The No. 2 Global Detective Read Free

being stupid, he reasoned. He noticed the label on his own door read just ‘Wormwood’. What did he expect, he wondered? This was Cuff College. Of course there would be running feet, locked doors, unexplained disappearances and strange smells.
    He was smiling to himself until he turned and saw something that made him shrink back in terror. Hanging from a nail driven into the wall, a small crudely carved wooden doll with a long hatpin sticking from a bloody wound in her chest. Under her someone had carved some words that made Tom step back in terror: The Dean and Prof. Wikipedia are bum chums.
    â€˜Bum chums?’ he said aloud. Did people say such things anymore?

3

A tea party …
    â€˜Ah, Hurst, my dear boy, there you are at long last. Settled in all right, eh? That’s the job.’
    Once again the Dean was standing by a fire, under another portrait of Wilkie Collins, with what looked like a
pastis
in his hand. The only differences from the first time they had met were that he had shed his smoking jacket and there were, post-Christmas, no mince pies. Instead he was wearing a white shirt, pristine, gathered with articulated steel bands just above the elbows, and some skull-and-crossbones cufflinks. A present from an indulgent nephew, perhaps. He looked well, slightly tanned perhaps, and the vein that Tom had noticed before Christmas no longer throbbed in the Dean’s temple.
    The Dean waved Tom to one of the two leather chesterfields and retreated behind his own magnificent dark wood partner’s desk. The fire spat and the ice in the Dean’s glass chinked 2 as he put it down on the leather blotter. Tom sat. It was ostentatiously civilised.
    â€˜Good Christmas? New Year?’ the Dean asked, careless of the answer, shuffling through his papers looking for something.
    Tom thought for a moment. He recalled a few long days with his parents: his mother absenting herself in the kitchen, his father sitting in the armchair in front of the fire, deep in a Danielle Steele novel.
    â€˜Quiet,’ he said.
    â€˜Hmmm,’ approved the Dean absently. ‘I always like to get some sun, myself.’
    The Dean’s room seemed designed to give away nothing more than the obvious: that he was a bookish dandy who kept his whisky in a heavy cut-glass decanter; his taste in art was orthodox to the point of nullity and he liked to keep his room warm. There was a series of framed photographs – portraits – on the wall. Past Deans of the College, by the look of them, in their fur-lined academic gowns. They were names Tom would know, of course. Some of the most famous names in the Genre. From where he was sitting he could see a photograph of a man with a very large head – he must, thought Tom, wear a size-eight hat.
    The Dean now had a sheaf of papers for Tom to sign and a ‘chit’ that he explained was redeemable from a tailor in town for one of the long black gowns similar to his own, although without the silk-lined hood. Together they went through the timetable for Tom’s lectures – two a week – and the list of his undergraduates. They were, as the Dean had suggested, a mixed bunch.
    â€˜I understood I was to supervise just five students,’ Tom said. ‘Yet I see six names here? I am not complaining, you understand, but perhaps it is a mistake? One name is repeated. Chowdhury? Or are they siblings?’
    â€˜Ah yes,’ agreed the Dean. ‘Chowdhury. Rather awkward. Chowdhury is – are? – Siamese twins. Joined at the head. Twice the brains; double the insight. I’m expecting great things of them. There aren’t many in the Genre from the subcontinent. Can’t think why.’
    It seemed that Tom was also to supervise an Argentinian gaucho, a Chinese tumbler and a man skilled at deep-sea diving. There was also a woman bus driver. The Dean tutted when he read out her name.
    â€˜Means she can only solve crimes committed on bus