on certain farms when the potatoes were smaller and harder to get. To compensate, some of the brighter ones hid a bag or two at the bottom of their bag. One day, a bag split revealing the dodge and that put a stop to that. So, putting down my battered and annotated paperback copy of John Donne in the hot van in which we had our lunches, I did what my old Welsh history teacher had taught me to do with his passionate lectures about the labour movement. I suggested we were involved in a class struggle and that I represent our class interests by asking for 15 pence a bag on days when the potatoes were smaller and scarcer on a threat of withdrawing our labour. They were happy to let me try. The boss’s response was to offer me 15p a bag for myself but keep quiet about it, appealing to that eternal principle of the ‘natural party of government’ - self-interest. I of course stayed true to my class and my education and held out for 15p for everyone. The boss needed that farm done that day on a deadline so he gave in. 15p for everyone. I was a working class hero; iconic organiser of the dictating lumpenproletariat. The next time we hit a small potato farm, we were back on 10p and it was take it or leave it. He now had a reserve gang waiting if we didn’t. There was always a handful of different pickers missing every day – I was the only 100% attender - and on that day the keenest strikers (apart from me) were absent. I said we should call his bluff but the gang bottled it and so ended my first strike.  Back to 10p a day and I wasn’t even a hero anymore, which made the sunstroke, sunburn, wasp stings and back-trauma even harder to take. Right at the end of the six weeks, I came back to the van and found the boss reading my John Donne. ‘I’ve never read a book in my loife let alone this roobish,’ he said. I didn’t try to explain it to him, largely because I could hardly disentangle a word of it myself back then– I just knew it was good – but I thought how everybody in the van really agreed with him and then he asked me with real wonder why I hadn’t accepted the private offer of 15p. I said ‘social conscience’ and that made as much sense to him as “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”  and then he said, “the reason I offered it to do you is you’re a go getter:  a hard grafter and a risk-taker like me, not like that load of malingerers.” And before I could do my Labour-rose tinted thing, he asked me if I ever realised that all of the gang except me were signed on the dole: ‘I look the other way and give them their signing on day off , the State pays them what I don’t and they walk away with double what you graft for all week, even if they have another day or two off as well. Is that your Revolution because it looks loike self-interest to me. You could use a bit more self interest yourself.’”

“So what are you saying?” protested Shelley. “That if we all worked for a totalitarian State instead of for ourselves, self-interest would wither away or something? Presumably on some starvation rations in a gulag?”

“A Totalitarian State would be a policeman’s Paradise probably. No wet liberal lawyers and protest groups to stop you putting the villains away. Along with all the dissidents who hate us. We do work for the State after all, even if we call it the Crown. But if my student experience working for Norfolk County Council maintenance department cutting the public grass is anything to go by, it depends on who’s running the gang. If it’s the young chargehand running a gang of old timers who made my life a misery because I was a student, never missing a chance to make me look like an idiot to make himself look clever, then no. If it’s Percy who took over after the apparatchik left for management and used to lead everyone to the pub for half a gallon of beer at the first spit of rain and then either set us back on the hooks and scythes and mowers drunk and for whom the Friday afternoon finished at 2 pm– which we all thought was great – then no, either. I’m not saying the bigger the State, the less self-centred the citizens. Powerful unions protesting workers rights and organising to help those without them is one thing. A transport industry run for the whole country; a national health service and a nations’ schools and hospitals run as a nation’s schools and hospitals instead of cut-throat competitive tenders is one thing.  Doing a night shift in a nationalised car industry and taking in a bunk bed because ‘The State” will bear the costs is another thing altogether and means you end up without a car industry. I’m just saying the less self-centred the citizens, the better State we’d all be in. Together. The better schools, roads, hospitals… Er… if you’ll excuse me a minute. I just need a…”

“Another one!”

“The prostate’s not what it used to be.”

He took a long time. She finished her coffee and waited.

The Sainsbury Centre was, like the rest of UEA but more so, a celebration of wide open spaces, the luxury of not having to build a University within the confines of a town, a suffocating tradition or the demands of a mediaeval heritage. The lake of plate glass which made up the wall was a long way from the table she sat at and seemed to embrace the equally spacious prospect beyond of wild parkland, trees, airy concrete and living water. She noticed a copy of the Student Newspaper, Concrete, on a table and became absorbed in a world the other side of the glass from her own. An article caught her eye, “BEING WORKING CLASS AT UNIVERSITY IS RARER THAN YOU THINK” its connection with their conversation feeling a bit spooky, as if Student Ken (rather than the one currently dribbling at a urinal) was writing it to her from his student days. She checked the byline to make sure he hadn’t.

It read like a journalistic version of one of the essays Ken had described himself writing, a communist manifesto that actually cared about people’s feelings – even the people his comrades wanted to put up against the wall and shoot – and ultimately less a red blueprint for economic restructuring than a hippy railing against the material world itself, an unworldly man fighting on the mean streets for a better world. Like Ken still was. He’d have hated the ‘historical’ materialism that Leninism imposed and been sent to the gulags by the comrades he helped achieve it. 

The student’s case was that University, that apparent answer to all thinking teenager’s angsts, was not an equal and accessible experience for everyone. The case was made sensitively. “I’m not saying you’re a massive Tory because you can afford certain accommodation or get takeaways every night of the week”. How Ken would have loved the use of that word Tory; the reverse of how it played in the Norfolk retirement villages they knew (where ‘socialist’ was the ‘S’ word, as in Sodomite, Sorcerer, Savage and Satan). The author just wanted to say that elements of student life were massively inaccessible for the working class student.  Those without middle and upper class parents to subsidise them had to work part or even full time to pay basic things like rent, which not only restricted their social and cultural life (one of the most  beneficial and developing aspects of University) but even their attendance at seminars and lectures: working class  students in serious employment were the most likely to miss these; with subsequent extra-stressful impact upon their academic progress. Lower income students were also less able to pay the subscription to join student societies. Lifelong University memories in gigs and bars – facilitated as they tend to be by booze, food, transport etc, which all cost money. 

A study (wrote the student) had shown that working class students at UEA have described feelings of ‘inadequacy, lack of belonging, deficit and discomfort’ in contrast to their apparently ‘more intelligent and socially accomplished peers’ and Northern students, in particular, complained of discrimination based on their accents and home location in a University where so many students come from privileged backgrounds-

Shelley looked up suddenly and swore. She still hadn’t found her phone to check the time, but Ken must have been in the loos for at least 15 minutes. She leapt up to investigate, opened the door and called in. And got a dirty look from a florid looking gentleman zipping himself up. No sign of Ken at all. 

So this the great escape!  Not in expatriate escapist Spain - which she’d anticipated - but all the way back here, a Lucy-fall from the very scene of the crime. He’d obviously set the whole thing up from the start; even put the article on the table to distract the gull detective, like the ‘bird’ she was. And now, at the very moment she was placing him at the scene of the murder, she’d lost him there! 

And if she’d lost him, she’d lost the case and a hard-won reputation. Along with her phone full of that murderer’s confessions, which he was no doubt busily decommissioning this moment. Because, as she’d always feared, all these high risk high reward days of tracking Ken and Lance and the windmill had not only taken her all the way to Spain and back in a sort of nowhere circle but ever further and further away from Lucy. Ken’s endless abstractions had not only taken her on a wild goose chase up a riverbank garden path and round a revolving windmill that led nowhere, he had been clever-dicking her and everybody else the whole time! That no-such-thing-as-a-joke was certainly on Shelley and no doubt Ken was killing himself somewhere now about how his endless ivory tower of tall stories had so complexly cock-and-ballsed up a ‘Lady’ DCI. After a week riding the windmill of Ken’s mind, Lucy was more elusive now than when they dug her up. In fact, more elusive than when Wally declared her a Missing Person nearly 50 years ago.

Who was the Wally now? DCI Shelley, the perfect model of  serial female promotion, fierce and bright,  everything done by the book, would now always be the dumb broad who’d been out-Donne by the old school Dick who had has been winding rings round her from the start.

 

Chapter Thirteen

Un-Donne

Lucy walked to the centre of the LCR in front of thousands of faces to make her maiden speech for the Revolution. Her heels rang out in the silence as necks craned to look at her in the spotlight.  Ken’s heart contracted with love for her (exactly like Paul Morel’s for someone – his mother was it? – in ‘Sons and Lovers’, Ken’s own University life story now euphorically relatable in phrases from actual Literature!) standing there so brave and alone and determined in her new Laura Ashley dress. Ken was strictly a civilian as far as speeches were concerned – like her he would fulminate in essays, sell the ‘worker’s’ paper on campus and in town, agitate on picket lines, argue in seminars, hand out leaflets, canvass votes on doorsteps, mobilise on marches, offer physical opposition to Fascists, all of them with his heart in his mouth and his brain in a confusion, but distilling his chaotic passions convictions into a lucid speech in front of a scrutinising crowd was simply beyond him. His convictions generated more heat than light, little Latin, less Greek and no measure. He watched Lucy address the microphone and hold up her quivering notes feeling much of her own stage-fright and all of his own. “Go on Lucy!” he whispered.

She made her points with a tremor in her voice but with that excellent Cambridge-bred diction which more than compensated. The potentially hostile crowd felt the more light than heat passion of  her maiden speech and the tremor, which might have crippled Ken, only won over many neutrals despite the extreme content.  And the hard liners loved the noble and uncompromising position she took.  And her striking and sincere stance, somehow humanised by her outfit of pretty dress and cute leather boots, made the usually Byronic Lance look a bit of a square. 

The thunderous applause that greeted her final sentence hit Ken like a punch. He jumped up, cheering as she came back to join him on their revolutionary benches. Lance, sitting with the Broad Left, joined in, grinning and bearing the fact that his own customary applause had been diminished by hers. The Girl Who Was Never There and The Girl From EUR whooped and whistled, part unquestioning Loveland loyalty, part genuine political admiration for Our Girl. “Doesn’t she sound bright?” they purred. The vote went with the Young Revolution that night and it was generally allowed that Lucy’s brave, reasoned girl-against-the-monolith voice and arguments had swayed the Union in its favour.

Ken was utterly made up for her – enjoying the comradely wink she gave him as she came down from her pedestal and his public identification with her glory – ‘she fabulous and I’m her boyfriend’ he told himself proudly - but he also felt anxious.  She’s gone somewhere I can’t follow. I’m her inferior now, not her equal. I will never be able to stand up and speak our mind for the cause like that.

As they cycled home to the Windmill, through the sweet and twenty summer night, he kept glancing behind and calling her ‘Madam Speaker’ and every time he did so she went all giggly and girly, looking down shyly at her pedals, coming back down to his childish level. He took his customary lead as they cycled – they used to joke about being the classic Hindu man with his devoted wife six paces behind - but felt for the first time like an impostor, like for all his cycling ahead he was actually following her now. 

He tried to restore his sense of equilibrium. It was a warm sexy May and she looked gorgeous on her old boneshaker and - but for the first time in their relationship he felt like a spare part. When he noticed her cycling come-to-bed thighs (in flattering tights instead of oil-soaked, chain-mangled flares) exposed by the new, flapping flowery dress, the shadow of her maiden speech spotlight came over his brain, the shadow he’d been standing in. He hated the way this turned him into a peeping Tom instead of her comrade in arms. 

When they rested together on the grassy back by the side of the main road through Cringleford and several workers’ vans in succession peeped and tooted their appreciation– in a way they wouldn’t if she had been in her customary jeans – he knew something decisive had changed in their love story.  ‘Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover’ (which she was studying at the moment in a seminar called “Yeats, Lawrence and Eliot: Three Faces of Fascism”) had become ‘Sons and Lovers’ (his virgin ‘A’ level peepshow).

She was still his luminous heroine but he no longer felt like her hero. It would take him two confused terms – and less consciously, the rest of his life - to work out what he thought and felt about this, especially when the beautiful and splendid heroine of his love story seemed to be spending more and more time in Damien’s. 

Because, like the devil, his feelings were legion. Proud. Jealous. Hurt. Sad. Lost. Belittled. Angry.

Murderous.

 

Chapter Fourteen

Not Donne

Well, wherever Ken had gone, his VW polo was still at the police station, the humblest vehicle there. Shelley checked it meticulously, then walked in past an interview room in which a drunken gentleman was ‘helping the police with their enquiries’. A smirking DC was asking the drunken gentleman rhetorically “if he had any information about a multi vehicle smash on Charing Cross Road based on a pub security camera capture of his own vehicle ramming the others at 43 mph”. The shaken but stirred gentleman chose to answer literally. “Yes. Those four vehicles are cars; the other one is a lorry.” The DC tried not to laugh and normally Shelley would meet his eye and do the same. But tonight Shelly didn’t feel like laughing.

She called a meeting and asked all available staff (two) to watch the campus buses into town, check the trains and airports and waited. But as she drove past Ken’s watched car out of the station car park at midnight, there had been absolutely no sign of him. Where on earth had he gone?

*

Ken had often fantasised at work while chasing missing and wanted persons about how he would escape a manhunt.; just disappear from his own life into thin air. The truth is you just have to know what the police procedures are and refuse to follow them. In his experience (learned from Conrad’s The Secret Agent at A level and then confirmed on the mean Z level streets) criminals on the run often think like a mirror image of the police themselves – the reverse image you get in a locker room mirror. Missing persons seem more likely to have their own idiosyncratic patterns. Ken’s favourite truancy plan had always been to just leave work in the middle of a shift, catch a random bus and just take it from there. Walk the coastal path to Cromer and book in at a hotel as John Donne. 

But Ken’s actual disappearance was even more complete because even he didn’t know where he’d gone. While completing his wee in the Sainsbury Centre, he recognised his old favourite Literature tutor, now an Emeritus but still looking as florid as ever though and the flower power showing no signs of waning. It took Ken back fifty years. 

And not just metaphorically. The serial shocks of the past few days since witnessing Lucy’s remains in the concrete – the return of the repressed in Spain and at the Windmill; Miss Apple’s Revelations (a Biblical update of Mrs Dale’s Diaries); the Old Bridge and the distilled and intense associations of the old University campus as he wandered out across the heathland past his old room in Norfolk Terrace heading for the Library. On a normal day, he would have been an old man on a vivid sentimental journey, his mind back there in the 70s but his body a reminder that he wasn’t. But because of all his recent mental upheavals, his profound mental impressions took over. He was out of his body in 1978, finishing his degree.

So while the nation’s police were looking for him, he was absent-mindedly using his Access Only Library pass, taking the lift up two flights to 002 on what was technically the fourth floor because the building itself had two storeys below ‘ground’ level, the first below-storey housing what in his day had been the audio-visual centre (mainly vinyl records of spoken word back then, a little different now.) The Library entrance 00 was actually on the third floor on a space age deck winged and flying like everything else in the futuristic concrete adventure at UEA. So while it felt like the 2nd floor, it was actually the fourth and this extremely familiar homecoming sense of spaceship spinning light-years-from-home defamiliarization only helped increase Ken’s mental evaporation into a vivid past present. So much so that yesterday’s infuriating memory of station know-all PC Steve Evans(one of the many empty vessels Ken had known in his career, who never let the fact that he knew nothing stop him shouting down an expert witness) asserting that UEA was a three-storey building so Ken’s evidence of Lucy’s five flight fall was nonsense, became part of his relived student career, reviving his many seminar arguments with an entitled and congenitally-uninformed Young Tory with astonishingly hairy arms called Burke, who never read any of the set texts on principle but didn’t let that stop him braying down anyone else’s informed opinion of them. (Evans was the kind of Burke who would smirkingly point out that you’d misspelled ‘Berk’ as ‘Burke’ as if that called you out while missing the erudite joke about Edmund Burke’s philosophical resistance to reason and also that ‘Berk’ is actually a reference to the pudenda-related rhyming slang Berkshire Hunt.) 

In Ken’s mind, he entered the Library with a student card bearing his photograph as a punk-thin 1978 student with a shock of black hair fuming about an Evans-Burke hybrid uninformedly arguing with his entire thesis and trying to clear such thoughts away to complete its triumphant corroboration in an epic essay that would finally satisfy his own inner conflicts, settle all external disputes, Revolutionise England and finally fulfil his own school-report touted but never quite realised potential. 

In ‘reality’ – by which a mid-Victorian novelist would mean the solid physical facts as observed by some detached omniscient observer (ie the reality which still notionally prevails in court rooms and crime scenes if less so on campuses and not at all in Trump’s America) –  In reality, he entered as a silver fox in a flat cap using his Access Only card,  exchanging a friendly word with the desk porter. (Can we assume the desk porter is detached? No.  But we will.)

The other powerful factor at work was that Ken, despite having forgotten Shelley and the police enquiry he was working on with her, was actually not behaving very differently than normal. He had, in fact, attended the Library with his Old Boy Pass during several periods of unease over the years. At first, decades ago, when the memories and the black outs were still quite raw, as a sort of sentimental journey, sucking at the dugs of the Alma Mater. A bit later, and older, less sentimentally, during a period when he needed to research material for Norfolk cold cases and as a background to the Margery Kempe Murders, he even took books away, forgetting to return them and being fined 50 pounds. As he was, at that time, giving money to help fund poorer students through their courses, he asked to be let off, resigning both his sponsorship and his Library pass in a demonstration of illogical fury when the Chief Librarian refused. This year, he had reconnected and had started spending away days on campus in Broadview Lodge, one of the shining new builds, using the Library, the now much better furbished Bar and other amenities with a mixture of mischievous adventurism and en avant bien étre déjà vu – watching the students he’d once been queueing for a rave at the LCR, as he ate burger and chips from a rave van then staying up until 2 am (watching TV in his room not attending the rave but this was still a wild night: he was usually in bed by 10), taking the buses into town with them and generally enjoying the sense of being a student again only with more comforts and on different kinds of tablets. 

It gradually dawned on him that he was trying to Finish His Degree. Throughout the four decades of his career, he’d kept going back to texts he’d studied at UEA and – a much bigger task – all the ones he hadn’t. Despite the Upper Second With Honours Bachelor of Arts that set him on the police fast track, however precariously – in his own mind he’d never really Donne.

He read the notices on the stairs absently. DO YOU NEED A CHAT? IF IT’S ALL GETTING TOO MUCH, COME AND SEE US ON 001. And on the glass doors of Floor 001 itself, invitations to come in and take the weight of the world off your shoulders. Yes, there’d been counselling in 1978 – his friend James, driven by desperation, had furtively sneaked round the hidden stairs up from The Street next to the launderette as if on the run from the police and through the door into the grey camouflage-concrete pillbox-like room at the end, half convinced the bourgeois state was filming him doing so for its records  – but that much-needed help for the lone crusader fighting against the capitalist state was never this obvious. Half a Library floor and in full view, like it was normal to go round the bend! …And what a blessing that help would have been. 

For a moment, Ken wondered where he was. But then something clicked and he remembered. 1978. Alone. Lost. Lucy-less. Finishing his degree.

No different from usual, despite his AWOL from work and the police search. This is it. On Library 002, the Fourth Floor, pacing in his policeman’s shoes around the entire PN section that was English Literature, walking its enormous expanse – half the floor of the giant building – to map out the task. The scene of the crime! He was a detective after all. And all the clues were there. There was something lucid in that sum of literary, academic and critical word that would crack his case and ‘EAS’ the void at the core of his being. 

He kept walking round the  shelves, vaguely aware that the pale faces of students - 10 girls for every 7 boys  - hardly more than children in his dying eyes – were worrying at their tasks on laptops rather than scrutinising shelves of hardbacks like him. He smiled wanly at the George Eliot (especially the George Eliot) Trollope and Keats he’d put back over the past year, enormous expanses of Text and Criticism he’d never got to during his original Degree and had now completed, yet without much sense of that void being any smaller. 

He found himself, inevitably, in the Seventeenth Century. He’d spent half his original student days there, returning compulsively to John Donne, doing more seminars on him than all the others put together, more than his coursework would balance, and then doing so again for two of his Finals papers: ‘Poetry’ and ‘Seventeenth Century, Literature, Language and Thought’. Damien his ‘Adviser’ never mentioned that maybe he should broaden his field of enquiry, Damien was too busy studying Lucy to waste time advising Ken how to plot his degree. It was Vic the Florid Literature Tutor, who did that. Over a machine hot chocolate at the options fair by the pigeonholes in EAS. No, today in the loos.  Not just because the coursework and spread of Finals papers demanded it but more importantly because there were other literary geniuses to explore, enjoy, be enlightened by. Shakespeare for instance. The Short Poem From Wyatt To Donne. Shakespeare, Theatre, Carnival and Court.  Shakespeare, Tragic Cadence and the Dying Fall...

What did that remind him of? 

There was something Ken needed to finish, some  impossibly metaphysical conceit he needed to work out. He loaded his arms up with some tried and trusted texts and critiques. Donne… No, let’s widen the field. The paper was called ‘Seventeenth Century Literature, Language and Thought’ after all. He added some others by Shakespeare. Greene’s Coney Catchers and Bawdy Baskets. He added a few ‘English Studies’ texts for the history, social and cultural background. Waltzer’s ‘The Revolution of the Saints’. ‘God’s Englishman’ (about Cromwell) by Christopher Hill, his namesake. He didn’t trust the mainstream History Department. It was a matter of principle that he’d never been up to 003 - the fifth floor – where their Burkish mixture of Good King Charles, Whig, Great Man and Not Quite Left Enough Interpretations of History lurked ready to seduce young minds from the Gospels of St Marx (which admittedly were also there but how did you know the wheat from the chaff?). Not since he’d done a mainstream History seminar with that Burke in the first term after Prelims who set them an essay that asked them to look at Europe from Hitler’s point of view and a load of third and second year toffs belittled Ken’s Robin Hood Interpretation of History. “Wealth isn’t a cake you divide up” some daddy-funded 2nd year Wimbledon smartass had sneered, “wealth needs to be created, invested in first,” and he’d never gone back. 

He brought all the reassuringly well-thumbed hardback 17C Texts, Critical Studies and English Studies tomes back to a window desk, next to a young woman with a bottle of water, crunching biscuits and tapping furiously on her keyboard. Conscious that he’d become an irritable old git in his late 30s let alone now in his 60s, where every distraction seemed multiplied,  he willed himself back into the days before he’d been police-trained to monitor and control other people’s (anti-social?) behaviour, the days when if the guy next door to you in Norfolk Terrace blasted your study bedroom away with his electric guitar and amp, you tuned it out by turning your record player on at full voume. He forced himself to focus and the tapping faded into his own thought-scape. This feels great,   he thought. 

Half an hour later, his junior desk mate had a visitor who after an anxious exchange of greetings confided in a fierce whisper that he ‘couldn’t go on.’ Unable to stop his police ears tuning in on this possible crisis, he gradually inferred that the visitor wasn’t a boyfriend ending a relationship or a fellow sufferer ending a life but that he was checking out of a play they were both involved in. In short, a drama, not a crisis, though the boy sounded close to tears. “I just can’t go on, Kathy, it’s doing my head in.” “Have you told Barbara? It’s very short notice.” “No. You know what’s she ,like the week before a show. I can’t face her. Can I give you a note to give her?” “Bloody hell Jonty, why me?” etc etc. In the end, Jonty wrote a note – “I CAN’T GO ON”, slapped it down on the desk (studiously uncollected by Kathy) and left.

The furious tapping and crunching resumed and, this time, Ken’s mental resistance – weakened by the little drama his ears had witnessed – collapsed. After five minutes unable to concentrate, he got up and moved everything (accidentally including the I CAN”T GO ON note) to the empty desk past the next window, and sat down, glorying in the view over the park to the Broad. 

He worked for an hour in blissful quiet. He felt the euphoria of the scholar lifted out of himself and all his little concerns by a complete absorption in his subject, like the philosopher engaged in thoughts beyond the ups and downs of his own limited existence; the scientist making the great discovery’ the poet and artist creating their masterpiece. He remembered this feeling. He’d always been at his happiest in such a state.

Most of the time alas he couldn’t forget himself. He was like a barometer of his surroundings, derailed by the slightest whisper of praise, blown off course by the slightest whiff of slander, a walking civil war of conflicts. But here he was at peace, in that place where the great artists, philosophers and scientists gave the world the best in art, poetry and philosophy; the greatest discoveries in science. In this blissful self-forgetting mental detachment from all material surroundings, this sublime abstraction from all concretions, his imagination was soaring like a poet-genius, giving form to an ideal like the artist lost in his masterpiece; the philosopher finding a solution beyond her own concerns to the problems of life; the scientist discovering the great cure.  

I shouldn’t let the shadow of Damien and his poison fruit tree blind me to the Eden light he stood in. I’m really glad I came to UEA, he realised. To this off-white angel of concrete abstraction beating its swan-spacious wings into the future. Giddily fusing the old separate disciplines, making new connections; not to mention forging progressive new disciplines on the front line of human progress. It was now a world leader in Climate Change Studies. An Old School University would never have suited me. Not even lucid Cambridge with its state of the art Science and state of the science Critical Theory and scholarly Oxford with its PPE Prepping for Parliament and Entitlement insider training of every Government we ever have (which wasn’t looking too clever lately) and probably a lot of intolerable Tim nice but Dims hee hawing across the quad as well. When UEA made him an unconditional offer he couldn’t refuse, he’d slacked off and still got two As and a D. Some of his teachers apologised for not grooming him for Oxbridge entry explaining the Head judged he didn’t “have the right background” (those who did had all fallen short) and there were times during his career when he’d seen Oxbridge fast trackers fly much higher than he ever would just because “they’d made the right contacts at the Varsity” and it looked so impressive on the CV, he’d wondered. He took in the view from the window and sighed contentedly. But this alt-hippy space-age deck of progressive enquiry in Norfolk heathland had always been his home. That study bedroom at the bottom of those giddy stairs in Norfolk Terrace was where he’d really been born.

He focused and read furiously for two hours. At 10 pm, crippled by the effort of reading on a University Library desk through varifocals requiring a severe tilting of the neck, he broke for drink in the Student Bar, conspicuously gulping his way through half a gallon of Camden Pale Ale among the late night ravers until 12 midnight Closing Time.  (The Witching Hour). Also incidentally presenting his Old Boy Library card with its name and recent photograph without any trouble – only a certain wry amusement at his age and the speed of his drinking - when asked for a ‘campus card.’ All the time he was composing his thesis in his head. 

At 12.05 am he stormed back up the concrete steps from The Street to the Square (noting for his own benefit of his own thought processes that UEA’s infrastructural flair for stating the bleeding obvious can sometimes be revolutionary) then turning back the right way to The Library (ditto), opened the outer door and inner checkpoint of the Library  with his card, exchanged another friendly word with another semi-detached (?) desk porter, took a hit on his asthmas inhaler in the lift up to 003, found he now had the entire floor to himself, got out his student block and biro and started writing.

He was resitting his last Finals paper: 17th Century Literature, Language and Thought. He could still see the question he chose then as clearly as if that 1978 paper was still spread out on the desk before him. 

4. “Thou losest here a better where to find.” Really?

That was France’s metaphysical consolation to Cordelia in ‘Lear’ and the question setter was definitely Damien in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach mode; religion as the false opiate heart of a heartless world, he thought. Damien inviting a materialist and /or dissident challenge to the Lamb Tomorrow quietism that Anglicans call Christianity;  that this-worldly Revolution of the Saints traced through the English Civil War and mourned in Paradise Lost. Right I’ll nail it once and for all. But before I get to Milton and Lilburne and Winstanley, I’ll define my terms. I’ll do a close reading of that “most rich being poor, most choice forsaken” context of Cordelia’s and a survey of Donne’s paradoxes and establish and that both are as much dialectical visions of an English Paradise present in its very Lostness as the wildest of the millenarians. I’ll show that all the poets, even Crashaw and the Cavaliers, were on the right side of the Civil War without knowing it.

It was 3 am when he had stopped for his first break and going to the water dispenser in the absence of anywhere else open on campus, had the idea to go up to 003 (the Fifth Floor) for the first time in his life. Forbidden territory. It’ll stretch my legs, he thought, and felt a ludicrous excitement at finally penetrating to the top of the Library. He couldn’t remember if History had always been there but it would be intriguing to see what its shelves looked like. As he opened the door to the stairs, he noticed with an irrational alarm that he wasn’t actually alone. A figure was going back into the carels at the end of the floor reserved for postgads completing theses, with handfuls of refreshments. Strange how disconcerting and spooky one human contact was in the dead of night in all that still space – silent except for the UEA hum: the hidden-in-Plain-sight generators, the ubiquitous monster fans milling hot air on an industrial scale, the space age sails wheeling round below deck at ground level somewhere, the rattling of 1963 metal grids  not yet upgraded as the Bar (tasteful inferior) and the Union (red Chesterfields) had so tastefully been and the original Learning Blocks were now being ; that patient grumble of concrete abstraction that moved through the exposed space craft vents in every UEA building.  

He mounted to the top floor and entered History, which shared a floor not with “English and American Studies” as Ken had remembered but with PE!  (not to mention Sociology!) as part of Social Sciences! Ha! 

The first tome that caught his eye though was a History of King Arthur, a totally unexpected connection with boyhood romance. Ken had been born on the Ken Hill estate in West Norfolk, and, his family surname being Hill, his parents couldn’t resist the charm of christening him Ken.  He became fascinated as a child by the golden Celtic torcs and other artefacts the hilly woodland was full of.  As a youth, he had written a feature for the village history society magazine suggesting that his native woods, looking out over the Wash, together with all the evidence of Celtic rituals and practices, and their belief in the sacredness of water (which would have covered much more of the lowlands below the hill than it did now) made a good case that Boudicca’s lost grave might one day be found here. From the boyhood enchantment with Boudicca’s chariot charge against the Romans he progressed in early teenage to a serious absorption in the Celtic quests and battles of King Arthur and as late as 18 applied to several Welsh Universities (none of whom made him an offer) in the hope of continuing that romance. 

He read with delight, as he stood silver-haired now among the shelves, a serious history, rather than just a romance, of Arthur and had to force himself to put it back for future perusal. Like Lord of the Rings during his international service in the class war, it was a beautiful escape into a fantasy more real than the historical-material world he sought to escape into a better tomorrow but today, as Auden once put it so well, the struggle. He glanced at his watch. It was 4.40 am. He must finish question 4.

He shivered. 003 was empty apart from himself, even the postgrad carels locked and unlit. He was at the top of an almost deserted building, utterly alone, in a dark night of the soul. As he walked back towards the stairs, he noticed the extension. He had vaguely noticed it from the outside; the newer, slightly more prefabricated build; the Block That Wasn’t There, at least not in his day. I’m going to look at it, he decided.

It took an extraordinary effort of will to step beyond the original Library exterior. In his mind, he was stepping through the 1970s exterior concrete and into thin air. He was taken a Lucy lover’s suicide leap. And while the extension was objectively a little less concrete, a little more of an abstraction, a bit flimsier than the original, joined to it by a very obvious, very slightly rickety ‘join’, it was absolutely there.  

Except in Ken’s mind it wasn’t. 

Neil Armstrong probably made his ‘small step by a man’ with more faith than Ken made his great leap into the “Block That Wasn’t There” but he forced himself, like some vertigo sufferer crabbing across a Suspension Bridge, to patrol its entire area. It contained books supplying some new wordly school of study they didn’t have in 1975-1978 – Teacher training was it? or was that the one below ? - he couldn’t remember.

It was as he re-entered terra firma into 003 proper that he heard a wail. He wanted to run to the stairs but forced himself to investigate. He was almost immediately above his own 002 desk when he noticed a something in the main aisle, about half way between where he was standing and where he’d read the Arthur book.

It was a girl in rave rainbow clothes, lying supine in a heap. Like one thrown headlong out of Paradise. Ken shook his head, shocked back into an unambiguous present. He was DCI Ken Hill on 003 of the UEA Library with a body that looked dead.  He felt at her neck for a pulse and noting the rave perspiration going cold on her skin. 

He ran to his desk for his phone, turned it on, vaguely aware of a flood of messages from Shelley screaming WHERE ARE YOU at him as he called it in. He ran back to the body. Her face was spangled with space make up from the rave but he still recognised her. 

It was the Indian girl who’d stayed behind in Damien’s Lecture Theatre a couple of days ago.

*

When the emergency services arrived, the only sign they found of the caller was Ken’s essay on his table with a note: ‘I CAN’T GO ON.’

 

Chapter Fifteen

More Easily Donne Than Said

Shelley retrieved what looked like the longest suicide note in history from Ken’s desk. Can’t he do anything in less than fifteen pages, she thought and then wished she hadn’t. The prefix I CAN’T GO ON said it all in four words: if he needed fifteen more pages to explain why, who was she to begrudge him? Awful to think ill of the dead and besides, for all his faults - including Lucy’s murder, its 50 year cover up and his week-long gulling of her - he had called in the body of the raver in the library, so, like Sylvia Plath laying the breakfast things and pouring two cups of milk for her children before topping herself, he was still thinking of others as he bade farewell to the living,  and, yes, she’d liked him.

She scanned the sheaf of speed-written papers and realised Ken’s suicide note was expressed as a Finals exam-answer. 

Q.4  ‘Thou losest here, a better where to find.’ etc

Metaphysical poetry is an intensely philosophical poetry in which the philosophy typically expresses the paradoxical nature of existence in shockingly extreme conceits. Yet the subject is often a passionate love, whether erotic or divine, no less passionate for being so passionately thought about. In T.S.Eliot’s phrase, the metaphysical poets ‘feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.’ Donne’s thought is felt and his feeling thought.  

In his wittily argued meta-physical seduction poem ‘The Flea’ in which “one blood made of two” symbolises the (refused) sexual union of himself, his lady and a flea which has bitten and sucked their bloods, Donne says if she kills the flea, she kills all three of them, and when she disagrees and kills it anway, he wittily reverses the argument and concudes she will lose as much honour sleeping with him as she has by killing the flea.  

A flea is a shockingly unromantic conceit for love but this very physical metaphysic of self-transcending union will be revisited later as Donne’s sermon “No man is an islande.” Meanwhile, even Donne’s “She is all states and all Princes, I. Nothing else is” is a metaphysical paradox because on the one hand she clearly isn’t and he isn’t and everything else actually very much is - and yet, in the universally recognisable experience of love described, the reverse stated in the actual lines is true. 

John Milton’s paradoxical expression of being in and out of love with God at the same time charges his vehicle the Petrarchan sonnet – before Donne a lyrical rather than a philosophical form – with a similar dialectical intensity.

When I consider how my light is spent

     Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

     And that one talent which is death to hide

     Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

     My true account, lest he returning chide,

     "Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"

     I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need

     Either man's work or his own gifts: who best

     Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed

     And post o'er land and ocean without rest:

     They also serve who only stand and wait.

The sonnet form (like sonata form) is based on a binary opposition. Binary opposition is how we think, using ideas that are the opposite of each other.  For example in many love stories ‘male’ and ‘female’ together make a binary opposition that helps to structure an entire comedy or tragedy (or later a whole novel). Binary oppositions that frequently occur in 17C literature are: God/ Devil; Good/Evil; Faith/Doubt; Spirit/Flesh; Truth/ Seeming; Puritan/Cavalier; Love/ Hate; Worship/Ritual; Strong/Weak…etc.

Milton’s binaries are not just structural but lexical–: ‘spent’ ‘useless’ ‘talent’ (when it’s useless) ‘death’ ‘ere half my days’ ‘denied’. You could argue that these suggest frustration, frantic useless action and failure. In opposition, we have ‘bear’ ‘serve’ (twice) ‘Patience’ ‘mild’, ‘kingly’. These suggest the serene opposite. And the whole is arguably resolved in the passive yet positive ‘stand and wait’ – the opposite of striving with talent and gifts. Both opposites are given equal weight, at different stages of the poem. It is only the overall sonnet structure which gives the final word to the quiet acceptance of his blindness.

A structuralist reading similarly detects that in the octave he is expressing all his frustration about being blind. Line eight ‘turns’ this round. The next six lines express a much more dutiful acceptance of God’s will. But without the octave and the ‘turn’ the sestet is just dogma: just another sermon about being good. The sonnet structure (a bit like the sonata form it is cousin to) gives us the very human complaining Milton giving full vent to his feelings of righteous indignation. “Why me, God!” We all recognise this with a smile. Then, arguably, the turn and the movement towards the beautiful final line seem to be won out of real human suffering. The meek acceptance has been earned. It’s a sincere development – through placement and displacement – to a sincere replacement. It’s not just stated like a credo.

A placement/displacement/ replacement structural reading – a variant of dialexis (thesis/antithesis/synthesis) corresponds with the formal boundaries of the sonnet; the ‘turn’ in the eighth line of the octave and the resolution/ synthesis in the last line. Todorov would call this the equilibrium, the agent of change (God? Milton himself? Both?) and a final resolution in a new equilibrium. The contemporary reader though might start her sonnet with that last line’s new equilibrium “They also serve who only stand and wait” and end it by leaping off the Miltonic roof! 

(Shelley stopped scanning and started close reading at this point)

Dialectics are usually associated with Marx who learned the approach from the German philosopher Hegel, then turned it on its head (as my Prelim History tutor, one of the few non-Burkes in the Department, patently explained to me.) Like many writers, Shakespeare, Donne and Milton use it to say something greater than the sum of two opposites. “Without contraries is no progression” wrote Blake, who believed that true Christianity should embrace all the evils of the world in order to transcend them. As opposed to critics like Dr Rapier who embrace all the goods of the world in order to strangle them.

In King Lear, France declares dialectically that his love has grown warmer than it was before: “Gods, Gods tis strange that from their cold’st neglect? My love should kindle to inflam’d respect.”) And paradoxically how more appealing Cordelia has become to him now her father’s dowry and blessing has been withdrawn.

Fairest Cordelia, thou are most rich, being poor;

Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despis’d.

This surely references Jesus’s paradoxical assertion (in the, for Shakespeare, recently translated little Latin and less Greek and thus much more accessible Bible) that the poor are rich precisely because they are poor in this world. 

Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;

Most choice, forsaken; and most lov’d despis’d!

Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon,

Be it lawful I take up what’s cast away.

Gods! Gods! Tis strange that from their cold’st neglect

My love should kindle to inflam’d respect.

Thy dow’rless daughter, King, thrown to my chance,

Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France.

Not all the dukes of wat’rish Burgundy

Can buy this unpriz’d precious maid of me.

Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind;

Thou losest here, a better where to find.

Unpriz’d precious ( a truly metaphysical paradox). France all but offered his rival first refusal before. “My Lord of Burgundy, what say you to the lady? …She is herself a dowry.” When Burgundy refuses to take her without the dowry, France seems to go beyond the realm of political alliances, reasonable dowries and even ordinary (though noble and sincere) human love. In fact, he goes beyond the material world altogether. His language becomes mystical. This anticipates Cordelia’s later holy language and status. (She weeps holy water, has Christ-like qualities)  The whole of this beautiful speech is built – around mystical paradoxes worthy of Proverbs or Zen - on a dialectical thesis/antithesis structure, often emphasised by juxtaposition or rhyme – unpriz’d precious, losest/find; neglect/respect, even ‘thrown to my chance’/‘queen of us, of ours and our fair France’ Expressed dialectically, France’s feelings of an initial love that reacts with the father’s hate to produce something beyond both. A divine love; a love not of this world, where “thou losest here, a better where to find.”

Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet’ is both astonishingly violent – beginning with ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God” moving through the alliterative, onomatopoeic, beat-stressed ‘break’ ‘’bend’ ‘blow’ ‘burn’ and the allusions to the Catholic-Protestant holy war sieges and religious cruelties and torturings of the time and after the antithesis at the start of the sestet “Yet dearely I love you” ending in paradoxical – and visceral -requests to be enslaved and raped.  “Except you enthrall mee, (I) never shall be free/ Nor ever chast, except you ravish me” as synthesis and resolution. Donne trebly complicates the medieval symbol of female chastity as a besieged citadel – or Thirty Years War fortress - by making it already ‘usurp’t’ and labouring to admit ‘another’; by making the other to whom it is ‘due’ a violently raping God and, in the highly personal context of the Holy Sonnets (probably written in 1609 not long before his death), seeming to adopt in his own person a female role of willing rape victim. 

The whole sonnet hangs on that violent paradox “for I/ Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free” and conveys all the overpowering conflicts of Donne’s 17C religious experience. He lived through – and was torn apart by, and brilliantly (and paradoxically) articulated – dialctically conflicted times. Born Catholic but compelled towards the more forward-looking and individualistic Protestantism in which his career prospered, he has been brilliantly described (by Dr Rapier) as expressing the warring binaries of those two Faiths; between Church and individual; between men and women and between resistance and submission.  

Donne’s “The Good Morrow” expresses – again paradoxically but true to the feeling it thinks (and the thought it feels) with such wit and intellectual force– how love “all love of other sights controules/ And makes one little room an every where.” When Burns says “My love is like a red red rose” we know and enjoy the feeling (and it was a new idea in Burns’ time) but we don’t think about it as a philosophy. Donne would go on to work out exactly why his love is like a red rose (and probably insist on the loving paradox of the thorns as well.)  And then do the same about a flea. Here one room is everywhere – which it can’t be and yet at the same time (for the lovers) definitely is, a paradox. The philosophy behind this argued out, with great poetic charm, wit and skill, to be that the (‘dull sublunary’) lovers’ individualistic fear of one another – the natural animal and 17C class-warring societal state with which the poem begins – is replaced by a mutual love that changes the world, or rather enables the lovers to divine the real world, a much more exciting and ‘true’ discovery than the voyages and adventures to the ‘new’ world with which Donne contextualises and contrasts love’s lucid revelation of reality. It’s a profound thought paradoxically expressed but anyone who’s woken up with a lover and felt so completely at home that there’s no particular need to go out (beyond ordinary animal needs) will feel and understand it. As Donne colloquially commends the Sun elsewhere “She is all States, and all Princes, I” / Nothing else is…. Shine here to us, and thou art every where; This bed thy centre is, these walls thy spheare.”

In his later Devotion a sermon preached as (Anglican) Dean of St Paul’s, Donne works through the paradoxical thesis “Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee” with relentless force and lucidity “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent; a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse…” This internationalist, little self-transcending real unity of apparently competing social atoms who are nevertheless, paradoxically, actually one communion, a higher self – in and as God -  is Donne’s mature extension of his youthful divining  in romantic love of a blissful fearless reality beyond the ego .

Dr Rapier has memorably shown how Marx famously applied the dialectics to economic classes rather than to ideas, to a concrete rather than an abstract universe, so that the class ‘thesis’ of the refined landed aristocracy is opposed by its antithetic opposite, the vulgar trade-driven bourgeoisies, and the conflict between these creates confusion capitalism. This new thesis of atomistic individualistic capitalism is opposed by its antithesis, the proletarian collective masses, and the (violent) conflict that ensues creates a new (and final, peaceful) synthesis – a classless (and collective) society. Perhaps what ALL the poets and writers and thinkers of the 17C, Cavalier as much as Puritan, were sensing, beneath the gruesome conflicts of the age, particularly the genius poet-thinkers considered here, was “a better where to find” - not just in heaven or France but in a new Eden of the future. A historical materialism beyond the material world and beyond the end of history-

I CAN’T GO ON.

 

Chapter Sixteen

Almost Donne

Ken had, once again, eluded them. As they searched the UEA Library and its immediate environs for his body, his mind, unconscious of the dead or alive manhunt, was trying to find the books he’d selected for his essay. It was a complete mystery to him. The usual procedure if books were left out on a desk untended overnight was that they would loaded on to the ‘changed your mind?’ trolley for subsequent return to the shelves and sometimes this meant they in effect disappeared from the user’s view and got silted up into the institutional machinery.

Such are institutions, thought Ken. They begin as a way of facilitating some vital human interaction but reify, like abstract verbs into concrete nouns, into an obstruction of their original raison d’etre. In principio erat Verbum. In the beginning the Verb… in the end the Noun; the messianic Love a barking dogma. The Saints of the Seventeenth Century understood this about the church; Ken had heard Lance say it about modern schools: they spent so much time and money and staff time facilitating and organising the thing they existed for – learning – sending a thousand people back and forth across a site, keeping the site safe, dealing with the disputes, making sure secretaries and a senior managers who didn’t actually  do any of the actual thing the institution existed for – teaching – got their coffee and biscuits and their legal representation and their reprimand if they were discovered having an affair at work etc etc. The river gets silted; the abstract turns to concrete. Ken found the best way to avoid losing the books he was working on was to return them to the shelves himself and on his return take them off again. On this occasion though, he’d been distracted by the lifeless body of the girl. And the books had disappeared, (along with his phone and the essay) which meant he was in the office of one of the Librarians chasing where they and the phone had gone as the manhunt raged around them. Truth is often stranger than fiction- even Derrida’s postmodern deconstructed fiction. (Especially Derrida’s postmodern deconstructed fiction.)

Meanwhile, back in the ‘present’, Ken decided to search around his desk one more time for the missing books and eluded three separate uniformed officers on the way up to 002. He disappeared into one lift as a uniform came out, emerged from it onto the fourth floor just after a second disappeared into the adjacent down lift and nipped into the gents for a wee just as a third was passing it on the stairs. At the desk, he accepted with appalled fatalism that the perfect answer to Q.4, achieved in a frenzy of concentration he would never be able to repeat, was lost but was partially compensated by at least finding his phone. My brain is definitely going, thought Ken, unable to think of the word that described this. Begins with a. No, it’s gone. I have absolutely no memory of leaving it there in what looks like an evidence bag. WTF. He saw again the torrent of WHERE ARE YOU? messages from Shelley. This time, without the distraction of a body on the library to report, he immediately called her back.

“Who’s this?”

“Ken! Who else would it be on my phone?”

“KEN!! Are you kidding?  Ken! Where are you?”

At this point a young rookie DC he’d missed on the stairs came back anxiously looking for an evidence bag he’d managed to leave behind in his haste to get all the relevant artifacts back to the station.  “Hey, what are you doing with that?”

“It’s my phone! Who the hell are you to ask?”

“DC Evans.”

“I might have known. Evans Elp Us! The Emergency Service From Hell!”

“Hang on a minute, you’re-”

“DCI Ken Hill, yes. Get your hands off my bloody phone!”

“Ken Hill, I’m arresting you in connection with the attempted murder of er Jai… Vindaloo… an unidentified female student. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Not really. I’m the hero who called that in. And you think I did it? …”

“Are you resisting arre-?”

“Wait a minute. Did you say ‘attempted’ murder? You mean she’s alive?”

“No thanks to you.”

“Every thanks to me. And thank God. If she’s alive pal, you can ask her yourself. I gave her CPR and called in the emergency services, unfortunately including you, which is a bit like asking the MET to photograph a victim or protect a member of the public.”

Shelley called down the line. “Ken. Can you pass your phone to DC Evans?”

“Absolutely not.”

“I mean just so I can talk to him.”

“You want to talk to Dickhead of Norwich? The Know All Who Doesn’t Know Anything?”

“Er yes.”

Ken handed Evans the phone. “A human being called DCI Waverley wants to talk to you, Big Head,” explained Ken. “Try not to mess it up.”

Evans snorted and took the phone. Ken could hear a lot of shouting. After which Evans shut his mouth for the first time since Cain killed Abel and handed it back.

“DCI Ken Hill, I’m de-arresting you. I am also authorised by DCI Waverley to request politely if you would agree to accompany me to the station.”

“Why have you forgotten where it is?” 

Dickhead of Norwich gave a tight smile. “She says she has rather a lot of things to ask you.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you son. And the next time you try to arrest a DCI who’s just saved a life, remember your Ps and Qs. Now you toddle off back to your sty. I’d like to talk to a colleague in peace.” 

“Ken?”

“Shelley. Is the girl really OK?”

“Yes.”

“Was she the one we saw in Damien’s lecture the other day?”

“Yes, it’s one of the many things I need to talk to you about. I thought you’d killed her and topped yourself. Before that I thought you’d done a runner. I’ve been trying to work out why from that crazy essay you left on the desk.”

 “YOU’VE GOT THE ESSAY! BRILLIANT! I THOUGHT WE’D LOST IT.”

“It was evidence, Ken! Have you any idea of the chaos you’ve caused round here, with half a Force looking for you. I thought it was some kind of Suicide Note. I’m glad you’re not dead and I’m glad you’re so happy about some exam essay but you have a lot bigger questions to answer.”

“No I don’t. The answer to who killed Lucy all in there. I finally worked it out. Made the unconscious conscious. Solved the crime.”

Shelley sighed. “And can you share these amazing revelations with the forces of law of order?”

“With you, certainly. Only I won’t be coming to the station with Bighead.”

“So I heard. Did you have to be so hard on him? He’s only just out of training.”

“Send him back for more. In fact, keep him there permanently.”

“And you did disappear.”

“And he already thinks he knows it all. And I didn’t disappear. I just forgot you were there and what decade I was in and then I was just writing that essay. But I’ll meet you – just you – on the campus.”

This again. Shelley hesitated, drew in a breath. “All right. Where?”

 

Chapter Seventeen

All But Donne In

“Thing is, Ken. You keep talking about your UEA like it was a Workers’ Paradise.”

“Lost.”

“ I don’t buy it. It sounds like more like Murder.”

“It was Paradise. Murdered. And we’re now about to find the Murderer. And then it can be Paradise Regained.”

“Really?”

“Definitely. It’s been really good coming back here with you, someone who’s not dead. A person can get stuck in the past.”

You Ken? Really.

“See every change as a decline. But this place is alive; wings fully extended and really flying now. Seeing it with you this past week – that initial shock of seeing Lucy’s body was like a defibrillator; it’s put the breath back in my lungs; dug me out of Lucy’s grave: unpeeled the Damien-snakeskin from my eyes. I had a great time here; and if I lost it near the end, well like that Tennyson course I ended it with, “Tis better to have loved and lost; than never love at all.” And it’s still going on, like a sky dive through thin air. Just not for me.”

“I see.” She didn’t. 

“What did you make of the essay?”

“Er-”

“This is the short version.”

He handed her a typed sheet. 14 lines. A sonnet. She was just at the volta when he spoke it all aloud by heart.

“What seemed to us a consummation,

A coming of age, to life, to our selves

In concrete abstraction of hippy elves

Busy in hives of abstract concretion,

Essays in ringcraft, spaced-age constructions

Of new humanities, new chosen twelves,

New depths and heights, soarings and delves,

Was just the dawn of this Urban Every Airman.

This Now Universe of New Spacious Age

With its Tom Paine wing, Climate Change lung,

Julian-vision beach under the paves, 

Greyed Apollo flight steps, new boldly-go stage,

Beam me up up-lifts, vertiginous walkways

Through heath, sky and water, has passed – to the young.”

A long pause. 

Shelly coughed. “What are you supposed to say when someone speaks poetry at you? ‘Very nice’.”

Ken laughed. “Just tell me you liked it.”

“I liked it.”

“You’re using the past tense as a distancing modality.”

“I like it.”

“You need a translation don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”

“I’ll risk it.”

 “Last month, half a century after I first visited UEA for my interview - in March 1973; they made me an unconditional offer I couldn’t refuse: - I spent a weekend here, working in the Library, watching Six Nations rugby in the SU bar; walking all my old acres of heath and parkland, munching through a Full Elizabeth Fryed breakfast in the Sportspark (my only work out there during the weekend), making films on my Iphone of old haunts and new Broads and wondering at all the new build. What’s your name? University Plain? No, Earthling! ‘Norwich Research Park’!”

She glanced at the sheet and noticed he was quoting the typed footnote to the poem, which he also evidently knew by heart. And, like many footnotes she’d read, she was none the wiser. 

“Ken, this has been going on for days. We really appreciate that you saved Jaya – and by saving her you have also really helped us in our Lucy enquiries beyond the call of duty as will become clear-”

“ ‘But’ …”

“But a week ago I gave you the benefit of the doubt when you asked if you could help. And, apart from your undoubted heroics with Jaya, I’ve been round and round the bloody Mill with you and all we’ve got out of it - apart from that Very Nice Poem – yes, Ken, I like it - is an epic Who Donne It exam essay that disappeared up its own ass on the first page as far as I’m concerned.”

“This is what happens when you stop fast tracking coppers. And let teachers who only got a grade D themselves teach A Level Literature. And let Government-programmed glorified teaching assistants who can’t spell teach English. You’ve got to learn to think for yourself, Shell.  You know what we got out of it.”

“If you mean I got a holiday in Spain on the firm’s time, that’s actually beside the point.”

“It isn’t. But we got a lot more than that. We got Lance.”

“But I still don’t know what he told us. You’ve cost us a fortune. The Spanish castle in the air. The manhunt we had out for you for 24 hours.”

“Some manhunt. I never even left the campus.” 

“Criminals don’t normally do an all-nighter in their alma mater’s Library. The uniforms aren’t used to it.”

“As I’ve said before, you’ve let the criminals get cleverer than you are. Don Quixote Morse has left the building. Sancho Panza Lewis aka PC Know All is the tribute act and he can’t do it.”

They were walking by what she now knew was his old ground floor ziggurat room now. 

"And before Loveland you all lived in that …beehive?"

It wasn’t her idea of Paradise. 

"Yep. Lucy in a cell at the top of the ziggurat Block 3, me in Block 5 at the bottom. The lady in her tower and the knight, looking up to heaven."

Shelley looked up to heaven.

Ken persisted. “The criminals are cleverer than you. But luckily I’m not the criminal.” He paused, looking over at the Library through the cedar trees. “What happened to the girl I found dead anyway?”

“Lucy?”

“Very good, Shell. And a brilliant shot like that deserves a confession. All in good time. I mean the raver. What was her name? Jade.”

“Jaya Tandula. One of your lot.”

“My lot?”

“A utopian. Extinction rebellion; climate activist. She was doing English Literature and one of the other things some of them do with it – Drama… Creative Writing… Philosophy… American Literature.” She checked. Creative Writing.”

“In my day they’d have called all of that EAS. Except Creative Writing which wasn’t a Course back then. It was a howl from the suicide roof fighting your demons in the dark without an Adviser in sight . The nearest we got to Creative Writing as a Course was Malcolm Bradbury chatting to us in the lift and Angus Wilson giving a celebrity lecture on Dickens. We just hoped the EAS Literature we studied would rub off. For the hippy proof – or not - of which, look up our do it yourself poetry magazine, ‘The Truth.’ But I haven’t needed a degree in Creative Writing to plot this Who Donne It. I’ve solved it with UEA Linguistics.”

“So you keep saying. But Jaya didn’t do her formal Creative Writing option either. Or some of the Literature. She kept doing options in Climate Change Studies instead.”

“That’s DEV in old money.”

“She was advised badly by some Green Man more worried about the planet than he was about her degree.”

“The Green Man may have a point.”

“But we can’t live like that.”

“But we can’t live without it either. Bourgeois realism is a puerile fantasy in those terms.”

“She took far too many options in Climate Change when she wasn’t actually throwing soup at some painting or powdered orange over some Snooker tournament table. So she hadn’t got enough courses to cover her Finals papers. So she was paying for private tuition.”

Something clicked in Ken’s brain. “With Damien.”

“Correct. So to pay for the private tuition she had to take a full time job on top of her main Finals prep while also catching up with what she’d missed and saving the world. It took its toll. Kindly old Doctor Death offered her another way of paying him.”

Ken swore savagely. “I hope she told him where to stuff himself? I know she’s a woman free to choose but in his terms she’s just a child.”

“She told him where to stuff it all right. But when he cut her loose, and also sent out a directive to other tutors that she wasn’t to be given unfair assistance, she had nowhere to go.”

“But she did! She could have reported him. Exposed him. She could have come to us.”

“He’s the highest authority in the University. It’s his Universe. She’s just a rebel angel crying foul. And a lot of police are still Wallies. PC Steve Evans for instance-”

“So she went to a rave with her mates, took too much ecstasy mixed with too many shots and decided to go out on a high.”

“Yes.”

“Why did she come into the Library?”

“I don’t know. Why do drunk and desperate people come into Libraries, Ken?”

“You think I’m in as desperate a state as she was?”

“I do, yes. I presume in her desperate state, in the middle of a rave that wasn’t working, Jaya thought she’d have one last cram for those missed courses she wasn’t up to speed on.”

“And write the perfect exam answer that would make it all right.”

“She didn’t get as far as you. She was on her second page and presumably going back to the shelves for another crammer when she passed out. When we found that I CAN’T GO ON note with your essay, we thought it was you doing a ‘Hamlet’ instead of her. That confused DC Evans for a while.”

“Well, he’s very easily confused. He’ll probably be Chief Constable by Thursday. Did you do ‘Hamlet’ for A level?”

“Er, yes. How did you know?”

“If you’d done ‘King Lear, you’d know it wasn’t my I CAN’T GO ON note either. It was some student resigning from a campus production. A production no doubt currently still waiting for its Godot to turn up. I must have picked up his note with my essay.”

Shelley wondered if she dare ask why doing ‘King Lear’ instead of ‘Hamlet’ for A level mean she would have known that. She decided she didn’t have time; that his reasoning, like Hamlet’s, was refined to the point of madness, real or feigned; that his clever dick, while heroic in Jaya’s case, was no longer amusing or revealing in his own and besides she had much more important questions to ask about the case. Lucy’s.

However, she asked anyway. “So why would have I known that if I’d done King Lear instead of Hamlet?”

“Elementary, my dear Waveney. In ‘Lear’ there is a note left on a table written by one brother pretending to be another which their old fool of a dad blindly believes with tragic consequences. In ‘Hamlet’ there’s a play within a play within a play and an audience wishing after four hours that Hamlet would just for God’s sake shut up and get on with it. Which means instead of checking who’s written the note and for what purpose before deciding what it says, you just send in a Special Needs Fortinbras called DC Evans to force an ending - Hang on, you said Jaya was doing English Literature.” Ken could almost hear the ‘Sherlock’ music in his head.  “So why is she top flooring on 003 grabbing crammers from the Social Sciences shelves. Among History books with a forward moving plot and a purpose?”

Shelley blinked. “Rather than these hippy windmills of your mind? It’s very interesting you should ask that. When Jaya first came round, half way between this world and the next, she was babbling incoherently about some ‘wali’ – she pronounced it ‘vali’ – ‘performing miracles’ from the fifth floor by controlling all the thoughts there, which then ‘mentally direct’ the ‘almighty powers’ on the fourth. She was in her unbalanced state presumably trying to write the perfect exam answer by magic. Invoking some perfect wizard mind master while completely off her own.”

“Jesus.”

“She mentioned Jesus as well as it happens as she started to come back to us. She called Him something else first when it was just an Indian nurse with her and then, noticing our white faces, translated it as Jesus. ‘Jesus’ appeared to her, she said, His face blissful and serenely compassionate on the seventh floor but his almighty voice on the fourth commanding her to stop the perilous mind games and quoting some poet called Kabir at her.” Shelley consulted her phone for the quote. “Saheaba ka ghara dura jaisi khajura/ Carhe so cakhe prema-rasa gire cakanacur.”

“Impressive pronunciation. Someone’s been on a course. ‘Saheaba ka ghara dura jaisi khajura/ Carhe so cakhe prema-rasa gire cakanacur.’ Which translates as?”

Again, Shelley wished the compliment didn’t please her so much. “Allowing for what gets lost in translation, “The Lord’s house is high, like the top of the tallest date palm/ If he climbs it, he tastes the nectar of love; if he falls, he breaks his neck.”

“That rings a bell. There’s a Sufi story called the Conference of the Birds. It was one the source texts for Chaucer’s Parlement of Fowles. But hang on. Where did Jaya get seven floors from? There only five floors to the Libra-.”

“Ha! Mr Seventh Evans! Mr Know All Who Knows Nothing! I think the seventh floor in Jaya’s blown mind might have been that sky.”

Brilliant. Ken looked up into its scary, windblown infinity. Not his Heaven of choice, but then neither was Dante’s. Those old fine wine and thousand virgin Arabs were better at visions of Heaven as well as algebra and medicine. Maybe the reason we don’t get so many martyrs in the West is that a harp in a cloud with an angel in yellow crayon singing Anglican hymns just doesn’t compete with all the heavens we can buy on Earth. “So the sixth is…”

“Yeah,” said Shelley, scanning the main block of UEA’s long continuous stretch of one queasily, “The roof.”

 

Chapter Eighteen

Not Quite Donne.

“OK, Shelley,” said Ken, somewhat self-consciously, looking at the E05 sliding kitchen window he’d used a short cut to his old room so many times and wondered if he could still navigate. “We’re here. The final chapter. If this were a novel, you’d know from how few pages are left-”

“ ‘Were a novel!’ Shelley finally had her revenge for all those ‘it’s not dunnit’ it’s did it/ it’s not Goldsmith it’s Golding put downs. “It’s ‘was’ a novel!” You sound like someone from the Norfolk backwoods!”

 “Context, my dear. If your semi-literate Someone from the backwoods of Norfolk says it, it’s a deviant grammar, or an expression of class solidarity, depending on your politics. As in “that were a difficult exam paper Sir.” If I say it, speculating here under the cedar trees and ziggurats of UEA, it’s the subjunctive case. The third person form of the verb, conveying a request, a wish or a hypothesis. In our case, a hypothesis, because this is not really a novel.  It’s real life.”

This is the life, thought Shelley. “Fair enough. You win again.”

“So – to repeat. If this were a novel, you’d know from how many pages are left how close we are to the reveal, always provided of course we’re on the same page.”

“I think we are. Is the final chapter you show me how and where Lucy died?”

“Yep…”

“I bet it’s a long chapter!”

Ken and Shelley climbed in through the ground floor kitchen window, caught the smell of the showers and toilets - 'that takes me back,' said Ken - and started the five storey climb to the walkway. "We used to call this Jacob's ladder'" he said, breathlessly. "Like the one in Genesis, you know?"

" Phil Coll-?"

"Lucy and I read the whole Bible one vacation. You can't understand the English Revolution without it."

 “Every time we get near to the heart of the case, you go off on one about ‘The Revolution’.”

“You’ve noticed.” 

“I can read you like a book now.”

"But do you read why? Why I always go back to the Revolution? You should try reading the Bible instead of listening to Phil Collins; the Genesis with Gabriel in it but long before Peter.  First ever murder case: a holy war crime by Farmer Cain on Shepherd Abel…”

Here we go. 

“Still unsolved according to Shelley and Byron, who swore Cain had been framed.  Maybe it was the third brother, Seth, or their text-deleted sister-wives. And the Adam and Eve chapters Luce and I read nude in the garden.

Keep him focused. "I hope it was a warm day!"

"It was a long hot summer!"

Now. "And you really didn’t mind that she loved other people?"

Silence.

"I'll tell you at the top," he puffed. 

Two cleaners came abruptly out of corridor on to the steep stairs and nearly sent Ken flying back onto Shelley. The first, a youngish woman, smiling broadly and clucking happily in a rich Norwich accent, was extremely apologetic and loquaciously friendly and material in the way he remembered Pauline the cleaner on his own corridor had been in 1975. So much warmer than he was used to in his windblown village on the Norfolk coast, where local strangers never spoke first or gave any more response than was strictly necessary and the turbo-driven holiday homers didn’t even see you unless you complained about them parking their Range Rovers across your drive while they took their greyhounds for a walk through the crops. The second cleaner, a middle-aged Black man who had smashed a pint of milk all over the stairs in the confusion, was not so cheerful. 

“No use crying over spilt milk,” quipped Ken.

If looks could kill

Ken’s first personal encounter with a Black person had been in the first week on this very campus at the age of 19, waiting behind an African fellow student queueing like Ken for letters from home. It’s funny now but then it was a culture shock, the alarmingly different features, colour, gait, stance, hair, voice. He was just a boy from the Norfolk woods mildly alarmed by the Geordie accents he couldn’t follow in the Prelims seminars and convinced the Glaswegian on his corridor was asking for a fight rather than for a light. In those days before Black footballers were the stars of your native football team and Hendrixes stopped letting you pretend they were White, diversity for a village boy like him was when they offered you a choice of cod or battered sausage at the local chip shop.  He had enough common humanity to object when some thugs at school had said the brothers from the local Indian take away smelled funny but had not yet learned how his and their own white rotting dairy-pungent diet smelled to those reared on the sharper sweats of chilli and garlic. He got used to Black students on campus long before he met any among the general working population including professionally as an arresting officer, with all the institutionalised racism that carried.  Post-Stephen Lawrence, he recalled the institutionalised semi-correctives slowly sinking in through the thick white skins. Both Ken and Shelley, stepping up through the brutal shards of glass and white liquid, tried to look like policemen who weren’t about to arrest the cleaner for Lucy’s murder in 1978 because he was Black in 2023 (“He looked guilty your honour. And if looks could kill, well, he’d have killed us as well.”) Shelley’s additional unease was that in the spectacular if momentary violence of the smashed bottle, she half expected an attack, orchestrated by Mad Ken. 

They peaked the stairs and came out on the walkway, still only half way up the Ivory Tower. An adjoining walkway, which to Shelley shook like a rope bridge in a thriller, took them there. "I used to dash up and down the stairs all day. Now I-" Ken couldn't finish. 

Shelley indicated a lift. They took it to the fifth floor.

Lifts made Shelley claustrophobic and Ken was too close.  She started to chatter. "I can see now how living like a worker bee in those hives back down there might drive under-pressure students to murder or suicide. But what made a lovey-dovey commune like Loveland go to pot?"

"Ha! You never lived in a ‘communal’ house ? Shared a flat?”

“In Hall when I was training. But I admit I went home for weekends. I like my own space.”

Ken moved even closer. His eyes were blazing. “Despite the Christian-communist connotations, after the honeymoon phoney war, 'commune' is usually another word for murder. We started off holding all our books and records in common, with all our initials LLEEK like some version of CCCP on everything and with a washing up rota like some Five Year Plan on the fridge and ended up stealing each other’s pens and fishing through the five week washing up pile for a carving knife to kill each other with, over whose turn it is.”

“I can see my single lifestyle has advantages.” 

But Shelley thought that ‘neighbours’ didn’t have to be living in the same house to generate ‘domestic’ scale murderousness. She remembered the Cole Green Murder – a brutal cottage murder on an idyllic village green in Norfolk– caused by “inconsiderate parking” by one neighbour. The victim – a chavvy chic holiday second homer - variously called himself an arts dealer or the owner/director of an arts centre and the two SUV mini coopers with personalised numberplates he and his wife Chavvy permanently parked on the dangerous corner of the public highway – even when they were on their long and exotic foreign holidays or at their usual home in Chaventry -that bent into and out of the village green certainly proclaimed wealth and self-importance though the garish works van he added in due course suggested he was in fact the rat-faced owner of a small picture-framing business. His botox-bloated-face-lift wife ‘worked in benefit fraud’ and had the ungenerous and suspicious personality to match. The three families who actually lived in the row, as opposed to the six vacation homers who only loaded its kerbsides with Range Rovers at irregular intervals, all struggled to navigate the one-couple carpark generated by their arrogant anti-neighbour. The four bag family shop family shop for the week - as opposed to the dainties of weekend holiday shopping  - with babies and all their gear had to be ferried across the main road; family visitors were unable to find a parking space; the one cottage with a parking space was blocked from using it by the ferrity-marky parked penis of an enormous SUV occupying the reversing space, necessitating either a kamikaze parallel reverse into the oncoming traffic of a main road on a blind corner; a long detour around the green back into what often turned out to be a catch 22 gridlock of vehicles coming from three lanes at once; or a forced parking across its own drive adding one more obstacle to the public highway. This RTA waiting to happen finally erupted when the neighbour with the unreachable drive had his wing mirror clipped by a passing farm vehicle and then smashed off by the HGV behind it. The matt black door of the offending holiday home, its ancient Beech hedge replaced by urban railings, its doors and fences all painted the same matt black as the ‘arts centre’ director/benefit fraud snatchers habitually wore, which together with their customised art numberplates and beetle-black vehicles had earned them the nickname “The Black Arts” - was furiously knocked on and shouts of ‘I’D LIKE A WORD WITH YOU!’ ensued. 

But no Black Arts figure emerged. The police were called to the scene later that day and found the picture framer with his face smashed in with a car wrench (later identified as his own) and his wife drowned in the old well that served the row of cottages as a cess pit accompanied by the murder weapon. Seven different neighbours, including two holiday homers the Black Arts had driven to destruction with their absentee towel-by-the-pool parking, were all in the frame for the double murder. All of them, decent parishioners and good if distant neighbours all,  had the opportunity and confessed to wanting to kill them and even of thinking about how they might do it, though most of them (not the neighbours with the drive) would probably have stopped at keying the SUVs under cover of the Norfolk dark. 

So you didn’t need to be living in the same house to fume and chafe for months and eventually explode into a madness and kill someone. But Shelley agreed with Ken that living under the same roof certainly helps.  Because they eventually found the Wife Donne It. (With good reason, but that’s another story). And had slipped and fallen and choked to death in the cesspit she’d inexpertly opened in the country dark, trying to bury the murder weapon in the neighbourhood’s night soil.

 “You’re right. One of the first things I learned is that a family kitchen is a crime scene waiting to happen – all those sharp blades and ovens and scalding oils. Not to mention the pillow murders and axe-in-the-shed horrors and DIY homicides. And the flower bed burials. I’ve seen marriages and families – rich, poor, educated, illiterate, highly cultured, feral, utopian, cynical - that bring out the very worst evil in people.”

*

Or did I get that case wrong, Shelley thought, a sudden chill creeping across her back.  Because for a long time, until forensics explained that the heavy damage to the wife’s face could have been caused by the impact of her fall against some rusty bars set in the wall of the well, the evidence suggested that the husband had killed the wife not the other way round. He’d clouted her with the wrench and thrown her in the cesspit, leaving Shelley with that long-unexplained mystery of who then killed the husband. 

Or was she muddling that cold case up with her enduring present tense suspicion that Ken killed Lucy? Unless of course, Lucy killed Ken and then fell – no suicidally jumped – five floors into the reifying concrete and drowned, horribly. Which would mean that piercing-eyes Ken, with his strange emaciated pale face and obsessive haunting presence – was a ghost…. 

She was working with a ghost! …A ghost reliving his own murder. Haunting the crime scene. Of course. That explained everything. I thought I was the hero of a Murder Mystery but really I’m in a Ghost Story! 

*

“As well as the very best,” she conceded. “The darkness as easily as the light.”

“Indeed. And our open marriage of light and dark wasn’t exactly helped by outside forces. Our Morning Star of the Revolution - Damien - after lecturing us against capitalism in class all day, put the rent up as soon as we'd moved in. The next day he broke our campus picket line to bank his loot with Apartheid at Barclay's. And sneered 'where's that in the text?' whenever we tried to work out a Party line in class. It was such a joy when we did seminars with someone who wasn’t preaching St Marx one minute and sneering “where’s that in the text?” the next. Such a liberation to read Dickens. Chaucer. Tristram Shandy. Victorian Poetry. With other teachers who liked us. It was like going home for the weekend. Having a Laugh that didn’t have a Dracula sneer in it.  A whole canon without that Bite of Death-Love in it.”

“So why did you keep going back to Rapier?”

“That’s the degree level question I’ve never been able to answer, Shell. He had a fatal attraction. A brilliant charisma. For Lucy and me especially because we were also his sort of acolytes, living in his Castle, tied to his Millstone, prosecuting his Revolution. When I still had Lucy, it still kind of worked. She made that world go round.  A commune, like any marriage, needs a shining light to guide it - some burning longing for an ideal that guides everyday life and makes it worth living. We had Lucy.  I had Lucy especially. But then Lucy's light dimmed.”

“She got into bed with Damien?”

“Yes. And me with her.”

“What?”

“Not literally. Though I fancy a part of me really did get off on ‘my’ girlfriend sleeping with the Campus King.”

“Which part?”

“Not that one. Though I’d have killed to be invited back to his Castle like she was. Have casual social intercourse in his kitchen, raise a wine glass over dinner in his dining room, chat about Donne in his Study where he marked our essays, get my hands on his brilliant annotated Library. I was jealous and I confess …it helped to have that vicarious affair with him via her. 

“Ugh.”

“I know. And we changed. Everyone at Loveland, me included, judged her by our own lack of faith. So while she was spreading Free Love, I got jealous and possessive; Lance projected his guilt - at letting his comrade down - onto her; The Girl Who Was Never There flashed her green eyes and whacked her for 'stealing' ‘her’ Lance. The Girl From EUR actually stole and wore her clothes and returned them stained and spoiled as if it was somehow a blow for proletarian justice. Laura sent her death-threats. And Damien was permanently terrified that she'd shop him to the authorities for corruption. 

"You mean for sleeping with her?" 

"Yes. Grooming her first with his brilliant erotic readings of literary texts, then giving her a nonstop stream of top grades all the time she was sleeping with him, then reminding her the day she tried to end their affair that he was the examiner for two of her five Finals papers."

"That's appalling. I'd have gone straight to the Dean of Studies." 

"He was the Dean of Studies."

Shelley looked down from the top floor onto the service road below. " This view's making me giddy.

“Me too. Look, Shell, I’m running out of time. I’ll have to rush the last bit.”

Hallelujah. 

“Mind if we sit down away from the window?”

They got as comfortable as the seminar chairs allowed. "Live and let live; love and let love, that was Lucy. She would never have reported him but he nourished very low ambitions of very academic heights and he judged her by his own faithlessness. A word from her and his reputation as the Revolution's morning star would be winged beyond repair."

"So he pushed her off the roof?”

We’re there at last. 

But Ken had fallen silent.

Shelley prompted him. “Did you see him do it? Is there any proof?" 

Ken was heaving with great scary breaths.  “I found her up there at the end of UEA just after Damien had given her his little warning. I love-gazed at her but she couldn’t see me. She was staring into the black hole of a downgrade after 3 years of Firsts. She said she'd been a fool and wanted to come home…”

“Whoa! You found her at the end of UEA? What’s the end of UEA?”

“The roof.” He pointed. He was bent over, breathing in great noisy gulps.

Shelley’s heart kissed a beat. “What are you saying?” 

More heavy breathing. He’s not going to keel over on me right at the death is he? 

 

Chapter 19 

We Have Left Undone That Which We Should Not Have Left Undone. 

1978 Ken, with a lot more hair and breath and a lot less experience of a world that takes both, and with a much younger heart albeit aching and broken, was ‘relaxing’ with some decadent elements of the trainee bourgeoisie, rebelling against the stress of Finals and the Puritanism of his two years International Service in the Class War. He’d done four of his Finals papers. University – which he’d worked so hard to get to as if it was some kind of Nirvana - would be over soon and, as he felt it passing, he suddenly suspected he'd wasted half of its priceless three years marching for a Paradise he already had (but wanted everyone else to have with him.) These ‘decadent’ elements, smoking joints that punk with its working class severities had consigned to history (or so Ken believed) listening to ‘Rumours’ and Cockney Rebel seemed to be having a lot more fun than him. ‘The best years of our lives.’

That first term acting the young artist writing a poem – “Shopping List” - on the Saturday bus back to Universe City from Norwich market after some honest earthling complained about his bags underfoot. 

“Do not ask me to move, to move

My bags from the aisle.

I am dialecting constellations 

Of Chopin and Liszt…

Never such innocence again. Ken sighed and took his leave of the ziggurat room, three blocks along and four up from his own First Year home, feeling like he was kissing it goodbye forever. He was on his way to the Library to start the long last slog on the 17C paper – his second best shot at a First – when something happened that brought all of these overwhelming desires, thoughts and emotions winged with a heady sense of having the boundless power to achieve all and any of them to a crisis. He saw Lucy walking on the ENV roof high above that already high walkway, powering down to MAP and BIO and the end of UEA. She saw him and wailed down. Like one of those three ladies at the end of ‘Morte d’Arthur.’  He thought at first it was some demob happy prank – he knew she was doing her last Final today but thought it was later. But she was wailing “Come up? Come up?” “You’re mad!” Ken called, with more approval than was sensible. “How do I get up there? I’ve got my final Final in 40 minutes.” She said you get a lift up to the top floor and then up though a utility room. It seemed a good idea at the time.  A great way to mark the passing of UEA, waving away all its loves and friendships, flights and fights, night befores and morning afters, deflowering blooms, paradoxical conceits, liberating humiliations, comings of age, agonising complexities, simple joys, serial rites of passage, first times, last times, highs and lows, and all with the love of his young life with whom he’d Donne so much of it. 

He still can’t remember how, your honour, and he promises never to do it again, but he got up there with her, and faced her, swaying and vertiginous, in the swirling wind. It was at this point he noticed (not always being quite as clever as he thought he was) that she wasn’t quite ‘right’. He slowly gathered through the scary smoky hilarity that she was not just crying but begging him to go back out with him. 

So he could have Lucy back. Like Adam had Eve when they started procreating – Cain the first born - in Genesis Chapter IV. Paradise After the Fall. She would be his, via Damien. They could marry and get graduate jobs and raise a family and live in some bourgeois semi-detached and gradually turn into her parents. (Definitely not his.) But that wasn’t the Lucy he’d loved. The one he’d known in Genesis 11.25. The one waving down from the ziggurat room above, holding his questing gaze. The one whose grail knight he’d been. This was another Lucy altogether, red-faced and wretched, in the sky but without diamonds. "You can’t turn back a Revolution that’s gone, Loose. It’s a bit late for that.”

“But I always loved you. I realise now. Those nights in our little room we made an everywhere, I’ve never been Donne like that before. Nor since-”

Neither had he. The laughter. The intensity. The passion. The mumsy passion killers she’d lost in the Milton-interruptus hurly burly of one particular conjugation in a carefully booked Library carel (when they were supposed to be writing essays on the Great Puritan Epic) which they simply could not find afterwards, meaning she attended their tutorial with Damien without them. (They turned up in her bag as she reached for the ancient hardbacked Milton Ken had stolen from a Weymouth library during his gap year, their compromised maidenliness hilarious in that context.) Such exquisite memories of a Paradise Lost erupting into a brain already addled with the weed he’d smoked and the shock of re-encountering Lucy, and of being half way up the sky on a very scary roof, made Ken shout, more savagely and absolutely than he actually felt. “NO! You sold the Revolution down the river to Damien for a First class degree. So you can damn well go back to the Dark Tower bed you made with Damien and lie in it!" 

He wanted to recall and refine the half-meant words as soon as he said them. But he realised with horror they came from a dark heart in a dark night of the soul, that spoke truer than either of them could bear. Humankind cannot bear much reality but it frequently has to. He was unable to consider a revisionist Paradise and he rejected the sobered one they might have regained.

She staggered back under the assault and accidentally dropped her bag off the roof with a bathetic phut on the service road five storeys below. A shock of hilarity convulsed him. Oly it wasn’t a joke.  “Sorry,” he said, tears in his eyes, iron in his soul. “Your old bag, sailing down the wind like that.”

She looked utterly crestfallen, a cartoon of distress.  “Old bag? You're laughing at me,” she wailed, voice ridiculous with despair.

And he was. Sniggering like the schoolboy this beautiful bereft nascent young woman of all his teenage dreams had made a man that Genesis II 25 night he finally let go with her. Finally. And forever. She didn't look beautiful anymore. The envious and resentful Loveland, him especially, had made her Lecturer-fascinating beauty look ridiculous at last and - with a self-stab of meanness through the heart - Ken was glad. 

"You were supposed to come and rescue me," she muttered.

"What?!"

"You were supposed to come and rescue me. From Damien’s Dark Tower.” Her cartoon-unhappy face was bloated with anguish now.  You never committed, you never had enough faith.” She repeated, invasively loud and clear now. “YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO COME AND RESCUE ME!" 

Bereft, by the enormity of this appeal to a genuine heroic manhood, of any kind of sensitive answer, he sniffed and let the weed do the giggling. 

A woman scorned. She turned into a fury. She backhanded the joint out of his giggling mouth. She tried to push herself into him, through him. "Can't you see I love you, you heartless dope! I love you. Why didn’t you have the balls to come and claim me?" (Hang on; he thought balls had gone out with heavy industrial capitalism!) She grabbed his hair, scratched his face as he fought her off.  

Then she just stood there very still, staring at the blood and skin under her fingernails. Then she turned and began to walk very deliberately to the edge of the roof.

 

“ Lucy! … What are you doing?"

There was a movement in the corner of my eye. It was Lance and the Girl From EUR, coming to ask her why she’d walked out of her fourth Finals paper. They saw her on the roof. They shouted "Loose! NO!!!" It distracted Ken a fatal second. Then Lucy saw Damien going by below, with his fury-wife Laura.

Lucy called "Laura!" from the height of her despair and only Damien looked up. Ken didn’t take it in at the time but was never able to forget it later. The last person Lucy ever appealed to (her faithful saviour Ken having failed to do so) was the last person on Earth to help her. The last person on Earth not to help her. Laura just kept walking, pulling Damien away and lecturing his deaf ear. ('And seventhly…')  

Laura’s probably still walking, away from that accessory to Murder guilt, in her mind. Ken knew he was.

He got to Lucy just as she stepped out into the thin EAS air they’d been treading for three years. He was yelling 'I love you.' He got as far as 'I-.' 

She blew him a kiss and turned into a voice on the wind. 'I’ll always love you, Ken, even if I can’t show it anymore.' 

Then she plummeted to the UEA bedrock like a Stone. A one-way dive into Brian Jones’ locker. Past first and second year BIO, CHEM and ENV students doing their alchemy experiments, making first and seond year SOC and EAS students, debating the economic base look almost worldly. EAS students like himself and Lucy moved heaven and earth to study as much of the 7 centuries of Literature as possible at University – I his case to learn how to write it – and then got side-tracked by sneering lecturers up blind alleys of Critical Theory about Critical Theory and mazes of Linguistics about Linguistics.

All the way down past bins and boilers to the real economic base: all the murderous concrete it takes to keep an Ivory Tower airborne.  Nobody saw her fall, or the concrete mixer's immediate cover up. Only Ken, Lance, the Girl From EUR, Damien and Laura, the ones who let her down.

*

Shelley thought about her new phone, then decided to leave it where it was. Movement was difficult. "What about the Girl-?"

"Who Was Never There? She was there.”

"Where? On the roof!? "

“Right behind us.  She’d been screaming at Lucy. “Go on you fucking whore. Jump.  You took the only love I ever had when you already had a dozen of your own.” 

“You…Damien… and ten others?”

“Including The Girl Who Wasn’t There actually. Which was partly the problem. Because I’m not sure it was really Lance who The Girl Who Wasn’t There was grieving for. Deep down, I think it was Lucy herself. You’ve got to appreciate how unbelievably lovely Lucy was. Everyone fell for her. And more than a few couldn’t share her or control their bitterness about it. She and Lucy had a fling which started with a dress swap in one of their rooms when Lucy was pushing the boundaries, with some same sex romances. It was as much the dress she wanted – a beautiful birthday gift from Damien – as the Lucy wearing it. Neither of them was even gay. The Girl Who Wasn’t There was extremely possessive. But unlike me, she didn’t pretend to herself that she wasn’t. She was actually wearing Lucy’s clothes on the roof when she-.”

“Pushed Lucy off?!”

“Not exactly, no.”

“ ‘Not exactly, no!’! What then?” 

“Not physically. After Lance cheated on her at the Mill (moving on through Lucy – which destroyed him, both because I was his best friend and because Lucy was the only one who ever really touched him, however briefly – after The Girl From EUR and before the 783. 9 recurring women all over Christendom – mainly Southern England, then Southern Europe and ultimately Christian North Africa - who were never the woman, or man, or God, or whatever it is he never found) she was never there, even when we met her on the stairs. Hence the name. But on the roof she really was there as plain as the devil, foaming at the mouth with hatred and vengefulness and cruelty and anger, a total satanic negation of the Loveland we’d tried to build at the Mill. The anti-housemate who was there and the real Girl hadn’t been at Loveland for ages.  She genuinely wanted Lucy dead and the force of that helped tip her off the roof. "

"That’s not Murder. If it was, as Laura said a week ago, we’d all be serving a life sentence.”

"But I'm still right, I think. Like Lance always believed I'd pushed Lucy off. From his point of view, I did. But he'd rather let me get away with murder than betray me again."

“Jesus.  But you didn’t push her? Physically?”

“Of course not. But mentally we all did.”

"Imagine what a defence lawyer would do to that in court!" Shelley glared at Ken, dissatisfied. "So everyone’s guilty."

"We were all there. But not for her. And we’re all serving a life sentence for it in our heads, more or less unconsciously. The sentence I’ve been trying to construct all week."

 

"Tut. We can’t arrest anyone for not being there for her, Ken.  And, if everyone’s guilty, no-one is."

"Except Damien. Damien is. Damien donne it."

"How?"

"I can't tell you. …I have to show you.”

“Please tell me you don’t mean…”

“Yes.  On the  roof."

 

Chapter 20 

Donne To Death

On the roof, Shelley experienced three sinking sensations at once.  One, a May day can feel as cold as November. Two, she really hated heights. Three, the terminal frustration of finding that her new M'aidez mobile, for back-up, was almost out of charge. 

Ken inhaled the thin air. "Everything takes on a different perspective when you’re this high. Damien said we tried to frame him. Up here you get a different frame, a higher point of view."

Shelley shivered, scanning the skyline, the roofscapes, the ziggurats.  Long-forgotten 'A' Level lines by her 'beautiful and ineffectual' namesake leapt to her lips and threatened to blow her mind.

"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, 

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing."

"That's right. The six of us watched Lucy fall. We watched the solidifying concrete do its perfect cover up. Then the Girl From EUR went to EUR; the Girl Who Was Never There went to Loveland (dressed as Lucy) for the first time in months and started finally packing up her stuff to leave UEA but just sat looking in the mirror and didn’t come out for a week; Laura went dress-shopping in Norwich. Damien went to his latest seminar on Donne as blithely as he then went to the Exam hall to invigilate our last Finals paper, Seventeenth Century Language, Literature and Thought. Lance and I looked into each other and saw the coward soul seeking the Easy Way Out. Then we followed Damien in like robots and found ourselves answering his question 1. 'Paradise Lost - Who Donne It?'

Lance wrote 'This is just words, this is just words' over and over again. He failed the paper. I, on the contrary, remembered all my revision and forgot who I was. 3 hours later, I came out of the Seventeenth Century and forgot the Twentieth, even the name I’d put on the paper. Lance took me home, an automaton. 

" Wally's keystone cops came round looking for Lucy. The Girl Who Was Never There let them in.  The Girl From EUR, dolled up like a disco queen in skirt and hairdo, was pretending she didn’t find her unaccustomed presence intrusive. They had the Bee Gees playing, getting down with the new factory steps. The freak-out hair and loon pants were gone. Wally’s cops looked them up and down like the truncheon they could feel in their (decidedly un-) hip pocket in a way they wouldn’t have done in the nubility-suppressing Mao tunics they’d done their degrees in. "Is that your cover story?' I asked and they just looked through me.  End of an era. 

The Wallies chuckled that we’d let the garden go a bit, meaning our 'weed' plantation. I waited to be busted, glad of it, heard my voice saying Lucy was history, that she was living in the past continuous with a Burke disguised as a Paine called Damien. 

"They took me in to the hospital, where they gave me their legal mind-blowing drugs. One day Damien appeared with a high-ranking cop in a dress uniform. The dress uniform asked had I considered the Graduate Police programme? They had a massive LSD bust planned called Operation Julie – and they needed bright undercover cops like I could be to play hippies. I'd be a DS in no time with a rosy future ahead of me. The one that’s now behind me. I giggled at Lance. Detective Sergeant Pepper. Why not?  We were dead anyway."

Shelley's phone beeped. A delayed text. She glanced at it then really looked at it.

"Then one day I find myself digging down there sous le pave.  With you, a sharp young DCI from Norwich. And with the apple-taste of a lost Eden in my mouth. Staring at the wreck of my fallen angel. And the shards start resurfacing in my brain. Into the Windmill Lucy and I built and the love we made there."

"Ken. You should see this.  Since Jaya Tandula shopped Damien, a Second Year and a Fresher on his latest Get Donne course have reported him threatening to send her down if they stopped sleeping with him. Both of them were listening in the wings that day when you raised the Lucy question. They were too frightened to talk to us then. But when you saved Jaya you broke the spell. You might not have saved Lucy or exposed Damien then but you’ve Donne it for this generation. It's curtains for Dracula. We've finally got the devil by his tale!" She looked up to see Ken standing at the end of UEA.

“I’ve finally finished my course. “University of Life (Failed).”And got my award. Death” he said. Death, the Final Frontier.”

“Ken! You saved Jaya, and that Fresher and all the others to come… you’ve stopped Damien. And we can get some justice for the past victims as well. We can even get him for Lucy now! Corruption, sexual grooming, bullying. Give her parents some long delayed closure. You don’t need to punish yourself…anymore.”

Ken wasn't listening. He could hear Lucy's whisper on the wind. "I’ll always love you, Ken, even if I can’t show it anymore." He called behind him to Shelley. "Give us a minute alone would you?"

"Not to jump after her, I won’t!You Wally! Fancy throwing yourself away now - after you’ve cracked the case. Are you nuts?” She tried to say what he might want to hear. “Don’t you understand, thanks to you and your damned UEA Linguistics we can finally prove who Donne it.  And you’ve Donne it proper old school, proper Linguistics and Literature, not with some post-80s fancy degree in Creative Writing! You haven’t failed. You’ve passed...” 

She called in their precarious rooftop situation, both a little wounded, not to mention completely exhausted; said they were staying put on the roof as they were in no state to move any further and was promised full back up (on double pay) within eight minutes. She closed the call.

“The funny thing is Shell, I’m really scared of heights” shivered Ken. For a clever Dick this isn’t a very clever way for me to end it all. 

It began to feel a bit cold up there on the roof. She reached him on the edge of existence and felt very lonely there and desperately wanted to hold him but couldn’t. The human condition.

“You know your namesake, the poet they teased you about in the sixth form. The one who wrote ‘I fall upon the thorns of life. I bleed.’?’

“Don’t!” 

“Well - you’re actually nothing like him. Names! Sometimes they’re just that. Arbitrary sounds. Or maybe a poetry, a soul music, beyond analysis. It just shows that language isn’t necessarily a guide to thought or reality or meaning after all, however much the linguists and literary critics spend their careers and lives wrestling with them on our behalf. You’re cheerful and down to earth and you get on with it. Very smartly too.” He paused, catching his breath. “Mind you, under all that worldly wise gritty mean street realism you know you ARE a romantic at heart.”

She sighed. That was a long time ago. “Am I?” 

“Yes. You gave me my crazy head. You never closed your mind to the possibilities of the case like Wally or DC Evans. You were watching me like a hawk but you kept going because deep down you wanted my tragic love to have a happy ending.”

“All right, Mr Freud. Even though I already knew the true love ended in that concrete down there?”

 “Yep. That’s what I mean by romantic. Flying like some beautiful and ineffectual angel in the face of the hard facts. But I hope you get a happy ending yourself.”

“Thanks. In my allegedly romantic way I think you have one now if could only see it. You passed your higher education degree a long time ago and today you passed something even higher. You’ve let Lucy go after all these years. You’ve laid her ghost, at long last. You’re Donne. Next time you go to the Library you might even read a book for pleasure.” 

“I’ve let Lucy go have I? He looked over the dreaming white concrete, its heathland skies fretted with the wings of wild birds, swans, magpies, jays. “ You’re a very smart cop, Shelley, and you’ve got an awful lot of things right. You’ll go far. And make the world a better place. But you’re wrong about my letting her go. UEA is my Taj Mahal for her.”

Back up finally arrived. Ambulance and police. Even a fire engine with ladders. The fire engine from hell. Shelley reached out for his hand “Come on, Ken. Time to get out of Paradise Lost." 

It was then she realised she was alone. 

She could still hear him, his voice as clear as it had been all week, curiously disembodied yet vividly present. Still harping on the themes they’d made their own, going through variations and recapitulations and crescendos almost like their own private language. He was still speaking loud and clear. But he was no longer speaking to her. 

 “Ken Donne. Lucy Donne. Un-Donne.”

He could see Loveland hovering on the river in the distance, beyond the marshes, lost in the mists. Its angel wings seemed to move. He looked down and everything revolved below. He leaned against the dizzying wind. He addressed the cruel concrete 5 floors below. "Goodbye ‘real’ world!" 

Time stood still. He stepped forward. Into a concrete-less abstraction. 

He could see for miles. All the windmills across Norfolk. Going nowhere. Going slowly. 

Gone.