The Murder Room by P. D. James Page B

weeks. There was the trauma of tripos and feverish last-minute revision, the ruthless seeking after pleasures soon to be relinquished and the melancholy knowledge of imminent partings. She preferred the first term of the academic year with the interest of getting to know the new entrants, the drawing of curtains shutting out the darkening evenings and the first stars, the distant jangle of discordant bells and, as now, the Cambridge smell of river, mist and loamy soil. The fall had come late this year and after one of the most beautiful autumns she could remember. But it had begun at last. The streetlights shone on a thin golden brown carpet of leaves. She felt the crunch of them under her feet and could taste it in the air, the first sour-sweet smell of winter.
    Emma was wearing a long tweed coat, high leather boots and was hatless, the coat’s upturned collar framing her face. Clara, three inches shorter, stumped along beside her friend. She wore a short fleece-lined jacket and had a striped woollen cap drawn down over a fringe of straight dark hair. Her weekend bag was slung over her shoulder. It held books she had bought in Cambridge, but she carried it as easily as if it were weightless.
    Clara had fallen in love with Emma during their first term. It was not the first time she had been strongly attracted to a woman obviously heterosexual, but she had accepted disappointment with her usual wry stoicism and set herself out to win Emma’s friendship. She had read mathematics and had achieved her first class degree, saying that a second was too boring to be contemplated and only a first or a third were worth enduring three years’ hard labour in the damp city of the plains. Since in modern Cambridge it was impossible to avoid being seriously overworked, one might as well make the extra effort and get a first. She had no wish for an academic career, asserting that academe, if persisted in, made the men either sour or pompous while the women, unless other interests supervened, became more than eccentric. After university she had moved promptly to London where, to Emma’s surprise and a little to her own, she was pursuing a successful and highly profitable career as a fund manager in the City. The full tide of prosperity had ebbed, throwing up its human jetsam of failure and disillusionment, but Clara had survived. She had earlier explained to Emma her unexpected choice of career.
    â€œI earn this totally unreasonable salary but I live comfortably on a third of it and invest the rest. The chaps get stressed because they’re handed half-million-pound bonuses and begin to live like someone who earns close on a million a year—the expensive house, the expensive car, the expensive clothes, the expensive woman, the drinking. Then of course they’re terrified of being sacked. The company can fire me tomorrow and I wouldn’t particularly care. I aim to make three million and then I’ll get out and do something I really want to do.”
    â€œSuch as?”
    â€œAnnie and I thought we might open a restaurant close to the campus of one of the modern universities. There you’ve got a captive group of customers desperate for decent food at prices they can afford; homemade soup, salads that are more than some chopped lettuce and half a tomato. Mostly vegetarian, of course, but imaginative vegetarian. I thought maybe in Sussex, on the downs outside Falmer. It’s an idea. Annie’s quite keen except that she feels we should do something socially useful.”
    â€œSurely few things are more socially useful than providing the young with decent food at reasonable prices.”
    â€œWhen it comes to spending a million, Annie thinks internationally. She has something of a Mother Teresa complex.”
    They walked on in companionable silence. Then Clara asked, “How did Giles take your defection?”
    â€œAs you’d expect, badly. His face showed a succession of