Nights in White Satin: A Laura Principal Novel

It was back in January when I'd been asked to coordinate security for the May Ball at St. John's. I didn't play hard to get. "We'll do it," I'd said. "No problem." For a private investigator, security work is bread and butter. Doesn't tingle the taste buds, but keeps the stomach full. "Piece of cake." That was Sonny's response. He's my partner at Aardvark Investigations, the man to blame for getting me into this line of business in the first place. His heart was set on expansion, and--as he never tired of saying--expansion calls for capital. Sonny knew a job that couldn't be turned down when he saw it. "Easy peasy," echoed Stevie, our right-hand woman, during the week-before planning session. "Maybe Geoff could help." She reached for the telephone. But by the time I asked, "Geoff?" she was deep in conversation with a client. No problem; piece of cake; easy peasy. Two parts business and one part bravado, these responses. St. John's College lies more or less in the center of Cambridge. The ten green acres that make up its grounds are bounded by busy roads--Northampton Street, Bridge Street, St. John's Street. The River Cam runs through St. John's, providing a conduit to Trinity College on one flank and to Magdalene Bridge on the other. Our brief was to keep college property intact, keep revelers safe inside, keep gate-crashers out. This might sound simple. But anyone who thinks they can coast their way through security with logistics like this is long on optimism and short on sense. It's part of the wayward tradition of the Cambridge May Balls--just as staging them in the month of June is part of that tradition--that there will be gate-crashers. Their exploits are the stuff of local legend. It's whispered through college corridors how a pair of students equipped with climbing gear scaled an outer wall, changed from tracksuits to black tie, and managed to reach Third Court before they were accosted by security men. How a party of women from Newnham wrote themselves into history by scuba diving up the Cam. They infiltrated St. John's from the river. Their presence was betrayed only by the slapping of their flippers on the lawn. How a Churchill man, stowed inside a brewery van, had been pinned under three hundred pounds of draft lager when a barrel detached from its moorings. He emerged with broken ribs and a greatly enhanced reputation. Or that's how the story goes. Our job was to hold firm in the face of siege. Sonny, Stevie, and I were to secure the beachheads of the ball. To guarantee that the mock-Gothic portals of New Building would not be breached. It might not be a heavyweight assignment, but it had an element of challenge. On the evening of the ball itself, even I felt a surge of excitement. By the time I'd escorted all the suppliers out of college and checked the storerooms for stragglers, there was a queue awaiting admission that stretched from the St. John's gatehouse all the way to neighboring Trinity. With three-quarters of an hour still to go before the party began, the crowd grew by the minute. Their voices bounced off the buildings on either side of the street. Echoes magnified the sound until a hundred people seemed like several thousand. I heard the raucous cries that greeted new arrivals; heard a football commentary conveyed by radio to the crowd. And every few seconds, massive and mysterious whoops of delight. "What's going on?" I asked Stevie, whose territory included the front entrance. She had just sauntered back from a recon outside the gates. "Someone's sharing round the most enormous bottle of champagne--" "A jeroboam?" "Whatever." Stevie hadn't attended Cambridge, and her shrug said she didn't care a hoot for the things that I'd learned there. "Champagne, yes. Glasses, no," she cSpring, Michelle is the author of 'Nights in White Satin: A Laura Principal Novel' with ISBN 9780345424938 and ISBN 034542493X.