the least interested in a few walls and windows. She did worse damage to herself, and she almost succeeded in hiding it. I’m not surprised that her…misery, distress, whatever you want to call it, manifested itself as anorexia. Anorexia is not for wimps! She is headstrong and calculating, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t in need of help. Most particularly if it turns out that she really is pregnant with Hornberger’s child and he is going to prison!”
Elizabeth sits behind her desk, her hands folded on the desktop, not visibly impressed by my vehemence.
“On days like these, I hate my job,” she says.
This was a word I should have had earlier. As I hurry across Library Square in a cold, gray drizzle, I feel as if a huge burden had been lifted off my shoulders. Strange. I should be in a panic, shouldn’t I? Nick Hornberger now definitely knows that Giles didn’t stick to his part of the bargain, which was to conceal the file. But I don’t believe for a minute that he is going to expose Giles and me.
Expose. For what? Fucking in the old observatory. Small fry.
When the phone rings that evening, I pick up. It’s Tim.
“Hey, Professor Blundell. Have you come out of your closet yet? You’ve been tenured for over a week!”
Tim is not amused. “Look in your inbox.”
“What? Tim, I—”
“Put the phone down and look at your emails. And don’t panic. Call me, or better still, call him. I’m trying to get hold of Gill Miller.”
“Who is Gill Miller?”
“The college’s computing officer.” He slams the phone down and I run upstairs, my heart beating high in my throat. What? What?
Damn dial-up! Who has dial-up Internet access these days?
An email from Nick Hornberger to the English department mailing list, subject: “An Englishman in New York.” The picture loads painfully slowly, but I know what it is before I’ve seen more than half an inch.
You couldn’t tell, really, who it is, if there was more than one female on the Observatory faculty who wears Mountie boots.
After staring at it for what seems like hours, I switch off the modem, go downstairs again, pull out the Shaftsboro phone book from under a pile of books on the living room table, and pick up the phone.
How can Hornberger send emails if he is in custody?
Funny, how your mind, when you stumble and fall, fastens on one tiny detail.
And what if I’m wrong? Doesn’t matter, now.
“Mr. O’Neal? This is Anna Lieberman. I am one of Selena’s professors, and I was—yes, that’s right, I’m the one who lives in Howard Walsh’s cabin. Mr. O’Neal, I was wondering whether Selena is at home. It’s rather important.”
But Selena is still at the college.
Ah, well. Nothing else to do, have I?
It is still raining in a thin, cold spray, cold enough to see one’s breath. Several windows are lit on the fourth floor; one of them may be Selena’s, or it could be Tessa’s. The great hall is still well-lit, but there is hardly anyone around. I nod a greeting at the security guard playing with his phone.
Steve Howell’s office door is closed, but dim light and soft jazz music are trickling into the hallway through the cracks where the door doesn’t shut properly. Light, too, under Selena’s door.
I don’t even knock. She jumps in her chair and gives a little yelp, but I quickly close the door behind me. A hard-working graduate student at her desk past eight o’clock on the first day of the semester. Some library books on her desk. I pick one up.
“The Devil in Renaissance Drama. Do you know, I think if Satan was really an aging university professor who gets off on deflowering Christian virgins, the world wouldn’t be in the state that it’s in.”
“I don’t know what you mean. What do you want?” she manages to say, and the steely defensiveness is never far from her surface.
“No, Selena. What do you want?” I sit down in Natalie’s chair.
The question throws her, and she falters.
“Hmm? What did you hope to achieve, for instance, by sending round that photo of Giles Cleveland and me? What do you hope to achieve,” I say, raising my voice above her protest, “by making yourself the tool of such a man? He isn’t even fascinatingly evil! He’s just…middle-aged and panicking!”
“You and Cleveland dumped him in the shit!” she flings at me, goaded into a reaction. “Cleveland said he’d keep the file!”
“No, Selena, Nick dumped himself in the shit when he forced himself