Parting Breath Read online

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, miss,’ he said, settling himself comfortably into a chair. She really was a most attractive girl … and he liked being called ‘Officer.’

  ‘I was just coming back to my room, you see, when I happened to bump into Miss Linaker.’

  ‘Coming back where from?’ asked Crosby who – university ambience or not – had ideas of his own on direct speech which were in no way dependent upon considerations of grammar.

  ‘Let me see, now …’ An engaging dimple appeared as if of its own volition on each of Miss Mantle’s nicely rounded cheeks. ‘It’s been such a funny day what with the sit-in and everything.’

  ‘We need to know,’ said Crosby even more directly. ‘It might matter. Now.’

  ‘I’d been working in Bones and Stones,’ said the girl readily enough. ‘I really wanted to use the Library – I’ve got an essay for Mr Mautby – but they’d closed it.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, miss.’

  ‘Are you? Why?’

  ‘That’s where the old gentleman’s bust is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Jacob Greatorex?’

  ‘The one with the chin and the long hair.’

  She nodded vigorously. ‘That’s right. He looks like Charles the Second but firmer.’

  ‘We have found that the young gentlemen are inclined to use him as a mascot when they’re excited.’ To hear him, anyone would think Crosby was old.

  The dimples deepened. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘And young gentlemen from other universities are in the habit of treating him as a trophy,’ said the constable prosaically. He wasn’t old. It was just that he’d had to give up those sorts of games earlier than the undergraduates had.

  ‘Ah, I see.’

  ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble with that bust down at the station.’

  ‘Have you?’ she responded with lively sympathy.

  ‘There was a raiding party from Oxford last year.’

  ‘I remember. After a Rugby match.’

  ‘Two breaches of the peace, one assault and one obstruction of the police in the execution of their duty,’ recited Crosby.

  ‘Was that you?’ she asked intuitively. She really was going to make someone a splendid wife one day.

  The constable nodded and became a size larger at once.

  ‘And before that, miss, they came for it from one of the London Hospital Medical Schools. Very rough, the medical young gentlemen.’

  ‘I suppose it’s because they’re going to be doctors,’ said Polly.

  ‘Two broken noses, four black eyes and a dislocated finger,’ tallied Crosby.

  ‘Who won?’ asked Polly.

  ‘One nose was ours,’ said Crosby. The possessive plural clearly referred to the forces of law and order versus the rest.

  ‘The London lot caught most of the damage.’

  ‘Good for us,’ said Polly. Her plural pronoun equally rightly took in the University of Calleshire against the rest of the student world.

  ‘They got as far as Calleford with the bust, though.’

  ‘Poor Jacob Greatorex.’

  ‘But we got it back,’ said Crosby. It was not at all clear this time whose achievement this was.

  ‘Good for you,’ murmured Polly tactfully.

  ‘So, miss, that’s why they closed the Library.’

  ‘And that’s why I had to go to Bones and Stones instead. And when they started to close up there,’ said Miss Mantle, ‘I came back to Tarsus.’

  ‘That would have been about … when?’

  ‘I must have left about twenty past seven – it doesn’t take more than a minute or two to get back from there, and then I saw Miss Linaker and we walked through the quad together and found all Colin’s things by the fountain.’ She looked at him anxiously. ‘Does that help?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Crosby.

  Sloan caught up with Roger Hedden just as he was leaving the dining hall of Tarsus College. Professor Mautby was with him.

  ‘Arguing in the Library, Inspector?’ The sociologist gave a short laugh. ‘I’ll say Moleyns was arguing. I was going to go over to stop them because they were making such a row.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Ellison, who’s supposed to be a pacifist, and Bennett,’ said Roger Hedden. ‘He was the other man. Hugh Bennett. I know him all right. He’s one of my sociology students but Moleyns wasn’t. I wouldn’t have known who he was if he hadn’t come over here afterwards asking for Professor Watkinson.’

  ‘Really, sir?’ said Sloan mildly. ‘Was he an argumentative type, would you say?’ Accidents going somewhere to happen, victims looking for someone to attack them, wars waiting for a trigger to tighten, fires only short of a match: that was how the experts in human behaviour thought these days.

  Professor Mautby looked up at that. ‘I shouldn’t have said so and as it happens I do know him – and Ellison, too, if it comes to that. Moleyns was reading ecology, you see.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sloan. So far this – that he had been reading ecology – seemed all that he had been able to establish about the dead man.

  ‘But,’ added Mautby, ‘I can tell you he did have another row the day before yesterday. On Tuesday evening. With a man called Challoner.’

  Hedden smiled thinly. ‘That’s not difficult. Most people have a row with Michael Challoner sooner or later. He’s that sort of man.’

  ‘Not at the very beginning of term, though, as a rule,’ pointed out Mautby. ‘They aren’t usually quite so contentious early on.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ murmured Sloan appreciatively. From what he had already heard so far at the University, Professor Simon Mautby’s own fuse was the shortest of them all: arteries hardening while you looked at him.

  ‘It was only the first night of term, remember, Inspector,’ the scientist said. ‘It’s generally later that tempers begin to slip a bit.’

  ‘Slip a bit!’ snorted Roger Hedden at his side. ‘That’s putting Tuesday’s row rather mildly, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’ Sloan encouraged the conversation, aware that at this stage anything – anything at all – might prove to be detective straw from which legal bricks could later be made: barristers were surprising brickmakers.

  ‘Hammer and tongs weren’t in it,’ said Hedden crisply, ‘and it was Moleyns whom Challoner was arguing with then.’

  Professor Mautby nodded confirmation of that. ‘I did detect atmospheric changes,’ he admitted.

  Sloan had no difficulty in evaluating this. Like many other explosive personalities, Professor Mautby no doubt put other people’s reactions on a level with his own: and they weren’t. One man’s apoplexy was another man’s constraint.

  ‘We heard them at High Table, Inspector,’ said Roger Hedden, ‘and believe you me, that takes a bit of doing these days. We very nearly had to have the row stopped, actually, and then the noise died down.’

  ‘There’s no discipline left anywhere these days,’ lamented Mautby. ‘There’s Moleyns lying dead, the Dean of Almstone prisoner in his own College of all things, the students arguing like so many fishwives.…’

  ‘Your laboratory broken into,’ said Hedden. ‘And white mice where they shouldn’t be.’

  Mautby didn’t actually say that he didn’t know what the world was coming to, but the sentiment was writ large upon his countenance.

  ‘Moleyns,’ said Sloan, whose own remit was more specific, ‘what sort of a student was he?’

  Professor Mautby shot Sloan a keen look. ‘Good without being inspired. Conscientious and all that. Kept up with his work all right.’

  Hedden leaned over and said gently, ‘All Mr Mautby’s students keep up with their work all right, Inspector.’

  Sloan could well believe this.

  ‘They’re here to work, Inspector,’ said Mautby shortly. ‘They shouldn’t be here if they don’t. Waste of the country’s money.’

  ‘And Colin Ellison?’ asked Sloan on an impulse. ‘He’s one of yours, too, isn’t he? Wh
at’s he like?’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Mautby without hesitation. ‘One of the best men I’ve ever taught. Nothing run-of-the-mill about him – in spite of the pacifism.’

  Mautby would get on well with Superintendent Leeyes. If a man held different views from the Superintendent’s own he stood condemned until proved otherwise.

  Sloan made a note about Ellison. He didn’t know the academic equivalent of topping the bill and having one’s name up in lights at a university, but from the Professor’s tone that was where Ellison was heading. He turned back to the lecturer in sociology. ‘Now, Mr Hedden, I understand that when you saw Moleyns yesterday he was asking to see Professor Watkinson. Did he say what about?’

  ‘Watkinson? No, I don’t know – but look here, you could ask him yourself. There he is.’ Hedden pointed out the ascetic-looking man of about sixty with a head of grizzled grey hair who was coming out of the door from the dining hall. ‘Hey, Watkinson! The Inspector here wants to know when you saw Moleyns.’

  ‘I didn’t.’ The Professor of Modern History acknowledged Sloan with a quick jerk of his head. ‘The young blighter didn’t turn up.’

  ‘When should he have done?’ enquired Sloan.

  ‘I left him a note in his pigeon-hole telling him I’d see him in my rooms after I’d finished my tutorials at noon today.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he didn’t come,’

  ‘Or send a message?’ asked Sloan quickly.

  An ironic twist appeared on Watkinson’s lips. ‘Stood me up as neatly as if he’d been a woman.’

  ‘And no apology afterwards?’

  ‘My dear Inspector, that was yesterday. Today nobody apologises for anything. I just went on working.’ His tone changed. ‘Actually, I’m doing a paper on Stanley Baldwin’s foreign policy.…’

  Sloan cleared his throat. If there was one patch of British diplomatic history he didn’t want to know about … one area where he felt veils should be drawn, not lifted aside … one time he thought that was better not remembered.…

  ‘I’ve been working on the Cabinet papers,’ went on the historian, ‘and one or two quite interesting points have emerged.…’

  His own father, Sloan remembered, hadn’t even been able to remain coherent on the subject of Baldwin’s foreign policy though he’d been more forgiving than was fashionable at the time about Neville Chamberlain – and more cynical about Russia, too. ‘These days,’ he said smoothly, ‘the young do rather expect you to wait upon their convenience.’

  Down at the station they said you even had to watch the police cadets now but he, Sloan, wouldn’t know about that. They didn’t often have trouble with them at Berebury: not once they’d heard Superintendent Leeyes’s introductory address on what was expected of a policeman. As soliloquies went, there wasn’t a lot in Hamlet to beat it.

  Professor Mautby was frowning at Sloan’s last remark about impolite students. ‘I shouldn’t have thought Henry Moleyns was one of those. To me he seemed quite well-behaved. Brought up by an aunt, I understand. That might make a difference, of course.’

  Sloan thought it very likely. There was a certain detachment about aunts.

  ‘My dear Mautby,’ said Professor Watkinson in pained tones, ‘do you know that the last time we had any trouble here and I ventured an opinion on it, my students had the effrontery to tell me that I was paid to teach them Modern History and nothing else. I told them,’ he added spiritedly, ‘that it was manners they needed to learn more than either history or subversion, and it’s still true.’

  ‘When did he make the arrangement to see you?’ asked Sloan, who was finding that a certain tenacity of purpose was called for in questioning professors.

  ‘Yesterday morning,’ said the historian promptly. ‘He wanted to know if he could come and consult me about something that was interesting him but that he didn’t know very much about. Makes a change,’ he said gruffly. ‘My own students all think they know everything about history because it’s happened.’

  ‘Now, being a scientist,’ said Professor Mautby, ‘brings it home to you how much you don’t know. Besides’ – he gave something approaching a grin – ‘I keep telling them.’

  Sloan said to Professor Watkinson, ‘So Moleyns asked to see you about something but didn’t turn up?’

  ‘Precisely. What about and why he didn’t come I don’t know, and now, Inspector, I suppose we never shall.’

  Oh, yes, we will, decided Sloan vehemently.

  But he did not say it aloud.

  10 Straight Thrust

  Aunts were different, all right. Sloan would have been prepared to admit that as soon as he set eyes on Miss Marion Moleyns. Maiden aunt she might be but she was certainly not the fussy, amiable, tearful, bootee-knitting, birthday-present-giving variety of aunt of popular imagination. Miss Moleyns was first and foremost a woman who worked for her living, and it showed. Dry-eyed, she confronted Sloan across the Bursar’s desk.

  ‘We always were an unlucky family,’ she said bleakly, ‘and this proves it, doesn’t it?’

  Sloan could only agree that it did.

  ‘My brother and his wife were killed in a car crash, Inspector, and I don’t reckon you can be unluckier than that, do you?’

  Sloan could only agree that you couldn’t. Traffic Inspector Harpe would be right behind him there.

  ‘The boy was ten at the time,’ she said, in a remote way. ‘I’ve had him since then, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan gently.

  ‘I must say he was very good at the time.’

  Sloan suspected that she meant by this – as most people do – that he had shown little emotion. ‘And since?’ he asked, understanding that she was also telling him that she, too, equated ‘good’ with reserve of feeling and wouldn’t make a fuss now.

  ‘No trouble.’ She inclined her head. ‘On his own a lot, of course.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘I couldn’t help that.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Sloan, well aware that one-parent families and their equivalent have never had it easy. The wonder was that a do-gooding society had taken so long to wake up to the fact. All working coppers found it out very early on.

  Miss Moleyns was still talking. ‘I had a living to earn, you see.’ She tightened her lips. ‘Two livings, actually.’

  ‘Your brother …’

  ‘My brother, Inspector, lived for the day and, believe me, his wife was no saver.’

  ‘I see.’ Sloan cleared his throat: however painful it was, their son’s name was going to have to be recalled from the conversational limbo of the newly dead. ‘And Henry … what sort of a boy was Henry?’

  ‘He was most thoughtful,’ she said detachedly. ‘Quite clever, the school said, though I must say I couldn’t see why he wanted to do – what do they call it? – ecology. We weren’t country people at all’

  Sloan did not pursue this. Instead he enquired, ‘Girl friends?’

  Miss Moleyns shook her head. ‘Nobody special that I knew about,’ she said. ‘The odd name cropped up but never more than once or twice.’

  Miss Moleyns was clearly not a Wodehouse-type aunt.

  ‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘he’d have had to finish at University and get a job before he could think of marrying.’

  Miss Moleyns was even more clearly quite out of touch with her nephew’s generation – if not with her nephew. Little things like being able to afford it no longer seemed to deter the young.…

  ‘This summer,’ he prompted her. ‘What had he been doing?’

  ‘He picked fruit at first,’ she said, ‘to earn some money. He was saving up. He wanted one of those student railway tickets – you know – the go-anywhere ones.’

  Sloan nodded. You couldn’t go anywhere with them; of course. Not yet. That Foreign Secretary’s dream after the war … who had it been now?… of going to Victoria and buying a ticket for where the ’ell you liked … Ernest Bevin, that had been his name … hadn’t come true yet. Though he�
�d been talking about passports, not railway tickets.

  ‘At least,’ said Marion Moleyns tonelessly, ‘he’d had his holiday before … before …’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘All sorts of places,’ she said vaguely. ‘Belgium … I know he went there because he told me they hadn’t got any hedges.’

  ‘Poor little Belgium.’ Now whereabouts in his subconscious had that come from?

  ‘And flat?’

  ‘Very flat, Belgium,’ said Sloan. Or that?

  ‘Like Norfolk, Henry said it was.’

  Of course. That was where that had come from.

  ‘Waterloo wasn’t like what Henry had expected, though.’

  ‘Where else did he go?’ asked Sloan, deciding that this was no occasion for quoting the Duke of Wellington.

  ‘I had a picture postcard from Cologne,’ she said.

  A young man going east, decided Sloan to himself.

  ‘It was of the Cathedral,’ said Miss Moleyns. ‘Very pretty – quite English in a way.’

  This, Sloan was aware, was praise indeed. ‘What did he say on the card?’

  ‘That I wouldn’t like the food there,’ she said simply.

  Henry Moleyns, then, hadn’t wasted his time on the ‘wish you were here’ style of platitude. Nor his money on a Donald McGill-type card.

  ‘All that red cabbage,’ she said.

  ‘Quite,’ said Sloan. Of such stuff are xenophobes made.

  ‘Not,’ she added literally, ‘that I would have liked a bicycle tour with a tent either but … but … but I would have liked to have had his last few weeks with him if only I’d known.’

  Sloan nodded. It was a constant refrain where there was a sudden death. Perhaps the saving grace of terminal illness was that this feeling was spared those around the deceased.

  Miss Marion Moleyns looked straight across the Bursar’s desk at Sloan in that curious mixture of attitude compounded of the defensive and the aggressive of one for whom life has never been easy. ‘He was a good boy, you see, Inspector. And what I want to know,’ she demanded, a harsher note creeping into her voice, ‘is why anyone would want to do a thing like this to him?’

  ‘And that,’ answered Sloan in the same spirit, ‘I can’t tell you yet – but I will, I can promise you. Just give me a little time.’