Parting Breath Page 7

  ‘You can tell a lot from the shape of the drop,’ Sloan interrupted him austerely. He’d heard Dyson on his likes and dislikes before and they weren’t exactly edifying.

  A quick brightness illumined the covered quadrangle as Dyson photographed first the drops of blood and then the whole scene.

  ‘I don’t often do this to music,’ he remarked, cocking his head slightly to one side.

  ‘Madrigals,’ said Sloan briefly.

  ‘Whatever they are when they’re at home,’ said Crosby, moving in from the shadows where he had been keeping guard.

  ‘“This sweet and merry month of May,”’ remarked Dyson, listening hard.

  ‘We’ve left them at it,’ said Sloan. ‘At least we know where that lot are.’

  ‘We’ll catch them when they come out,’ said Crosby. ‘The last man in may have seen something.’

  Sloan wasn’t so sanguine.

  In his experience the young were not truly observant. Not after adolescence began, anyway. Until then they saw a lot in a sharp-eyed but innocent way. Then their worlds narrowed to themselves and it was several years later before they discovered the great human outside again. After that they observed it in a way that was no longer quite so innocent but more detached.

  ‘“When nature wantons in her prime,”’ warbled Dyson alertly.

  ‘“And birds do sing, and beasts do play,”’ added Crosby in tune, entering into the spirit of the thing.

  Then Williams, Dyson’s assistant, turned in the direction of the sound and began quoting too. ‘“For the pleasures of the –”’

  ‘That may be a chorus for male voices,’ Sloan said gruffly. ‘This isn’t. Get on with it.’

  Someone else began his work by appealing against the light in the cloister, too.

  That someone was Dr Dabbe, Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury and District General Hospital, and Police Surgeon to those of the force’s clientele that were already dead. He stood by the body for a minute or two giving it his whole attention. His assistant, a perennially taciturn man called Burns, had rigged up another light and was now unpacking the pathologist’s bag.

  ‘Well, well, Sloan,’ began Dr Dabbe easily, ‘and what have we got here?’

  ‘Henry Moleyns, student,’ said Sloan literally. Actually that was also about as far as he was prepared to go at the moment: that the young man was Henry Moleyns and a student.

  ‘While what I have is one young man not long dead – within the last hour, I should say.’ Dr Dabbe cocked an enquiring eye at the policeman. ‘Is time going to be of the essence?’

  ‘I expect so,’ answered Sloan gloomily. ‘It usually is.’

  The pathologist’s assistant had already – unbidden – begun to take the temperature of the atmosphere.

  ‘Cause of death almost certainly an incised wound to the left of the sternum,’ said the pathologist, peering forward but not touching anything.

  ‘Right,’ whispered Crosby under his breath. He was leaning forward because he was taking notes.

  ‘Left, Constable,’ said Dr Dabbe, whose hearing was excellent.

  ‘Left,’ pronounced Sloan flatly. ‘The deceased’s left.’ Someone, someday, was going to have to sort Constable Crosby out.…

  ‘Stage left,’ said the pathologist, adding conversationally, ‘The Devil always enters stage left. Did you know that, Sloan?’

  ‘No,’ said Sloan shortly. Sorting Crosby out wouldn’t be easy.

  ‘One funny thing, though.’ Dr Dabbe had stopped and was examining Henry Moleyns’ hands.

  ‘Yes, Doctor?’

  ‘No cuts or scratches anywhere on his fingers.…’

  ‘We’d noticed that,’ said Sloan generously. As far as he knew, Constable Crosby hadn’t noticed anything.

  ‘Very unusual with a stabbing.’

  ‘Most people would put their hands up,’ agreed Sloan.

  ‘I would,’ said Crosby immediately.

  ‘Pure instinct, of course,’ said Dabbe. ‘Automatic reaction. It doesn’t save them.’

  ‘So …’ began Sloan.

  ‘So he didn’t see it coming?’ offered Constable Crosby from the side-lines.

  ‘Or didn’t take it seriously,’ said Dr Dabbe. ‘I expect a fair bit of horse-play goes on in a place like this.’

  ‘So …’ repeated Sloan, thankful at least for Burns’s habitual silence: back-chat à trois was quite bad enough. ‘So …’

  ‘Or didn’t recognise the weapon for what it was,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘So it was not an accident, anyway,’ persisted Inspector Sloan. That was always something that had to be got out of the way.

  ‘Very unlikely.’ Dabbe grinned enthusiastically. ‘Of course, Sloan, you do get some really esoteric accidents these days. There was a case the other day –’

  ‘And not suicide?’ went on Sloan firmly. That was something else that had to be got out of the way. Officially. And before the press got too excited: and before the pathologist got carried away.

  ‘Not unless he fell on his sword,’ said Dr Dabbe. ‘Not much of that about these days.’

  ‘Hara-kiri,’ said Crosby. ‘I’ve read about that. That’s what the Japanese do.’

  ‘Only when they’ve failed at something,’ said Sloan dryly.

  ‘There’s no sword about that I can see,’ said Crosby, peering about.

  ‘No sword immediately visible,’ the pathologist corrected him amiably. ‘I’ll be able to tell you more about exactly what did it presently, but you’ll have to find it, Sloan – that’s your job. Unless it’s still in the body, of course, and then it’s mine.’

  ‘I don’t care who wants to do what, Mr Bennett,’ said Alfred Palfreyman magisterially. ‘There you are and there you stay.’

  This time the emissaries from the Almstone administration building were definitely a delegation and not a raiding party. Hugh Bennett and another man had got out of one of the windows before the Head Porter’s assistant, Bert, could get all the window frames back in again. They had promptly come round to the Porter’s Lodge to ask for the keys.

  ‘Ho, no,’ continued Palfreyman. ‘We’re having none of that. The only person that comes out of that building until I say so is the Dean. And the sooner he comes out, Mr Bennett, the better, if you take my meaning.’

  Odds of two to one are in theory considered better than evens – but Hugh Bennett still didn’t sound confident when he said, ‘Dr Wheatley doesn’t come out of there until he lets Malcolm Humbert come back to Almstone College.’

  Palfreyman, who considered himself the equivalent of two students any day of the week and therefore didn’t even feel outnumbered, said, ‘The Dean comes out. Nobody else does.’

  ‘Not until he lets Humbert back,’ said Hugh Bennett immediately, though some of the conviction had gone from his voice.

  But Bennett had underestimated his opponent. Neither stalemate nor an arguing match had crossed the Head Porter’s mind.

  ‘Nobody else,’ Palfreyman repeated, ‘unless you’ve got Mr Ellison of Tarsus with you in there. He can come out. The police are looking for him.’

  7 Compound Attacks

  ‘“Twenty-six minutes”?’ echoed Superintendent Leeyes down the telephone line. ‘Is that all he said?’

  ‘So the girl tells me, sir.’ In duty bound to keep in touch with Police Headquarters, nevertheless Sloan wasn’t finding the process helpful.

  ‘And was it?’

  ‘Was it what, sir?’

  ‘Twenty-six minutes past seven,’ snapped Leeyes, whose approach to most things was literal. ‘Didn’t you ask the girl?’

  ‘She thought she found him just before the half hour, sir.’

  ‘So the time matters,’ concluded Leeyes speedily, ‘doesn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Sloan. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Come, come, Sloan,’ said the Superintendent testily, ‘men don’t waste their dying breaths on saying things that don’t matter, do they?’

&nb
sp; Sloan himself drew breath. King Charles the Second’s ‘Let not poor Nelly starve’ was the first quotation that came into his mind. Sergeant Gelven, at least, would have said that that was important. He was the fattest man on the station.

  ‘Do they?’ repeated Leeyes.

  Sloan searched his mind. There had been something he’d learnt at school … what was it now … and then it came to him: ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius.’

  ‘What?’ enquired Leeyes.

  He must have said it aloud.

  ‘Socrates,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan uncertainly, ‘I think.’ A grubby schoolboy when he’d first heard that, he’d never thought that he would ever call it to mind again. ‘Last words.’

  ‘Well, they’re important, aren’t they?’ said Leeyes largely. ‘Out of debt, out of danger.’

  Sloan hadn’t thought of that aspect of the ancient philosopher’s remark.

  ‘He wouldn’t have wanted to die owing,’ said the Superintendent. ‘Not him.’

  ‘No, sir,’ agreed Sloan hastily, blessing some long-forgotten schoolmaster. Perhaps now – who knows – he would find a use for Pythagoras’ Theorem. The Geometry teacher had always insisted that everyone ought to be able to prove Pythagoras. Sloan could – or rather, had once – but hadn’t found the fact helpful in life so far.

  ‘Twenty-six minutes,’ mused the Superintendent. ‘Funny time.’

  ‘We think he was on his way to an appointment with the Chaplain,’ offered Sloan, ‘at seven-thirty.’

  ‘Was he now?’ said Leeyes quickly. ‘What for?’

  ‘We don’t know. He made an appointment with the Chaplain without saying what it was about.’

  ‘We can’t read too much into it, then, can we?’ said the Superintendent.

  That, thought Sloan to himself, was rather good coming from a man who had decided that William Shakespeare was an atheist solely on the strength of Hamlet’s final ‘The rest is silence.’

  ‘It might matter, sir,’ said the Detective Inspector. ‘Too soon to say.’

  ‘Anything else come to light?’

  ‘Henry Moleyns wouldn’t go to the sit-in,’ said Sloan slowly. ‘Apparently he had quite an argument about it in Hall on Tuesday evening with a man called Challoner.’

  ‘He’s one of the trouble-makers, isn’t he?’ The Superintendent had the true policeman’s memory for the bad lot.

  ‘Number two after Humbert, I should say.’

  ‘Find out about that, then, Sloan.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Dr Dabbe says that the weapon –’

  ‘Tut, tut,’ said Leeyes reprovingly, ‘don’t you know that “weapon” is an emotive word?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ And he knew all about the emotions the use of the Weapons aroused, too, but he did not say so.

  ‘Can’t have you using that,’ said Leeyes. ‘As good as a red rag to some of our lady magistrates.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Sloan impassively. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Weapon implies attack …’ The Superintendent’s voice became an elephantine parody of someone in Court.

  ‘He was attacked,’ Sloan began again.

  ‘I know he was. You know he was. He knows he was.’ Leeyes came to the end of his declension and said smartly, ‘But that doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to get away with saying so in court just like that.’

  Unmoved, Sloan started yet again. ‘Dr Dabbe has described the nature of the instrument which caused the penetrating wound, sir.’

  What you thought and what you said in court were horses of such different colours – and as far as the police were concerned always would be – that Sloan saw no irony where none was intended.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Leeyes. ‘Now, what about this instrument?’

  ‘Sharp, sir.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘So far. The doctor’s going to do a post mortem straight away.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I shall want some help, sir, please. A woman police officer, for the night.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Leeyes grunted. ‘What about the Dean of Almstone?’

  ‘Still prisoner.’

  ‘Poor Wheatley,’ said Kenneth Lorimer. ‘He won’t be very happy, will he?’

  The Dean of Almstone, Dr Herbert Wheatley, might still have been safely in baulk in his own administrative block, but the Master of Tarsus, Professor Kenneth Lorimer, was still very much in play. This might have been due to chance. He had been in London all day doing battle at a University Grants Committee meeting and had thus not been available for kidnapping.

  The expression ‘Dining with the Vice-Chancellor’ which had been so readily bandied about by John Hardiman, the Bursar, earlier in the evening, had been merely a cover story for a prolonged conference of such heads of the six Colleges as were still at liberty. They were gathered in his sitting-room.

  ‘Well, gentlemen,’ said the Vice-Chancellor as the coffee cups circulated, ‘are we agreed to continue our policy of masterly inactivity?’

  The others gravely acknowledged the pun and nodded their assent. The various alternatives to doing nothing had in any case all been thoroughly canvassed over the past hour: and been dismissed in turn as mostly wishful thinking.

  ‘Palfreyman tells me,’ went on the Vice-Chancellor, ‘that they haven’t injured Wheatley or anything.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said the Dean of Ireton briskly. The term before, he himself had been severely bruised about the left eye while attempting to introduce a distinguished but unpopular speaker who had come to address a meeting at Ireton College. The distinguished speaker had not only never had a hearing (‘Democracy in Danger’ had been his subject) but had been covered in flour for his pains.

  ‘And Wheatley hasn’t made any concessions, I hope,’ said Lorimer of Tarsus hawkishly. Professor Lorimer had made none at all at the University Grants Committee meeting and was still feeling militant.

  ‘None,’ declared the Vice-Chancellor. ‘Malcolm Humbert doesn’t come back.’

  ‘Can’t we get rid of Challoner too?’

  ‘Not legally,’ answered the Vice-Chancellor with precision.

  ‘Timothy Teed’s in there with them, I take it?’ said the Dean of Ireton. ‘Making the most of it all for his next programme.…’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘What’s he wearing?’

  ‘A deer-stalker.’

  ‘He would.’

  ‘The cameras will pick that out all right.’

  ‘Bound to.’

  ‘He never misses a trick, does he?’

  It was at this point that the news of the stabbing of a student reached them; and the Vice-Chancellor made a remark also destined to go down in the annals of the University of Calleshire:

  ‘Really,’ he said, ‘this is going too far.’

  ‘They haven’t stopped singing, sir,’ announced Detective Constable Crosby as Sloan got back to the quadrangle after telephoning the Superintendent.

  ‘Good. At least we know where they’ve been all evening.’

  ‘“A pretty bonny lass was walking,”’ chorused the University Madrigal and Glee Club. ‘“In the midst of May before the sun ’gan rise.”’

  ‘No one’s come out,’ went on Crosby, ‘and everything else is quiet.’

  ‘Good,’ said Sloan again, casting his eye along the paved way. All that now remained of the earlier drama was some chalk lines on the stones. The late Henry Moleyns had been cocooned in polythene and removed to Dr Dabbe’s mortuary while – the thickness of a wall away from sudden death – the singing had gone on.

  ‘I don’t know how they keep it up, I’m sure,’ said Crosby as the next two lines of the madrigal drifted over the quiet quadrangle.

  ‘Let’s find out,’ suggested Sloan.

  ‘Listen to them, sir.’

  ‘“I took her by the hand and fell to ta
lking,”’ sang the undergraduates, ‘“Of this and that, as best I could devise.”’

  ‘They’ve had half a dozen goes at this one already,’ said the constable as the final strains of the madrigal came over the still evening air. ‘I know it by heart now.’

  ‘“Heart” seems to be the operative word with madgrigals,’ observed Sloan, moving towards the door leading to the singers.

  ‘“I swore I would, yet still she said I should not,”’ trilled the madrigalists. ‘“Do what I would, and yet for all I could not.”’

  ‘They get into a muddle with that part sometimes,’ said Crosby.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Sloan vigorously, ‘but all the same I still think I prefer it to “Humbert in, Wheatley out.” Come on.…’

  Inside the Madrigal and Glee Club meeting were not only singers but musicians. A large girl in a voluminous smock was strumming a strange instrument as they entered, while a weedy youth was blowing away at one nearly as tall as himself. Four singers were standing in the middle of the room, their mouths wide open, for all the world, thought Sloan, like four little birds in a nest waiting for worms.

  ‘There’s some funny folk about even without looking in the mirror,’ muttered Crosby into Sloan’s right ear.

  ‘Police,’ said Sloan loudly.

  This group of undergraduates was not of the stuff of which militant demonstrators are made.

  ‘Were you looking for someone?’ asked their leader politely.

  ‘The last man in here tonight,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Stephen,’ they said with one accord, pointing.

  ‘Me,’ said a bespectacled boy with tow-coloured hair, who was sitting among the musicians with a very tiny instrument in his hand. It bore a close resemblance to the tambourine which Sloan remembered from his own first year at infant school and to the best of his recollection had not seen since.

  ‘Stephen?’

  ‘Stephen Smithers,’ he said, laying down his instrument. ‘I was last, I know, because I was late.’

  ‘At least three minutes,’ said the leader.

  ‘Nearer five,’ said the large girl in the smock censoriously. It was a decidedly unbecoming garment on one so large. ‘We couldn’t start with an air.’