Parting Breath Page 4

  ‘Will he wear his boots? That’s what I want to know,’ drawled another young man who never wore anything on his own feet stouter than moccasins. Actually he, too, resented always being upstaged in the matter of outrageous dress by a don who dressed from a pre-war gents’ outfitters’ catalogues; but he couldn’t bring himself to say so. ‘I just love his boots.’

  Michael Challoner hadn’t been able to say: hadn’t in fact wanted to contemplate Professor Teed at all. The Professor’s support could well end up by being an albatross around the neck of any organiser.

  ‘Why is he coming?’ asked the Treasurer. By rights the question should have come oddly from the lips of one dedicated to the Cause, but it didn’t.

  ‘Search me,’ said Challoner wearily. Like many another organiser before him, he was finding his energies sapped by side issues and his own supporters more trying than a thoroughgoing opposition. ‘Come on. It’s time we got going.’

  ‘It’s to see how we behave,’ said the Vice-Chairman of the Committee darkly. ‘We’ll all be in his next book, you see.’

  ‘Species Studentius cremondii,’ said the only man there to regret the passing of a university entrance qualification in Latin.

  Wednesday evening was devoted by all the supporters of the coming sit-in to the practising of the Ho Chi Minh shuffle throughout the six Colleges of the University: and by one man to the breaking and entering of Colin Ellison’s room in Tarsus College.

  4 Lunge

  At least, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan was of the opinion that it was one man who had done the breaking and entering. He and Detective Constable Crosby had responded to a call from John Hardiman, the Bursar of Tarsus, made when the break-in was discovered by an indignant Ellison.

  ‘And an amateur at that,’ added Sloan, looking round the disturbed room more dispassionately than Colin Ellison had been able to bring himself to do.

  ‘But why me?’ wailed that young man, much struck by the unfairness of having his room wrecked while other rooms remained just as their owners had left them.

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ said Sloan, while Constable Crosby set about a routine search for traces of the intruder. ‘He hasn’t done any real damage, has he?’

  ‘No damage?’ squealed Ellison, his complexion a rapidly mounting red. ‘Look at the mess! Just wait until I lay my hands on the blighter who –’

  ‘Mess, yes,’ agreed Sloan, unmoved. ‘Real damage, no.’

  ‘But why …?’ Ellison’s curly hair went oddly with his crossness.

  ‘We will need to know exactly what has been taken before we can tell you why,’ explained Sloan firmly, ‘and perhaps not even then.’

  ‘I’m a pacifist’ – Ellison jutted his chin in the air – ‘but when I catch –’

  ‘What is missing?’ repeated Sloan.

  ‘My course work, for a start,’ groaned Ellison, starting to prowl round the room.

  ‘No, don’t move or touch anything. Just tell me about anything that isn’t here.’

  ‘My lecture notes,’ said the student, looking about him. He stood awkwardly where he had stopped, like a child caught in the middle of playing the game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. ‘My vacation study – God, I meant to hand that in today – heaven knows what old Mautby’ll say if he doesn’t get that in on time – it’s not funny, crossing him, I can tell you – some library books – they flay you alive here if you lose library books – all my microscope slides – all my microscope slides,’ he repeated shakily, the enormity of his loss only just beginning to strike him.

  ‘Money?’ asked Constable Crosby with the air of one getting down to brass tacks.

  This remark at least had the merit of stemming the catalogue of loss.

  ‘I haven’t got any money,’ said Ellison, turning to the detective constable.

  ‘Oh,’ said Crosby, falling silent: perhaps even Mr Oscar Wilde’s celebrated cynic would have had difficulty in putting a price on this particular student’s losses.

  ‘My grant hasn’t come through yet,’ explained Colin Ellison bitterly, ‘and, man, am I going to need it now.’ He waved a hand round the room. ‘At least this might make sense if I were a millionaire.’

  Sloan forbore to tell the student that – for a variety of reasons – millionaires tended to get burgled less often than non-millionaires. Instead he asked him if he had any enemies.

  ‘The Direct Action Committee don’t love me anymore.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I won’t go to their precious sit-in and I said so.’

  Sloan nodded.

  ‘I don’t believe in aggression,’ added Ellison rather priggishly.

  ‘I see,’ said Sloan. And he did. Non-aggressors were great provokers of violence. He often wondered if they ever knew how great: especially in matrimonial causes.

  ‘And where were you this evening when all this happened?’

  ‘Out,’ said Ellison quickly.

  Too quickly.

  Much too quickly. Sloan took another look at the young man. It was a cool evening but he had suddenly started to sweat.

  ‘Oh?’ said Sloan unhelpfully.

  ‘Yes, I …’ Ellison couldn’t keep still any longer, either. He started pacing up and down.

  Detective Inspector Sloan, arch-interviewer, waited, deliberately allowing the tension to rise. Police in Great Britain didn’t have guns but they did know how to handle tension and to use it as a weapon: to the manifest surprise of a succession of takers of hostages.

  ‘It’s like this,’ Ellison began again.

  Sloan said nothing, professional ear fine-tuned to recognise a falsehood. He’d slay Crosby if he spoke now.

  ‘I watched a bit of Rugby,’ said Ellison at last.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I met a couple of fellows from Ireton and had a coffee with them.’

  Sloan’s face couldn’t have been more unresponsive.

  ‘Do you want their names?’ asked Ellison uneasily.

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Sloan, adding smoothly, ‘and after you left them?’

  ‘Then,’ said Ellison after another pause, ‘I went into Bones and Stones.…’

  ‘Where?’ asked Crosby involuntarily.

  ‘Sorry.’ He jerked his head. ‘The University Institute of Anthropology and Archaeology.’

  ‘And’ – Sloan resumed the initiative – ‘you stayed there until you came back here and found this?’

  It wasn’t, the policeman consoled himself, really and truly verballing. Verballing was putting words into a man’s mouth – and statement. But it wasn’t cricket either, what he was doing, let alone playing the game according to Judges’ Rules: not leading someone on to complete what Sloan strongly suspected was a tissue of lies.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Ellison with such patent relief that Sloan knew that he was right: his copy of Judges’ Rules and Administrative Directions to the Police could stay on the shelf for a little longer. Ellison said firmly, ‘I did stay there until they closed and then I came back here.’

  It could only have been thought transference that prevented Crosby from looking at his watch.

  Or will-power.

  Sloan’s will-power.

  Every man who’d ever been on the beat knew that all the University Institutes closed at half past seven. It had been nearly nine o’clock when Ellison had come back to his room and reported the damage.

  ‘What I was getting at,’ continued Sloan untruthfully, ‘was whether anyone would know for certain that you were out and that it would be safe to break in here.’

  There was no mistaking Ellison’s relief now. His frown cleared. ‘Ah, I see.’

  ‘Well, would they?’

  ‘What – oh, I don’t know. I’d have to think about that.’

  ‘Did you see anyone you knew when you were out?’

  ‘Oh, yes.… A lot of people.’

  ‘Supper?’

  ‘Skipped it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Not hungr
y.’

  Sloan nodded and turned his attention back to the room itself: Children in arms knew everything about fingerprints nowadays, but they’d have to be searched for, all the same. Before very long, infants at their mother’s knee would know all about germ prints, too. These days even veritable tyros at crime knew that you could tell a man’s blood group from his saliva – funny that, when you came to think of it, because people had been talking about a man being the spitting image of his father since time began. Long before anyone found out about blood groups; long before they knew that father and son and mother and daughter were linked by the likenesses in tiny platelets of blood.

  Or that a signpost to that blood group was contained in every deposit of spittle. Had the ancients guessed that, too, he wondered briefly, his attention caught by something small on the floor.

  A dead spit, they would say, he thought, moving towards it. As alike as if the man had been spat out – not born. None of your Adam’s-rib touch, he thought to himself, and then grinned. He was hypersensitive to the matter of birth just at the moment. His wife, Margaret, was going to have a baby – their first – and, just as all roads lead to Rome, so all his trains of thought ended up with the subject of birth.

  He still couldn’t see exactly what it was, it was so small, this thing that had caught his eye. He stooped and peered at it. It could have been a large seed of grass or an ear of corn – wheat, perhaps.

  ‘Been helping with the harvest?’ he enquired of Ellison casually.

  ‘Not me.’ The student shook his head. ‘I’m not one of your cow-cocky ones, thank you very much. I went on the buses.’

  ‘I see. A city type, eh? Well, we’ll have that in a plastic bag, Crosby, whatever it is.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  It was quite late by the time the two policemen had collected what information they could from Colin Ellison’s room. Nobody could call it a lot.

  ‘He was somewhere he shouldn’t have been when it happened,’ pronounced Sloan. ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘And whoever did it wore gloves,’ contributed Crosby.

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ said Sloan wearily.

  ‘And size eight and half shoes.’

  ‘So do half this mob, I should think.’

  ‘As for the lock,’ went on Crosby, ‘it was pathetic.’

  Sloan wasn’t surprised. The locks here were meant to keep out the casual interrupters of work and sleep: not the dedicated intruder. He stood for a moment on the deserted landing near the top of the staircase leading down to the quadrangle. In the distance he could hear noise.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Detective Constable Crosby cocked an ear. ‘The procession, sir. I reckon it’s still going on.’

  Sloan frowned. ‘What is it they’re shouting now?’

  ‘Rah, rah, rah?’ suggested Crosby, who was an aficionado of the American silver screen.

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Sloan, listening intently for a moment to the far-off chanting.

  ‘Could it be “Humbert” something, sir?’ asked the younger man.

  ‘It could,’ said Sloan, mindful of the morrow. ‘Easily.’

  ‘It’s “Humbert in, Wheatley out,”’ pronounced Crosby as a sudden change in the wind carried the sound more clearly towards Tarsus. ‘That mean anything, sir?’

  Sloan sighed. ‘It does. Humbert is the student they want back. Dr Wheatley is the Dean of Almstone.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the constable, losing interest. ‘Well, the people who were still in their rooms in this corridor didn’t hear a thing except for the procession – nothing from Ellison’s room at all. I checked.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think they did with that racket going on,’ said Sloan absently. ‘It was a good moment to choose.’

  They started to descend the staircase.

  ‘I wonder,’ mused Sloan, ‘what our man was really after.…’

  ‘Perhaps,’ offered Crosby, ‘he just wanted to stir things up a bit.’

  Sloan shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘He had stirred things up,’ observed the constable studiously. ‘All those papers on the floor and books everywhere.’

  ‘There was a bottle of ink on the windowsill,’ said the more experienced Sloan, ‘in full view of whoever came in. A real stirrer would have used that and then gone on to other things.’

  ‘A real thief would have taken something valuable,’ persisted Crosby, still smarting from Ellison’s response to the mention of money. Constables weren’t exactly rich, either.

  ‘This one will have done all right,’ returned Sloan briskly. ‘You can be sure about that, Crosby. Valuable to him. Not to you or me. Perhaps,’ he went on, following a new train of thought, ‘not even valuable to Colin Ellison.’

  Crosby started to pack his notebook away. ‘He might have just wanted to hinder him a bit. Hold him back in class and all that.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the Detective Inspector pleasantly, ‘so that’s how you got to the top of the Mixed Infants, is it, Crosby?’

  ‘Sir?’

  Sloan sighed. ‘Nothing. The Bursar did say Ellison was one of their bright young hopefuls.’ The C.I.D. man looked across at the constable, who wasn’t one of theirs, and said, ‘I suppose, to be on the safe side, you could find out if Ellison is in the running for student of the year or the Mortimer Prize or whatever and has a deadly rival.’

  ‘Will do, sir.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan led the way down the dimly lit staircase and into the quadrangle. Its refectory table was not the only link that Tarsus College had with the monastic tradition. The cloister-style covered way that ran round the inside of the quadrangle provided a good way of getting from one part of the College to another with dry feet. ‘Now, the Bursar’s office is this way, I think.…’

  ‘Sir!’ hissed Crosby suddenly. ‘Look over there – quickly. That way!’

  Sloan lifted his head. ‘Where?’

  ‘The other side. Across there. I could swear I saw ghosts.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan sighed. Far from being a young hopeful, Detective Constable Crosby was not even the brightest of the bright and it was house policy down at the Police Station to try to keep him on the less vital jobs. Then Sloan, too, caught sight of two figures dressed from head to foot in white flitting past the fluted columns of the opposite side of the quadrangle. He strained his eyes in the darkness. They were travelling at a lope that was not running but was not walking either. It was the enviable pace of healthy young men with energy still to spare.

  ‘They are ghosts,’ insisted Crosby, ‘because I can’t hear them.’

  The Hereward Reader in Logic would have had something to say about this line of reasoning. Even Detective Inspector Sloan, grammar school alumnus, didn’t go along with it.

  ‘Rubbish,’ he said briskly, adding in the best empirical tradition (and he had learned that from life), ‘What we need is a closer look.’

  At first this didn’t get them very far.

  Constable Crosby peered through one of the bays and then reported with every evidence of melancholy satisfaction, ‘Ghosts, like I said, sir. They haven’t got faces.’

  Sloan moved forward, too, the better to see towards the other colonnade. ‘Now, my lad, if you’d said that they hadn’t got heads …’

  The figures, which continued to progress at their steady pace across the side of the quadrangle opposite to the two policemen, were not, however, headless. As they came round the corner of the quadrangle Sloan saw them both quite clearly. He turned and said with some acerbity to his subordinate, ‘You couldn’t hear them, Crosby, because they’ve got rubber-soled shoes on, you couldn’t see their faces because they’re wearing fencing masks, and you thought they were ghosts because they’re dressed from head to foot in white. Satisfied?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the constable stolidly.

  ‘When you’ve been in the witness box once or twice,’ went on Sloan more tolerantly, ‘against a really nasty piece of legal wor
k, you won’t jump to conclusions quite so quickly. Now then, we’ll just check with the Ireton College porter on how soon our hero pops across to find two friends to give him an alibi and then we can say good-bye to the Bursar. Time we weren’t here anymore. We’ve all got a heavy day tomorrow if this sit-in goes ahead.…’

  The sit-in did go ahead.

  Thursday dawned a fresh clear autumn day with a promising wind from the east. The students got to the administration block at Almstone early. They filed in and, ignoring the desks and chairs, squatted on the floor instead.

  ‘Sitting-in means sitting down, I reckon,’ remarked one student to his friend, ‘don’t you?’

  ‘Fundamentally, yes.’

  ‘Ouch,’ he grumbled, ‘do you mind!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s much too early for puns like that.’ He hunched his shoulders. ‘Move up a bit there, can you? There’s a girl wants to sit next to me.’

  ‘Lucky Jim.’

  Not far away there was someone who wasn’t being quite so lucky: the Dean of Almstone, Dr Herbert Wheatley, who had answered the door-bell of his home to a contingent from the Student’s Direct Action Committee.

  No thought of anything but genuine negotiation had entered that good man’s head when he agreed to interview them. Indeed, he had been hard put to it to remember to temper his natural warmth down to neutral agreement in response to this overture. It had come earlier in the day than he had dared to hope.

  He received the six students who comprised the delegation with diplomatic punctilio and invited them to his study, though even as he did so the thought did cross his mind that six was rather a lot for the purpose. From that moment things had gone wrong. The delegation, far from coming to parley, had but one intention and that was to take him hostage.’

  ‘Until you let Malcolm Humbert come back,’ said their leader.

  ‘Never!’ spluttered the portly Dean. ‘And take your hands off me.…’

  Alas, odds of six to one seldom favour the one and Dr Wheatley’s case was no exception. Besides, one overworked, overweight and highly indignant academic was no match for six fit and active young men.