The Ghost

was on the far right-hand side, wearing his striped blazer, a bow tie, and a straw boater. There were two girls in leotards, fishnet tights, and high heels: one with short blonde hair, the other dark frizzy curls, possibly a redhead (it was impossible to tell from the monochrome photo): both pretty. Two of the men apart from Lang I recognized: one was now a famous comedian, the other an actor. A third man looked older than the others: a postgraduate researcher, perhaps. Everyone was wearing gloves.
    Glued to the back was a typed slip listing the names of the performers, along with their colleges: G. W. Syme (Caius), W. K. Innes (Pembroke), A. Parke (Newnham), P. Emmett (St. John’s), A. D. Martin (King’s), E. D. Vaux (Christ’s), H. C. Martineau (Girton), A. P. Lang (Jesus).
    There was a copyright stamp— Cambridge Evening News —in the bottom left-hand corner, and scrawled diagonally next to it in blue ballpoint was a telephone number, prefixed by the international dialing code. No doubt McAra, indefatigable fact hound that he was, had hunted down one of the cast, and I wondered which of them it was and if he or she could remember the events depicted in the photographs. Purely on a whim, I took out my mobile and dialed the number.
    Instead of the familiar two-beat British ringing tone, I heard the single sustained note of the American. I let it ring for a long while. Just as I was about to give in, a man answered, cautiously.
    “Richard Rycart.”
    The voice, with its slight colonial twang— “Richard Roicart” —was unmistakably that of the former foreign secretary. He sounded suspicious. “Who is this?” he asked.
    I hung up at once. In fact, I was so alarmed that I actually threw the phone onto the bed. It lay there for about thirty seconds and then started to ring. I darted over and grabbed it—the incoming number was listed as “withheld”—and quickly switched it off. For half a minute I was too stunned to move.
    I told myself not to rush to any conclusions. I didn’t know for certain that McAra had written down the number, or even rung it. I checked the package to see when it had been dispatched. It had left the United Kingdom on January the third, nine days before McAra died.
    It suddenly seemed vitally important for me to get every remaining trace of my predecessor out of that room. Hurriedly, I stripped the last of his clothes from the closet, upending the drawers of socks and underpants into his suitcase (I remember he wore thick knee-length socks and baggy white Y-fronts: this boy was old-fashioned all the way through). There were no personal papers that I could find—no diary or address book, letters, or even books—and I presumed they must have been taken away by the police immediately after his death. From the bathroom I removed his blue plastic disposable razor, toothbrush, comb, and the rest of it, and then the job was done: all tangible effects of Michael McAra, former aide to the Right Honourable Adam Lang, were crammed into a suitcase and ready to be dumped. I dragged it out into the corridor and around to the solarium. It could stay there until the summer, for all I cared, just as long as I didn’t have to see it again. It took me a moment to recover my breath.
    And yet, even as I headed back toward his—my—our—room, I could sense his presence, loping along clumsily at my heels. “Fuck off, McAra,” I muttered to myself. “Just fuck off and leave me alone to finish this book and get out of here.” I stuffed the photographs and photocopies back into their original envelope and looked around for somewhere to hide it, then I stopped and asked myself why I should want to conceal it. It wasn’t exactly top secret. It had nothing to do with war crimes. It was just a young man, a student actor, more than thirty years earlier, on a sunlit riverbank, drinking champagne and sharing a spliff with his friends. There could be any number of reasons why Rycart’s number was on the back of that photo. But still, somehow, it demanded to be hidden, and in the absence of any other bright idea, I’m ashamed to say I resorted to the cliché of lifting the mattress and stuffing it underneath.
    “Lunch, sir,” called Dep softly from the corridor. I wheeled round. I wasn’t sure if she’d seen me, but then I wasn’t sure it mattered. Compared to what else she must have witnessed in the house over the past few weeks, my own strange behavior would surely have seemed small beer.
    I