Our Game

Wait, I told myself. Add a beat. That's what being calm is all about. This is your own house, late at night. Only then did I consent to unchain the door to them. Seventeenth-century, iron-bound, and weighs a ton. The night sky restless. A capricious wind snapping at the trees. The crows still shifting and complaining, despite the darkness. During the day we had had a crazy fall of snow. Ghostly grey lines of it lay on the drive.

"Hullo," I said. "Don't stand there freezing. Come on in."

My entrance lobby is a late addition by my grandfather, a glass-and-mahogany box like a vast elevator that serves as an antechamber to the Great Hall. For a moment, there we stood, all three, under the brass lantern, going neither up nor down while we looked each other over.

"This is Honeybrook Manor, is it, sir?" said the moustache, a smiler. "Only we didn't seem to see a sign at all."

"We call it the Vineyard these days," I said. "What can I do for you?" But if my words were polite, my tone was not. I was speaking the way I speak to trespassers: Excuse me. Can I help you?

"Then you would be Mr. Cranmer, am I correct, sir?" the moustache suggested, still with his smile. Why I say smile, I don't know, for his expression, though technically benign, was devoid of humour or of semblance of goodwill.

"Yes, I'm Cranmer," I replied, but preserving the note of question in my voice.

"Mr. Timothy Cranmer? Just routine, sir, if you don't mind. Not disturbing you, I trust?" His moustache hid a vertical white scar, I guessed a harelip operation. Or perhaps someone had smashed a broken bottle into him, for he had a patchy, reconstructed complexion.

"Routine?" I echoed, in open disbelief. "At this time of night? Don't tell me my car licence is out of date."

"No, sir, it's not about your car licence. We're enquiring about a Dr. Lawrence Pettifer, of Bath University."

I allowed myself a chastened pause, then a frown midway between amusement and vexation. "You mean Larry? Oh my Lord. What's he been up to now?" And when I received no answer but the stare: "Nothing bad, is it, I trust?"

"We're given to understand you're an acquaintance of the Doctor's, not to say close friend. Or isn't that correct?"

It's a little too correct, I thought.

"Close?" I repeated, as if the notion of proximity were new to me. "I don't think I'd go that far."

As one man, they handed me their coats and watched me while I hung them up, then watched me again while I opened the inner door for them. Most first-time visitors to Honeybrook make a reverent pause at this point while they take in the minstrels' gallery, the great fireplace, the portraits, and the wagon roof with its armorial bearings. Not the moustache. And not the coffinhead, who, having until now lugubriously observed our exchanges from behind his older colleague's shoulder, elected to address me in a deprived and snappish monotone:

"We heard you and Pettifer were bosom pals," he objected. "Winchester College was what we heard, no less. You were schoolmates."

"There were three years between us. For schoolboys that's a lifetime."

"Nonetheless, in public school circles, as we hear, such things make a bond. Plus you were students together at Oxford," he added accusingly.

"What's happened to Larry?" I said.

My question drew an insolent silence from both of them. They seemed to be deliberating whether I rated an answer. It fell to the elder man, as their official spokesman, to reply. His technique, I decided, was to play himself in caricature. And in slow motion too.

"Yes, well, your doctor friend has gone a bit missing, to tell you the truth, Mr. Cranmer, sir," he confessed, in the tones of a reluctant Inspector Plod. "No foul play suspected, not at this stage. However, he's missing from his lodgings and his place of work. And so far as we can gauge"—how he loved that word; his frown said so—"he's not written anybody a goodbye billy-doo. Unless he wrote you one, of course. He's not here, is he, by any chance, sir? Upstairs, sleeping it off, so to speak?"

"Of course not. Don't be ridiculous."

His scarred moustache abruptly widened, revealing anger and bad teeth. "Oh? Now, why am I being ridiculous, Mr. Cranmer, sir?"

"I would have told you at once. I'd have said, He's upstairs. Why should I waste your time, or mine, pretending he isn't here if he is?"

Again he didn't answer me. He was clever in that way. I was beginning to suspect he was clever in other ways as well. I had a prejudiced view of policemen that I was trying to unlearn at the same time that he was deliberately playing on it. Partly it was a class thing; partly it stemmed from my former profession, which treated them as poor relations. And partly it was Larry agitating in me, because, as we used to say in the Office, Larry only had to be in the same borough as a policeman to be arrested for obstructing him in his lawful duties.