Chapter 2

In which the rest of my old crew make their entrances and one of them makes an untimely exit.

If Keir Hardie, that hoary, hairy, pioneering old socialist of yesteryear, had been asked at the founding of the Labour Party 120 or so years ago to describe what he would expect a Labour MP of the 2020s to look like, it is unlikely that the character he would have described would have borne much of a resemblance to the Right Honourable James Thaddeus (“Jammy”) Jeffers MP. 

            Yet another lawyer, old Jammy had always been lurking in a slightly creepy and sinister manner around the periphery of our social circle, primarily because we were never his primary focus. Nor, of course, was the law. If he had spent half the time studying for his degree that he had spent trying to get ahead at the Cambridge Union (with all the scandal and skulduggery that traditionally entails, which he had embraced with an almost psychotic degree of gusto) he might have done better than the low 2:1 he had ended up scraping by the skin of his teeth. 

            He had nonetheless managed somehow to blag his way into a pupillage with an alarmingly trusting set of barristers’ chambers, only to jettison them at the earliest opportunity when he managed to oil his way into the nomination for a safe Labour seat just in time for the 2010 election. Which he then proceeded to lose. I’m not sure that it was entirely his unvarnished and barely concealed contempt for the great unwashed masses that sunk his campaign. Poor old Gordon Brown had done his best to help scuttle the ship by gratuitously insulting old ladies and then getting down on his belly and grovelling to them in an embarrassing and forlorn attempt to dig himself out of yet another hole. That was Jammy’s excuse, anyway. 

            Most wannabe politicians would have taken the rather leaden hint that the electorate had pointedly dropped on his toes at that point, and gone off to do something else with their lives. After all, Jammy had never been much of a people person. I’m not much of one either, as it happens, a realisation that dawned on me recently when I went back and listed all my favourite neighbours from everywhere I have ever lived and noticed that all of them were cats. But I have never had a burning ambition to be Prime Minister (and at this stage I suspect that that particular taper is unlikely to burst belatedly into flame). 

            Jammy, by contrast, was single minded in his pursuit of power. If he had to change to get it, he would give them a different Jammy. As Groucho Marx famously said, “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others!” Groucho wasn’t the only Marx Jammy had taken to quoting during the Corbyn era.

            Traditionally the Cambridge Union has always been the delivery address where the stork drops off baby Tory cabinet ministers to be reared, nurtured and trained in the dark Machiavellian arts of political intrigue before emerging three years later as fully fledged Alan Maks. I have no doubt that if Jammy had arrived ten years earlier or five years later that would have been his fate as well, but back in 2003 the spectral hands of Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard had been feebly tilting the Tory tiller between the icebergs of public disgust and electoral irrelevance, and it had very much looked like the best way for a conservative politician to get ahead for the foreseeable future was to join the Labour Party.

            It hadn’t quite turned out like that, of course, and over the next ten years it had been rather amusing to watch, from a safe distance, Jammy’s absurd and painful political contortions as he attempted to convince his allies (Cambridge Union rats of his nature didn’t have friends) that he was, in turn, a die-hard Blairite, a born-again Brownite, a nimble Millipede (switched brothers just in time to avoid making too much of a tit of himself) and then a fanatical Corbynista who regarded “nuance” as something you get when your uncles get married, before bouncing back as part of the Starmy Army. I was as astounded as anyone to see him selected as the candidate for Cambridge in 2015, and doubly dumbfounded to watch the awful little greaser actually win this classic swing seat, and then hold onto it, despite exuding all the charm of a secondary villain in a film where the main villain is a zombie apocalypse.

            He was a pretty good mate though, Jammy, all things considered, even though I had never been useful enough to him to develop a true intimacy. He was married now, to some other firebrand in the middle echelons of the party, and there were a couple of kids, but I had never met any of them, and I had not for a moment imagined that he would be deigning to descend from his ivory tower to join us mere mortals this evening. Yet here he was, listening to us talking an entirely different variety of guff to the sort he was used to. True, he made a point of continually checking his phone every few minutes, and he tried his best to look shocked and appalled whenever one of us told a rude joke, but his efforts were half hearted. I guess you can’t turn the politician off completely.

            As it happens he wasn’t really given much of an opportunity to do so, as it was only a few minutes before Donald Campbell spotted him and made a beeline for our table, with the Butcher of Baghdad trailing grubbily in his wake.

            “Well, if it isn’t the local dignitary!” Campbell leered. “You’ve not been answering your mail, Mr Jeffers.”

            Jeffers silently mouthed something which looked to my untrained eyes like “oh f**k, a constituent!” But he had been in the game a few years now, so he knew how to mask his panic. He turned to the old bruiser with a smile.

            “If this is a constituency matter I would of course be happy to discuss it during my surgery hours, which you can find on my website. This really isn’t the best time, as I’m having a drink with some” (short, revealing pause) “friends of mine, but rest assured I take everyone’s concerns seriously and...” 

He stopped, looking down at the gnarled finger which Campbell was pointing aggressively at his chest. The ex-Porter was now right in his face and breathing heavily.

            “Now you listen to me, you jumped up little basturt!” he snarled. That got our attention, and I hope it’s got yours too, dear reader. I’m not just adding this anecdote to the narrative for the sake of including a bit of local colour, you know! 

            “I’ve been tryin’ to get hold of you for weeks,” he went on, “but your bloody PA hasnae let me near yez! Keeps accusin’ me of makin’ a fuss. Well damn bloody right I’m makin’ a fuss. A murdered Porter may not matter much to the likes of you. Albert Ross may have been a small man in your eyes, but he was part of our community! To us, he wuz fam’ly!”

            “Albert’s dead?” I asked, saddened but not particularly surprised. Albert Ross, not to be confused with the feathery chap who was bumped off by the Ancient Mariner, had been another of St Crisps’ long serving Porters. Campbell was right - the old boy had been a kindly, if absent minded old soul who had been greatly loved, but he had seemed pretty doddery even fifteen years ago. Anyone who had taken the trouble to murder him would have to have been a very impatient fellow.

            “Yes, three weeks ago,” Britta replied. “Didn’t you get the email? Tanya and I went to the funeral. We’d been out for a drink with him just a few weeks before - it was such a shock.”

            “How did it happen?” I asked, apparently the only one out of the loop.

           “Fell off his bike,” Ed responded bleakly. “First I’ve heard of foul play though. He was pretty shaky when I last saw him, and that clapped out old bike was creakier than he was.”

“I get that you’re upset, Mr Campbell,” he added. Ed was usually on first name terms with everyone but had clearly concluded that a modicum of deference to the resident nutter was called for here. “But it can’t have been that much of a shock to you, at his age, surely?”

            “You didn’t see it,” Campbell snarled. “He was goin’ down Castle Hill like a streak o’ lightning. No way those brakes failed on their own. He was always bloody careful to keep an eye on his brakes, was old Albert. Someone cut them!”

            “As I understand it,” Jammy finally spoke again, “the police did carry out an investigation, and...”

            “An’ then they dropped it like a hot potato!” Campbell scowled. “No evidence of foul play. There wasnae enough of the bike left for them to form a conclusion aboot that, an’ heaven forfend they actually get off their arses an’ start asking questions of the right people!” 

            “I’m not exactly sure what you expect me to do,” Jammy pointed out rather limply, “I’m not responsible for what the police may or may not decide is worthy of investigation. Their resources are very limited thanks to a decade of brutal Tory austerity and...”

            “Don’t you dare turn this into a party political broadcast, you slippery wee shite!” Campbell roared. “You’re a f****n’ MP. Do what f****n’ MPs are supposed tae do! Put a bit of stick aboot. Throw yer weight aroond! Get some answers out o’ Inspector Baynes an’ his lot! You were a St Crisps man, although I’m buggered if I can remember ye from Adam! Doesn’t that mean anythin’ to ye? This was an attack on our College! An attack on one is an attack on us all!”

            “Us? Forgive me, but as I understand it you don’t even work there any more!” Jammy snapped, his penchant for political point scoring apparently prevailing over his instinct for self-preservation. Campbell started to lunge at Jammy, but fortunately a sweet voice distracted him before he could break anything important.

            “Donald!” Tanya Bullock stood in the doorway, flanked by Robbie Irons. It was Tanya who had spoken, and she had sounded genuinely delighted to see the old psychopath, which rather stopped him in his tracks. I was glad that Robbie had turned up though. He was the only one in our group who would have had a hope in hell of “containing” Campbell if things had really kicked off.

            “Hmmm. This is quite a gatherin’ ye’ve got goin’ on here, isn’t it?” Campbell muttered. 

            “Yeah, and as it happens I was going to suggest we move next door to The Mitre,” Ed cut in, as grateful as the rest of us for the reprieve. “There’s a few more to come and we’re running out of space in here.”

            “Well you have a lovely evening, ladies an’ gents,” Campbell gave a sinister little bow. 

“An’ you,” he added, turning to Jammy, his belligerent index finger making another appearance, “remember what I said!” 

And with that, much to everyone’s relief, he moved off in the direction of the bar, again followed by Saddam, who, unless I imagined it, appeared to give me a surreptitious wink. Those of us who had pints finished them off rather more rapidly than planned, and the seven who were now in our party traipsed off to The Mitre in search of the next one. By the time we got there we had become eight, for Neil, Britta’s husband, appeared from the end of St John’s Street just as we were emerging, and joined us.

            Doubtless I have already said enough about Neil for you to have reached the conclusion that there is nothing else of interest to say about him, and that is probably true (for the present, at least). I should, however, take a moment, before we get ensconced in our second pints, to introduce Tanya and Robbie. 

Tanya, like her best friend Britta, had been an English student, and like Britta, had ultimately returned to the Cambridge area after the statutory few years in London. For a while, at least. Just a few weeks ago, however, Tanya had ended up committing a shocking act of betrayal by accepting the offer of a much coveted fellowship at St Matthew’s College, Oxford. This was, as I understood it, her first visit back to the mothertown since the move. It had not surprised me for a moment that the Oxford mob had sought her out, for Tanya was one of the cleverest people I had ever known. Fifteen years on, my childish crush on her was barely diminished. 

            She was essentially the embodiment of one of those “geeky girls” in a teen comedy from the 1990s who is already damned attractive before the makeover she gets during the course of the movie, despite everyone else in the film failing to notice this fact until she takes off her glasses. Well, I had noticed, in Tanya’s case, even before she switched to contact lenses, and much good it had done me. As is the case for most of the girls I fancy the pants off, Tanya was fond of me, I think, but it was in much the same way as she would have been fond of a loyal sheepdog (if she had happened to have one, and didn’t happen to be a cat person).

            She had gone out with Robbie in the first year and a bit of our stint at university, before he called a halt to it and swiftly moved on to Britta. I could understand it, in a way. Tanya was very much a creature of comfort. She liked dressing gowns, slippers, tea and musty library smells. Robbie liked adventuring, rock climbing, crossing the Atlantic in small yachts and trekking to see polar bears near the Arctic Circle (and then punching them in the face, probably). This was a stretch even for Britta, as it turned out, but at uni Britta had been anxious to emphasise the fact that she was up for anything.

            The two girls’ relationship had naturally soured temporarily, although there had never been any suggestion as far as I knew that any cheating had gone on or that Britta had been instrumental in the break up, and a term or two later they were back to being bosom buddies. Emotionally, however, Tanya had suffered enormously as a result of the rather callous dumping, and whilst she had been in a number of relationships since, they had tended to be short lived, and she had never married. Thus I had been somewhat surprised to see her arriving in the company of her old flame, also still conveniently unmarried, now.

            Robbie, a civil engineer by trade, was a big strapping blond fellow of at least six foot six, and I was somewhat nauseated to note that he still seemed to have the body of a twenty five year old. He had been a rower (of course he had), and indeed from his physique he very much looked as though he was still at it. He had narrowly missed a place in the Oxford-Cambridge boat race of 2005 due to some sort of ghastly “extreme sport” related injury. He was a good sort, though, and he and I had always got on well despite having not much in common apart from (briefly) a shared interest in the same female ladychap.

            Britta had sent Neil off to get a round in whilst the rest of us went in search of a table big enough to accommodate all of us plus imminent new arrivals. I felt a bit sorry for Neil, boring bugger though he was. It was hard to tag along to a gathering like this as a “Johnny-come-lately” where everyone else had three years of shared experiences which they were keen to spend the evening reminiscing about (it was certainly much better than having to focus on the tedious things we had been up to since). As a crowd, we had never been particularly good at welcoming in outsiders, and I rather took the view that in the latter end of our thirties, as a group we should be getting better at this by now. I therefore got up to help the old bean counter with the drinks, only to discover that he had procured a tray and was tottering cautiously towards us one step at a time. It was fairly clear that if I offered to help by taking a couple of drinks off the tray, given my track record the whole thing was bound to go flying, so I cautiously sat back down again. 

Neil’s journey from the bar was not completely smooth and uninterrupted, however, thanks to the arrival of Matt Sampson, who I have alluded to previously, who took the opportunity to clap Neil on the back in a gesture of what was almost certainly faux bonhomie. The tray stayed in Neil’s hands, but there was quite a bit of spillage swilling about by the time he made it to the table. At which point it transpired that we were short of a Grolsch, which had been Ed’s order.

            “Sorry,” Neil said, but as he spoke I saw that his hands were slightly shaking, and I didn’t think it was because the tray had been too heavy for him. 

            “Aren’t you an accountant?” Ed asked sarcastically. “I always thought the “count” bit was quite an important part of that job?”

            “An accountant who can’t count is just “acant!”” Dan, added helpfully. Dan was never one to knowingly diffuse a tense situation when an opportunity for some gentle s**t-stirring presented itself.

            “It’s all right, I need to get one in for Matt anyway,” Ed sighed, slouching barward. I saw Neil direct a look of sharp hatred at Ed’s retreating back, the intensity of which rather took me aback. Granted, Ed’s reaction to what had, on the face of it, been an honest mistake had been an unnecessarily churlish attempt to belittle the husband of one of his closest friends, but it had not been the worst dig in the world, and if it had been directed at me I would have laughed it off. There was something distinctly off here. 

            This thought kept playing around in my mind for a grand total of three seconds before Matt sat down next to me, clapped me on the back (this seemed to be his thing now) and asked me what he had missed. He looked a little pale and strained, I thought, but still retained his sickeningly youthful good looks, and his jet black hair had, as far as I could see, yet to be infiltrated by any lighter interlopers.

            “A veritable procession of shadows of the past,” I declared grandly, bringing him up to speed on my encounters with Sinclair, Campbell and Saddam.

            “Shippers not made an appearance yet?” Matt asked.

            “Shippers”, aka Professor Ronald Fairbanks, had been the older and far less accomplished of our two principal law supervisors. An elderly man with a shabby wardrobe and a fluffy, tobacco stained white beard, his resemblance to Harold Shipman, the fiendish mass murderer and probable one time Gerald Sinclair pen-pal, had earned him that unfortunate nickname even with some of his fellow fellows, to the extent that most people tended to forget his real name. Old Shippers had been propping up the college bar for the better part of 50 years now. Indeed he had taught Matt’s father, Richard, and had frequently referred to him as “Dickie” in supervisions, much to Matt’s embarrassment. During his lengthy tenure he had written a grand total of 18 articles, most of them unreadable even by the dry standards of legal literature, spent a bit of time playing cricket and a lot more time bragging about it. 

            By the time we turned up as undergraduates, the rather more dynamic EU law expert David Williamson was running the show and Shippers had been relegated to teaching first years. This was an effective arrangement, for first year undergraduates’ results don’t count towards their degree, meaning that they tend to be almost as severely allergic to writing essays as Shippers was to marking them. I vividly remembered getting his first reading list through in my pigeon hole towards the end of the very first week of my university career. This comprised a list of six texts with a note at the bottom saying “But you can read those next time. You’re only young once, and I am rapidly running out of middle age. So this week let’s just chillax and drink some port!”

            Subsequent supervisions, a bi-weekly opportunity to sit in on his burbling stream of consciousness, had left us little the wiser about the law of tort, but if a question had come up in the exam about the performance of the St Crispian College Cricket Club during Shippers’ brief but (to him) memorable tenure as captain (1974-78) I might have ended up getting a better mark. 

            “Not yet, mate,” Ed replied for me as he returned to his seat. “But the weekend is young. Good to see you though - I thought you weren’t going to make it till later!”

            I have already alluded to Matt being a difficult man to get hold off, and part of this was down to his aggressive workaholism. I was pretty surprised that Ed had managed to pin him down for a whole weekend. But then Ed and Matt had always been incredibly close, barring a couple of incidents at university, the provenance of which I had never entirely got to the bottom of, but which had on each occasion left them barely on speaking terms for the better part of a term. Ed had clearly done something that Matt had found difficult to forgive, but what it could possibly have been remained a mystery to me, for Ed was not the easiest person to fall out with - certainly not by the standards of a friendship circle that included the pugnacious Dan amongst its number.

            I had never personally seen much of Matt’s alleged dark side, despite having known him all these years, but a number of his relationships (Britta being an obvious exception) had ended vitriolically enough for it to be clear that the “inner Matt” was a far more difficult and troubled customer than his outwardly charming, relaxed demeanour would suggest. 

            Perhaps his marriage had tamed a few of his demons. I had met his wife Lydia a few times and found her to be an extraordinarily neurotic and disapproving character who I suspected would not have been able to stand much of the emotional manipulation his other exes had accused him of. She didn’t have a huge amount of time for any of us, which was perhaps another reason why Matt had become increasingly elusive in the last few years, and I was quite surprised when Matt indicated that she would be joining us the following evening. Ed did not entirely succeed in hiding his disappointment, as Lydia’s presence would definitely put a dampener on her husband’s enthusiasm for juvenile hijinks.

            By now the conversation was in full flow, with even Neil and Jammy starting to relax, and as late afternoon turned into early evening the number of empty glasses gradually accumulated. My desire to crawl on elsewhere was gradually dampening so when Dan suggested we stayed for dinner I gratefully seconded his fine proposition. 

            The next of our old acquaintances to join us was Sadie Thomas. This was another surprise, for while she was another fellow lawyer, so naturally had hung around with us as much as our mutual syllabus required, she had never really been one of the crew. Like Jammy, she was desperate to be seen as a high flier, although her ambitions lay in the field of the law rather than politics, and she was now a moderately successful but extremely publicity hungry media barrister. Our crowd had probably had at least one foot on the ground too many for her liking. 

            We had since bumped into each other at networking drinks and the like, and had had numerous perfectly civil conversations, but she had never been very good at disguising the fact that she was desperately scanning the room to find someone more influential to talk to.

            As such, her presence here was somewhat perplexing. Yet here she was, doing the rounds, kissing and hugging everyone in a rather continental sort of way as she milked her entrance. I couldn’t help noticing that my peck on the cheek was rather perfunctory compared to Matt’s but given the excess of cloying perfume she had put on (possibly using a bucket) this did not come as too much of a disappointment to me. I got a distinct whiff of gin overlaying the perfume though, and she was evidently already several sheets to the wind.

            “Sorry I’m late, darling,” she said to Ed, who winced (Ed was most definitely nobody’s darling). “I was having dinner with Davie.” 

“David Williamson?” I asked, but hadn’t really needed to. Sadie had had a huge crush on our esteemed supervisor from the moment she had arrived in Cambridge. In fact he had probably interviewed her, so it may have developed even earlier. Nobody else, needless to say, had ever called him “Davie”, which was just one of many things about him to which Sadie was happily oblivious. A small man with thinning fair hair, Williamson was a year or two younger than Sinclair, and probably even brighter. His dual mission in life had been to foster a more positive impression of the EU amongst his undergraduates, and to bring beige jumpers back into fashion. Neither mission had been an unadulterated success.

            “He’s written a new book about Brexit,” Sadie announced in the tone of someone whose dog has learned to perform a new trick. She was one of those people who pronounced it “Breggsit”, which has always baffled and irritated me in equal measure. I’ve never heard anyone talking about their “eggs” wife, after all, although perhaps that’s just because I don’t know any polygamous poultry farmers. 

            “Ooh good,” I exhaled wearily. “We’ve definitely not had enough people talking about THAT subject over the last few years.”

            She ignored me, and proceeded to start flirting with Matt with bludgeon-like subtlety. Last I had heard, Sadie was married (although there was no wedding ring on her finger now), but why I expected that to have changed her behaviour I was not at all sure. I had never much enjoyed Sadie’s company and Ed, the founder of this peculiar feast, had always been far more open than I had about his dislike for her. His guest list for the weekend was turning out to be as unexpected as it was motley.

            My conclusions on this were reinforced when I saw Hubert Cailasson walk into the room. Now there was a man I had not even thought about for well over a decade. We had been Facebook friends at one point, I think, but he was hardly ever on it. Hubert, yet another bloody lawyer, albeit one who had ultimately gone into academia at one of the London colleges, had matriculated a year ahead of the rest of us but had done a year abroad. This meant that we had had supervisions with him in our final year, and he had shared a house with some of us. Despite such close proximity, I don’t recall any of us getting to know him particularly well, due to his being one of those scarily intense artistic types. 

            During Fresher’s Week I had assumed that Matt, Dan and Ed were all bosom buddies with him, on the basis that they had apparently already given him an affectionate nickname. It had taken me over a week to discover that he was in fact called Hubert, rather than the identically pronounced, but rather less dignified, “Hugh Bear”. When I had rather foolishly admitted to this hilarious misapprehension some weeks later, the other chaps had taken this as a cue to start referring to him by a series of increasingly outlandish ursine nicknames ranging from Paddington to Rupert to Baloo and settling, predictably, on Pooh. Relations with the poor fellow had never entirely recovered. 

            His family originally hailed from Guadeloupe, as I recall, which made him something of a rarity in our otherwise rather pale, stale intake. Perhaps he had felt out of place - I knew plenty of people who had. But the fact that he had always taken a small wooden cat, roughly half the size of a fist, into supervisions with him and proceeded to sit there silently stroking it, had given me the impression that obtaining wider social acceptance had probably never been number one on his to-do list. 

            My initial thought when I saw him was that this was yet another coincidence, and that he would proceed to ignore us or at best give an embarrassed nod of acknowledgement. But no, he strode straight towards us, towering over everyone (except Robbie, of course) and shook Ed’s hand, before doing the rounds, although there was no warmth in his greeting, and he proceeded to sit mostly in taciturn silence as the evening progressed, occasionally smiling but steadfastly refusing to laugh at the crude jokes that were now raining down thick and fast as several beers worked their magic on us. I wondered why he had accepted the invitation. I concluded that he must be one of those shy extroverts, and that, like the rest of us, he had probably not done particularly well at keeping in touch with people as he progressed through life, and so doubtless it felt nice to be invited.

            Matt, as ever one step ahead of me intellectually, solved the mystery of the “random guest list” before I did, although I like to think that during the course of the evening it would eventually have dawned on me. 

            “So tonight’s the night then, Ed?” he surmised. Ed did his best “innocent face”, which was, I have to say, staggeringly unconvincing. 

            “What are you on about, mate?”

            “Well, I can’t help noticing that, with the exception of Britta’s hanger-on over there,” he gestured over to Neil who was on his way back from the toilet and so fortunately missed hearing this somewhat dismissive description, “the guest list for the weekend seems to dovetail neatly with those of us who were in the room on Time Capsule Night.”

            “We’re not doing that tonight, are we?” Dan interrupted. “I thought we were saving that for tomorrow?” 

            “We shall see, mate, we shall see,” Ed grinned. 

        “Ridiculous charade,” Sadie sniffed pompously, ostensibly to herself but definitely making sure that everyone heard.

            “Funny you should say that,” Ed’s grin widened.

        My heart sank. From my perspective this was rather an unwelcome development. I only had very hazy memories of “Time Capsule Night”, an evening which had taken place in the second term of our third and (for most of us) final year in Cambridge. Finals had been looming large over our collective consciousnesses at the time, and it had been one of the last major piss-ups we had indulged ourselves in before knuckling down to weeks and weeks of relentless revision. 

            But also looming even larger in the background was the spectre of what would happen afterwards, after we pushed ourselves through that gruelling ordeal and, pass or fail, thrusted ourselves out beyond the cocoon-like confines of Cambridge into the wide world, whatever it might choose to make of us. The deep seated knowledge that, whatever glib protestations and promises we might make now, we would not be seeing as much of each other as we were now. Yes, my memories were hazy, but what I did recall was that that evening we had all been feeling very keenly that the future was almost upon us, so when Ed had suggested that we all make a prediction of what we would be doing in fifteen years’ time, put it in a time capsule and pledge to meet up on the anointed day to see how close our predictions had been, all of us jumped at the idea.

            The Time Capsule Pact had been made in Ed’s room. We had always spilled out into Ed’s room after the college bops, at least in the third year. As those of you who have been paying close attention will remember, St Crisps in those days had not had enough accommodation for all of its students, and whilst it had since taken steps to remedy this, in 2006 we had been forced to sort out our own accommodation. 

            Ed had had rather an easier time of this than most of the rest of us, as his dad had been an affluent if somewhat disreputable property developer from Billericay, who had taken this as an opportunity to get on the Cambridge property ladder, snapping up a small, centrally located house just off Jesus Green and renting it out (at a generous discount) to Ed and three mates and, in subsequent years, to younger students (without the discount).

            I had not been one of the “three musketeers” who had made the cut. Matt had been a shoo-in for one of the spot, as had Niamh, Ed’s then girlfriend, an Irish girl who all of us, including Ed, had referred to as “The Gymnast”. I lost a coin-toss to Dan for the last room and, relegated to the Roy Kinnear role, was shunted off up the hill to some ghastly concrete monstrosity on the way to Girton (which by Cambridge standards is Outer Mongolia, only with slightly fewer yaks). Still, I had spent quite a lot of time in what quickly became known as “Chateau Dickinson”, having eventually resigned myself to the fact that I had missed out, after a few weeks of initial huffing and wound licking. And so it was that I had been on hand for Time Capsule Night.

            Most of us had been in relationships at the time; that much I do remember (as one tends to when one is the honourable exception to what had felt like a coordinated mass exercise of coupling up). Ed had been with Niamh (just). Britta had been with Robbie. Dan had been with his long term girlfriend Hannah who was down from Durham (now deceased). Tanya had been with some rather dull medic whose existence I remember rather resenting but who had at least had the decency to mainly hang around with his own crowd; he had not been there that night. Even Sadie and Jammy had been together at the time, although fortunately for Britain’s sake, that had not lasted more than a couple of months. As a power couple those two would have made Lord and Lady Macbeth look like John and Norma Major.

            Who did that leave? Matt had been with Laura Tebbutt at the time, I think. She had also dated Ed and Jammy for a bit, but those dalliances must have been earlier, as those two had been loved up elsewhere by that point. It didn’t surprise me that Laura was a no show tonight. She was now a high flying corporate partner at one of those firms which was even more workaholic than my lot, and had started paying their newly qualified lawyers upwards of £150K a year on the strict proviso that they never dare to go out in daylight unless it is to fetch their supervising partner his eighth coffee of the day. 

            Then there had been me, and Hubert, who had always kept his love life to himself, in much the same way he kept every other part of his life to himself. And finally there had been Chris Cleghorn, known as “Random Chris” for his tendency to turn up at parties hosted by people at best only slightly known to him, treat his hosts like lifelong buddies and make himself at home, usually at the very point that the bona fide guests were on the point of departure. We Brits are a reserved bunch, and are generally too polite to point it out to people when they have not, technically speaking, made the invite list. Chris had exploited this fact shamelessly to bag himself a hell of a lot of free beer in his three years, but we had all lost touch with him several years ago. In a sense this actually made it more surprising that he wasn’t here.

            The upshot of the above is that we singletons had been a distinct minority amongst those in the room that night, and those who were in relationships had not been particularly backward about drawing attention to the fact. As such, my recollection was that I had written a rather self-pitying paragraph or two, predicting that I would still be alone in a rather soulless, dead end job, with only my loving tabby cats to stave off the unbearable, heavy loneliness deep within my soul. Even more depressing was the fact that I had got it pretty much spot on, except that poor old Clawed Rains, aka The Cat, had moved on to the great snuggle basket in the sky some months ago.

            As such I was rather hoping that we would manage to get Ed drunk enough to spare our blushes and forget about the whole thing, but the rather simian smile he flashed when saying ”We shall see” led me to conclude that this was probably a forlorn hope, especially given how carefully he appeared to have picked the guest list. I took another slurp of lager and tried to focus as best I could, given how freely the alcohol had been flowing all evening on the conversation next to me. 

            “So,” I slurred, turning to Jammy, “are you joining us in availing yourself of the college accommodation tonight?”

            “Are you trying to chat me up, Rog?” he teased. I retorted with a derisive snort.

            “Yeah, I thought I would join you guys, and get the full experience,” he said when he realised I was still waiting for an answer to his question. “It’s good to get away from it all, sometimes.”

            “Get away from it all? Isn’t this your constituency?”

            “Er...yeah,” he looked embarrassed. “Truth be told, since I joined the Public Accounts Committee I don’t spend as much time doing constituency work as I really should be. Work bloody hard though. This is the first break I’ve taken since the party conference!”

            “The highlight of everyone’s calendar,” I chuckled jovially. “I hear it was a raucous affair this year.”

            “It always bloody is these days,” Jammy grimaced. 

   “Still,” he added with a surreptitious cheeky grin, “I got my knob away, so that’s something!” 

    This expression was a new one on me, and Britta, on the other side of him, gave him an incredulous look to which he remained entirely oblivious.

            “Ah, well that must have been an enjoyable minibreak!” I jibed, sending Britta into a fit of the giggles. Jammy, who would doubtless have appreciated the brilliance of this choice piece of wit if it had been directed at anyone else, looked irritated.

            “I see we’re already getting intellectual”, a caustic northern accented female voice declared from behind us. I looked up. Laura Tebbutt had made it after all. It was now after 10pm but our party was finally complete.

            Laura was a petite, extremely attractive brunette from Yorkshire, or somewhere similar - north of the Watford Gap, anyway. Must have been near Bakewell, now I come to think of it, as I remember a crowd of us went up there to visit her once and thoroughly embarrassed the poor girl by getting a tad rat arsed and wandering around the town centre late at night demanding to know where the tarts were. 

            Laura had a perennially sweet expression on her face which belied an extremely sarcastic and hard as nails personality. I suspected that many people on the other side of her transactions had underestimated her to their cost for that very reason. I liked Laura, but she had always slightly terrified me. She had already furnished herself with a cocktail so girly that I was astonished that The Mitre had been prepared to serve it. When Ed saw it his expression was suitably appalled. 

          “Polish it off, lass”, he insisted. The two of them had always been shamelessly flirty with each other even when in relationships with third parties, and he always called her “lass” because she came from Yorkshire. “We were about to give up on you and head up the hill!” 

Laura looked at her watch, which looked suspiciously like a rolex.

           “Ed Dickinson, have you gone all middle aged on me?” she snapped. “It’s only just gone 10 and I’ve just bought myself a drink. I’ve had a bloody awful day and I’m not going to be rushed into polishing anything off, thank you very much! Budge up, Rog.” 

I obliged, meekly. We did, however, call it a night after she had finished, although, Laura being Laura, she pointedly refused to be rushed, meaning that it was around a quarter to eleven when we began our weary and unsteady trek back up Castle Hill towards our accommodation. Ed, who had clearly been slightly irritated by Laura’s comment, made it clear that he had absolutely no intention of yielding to the social norms of middle age just yet, and announced in no uncertain terms that he was not allowing anyone to go to bed yet, as he had bought in more booze for us to drink in his room. 

            Dan, who had started early and had somehow managed to sneak in a couple more drinks than the rest of us during the course of the evening, was lurching unevenly from one side of the pavement to the other at this point. He had never been particularly good at knowing his limits though, and he whooped when he heard that more drink would shortly be made available to him, before picking up the pace of his staggering.

            The street lighting is not particularly good when one gets to the top of Castle Hill. It was as cold as a penguin’s chuff and as dark as a panther’s nadgers. Quite a striking contrast to the noisy frivolity of the pub, and Cambridge suddenly felt rather empty and ever so slightly eerie. I had not had many opportunities for exercise lately so I was wheezing slightly as we got to the flatter section of the walk. I decided to take a restorative slurp from my trusty hip flask in which I had secreted a modest quantity of wonderfully warming 12 year old Glengoyne. Truth be told, I was rather regretting having drunk so much, but I knew of old that it was far too late for me to avoid the next morning’s hangover now and that the difference that a swig or two of whisky would make was negligible.

            “Alea bloody well jacta est,” I muttered, taking another swig.

          “Ah, you’ve brought the old hippers!” Ed grinned at me. Tanya, who had been walking just ahead of us with Robbie, turned and gave me a “look”.

            “You haven’t still got that thing, have you?” she asked, amused. I beamed at her, delighted to finally have a chance to chat, for she had been deep in conversation with other people for most of the evening, so we had barely got two words in up to this point.

            “Old habits die hard,” I responded, far too plastered to come up with anything more original. 

            “So do worn out livers!” Tanya retorted acerbically, although the warmth in her voice remained. Once upon a time she had been very glad of that hip flask. It had helped me comfort her during her painful break-up with the very chap she had now linked arms with. A more unscrupulous man than I might have tried to take advantage of that situation. But then again, perhaps the warmth in her voice was a reflection of my not having done so. For old times’ sake I proffered the flask, but Tanya wrinkled her nose and firmly declined. Britta on the other hand...

            “Oh you legend, Rog,” she beamed, snaffling it out of my hands and taking an unladylike glug, much to her far more sober husband’s evident embarrassment. She passed the flask back to me and I decided that a “swig or two” might as well turn into three. This turned out to be an error, for as the whisky was tumbling down my throat I was startled by the sound of some incredibly sinister singing emanating from somewhere in the surrounding blackness.

 

            “There’s no earthly way of knowing

Which direction we are going.

There’s no knowing where we’re rowing

Or which way the river’s flowing.

 

Is it raining? Is it snowing? 

Is a hurricane a blowing?

 

Not a speck of light is showing

So the danger must be growing!

Are the fires of hell a glowing?

Is the grisly reaper mowing?

 

Yes the danger must be growing!

For the rowers keep on rowing 

And they’re certainly not showing 

Any signs that they are slowing!”

 

Now if you thought that song was terrifying when sung by an avuncular twinkly man in a top hat in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, imagine just how potentially trouser ruining it was to hear it sung in the pitch blackness in the middle of the night by a psychotic Glaswegian with a penchant for extreme violence!

            As he finished the song, Donald Campbell loomed out of the darkness with a terrifying rictus grin on his face. Saddam was nowhere to be found. Presumably there comes a point at which even Iraqi dictators have to draw the line and make themselves scarce. The ex-Porter was greeted by a stunned silence.

          “You kids have a good evening, now!” Campbell beamed at us with a terrifying bonhomie which suggested that we might as well enjoy it because it would be our last, and that he would be knocking us off one by one with a screwdriver as soon as he had finished sharpening it. And with that he was off, giving us a sarcastic little wave and disappearing into the night, leaving us all thoroughly disconcerted.

 

            By this time we had reached our destination and the whole crowd trouped in gratefully through the Porter’s Lodge. Gavin was no longer on duty and his replacement was not much older than we were. He gave us a disapproving look as we traipsed through, yammering away in unnaturally loud voices.

            “I think I’ll turn in,” Neil announced. 

“Don’t let me stop you enjoying yourself though,” he added. This was presumably directed at Britta.

            “I’ll just stay for one more,” she promised him without the remotest semblance of sincerity, but her husband nodded and sloped off gloomily in the direction of Bedfordshire. As soon as he had disappeared, his wife turned to us and declared, “Right, let’s f*****g GET ON IT!” 

“You haven’t had many nights out since the kids were born, have you?” I surmised.

            “Does it show?” Britta asked sweetly.

            “Getting on it” turned out to primarily consist of lolling around in Ed’s room drinking bottles of beer. Dan, who had been mumbling increasingly incoherently as the evening progressed, promptly fell asleep five minutes after bagging the comfiest chair. 

            The rest of us soon started chinwagging in smaller groups, with Britta, Laura, Ed and myself reminiscing nostalgically, and Matt looking extremely uncomfortable next to Sadie who had insisted on sitting him next to her on the floor and speaking intently and intensely rather more closely into his ear than his sense of personal space demanded. Tanya and Robbie clearly hadn’t finished “catching up”, as they were solely focused on each other. Hubert, sitting a little apart from the rest of us in a corner, started doodling on a small pad of paper he had produced from a baggy trouser pocket. 

            That left Jammy, who, much to his chagrin, had spent virtually the entire evening not being the centre of attention. Clearly feeling somewhat left out, he disappeared wordlessly and reappeared a couple of minutes later with, God help us, a guitar. Having gone to the trouble, one could not really refuse to let him play and some of us even, to our eternal shame, whooped with enthusiasm as he cracked on with a Coldplay medley, glooming the rest of us into sombre and attentive silence, although Sadie continued to whisper at Matt throughout the proceedings. 

            When he had run out of Coldplay he moved on to “Wonderwall”, “Hotel California”, an overlong version of “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters, and numerous other songs. When he announced he was going to finish off with “The Sound of Silence” my hopes were temporarily raised, only to be dashed on the rocks when he started warbling the Paul Simon song of that name.

            The ordeal eventually came to an end, and I heard Britta mutter something that sounded like “relief”, which reflected my sentiments entirely. 

            “Well that was...er....” I began, but before I could finish my sentence, my efforts to be polite were somewhat sabotaged by the emergence of a sharp, vibrato bottom burp from the sofa next to me, which was, incidentally, by far the most tuneful thing any of us had heard all night. Britta looked at me with her best “sweet innocent” face which was rather undermined by the fact that she was wafting her hand around in front of her dangerous, jet propelled derrière, presumably in order to “spread the love”.

            “Gesundheit,” Tanya muttered.

            Ed, who had himself been merrily guffing away all evening, raised his bottle of beer respectfully to a fellow flatulist. Britta had always the more flamboyantly flatulent of the two, whilst for Ed it was more like punctuation, although he had, to his great credit, mastered the art of passing wind at both ends simultaneously (a skill which even eludes most deities, if you believe Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King).

            “Oh for the love of God,” Laura sighed, rolling her eyes and edging towards the open window. “I swear I’ve heard more from your arse over the years than I have from your husband, the poor long suffering b*****d!” 

You could tell Laura was pretty drunk now as she always sounded increasingly northern when she had had a few.

            “Jammy, I think that was what’s known as constructive criticism,” Matt informed the crestfallen politician cheerfully.

             “How long have you been playing the guitar for, anyway?” Tanya asked, side stepping to a safe distance from her farty friend and attempting to mollify a now rather grumpy looking Jammy.

            “About ten years,” said Jammy. Britta looked at the fruit-based device on her wrist.

            “It’s actually only been about half an hour”, she muttered. “Bloody well feels like ten years though!” 

            “Ok let’s move on!” Jammy snapped. This had clearly not been the reaction he had been hoping for. Presumably on his Select Committee Away Days his audience tended to be more polite. “Are we going to do the sodding time capsule or what? How about I hand them out at random and everyone can read theirs out and the rest of us can guess whose is whose?”

            “That’s not for tonight,” Ed grinned, clearly savouring the prospect of whatever it was he had planned. “We don’t want to spoil the Easter treat, now do we?” 

Jammy now looked like he was really struggling not to lose his rag. Sadie, looking incredibly pale, suddenly stopped clinging to Matt like a besotted limpet, tottered across the room and then threw up noisily into the little bin by the door. I turned to Ed, assuming that, as the person who would be sleeping here tonight, he would be at least a tiny bit irritated by this development, but he simply said “Wahey!” before taking another slurp of beer. 

            “I’ll get her to bed,” Tanya offered. Whilst I felt somewhat thankful that there was at least one grown up in the room, I felt pretty certain that Tanya would rather easily manage to resist the temptation to come back once she had taken care of the stricken Sadie and that this was the last we would see of her that night. 

            “Yeah, I think I’m going to hit the hay as well,” Robbie announced. I had been pondering a similar announcement for some time but lethargy had kicked in and even the eye-watering smell of vomit and stale fart that was still percolating miasmically around my part of the room was insufficient to shift me. 

            “So, him and Tanya. What do we think? Shagging?” Laura asked as soon as the door had closed behind the second half of this abominably cosy couple. Much to my annoyance, the general consensus was in favour of her theory. Meanwhile Dan, still bleary but at least as alert as he had been for several hours, caught sight of Hubert who was still continuing with his artistic endeavours.

            “Can I have a look, mate?” he demanded. 

            “No,” Hubert replied curtly. I was expecting some sort of excuse by way of follow up but apparently he felt that “no” was enough. Sadly it wasn’t enough for Dan, who was an argumentative and aggressive drunkard at the best of times. After a few more attempts at persuasion, consisting principally of repeating “Go on!” over and over again and making a forlorn effort to turn it into a chant, he eventually took matters into his own hands by standing up and snatching the pad out of Hubert’s hands, knocking over the budding doodler’s drink in the process. Dan took one look at its contents and went bright crimson in the face.

            “F**k you!” he snarled, violently hurling the pad of paper into a corner. Normally in my experience such exclamations are a prelude to storming off in a huff, but Dan did no such thing, but rather let his words hang there awkwardly while he and Hubert stared at each other, eyes aflame, as they angrily circled each other like a pair of rutting stags. 

            “Come on guys,” Jammy pleaded with them half-heartedly, showing us a truly tantalising glimpse of the sophisticated diplomatic skills that would no doubt serve him in good stead if he ever made Foreign Secretary.

            Hubert was clearly aware that the rest of us in the room had always been closer to Dan, and were therefore instinctively more sympathetic to him even though he was clearly being a dick and we didn’t really understand what was going on. As such, it was Hubert who eventually capitulated under pressure and marched out of the room with a snarled “F**k you all!” as he furiously wrenched the door open and slammed it shut behind him with a hinge rattling bang.

            I took this a suitable cue to make my excuses and depart. The party was dwindling, the mood was souring and I still had high hopes of avoiding spending the whole day tomorrow feeling like a badger had defecated in my mouth, albeit I had pretty much written off the morning on that front. Britta followed my lead, as unlike the rest of the party, our rooms were in C Block in the next building (Ed and the others were all in D Block). We wandered into the courtyard for a couple of minutes to get a spot of fresh air before turning in.

            “It’ll all look ridiculously trivial in the morning,” Britta commented. “I just hope Hubert doesn’t decide to skip the rest of the weekend. He’s not a bad sort, really.”

            “What are you two up to during the day tomorrow?” I asked. Ed had outlined his plans for the evening - we were all due to meet up at 6pm tomorrow for an early dinner at The Ivy - but had presumably assumed that we could, and would prefer to, make our own plans for the rest of the day and team up as appropriate.

            “Neil’s going to be working,” she said. “Do you want to grab breakfast somewhere and climb the Great St Mary’s Tower? I’ve never done it and apparently you get the best views in Cambridge.”

            “How many stairs?” I asked dubiously. I had always admired GSM as a church and indeed an old mate of mine was on the PCC, but as someone with a lifelong fear of both heights and strenuous exercise, this would not have been my first choice of activity to start off the day with. But Britta was a persuasive little dynamo and I could already feel myself relenting as I asked the question.

            “Hundreds of the b******s!” Britta replied cheerfully. “I’ll wake you at 7. Ed told me earlier that he’d be up for it as well so we’ll drag him along if the others have let him get any sleep by then!”

“7? Steady on!” I spluttered. 

            “The early bird catches the worm, Rog!”

            “He’s bloody welcome to it!” I snorted. Sodding hell, I thought. Next she’ll be suggesting that we get up at 5am for rowing practice. I had steered clear of the rowing during my undergraduate years precisely due to my allergy to early mornings. Britta had coxed for a bit but she had never been one of those rowers who you could never get off the subject of bloody rowing. Robbie was really the only rowing bore amongst us, and one upside to his having been in a conversation cocoon with Tanya all evening was that at least he had been prevented from regaling us with his thoughts on that particular subject.

            I bade Britta goodnight and reeled off in the approximate direction of my bedchamber. When I got there I took an enormous and very gulpy drink of water in a rather depressingly middle aged way, before looking around in bemusement and wondering whether I was going a bit potty. I had been sure I had left my bag under the little table by my bed and indeed I remembered buggering about trying to squeeze it under in a rather forlorn attempt to make the rest of the room feel more spacious. And I had definitely left it zipped up. Now it was unzipped and leaning against a wall on the other side of the room. 

            I quickly rifled through it, trying to make a mental list of what I had packed so that I could work out if anything was missing. Spare clothes? Check. Pyjamas? Check. Toiletries? Check. Dog-eared copy of Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens? Check. I had absolutely nothing remotely worth nicking, of course, and if anyone had been in my room, and I wasn’t going completely tonto, they had obviously drawn the same conclusion. I made a vague mental note to remonstrate with whichever Porter was on duty about it in the morning as I drifted off in to a rather overdue slumber.

 

            I was awoken a little before 6am, feeling as fresh and dynamic as a fossilised wheel of stilton, by the sound of someone, who was clearly feeling a lot worse than me, frantically flushing the toilet. It sounded like it was coming from the next block where Ed and most of the others were sleeping (I had left my window open to get some fresh air). I groaned, stuck a pillow over my head and waited for it to stop, which it failed to do for some considerable while. Clearly there was some sort of pitched battle going on: man vs latrine.

            As I have already recounted, these accommodation blocks were still fairly brand spanking new, but clearly the Bursar had felt that plumbing was something the builders could safely cut costs on. One of the things I have a tendency to pontificate about, given the opportunity (and I realise that this is entirely tangential to the plot so I will refrain from subjecting you to my full rant on the subject) is that more than fifty years after we put a man on the moon, there are a number of things that the human race should really be starting to get more of a handle on by now in terms of construction, and toilets are right up there on that list of shame with umbrellas and photocopiers. 

            I must have nodded off again pretty quickly, as it only felt like a few minutes later when I heard Britta’s firm and distinctive rap at my door. I groaned again (it is what one does in these situations) spent a couple of minutes blundering around the room whilst hastily dressing and deodorising, and opened the door to my depressingly bouncy looking friend.

            “Morning matey!” she said. “The beds have improved a bit, haven’t they? Less creaky, for one thing!” 

Due to my horrendously inactive sex life I had had less experience of the whole creaking phenomenon last time around but I grunted some sort of vague platitude by way of response. 

            “Let’s see how Ed’s doing,” I suggested. “Wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up having fallen asleep on the couch!” 

We turned the corner towards the door to his bedroom and stopped in horror. The window to his room was sprayed with copious quantities of red fluid, spattered haphazardly across its entire surface.

            “What the hell?” I breathed. Britta rapped at the door.

            “Ed? Is everything OK?” She was met with an ominous silence. After a few seconds of terrified hesitation I dared to look in through the window. Even without the blood (for I had already convinced myself it could be nothing else) it was extremely dirty and I could barely make anything out, but there was definitely a human form in there, and it was lying by the side of the bed, not on it.

            “This...this is one of Ed’s pranks, right?” I stammered unconvincingly. Britta looked grim.

            “We’d better get the Porter,” she said.

            Gavin was on duty again. I could only assume that he needed to work the extra overtime to pay for his ever expanding porn collection. His reaction when we told him what we had just seen was typically surly and incredulous, but he grabbed the spare key from the wall and came out with us anyway.

            Turning the key in the lock can only have taken Gavin a few seconds, but every millisecond seemed to drag on excruciatingly. When we got in, however, time seemed to stop altogether.

            “Oh my giddy b***h of an aunt!” Gavin whispered.

            To misquote old Brucie Willis in that film about the two sweary hitmen, Ed was dead, baby. Ed was dead. And he was not being subtle about it. 

            His shirt was ripped open and his bare chest was exposed to us, or at least what was left of it, for it had been slashed to ribbons by what had to be almost twenty stab wounds, several of them deep and gaping. The murder weapon had obviously been a large hunting knife, and we did not need Sherlock Holmes to tell us that much, as it had been left sticking out of his neck. In fact it had gone right through with tremendous force and appeared to now be pinning his body to the floor. 

            On his forehead was a scrap of paper which appeared to have been pinned to his head by a drawing pin. On the paper was drawn a small, cartoon picture of a little devil, complete with horns, tail and pitchfork, with a malicious grin on his face. The expression on the face of my dead friend, however, was one of shock and utter terror. 

            Britta, who even in happier times had had quite a larynx on her, screamed. I feel absolutely no shame in admitting that I did too. Then I took a second look and immediately collapsed into a flood of tears.