Crucible (3 page)

I sought to drive these thoughts from my mind as I crossed from the Guest Row over the Broadgate to the college. The buildings that rose above me, behind the houses and booths that fronted the street, were almost entirely in darkness; one or two lights flickered behind narrow windows on the turnpike stairs, but none from the students’ chambers. Even the gatehouse was in darkness and the porter away from his post. This was unusual, and increased my concern for the boys who had been left in Matthew Jack’s care. I made my way down a side alley that would bring me out by the wall of the college garden. I knew that the gate leading from the garden to the library courtyard was
not beyond the ingenuity of a man of my height and years to scale.

I was surprised to find the gate to the library close ajar and creaking lightly on its hinges. I could not think who amongst the students could have been so careless on this of all nights, when Matthew Jack, and evidently the porter also, would be on the prowl along the corridors and stairways. A light from above caught my eye, a tiny flicker through a gap in the library shutters; I remembered having noticed it as I’d passed earlier with William. I had been all for going up to tell Robert to go home for the night, but William had persuaded me that I was in greater need of getting home myself, and so we had left him. I was surprised, all the same, to see that he was still there – he must have fallen asleep. It would not have been the first time, and yet I knew he had to read in the kirk early the next morning, and that it would not do for him to appear before the congregation unwashed and in his workday clothes. I decided to go and rouse him before I went to look for Dr Dun or to check what Matthew Jack had done to the boys.

The night-time scents of the garden still hung in the air, the honeysuckle and the climbing roses that tumbled over the walls and trellises contending with one another for mastery of the falling dusk, but as I rounded the corner in to the library courtyard another smell, sickly, warm and cloying, rose above all the other usual odours of the place: the smell not of the college close but of the flesher’s yard.

I almost stumbled on it in the half-light: the shape
sprawled across the cobbles a few feet from the library steps, its dead eyes looking up at me in mute appeal, was Robert Sim. Flies were already busy about the blood congealed at his throat.

FOUR
The Library

Dr Dun knelt on the ground, carefully making such examination as he could beneath the lanterns held by the college porter and one of the baillie’s men. The principal lifted Robert’s head gently and I saw that the right side of the librarian’s face, where it had lain on the ground, was caked in dirt and blood. Dr Dun had seen such sights often enough before, but it was a minute before he found his voice.

‘There can be no doubt, Alexander. He has been murdered. You see the wound at his throat?’

I nodded, not wanting to look again at the bloodied mess that had once been my friend. Behind me, I could hear the porter retch.

‘And here,’ continued the principal, pointing to the dead man’s palms, ‘you can see the gashes where he sought to defend himself. It looks to have been a small, but very sharp knife.’

The baillie spoke to me. ‘Have you found any such knife?’

I shook my head. ‘I have not looked … I ran to get the
porter – to fetch Dr Dun and yourselves, then I came back to stay with – Robert.’

‘You did right,’ said Dr Dun, brushing dirt from his clothes as he stood up, not noticing, it seemed, the brown smears of blood on his cuffs and the hem of his cloak. ‘This is a bad affair and, and I fear it will reflect badly on us.’

The baillie was a man of business, with little time to spend on civilities. ‘It is indeed a bad pass.’ He tilted his head. ‘And it is Robert Sim?’ The principal nodded. ‘How long do you think he has lain dead like this?’

Dr Dun shook his head. ‘I cannot be certain. Not long. The body is not yet stiff and the blood not fully congealed.’

‘And do you think he was slain here?’

The principal indicated the state of Robert Sim’s face, and his fingernails. ‘I think you can see here and here that he made some effort to drag himself along the ground, towards the courtyard. Robert Sim was meticulous in the cleanliness of his hands. He would allow no one with dirty hands to touch the books in his care. He kept a basin of water and a drying rag up by the door there for that express reason. Even I was directed that way more than once. But look at his own fingers – they are caked in dirt and blood. He must have clawed his way along the ground. He did not get very far. Also, the blood has not spread greatly. I would think he died very close to where the assault took place.’

The baillie nodded. ‘At the bottom of the stairs here.’ Then he turned to the gatekeeper. ‘Mr Sim lived in the town, not in the college, is that not so?’

The man nodded.

‘At what time did he usually leave the library on a Saturday?’

The man looked troubled. ‘The library is only supposed to be open until noon on a Saturday, but sometimes Mr Sim had work of his own to do and he …’

‘So he had no usual time of leaving?’

‘It would change from week to week, but he never stayed later than eight in the summer, five in the winter.’

‘But he did not leave tonight?’

The gatekeeper looked from the corpse to the baillie and back to the corpse, as if the town magistrate lacked in something.

‘I think what the baillie is asking,’ I said, ‘is did Robert Sim leave earlier in the evening, and then return?’

‘I could not say.’

Dr Dun now interjected. ‘Do you mean you were not at the gate?’

The man was firm in his own defence. ‘I would have been, but Mr Jack arrived back from the Links with the scholars and he was in very high dudgeon. There had been some fighting and trouble, and he called upon me to see to it that every one of them was locked in their chamber for the night, but only after the rooms of the likeliest had been searched for weapons. He has had me patrolling the corridors and landings half the night.’

The principal ran a hand over his brow and muttered, ‘He goes too far, always too far.’ And then, barely able to
mask his anger, he said to the gatekeeper, ‘So what you are saying is that anyone other than the scholars under guard could have left or entered this college tonight.’

The man was surly. ‘The gates were locked.’

But we all knew there were places, not just the gate I had come in by, but breaches in our crumbling walls, sorely in need of repair, where a careful and agile man might pass unseen.

‘Would that he had come with us,’ I murmured.

‘What?’

I told the baillie of our invitation to Robert to join us on the Links.

‘When was this?’ asked the principal.

‘In the afternoon, at around three. I had been working in the library for an hour or so.’

‘Who else was there?’

‘No one. When I left with William Cargill, Robert was alone.’

‘Then I think we had better see what the library has to tell us, do not you, Baillie?’ said the principal. Taking the lantern from the porter he set his foot on the bottom step and led us up the outer stairs.

The door was unlocked, and there was no sign of the key.

‘That is not right,’ said the gatekeeper. ‘He never went out and left the place unlocked, never once. He kept the key on its ring at his belt.’

‘Perhaps he had not yet intended to leave for the night,’
said the baillie. ‘Perhaps he had merely gone out for a moment for air, or to meet with someone else in the college.’

‘He would still have locked up,’ I said. ‘He would allow no one to remain unsupervised in the library – master or student.’

The principal concurred. ‘And besides,’ he added, indicating the corpse on the ground, ‘he has with him the satchel that he used to carry work back and forth from here to his lodgings. He was going home.’

Below us, the constable knelt and undid the buckle on the worn leather satchel. He rooted around in it a moment, and brought out a large, hide-bound ledger, with the symbol of the incorporated trades embossed on the front. ‘There is only this, nothing else.’

The book was passed up to the principal, who took it in his hand and nodded. ‘The Trades’ Benefaction Book.’

I had seen it often before – folio, bound in pigskin. ‘It was on his desk in the library this afternoon,’ I said. ‘It was this that he planned to work on tonight.’

‘Well, his assailant had no interest in that, it would seem.’

The constable laid aside the satchel before carefully unclasping and sliding the belt from Robert Sim’s body. There was no ring of keys around it, but the thong from which the ring had hung had been cut.

‘Someone has evidently forced the keys from him, dead or alive,’ said the baillie.

Dr Dun pushed open the door and led us into the library. I don’t know what I had thought we would find in there –
blood, broken glass, splintered wood, torn and flung-about books, signs of a struggle – but as one candle after another was lit in the sconces along the walls, there was very little evidence of any of that. In fact, at first sight, the place did not seem greatly altered from how it had been in the afternoon. Desks and chairs were where they had been, books were on their shelves, not strewn on the floor. Not even the inkpot on the librarian’s desk had been overturned, and yet I had a strong sense that the place had been searched. The door of a press was not quite properly closed; a candle had burned right down to the wick, as if it had never been put out; one or two books had not been pushed right in on their shelves, as Robert Sim would have taken care to do. And on his desk, as it always was, bound in leather and kept in the librarian’s own neat hand was the register of readers. Its companion, the library catalogue, bound in identical style and kept in the same hand, was gone.

The principal, his hand resting on a lectern Robert had often used, was also looking around him, noticing, I was certain, the same things I myself had noticed. The baillie and his constable found less to interest them, the former soon making his own assessment, and implying in his tone that he looked for no other.

‘Well, there is little amiss here. Evidently Robert Sim had left for the night and was assaulted and robbed outside. His assailant, finding nothing of value here, made off into the town unobserved, it would seem.’

He had begun to walk back towards the door when a
shout from the constable below took our attention. He shouted again for the baillie. I was first to the stairhead and saw, in the intermittent light from his swaying lantern, a set of keys and something else that briefly glinted as the light swept over it; it was a knife, small and lethally sharp, picked up a moment earlier from a dank corner beneath the stairs. It was evident to us all that this must be the instrument that killed Robert Sim, but only once I had suggested it and the principal confirmed it did the burgh’s officers realise what it also was: a doctor’s scalpel.

The baillie directed the constable to try the keys in the library door, and carefully took the scalpel from him. The blood was brown and dry on the blade, and smeared on the handle. He held it out towards us. ‘You are certain that that is what it is, Dr Dun?’

‘There can be no doubt. Every doctor and surgeon in the town will have one.’

The baillie shook his head. ‘Well, I’ll hazard that there is one doctor or surgeon in this burgh who has one less tonight than he had this morning. The first thing to be done is to draw up a list of all the physicians in this and the Old Town.’

‘And the first name on that list will be my own,’ said the principal.

The baillie made to protest, but Dr Dun held up a hand to stop him. ‘There can be no partiality, no respecting of persons in the search for the perpetrator of this brutal deed. You will find such a list in the third drawer of the tall
Dutch chest in the room next to my chamber. I will have one of the students copy it for you.’ He turned then to the gatekeeper. ‘And you will grant the town’s officers access wherever they might wish. If the truth be hidden somewhere in this college, it will be found out. And now, Baillie, you will excuse me, for the hour is late and I must speak with Mr Seaton about how this business is to be managed here, within these walls.’

The baillie’s mind was on the matter of doctors and their knives now. ‘We will begin our investigations in the town tomorrow. I know the final examinations are almost upon you – we will strive to avoid disruption of the college business. I am greatly obliged for your assistance, Dr Dun.’

Finally, the principal and I were alone, and I was not greatly surprised to see Dr Dun turn once more towards the library. ‘Now, Alexander, before we find the answers, I think we must first know the questions, don’t you?’

Again, I was struck by the strange but oddly imperfect tidiness of the library. In a place that was usually silent, the heavy silence of the night, punctuated only by the sounds made by Dr Dun and myself, was like a third presence. The principal placed the Trades’ Benefaction Book on the librarian’s desk. ‘The catalogue is missing,’ he said, as much to himself as to me.

‘I had noticed that.’

‘What else?’

‘Very little. That is what seems so strange. One or two
books do not look quite right on their shelves – I suspect, should we look, we would find that some of them are not in their proper place.’ I cast my eye about me again. ‘That box of mathematical instruments, beneath his desk there, is somewhat askew. One of the press doors has not been shut properly. I think the place has been searched, very carefully, by someone who knew exactly what they were looking for.’

Dr Dun nodded. ‘I believe you are right. But what was it, and did they find it?’ He sighed deeply and sat down in Robert’s chair. ‘Let us be systematic.’ He pulled towards him the ledger in which Sim recorded the names of those using the library along with a note of what they had consulted. The ribbon marker was still at Saturday’s page, and my own name the last one on it. ‘It was a quiet day,’ said the principal. ‘Three readers in the morning, and only one other than yourself in the afternoon.’ He turned the book towards me and I scanned the short list of names. There was my own, with the Kepler registered beside it, and the scholar who had been slumbering over his Aristotle until I had sent him out into the sunshine. Two other scholars, of the senior class, had been in in the morning, but it was the third name that caught my attention: John Innes, my friend and regent in the King’s College.