For a moment, Kelvin looked thoughtfully, then sighed, realizing that after some years of slow investigation, followed with some amount of money for the mission, he had fulfilled the promise he made to the Dean in prison. He remembered vividly that he had said with concealed tears, “I know you don’t deserve to be here because you have not done anything wrong to anyone. BM Kazeem and I will take care of your son. Nothing will harm him.” Then he had hardened himself as he remembered a sentence in Hitler’s message of encouragement to the SS. He had said to Judas, “I will make sure I get to the bottom of your case, my Dean. Nobody can hurt you and go scot-free while I still have breath. I promise you this day, I’ll get at whoever framed you up and killed your wife.”
He got out of the taxi and, with quickened steps, walked down to the lone bungalow. He reasoned that he would keep back a vital truth when telling the Dean the outcome of his findings. He shouldn’t hit him with too many blows at a time.
***
Judas had been crawling in and out of his laboratory, taking in a bowl and bringing out a telescope or something. Exhausted by the stress of his work, he sat heavily on a tapestry-covered wing chair in the dining space where he had set his lunch—some self-made wine in a fat flask and a long parcel of weeds.
He rested an arm and stared at the bathroom door down the narrow corridor. As he splashed the contents of the flask into a glass, still looking at the door, he wondered what Kane was doing there all day. He’d seen him enter the bathroom for the fourth time that day, coming out at intervals to watch pornographic films.
On all four occasions, there hadn’t been water spilling as a sign of bathing. Something was going on.
Slowly, pushing his chair backward and standing erect abruptly, he decided to check him out. He moved silently, nearly on tiptoe. He paused for a moment, leaned on the door, careful not to make a sound, and plastered his eyes obliquely on it in an effort to locate a tiny hole the last occupant of the house had carefully drilled there, he was sure, to watch his daughters and female visitors bathe. Judas found it and closed an eye, squinting with the other one. He saw Kane standing before him, with head tilted backward a bit and mouth twitched with pleasure, releasing silent oohs. With mounting interest, Judas started to examine the situation. He noticed that his son kept closing and opening his eyes halfway, like someone trying to sleep. Is there a girl kneeling in front of him? Judas asked himself, then lowered his head to answer. No. Pants down, a hand moving back and forth. “My motherfuckin’ god!” he shouted, laughing. “You’re fuckin’ jerking off.” Just as he was about to bang on the door to make a jest of Kane, the doorbell rang. He quickly went for it. He hated the unmusical sound, even though he’d invented it.
Kane, still in the bathroom, quietly belted his trousers, wondering who was visiting. He bent down to search for the tinier hole he’d also drilled on that door the day he’d arrived.
When Judas had satisfied himself that the caller wasn’t unknown, he opened and held the door for his main man. Superintendent Kelvin walked past him and sat on his favorite seat, clasping hands on his knees, staring ahead.
Without as much as good afternoon, Kelvin began. “Master, er . . . there are some facts I have gathered. You . . . er, Clara.” He waited for Judas to get seated.
“I am so grateful to you, my dearest Kelvin.”
“Before your journey to prison, your wife, Clara, had been having a relationship—sexual, of course.”
“My fuckin’ God!” Judas’s heart skipped for a moment, then began to pound in his head.
“She had been dating one Larry Harrison, a very young widower and the only son of a millionaire. The Larry guy had a daughter by his first wife. There was nothing he didn’t do to get your wife to divorce you and marry him. You can . . .”
“Divorce me? When did they start committing adultery?” Judas queried dryly.
“It must have been a couple of years before you started lecturing us—in Hertford, that is, barely a year before Clara was pregnant with Kane. What I found out revealed that she loved the Larry guy as much as she loved you.”
“So a trusted jewel like my immortal Clara could be so wonky to smudge me by getting mucilaged to this kind of wormwood.” He drew a stool to himself, draped both soft white arms on it, and continued more dryly: “So all along, I was standing comfortably on a three-legged vanity. Someone was inserting his third leg inside my cherished canoe. Clara, shame on you.”
“My Dean, I will suggest you don’t interrupt me because I may forget some important discoveries.”
If Judas was thinking rightly, without this bad news in his head, he would have reminded Kelvin that he always told them as students to make use of jotters all the time.
After a short disturbing silence that kept the Dean waiting, Kelvin started tapping his head rapidly with a finger, staring blindly at the carpet, in an attempt to recall what he said last.
He finally went on. “Your late wife wanted the relationship to continue secretly as it had been, but never consented to the idea of divorcing you. So the Larry guy reasoned that you were the only obstacle to his dream wife. Through one terrible Othollo from MOPOL, he organized to get rid of you for some time. The guy who gave the false confession that nailed you was a real armed robber, an Othollo man. Immediately he wrote that confessional statement against you, Othollo presented him with a poisoned meat pie and some money. Then he died.”
Superintendent Kelvin paused for breath and wiped his forehead. “It wasn’t long before the Larry guy was down with a complicated disease or something. On his sick bed, surrounded by family members, he never stopped muttering the two words—Clara Duncan—until he died. His father, Dave Harrison, himself a gangster in his early years, wouldn’t give another meaning to the names, Clara Duncan, other than a murderer. He wouldn’t accept that his now-deceased son was calling the only name he loved. The Dave guy employed the services of his friend, the same Othollo, to find whoever bore that name. It took some years before she was found and killed in that club.”
“I am stained, nauseated. I feel like I have been injected with homicidal intention. It will surely give vent to my display of fangs. How can we get this Dave?” Judas asked pointedly. “Is he still alive?”
Kelvin removed a sheet of paper from the book, the last days of Hitler. “That contains everything necessary for you to know about Dave Harrison.”
Judas collected it with a shaking and sweat-soaked hand. He soon decomposed it. “I am grateful to you, my dear Kelvin.”
“My Dean, I did not investigate this case for the fun of it.”
“Undeniably so.” He was absent-minded. What clouded his disturbed mind was Clara’s unfaithfulness.
“Dave Harrison must face justice, my Dean.”
“Definitely, he must.”
“If he faces the State’s justice, by and by he will free himself.”
“Surely, he will.”
Kelvin frowned. “If he frees himself with money, we would be unhappy and we’ll be interested in killing him.”
“Essentially, we would.”
“And if we do, we’ll be prime suspects because we’ve just had a case against him.” Kelvin said enthusiastically. “So we must drop all evidence that can nail him and go ahead with a well co-coordinated jungle justice.”
Judas folded the sheet of paper, hid it in the cushion he sat on, and made Kelvin know how careful they must be if they had to kill