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interest him. He could think about nothing but the girl in the hotel, and after he had finished his Soho piece he made sure Valerie’s death finally made it to NIBS. Normally the short pieces in News in Brief were written by stringers trying to get a toe-hold, but he had a feeling about the girl and wrote it himself. And the mini-headline: ‘ HIGH HEELS ARE DANGEROUS ’. That had the ring of the American writers he admired – Dashiell Hammett, Micky Spillane, Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler. Chandler was originally English, of course. He’d even been to the same school as Blackstone: Dulwich College.

chapter 4

    ‘I OVERHEARD A HILARIOUS conversation in Blackwell’s.’
    They were seated at the back of the Cadena Café on the corner of Cornmarket and the Broad. ‘There was this woman in the languages section – obviously a don’s wife – and she was asking for a Hungarian phrase book ! “We’ve got a wonderful young freedom fighter staying with us,”’ mimicked Charles Hallam in his campest falsetto. ‘“A refugee from the revolution! So brave and so handsome!” God!’
    Penny Brookfield squinted at Charles through the smoke from her cigarette. She looked puzzled, and didn’t seem to see why it was funny.
    ‘Don’t you see how pretentious it is? All that rot about freedom fighters. Half of them are just petty criminals trying to evade justice back home.’
    ‘Oh – are they?’ Penny looked terribly disappointed.
    ‘Well – not all of them I suppose.’
    It was Fergus, his communist friend, who had told Charles that. But that was before Fergus had left the Party, disgusted by the Soviet invasion. Charles, like almost everyone, sided with the rebels, yet was cynical about the Cold War propaganda that daily flooded the papers.
    ‘D’you think there’ll be another war?’
    ‘I shouldn’t think so.’
    The excitement of the past weeks grew ever more feverish. There was bad news every day. Even the undergraduates talked about nothing else. It seemed as if he alone was bored now, sick of the photos of Anthony Eden, a broken prime minister, with his toothbrush moustache and weak chin, sick of pictures of fighting around the Suez Canal, and equally sick of the Hungarian uprising and the anti-communist hysteria in its wake.
    ‘You’re not in a very good mood, are you,’ said Penny.
    Charles resented Penny for having noticed. Not that it was a mood. These days it was a settled disposition. ‘I’m fine.’ He looked away across the crowded café, through the swirls of smoke. At the front, W.H. Auden, the famous Professor of Poetry, could be seen silhouetted against the light as he held court amid an admiring circle of acolytes. That annoyed Charles too: the jockeying for position, the fawning on celebrity – and Fergus, for all his revolutionary views, was as bad as the rest of them. In fact he was sitting there now, gazing with rapt attention at the poet’s craggy face.
    ‘Are you going to Julian’s party?’
    Charles made an effort to smile. ‘Not sure. Probably not. I was surprised he even invited me.’
    ‘Alistair said he’ll see me there. Oh, do come.’
    She stirred the foam around in her coffee. She was pretty, he supposed, her face still rather unformed, with big eyes and mouth and thick eyebrows; her short curly hair was mousy brown and hadn’t been brushed; and she shouldn’t be so desperately earnest.
    ‘I don’t go to undergraduate parties any more,’ he said. ‘I’m no longer in circulation. In fact my life is a social wasteland.’
    She laughed, astonished. ‘What on earth do you mean?’
    They had, after all, met at a party. Long ago, it seemed, on the New Building lawn at Magdalen. Alistair’s party. The funny thing was, he’d had his eye on Alistair and then the truth had dawned – that Penny was Alistair’s girlfriend. So he’d chatted to her, flattered her, found out which college she was at (St Hilda’s) and later sent a note round inviting her to tea. He’d