Parting Breath Read online

  ‘If this is your idea of a delegation,’ he snapped at them as they hustled him out through his own French windows and into a waiting van, ‘it isn’t mine.’

  ‘All’s fair in love and war,’ said one of his captors, shutting the van doors behind him.

  ‘War!’ snorted the Dean, quondam Artillery officer, still struggling. ‘Let me tell you, this wouldn’t happen in war. The Geneva Convention –’

  ‘That’s Boy’s Own Paper stuff now. Things have changed, Daddy-O. Didn’t you know?’

  They bore their captive back to the administration block at Almstone College, which was by now completely full of squatting undergraduates. The sound of chanting welled up to greet the arrival of the kidnapping party, reaching a crescendo as the Dean was hurried in.

  ‘Humbert in, Wheatley out, Humbert in, WHEATLEY OUT … OUT … OUT …’

  The noise was so great that it was a physical thing, a massive wall of sound that could almost be felt.

  ‘This is outrageous,’ the Dean managed stiffly.

  Nobody took any notice at all.

  The students established him in the private office of the Head of University Administration and locked the door. As they left, one of his tormenters, an American postgraduate student from a world-famous School of Business Studies, pointed to a little door.

  ‘Dean, you’ve got the freedom of the executive washroom. What more do you want?’

  The Dean, positively plethoric in appearance now, began to tell him.… But none of the six had stayed upon the order of his going and he found himself talking to an empty room.

  Then he realised why. The chanting outside, which had never really died down, was starting to rise to new heights now. It had also taken on a different emphasis.

  ‘Humbert in, Wheatley out. HUMBERT IN, Wheatley out, HUMBERT … IN … IN … IN …’

  The object of the exercise, concluded the Dean, Malcolm Humbert himself, must have arrived.

  It was part of Dr Herbert Wheatley’s punishment that he had to listen to the speeches.

  Dimly, in what now seemed a distant and quite disassociated past, he remembered listening to – and, might he be forgiven, discounting – complaints from the Administrator about how noisy his office was: how his work was interrupted by the circumstance that he could hear everything that was going on in the main office. Mentally the Dean apologised to the man. He had been quite right. Dr Wheatley, sitting in the Administrator’s room, could now hear every word of Malcolm Humbert’s speech in the main office only too clearly.

  In its own way it was a small masterpiece.

  Humbert’s approach was deceptively mild.

  Others could make the demands, take the hostages: he projected sweet reasonableness in every sentence. As far as he was concerned, the Establishment had nothing of which to be afraid. In fact, he was grateful to the authorities for showing him the error of his ways.…

  It was perhaps fortunate that there was no one in the room with Dr Wheatley to hear his comment on this.

  The image presented to the seated students was one of a chastened man, Humbert referring almost shyly to a summer spent working hard to catch up with his reading.

  (It had, as Dr Wheatley well knew, been spent in the Falls Road, Belfast, where, whatever he had been doing, it wasn’t reading.)

  And, Humbert asked rhetorically, what was education for if it was not to teach a man to profit by his mistakes?

  At this point, Dr Wheatley very nearly had a seizure.

  Malcolm Humbert, student manqué, went on to say that he only wanted to be taken back by good old Almstone.

  Cheers and cries of ‘Good old Almstone.’

  You couldn’t, reckoned the Dean, still in possession of his teaching faculties, get more illogical than that.

  Freedom to learn, continued Humbert in the same oblique vein, wasn’t a lot to ask.

  The Dean ground his teeth.

  And Humbert thanked them. Whatever emerged at the end of the day – success or failure – he thanked them now. Solidarity was a great thing (cheers) – they stood … sorry … sat (laughter)… shoulder to shoulder … well, hip to hip, if they insisted (they insisted: more laughter)… in the cause of the right to learn.

  It was perhaps just as well Malcolm Humbert stopped speaking when he did. Sphygmomanometers will measure a middle-aged blood pressure just so far and no further.

  And what did emerge at the end of the day was different from what anyone supposed – and unluckier.

  It was a girl called Bridget Hellewell who made the discovery that really lifted the day of the sit-in into the University legend league.

  She was a tall, ungainly third-year student of Tarsus College, reading mathematics, with prominent cheekbones and an uncertain manner – half unsure, half aggressive. She was really at her best only on a political platform, the light of battle in her eyes, the clarion call to victory on her lips and her strident voice an asset.

  So, but for the uncertainty, might Boadicea have been leading her tribe of Iceni onwards. There, however, the resemblance ended, because Boadicea would almost certainly have taken in her stride the discovery made by Bridget Hellewell as she hurried back over to Tarsus from Almstone just after half past seven in the evening.

  It was of a man clutching one of the columns of the Tarsus cloister.

  As she neared him he slid down to the ground in an untidy heap.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, going closer.

  The man, who, even in the half-light of the covered cloister-walk, was patently not all right, shook his head mutely.

  She bent down beside him, seeing his chalk-white face for the first time in the dim lighting. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘Are you ill?’

  The man moved bloodless lips now in response but no sound came from them save a throaty rasping. He seemed too short of breath for speech.

  With some vague idea that it was the right thing to do, she put two fingers on his pulse. A rapid, thready vibration met her touch. It got more rapid even while she felt. She didn’t like his breathing, either. It, too, was rapid and shallow, as if a deeper breath was painful or even plain impossible.

  ‘What was that?’ she asked, putting her head nearer and starting to loosen his shirt.

  But he had only run his tongue around his lips as if thirst was a problem, too. Speech seemed quite beyond him.

  ‘A drink?’ she suggested. ‘Do you want a drink?’

  He managed a nod at that, a nod that was no more than an inclination of his head between gasps of breathlessness.

  ‘I’ll get help,’ she said, making to rise. ‘You’re ill.…’

  Something touched her knee. She looked down and saw that it was his hand … a white, flaccid appendage almost beyond movement but trying to pluck at her skirt.

  ‘You want me to stay?’ she said, showing more sensitivity than her friends would have credited her with.

  There was another movement of the head that might have been a nod.

  And some moving of the lips that was a definite attempt at speech.

  Bridget Hellewell put her head close to his mouth. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Twenty …’ he gasped softly; ‘… twenty-six minutes …’

  The sound – such as it was – stopped abruptly.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘Say that again. I didn’t quite catch …’

  But this was something that the man – whoever he was – could not do. From looking very ill indeed he changed to looking infinitely worse. And instead of speaking he turned paler still, gave a great convulsive cough and fell back so clearly dead that Bridget Hellewell started back from him.

  Then she saw her own hand: the one that she had put near his shirt.

  There was something wet and sticky on it.

  She stared at it for a long moment in the dim light before she recognised it for what it was.

  Blood.

  She stumbled to her feet and ran and ran.

  5 Feint

  ‘Almstone Admi
n., I suppose,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan unenthusiastically when the call from the University came through to the Police Station. He – and most of the rest of the modest local force there – had been on stand-by duty all day long.

  ‘No,’ snapped Superintendent Leeyes. ‘Tarsus College.’

  ‘Not the sit-in, then?’ said Sloan, surprised.

  ‘Not the sit-in,’ came back Leeyes smartly. ‘A dead man in the quadrangle.’

  Sloan looked up. This was quite different. ‘Identified?’

  ‘Oh, yes, they know who he is all right.’ Leeyes pulled the message pad nearer. ‘No trouble there.…’

  ‘That’s something, I suppose,’ murmured Sloan, wondering exactly where the trouble was.

  ‘His name is Moleyns,’ continued Leeyes. ‘Henry Moleyns.’

  ‘One of them?’

  ‘He’s a student, all right,’ grunted Leeyes. ‘No doubt about that. They say he’s a second-year undergraduate at Tarsus College reading ecology, whatever that might be when it’s at home.’

  ‘Nature study, sir.’

  ‘Really?’ Leeyes lifted his bushy eyebrows. ‘Well, it hasn’t done him any good.’

  ‘What happened to him, then?’

  The Superintendent stirred irritably. ‘I don’t know, Sloan. That’s what you’ll have to find out. All I know is that some girl or other found him dying in this quadrangle that they’ve got at Tarsus.’

  ‘I see, sir.’

  ‘And that you’d better get over there quickly.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Moreover,’ added Leeyes, compounding his difficulties, ‘you can’t have Sergeant Gelven because he’s still over at Easterbrook on that fraud job that cropped up this morning. You’ll have to make do with Crosby, I’m afraid.…’

  It was Alfred Palfreyman, Head Porter of Almstone College, who took the action destined to be of the greatest immediate help to the police.

  In the early part of the day he had maintained a watch on the sit-in without doing anything – just as all those years ago he had kept a close surveillance on Mallamby Ridge before the battle.

  Even Mr Basil Willacy’s much-heralded and nicely calculated arrival to encourage the students with a few well-chosen words had provoked the Head Porter no further than to a quick rolling of the eyeballs and a muttered reference to overgrown schoolboys. There had been a subaltern, he remembered, in the East Calleshires just like young Mr. Willacy – about as green as they came. At least, the subaltern had been green until the storming of Mallamby Ridge. Not after. Unfortunately Mr Willacy hadn’t met a battle yet, but in Alfred Palfreyman’s opinion it was exactly what he needed.

  Michael Challoner, noted the Head Porter, had come and gone several times in the course of the morning, but even Alfred Palfreyman had not guessed where the students’ deplorable old van had been until he saw Dr Wheatley being bundled out at the entrance and practically frog-marched into Almstone.

  Mrs Wheatley had taken the news calmly enough. ‘He may even be better there, Palfreyman, than fretting here.’

  ‘Yes, madam, but his lunch –’

  ‘I don’t think,’ said the Dean’s wife, ‘that missing his luncheon will do him too much harm. Or,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘his dinner.’

  ‘No, madam.’

  ‘But, Palfreyman …’

  ‘Madam?’

  ‘You’ll see that they don’t actually hurt him, won’t you?’

  ‘I don’t think they’ll do that …’

  And as far as the Head Porter could make out they hadn’t. From time to time he had circled the building and heard nothing but speeches, and one thing that being in the Army had taught him was that speeches hurt nobody. All that he had been able to see through the empty window frames was a sea of hands and a placard which read JOIN US.

  He had seen to it, though, that no one at all had gone in or out of the Almstone administration block without his knowing. And as soon as he heard about Henry Moleyns he saw to it that not only did no one enter Almstone without his knowing but physically no one left the building at all.

  ‘Those locks, Bert,’ he said to his assistant, ‘that we took off last night …’

  Bert opened a locker. ‘They’re over here.’

  ‘Get ’em back on double quick, and take the keys with you.’

  ‘Lock them in, do you mean?’

  ‘I do,’ said the old soldier. ‘Then at least we’ll know where some of them are. That boy Moleyns had blood on his chest and it didn’t get there on its own.’

  Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan (known as Christopher Dennis to his wife and parents, and ‘Seedy’ to his friends and colleagues in the force) hadn’t got as far as examining Henry Moleyn’s chest yet. Up until now he and Detective Constable Crosby had only reached the Porter’s Lodge of Tarsus College.

  The harassed Bursar, John Hardiman, met the two policemen there, anxious that he had done all the right things.

  ‘We haven’t let anyone near him,’ he said, ‘and Higgins here’ – he indicated the Tarsus College porter – ‘has a note of everyone who has been in and out this evening.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘He closed the main gate at once.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Sloan. There would, he knew, be other exits and entrances – there always were – but finding them could wait awhile.

  John Hardiman cleared his throat. ‘The Chaplain is with, er, Moleyns now seeing that, er, everything is, er, all right.’

  Sloan took this euphemism at its face value and nodded.

  ‘We haven’t touched anything, of course.’ John Hardiman might have had a file in his hand marked ‘Action to Be Taken by College Bursars on the Discovery of a Dead Body.’ Sloan knew that the Civil Service issued one on ‘Bombs and Threats of Bombs.’

  ‘Good,’ said Sloan warmly.

  He supposed that – figuratively speaking – bodies fell into the College Bursar’s lap on much the same principle that the police collected a lot of their less happy jobs. If it wasn’t anyone else’s duty, then it was theirs. Sloan had been told that in the Civil Service, by some quirk of official irony, dealing with bombs came under the Accommodations Officer.

  Since Samuel Pepys, perhaps.

  Or even Guy Fawkes.

  You never knew with traditions.

  ‘And,’ continued the Bursar, oblivious of Sloan’s train of thought, ‘I’ve sent Miss Hellewell over to Matron’s room. I know you’ll want to see her as soon as possible but she was very distressed.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Sloan, wondering what was possibly left to come after this. Not a lot, he hoped. Crosby was getting visibly restive already.

  ‘I have,’ said Hardiman predictably, ‘also informed the Master of Tarsus.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sloan, concealing his own impatience as best he could. Death took people in different ways. It had obviously taken the Bursar by surprise because he was still trying to treat it as an administrative failure. Unless this was the way Bursars saw everything.

  ‘The Master,’ continued the Bursar solemnly, ‘was dining with the Vice-Chancellor.’

  Crosby could keep silent no longer. ‘That lets him out nicely, then, doesn’t it?’ he remarked.

  John Hardiman turned courteously to the detective constable. ‘I beg your pardon.…’

  ‘If there’s been any funny business,’ amplified Crosby with a comprehensive sweep of his arm, ‘then that puts the Master in the clear, doesn’t it?’

  This, instead of clarifying matters, clearly confused the Bursar. His frown deepened. ‘I don’t quite follow.…’

  ‘Of course,’ added the detective constable conscientiously, ‘that would only be if the Vice-Chancellor is reliable.…’

  The Bursar swallowed preparatory to speech of a more definite kind; while Sloan charitably decided that they went too far at the Police Training School. Natural suspicion – even a simple open-mindedness about suspects – was one thing, but you didn’t include Caesar’s wife: not to begin
with, anyway.…

  ‘If,’ said the Detective Inspector hastily into the silence, ‘we might see the deceased as soon as possible.…’

  He managed not to murmur under his breath as well, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.…’ Bricks seemed to be dropped every time the insouciant constable was taken anywhere and the University was no exception. How Crosby got on when he was allowed out on his own nobody at the Police Station cared to think. They just tried not to let it happen too often, that was all.

  John Hardiman turned back to Sloan at once and said rather abruptly, ‘Certainly. Follow me.’

  The two policemen fell in behind him, Sloan reflecting that the fundamental and time-honoured differences between Town and Gown weren’t going to be anything compared with those between Gown and … Gown and … Gown and Cape … no, that wasn’t right.… Gown and … Gown and Truncheon.

  ‘It’s not far,’ the Bursar was saying. ‘Through here and into the main quadrangle and down this side on the left and then right. He’s half-way down on that side.’

  So he was.

  Henry Moleyns was lying exactly where the girl Bridget Hellewell had left him – in an ungainly heap on the cold stone of the cloister floor, near the base of the pillar to which he had clung in his last moments. As they approached him a tall figure standing by in the shadows moved forward to greet them.

  ‘This is Mr Pollock, the Chaplain,’ said John Hardiman in suitably muted tones. ‘We tried to get our doctor, too, but he was out.’

  ‘They always are,’ said Sloan, nodding a greeting. His own doctor hadn’t better be, though, not if – when – Margaret, his wife, needed him.…

  He brought his mind back to where he was and peered forward, suppressing an irreverent desire to quote some cynic of the past whose memorabile dictum had been ‘After death, the doctor.’ Instead he pulled out a really powerful torch and shone it on the body on the floor. The cold light served only to emphasise the waxen appearance of the dead face. He shifted the beam about until he had had a good look at the immediate scene.