Parting Breath Read online

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘It was meant to stop argument and all it’s done is cause it.’

  ‘Yes, but these things of Ellison’s on the fountain parapet –’

  ‘It’s always the same with new legislation,’ went on Leeyes, undiverted. The mere sighting of a hobby-horse was enough to set him off.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Sloan – and meant it. It was only since he had been a working policeman that he had realised why it was that they had given King Alfred the extra title of ‘Great.’ To be a good lawgiver you had to be really great.

  ‘They always think they’re improving things, Sloan.’

  ‘Motives of the highest, sir,’ said Sloan. It didn’t do to argue with Superintendent Leeyes, and in any case the Superintendent’s thinking on criminality hadn’t really advanced since certain tablets had come down from Mount Sinai and it wasn’t likely to make any progress now.

  ‘This Colin Ellison, then,’ said Leeyes grandly, ‘you’d better give his room another going-over too.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And find out where he comes into things.’

  ‘That’s not really clear yet,’ said Sloan frankly.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘We’re not too sure about that, either,’ admitted Sloan. ‘We are looking for him.…’

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘But we haven’t found him so far. He’s not at the sit-in.’

  ‘Last seen?’

  ‘In the quadrangle,’ said Sloan.

  ‘When?’

  ‘About seven-thirty,’ said Sloan unhappily.

  ‘Ah,’ said Leeyes – just as Sloan had known he would.

  ‘You don’t,’ ventured the Detective Inspector, ‘usually stab people in the chest for stealing your notebooks.’

  ‘Sloan,’ said Leeyes irately, ‘I won’t have you coming that “it can’t be him because it’s too easy” line with me.’

  ‘I’m not, sir.’

  ‘Because,’ said the Superintendent, totally unheeding, ‘if the villain wasn’t nearly always the most obvious person in sight this new generation of constables would never even know which collar to feel.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘If Ellison’s gone to earth – and if that’s not a guilty action I don’t know what is – you’d better find him quickly.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Sloan coughed. ‘There was something else, sir.’

  He told the Superintendent about Crosby’s theory that someone else had searched Moleyns’ rooms before him.

  ‘And not for stray ears of wheat either, I take it?’ concluded Leeyes.

  ‘No, sir. The desk.’ He explained about the papers in the drawer.

  ‘And Crosby’s quite sure it wasn’t just Moleyns putting the contents back wrongly himself?’

  ‘He took the trouble to do it with gloves on if he did,’ said Sloan succinctly. There was one thing that could be said about Crosby. There was no one to touch him with a can of Aluminium No. 1 Finger-print Powder. ‘And all we know about whoever it was is that they had the regulation number of fingers and thumbs.’

  ‘Anything else there?’ enquired Leeyes.

  ‘Just the note from the Chaplain. We knew Moleyns had made an appointment to see him because Mr Pollock told us.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘That we don’t know,’ said Sloan, ‘and neither does the Chaplain. It could have been about almost anything, I suppose.…’

  ‘Saw one once myself,’ said Leeyes unexpectedly.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Before we went ashore at Walcheren in ’44. The Brigadier seemed to think we should.’ He grunted. ‘In case we had anything to declare to St Peter, I suppose. You know what soldiers are.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ And he did, too.

  ‘Told him I was a copper,’ said Leeyes reflectively, ‘and that shut him up.’

  ‘It does most people,’ said Sloan. It went with the job, did that. It wasn’t only the hours that were unsocial. Even if you said you were a copper’s wife most people fell silent – or so his own wife, Margaret, told him. He wondered how a copper’s wife’s son would get on.…’

  Leeyes was still talking: ‘… and then I said that I believed in law and order and the enemy didn’t and as far as I was concerned that was that.’

  Sloan felt a pang of sympathy for some anonymous cleric. A faith as simple as the Superintendent’s must have been refreshing but hardly textbook.

  ‘He was an Army Chaplain, of course, Sloan.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Sloan hastily.

  ‘All the same, you’d better find out what the deceased wanted to see the University Chaplain about, Sloan, hadn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Now, if Hamlet had only got things straight in his own mind right at the very beginning …’

  Sloan rang off as soon as he decently could.

  The little group of dons that had foregathered in the Combination Room at Tarsus College had now moved into the Hall and taken their places at High Table. Their numbers did not compare with those present on the previous Tuesday evening, the first night of term – there were too many absentees for that. The Master of Tarsus, Kenneth Lorimer, was with the Vice-Chancellor: the news about Henry Moleyns and the sit-in had seriously up-staged his own recitation, rehearsed in the train, of how he had got the University Grants Committee round to his way of thinking, not easily, mind you, but after a struggle.…

  Basil Willacy was at the sit-in, where he was – much to his annoyance – totally eclipsed by Professor Timothy Teed, who was there, too, and who for some reason best known to himself had adopted the rig-out favoured by his late Majesty King Edward the Seventh when out for a day’s shooting at Sandringham. John Hardiman, the Bursar, hadn’t felt like eating after seeing Henry Moleyns and – in between finding somewhere for what Detective Inspector Sloan bluntly called a murder headquarters and he himself still preferred to think of as an office – was fortifying himself with eggnog instead in his room. Hilda Linaker hadn’t appeared either.

  Professor Tomlin had led the way in. ‘It’s my turn to say Grace, gentlemen. Do you think I should – ah – say anything else?’

  There was a general shaking of heads. The dons were of one mind.

  ‘No, no.…’

  The Master’s job, don’t you think?’

  ‘Tomorrow would be better, surely.…’

  ‘We don’t really know enough to say anything do we?’

  ‘There’s no one here, anyway,’ said the junior scientist. He, at least, was aware of the preternatural hush in the Hall. ‘Well, hardly anyone.’

  This was true. The High Table was not the only one to be seriously diminished in number. Beyond it, all the way to the Buttery, stretched tables almost empty of students. There was only one that was anything like full and that was the one nearest to the Buttery.

  The dons peered round.

  ‘Quite like Zuleika Dobson, isn’t it?’ said Neil Carruthers.

  ‘You said you preferred the place without students, Tomlin,’ Bernard Watkinson reminded him. ‘Now you’ve got it that way. At a price, of course.’

  Professor McLeish adjusted his glasses. ‘There are some dining, you know.’

  ‘A handful of dissenters,’ suggested Roger Hedden, the sociologist. ‘I suppose I should be taking a professional interest in an out-group. The non-sitters-in or the sitters-out.’

  ‘They’re scientists, I hope,’ said Mautby, still visibly seething about his violated laboratory. ‘If I find my ecologists haven’t too much sense – and too much to do – for sit-ins, then I shall have something to say to them tommorrow.’

  ‘Plenty of politics in ecology,’ remarked Carruthers provocatively. ‘You’ve only got to call it “food supply” instead and everyone starts getting excited.’

  ‘If they are my ecologists over there,’ said Mautby, ‘and I think they are – at least they’re eating here properly and not camping in their rooms feeding out of tins of Phaseolus v
ulgaris.’

  ‘Of what?’ asked old McLeish. Sanskrit – but little else – was an open book to him.

  ‘The humble baked bean,’ explained Hedden kindly.

  ‘Talking of food,’ said Watkinson, ‘I can see from here that Fat Boy hasn’t gone to the sit-in.’

  ‘Talbot?’ said Carruthers. ‘You won’t catch him going anywhere that the food supply is restricted. Where’s our doughty College Librarian, though?’ He looked round the High Table. ‘He’s not here. Don’t say Pringle has defected to Malcolm Humberts’ cause.’

  Professor Tomlin gave a short laugh. ‘No need to worry about that, Neil. He’s an opportunist, is our Peter. He’s taken advantage of the Greatorex’s being closed today because of the sit-in and gone off to the Bodleian.’

  ‘Something they’ve got that we haven’t?’ enquired Watkinson slyly. ‘I thought the Greatorex was perfect.’

  ‘Only in certain fields, I understand,’ responded Tomlin gravely. He paused. ‘You know, I’m not at all sure that I shouldn’t have mentioned poor Moleyns this evening after all …’ He was accountable nightly to his wife, the Bishop’s daughter, as well as to the Master of Tarsus, and of the two she probed the more deeply.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Carruthers, the moral philosopher. ‘They know. You can’t keep something like that quiet. And saying anything won’t help.’ People expected philosophers to be comforters, but they weren’t. On the contrary, in fact. Carruthers pointed to the table next to the Buttery. ‘See how quiet they are.’

  He was quite right. The man with the shoulder-length hair sitting half-way down the table – Barry Naismyth – was uncommonly subdued. So were the others there, all of them all too well aware of the empty chair in their midst – Henry Moleyns’ chair.

  ‘Polly?’ asked Derek Doughty, unnaturally anxious. ‘Where’s Polly? She wasn’t going to go to the sit-in.’

  ‘She’s seeing the police,’ said Martin Robinson. His father was on the Bench and approved of the police. He wondered how soon he would be on the telephone, too.…

  ‘They came to the Madrigal and Glee Club,’ said Barry Naismyth, ‘and talked to Stephen Smithers.’

  ‘Stephen Smithers?’ echoed Martin Robinson.

  ‘He was the last to arrive, that’s all,’ said Naismyth hastily. No one could seriously suspect Smithers of violence.

  ‘And Colin?’ asked Doughty, looking at the other empty chair. ‘Where’s he?’

  Tommy Talbot shook his head. ‘Nobody knows. They’re looking for him everywhere.’ Unlike the Bursar, Talbot was still eating well. ‘The police want him to identify his things.’

  ‘That’s a funny business, too,’ said Naismyth thoughtfully. ‘It doesn’t make sense – someone nicking Colin’s things, and then leaving them out by the fountain.’

  ‘Someone want me?’ said Colin Ellison himself, suddenly appearing from behind them. ‘Sorry to be late again.’

  ‘Talk of the …’ began Robinson, and stopped.

  ‘Devil,’ Ellison finished pleasantly for him. ‘I wasn’t going to come down to eat tonight but I was afraid you’d all think I was at the sit-in if I didn’t.’ He pulled out a chair and sat down, looking round at the empty chairs as he did so. ‘Don’t say Henry went after all? And Polly?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ responded Naismyth sharply.

  It was soon obvious to them all – and to the police later – that Colin Ellison either really and truly hadn’t heard about Henry Moleyns or was going to insist until kingdom come that he hadn’t which at this moment amounted to the same thing.

  9 Counter-parry

  Miss Hilda Linaker’s set of rooms were pleasantly feminine in spite of her athletic appearance, and comfortably untidy. They were on the second floor of Tarsus College and in daylight must have commanded a fine view over the quadrangle. There were books everywhere. Detective Inspector Sloan was sitting in a fireside chair facing Miss Linaker. His only book was a notebook and it was open on his knee.

  ‘I saw no evil,’ she said seriously, ‘and I heard no evil.’

  ‘You must have been very near,’ he said.

  ‘Near in time and near in distance,’ she agreed in Aristotelian vein. ‘Twenty-six minutes past seven could easily have been the time we were there but, as I said before, I can’t be quite sure.’

  ‘A pity it wasn’t raining,’ he said involuntarily.

  ‘Then you’d have known how long Colin Ellison’s things had been out by the fountain, wouldn’t you.’

  At least, thought Sloan, ready comprehension was to hand in a university setting. That, though, like much else, cut two ways. It meant that whoever he was dealing with in the way of a villain was likely to be clever, too. He asked her if she had seen anyone at all.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the don, ‘there were quite a few people about. There always are round about the lodge and the quadrangle, and they weren’t all at the sit-in. It’s just that I didn’t notice anyone in particular – except Polly Mantle, of course. I know most of the girls in Tarsus by sight even if I don’t teach them.’

  ‘And Henry Moleyns?’ asked Sloan. ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Not really,’ she replied, ‘but I happened to hear him arguing in the Library yesterday.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sloan alertly. ‘Who with?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘I don’t know with whom. There were three of them, actually. You’d better ask Mr Hedden that. The men, I must say, I don’t all know by sight unless they’re my students. But Roger Hedden …’

  ‘Hedden?’

  ‘Lecturer in Sociology.’

  Sloan’s professional mask must have slipped because Miss Linaker said quite gravely, ‘I believe he subscribes to Alexander Pope’s view.’

  ‘And what would that be?’ asked Sloan, out of his depth.

  ‘That the proper study of mankind is man.’

  ‘Ah.’ There was another definition of a sociologist Sloan had seen somewhere … the police canteen, he thought. Someone had pinned it up after they’d had a visit from a post-graduate sociologist doing a thesis on something wildly improbable like ‘the influence of their working surroundings on policemen.’ How had it defined sociology? ‘The study of those who don’t need studying by those who do.’ It had stayed up on the canteen wall a long time, had that one.

  Miss Linaker was still speaking. ‘Roger Hedden must have seen to whom poor Moleyns was talking, Inspector, because he was so much nearer than I was. It was he who complained to me about the noise they were making. I knew that one of them was Moleyns only because he came over to Tarsus immediately afterwards to ask to see Professor Watkinson.’

  ‘Watkinson?’ Sloan wrote that name down under Hedden’s.

  ‘Bernard Watkinson, Modern History,’ said Hilda Linaker.

  Sloan was irresistibly reminded of Wales: Jones the Shop, Jones the Post, Jones the Railway.… Here at the University you weren’t just a name but a name and a subject. That, he supposed, was one stage better than being a name and a number – as in the Army and the Police – and prison … or a name and a disease, as in hospital, which was worse.

  Miss Linaker, who seemed to have an uncanny facility for following his mind, said, ‘We’re all specialists here. That’s our trouble. We all know too much about our own field and not enough about the next person’s.’

  ‘It has its dangers,’ agreed Sloan moderately. The Superintendent, now – he discounted all expert opinion on principle – and, so they said, did juries.…

  ‘The territorial imperative of learning, I suppose you could call it,’ said Miss Linaker, demonstrating that in universities, at least, trains of thought, once started, ran on.

  Sloan didn’t know whether to write that down or not.

  ‘That,’ amplified Miss Linaker, ‘means “Keep off, It’s Mine.”’

  Now there was a sentiment every policeman understood. His own property was very dear to every normal citizen – dearer than his own person, often enough (perhaps they could explain
that in a university) – and disregarding his rightful claims to that property, the basis of most crime. And if you didn’t learn that early on, then you weren’t going to make much of a policeman.

  ‘They say it applies to animals, too,’ observed Miss Linaker, still keeping to the point. ‘I must say it’s an unusual academic who ventures an opinion on something in someone else’s field-except mine, of course,’ she added dryly. ‘Everyone feels qualified in English Literature.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Sloan. After Hamlet, that certainly went for Superintendent Leeyes, too. ‘They tell me, miss, that you were wearing a gown.’

  ‘My working clothes, Inspector. Proclaiming to the world what I’m doing. Like “Young Harry, with his beaver on.”’

  ‘I see.’ He didn’t of course, so he looked down at his notebook and repeated, ‘“Professor Watkinson, Modern History.”’

  ‘I don’t know what it was that Moleyns wanted to see him about,’ said Miss Linaker. ‘You’ll have to ask him that.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Sloan. ‘Now – er – miss – madam – perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me where you had come from.… I mean, from where had you come.…’ Sloan hesitated. Even that didn’t sound right and he ought to try to get it right here. What was it that their English master used to bawl at them so they would remember – only Sloan hadn’t remembered – ‘A preposition is something you shouldn’t end a sentence with.’ His intention was clear, that was what mattered. The Superintendent, that master of police English, said that grammar was only difficult when you thought about it. Mind you, the only grammatical point that was ever seriously considered down at the Police Station was that perennially knotty one about why men were hanged while game was hung. He would have liked to have asked the don that.

  Instead he said, ‘I mean, before you met up with Polly Mantle.’

  ‘The Porter’s Lodge,’ she said. ‘I’d been out in the town to see someone. I don’t know if it matters who, but it was Mr Pringle, the Librarian. He was out – away, actually – so I came back.’

  It was Detective Constable Crosby who was interviewing Polly Mantle and he was enjoying every minute of it.

  ‘There isn’t a lot to tell, Officer,’ she told him.