Parting Breath Page 18

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Stephen Smithers. Reading music.’

  ‘That, I suppose,’ said Leeyes sarcastically, ‘comes after “the cat sat on the mat.”’

  ‘He of the sneeze,’ said Sloan, ignoring this.

  ‘What sneeze?’ demanded the Superintendent even more irritably.

  ‘Hay-fever, actually, sir.’ Sloan had forgotten that Leeyes wouldn’t know about the sneeze. ‘He’d still got it this morning. Very nasty.’

  ‘Spare me the medical detail.’

  ‘He gets it,’ Sloan informed him gratuitously, ‘from wheat.’

  ‘I do not care,’ declared Leeyes with something amounting to passion, ‘where he gets it from –’

  ‘Canadian wheat, sir. Apparently we’ve got a lot of it over here now.’

  ‘Sloan, neither physical infirmity nor agriculture –’

  ‘Canadian wheat is different from ours.’

  ‘The Maple Leaf for ever,’ snarled Leeyes.

  ‘A new sort of hay-fever, you might say.’

  ‘As a hardworking police officer – a very hardworking police officer, Sloan – do I need to know that?’

  ‘No, sir.’ He, Detective Inspector Sloan, had had time to think, though: time to place what it was that Smithers had told him that he now knew was so important.

  ‘And this Smithers boy, Sloan,’ continued Leeyes undeterred, ‘who you say can read music –’

  ‘Not can read, sir,’ said Sloan, despairing. ‘Is reading. For a degree.’

  ‘And who,’ carried on Leeyes magnificently, ‘has hay-fever of Canadian origin …’

  Sloan gave up the unequal struggle.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Leeyes, who could have given points in tenacity to a working ferret any day of the week, carried on. ‘He told you who killed Moleyns?’

  ‘No, sir. All he told me was what the murderer’s disguise was’ – another thought came to Sloan even as he spoke – ‘and the weapon he used … and how he could carry it around without any questions being asked … and how it was that Henry Moleyns didn’t recognize him.… Crosby thought the same disguise was a ghost.’

  ‘And,’ interrupted Leeyes heavily, ‘am I going to be privileged to be told as well?’

  ‘For my money, sir, the murderer was dressed in full fencing kit.’

  ‘Ahhhhhhhh …’ A long, slow breath escaped the Superintendent. ‘That’s head-to-foot stuff, isn’t it?’

  ‘With mask,’ said Sloan for good measure. ‘Just the back of the head shows.’

  ‘And the weapon a sword,’ concluded Leeyes. ‘An épée or whatever you call them.’

  ‘Smithers told me he’d seen a member of the club in the quadrangle, sir, only the penny didn’t drop at the time. Come to think of it, so did Bridget Hellewell. Henry Moleyns would think whoever it was, was just giving him a friendly lunge.’

  ‘If,’ said Leeyes neatly, ‘he’s your library man as well, then you might say that sartorially he went from one extreme to the other.’

  ‘Miss Linaker,’ said Sloan, not listening to him, ‘gave me a clue as well yesterday, only I didn’t know what it meant.’

  ‘And what,’ enquired Superintendent Leeyes with ill feigned patience, ‘did Miss Linaker say?’ The Equal Opportunities Commission might not have made its mark in some quarters, but down at Berebury Police Station Police Superintendent Leeyes was perfectly prepared to believe that Crime as Opportunity included women too.

  ‘It was something out of Shakespeare, sir.’ Of course the Immortal Bard had had a word for it. Like the Greeks, you couldn’t catch him without every human situation, every emotion, covered again and again.

  ‘Not Hamlet?’ The Superintendent knew his Hamlet now as well as he knew the faces of the old lags in Berebury.

  ‘Not Hamlet,’ said Sloan. ‘King Henry the Fourth.’

  ‘Don’t know it.’

  ‘Part One, she said.’

  ‘It’s always Part One,’ growled Leeyes. ‘Well?’

  ‘“Young Harry with his beaver on,”’ quoted Sloan, as the door of the room – the absent don’s room at Tarsus – opened. A police messenger entered with a sheaf of reports. He was clearly a motorcyclist and was wearing the regulation crash helmet: a latter-day beaver, that’s what a crash helmet was. He was dressed in the gauntlet gloves that those of that ilk favour in cold weather and the leggings and boots that somehow went with the job. At the time Sloan saw him for what he was. It was only long afterwards that he realised that he had been looking at a thoroughly modern Mercury – a messenger from the gods.

  He had, in fact, only come from Berebury Police Station.

  Not Olympus.

  ‘From your desk, sir,’ said the man, handing over the papers. And was gone.

  Sloan took them with his free hand in much the same way as a Cabinet Minister opens his dispatch boxes: it was part of the routine that went with the job. Come what may, the routine went on.…

  With one ear still tuned to the Superintendent, he cast an eye over the top ones. This handful looked pedestrian enough.

  The first was from Sergeant Gelven pursuing fraud over at Easterbrook.

  The second one was from the constable who acted as Coroner’s Officer. Police Constable King had dutifully turned in his report of all that Henry Moleyns had been wearing and had had in his pockets when he was brought into the mortuary.

  Detective Inspector Sloan cast his eye down the list of the mundane – until he came to something not quite so mundane.

  One receipt for a roll of photographic film left for processing on Tuesday.

  At the chemist’s shop nearest to the University burgled before midnight.

  18 Redoublement

  It did all add up.

  Lady mathematicians notwithstanding, all that had happened at Tarsus College in the University of Calleshire was adding up. And when he’d done his sums, he, Detective Inspector Sloan, would know the answer – the grand total – and be able to go home to his wife and have a wash and a shave like other men who weren’t unlucky enough to be police officers on duty.

  A sort of subtotal to the addition sum was provided by Detective Constable Crosby, returning hot-foot from the chemist’s shop in Berebury High Street.

  ‘It was the photographers, sir,’ he announced. ‘They do their own processing there. The film that Moleyns left there on Tuesday morning has gone.’

  Sloan didn’t feel any more satisfaction than he might have done fitting a piece of a jigsaw puzzle into the hole that was waiting for it. The new piece only added to the picture; it didn’t complete it.

  ‘Some bottles of tablets,’ went on Crosby, ‘were scattered about, but now they know about the film they reckon that spilling the tablets was just a blind.’

  ‘It was the film that the break-in was about,’ said Sloan with increasing certainty. ‘Had it been processed?’

  Crosby nodded. ‘Yesterday. I spoke to the boy who did it.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He thought – he won’t swear to it, mind you – that it was just trees.’

  ‘Trees?’ Sloan couldn’t have said off-hand what it was he had been expecting, but it hadn’t been trees.

  ‘A wood,’ said Crosby. ‘He thinks that they were photographs of a wood.’

  ‘Moleyns,’ declared Sloan with conviction, ‘had discovered something.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘On his vacation. Abroad.’

  ‘Somewhere,’ said Crosby unhelpfully, ‘but we don’t know where.’

  Sloan looked at the constable. ‘We can assume – seeing that someone went to the trouble of stealing his passport – that he went somewhere in Europe that you needed a visa for, and that he didn’t want anyone to know where that had been.’

  Crosby was still unimpressed. ‘He might only have wanted those photographs for his holiday essay that they all had to do. That was about woods, sir, wasn’t it?’

  He broke off as he saw Sloan staring at him.

 
‘The essay, Crosby!’ breathed the Detective Inspector. ‘Of course, it was because of the essay. All because of the essay,’ he said wonderingly. ‘What clots we’ve been. Come on – hurry – hurry.…’

  But Higgins, the porter on the Tarsus gate, was only moderately helpful.

  ‘Professor Mautby brought them in this morning, sir, as usual. The whole pile. It’s a bit like school, the way he does that, I always think, but there’s no telling Professor Mautby anything.’

  ‘No,’ said Sloan flatly. ‘The essays …’

  ‘Over there.’ Higgins cocked his head towards a pile of papers. ‘I just put them on that shelf for them to help themselves. Quite a lot of them have gone already.’

  ‘Not Colin Ellison’s, I hope,’ said Sloan urgently. He’d been visited by another idea – one of those misleading pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that looked as if it could fit in anywhere – but was, unbeknown to all, the key piece. Key pieces never looked like key pieces.

  ‘No, sir.’ Crosby had been thumbing through them. ‘That’s here.’

  ‘And the one Henry Moleyns did?’ Sloan tried to keep his voice even.

  ‘I known that isn’t there,’ put in Higgins helpfully, ‘because someone else came down to check on that not five minutes ago. He said it did ought to go back to the poor young gentleman’s aunt, so I told him Professor Mautby must still have it. It didn’t come back with the others anyway.…’

  Sloan spun round on his heel. ‘Where does Professor Mautby live, man? Tell me, quickly.’

  Time seemed to stand still while the porter ran his finger down the list and gave them the address of a house in north Berebury. It – time – still had the same crystallised quality for Sloan as their police car set off through the streets at a pace that caused bystanders to stare, and to think – quite mistakenly – about the ancient police sport of stolen car chasing.

  As they left the centre of the town behind and swung into the approaches of the residential part of Berebury, Sloan said, ‘Let’s have a bit more of our two-tone now, Crosby.’

  ‘It’ll warn him, sir,’ objected the constable, ‘tell him that we’re on our way.’

  ‘It might save a life if we’re late.’

  Even as the police car was swinging into Acacia Gardens a man was leaving Professor Mautby’s house. He was apparently taking courteous farewells of the Professor’s wife, clutching something in his hand as he did so. Crosby brought the car to a screeching halt at the Professor’s gate and shot out of it towards the man.

  It was at that moment that the conventional departure scene disintegrated with the suddenness of breaking glass. Mrs Mautby stepped backwards, Crosby ran forwards, the man feinted a run away and then turned and hit the constable hard as he advanced. Sloan, bringing up the rear (his son would play in the defence, that was settled), attempted a tackle. It brought the man down all right but it was like trying conclusions with an eel. Crosby, an unhealthy colour now, drew breath and re-entered the fray but in a flash the man was free of Sloan’s grip and, ducking back from the constable’s approach, he slipped unexpectedly sideways, leapt the low garden wall and was gone.

  A bruised but triumphant Crosby flourished a handful of papers. ‘I got this off him, though, whatever it is.’

  ‘That,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘is the essay that Henry Moleyns copied from Colin Ellison’s work.’

  In the end it was Professor Mautby who supplied most of the missing pieces of the jigsaw. Sloan had instructed Crosby to drive straight back to Mautby’s laboratory at the University while he himself issued staccato orders into the car radio about a man, last seen making off from Acacia Gardens. ‘Wanted for murder – may be armed – is known to be dangerous – if seen, detain and arrest. Watch his house.…’

  Professor Simon Mautby was less surprised than Sloan had expected.

  ‘Roger Hedden?’ His bushy eyebrows came together. ‘Yes, Inspector, that fits. I did wonder about him.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Sloan tartly.

  ‘On my account, not yours.’

  Sloan waited for enlightenment.

  ‘Someone,’ said Mautby simply, ‘was watching me.’

  ‘Watching?’

  ‘Call it spying, if you like. Sounds a bit dramatic, I know.’

  ‘But that was what it was?’ said Sloan, another piece of the jigsaw slotting into place.

  ‘Research has to be done somewhere,’ said the ecologist obliquely. ‘I do mine here.’

  ‘Yours?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Ours,’ said Mautby firmly.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Sloan. ‘Hedden …’

  ‘Hedden stayed on through the summer vacation when I did.’ The ecologist grimaced. ‘Sociologists don’t usually work as hard as scientists.’

  Sloan wasn’t interested in academic chestnuts. ‘A sociologist,’ he pointed out, ‘wouldn’t know what you were doing.’

  ‘True. That’s one of the things that made me start to wonder if Hedden was our resident Red.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Not many sociologists know the botanical name of the humble baked bean.’

  ‘And Colin Ellison?’ said Sloan, another part of the jigsaw puzzle at hand. ‘He was watching your work, too, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Clever boy,’ said the scientist reflectively. ‘Clever enough to spot what I was doing. He was the only one who did, you know. Pity he’s a pacifist.’

  Sloan reserved his judgment on this. He’d had bigger red herrings trawled across his path in his time.

  ‘White mice?’ exclaimed Constable Crosby suddenly.

  ‘That was sabotage,’ said Mautby soberly. ‘And amateurish, at that. That’s when I knew Ellison wasn’t the main watcher. If Hedden had been going to destroy my work he’d have waited until I’d finished and stolen it for his people.’

  ‘His people?’

  ‘Our future enemies,’ said Mautby. His eyebrows came together, and he gave Sloan what in anyone less formidable might have been a half-smile. ‘You don’t have anything except friends in peace-time, do you?’

  This promising line in university hair-splitting was interrupted by Crosby. ‘But,’ he protested, unable to contain himself, ‘you only do plants.’

  The Professor turned his way. ‘Plants equal food, my boy. People need food, especially in war time.’

  ‘And your work?’ asked Sloan, suddenly both very tired and greatly saddened. If Ellison knew about it, there was every reason why he should.

  ‘On a creeping defoliant. One that wouldn’t need spraying from the air as napalm does. All you would have to do is to start it off in enemy territory and it would go on destroying crops on its own. Self-perpetuating – like a plague of locusts, only better.’

  ‘What stops it?’ Sloan himself would have used the word ‘worse’ there, not ‘better,’ but then, as he reminded himself, he was only a working policeman.

  ‘Ah,’ said the scientist chillingly, ‘that still needs some work doing on it.’

  ‘And where does Moleyns come in?’ said Sloan, still sticking to essentials.

  Professor Simon Mautby shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘His essay …’

  ‘A straight crib of Colin Ellison’s – for what that’s worth. Don’t ask me why.’

  Sloan moved with the bone-weariness of a man who has had no sleep. ‘May I use your telephone?’

  ‘Who did you say?’ Superintendent Leeyes sounded disbelieving.

  ‘Hedden,’ repeated Sloan. ‘Roger Franklyn Hedden.’

  ‘The sociologist?’

  ‘Ah, well, sir … that’s just it. We think he was a sociologist all right –’

  ‘That’s what I –’

  ‘But he was something else as well.’

  That was when the explosion came. ‘And you two fumble-fingered fools,’ bellowed Leeyes, ‘had him in your precious lily-whites and lost him?’

  ‘You don’t take that sort alive,’ said Sloan confidently. Hedden hadn’t even
made the mistake of going back to his rooms in Tarsus.

  ‘You can at least try,’ roared the Superintendent.

  ‘We did try, sir.’ Crosby was going to have a magnificent bruise tomorrow to prove it.

  ‘And you call yourselves policemen.’ Leeyes’s vocal vigour was undiminished. ‘What will –’

  ‘Policemen, sir,’ said Sloan with new assurance. ‘Nothing more.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Hedden isn’t an ordinary villain.’

  ‘Out of your league, were you, then, Sloan?’ snapped Leeyes.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan firmly. He’d just realised that that was what made the game – life, if you liked – manageable. It was when you stepped out of your league that you ran into trouble. ‘We were – and so was young Henry Moleyns.’

  ‘And am I going to be told exactly which league this superman Hedden was in?’

  ‘International,’ said Sloan unhesitatingly.

  ‘I suppose,’ conceded Leeyes after a moment, ‘that there’s some research going on at all our universities. What is it here?’

  ‘Work,’ said Sloan, ‘on a new method of jungle clearance.’

  ‘Ah – agricultural purposes.’

  ‘Strictly not for the birds anyway,’ said Sloan ambiguously.

  ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ said Leeyes. ‘We used something at Walcheren that some Oxford boffin had invented –’

  ‘Same sort of thing,’ agreed Sloan hastily.

  ‘And what,’ enquired Leeyes, ‘had Henry Moleyns got to do with – er – jungle clearance?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Sloan,’ thundered the Superintendent warningly.

  ‘Henry Moleyns,’ said Sloan, clarifying his own thoughts as he went along, ‘did his vacation study before he realised he’d stumbled on something sinister.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yet. I do know that he hadn’t time between getting home on Monday and Thursday morning to do another essay for Professor Mautby, so he nicked all of Colin Ellison’s work.’

  ‘And copied Ellison’s essay on Wednesday night?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. And then on Thursday evening he put all of Ellison’s things on the fountain parapet.’