Parting Breath Page 19

  ‘On his way to the Chaplain.’

  ‘I can only think he was going to consult him about the implications of what he’d found. We know he tried to see the Professor of Modern History, too.’

  ‘Bernard Watkinson,’ said Superintendent Leeyes. ‘Harpe and his traffic people are always getting on to me about his blood alcohol – he drives like Jehu – but they can never actually catch the blighter at the right moment.’

  ‘He was in Military Intelligence in the war, so he’ll take a bit of catching,’ responded Sloan absently. Then he repeated the sentence, as if hearing it for the first time. ‘He was in Military Intelligence in the war … that wasn’t a secret.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound as if it was,’ said Leeyes caustically.

  ‘I reckon,’ said Sloan undeterred, ‘that when Hedden overheard Henry Moleyns, on top of his row in the Library, try to make appointments with both the Chaplain and a Professor of Modern History who had been in Military Intelligence, he must have wondered what was up with the lad. After all, he was supposed to have been an ecology student.’

  ‘It’s a different ball-game,’ said Leeyes, ‘is nature study.’

  There were two distinct schools of thought down at Berebury Police Station. One was that the Superintendent possessed a sense of humour: the other was that he didn’t.

  ‘Er – quite,’ said Sloan, who wasn’t willing to be quoted on this one. ‘As well as that, sir, Moleyns had already had a noisy argument in Hedden’s hearing about not going to the sit-in – and another in the Hall that he may well have heard about.’

  ‘Two and two together …’

  ‘Make four. A man like Roger Hedden – trained, utterly professional, dedicated – would have followed Moleyns up after that as a matter of course.’ Sloan coughed. ‘It is even more likely, sir, that Hedden was acting on instructions from, er, above.’

  ‘His master’s voice?’ said Leeyes.

  ‘They’re very thorough.’

  ‘I expect the boy was kept an eye on while he was over there,’ agreed Leeyes tacitly. ‘They’re better at that sort of thing than we are.’

  ‘Either that, or Hedden got Moleyns to confide in him instead.’

  ‘Then,’ said Leeyes colourfully, ‘the beetles would have started to come out of the woodwork all right.’

  ‘If,’ said Sloan, ‘he persuaded Henry Moleyns to tell him the whole story.’

  ‘Sounds to have been too important for the Chaplain, whatever it was,’ grunted Leeyes, who cut a remarkably fine figure at an official church parade, swagger-stick to the fore, theology nowhere in sight.

  ‘He ought to have gone to Mautby,’ said Sloan. ‘He’d have been safe enough with him whatever his secret – I think.’

  Leeyes grunted again. ‘It’s as well to know your friends as well as your enemies.’ He himself had sorted out both on the Watch Committee years ago. ‘By the way, Sloan, I always knew that there was something funny about Roger Hedden.’

  ‘A state of nature is a very good disguise,’ murmured Sloan, ‘but don’t ask me why.’

  ‘Not that, Sloan.’

  ‘What then, sir?’

  ‘A proper sociologist would have been at the sit-in.’

  19 Remise

  ‘Third time lucky, sir,’ announced Constable Crosby, reappearing in Professor Mautby’s laboratory, his latest mission completed. ‘I’ve got Henry Moleyns’ essay notes now. At least, that’s what I think they are. They were in Hedden’s sitting-room. Well hidden. He’d got a secret cupboard in his drinks cabinet.’

  The constable laid out on the laboratory bench a rough notebook and some sketch plans.

  ‘Half a hectare of woodland in depth – the complete ecosystem,’ murmured Professor Mautby, moving over and considering what he saw. ‘That’s what I gave all my second year students as a vacation study.’

  The laboratory suddenly seemed a very quiet place as Mautby bent over the papers.

  ‘Yes,’ said the ecologist at last. ‘This will be it. There’s his preliminary drawing to scale.’

  Sloan felt as if he had been playing in some particularly vigorous scrummage as he moved stiffly over to the bench and looked at the sketch plan. It meant nothing to him.

  On the other hand, it did mean quite a lot to Professor Simon Mautby.

  ‘Henry Moleyns,’ he began slowly, ‘chose to study a section of forest, Inspector, or more accurately a clearing in an old forest. In a cold climate.’

  ‘East of Cologne,’ volunteered Sloan.

  ‘And north, I should say. The trees he listed are nearly all coniferous.’ He pointed to the notebook. ‘Pines.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I say, this is curious.’ The Professor peered more closely at Moleyns’ notes. ‘He found that the ground in the forest had once been completely levelled.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And not naturally.’

  Sloan sat down on one of the bench stools.

  ‘Then,’ continued the scientist, head still down, ‘it had been replanted.…’

  There was a sudden scrabbling sound behind Sloan’s back. He spun round with the speed of light – and a rat moved across the front of its cage and back again.

  ‘They don’t like visitors,’ said Mautby.

  Sloan exchanged a baleful stare with the rat and then turned back to the bench. ‘How did Moleyns know that the wood had been replanted?’

  ‘He worked it out. It’s not a difficult thing to decide. The trees he examined were all exactly the same age.’

  ‘Seedlings, you mean?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘The boy had dug down to several roots.’ Mautby was totally absorbed now. ‘The trees he looked at had all been at least two years old when they were replanted.’

  ‘A plantation, you mean, then?’ said Sloan uneasily.

  ‘Not exactly. That is,’ continued Mautby with academic detachment, ‘not according to what Moleyns had written. He records the fact that the trees at the edges of the clearing were somewhat stunted because they had been planted in the shade of older trees.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘He’d found something else,’ said Mautby quietly, ‘when he checked the roots.’

  The silence in the laboratory was almost palpable now.

  Sloan’s mind was hundreds of miles away from Berebury and the University of Calleshire. It was in a clearing in a wood that had once been levelled and then replanted with two-year-old trees. ‘These pines, Professor,’ he said into the stillness. ‘About how old are they now?’

  The older man looked up. ‘Between thirty and forty years. All of them.’

  ‘And when Moleyns dug down to the roots?’

  ‘I think you can guess, Inspector.’

  Sloan met his eye and nodded.

  ‘Bodies everywhere he dug.’ Professor Mautby pushed the dead student’s sketch map towards Sloan. ‘Half a hectare’s quite a lot of ground.…’

  ‘No wonder he wanted to talk to the Chaplain and Professor Watkinson. I suppose that’s why he was in the Modern History part of the Library, too, when Hedden overheard him.’

  ‘I think that’s what I would want to do, too,’ said Mautby baldly, ‘if I were his age and stumbled on a mass grave in a foreign country.’

  ‘Hedden’s country, do you think?’ asked Sloan. The police essentials of the case hadn’t left him for a single instant.

  ‘Moleyns very carefully doesn’t say where,’ said Mautby. ‘So carefully that it must matter. If this is all that he brought back, then I can’t tell you any more.’

  ‘It isn’t.’ For reasons of his own Constable Crosby had chosen to stand facing the caged rat but he had been listening. ‘There was something else, sir, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Not that I – yes, Crosby, of course there was. I was forgetting.’ Sloan nodded. Perhaps they would make something of the detective constable, after all.

  Constable Crosby produced a plastic bag, duly sealed and labelled, an
d handed it to Professor Mautby. ‘The student who never stopped sneezing said it was because of the new Canadian wheat – that was what reminded me.’

  ‘We think Henry Moleyns shed a couple of ears of wheat around the place,’ explained Sloan to the ecologist more diffidently. ‘Would they tell you anything?’

  Professor Simon Mautby adjusted his glasses and closely examined the contents of the package. ‘Triticum polonicum,’ he said. ‘No doubt about that.’

  ‘Does polonicum,’ asked Sloan cautiously, ‘mean what I think it means?’

  ‘Polish. The wheat isn’t confined to Poland. You get it all round that area.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It doesn’t tell us exactly where he’d been or anything like that.’

  ‘Just the general direction,’ said Sloan. ‘Darkest Europe …’

  ‘Even now’ – Mautby stared out of the window – ‘we don’t know everything that went on in Europe then. Watkinson will tell you that.’

  ‘Moleyns was being very careful.’

  ‘Old secrets,’ said the scientist, ‘can be as dangerous as new ones.’

  ‘Quite.’ That was handsome coming from him. If Simon Mautby’s creeping defoliant ever got going there would be no food for anyone anywhere.

  ‘Moleyns might have thought some things are best left unknown.’

  ‘So must Roger Hedden,’ said Sloan astringently.

  ‘What – oh, yes, of course.’ Professor Mautby pointed to the dead student’s notes. ‘Otherwise you realise that Moleyns would have told us where this was, and he doesn’t.’

  ‘He did try, didn’t he?’ said Sloan. ‘But he left it too late.’

  ‘Too late?’

  ‘His parting breath,’ said Sloan, the last piece of the jigsaw slipping into place.

  ‘“Twenty-six minutes”?’

  ‘It means something else besides time, doesn’t it?’ Sloan said very quietly.

  ‘A line of longitude!’ breathed Mautby.

  ‘I saw it on a map today.’

  ‘Of course, Inspector. I never thought of that.’

  ‘I think “twenty-six minutes” was the first half of a map reference,’ said Sloan. He pointed to the notes on the bench. ‘You do realise, don’t you, that we’re never going to know the second half?’

  ‘The Vice-Chancellor’s compliments, gentlemen’ – Alfred Palfreyman’s parade-ground voice carried effortlessly across the crowded Almstone administration block – ‘and you’re to make your own minds up whether you come out or not.’

  His assistant, Bert, was busily working away at the locks.

  ‘The doors are open from now on,’ boomed the Head Porter, ‘and the police don’t want to see any of you at all.’

  Several hundred pairs of eyes turned his way.

  He lowered his stentorian tones a register. ‘And I’m to tell you that Mr Hedden has met with a nasty accident.’

  There was a murmur throughout the ground floor.

  ‘This morning at the railway station. We think he must have dropped his ticket or something.’

  There was nothing accidental about Palfreyman’s use of the royal ‘we.’ It was his way of aligning himself, as always, with the angels.

  ‘Just before the express went through.’ If it was to be put about that the able-bodied Roger Hedden had met his death by mischance, then it was not for him, Alfred Palfreyman, to wonder if the sociologist had fallen or been pushed: but he knew what he thought.

  ‘He’d gone to catch the local train and forgotten about the express.’ You couldn’t stop old sergeant-majors thinking but they never gave an opinion – not even after Balaclava.

  There was another murmur: this time of sympathy.

  Palfreyman lowered his voice still further. His next message was pratically routine. ‘Would someone pass the word to Professor Teed that there’s a television crew outside that wants to interview him for his opinion on the sit-in.’

  His last message to those sitting-in in the Almstone administration block he suppressed altogether. The sergeant-major in him just would not let him relay it to the students. It had been from the Vice-Chancellor and had shocked the Head Porter to the very core.

  Palfreyman had been receiving his instructions about what to say to the undergraduates. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calleshire had been fresh from hearing the whole story of the murders of Henry Moleyns and Peter Pringle from Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan, Head of the Criminal Investigation Department at Berebury Police Station.

  ‘Tell them, Palfreyman,’ said the Vice-Chancellor sadly, ‘that in the long run obedience to authority is more terrifying than disobedience.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, dog-tired now, was consoling a woman on the loss of a letter. A broken épée had been found, which was being examined for bloodstains, and now he was sitting in a pleasant set of rooms in Tarsus College overlooking the quadrangle where so much had happened.

  ‘I think, Miss Linaker, it is very possible that this letter from Richard Wordsworth to his brother William that Mr. Pringle’s note mentioned about their other brother –’

  ‘John Wordsworth.’

  ‘ – who you say was lost at sea.’

  ‘Drowned when the East Indiaman The Earl of Abergavenny went down,’ she said.

  ‘Really, miss?’

  ‘Off Portland on February 5, 1805.’

  ‘That letter,’ said Sloan, ‘about John Wordsworth and Jane Austen …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It may never have existed.’ He was doing this very badly, he knew; out of his depth in the past. ‘Or at least never been here at Berebury with Algernon Harring’s papers.’ Sloan took a deep breath. ‘You must appreciate that we have no reason at all, absolutely no reason, to suppose any letter existed. We think it was just a clear piece of opportunism on Hedden’s part.’

  Miss Linaker sighed.

  ‘Moleyns wasn’t a wealthy student,’ said Sloan, ‘so stealing for gain could have been, er, envisaged and he wouldn’t have been around to rebut any suppositions. He knew about the Wordsworth papers, too.’

  She lifted her head. ‘He did?’

  ‘The library assistant told him, remember? You and Hedden were both there at the time.’

  ‘So we were. I’d forgotten.’

  Sloan paused, aware that the police view wasn’t the only one. ‘The idea of the letter was important enough to serve for motive. It didn’t have to exist.’

  ‘You’ve searched for it?’ she asked him gruffly.

  ‘Everywhere that we can think of.’

  ‘Roger Hedden’s rooms?’

  ‘It’s not there.’

  ‘The Library?’

  ‘Not as far as they can tell.’ How they could ever tell in libraries was beyond him.

  ‘What about where Henry Moleyns lived?’ asked Miss Linaker. ‘Moleyns comes into it all somewhere.’

  ‘It’s not there, either.’ Sloan cleared his throat. ‘And he doesn’t come into the picture in that way, either, miss. We don’t think Henry Moleyns had stolen it or anything like that – though I think we were meant to think that. That was the whole idea. And a clever one at that.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Moleyns had – er – other worries, miss.’ They weren’t going to be shared with anyone else at the University – those worries – beyond the Vice-Chancellor, but Sloan did not say this to the Professor of English Literature.

  ‘Colin Ellison,’ she hurried on. ‘He seems to have been very active over something.’

  ‘Professor Mautby’s research,’ said Sloan dryly. ‘He’s telling his Member of Parliament about it now.’

  ‘So Simon’s secret is out now, then,’ said Miss Linaker unexpectedly.

  ‘How did you know that he had one, miss, if I might ask?’

  She smiled faintly. ‘He never kept his laboratory assistants for very long and he let people put it down to his bad temper.’

  Sloan nodded. Actions always spoke louder than words. />
  ‘And he’s not really bad-tempered, you know. Only clever.’

  Sloan let this pass. He’d always felt that the ability to suffer fools gladly was an underrated virtue. It should have been with the cardinal ones … perhaps it was, though.

  ‘I suppose,’ she sighed, ‘that that puts poor Simon back to square one. Like me.’

  ‘Professor Mautby,’ said Sloan, as bracing as he dared, ‘does not strike me as a man easily deterred.’

  She looked up quickly. ‘Oh, I shall publish, of course. “Anne’s shudderings were to herself, alone.”’

  ‘Beg pardon, miss?’

  ‘That’s from Persuasion.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But it would have been a very splendid thing to have been able to name that which is nameless and dateless.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’ Whoever Henry Moleyns had found would remain nameless and dateless, too.

  And numberless.

  An exceeding great army, thought Sloan to himself (It was his mother who had insisted on his going to Sunday School.) An organised wickedness.

  ‘Inspector …’

  ‘Yes, miss?’ Out of the window Sloan could see the first of the students beginning to trickle back into Tarsus from the sit-in: the Vice-Chancellor’s manifest lack of interest had done the trick there.

  ‘Why did Roger Hedden pretend about the letter and then kill poor Peter Pringle?’

  ‘There had to be a plausible reason for Henry Moleyns’ being killed – one that everyone could know about, that is. Hedden wanted everyone to think it was because of the theft of a valuable letter.’

  ‘It would have done the trick, too,’ she said expressionlessly.

  ‘If the Librarian was dead as well,’ Sloan hurried on – if that sentiment of hers was the tip of an iceberg he didn’t want to see the other end – ‘then, miss, not only did the story about there being a letter hold good but the murder of the Librarian actually lent credence to it.’ He coughed. ‘I’m afraid from what I hear that poor Mr Pringle must have put the idea into Hedden’s head himself at High Table.’

  ‘Peter? How?’

  ‘When he told everyone about the legal letters with the Wordsworth connection.’

  ‘That’s right.’ She nodded vigorously. ‘Algernon Harring was a lawyer, and so was Richard Wordsworth. At the Staple Inn.’