Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) (20 page)

“Oh! You haven’t heard.” It hadn’t occurred to me that no one here knew Lindsey had been shot. No one here even knew who she was and wouldn’t have recognized the name Dr. Lindsey Scoggin if they
had
heard about a shooting in another part of town. For the first time, it dawned on me that the shooting would have already been all over the TV. In a town like this a shooting, especially when it involved a doctor, would be huge news. But the conference members were, by and large, staying in rooms without TVs. Those who, like Larry, were staying in hotel rooms wouldn’t make a connection between the victim and our group even if they heard Lindsey’s name.

I started to explain, but Claudia Moss walked in at that moment and Larry looked toward the door, saw her, and waved her over. I felt a tug at my elbow.

“Aunt Dotsy? Come over here. Georgina and I want to show you something.” Georgina stood by a glass display case nestled beneath the tall, mullioned, east window. I got a chill when Georgina greeted me. The last time I’d heard that voice it was coming from the second floor of the faculty wing and it was saying, “If looks could kill, I’d be dead!” I hadn’t recognized her voice when I was standing beneath the back windows of the faculty rooms, possibly because I’d never really talked to her long enough to register its tone.

“Look at these guns, Aunt Dotsy. Aren’t they great? Georgina says this one was used to kill Catesby in the Gunpowder Plot.” I wondered if Claire knew anything about the Gunpowder Plot or if she was merely repeating what Georgina had told her. The glass top of the display case wasn’t far below Claire’s eye level.

I looked at the one Claire indicated, a long pistol in burnished wood and engraved steel. It lay on a green felt mat with perhaps ten other firearms. All of them looked very old. I wondered how Claire could so casually look at guns while her own mother lay in the hospital suffering from the result of one’s use.

“Uncle Harold loves old guns,” Georgina said. “He inherited some of these from a former master of the college, and he bought some of them himself. Each one is probably worth thousands.”

“Since Harold’s field is Anglo-Saxon England, I’d have thought he would collect swords and spears,” I said.

Claire spoke up. “I asked Georgina how her Uncle Harold could have these if the United Kingdom doesn’t allow people to keep guns and she said gun collections like this are allowed.”

“I don’t imagine your average criminal would know how to fire one of these even if he managed to get in here and smash the glass,” I said.

“I can shoot,” Georgina said, then added, “clay pigeons.” She closed one eye and aimed a pretend shot at the ceiling with her forefinger.

Claire’s face screwed up.

“Not real pigeons,” I told the child. “Clay pigeons are just small discs people use to practice shooting.”

“Oh.”

When Claire and I left the party, Georgina went with us. I sent Claire up the stairs to check on Caleb and asked Georgina to sit with me on the bench in the middle of the quad. This was the same bench Bram Fitzwaring and I had shared on his last night alive, and the same one Daphne Wetmore and I had shared while we waited for the EMTs to emerge from Bram’s room.

The Elizabethan “serving wench” of our first night’s party in the Master’s Lodgings was gone, replaced by a typical—albeit prettier than average—college student. Georgina wore no makeup. Straight brows above China blue eyes and a tiny space between her two front teeth lent a touch of character to a strictly symmetrical face. Her gaze lingered on the entrance to the staircase into which my young charge had disappeared. “I like Claire, don’t you? She’s clever for her age.”

“Very,” I said. “Did she tell you about her mother getting shot this morning?”

“Bloody hell!” Georgina recoiled as if she herself had been hit.

“Her mother was shot this morning, coming out of their flat out near the Radcliffe Hospital.” I told her the story and ended with the fact that Lindsey Scoggin was still, as far as I knew, in surgery.

Georgina was clearly shocked at the crime, an anomaly in a town where crime usually meant bicycle theft. “Lindsey Scoggin, you say? That’s Claire’s mother?”

“Dr. Lindsey Scoggin. Why? Do you know her?” It would be too coincidental, I thought, to have mentioned the shooting to someone who actually knows the victim. Lindsey was new in town and hadn’t had time to make more than a few acquaintances.

“The name sounds familiar, but I don’t know where I’ve heard it. Oh, wait! At my friend’s house this morning. On the telly! It was all over the news.” She slapped her hand against her forehead. “That was Claire’s mum?”

Our conversation wandered onto Georgina herself and what she was doing in Oxford. She was a student, she told me, of Keble College and would soon begin her third and final year. Keble was widely regarded as the ugliest of Oxford’s forty colleges, she said. Reading chemical engineering, she hoped to work in pharmaceuticals (which she pronounced “pharma-CUTE-icals”) upon graduation.

“Speaking of pharmaceuticals,” I said, giving the word the American pronunciation, “I take it you know Dr. Bunsen.”

Her expression froze for a second. “Why? I mean, I know he’s a fellow here, and he’s staying for the summer. I see him around.”

“You were in his rooms last evening. I heard you because his window was open. I wasn’t snooping. I was looking for the back gate and Dr. Bunsen’s rooms are directly over that walk. I heard you say, ‘If looks could kill, I’d be dead right now.’”

Georgina flashed me an incredulous sneer of the sort you get when someone is desperately buying time. “Last evening? What time last evening?”

“About dusk. About six-thirty.”

She stared at her feet for a second before answering. “Right. I was there. I went up to see him because I’m writing a paper on liver enzymes and I need some reliable sources. What I meant . . . what I was talking about when I said that . . . was this girl I caught trying to nick my iPhone.”

I decided to let that pass as if I believed her. “I gather, from the fact that your last name is Wetmore, it’s Harold rather than Daphne to whom you are actually related.”

“What’s keeping Claire? Do you think we should go up?” Georgina looked toward Staircase Thirteen, then returned to my question. “Right. Uncle Harold and my father are brothers. My parents live out Cowley Road. I’m staying with them until Michaelmas,” she said. Michaelmas was Oxford’s word for the fall school term.

“Perhaps we’d better check on the kids,” I said.

We met Claire clattering down the stairs. “Caleb’s crying. Can you come up?”

“What about?”

“He’s afraid Mommy’s dead.”

I lunged ahead of Georgina and clambered up the last two flights. “You have the key, Claire. Open the door.”

We found little Caleb lying face up on my bed, tears streaking across his cheeks and into his ears. After a minute of cuddling, he consented to stop crying long enough to talk to Grandma Lettie on the phone.

I called her. Before I handed the phone to Caleb, Lettie gave me the latest news. “She’s out of surgery but they’ve got her in intensive care. They’ve put a breathing tube down her throat and a drainage tube in her side. They’re worried about fluid collecting in her chest. Oh, Dotsy! They let me peek in for one second and I just about passed out! She looks awful.”

Hiding my gut reaction, I said, “Caleb is so worried about his mom. He’s right here beside me. Could you talk to him and tell him she’s going to be fine?”

Caleb took the phone and swung his feet off the side of the bed. He listened, mumbling an occasional, “Yeh,” between hiccups and sniffles. Then, he said, “Are you sure? Are you really sure?” Apparently Lettie told him she was sure because Caleb said, “Okay, bye,” and handed me the phone.

Lettie said, “That was tough. Does he look all right now?”

I assured her he did.

“Can we come to the hospital now, Grandma?” Claire said, loudly enough for the phone to pick up her words.

“Stall them for an hour, Dotsy. Then bring them out.”

“You sure?”

“Give me an hour. I’ll figure out how to handle it. Claire is too smart to believe us if we lie to her.”

“You got that right!”

While Claire took her little brother downstairs to the toilet, I seized the moment to talk to Georgina. “Lettie needs an hour. After that, I can take the kids to the hospital.”

“I can go with you. I can look after the children while you and Mrs. Osgood go in to see their mother.”

“Thanks, but we’ll be all right. What I do need you to do is figure out how to keep them entertained until it’s time to go.”

Georgina sat on the side of my bed and stared at the floor for a minute, then said, “Bubbles.” She jumped up and stepped across to the door. “I’ll meet you in the quad in five minutes.”

With no further explanation, she dashed out and down the stairs. When the children returned, I helped Caleb wash his hands at my sink and gave him a comb for his hair. By the time we emerged into the quad, Georgina was there with a ten gallon bucket and a long tube attached by rings to a mesh belt. She waved the contraption in a sweeping motion and produced a bubble about the size of a MINI Cooper. It started as a long, caterpillar-like, undulating form, then, picking up rainbows in the afternoon sun, morphed into a sphere. The children were captivated. I was, too.

Georgina showed them how to make their own bubbles by dipping their hands in the soap and glycerin mixture, their fingers curled into okay signs. Conferees walking across the quad to the afternoon session stopped to watch. I asked, “How did you just happen to have this all close to hand?”

“Pure luck,” she said. “Last week Uncle Harold, Aunt Daphne and I went to a fete they had at Attwood House. Aunt Daphne’s sister is Lady Attwood, and they have more money than God. You should see their house.

“Anyway, it was outdoors on the lawn and they had games for children and adults. That’s where I saw this bubble thing and the lady who was in charge had several of these tube contraptions. I bought one from her.”

“Is that where you learned to shoot clay pigeons?” I asked.

“Right! But not last week. The Attwoods have a bunch of people out in the autumn for a pheasant hunt, but they have a trap shoot set up for people like me who don’t want to kill birds.” Georgina made a face, then turned to applaud the bubble Claire had produced. “You should go. Aunt Daphne can get you an invitation. Oh, I guess you won’t be here in October.”

Georgina went with us to the hospital, but left us almost immediately for the research wing. By this time I knew without asking that she and Keith Bunsen were lovers. I knew it by how often she mentioned him, by her tone of voice when she did, and by how often she looked toward his window while we were playing with the children in the quad. I’d never heard either of them mention or even speak to the other when Daphne or Harold Wetmore was present, so I further speculated that this was not a match approved by the family. She told me she was living with her parents for the summer but would share quarters with two girlfriends when school started. “My mum and dad were against it. Thought we’d be bonking every bloke in town. But I’m so knackered most nights after ten hours in the lab, I can’t think of taking the bus out Cowley Road. I’m ready to pack it in.”

We found Lettie in Lindsey’s room, or rather, the room they’d bring Lindsey to when she left the intensive care unit. Lettie grabbed her grandchildren and kissed them. Both kids teared up, but Lettie, stoic as a gladiator, sat them down to talk. She explained about how they would only, because of germs, be allowed to peek in at their mother from a distance. Nothing was wrong. The tubes and equipment they would see were standard for chest wounds. Their mother would be well soon.

“Does she have a breathing tube down her throat?” Claire asked.

Lettie rolled her eyes at me as if to say,
I forgot how smart this kid is.
“Yes, but it doesn’t hurt her. They’re keeping her asleep until they see there’s no fluid left in her chest.”

“Medically induced coma,” Claire said.

“Is that what Aunt Dotsy told you?” Lettie’s tone had a sharp edge.

“That’s what doctors call it. I’ve heard Mom call it that.”

With a sigh, Lettie rose and led the children out. Having nothing to read, I studied the view out Lindsey’s third-floor window. Long shadows stretched across the grassy fields lined with green hedgerows. I heard a peck on the open door behind me.

It was Chief Inspector Child again. This time he was alone. He asked where Lettie had gone and I told him. “She has Dr. Scoggin’s children with her?” He seemed concerned.

“The children really need to see that their mother is still alive. Lettie can handle it.”

“Several of Mrs. Scoggin’s neighbors have called to say they will stay at the flat and care for the children. You don’t have to do all the work yourself.”

“I don’t mind at all. I’ll work it out with Lettie when I have a chance.” I sat on the bed and motioned CI Child toward the room’s only chair. “Will the bullet they removed tell you what kind of gun it was?”

He paused as if considering how much he should tell me. “The bullet is an unusual caliber. Our lab has it now, but the firearms man says it may be from the sort of gun used by German infantrymen in the Second World War.”

“Wow! That would narrow it down, wouldn’t it?”

“Not really. Guns have to be registered, you know, and a big percentage of the ones in private hands are old. Collector’s items, and a lot of them are German and date from the nineteen forties.”

“But you do have records.”

“Even if forensics tells us the type of gun and it turns out to be German and from the Second World War, that won’t tell us much. It seems like every home in nineteen fifty had at least one weapon swiped from a German soldier, and a lot of them are still around.”

Chief Inspector Child hitched up his trouser leg at the knee and cleared his throat. “Mrs. Osgood has told us Lindsey Scoggin was seeing Dr. St. Giles Bell. Do you know him?”

“I met him once. Lindsey took me around the hospital here a couple of days ago, and we went to Bell’s lab in the research wing. We talked for a few minutes.”