Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) (16 page)

All in all, Larry’s reaction to my harmless statement at my breakout session, and to my reading up on the Arthur links in the Fellows Library, made no sense.

And if Bram had indeed been murdered, I had to know by whom and I had to know why. But was he? No one but me seemed to have any doubt that his death was natural. No one including the medical examiner, who knew a lot more about such things than I. It was time for me to rethink the whole thing. I had not one scrap of evidence.

Turning back, I walked uphill and passed Alice’s Shop, a store that found its way into Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking-Glass
as the Old Sheep Shop. Now it specialized, not in Alice’s barley sugar, but in children’s clothing and Alice memorabilia. A little way past Alice’s Shop, I spotted John Fish stepping out of a bookstore and already dressed in top hat and black coat for his evening ghost tour. I called to him.

John waited on the sidewalk for me to catch up. “How are things at St. Ormond’s? Grey Lady still afoot?” His yellow-toothed grin tightened at the corners and quickly faded, perhaps because he was self-conscious about the condition of his teeth.

“I saw her again the other night, and I chased her, but she got clean away.”

He shot me a look of alarm. “Again? But that’s not possible!”

“Why not?”

His head lowered, he didn’t answer me.

“Oh, I get it. You
did
know about it. You were behind it!”

He still didn’t answer but I caught a glimpse of his face beneath the brim of his black hat and saw a mixture of indecision and chagrin. I had almost given up waiting for a response, when he said, “It was supposed to be a joke. Daphne Wetmore and I thought it up. We thought it would be a good conversation-starter on the first night of your conference.”

“You certainly succeeded. The talk at dinner was of nothing else.”

“Aye, that’s what you told me. I haven’t seen Daphne though, to find out what she thought of it. The Grey Lady, as your group called her, was played by Bumps McAlister. She’s the wife of the bloke who owns The Green Man on the High.”

“I know The Green Man. I was in there the other day.” I told him, as briefly as I could, the connections between Mignon and Bram and the proprietors of The Green Man. “My friend Mignon, in fact, had dinner with them last night.”

“Aye. Oxford’s a small town when you come right down to it.”

“But why did the Grey Lady come back again Saturday night?”

“She didn’t.”

“She
did.
I chased her across the quad and nearly broke my ankle.”

“I can’t explain that.”

“And she disappeared more or less into thin air. I thought I’d catch her at the back gate. It was the only place she could have possibly gone, but when I got there the place was empty and the door was locked.” I stole another glance at John’s face and realized I was providing him with fodder for a brand-new ghost story. “I gather that you and Harold Wetmore aren’t the best of friends, but apparently you and Daphne are. Am I right?”

“She’s a good woman,” John said. “Does everything she can to help St. Ormond’s, too. Harold is nothin’ but an arrogant old ass. Gets by on his reputation.”

“He certainly has a great reputation as a historian. My major professor, the man I came over here with, practically genuflects every time he sees him.”

“Daphne, too. Don’t ever let her hear a bad word about her Harold. I made that mistake once and she nearly took my head off. Hero worship, if you ask me. Makes me sick.”

We’d reached Carfax corner where I vaguely intended to turn right, but when John kept walking straight ahead, up Cornmarket Street, I followed him. “Did you hear about the man at St. Ormond’s who died? It was Bram Fitzwaring, the man I was just telling you about. He was staying on the same staircase as I am.”

John said he hadn’t heard about it, then asked, “You say he knew Simon McAlister?”

“Is that the shopowner’s name? Yes. Mignon and Bram were from Glastonbury but they’re all connected, apparently, by this New Age thing. Bram was scheduled to deliver a paper at our conference and they both had rooms on Staircase Thirteen. Mignon is still here.”

“What did he die of?”

“Hypoglycemia, they say. He had diabetes, like me.” I leaped out of the path of a bicycle that came my way from the right as I stepped off the curb. “But several of us got sick that night, and I’ve wondered if it might not have been caused by the food they served at the cocktail party that evening. Since Bram was diabetic, if he got sick and threw up, that could bring on the hypoglycemia.”

John nodded, somewhat disinterested, I thought. As if his mind had wandered off on another track.

“I suspect the mussels,” I said.

“Why?”

“Yesterday I went out to the Radcliffe Hospital to see the daughter of a friend of mine. She took me through their research wing and I met a man who was working with a poison found in shellfish. It just made me wonder.”

“That’s what happens when you get one thing on your mind. You start wondering about everything.”

Technically, that made no sense at all, but oddly enough, I knew what he meant. “He had a pan full of oysters sitting in a poisonous bath. He told me he’s using it for his work on nervous disorders.” I thought about him again. So charming. Too charming? I don’t trust men with too much charm. “Odd name, he had.” I searched my mind to remember it. “St. Giles was his first name. St. Giles Bell.”

John Fish stopped. He lifted his stove-pipe hat and ran his hand through his greasy hair. “Well, now! That’s a name I do recognize. From the papers.”

“Oh?”

In his best funereal tones, he said, “His wife died last year. Fell down the stairs and broke her neck.” We had reached another intersection. John paused again and his body language told me his destination lay somewhere down Beaumont Street. If I intended to return to St. Ormond’s for dinner, I needed to walk in the opposite direction, so I stopped, too.

“And you remember this from the papers? You mean the obituaries?”

“No, it was on the front pages for a while, then the back pages. Nothin’ ever came of it.” He took my elbow in his hand and looked at me through knitted brows. “But there were those as said it weren’t no accident.”

“You mean she was
pushed
?”

“Nothin’ ever came of it so who knows?” He shrugged, turned, and headed down Beaumont Street leaving me with a bunch of questions still forming in my mind.

I knocked on Mignon’s and Lettie’s doors as I passed by on my way up the stairs. Nobody home. In my room, I found myself pacing with the same nervous energy as before. I moved the fresh towel the scout had left me from the foot of my bed to the radiator beside the basin. I threw a plastic shopping bag and a couple of receipts in the trashcan. I checked my blood sugar, found it too low, and ate the Chocolate Kream cookies the scout had left on my tea tray. It was too early to dress for dinner so I kicked off my shoes, sat on the bed with my back against the wall, opened my iPad, and googled “saxitoxin.”

Over the next hour I learned:

1. Saxitoxin is one of several poisons produced by a few marine algae and it is the most potent non-protein poison known. A mere 0.2 milligrams could kill a person. (Doing the math, I found that one gram, the weight of a paper clip, could kill 5,000 people.)

2. It is specifically a sodium channel blocker, and as such is proving to be a valuable tool in neurological studies (as St. Giles Bell had already told me).

3. It is unaffected by heat, so cooking tainted fish or shellfish does not make it safe to eat.

4. It has been a subject of study by the United States CIA and is rumored to have been given to spies as suicide pills.

5. Saxitoxin poisonings, worldwide, are not uncommon.

6. After receiving a lethal dose, death usually occurs in two to twelve hours.

7. There is no cure, but if the person suffering from the effects of saxitoxin can be hooked up to a respirator in time, he can survive. Death usually comes from lack of oxygen due to the fact that the breathing muscles are paralyzed.

8. It may be possible to detect saxitoxin in the brain of a victim. (But not if the victim, like Bram, has already been cremated.)

All this dove-tailed nicely with what I’d learned in Bell’s lab, but I still wondered how Bram could have received a lethal dose. If it was from the mussels at the party before dinner, wouldn’t he have felt the effects by the time he joined me on the bench in the quad? That was at nine o’clock. One of the websites listed numbness of the lips as an early symptom. A feeling of constriction in the throat and incoherent speech might follow. Bram certainly was talking crazily, asking me if I wanted to go out for pizza when we’d all just had a huge dinner. But that wasn’t incoherent speech. He wasn’t slurring his words. I needed to talk to a real doctor. Lettie’s daughter Lindsey was a real doctor.

I already had Lindsey’s number in my cell phone. I called it and immediately wished I hadn’t because if Lindsey was still at the hospital, the call might interrupt something important. My next thought was that if she was doing anything important, she’d have the turned the phone off or switched it to vibrate.

“Hello?”

Lindsey’s voice surprised me and for a minute I stammered around trying to explain why I’d called. Lindsey told me I’d caught her eating a very late lunch in the hospital cafeteria. I explained in as few words as possible, then asked, “How hard would it be for someone to filch a bit of saxitoxin from Dr. Bell’s lab?”

“Impossible.”

“You mean difficult. Nothing’s impossible.”

“And it’s possible the NBA will draft me next season. No. Impossible. You would not believe the security around St. Giles’s tiny stash of saxitoxin. First of all, he doesn’t have that much on hand at any one time. He has a system of labeling that would make it impossible for anyone but himself to know what was what. He stores it in several different concentrations, some so weak they’d be harmless to humans. It’s all kept in a time-lock safe so anyone sneaking in after hours couldn’t get to it if they were holding a gun to St. Giles’s head. There’s an electric eye on every door and a motion detector that covers the whole lab.”

“Okay. One more question,” I said. “I know that people can die from eating shellfish tainted with saxitoxin, and that cooking doesn’t make it safe. But what about an injection? Could it be injected?”

“Oh, sure. It probably wouldn’t take as much if it were injected. It would probably work faster, too.”

“How fast?”

Lindsey laughed. I could tell by her voice her mouth was full of food. “You’ve got me there. Would you like to talk to St. Giles again? Mom told me you’re like a bloodhound when you sniff something rotten.”

“I miss your mom. I’ve hardly seen her for a week.”

“Sorry about that. Did you say you do want to talk to him again or not?”

“I don’t know, Lindsey. I’ll talk to you later.”

Daphne Wetmore was leaving the college as I walked across the quad on my way to dinner. She stepped out from a side door of the porter’s station swatting at a drooping tendril of wisteria that encircled the door, her face slick with sweat. The breeze I’d felt earlier now departed, the quad was sweltering under a hot, heavy blanket. Daphne was always in a dither it seemed, but this was the first time I’d seen her without makeup and with her baby-fine hair in disarray. She had the kind of hair that had to be washed and fluffed daily, otherwise she would look like a wet cat. Without mascara, her eyes almost disappeared beneath her heavy auburn brows. Her skin was splotchy and flushed.

“Oh, Dr. Lamb! I’m glad I caught you. I’ve told the porters, but they may forget to tell Harold. I have errands to run and I don’t know exactly when I’ll be back so I’ll probably miss dinner. Will you tell my husband not to worry? I’ve taken the car, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“No problem,” I said. “Car? I didn’t know you had a car. Where do you park it?” I hadn’t seen any places nearby where you could park a car without paying by the hour.

“We keep it in a resident’s parking lot just off St. Cross Road. Oh! One moment!” Daphne scrambled through her purse, dropping a lipstick, a cell phone, and a spray of loose change onto the grass. “There’s something else I have to tell Harold, but . . .” Her hands shook as she pulled out a notepad with a short ballpoint attached to one side and turned, searching for an appropriate writing surface. “It’ll be better if I write it. You’ll never remember . . .” I offered my back as a writing surface but, after scribbling a few words, her pen quit due to its inverted position. “Oh, damn!”

I handed her a pencil over my shoulder.

She finished writing, ripped the note off the pad, folded it twice, and handed it to me. “Give this to Harold.” She scrambled through her purse again and pulled out a key ring with the college’s magic button attached. “He needs it
before
dinner. Do you mind? Thanks ever so much.”

The note she handed me was wet with perspiration, partly hers and partly mine, I suspected. I could feel my shirt sticking to my back. I unfolded the note carefully to avoid tearing. It said, “His name is Malcolm. Tell him you’re sorry for his loss. His wife died last week.”

I believe I could have remembered that.

I had some extra time before dinner and I considered checking the SCR to see if there was a pre-as well as post-dinner gathering. I suspected there might be, but looking around the East Quad, I thought of something else. Perhaps, in the daylight, I’d have better luck figuring out where the Grey Lady had gone that night. The last I’d seen of her, she was dashing through the north archway while I hopped on my good foot, giving way to my twisted ankle. I walked through and turned left, as I had done that night, into a dead end. The late afternoon sun poured gold across three roofs, their weathered gargoyles leering down at me from the overhangs. Ahead stood a solid brick wall, some three stories high, and flanked by two ancient stone walls. To the left, the backside of the wing that housed the rooms of Keith Bunsen and several other faculty members. The one on the right incorporated bits of the ancient city wall, much repaired over the last eight hundred years. Behind me, the Master’s Garden and a door to the Wetmores’ lodgings.