office. He had a boy in a blood-soaked T-shirt.
The reason that he was looking at it anyway was that he was, as they put it so nicely in the local paper, baffled. Sean Whiteside, twenty years old, chemistry student, barman of the Hollow Crown, had been found dead in his room by his father, shot through the heart. No witnesses, no suspects. No enemies. Apparently he had been popular, but not so popular as to raise deadly jealousies. He left one devastated girlfriend, two heart-broken parents. And one police inspector at a loss. It was an odd crime. Not, by CID standards, very violent. Just one shot, precise and lethal. There seemed to have been no struggle, no drama. Not in Sean Whiteside's death, and little in his life. His parents had told him he was a hard-working student, a scholarship boy of which they were rightly proud. Even allowing for the rosy view fond parents tended to take of their children, Whiteside's life did not appear to have invited danger.
His phone rang. DS Walter. 'Yes?'
'Sir? We have a lead.'
He almost admired the man for the way he could make 'sir' sound insubordinate. Sergeant Walter was having a hard time getting over the fact that his younger colleague had jumped ahead in the promotion stakes.
'Yes?' he said again, neutrally. He had promised himself never, ever, to lose his temper with Walter.
'You'll love this. The kid was pushing Oblivion.'
'Right. That changes things. How did you find out?'
'Fellow student of his told me. Bought some of the stuff off him a month back. Couldn't tell me where he got it from, though.'
'We'll find out. Thanks, Walter. I'll contact the boys in Narcotics.'
If Whiteside had been a dealer, things were suddenly looking a lot more messy than the whiteboard suggested. Collins didn't like this at all. There wasn't much drug-related crime on his patch, but there was always some, of course. And things tended to get confused pretty quickly when dealing with it. Organised crime didn't stay neatly within CID approved boundaries. He tried to reassure himself that Sean Whiteside couldn't have been a big-time dealer, otherwise Narcotics would have contacted him by now. Wouldn't they? The name had been all over the papers. Yes, surely even those dopes would have made the connection. He called his opposite number in the drug squad and asked for a list of all sources of Oblivion in the neighbourhood.
'Nasty stuff that, Oblivion. Remember the Miller girl?' Jim said, 'Your dead boy a user?'
'Dealer. Nothing big, I think.' Meaning: nothing for you to worry your pretty head about.
'I'll email you a list. But I would appreciate it if you'd give us a heads up before talking to any of them. We've got some delicate operations running.'
'Of course. Thanks, Jim.'
He got up, selected a purple marker, and wrote 'Oblivion' in capitals on the shiny white surface. He looked at it, his head to one side, and decided to add a small question mark.
'Sir?'
DC Holmes was hovering in his doorway, looking like she was trying hard not to laugh.
'What is it, Sally?' He usually addressed his team by their last names, but he never called her Holmes, for fear she would start calling him Watson.
'There's a Mr Walsingham to see you, sir. Says he has an appointment.'
Of course, the distraught academic. Collins looked around his office. Better than an interview room? Or worse?
'Give me two minutes. Then show him up here.'
'Will do.'
'Cheers, Sally.'
He did a little futile tidying, shrugged on the jacket of his suit and made another call. He thought he'd better give that list to Sergeant Walter to pursue. Meanwhile, he would get on to his own contact in the world of small-time dealers. Someone who Jim in Narcotics, with any luck, didn't know anything about.
10
On her first morning, after a long lie-in, Simon announced he was taking her for a ride through the park. Not having come near a horse since a brief crush at age eleven, Claire reluctantly agreed to try out the mildest mare in the stables.
'You'll love it,' Simon said confidently, 'We can go along with dad and aunt Esther as far as Drovers' Lane, and leave them to have a proper ride while we go back the easy way.'
'Oh, your father's back, then?'
'Yes, he came home last night. And I think he's pleased you're here,' Simon replied with a grin.
Once she got used to all the things one had to pay attention to when sitting on a horse, Claire had to admit that it was lovely. And just wait till she told Julia, her friend would be green with envy - their own stables!
'I suppose most of the surrounding land belonged to the house at one time or another?' she asked Simon's father - calling him Simon as well didn't come easily, and he insisted she should not be formal, so in practice she didn't call him anything much.
'Yes, all the farms and the fields once belonged to the house. Not for years now, of course. Even my grandfather hardly remembers the time when tenants came up to the house at Michaelmas to pay the rent.'
It sounded like he was talking about an impossibly remote past, but of course his grandfather was the spry old gentleman Claire had said hello to only this morning. It always surprised her what people would and would not call a long time ago. To her it seemed amazing that old tenancy customs had persisted to within living memory. It was practically yesterday.
The cottages they were now riding towards had stood there longer than that, though. White-washed prettily, sporting faded hanging baskets, no doubt extensively converted inside, but still, Claire thought, three-hundred years old if a day. Julia and her husband had recently bought something like that, for weekends away from London. Was she any different, wanting to spend her days in that big house behind them? Maybe not.
'Is that the kind of history you are interested in? Social history?' Simon's aunt asked.
'Not exactly. I'm interested in the gendered experience of history, and so also in the social structures that frame those experiences. But of those it is religion which interests me most.'
She realised Simon's father, riding beside her now, was watching her intently. She assumed he was taking her measure, seeing if she was going to fit in. But not in the nothing-but-the-best-for-our-son way Simon Peter had yesterday at dinner. There was something else, a sense that what she answered now might actually be very important.
'So you believe past experiences can be recovered?' he asked abruptly.
'I hope my words have not suggested that,' Claire replied carefully, 'Certainly not in any crude sense. The past is not just the present in a longer dress. But I think we may at least find where past experience differs from present, even if we cannot know exactly what constitutes the difference.'
He nodded. 'A realistic aim.'
'No more than that, Claire? Really?' Simon asked. He seemed disappointed.
She understood. It was often like that with people who weren't professional historians. The kind of history everyone was taught at school gave
