Death at the Alma Mater (16 page)

“Of course, Chief Inspector,” she said. “I quite understand.” Another pat of her hair, and she leaned in conspiratorially—in case MI5 were listening in, presumably—before launching into a more or less cogent summary of her evening. Down to drinks at seven-thirty on the dot. Dinner at eight. Dinner finished at nine-fifteen or maybe a little later, she wasn’t sure. She headed straight for the SCR. Her husband used the facilities and joined her shortly thereafter.

“And you, Mrs. Dunning,” St. Just asked delicately. “You yourself had no need of, erm, the facilities?”

“I have the constitution of an ox, and I don’t see any point in layering on powder and lipstick like some I could mention here—that television woman for a start. No. I came straight in.”

“Did you see anything unusual, anything at all that might help us?”

“No. Coming out of Hall, through that overhead passage window, I saw Lexy talking with James in the Fellows’ Garden. It was the last time I saw her—alive.” She allowed herself a little waver of melodrama on the last word, then sank back in her chair, her mental survey of the hollowness and futility of all life’s endeavors reflected sadly on her face. Apparently satisfied with her performance, she added, “That strapping young yellow-haired fellow came dashing in at five minutes before ten o’clock. I know. I checked my watch.”

St. Just beamed at her. It was apparently all and more than she could have hoped for in the way of reward. They talked a few more minutes to no further purpose and then she left the room, meek as a lamb.

“A police investigation on British soil, Sir?” said Sergeant Fear as soon as the door had safely shut behind her broad back. “Interpol? Benchmarking? And, BOLOs? Be on the lookout for what?” St. Just was, Fear supposed, his mentor. But St. Just’s quick ability to read a person’s character and play to it … Fear suspected St. Just possessed a gift that couldn’t be taught. “Why didn’t you mention the Flying Squad while you were about it?”

St. Just grinned widely. “The Chief Constable would be pleased,” he said. “You see, I have picked up some of her jargon, after all. I guess we’ll have the husband next, God bless him.”

–––

Mr. Dunning looked to be a pleasant man in his mid-forties. He was nearly bald, with just a small fringe of salt-and-pepper hair left to encircle his head. He sported gold-rimmed glasses and a little goatee that brought his round face to a Lenin-like point. This all contributed to his looking rather older than his true age, which he stated for the record to be forty.

“Your wife has given us a summary of your movements this evening, but of course we have to verify—and sometimes, re-verify—every statement for accuracy. You do understand. So if you wouldn’t mind, Sir … ”

And Mr. Dunning proceeded to give them a summary that matched his wife’s, although his grasp of exact times seemed to be more tenuous than hers.

“I think everyone was back in the SCR by half past. Maybe sooner,” he told them.

“I see. That’s all fairly clear. Now, I would like your impressions of the atmosphere this weekend.”

“Oh, my,” said Mr. Dunning mildly. “My wife is much better at this sort of thing—atmospherics, you know—but I’ll do my best.” His eyes blinked thoughtfully for several seconds behind the glasses. At last he said, “Well, she wasn’t happy, anyone could see that. The victim, I mean. Lexy. It was a shame, really. She was just as pretty as a peach, that girl. Woman, really, of course, but she had a girlish quality to her.”

“But you knew her when she was a girl, isn’t that correct? When you were here at St. Michael’s as students together?”

“Well. Hmm. No. No, that wouldn’t be accurate to say we were together, and I certainly wouldn’t want Constance—Mrs. Dunning—to get any ideas in her head like that. Lexy was, if you want to know the truth, simply not in my league. I doubt she even noticed I was alive. She pretended to recognize me this weekend but I could tell she really didn’t. You have to realize, there were hundreds of kids running around back then—you’re not getting a true picture of the college out of term, as you must be aware. Those of us here this weekend—well, little pretense is made that we’ve not been cherry-picked because we’ve reached a certain, shall we say, financial threshold in our lives. That’s why there are so few of us here. I don’t mind. I love St. Mike’s and they’ll get plenty of moola out of me before all’s said and done.”

“What was Lexy like at that age?”

“Oh, I don’t know. An angel with a temper? But that makes her sound angry, or violent. Not that. Just very emotional. Very fragile. Prone to scenes.”

“Rather a difficult person to have around?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said again. “It never bothered me. But as I’ve said, our paths didn’t cross much.”

Anyone married to Constance Dunning might require or acquire the ability to let things slide off his back, reflected St. Just. The thought gave birth to his next question.

“Did you meet your wife here at St. Mike’s?”

“No, indeed. We met on my return to the States, a few years later. Been married ever since.”

“Did you notice anything unusual about this weekend? Any unusual alliances or feuds forming, perhaps?”

“You want to hear anything, however minor, I take it? Well, Augie Cramb is here this weekend, as I suppose you know or will learn. He comes across as buffoonish, but I wouldn’t be too taken in by that if I were you. He comes from oil money and made more of his own in the tech world. We were in the same boat together, literally, back in the day. Rowing, that is. He seemed to go out of his way this weekend to befriend Sebastian, the boy who found the body. I saw them talking together on several occasions—probably about his rowing. I did tell you it was a minor thing. Just something I noticed.”

St. Just could think of no further questions to ask him. With the traditional request that he make himself available for further questioning by himself or one of his men, he told Karl Dunning he could leave. He left.

UNQUIET AMERICAN

Augie was their third
American of the night, but he was of a much different cut from the Dunnings of New York. Slow of speech, relaxed in attitude, he sprawled in the armchair vacated by Karl Dunning, but unlike Dunning with his rather precise, buttoned-down, yet helpful manner, Augie filled the room with his large body and his booming drawl. He spoke at such a leisurely pace Sergeant Fear had no trouble keeping up with him in his notebook, although a few words gave him trouble. He’d have to look them up later, back at the station. What, for example, was a pawdnuh?

Now Augie Cramb was saying something about calling his gopher back home.

“I’ll ask him to email y’all a few photos from that time. You’ll see. Lexy could make a dead man walk, if she felt like it. Trouble was, she didn’t much feel like it, mostly. Wouldn’t put out for no one, excepting, I reckon, that husband of her’n.”

“I see,” said St. Just. “Now, w—”

“Cold as charity, our Lexy,” Augie warmed to his theme. “Cold as a nun’s—say, you boys ain’t Catholic, are you?”

St. Just shook his head. “C of E.”

Augie Cramb looked puzzled. Was this one of those wacky cults? Plenty of those where he came from, but what would these two policemen be doing as members?

“Go on, Sir. You’re saying Lexy lacked … a passionate nature?”

“Oh, she was passionate in that arty-farty way she had. Everything was ‘too, too’ and ‘simply mah-velous, don’t you know.’ But there was no beef in that taco, no siree. No huevos in that ranchero. For that, a man needed to look elsewhere. Damn waste, it was. A cry and shame, as my daddy would have said.”

“Are you trying to say she was frigid, Sir?” asked St. Just.

“Ain’t that what I been a-tellin’ you?”

No, you sidewinder. Sergeant Fear, exasperated by trying to translate the man’s accent and vocabulary, was beginning to show the strain. The page of his notebook reserved for Augie Cramb was smeared and blotted with crossings-out and corrections. Here and there he’d added a few stars by the man’s statements—Sergeant Fear’s own system for ranking the truthfulness of a witness. St. Just call it his Torquemada Michelin Guide. One star meant truthful; five meant the sergeant believed the witness was almost certainly lying.

“Are you speaking from personal experience, Sir, or are these your impressions? Perhaps you’re repeating a rumor you heard elsewhere?”

“Well …” and there came over Cramb’s features a worldly-wise, man-to-man smirk: James Bond letting his hair down. “Normally, I would defend a lady’s honor to the death, but since this is her death we’re talking about—yes, we took it for a test drive once, after a spectacularly drunken night in the college bar. It was not a success, and the experiment was never repeated.”

St. Just, wondering if the failure might not have been more on his side than hers after a night’s drinking, asked mildly, “And that was the end of it?”

“Tell you the truth, Inspector, she gave me a wide berth after that. Ashamed, I reckon, of her performance. Next thing I knew, she’d taken up with Sir Whatsis—James Bassett—and that took care of the problem nicely. Still, for all the coldness, all the men were half in love with her.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I have to admit, if I’m honest: She was way out of my league.”

St. Just and Sergeant Fear surreptitiously exchanged glances. The phrase was becoming a little too familiar.

“Hmm.” St. Just reckoned Lexy might have a different story to tell about the drunken night, had she been there to tell it.

“She was our cox, did you know? Yep. Me, James, and Karl were all in the college eight boat. Happiest time of my life. You wouldn’t think it would be such a turn-on to have a purty little gal like that screaming bloody murder in your ear first thing on a freezing cold morning, but let me tell you—”

He paused to lick his lips before continuing his reminiscences.

“Moving right along, Mr. Cramb, I wonder if—”

“A’course, that didn’t work out in the long haul, the business with James. Man’d have to be blind not to see India was the one for him. Well, they say the course of true love is a rocky road and I reckon it’s true. Anything else I can do for you gentlemen?”

“I’d like your general impression of the events of the weekend, anything you may have noticed, anything at all,” said St. Just.

“I really couldn’t say. I kept to myself, mostly. Had a few conversations with that young Sebastian feller. Nice kid. Needs someone payin’ attention to him, is all. Don’t we all need that? Or we’d all go to the bad … Anyway, as I say, I knew why I was invited here and apart from a private conversation with the Bursar I was pleased to keep myself to myself. We’re a self-selecting group at this weekend hootenanny, you know. It is well understood that we’ll be hit up for money at some point, and hit up hard. Or we would have been, before all this happened. Anyway, those who don’t want to be held upside down until the last penny drops, so to speak, stay well away from these events. The weekend after this is for what I think you guys call the punters—the ones who think a five-hundred dollar donation is a big deal. A’course, they ain’t invited, that type, to this weekend.”

“So, I gather you’ve donated generously in the past, which is why your name turned up on … shall we call it the A-list?”

“Thas right. An old barn of a place like this takes serious cash to keep it going. I’ve been happy to oblige. More where that came from, anyhoo. Well, gentlemen”—and here he slapped his knees preparatory to rising—“if there’s nothin’ else, I’ll be—”

“Actually, Sir, we were just getting to the interesting part.”

“Inerestin’?” He hesitated, then slowly settled back in his chair. “Okay. Shoot.”

Don’t tempt me. Sergeant Fear, who generally liked Americans, couldn’t quite pinpoint why this one kept getting up his nose. But he had a feeling something was being left out of the man’s testimony, and deliberately. A shift of the eyes, nearly imperceptible, made Fear think Cramb was hiding something, or at least avoiding it. Whether it was something important or not, Fear couldn’t say. His daughter Emma sometimes had that evasive look, and she was only four. Just to be on the safe side, he placed an extra star next to Augie Cramb’s comments about Lexy.

St. Just said, “You say James and India were meant for each other. What went on back in the day when James left Lexy for India?”

“What didn’t go on. Doors slamming, boo-hooing, weeping into the pond at midnight. And that was just the bedders—only kidding, but it upset everyone within range. When I said Lexy was passionate, I reckon I should have flat-out told you she was a drama queen. There was more of that on view this weekend, but much milder than what we were used to seeing. Damned awkward for a man when a gal cuts up like that. Spent half her time moping about on that bench by the fountain in First Court, sighing over a poetry book or whatever, or simply looking bereft. I used to think all that was needed to complete the picture was a reflecting pool.”

“How did India take all this—what was going on this weekend?”

Cramb let out a little bark of pleasure. “India’s what you’d call a man’s woman—the kinda woman that men both trustand lust after. She’s got balls on her, that one. She might not have liked what she saw, but I think she knew James well enough to know Lexy was no threat. Sexy gal, India, always was, though she looks like a prairie dog after a hailstorm half the time. James took one look—back in the day, as you say—and acted like sex had just been invented. As far as James was concerned, that was probably the case, especially after his time with Lexy. These boarding schools you fellers have over here—take all the stuffing out of a man. India runs that show, unless I miss my guess. If anything, the shoe might be on the other foot, if you know what I mean.”

“Sir?”

“India and that Geraldo looked mighty friendly to me. Friendly, that’s all I’m sayin’. But I don’t reckon Lexy liked India running all over that property any more than she appreciated India poaching her husband some-odd years ago. That’s all I’m sayin’ ,” he repeated.

That was quite a lot, thought St. Just. Cramb was the first person to mention this. Karl Dunning may have been right: It might be a mistake to dismiss Augie Cramb as a complete buffoon. Maybe Lexy, “passionate” Lexy, had confronted her old rival India. Worth looking into.

“And your movements after dinner, Sir?”

“Skipped to the loo. Hah! That’s what you’d call a trans-Atlantic joke. Heard it on the Queen Mary II coming over one year. Anyway, I popped in and out—stepped out front for some air. Had to make a phone call, too, on my cell. Porter saw me. I strolled the grounds a bit, then came to the SCR. Wasn’t long after, Sebastian came in to fetch help. Poor kid looked like he’d seen a ghost. I stayed with him and sent James as advance scout to see what was up.”

He pushed back the sleeve on his left arm to reveal a thick gold wristwatch. It had several small windows on its face to display things like the tides and the phases of the moon. If it also read out horoscopes in six foreign languages, St. Just thought, he would not have been surprised.

“Why didn’t Geraldo Valentiano go?” he asked. “After all, he was Lexy’s escort, was he not?”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Cramb replied. “That pantywaist? Last man you’d want in an emergency. No, James said he’d go see what was wrong and I for one was pleased to let him do it. Sound enough man, James, but Geraldo I wouldn’t trust an inch. He uses pomade on that hair of his, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised if his hair were dyed, too. And his hands are manicured.” He glanced at his own rough hands that looked as if they were often employed in ripping trees from the ground. He shook his head. “Can’t be trusted.”

He sat back, arms folded, having delivered this string of conclusive evidence. “And that’s that.”

“How long were you on your mobile, Sir?”

“My cell? Dunno. Ten minutes? Five? You can check the records, fine by me. I got me one of them phones that works internationally. Had to make a call home.”

“You’re married, Sir?”

He shook his head.

“Never met the right lady. And the divorce rate being what it is, a man’s gotta be cautious these days. Thar’s golddiggers in them thar hills. That all?”

“Yes, for now. Thank you.”

Cramb stood and hitched up his pants. Despite themselves the two policemen stared, fascinated, at the belt buckle he wore in place of a cummerbund. Highly polished and intricately carved, it depicted an enormous steer’s head, its eyes represented by two large turquoise stones. It and the wide belt would have been suitable for securing the college gates, let alone holding up Cramb’s trousers. His feet were shod in tooled-leather cowboy boots.

“Good luck catching whoever did this,” he said. “Lynching’s too good for him. She was a nice little lady, and purty as a daisy. Damned shame.”

After he left, St. Just said, “We’ll need to take him up on his suggestion of checking the phone records. It might help us pinpoint these times. Still, a ten-minute call on the records doesn’t mean he was talking to anyone for ten minutes. He could have been put on hold the whole time, or have reached an answering machine. The mobile could have been in his pocket, engaged, as he strangled Lexy.”

“I didn’t much care for him, Sir.”

“I noticed the chill. Any particular reason?”

“Dunno. What kind of man wears clothes like that?”

“It’s his culture. It’s how people dress where he comes from. Think of him as a Maori tribesman and it will come easier. Let’s see …” and he consulted the list again. “Time for a word with Hermione Jax.”