Parting Breath Read online

  He greeted Sloan as an ally.

  It was a nice point. The relationship between the Army – the military power – and the Police – the civil power – has traditionally been a delicate one. Indeed, the quality of the relationship was often a factor in revolutions in Ruritanian countries – banana republics couldn’t always afford a police force – but there was no room for doubt in Alfred Palfreyman’s mind about where either stood. The Army was there to protect Queen and Country; the Police to preserve the Queen’s Peace and to protect the law-abiding. He saw Justice as clearly as did the Lady with the Scales at the Old Bailey as having a duty to ‘Defend the Children of the Poor and Punish the Wrong-doer.’

  ‘Where will all this end?’ he demanded of Sloan. ‘That’s what I want to know. First you have your student power and now they want pupil power:…’

  ‘Pram rule?’ suggested Sloan lightly, though he was certain that there was going to be none of that in his own house, come the arrival of the new baby.

  ‘Anarchy, more like,’ said Palfreyman. ‘Just you wait. They’ll need the Army again then. Any rule’s better than no rule, you know.’

  ‘The students …’ said Sloan, ducking out of debate on this. How not to argue was lesson one at some police training schools. ‘The students. You’ve got them bottled up nicely for us.’

  ‘No trouble,’ said Palfreyman with a deprecating wave of the arm towards the administration block. He grinned a bit. ‘Like our old grenade instructor used to say, they’re only dangerous until you know they’re dangerous – then they’re safe.’

  ‘This boy Moleyns,’ said Sloan. ‘Anything funny about him?’

  ‘He wasn’t a gentleman’s gentleman if that’s what you mean,’ said the Head Porter sagaciously. ‘Our trouble here is that they’re all looking more like each other every day.’

  ‘Unisex,’ pronounced Sloan.

  ‘What they want to do,’ said Palfreyman, and not for the first time, ‘is to get their hair cut.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan. He, too, had heard that before. You would have thought that every Magistrate that ever was had been hand-reared on the legend of Samson and Delilah.

  ‘Queen’s Regulations,’ prescribed Palfreyman. ‘Now, if they all stuck to those there’d be no trouble anywhere.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Sloan, old enough to be aware that sooner or later everyone had to have their own articles of faith. Thirty-nine did for some. And a Little Red Book for others. Some people – however long they lived – got no further than a schoolboy code; others found ‘My Country, Right or Wrong’ was as good as any. Moses or the Medes and the Persians – all Sloan knew was that very few people managed without one altogether.

  ‘And after unisex,’ prophesied the other man, ‘we’re going to get something much worse.’

  ‘Tell me,’ invited Sloan, short of time though he was.

  ‘Women’s lib,’ said the old soldier. ‘Sign of real decay, that is. You mark my words – women in power means the men aren’t up to much. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

  ‘A bad sign,’ agreed Sloan gravely. ‘Civilisation on the way out and all that.’

  ‘Though,’ said Palfreyman in a belated attempt at fairness, ‘the Amazons were a well-run tribe. Many’s the time I’ve heard Professor Teed say so.… I daresay you’ll have heard of him, Inspector. Most people have, what with television and his books. You can see him through the glass door. Look – over there.’

  As it happened, as the Head Porter was speaking Professor Timothy Teed was laying down the law about something other than Amazons. The time of day made very little difference to the Professor’s loquacity. Indeed, unkind spirits said that if you put him into a darkened room and turned a light in his direction he automatically went straight into his television performance.

  ‘Any burglar that waked him up in the night with his torch,’ Hugh Bennett said once, ‘is in for a nasty shock.’

  ‘If he gets Teed’s lecture on the Scottish sporran he’ll go straight away,’ said the friend to whom he was speaking. ‘And leave the swag behind.’

  ‘Teed’ll sell him his book, more like,’ Hugh Bennett had said. ‘After all, they say it is the definitive work.’

  ‘They also say,’ said the friend, who had a lively imagination, ‘that it has been banned in every country in the world where they’ve still got censorship.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘And that it is now required reading among the more backward tribes of the Upper Orinoco.’

  ‘Pull the other one,’ Hugh Bennett said amiably.

  Bennett was looking across the crowded administration block at Professor Teed now. The ground floor was – thanks to the Head Porter, if not to the strength of their Cause – as full now as it had been earlier in the day. As the day of the sit-in had approached, Bennett had concentrated his propaganda activities on the senior members of the University. He had long ago made the discovery that, in a protest matter, one don was worth a hundred undergraduates. Recruiting them, though, had been a different – and delicate – matter.

  True, Mr Basil Willacy had promised Hugh Bennett his support without demur, but he was easily flattered and only too glad to demonstrate his alliance with the young. He was still struggling to show he was one of the boys.

  Mr Roger Hedden, now, though still youngish and a sociologist to boot, had told him to get lost, and Professor Tomlin, although notably fond of reminding everyone of how the day had gone at Guernica, had not wanted to know. Marriage to the daughter of a Bishop had wrought great changes in an erstwhile rebel.

  A certain circumspection had prevented Bennett from approaching some of the older members of the Combination Room at all. No one in his right mind, for instance, would have asked Professor Mautby. Bernard Watkinson (Modern History) was noted for his short answers to long questions, and somehow Miss Hilda Linaker’s mind seemed always to be on Jane Austen – and she had been noted for referring only en passant to the Napoleonic Wars. But Professor Timothy Teed, Head of the Department of Social Anthropology, had been a very different matter.

  Now he was in the centre – the epicentre, actually – of the sit-in. True to form, he was dressed in plus fours and Norfolk jacket and the largest pair of brogues seen outside a shooting syndicate. He was improving the shining hour by teaching.

  ‘You see my shoes, Miss Goldsworthy?’ he said, thrusting a heavily clad foot forward in front of the person sitting next to him – an inoffensive girl called Mary Goldsworthy.

  It would have been difficult for her not to have seen them and she nodded.

  ‘Why have these shoes got this particular set of holes in them?’

  Mary Goldsworthy, always quiet, murmured, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You should know,’ he said peremptorily. ‘You’re reading Social Anthropology, aren’t you?’

  ‘Ye – es,’ she stammered.

  ‘And you come to my lectures, don’t you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You’ve heard me say that every single detail of human dress has significance, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, averting her eyes from his plus fours.

  ‘Brogues,’ he announced, ‘used to have real holes in them. Why?’

  ‘I … I … I don’t know.’

  ‘Use your imagination, girl! Before drains. When street and sewer were one and the same … the holes were to let the ordure through – understand?’

  Mary Goldsworthy flushed and nodded.

  ‘I thought it was to ventilate me feet,’ muttered an unwashed student while Professor Teed turned his attention elsewhere. There was much for him to observe.

  Near the door a Moslem youth in his first year at the University of Calleshire, though well versed in the ways of the Baghdad souk, accidentally trod on the foot of a girl near him.

  ‘May Allah bring you sons,’ he murmured apologetically.

  The girl – a leading pro-abortionist – looked startled.

  At the back of the
room a male geographer and a female Arts student were rapidly furthering each other’s acquaintance.

  A nearby biologist gave them a poke. ‘This is a sit-in, remember.’

  The geographer waved him away. ‘Dont mind us. We’re only pair-bonding.’

  And in a darkened police car Detective Constable Crosby was sitting beside a middle-aged woman still tense with shock and rigid with self-control. She had hardly spoken all the way back from Berebury to Luston. Crosby, who hadn’t in any case known what to say, was also silent. For a wonder, his speed had been equally muted.

  Now that the police car was approaching the town of Luston, though, he turned his attention from the wheel for a moment.

  ‘Left at the bottom of the hill,’ she said, answering his unspoken question. ‘Then right and right again at the traffic lights.’

  He hadn’t been in Miss Marion Moleyns’ house more than half a minute before he was on the telephone to Sloan.

  ‘It’s chaos, sir! The whole place has been taken part.…’

  13 Cut-over

  The hawkish Dr Kenneth Lorimer, Master of Tarsus, and the Vice-Chancellor of the University were still in conclave. The scene, though, had shifted. No longer were they sitting comfortably and over-long after dinner at the Vice-Chancellor’s house with the other Heads of Colleges. Now they were back in the more workmanlike setting of the Master’s room at Tarsus College. This was where Sloan ran them to ground.

  ‘Coffee, Inspector?’ John Hardiman, the Bursar, was in attendance in his usual role of universal acolyte.

  ‘Your policewoman?’ asked the Vice-Chancellor immediately. ‘I hope she’s all right?’

  ‘Nobody’s tried to attack her so far,’ said Sloan.

  ‘I am not in a position,’ said the academic precisely, ‘to know if that is good or bad for your plans, but I can certainly assure you that the other young lady …’

  ‘Bridget Hellewell,’ said Hardiman.

  ‘… is quite safe and sound in our spare room. My wife,’ said the Vice-Chancellor, ‘reported that she was asleep before we left.’

  ‘Good,’ said Sloan warmly. There were, in fact, two policemen watching over the Vice-Chancellor’s house, too, tonight, but Sloan saw no reason for acquainting him with this information.

  ‘Inspector,’ said Dr Lorimer impatiently, ‘what exactly is going on in this University?’ The Master of Tarsus was a man who believed in taking the initiative in conversation: it almost always made for difficulty.

  ‘Murder,’ responded Sloan briefly. ‘At least.’

  ‘At least?’ Lorimer look startled.

  ‘I can’t tell you everything else yet, but there will be the reason for the murder as well, don’t forget. That will have been going on, too, sir, won’t it?’

  ‘At this University? Here? But …’ He halted. The University Grants Committee was never far from Dr Lorimer’s thoughts: murder wouldn’t further his case with that Committee.

  ‘That I can’t tell you yet, sir. Not whether it was here or not. But it will emerge.’

  The Vice-Chancellor was a realist, too. ‘That’s what I am afraid of.’

  ‘But here …’ Dr Lorimer appeared to have some difficulty in absorbing this point.

  ‘The murder was here, Kenneth,’ rumbled the Vice-Chancellor, ‘so it’s not unreasonable to postulate that its, er, raison d’être might be here too.’

  The Master of Tarsus was not the first man that Sloan had seen unsuccessfully grappling with the proximity of unpleasantness. Facts were easy enough to grasp; it was the nearness of nastiness that most people didn’t like.

  He cleared his throat and spoke again. ‘If it’s any help to you gentlemen, the police have been able to rule out some of the more usual motives for the murder of a young man.’

  ‘Good,’ said the Vice-Chancellor with visible relief. In his day he had been a noted classical scholar, and he did not need anything spelled out. ‘I’m sure that’s a great help.’

  ‘It narrows the field,’ said Sloan cautiously.

  ‘That’s something. Have you, er, anything else to tell us?’

  Sloan took the cup of coffee that John Hardiman had conjured up from somewhere. ‘It’s a little early to say but we think it might be that Moleyns had, er, so to speak – found something.’

  ‘Don’t you mean found something out?’ pounced Lorimer.

  ‘Perhaps that, too,’ rejoined Sloan mildly.

  ‘The Inspector,’ observed the Vice-Chancellor, ‘will no doubt have grounds for what he is saying.’

  Lorimer swallowed hard and adopted a slightly less inquisitorial tone. ‘You mean that he might have made a discovery?’

  ‘Henry Moleyns’ home in Luston was completely ransacked this evening while his aunt was over here,’ said Sloan, answering them both.

  This Vice-Chancellor was onto the other implications of this before Dr Lorimer had absorbed the gist of the original. ‘Inspector, if someone was over in Luston tearing Moleyns’ house apart, then that person couldn’t have been here attacking your decoy policewoman.’

  ‘No, sir, they couldn’t, could they? Not yet.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s the reason why all’s quiet.’

  ‘Perhaps, sir.’

  ‘The night’s not over, of course.’

  ‘Not by a long chalk, it isn’t,’ agreed Sloan.

  ‘I hope, Inspector, that you haven’t anything else on your plate just now,’ said Dr Lorimer, catching up and not to be outdone.

  ‘No more than usual, sir,’ said Sloan.

  ‘I trust it’s a quiet night in the town anyway.’ Lorimer contrived to sound patronizing even if he hadn’t intended to.

  Sloan suppressed an impolitic remark about the natives still being friendly and said in a rather constrained way instead that there had been a fraud case building up in one of the villages all day.

  ‘Ah, fraud,’ said Lorimer. ‘How interesting.’

  ‘And,’ said Sloan quickly (before unguardedly saying something equally unwise about people who lived in glass and ivory towers not throwing stones), ‘one of the chemists’ shops at this end of the High Street was broken into earlier this evening.’

  ‘Drugs, I suppose.’ All Vice-Chancellors knew all about drugs these days. It went with the job. ‘You two won’t believe this, but when I was a young man at university the only drugs I had heard of were aspirin and morphine. Vice was confined to wine, women and tobacco.’

  ‘Then,’ said Sloan, his mind still on his work as a preserver of the Queen’s Peace, ‘there’s the sit-in.’

  The Vice-Chancellor ran a weary hand through iron-grey hair. ‘If anyone had told me last week, Inspector, that I could forget a sit-in here while it was still happening, I shouldn’t have believed them.’

  ‘But,’ Sloan reminded them both, ‘murder takes priority.’

  It was much later when Detective Constable Crosby telephoned Sloan again. The Inspector was by then back once more in the rooms of the Tarsus don who was on sabbatical leave. Not only did the gentleman concerned have a fine taste in carpets, but unfortunately he ran to exceedingly comfortable chairs as well.

  Detective Inspector Sloan had unwisely sunk into one of these when the telephone bell rang. Had he needed any confirmation that it had been a long hard day, the softly yielding way in which the cushions welcomed him would have provided it.

  ‘Well?’ he said down the line to the constable, trying to sound alert.

  ‘Taken apart,’ said Crosby tersely. ‘The whole house. Almost.’

  Sloan nodded to himself and murmured, ‘No stone unturned.’

  ‘Drawers, cupboards, shelves – the lot,’ said the detective constable.

  ‘I wonder what he was looking for?’ The chair was so comfortable that Sloan was beginning to feel a certain sense of detachment stealing over him.

  ‘Something thin and flat,’ said Crosby.

  ‘How do we know that?’ asked Sloan curiously.

  ‘The carpets,’ said Crosby. ‘He had t
he one in Moleyns’ bedroom up. And the books.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Gone through,’ said Crosby graphically.

  ‘A letter?’

  ‘Could be. He –’

  ‘He?’

  ‘He or she,’ conceded Crosby after a moment’s thought. ‘The furniture hadn’t been moved and the carpet wasn’t nailed down or anything.’

  ‘He or she, then,’ said Sloan. For ‘he’ you couldn’t always read ‘she’ in crime; perhaps you would be able to one day, the march of progress being what it was.

  ‘They,’ said Crosby elliptically, ‘had the books out and on the floor.’

  ‘Something thin and flat,’ mused Sloan.

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to know what it was, sir.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I think he –’ The constable stopped and started again. ‘I think he or she found whatever it was they were looking for.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘In the books.’

  ‘What books?’ Sloan was quite awake now, sitting bolt upright and well away from any cushions.

  ‘In the last book he took off the shelf, sir.’

  ‘What last book?’ He mustn’t shout. Not in a room like this: not down the telephone line to a constable.

  ‘I don’t know which book, sir,’ explained Crosby patiently. ‘Not exactly. I daresay I could work it out if we knew the order they were in on the shelves before.’

  Sloan took a deep breath. He wasn’t going to sit here and have things explained to him patiently by Crosby as if he were deficient in understanding. ‘I wasn’t,’ he said, controlling himself, ‘asking you to tell me if it was in Alice in Wonderland or Peter Rabbit, Crosby. What I want to know is, how do you know that he found it at all?’

  ‘Because he’ – the pause was so transient that it could scarcely be called reproachful – ‘or she stopped looking for what it was they wanted half-way along the shelf. Just like that.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Sloan with an irony that he couldn’t have told was unconscious or not, ‘that was where you came in.’

  ‘No, sir. I didn’t disturb anyone. I checked. Entry and exit were by the Yale lock on the front door. Child’s play, opening them.’