By Jude Cook.
The following is an extract from Time Being (Salt) by Jude Cook:
The news reaches Esther, like it reaches everyone else, on the last Friday before Christmas. The end of the autumn semester. London dripping with unhealthy vapours; the tawdry dazzle of the Strand’s festive lights visible from the university’s upper rooms.
It’s by far the most shocking thing to happen on a London campus in decades. A lecturer shot dead – in apparent imitation of the Reeva Steenkamp case a few years before – through the door of a toilet stall in the Humanities building. The questions are myriad. Too many to answer in the short window the press affords the story before the customary slide into seasonal oblivion. The victim is Laura Cameron, Professor of Philosophy, and Esther’s dear friend and colleague. A mother of two, and almost as renowned for her eccentric, bohemian style as for her books on metaethics and moral responsibility. With her heron’s-nest hair, held high in an improbable construction, Laura was unmistakeable walking into a conference hall, or on TV. A public academic, and the youngest woman to be made professor at the University of London, Laura was brilliant, risky, unconventional. A force of nature, the newspapers predictably say. All the qualities, Esther reflects in the dark, time-arrested days of January that follow, that she lacks.
Just forty-two. Her children, Kristina and Theo, just seven and five, deprived of a mother in the most unimaginably violent fashion.
But Laura was indeed a force of nature, of life. And it’s this life-force that obsesses Esther as the broadsheets struggle with the question of why?
Tall and rangy. A plank-like body somehow both clumsy and agile. Latin-American brows and hot emotional eyes inherited from her Chilean artist mother. A smile revealing a dangerous feline sensuality. Laura was well-loved and slightly feared. Clad in a crazy amalgamation of charity shop and designer, a pricy bag slung over a pastel cardigan, she was bubbly, funny, raucous and intimidatingly bright. A virago and a firestarter. ‘A firework,’ as her dependable and handsome barrister husband, Jack, says, weeping on television. And not without contradictions. A femme libre and a homemaker. A pragmatist and a dreamer. An efficient organiser, tipped for Head of Department, and a loose cannon. In any given situation, she was simply herself. It is this quality – the talent of being loyal to her quiddity – that Esther, and everyone who knew her, openly mourns.
And why just won’t go away.
Who would want to murder such a woman? It’s a question the Met’s Senior Investigating Officer, DCI Wahid Malik, visibly struggles with during his frequent televised appeals for information over the Christmas holidays. Esther is transfixed by Malik’s sensitive face. His vigilant, vulnerable brown eyes. His neatly maintained salt- and-pepper goatee. His lustrous crest of ebony hair, so burnished it appears to have been polished. He reminds her of the Bollywood stars she saw on huge, tattered billboards during her time in Mumbai. Did Laura have any enemies we’re not aware of? Malik wants to know. Laura’s personal history is being excavated. It’s common knowledge at the university that Laura had lovers, both male and female, but now the whole country knows. The most frequent comparison-case cited by the press is the murder of the TV presenter Jill Dando; a case Malik refuses to mention, perhaps because it’s still shamefully unsolved twenty years later. ‘The fact remains,’ Malik says under the white glare of the lights, ‘there’s very little to go on.’ The crime scene, he reminds everyone, is the cleanest he’s ever come
across.
The gun is French-made. Ballistics have tracked the bullet that killed Laura down to a factory in Marseille. But Europol have drawn a blank. And the CCTV footage is frustratingly poor. Only the fleeting back of a tall, overcoated figure, squeezing through the security gates behind a student, indicates the male suspect was ever present. There’s no evidence of his escape route, except for a broken window in the Ancient Languages block, which may or may not have been done weeks before. No prints. No sign of a struggle. No paper trail. No motive. ‘As yet,’ Malik says, his long lashes blinking into the lens, ‘Professor Cameron’s death remains a mystery.’
Like everyone who hears about, or is proximate to, a sudden unexpected death, Esther reacts to Laura’s tragedy with a desperate desire for more life. Bigger, deeper, swallowing life. On her daily walks in Priory Park, near the Crouch End flat where she’s lived largely alone for over twenty-five years, the news makes her want to fill her lungs with air; to linger under the January sun’s frail caress, to delight in its meagre warmth. Like everyone else in the country, she’s just lived through three gruelling, traumatising years of a pandemic, and so wants to live more abundantly. To proclaim, I am, I am, I am into the face of the void.
It strikes Esther that the deaths of others haven’t really touched her until now. Astonishing, given her forty-seven years. Unless she counts the relatively early death of her mother, two decades before; a sadness that seems ever-present in her life. And, of course, the murder of most of her relatives on both sides in the Holocaust. The second-generation trauma of her parents is something she’s only recently begun to address. Her own inherited trauma, too. But Laura’s sudden absence from the Earth precipitates questions that she, Dr Esther Luck, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, and a lifelong atheist, shouldn’t find difficult to answer. A child’s questions. Where has she gone? Where has that superabundant spirit vanished to? As Jack says more than once, ‘There’s a Laura-shaped hole in the universe.’ Some people, she concedes, take up more space in the world – more space in people’s psyches – than others. Having never taken up much space herself, being small, dark, undemanding, with a quality a former boyfriend called ‘serene intensity’, Esther is jealous of those labelled larger-than-life. Aren’t all our lives the largest thing, to ourselves? She wonders how you become this way. Does it start in early childhood? Or is it something people aspire to, something they work on, something she forgot to do when she was young? She’s surprised and troubled to find herself asking these rudimentary questions. As to the mystery of where Laura has disappeared to, she can’t answer. It shouldn’t even be a question.
At the memorial service at the end of January she talks to Jack. She and Jack go back a long way. She’s known him longer than she’s known Laura.
The ceremony is held in the St Mary le Strand Church, whose turreted, climbing spire Esther can see from her office. It’s a day of bleak rain, of quiet and terrible despair. The whole department turns out. With term suspended for a week while the investigation winds up on campus, it’s the first time many of Laura’s colleagues have had the chance to share their grief in person.
After the Bach cantatas, the readings from Kristina and Laura’s sister Carmen, the fond reminiscences and angry avowals of justice, the big crowd files out onto the narrow spit of pavement next to the buses and tearing taxis.
Under a wide black umbrella she finds Jack.
‘How are you holding up?’
‘I’m not sure I am,’ he says, forcing a smile.
His face, always so rugged yet sensitive, is distorted by grief. His penetrating cobalt eyes, usually brimming with empathy, are drained of their customary joie de vivre. Their special Jack sparkle.
‘The children will need you more than ever in the coming months.’
He shakes his head. ‘I’m held together by pulleys and strings at the moment.’
‘Your reading was so beautiful . . .’ she mumbles, unable to come up with anything more profound. ‘I never thought you’d choose Montaigne.’
Esther finds she’s crying. Hot tears streaking her cheeks. It’s not the first time Jack’s seen her cry.
‘She was my best friend above all else. And no one’s better on friendship than Montaigne.’
She places her hand under Jack’s left elbow, as if to prop him up. All six foot three of him.
‘Just as importantly,’ Jack says, ‘how are you doing?’
Removing her hand quickly, wiping her tears, she knows it’s a question she’ll never be able to answer.
Back home, later that evening, Esther has what feels like a full-scale nervous breakdown. The dam of emotion, kept in check since December, abruptly bursts.
Under the low lamp, surrounded by her neatly shelved rows of books, her carefully curated framed sketches, her colour-coded folders, she begins to lose her mind. She sits in the deep rattan armchair that used to belong to her mother and weeps for an hour. Through the three sash windows that look down onto Topsfield Parade, she can see the implacable Victorian face of the Crouch End clock tower. The sight feels like a repudiation. A damnation. She has time – is in time – while Laura doesn’t. Her friend is nowhere, consigned to oblivion, to countless aeons of nullity, of eternity. Lost to the infinite. While she at least has the finite. The here and now.
The thought makes Esther panic, makes her desperate. It makes her want to jump out of the window and on to the street below.
And all because of a single fact.
The truth is, Laura’s death on the fifth floor of the university wasn’t a surprise to her. The public announcement reached her at the same time as it reached the others, but it wasn’t a shock.
Because she was there.
She was there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jude Cook is the author of the novels Byron Easy (2013) and Jacob’s Advice (2020). In 2025, he launched a new press, Conduit Books. He reviews fiction for the Guardian, Spectator, Literary Review, TLS, and his short fiction has appeared in The Moth, Tamarind and The Tangerine. He is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster, and in 2025 was a judge for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for small presses. His new novel is Time Being (Salt Books).
