Death at the Alma Mater (9 page)

If someone had forgotten to put away the college’s equipment there’d be hell to pay, he thought. Was all this stuff lying there when he’d set out? He wasn’t sure…he hadn’t been looking in that direction.

One year, during May Bumps, a group of undergraduates had thrown a plastic dummy in the water dressed in Queens’ colors. Intimidation of their chief rival was the goal. It was the kind of harmless rag that went on all year, usually in the run-up to the Bumps. So Sebastian didn’t hesitate, but poked at the lumpen form with the tip of one of his oars.

That didn’t feel right, he thought. He couldn’t have said why it wasn’t right, but the form was softer and more yielding and yet heavier than he, in his limited experience of dummies and lumpen forms, would have expected.

No. No sirree. That couldn’t be right.

He stepped a foot closer, peering into the darkness. Then, dropping his oars with a loud, jumbled crash, he ran.

THE PARTY’S OVER

St. Just sat eighteen
miles away in another suicidally boring meeting at Hinchingbrooke Park, Huntingdon—headquarters for the Cambridgeshire Constabulary. The meeting had convened some hours ago in a building that looked like a prison, only with larger windows, in a room that resembled a classroom in a particularly underfunded
comprehensive
school.

It was an unusually late meeting, even by the standards of the new Chief Constable, who would accept nothing less than the one-hundred-percent proven devotion of her team. These after-hours catered meetings had become both her stick (metaphorically) and her carrot (literally) for attaining that devotion. She was delivering herself of her usual views on Crime Management, views illustrated with colorful pie charts displaying crime trends, transgression “hot spots,” and intelligence analyses. With all the fervor of the convert to the scientific method, the Chief believed that if only crime could be precisely quantified, it could be made magically to disappear.

As though, thought St. Just, anything as unpredictable and bloody-minded as the criminal element thwarted of its desires could be managed. Pacified, perhaps. Bribed, certainly. Managed, never.

St. Just was sketching a caricature of the Chief in the margins of his hand-out sheet—unobtrusively, he hoped—confining himself to a very small corner of the page, trusting that his occupation and less-than-full attention to the grave matters at hand would go unnoticed. He was trying to capture the look of her hair, which she wore in a shining helmet—impenetrable, St. Just feared, to any idea that could not be summed up in a catchy slogan.

A few more of these interminable meetings, he thought, and I might develop some talent as a miniaturist. Perhaps Hilliard got his start this way.

“Citizen advisory councils are of course crucial,” she was saying. Which side, he wondered idly, darkening the Chief’s widely spaced eyes, was meant to be on the receiving side of whatever advice was being sent ’round? And if there was one thing that got up St. Just’s nose, as his sergeant would have said, it was the kind of claptrap that made the police sound like social workers. “Multicultural Inclusiveness” he understood, but what was “Community Outreach Delivery” when it was at home, he wondered?

And was any of it adding to the number of solved crimes?

The Chief’s “Reach Out!” PR campaign continued apace, the Chief wending her way through various stupefying talking points, pausing for emphasis only, it seemed, when she wished to share an insight of spectacular dullness. She remained undaunted by the fact that sending the police door to door in some of the worst neighborhoods in Cambridgeshire had netted them nothing but verbal abuse and several bites requiring stitches from a poodle of peculiarly vicious disposition in Histon. One unfortunate Constable had had the contents of a dustbin emptied on his head from the upper-story window of a rooming house. He was lucky—in another age, it would have been a chamber pot. The dustbin offender remained at large, but for every one captured, it was felt, another would soon grow to take his place. St. Just thought all the reactions perfectly justified, including the poodle’s. As one community member had been heard to exclaim, nicely capturing the prevailing philosophy, the very Zeitgeist, as it were: “If we want the bloody police we’ll ring for the bloody police.”

Since the meeting—lecture, rather—had been planned to run even longer than usual, the Chief Constable had had catered in for the delectation of her team large trays of what he was sure she would call canapés but St. Just would call rabbit food. Thus it was that once he and the rest of her Reach Out! team had finally been freed for the night, he decided to stop on his way home at the Three Jolly Butchers for a leisurely meal and a pint. The pub wasn’t crowded, and he easily secured a wooden table to himself near the Inglenook fireplace. He had already placed his order for one of his favorites, the pan-fried pork medallions with bubble and squeak. Looking about now at the low, beamed ceilings, he thought he should bring Portia here soon, as the food was as excellent as the atmosphere. That he had not done so yet was probably because he equated the place with his work, and he struggled, as did most of his colleagues, to draw a firm line between the personal and the official. Events would soon prove this was nearly impossible. He had no sooner been served than his mobile phone vibrated, the surprise jolt sending his fork flying through the air. Blast the thing. He unhooked the device from his belt and looked with apoplectic disbelief at the number. It couldn’t be, but it was. The Chief herself, reaching out. Sod it. He was supposed to be off duty. He took the call outside.

“St. Mike’s. Yes’m, I certainly know it. A woman. Strangulation, you think. Good God. The University Constabulary…Yes, of course. Quite outside their brief. I’ll give Sergeant Fear a ring and we’ll be right over.”

Ringing off, he punched in the number to Fear’s house, cursing the late hour. His right-hand man had taken a short furlough, but needs must. Why did murder always seem to happen after dark? But he knew the answer. “Under cloak of darkness” was a cliché for good reason. Nighttime, when the good and the just were tucked safely before the telly in their homes, no doubt watching a crime show—that was the time the predator went on the move.

–––

Someone picked up the receiver on the first ring, but there was dead silence at the other end.

“Emma?” St. Just guessed. “Is that you, Emma?” Silence. Emma was Fear’s four-year-old. Four going on thirty-five. What on earth could she be doing up so late?

“Emma, may I speak to your …” What would she call him? “Your daddy, please?” Silence. Thinking he just wasn’t using the right vocabulary, he tried again. “Your dadda?” No. “Your Pops? Poppy?” He was running out of options, and he had a murder to investigate. “Your father, please, Emma?”

“Who is that, Emma?” St. Just heard Sergeant Fear call as if from a great height, where no doubt he was, from Emma’s perspective.

“It’s Inspector St. Just.” Her slight lisp rendered this as, “Ith Inthpector Thaint Justh.” He felt his heart melt.

“Bye-bye, Emma,” said St. Just softly.

“Bye!” yelled Emma, loud enough to pierce an eardrum.

There were sounds of a minor scuffle, and Sergeant Fear came on the line.

“Sorry, Sir. Emma hasn’t quite found her volume control yet.”

“Just the on-and-off switch, I take it.”

He filled his sergeant in on as much of the situation as he knew, concluding, “Someone called the CU Constabulary, who naturally called us in.” The Cambridge University Constabulary was a small, non-Home Office force that was most often called upon to deal with crowd control and internal university matters. Murder in a college setting was rare to the point of being unheard of. Quite naturally, the University had called in the Cambridgeshire Constabulary.

St. Just quickly settled his tab with the landlord, who was getting used to these abrupt departures. He offered to package up the meal but, reluctantly, St. Just declined. As these things went, time for the next good meal was hours or days away, and he’d have to exist on the Chief’s dainty offerings for a while.

Travelling at a rapid but measured pace along the A14, he arrived at St. Michael’s College within minutes of Sergeant Fear, who stood waiting for him at the entrance. Already parked beside Fear’s car in a small lot at the front of the college were the SOCO van and Malenfant’s red Daimler.

The two men—St. Just tall, broad, and middle-aged; his sergeant tall, with a youthful gangliness—strode towards the college, their footsteps ringing out against the cobblestones, to the massive wooden double gates, built to withstand the sieges of earlier centuries. They stepped through the inner door cut into the gate for pedestrians. After showing their warrant cards to a shaken Head Porter, who presided from within an intricately carved neo-Gothic cage at the college entrance, they were shown by his assistant the way to the Master’s study.

“Frightful business, this,” said the Master. He had seen their approach and walked briskly across the first court to greet them, hand out in practiced greeting. They might have been dignitaries come to plant a tree or open a new building. But releasing the handshake, the Master began wringing his own hands distractedly, betraying his anguish at having a corpse on the premises. St. Just had the distinct feeling that the corpse wasn’t nearly as worrying as its location: hard by the college boathouse, according to the Chief Constable. The Master confirmed this impression with his next sentence.

“To have this happen this weekend, of all weekends,” he said. “And here.” He sighed deeply, adding in aggrieved tones, “Why couldn’t it have been Jesus?”

St. Just felt Sergeant Fear stiffen beside him in alarm: Were they dealing with a religious mania of some sort? But St. Just, familiar with some of St. Mike’s history, assumed the Master meant the nearby Jesus College. It was well known there was strong feeling between the two rivals. Something to do with one of the boat races held between the wars—allegations of sabotage resulting in wounded feelings, hurled insults, and umbrage taken—all the usual. The St. Michael’s boat had sunk, if memory served, giving all aboard a good and embarrassing dunking. Such memories ran long and deep in Cambridge.

“I doubt there would be a good time, when you think about it, Sir?” said St. Just. “Or a good place?”

The Master thought for a moment and then said, “No, no, I suppose not.”

But he didn’t look convinced. How much better if Jesus College were going to be splashed all over the newspapers as a haven for murderers and cutthroats. Applications to St. Michael’s would be down next year because of this, no question about it. The students wouldn’t mind—they’d love it, in fact, the ghoulish little cretins—but their parents … Really, it was most distressing. He voiced the last thought aloud.

“I can’t begin to tell you how deeply distressing this is. It was our alumni weekend, you see. Well, that’s certainly ruined, for a start,” he fumed huffily. He might have been a vicar’s wife complaining about low participation in the Bring and Buy.

St. Just, watching him, thought he had the kind of face designed for a periwig—the long, high-arched nose, the sullen set of the full but bloodless lips. But St. Just nodded, not without sympathy. It was definitely a sticky wicket: deuced hard to explain to the old members how standards had slipped this far since their day.

“I quite understand your distress,” he said. “Now, we will need to talk with you at some length, but for the moment, if you would lead us to where the body was found …”

This set him off again.

“Body,” gasped the Master. “A body at St. Michael’s.” The man looked to be genuinely in a state of shock, his narrow face drained to a faint gray in the artificial light of the court.

“Sir,” said St. Just firmly. “If you wouldn’t mind. Time is of the essence in these matters.”

The man seemed to gather his wits through an effort of will. His mouth gathered into a puckered twist, he stolidly led them across the close-cropped grass towards the river, the jaunty bounce in his step as he’d walked over to meet the policemen now completely subdued.

SOCO had already established a beachhead. The body of Lexy Laurant remained in situ, hidden by a crime scene tent that was illuminated to an unearthly glare by arc lamps. It was a scene that had all the otherworldly qualities of a low-budget outdoor film set, complete with space aliens—SOCO—pacing the area in a methodical, robot-like search for evidence, wearing booties just a shade away from being Cambridge blue. Two constables conferred to one side of the tent, their heads close together, talking quietly, as if not wishing to disturb the newly dead. The air was laden with the scents of summer and the murmurs of the men; the gentle lapping of the river could just be heard behind the muted silence. The river, regardless and apart, wended its slow, sinuous way towards the River Ouse, which in turn would travel forty miles to meet the North Sea.