Parting Breath Read online

  ‘More like ten minutes,’ said someone else.

  ‘Which wouldn’t have suited the Duke of Wellington,’ said one of the singers.

  Sloan turned enquiringly towards the last speaker.

  ‘Great on punctuality was the Duke,’ the young man said, adding by way of explanation, ‘I’m reading History.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sloan. ‘And what would the rest of you be doing?’

  Of the eight it emerged that two were reading English, only one Music, one was going to be a linguist (the fat girl), two were reading Theology (more musical clergymen, thought Sloan) and one was reading Politics.

  ‘Politics?’ echoed Sloan. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Barry Naismyth.’

  Sloan was quite relieved that the voice was deep. Sexing students these days could be as highly skilled as sexing chickens except that you didn’t get paid for it. Naismyth’s hair was as long as any girl’s and – which was worse – curly, and his clothes totally and quite deliberately epicene.

  ‘And if you want to know why he isn’t at the sit-in,’ began the historian smugly.

  ‘Yes?’ said Sloan, intrigued.

  ‘It’s because he’s just read the life history of Napoleon Bonaparte.’

  Naismyth started to protest.

  ‘Has he?’ said Sloan. He considered the historian. ‘And you’re going to tell me what that’s got to do with his missing the sit-in, aren’t you?’

  The speaker grinned. ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with it,’ interposed Barry Naismyth hastily. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Just as Napoleon was first beginning in politics after he left Corsica something a bit troublesome cropped up –’

  ‘The French Revolution,’ said Sloan. There had been a lecturer at the Police College who dated all disorder from that: Cromwell’s English Republic had been an orderly one.

  ‘Yes, well’ – the student was clearly surprised – ‘When Napoleon could see that everyone was going to get egg on their faces, what did he do?’

  ‘You tell me,’ suggested Sloan, ‘then I’ll know, won’t I?’

  ‘Galloped off in the opposite direction, that’s what. Went off on a long campaign somewhere else, Italy, I think.’

  ‘I’ll let you into a little secret,’ said Sloan. ‘It’s been done before.’

  ‘Not news?’ said the history student sadly.

  ‘Not news,’ said Sloan. ‘A lot of politicians duck when they see trouble coming. They get diplomatic illnesses.’ His manner sobered suddenly. ‘And then they leave the dirty work to the police.’ He looked round the room. ‘And the rest of you? Why weren’t you at the sit-in? Have you all got Napoleon complexes or what?’

  ‘It was our Club night,’ said the girl in the smock earnestly. ‘That’s why we didn’t go.’

  ‘We’re rehearsing for a concert, too,’ said one of the incipient clergymen.

  ‘If wet, in village hall,’ muttered Crosby.

  Sloan pulled himself together. ‘Now, then, Mr Smithers, can you spare us a moment.…’

  The chief impediment to interviewing Stephen Smithers was his sneeze.

  ‘Sorry,’ he sniffed. ‘Hay-fever.’

  ‘You were late at the meeting,’ observed Sloan.

  ‘Had to get some more tissues,’ he explained. ‘Run out. I buy them by the hundred now. Ah … ah … ah … atishoo!’

  ‘Sneeze on Monday, sneeze for danger,’ said Detective Constable Crosby.

  ‘When should you have been there?’ asked Sloan valiantly, where a lesser man would have turned upon his assistant.

  ‘Seven-thirty but … atishoo … sorry … I wasn’t.’

  ‘So we hear.’

  ‘They had to start with a madrigal,’ said Smithers. ‘No glee without me.’

  ‘No glee.’ Crosby wrote that down. Sloan wondered what the Superintendent would make of it.

  Smithers sneezed again.

  ‘Sneeze on Tuesday, sneeze for sorrow,’ said Crosby.

  ‘How late were you?’ asked Sloan rather sharply.

  ‘They’d got to the end of John Wilbye’s “Cloris,”’ said Smithers helpfully, ‘so I expect we can work it out if it’s important.’ He looked alertly from one policeman to the other. ‘It is important, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Sloan, ‘it is important.’

  ‘Couldn’t stop sneezing, you see.’ He was fumbling for a tissue even as he spoke. ‘It’s even worse first thing in the morning. They say,’ he managed between sneezes, ‘that all this hay-fever’s come from a new strain of Canadian wheat that they’ve brought into England these last few years but I don’t know, I’m sure. All I know is –’

  ‘This evening,’ said Sloan implacably.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you see anyone as you came along?’

  ‘Plenty of people. Had you anyone in mind, Inspector?’

  ‘Henry Moleyns.’

  Smithers shook his head. ‘Not him. At least, not that I remember.’

  ‘Did you see anyone at all you knew?’

  Smithers screwed his face up as for another sneeze but this time it signified the effort of recollection. ‘Colin Ellison – I saw him on the stairs. Someone from the Fencing Club and Miss Linaker. She was in a hurry like me. There were people about, you know. There always are.’

  ‘Did you cross the quad or go round?’

  ‘Across,’ said Smithers promptly. ‘Saves time. I knew I was late.’

  ‘Did you see anything unusual by the fountain?’

  ‘Nothing,’ sneezed Smithers. ‘Should I have done?’

  ‘Not,’ said Sloan precisely, ‘if there wasn’t anything there unusual to see at the time.’

  Over in the Combination Room at Tarsus College, old Professor McLeish was taking a detached – not to say totally academic – view of the news of the death of Henry Moleyns.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that the last time that we had an undergraduate of this University actually killed on the premises, so to say, was in 1797 – or was it 1798 – yes, perhaps it was in 1798.…’

  One of the young scientists present who still believed in accuracy above all for its own sake (and even more naïvely believed that other people felt the same) waited on principle for him to decide.

  Nobody else did.

  ‘What happened then?’ enquired Professor Tomlin curiously.

  ‘A duel.’

  ‘Ah.’ Professor Tomlin gave a wolfish smile. ‘Pistols for two, breakfast for one.’

  ‘If my memory serves me correctly,’ said old McLeish complacently, ‘it was over a lady.’ In fact his memory was excellent and few people knew enough to contradict him anyway.

  ‘Boys will be boys,’ muttered Roger Hedden sotto voce.

  ‘Or it might have been a matter of honour between gentlemen,’ said the old man.

  Those in the Combination Room treated this as the unlikeliest explanation at all.

  ‘That’s out these days,’ said someone quickly.

  ‘And how!’ added the College’s classicist, who was for some reason curiously addicted to modern slang – taking his revenge on the live tongue for the invulnerability of the dead ones, his colleagues thought. ‘There isn’t much of that about these days.’

  ‘And as for the lady’s honour …’ began Bernard Watkinson, the misogynist.

  ‘Nobody seems to think that’s worth fighting for anymore either,’ agreed Tomlin mournfully. He was much-married to the daughter of a Bishop who found it impossible to keep abreast of changing standards and lamented the fact ad nauseam.

  ‘I believe that there was some suggestion,’ rumbled on old McLeish, ‘that our Jacob Greatorex had – er – an insurable interest in the outcome of the duel.’

  ‘Very probably.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think anyone is going to gain from young Moleyns’ dying,’ said someone. ‘He’s an orphan. Brought up by a maiden aunt, I believe.’

  ‘Poor Moleyns,’ said Hedden ambiguous
ly. ‘I wonder what really happened?’

  This, as is usually the way with the first instalment of bad news, nobody seemed to know. And – as again is the way with bad news – they were about to go over the same ground all over again when they were joined by an irate Professor Simon Mautby. He erupted into the Combination Room in a fine state of outrage.

  ‘Just wait,’ he stormed. ‘Just wait until I get my hands on them. That’s all. Just wait – then I’ll – I’ll –’

  ‘Hands on whom?’ enquired Tomlin.

  ‘Whoever’s been in my lab without my permission,’ snapped Mautby. ‘That’s who. And when I do I’ll –’

  ‘And what did they do in there?’ asked Tomlin with the maddening calm that men reserve for other people’s difficulties.

  ‘Do!’ exploded Mautby. ‘They opened one of the animal cages there, that’s what they did. And when I catch them I’ll –’

  It wasn’t that words showed any sign of failing the Professor of Ecology. It was just that he was interrupted before he could get on to the fine detailing of the hanging, drawing and quartering that was obviously in store for whoever had illicitly entered his precious laboratory.

  ‘What happened as a consequence of this cage being opened?’ enquired the junior scientist earnestly. After all, Penicillium had been discovered by much the same sort of accident.

  ‘Some white mice got out,’ said Mautby tightly.

  Nobody in the Combination Room so much as tittered.

  ‘And?’ enquired Watkinson gravely.

  ‘And one of them used one of my heated propagating trays for the accouchement of her family.…’

  8 Prises de Fer

  Detective Constable Crosby’s initial examination and subsequent sealing up of Henry Moleyns’ room in Tarsus College was following the orthodox pattern he had been taught at his Police Training College. As far as he was concerned he was not looking for anything in particular and, if asked, would have replied that he was carrying out a routine procedure.

  He did, however, find something.

  But not immediately.

  The room was a pigeon pair with that occupied by Colin Ellison, which he had seen the evening before – and no doubt with a hundred others, too. Crosby’s search of it was not done on ‘Hunt the Thimble’ lines. It was, on the contrary, done very methodically indeed. Constable Crosby would have found Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter first time round.

  He began with the bed. He had once found a shot-gun under a mattress – only just before its owner reached it, too – and now he always looked there first. There was nothing under Henry Moleyns’ mattress, nor, as it happened, under the bed either. The College beds were high, narrow and well-castored for ease of making. In spite of all these things Henry Moleyns’ bed had been no more than cursorily pulled together to give the semblance of tidiness. A complete search of it yielded nothing whatsoever.

  Crosby then turned his attention to the built-in cupboard that served the office of a wardrobe. It was behind the hanging dresses here that ladies usually kept that which they did not want found.

  Bottles, as a rule.

  All that Henry Moleyns had hanging up in his wardrobe were a couple of jackets and some two or three pairs of trousers. Behind the door was a style of windcheater called a combat jacket by young men who had never known the meaning of the word. The University authorities in their wisdom did not provide dressing tables for their Malvolios. Instead there was a tallboy with a mirror beside it on the wall.

  Crosby went through the drawers of this one by one. He performed the operation police-fashion by taking them out in turn, placing each one on the bed and examining both the contents and the drawer itself. The pinning of stolen property to the outside back of a drawer had been known to happen in criminal circles. It had not happened here. In fact the drawers contained nothing more than a student might have been reasonably expected to need in the way of clothes for the autumn term.

  Beside the tallboy was a shoe-rack. Crosby stopped to look at Moleyns’ shoes. Shoes told you such a lot about a man – how he walked, rich or poor, particular or careless and, as often as not, where he’d been. Poor but particular, decided Crosby a moment later. And the student had walked quite firmly on the centre of the sole without scuffing heel or toe. As to where he’d been, there was nothing to show that without using a microscope. Deciding to leave any hunting of the slipper to others, he turned his attention to Moleyns’ desk.

  Here again there was a marked likeness to Colin Ellison’s possessions. Crosby mentally ticked off a list of items that it seemed no ecology student should be without – lecture notebooks, textbooks, microscope slides, course work … as far as he could tell, in Henry Moleyns’ case they were all present and correct, but other and more expert eyes would also have to check on that.

  The desk itself was not of the tidiest. Lecture schedules jostled with Club notices – Moleyns would seem to have been a member of the University Fencing Club and the Tarsus Debating Society – while the University Calendar itself and the Collegiate Church Kalendar (in this setting Constable Crosby unhesitatingly laid the disparity in spelling at the printer’s door) took pride of place on the much-pinned wall behind the desk. Of a more personal nature there was very little, and nothing of moment on the desk itself. Then he pulled open the first of the three drawers – and became very thoughtful indeed.…

  Later he moved over to the bookcase, which was also a standard fitment. There were more textbooks here, and plenty of paperbacks – which, though they could be said to be loosely about the study of nature, were also about a decidedly extra-curricular aspect of it. Whoever told them that Henry Moleyns hadn’t got a steady girl friend might well have been right. It did not mean that his mind was elsewhere.

  The wastepaper basket yielded a short, screwed-up note from the Reverend C. A. T. Pollock, University Chaplain, saying that he would be happy to see Henry Moleyns in his office at 7.30 P.M. on Thursday evening as requested. Crosby retrieved this and laid it carefully on one side.

  He then returned to the centre of the room and stood there as he had done when he first came in, trying to recapture a feeling that he had had when he had entered the room earlier.

  He did his best to explain this to Inspector Sloan afterwards. ‘A funny feeling, sir.’

  ‘Yes?’ Funny feelings were not encouraged at Berebury Police Station.

  ‘I didn’t know what it was at first.’

  ‘And what was it?’ enquired Sloan with what patience he could muster. It had been a long day and it wasn’t over by any means.

  That someone else had been and done a search ahead of me.’

  Sloan looked up alertly. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘This feeling, sir.…’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘The top drawer of the desk.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Everything in it was the wrong way round.’

  ‘Upside down?’

  ‘Back to front.’

  ‘Ah.…’ Sloan let out a sigh. The boy was learning something after all.

  ‘You wouldn’t sit at a desk and put everything in it facing the wrong way, would you, sir?’

  ‘No,’ agreed Sloan thoughtfully, ‘you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Bit if you’d emptied the drawer quickly, looking for something …’

  ‘And found it,’ said Sloan pessimistically. It was obviously going to be this sort of a case.

  ‘And then been disturbed and had to put everything back quickly …’

  ‘You’d have been standing, of course,’ said Sloan, tacitly accepting the argument, ‘working from above.’

  ‘In a hurry, too, sir.’

  ‘So if you heard someone coming you’d just stuff everything back from where you stood.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Sloan looked up. ‘What wasn’t there?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Crosby, not unreasonably.

  ‘We shall need to know.’

 
‘Yes, sir,’

  ‘Well done, anyway,’ said Sloan absently. ‘Find anything else?’

  Crosby coughed. ‘Yes, sir, there was something else.’

  ‘Tell me,’ commanded Sloan.

  The detective constable produced a small plastic bag, duly sealed and labelled. Lying in the bottom of it was a solitary seed of wheat. ‘I just happened to notice it, sir,’ he said modestly.

  ‘Where?’ barked Sloan impatiently.

  ‘In the bottom of his wardrobe.’

  ‘Trouser turn-ups, I’ll be bound,’ breathed Sloan, beaming. ‘The greatest gift to forensic science after finger-nails.… Here, pass me that telephone.’

  ‘What the devil,’ demanded Superintendent Leeyes a moment or so later, ‘was Henry Moleyns doing stealing stuff from Ellison’s room?’

  ‘We don’t know yet if both ears of wheat are the same, sir,’ Sloan said cautiously. ‘They only look alike to me.’

  The Superintendent dismissed this as mere quibbling.

  ‘Moreover,’ continued Sloan energetically, ‘we don’t know if Henry Moleyns was the one who had stolen Ellison’s things. After all, someone else might have got into both rooms.’

  ‘And crouched at the back of the wardrobe?’ enquired Leeyes acidly. ‘Be your age, Sloan.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Sloan sighed. He certainly felt it today. He’d need more vigour than this if he was going to show his son how to keep his cricket bat straight in ten years’ time.

  ‘That wheat came from Henry Moleyns’ clothes all right,’ decided the Superintendent. ‘You’d better do another search of his rooms.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And his home, wherever that may be.’

  ‘It was in Luston, sir.’ A shocked aunt was even now on her way over to Berebury from there to see Sloan. Someone was going to have to show her Henry Moleyns’ body. It sounded such a simple procedure as ordained in Jervis on Coroners.…

  ‘And this man who had his things stolen yesterday.…’

  ‘Colin Ellison,’ said Sloan, ‘and “removed” might be a better word than “stolen”, seeing as we think they’ve all turned up.’

  ‘Don’t come the Theft Act with me, Sloan,’ rumbled Leeyes, changing tack suddenly. ‘It’s given me quite enough trouble as it is.’