Parting Breath Read online

  ‘Experiments,’ Leeyes was declaring firmly, ‘that’s what they’ve got the white mice for.’

  Sloan gritted his teeth. Even Crosby wouldn’t have supposed Professor Mautby was keeping white mice in his laboratory as pets. Not knowing Professor Mautby, that is. The students were another matter. He wouldn’t be too unbearably surprised from the look of them if one or two had their teddy bears up with them.

  ‘Research,’ Leeyes said. ‘They do research in universities sometimes, Sloan, don’t they?’ He remembered the Assistant Chief Constable and qualified this. ‘In some universities, anyway.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, sir, except for the white mice.’

  ‘If,’ said Leeyes tartly, ‘it’s the sort of research that involves people getting killed in the practised fashion that Dr Dabbe suggests –’

  ‘He only said –’

  ‘Then,’ swept on Leeyes regardless, ‘no one’s going to know except whoever’s paying for it.’

  ‘The government, do you mean, sir?’ asked Sloan, trying not to sound too obtuse.

  ‘As long as it’s our own government,’ said Leeyes piously, ‘and not someone else’s then that’s what I do mean.’

  ‘How do we find out?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Leeyes grandiosely, ‘that’s a different matter. The forces of law and order on the ground are never told anything by government until the cat’s out of the bag and someone wants somebody caught. Not that one half of the government ever knows what the other half’s up to anyway.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Parliamentarians – like everyone else – haggled over the price of bicycle sheds, not what was going on inside defence contracts – in public, that is. As for the research being done for someone else’s government …

  ‘Universities,’ said Leeyes didactically, ‘are hotbeds of dissent. You’ve only got to read the newspapers …’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘To say nothing of things like this sit-in,’ growled Leeyes. ‘Students are always agin the government.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan. His father used to go on about that. Something about their having been agin the government in Stanley Baldwin’s time, too, that his father had brooded on at Munich and afterwards: ‘That this House will in no circumstances fight for King and country.’ ‘Doesn’t mean much, sir,’ he said reassuringly. ‘The only thing that’s different is that nowadays, as well as the students, some of the lecturers are against the government too.’

  Police Superintendent Leeyes said something distinctly unparliamentary about dissenting lecturers that would have pained those highly-educated souls had they been privileged to overhear it.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan automatically, ‘but where does that get us over this research business?’

  ‘Man-eating mice?’

  ‘Professor Mautby,’ said Sloan a trifle stiffly, ‘is an ecologist.’

  ‘Man-eating plants, then,’ responded Leeyes upon the instant.

  Suddenly De Chirico’s metaphysical prints seemed ordinary and familiar while more terrifying visions as yet uncharted by artists drifted through Sloan’s mind.

  ‘Popular with the Treasury, of course,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Saves ammunition. You should have seen them dole it out before Walcheren.…’

  The seaborne landings at Walcheren had been the highlight of Superintendent Leeyes’s war-time career. They came into the conversation on the slightest pretext – not for one moment did Sloan suppose that the wherewithal of war had really been in short supply there.

  ‘Professor Mautby might be doing some work on plant-borne diseases,’ suggested Sloan hastily. Reminiscence had to be stemmed at least once a month.

  ‘Germ warfare with a difference?’ mused Leeyes, considering this.

  ‘Buy your own seeds?’ suggested Sloan lightly: the further they moved from Walcheren the better.

  ‘You never know what scientists will get up to next,’ said Leeyes darkly. ‘Two-headed dogs …’

  ‘Making two ears of corn grow where one had grown before …’ began Sloan. No, that wasn’t science: that was politics, he was sure.

  ‘Instant villain cure,’ said Leeyes revealingly. ‘Perhaps they’re working on that.’

  ‘It’s what we want,’ Sloan endorsed this.

  ‘Some of that Alice in Wonderland stuff,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘One dose and they grow smaller.’

  That was something else Sloan would have to bone up on for his son. Inexplicably Alice in Wonderland had grown in importance over the years. He didn’t know, though, that he would ever be able to explain ‘Jabberwocky.’

  ‘That’s the idea, sir,’ he said heartily. ‘Smaller villains.’ Actually, petty criminals were usually small men, anyway, and on the undernourished side too. Or was it just that policemen and prison officers were big ones by comparison? They said small people were more highly sexed than tall ones – perhaps a tendency to crime went that way too. That was a nice point for the moralists.…

  ‘“Let me have men about me that are fat,”’ said the Superintendent in his quoting voice.

  ‘Hamlet?’ hazarded Sloan. If it wasn’t Walcheren it would be Hamlet these days.

  ‘Julius Caesar,’ said Leeyes. ‘Where is all this getting us, Sloan?’

  ‘Nowhere, sir. All that Henry Moleyns has done so far that we know about is duck out of the sit-in, probably nick some things from the boy Ellison’s room …’

  ‘And leave them where we were bound to find them.’

  ‘Have a row with another student, Hugh Bennett.’

  ‘Which may or may not mean anything,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘Make – and break – an appointment with the Professor of Modern History.’

  ‘But about what we don’t know,’ said Leeyes with scant regard for syntax.

  Sloan hadn’t finished. ‘Make – and not be able to keep – an appointment with the Chaplain.’

  Leeyes hadn’t finished either. ‘And get himself killed,’ he said.

  ‘That, too,’ agreed Sloan as he rang off.

  He paused by the print on the wall that had seemed to him like Columbine and Harlequin and read the caption for the first time. It said ‘Hector and Andromache.’ He turned off the light and stepped out of the room. He hadn’t time for the ancient Greeks just now.

  12 Counter-Riposte

  Detective Inspector Sloan began his night round with a visit to the University Sanatorium.

  It was a curious Victorian building – midway in architectural style between Fairfax and Ireton Colleges and the university’s two modern ones. The edifice owed its position – isolated from all other College buildings – to what was known to medical science about infectious diseases at the time it was built, and its design to the influence of William Butterfield and his Keble College at Oxford.

  Matron lived in the building in similarly splendid isolation. As it happened, this nicely reflected her situation among the academic community. Being both properly qualified for her job (at one of the oldest teaching hospitals) and a member of a noble profession, there were some social activities from which she could not very well be excluded and some (notably those involving good provender) from which she would not.

  ‘On the other hand, she is not a member of this University,’ sticklers for College etiquette would insist to the Bursar when the smaller invitation lists were being compiled.

  ‘Governesses used to exist in the same sort of no man’s land,’ a social historian had once informed him unhelpfully.

  ‘Neither one thing nor the other.’ One of the philosophers picked up the conversation. ‘Incidentally, that is one of the most interesting of theoretical propositions because if one is not one thing, logically one is something else. Plato said …’

  On the whole the Bursar found they got on better when Plato was left out of discussions.

  ‘Perhaps,’ another learned voice had suggested, ‘we should regard her as a Liberal Unionist.�
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  There had been a pause, then:

  ‘Ah,’ with satisfaction, ‘Oscar Wilde.’

  ‘“Oh, they count as Tories.”’ Someone supplied the rest of the quotation in a Lady Bracknell voice. ‘“They dine with us. Or come in the evening at any rate.”’

  ‘Neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring.…’

  The Bursar, John Hardiman, mindful of much co-operation in the matter of the emergency use of sanatorium beds late at night, would outwardly concur but later consult the good lady in question on the more germane matter of whether or not she wanted to come.

  All that Detective Inspector Sloan knew about Matron was her ready acceptance of his bizarre proposals about the use of her sanatorium tonight. There had been nothing equivocal about her response to those – she had been as practical as Florence Nightingale at Scutari. He set off towards the sanatorium confident that she at any rate would have done her part.

  Nevertheless he approached the building with circumspection and stood in the darkness of the University grounds until he could make out the other watchers. Even then he made no move, mindful of some highly idiosyncratic advice that he had once had from the Assistant Chief Constable. His mannered voice came unbidden now into Sloan’s mind: ‘Never put up a bird, Inspector, until you’re ready to shoot it.’

  The Assistant Chief Constable’s analogies were all taken from the world of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. What was so interesting was the way in which they fitted so well into the world of thief-taking. Sloan glanced about him. Perhaps someone in the darkened campus which surrounded him was already writing a thesis on this.

  It did not take him long to spot the watchers by the threshold. There was a whiff of tobacco smoke in the late evening air that betrayed the general direction of Police Constable Smith. Smith would not be the first person to be given away by my lady nicotine – she was as wayward a mistress as any of her sex. There was no tell-tale glow in the darkness, so Smith had either heard Sloan coming or perfected the art of invisible smoking. One of the first things a man learnt on the beat was the cupped hand, the swallowed smoke.…

  Over on the other side of the path Police Constable Carpenter trod on a twig. Sloan could make out his outline against a bush.

  ‘Dogberry and Verges,’ the Superintendent had said when he sent them over. ‘They can be your officers of the watch, and Heaven help the lot of you if anyone lays a finger on Battling Bertha.’ He had paused and added thoughtfully, ‘And Heaven help them, too, of course.’

  Sloan had taken his point.

  When he had first asked for a woman police officer for the Moleyns case the Superintendent had taken it for granted that he would want Policewoman Perkins – people usually did want Policewoman Perkins. Not for nothing was she known affectionately throughout the Calleshire force as Pretty Polly. The County’s other woman police constable was known, equally affectionately, as Battling Bertha.

  True, motorists disadvantaged at being found in the wrong had been known to refer to her less affectionately. Shouts of ‘Seig Heil’ had been heard in Berebury High Street and muttered references to ‘Fascists’ in the more restrained atmosphere of the Crown Court – though one youth who had succumbed to the temptation offered when she had stooped to attend to a shoelace in Berebury’s shopping precinct had to be hurriedly let off with a caution by a Bench in very real danger of losing its self-control.

  Sloan had wanted Battling Bertha because she looked more like Bridget Hellewell than Polly Perkins did: that was all, not because Polly Perkins wasn’t as good at looking after herself as Battling Bertha. Many a man had attacked Polly in a lonely spot on a dark night only to find himself pinned to the ground until he was arrested. But there could be no confusing Polly’s features with the raw-boned earnest ones of Bridget Hellewell, student leader.

  And with a deep conscientious fervour Sloan hoped that Battling Bertha’s homely features would do, and would not be injured in the process.

  He moved over to Carpenter, giving Smith the chance to extinguish whatever he had been smoking. ‘All quiet?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Not a dicky-bird anywhere near, sir. Matron’s gone to bed. She went up at her usual time, just as we arranged. Bathroom light out first, than her bedroom one. Ten minutes after that the other bedroom light, like you said.’

  ‘Who’s up there with her?’

  ‘Police Constable Baynes is in the bedroom and P. C. Collet is downstairs but out of sight.’ Carpenter tapped his pocket. ‘We’ve got all our signals laid on if anyone shows up.’

  ‘But nothing has so far?’

  ‘Nothing near the sanatorium.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘There’s been someone over by Tarsus.’

  ‘Someone?’ queried Sloan sharply. Carpenter should know better than this.

  ‘A woman, sir.’

  ‘What doing?’

  ‘Pacing up and down. At least, that’s what it looked like from here. It’s a tidy distance, sir, and it’s pretty dark.’

  ‘Where exactly?’ demanded Sloan. It was like drawing teeth, extracting information from Carpenter.

  ‘This side of the Tarsus quadrangle.’

  All the Berebury Force used the word in full: always had. ‘Quad’ sounded like something very different to a policeman, and they couldn’t be doing with confusion.

  Carpenter hastened on. ‘This side of the main building. It was only when she crossed in front of the entrance that you could see that there was anyone there at all. There’s a little bit of light spilling out from that lamp above the entrance.’

  Sloan turned to look for himself.

  ‘You’ve got to step into the light, sir, if you’re going that way.’

  ‘And which way was she going?’ asked Sloan, trying not to make his patience sound elaborate. That never got you anywhere with anybody.

  ‘Nowhere,’ said Carpenter, contriving to sound injured. ‘Like I said, sir, that was the funny thing. She was just pacing up and down.’

  ‘Height?’

  ‘Shortish.’

  ‘Fat or thin?’ If a silhouette could convey anything, it was that.

  ‘Plumpish.’

  ‘Anything else about her?’

  Carpenter paused. ‘Not young,’ he said at last. ‘I think.’

  ‘We’re getting on,’ conceded Sloan.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Clothes?’

  ‘I couldn’t rightly see, sir. I should say she had a coat on but I couldn’t swear to it.’

  ‘I see.’ That was another thing that sorted out policemen from the rest of the world: the likelihood of having to swear on oath to whatever it was they said. ‘She’s not there now, is she?’

  And that, thought Sloan to himself fairly, was as silly a remark as any that poor Carpenter was likely to make. Superintendent Leeyes would compare Sloan with Horatio asking the nightwatchmen at Elsinore if Hamlet’s father’s ghost was still around on the battlements.

  ‘No, sir,’ replied Carpenter, who, if asked a silly question, still answered it.

  ‘Right,’ said Sloan more peaceably. ‘Now, remember what you’re to do.…’

  The trouble with both the Superintendent and his preoccupation with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was that they got into everything.

  Higgins, the porter on the Tarsus gate, was having quite a struggle with one member of the University. Only the knowledge that his orders came from the Master of Tarsus in person strengthened his arm.

  ‘No one is to come into the College tonight, Professor, without I let Dr Lorimer know.’

  ‘Much too late to trouble him,’ said Simon Mautby with his customary firmness. ‘I’m only going across to my rooms for a moment. I’ll lock up behind me, don’t you worry about that.’

  That wasn’t what Higgins was worried about but he didn’t say so to Professor Mautby.

  ‘An experiment,’ said the ecologist breezily. ‘Needs a special time-setting. I won’t be long, Higgins. Time you shut up sho
p anyway, isn’t it? All our late birds should be back in the nest by now, surely?’

  ‘Most of them,’ said Higgins feelingly, ‘are still over at the sit-in at Almstone. I’m keeping open in case they aren’t.’

  ‘Serve ’em right if they are locked out.’ Professor Mautby jangled his keys and set off through the Tarsus quadrangle. ‘Don’t you lock me in, Higgins, either. That would never do. I’ve got work to do at home tonight.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan shook Hamlet out of his mind by walking across to the administration building at Almstone to check on the sit-in for himself.

  There had been no change in personnel there. Other people – and other ranks – were permitted to show tiredness, battle-fatigue, even, but not men who were or had been sergeant-majors in the British Army. Alfred Palfreyman, presently Head Porter at Almstone College, but first and foremost sometime of the East Calleshire Regiment, looked in just as good trim now as he had looked that moment many, many hours ago when he had first come on duty.

  Whether he had in fact snatched some sleep Sloan couldn’t begin to guess: it might only have been that he could rest awake, as generations of recruits were led to believe, or perhaps that sergeant-majors needed no sleep – as Her Majesty’s enemies were encouraged to think. In any event the secret of his untiring strength belonged with the other secrets of his profession, and the policeman, who had his own survival methods, secret to his own calling, invoked when life – or death – became too pressing, wouldn’t have presumed to question him about it.