Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) (23 page)

The next few minutes were like standing in a wind tunnel. Lettie was talking in one of my ears while my brain struggled to process what I thought I knew about Georgina. How wrong could I possibly be? Fact was, I didn’t know anything about her for certain. That she and Keith Bunsen were on intimate terms was an assumption based on the voice I heard through his open window. I’d had an
aha
moment an hour ago when I mistook her for the Grey Lady. I’d also figured she was the phantom I chased across the quad and that, rather than hiding in the little stairwell by the back gate, she had slipped into Staircase Ten and up to Keith’s rooms.

Lettie was still talking. I made her repeat everything.

“Lindsey says she found out Georgina—she didn’t know her last name—was also having an affair with St. Giles Bell and that’s why she ran out of the hospital and came home crying. Lindsey, that is. I told you she came home in bad shape. Well, it seems that Lindsey went down to St. Giles’s office—the one he keeps in the research wing—and found an eleven by fourteen photo in St. Giles’s top desk drawer. It was signed, ‘All my love forever, Georgina.’ She says she’s seen Georgina hanging around there a couple of times but never even wondered what she was doing there.”

“Wait, Lettie. This is the same area where Keith Bunsen has his lab.”

“Who?” I started to explain, but Lettie’s next statement sent me off in another direction. “The police are trying to find Georgina right now. They found out her last name is Wetmore—isn’t that a coincidence?—and they’re on their way to her house.”

“Her house?”

“Her parents’ house. She still lives at home.”

I ended the call and tried to figure out what to do next. Georgina was probably still at Keith’s apartment across the quad, unless I had this whole thing figured wrong. If she was, I needed to warn her. If she wasn’t, was she still here at the college? Where else might she have gone after we walked in together? What if it was true? Could it be?”

I should trust the police to do their job.

That, bottom line, was the simplest and easiest way to proceed. Trust the police. Could it be true? Could Georgina possibly have been the shooter? I didn’t know her that well. She told me she could shoot. There’s a case full of guns in her uncle’s library. Lindsey’s neighbor told the police they saw someone, possibly a woman in a dark anorak, leaving the scene. As I made more and more connections, I began to suspect Georgina’s motive for being so damned friendly with the children.

And there I sat, on the side of my bed, agonizing over a hundred unanswerable questions, my phone still clasped in my hand, while the police barged into St. Ormond’s and arrested Georgina Wetmore.

I emerged into the quad to the sight of Georgina Wetmore, two policemen and a policewoman leaving through the front gate. As soon as the door within the gate closed behind them, a dozen porters, scouts, and college guests emerged from their various holes in the surrounding stone, questions on their faces. Poor Daphne Wetmore stumbled out of the passage that led from the Master’s Garden and leaned against a wall, her shoulders heaving with her sobs. I ran over to her, but others reached her first.

“They think she killed that doctor,” I heard her say. Then, in bits and pieces, “in for questioning,” and “don’t know,” and “I tell you
I don’t know
! They wouldn’t tell me anything!”

I flew back to my room for my purse, then out the front gate to hail a cab.

I bought a vase of flowers on the ground floor of the hospital and took an elevator up to Lindsey’s room. Lettie, with Caleb on her lap, tried to rise and offer me her chair, but I waved the offer aside. Lindsey thanked me for the flowers and pointed to the windowsill. She looked pretty good considering what she’d been through. Claire stood at her mother’s head, one hand under the pillow, caressing the sheet, as if it were an extension of Lindsey herself.

“They may let her go home today,” Lettie said.

Caleb pumped his little fists.

“Did Mom tell you the latest?” Lindsey said.

I nodded, but glanced at both children. Did they know? How awful for them to discover yesterday’s playmate was today’s suspect.

Lindsey answered that question by telling the children to run downstairs and get her a newspaper. Claire took a five-pound note from her mother’s purse and joined Caleb in the hall. “They don’t know,” Lindsey said.

“I’m glad. Did Lettie tell you Georgina came out here with us yesterday? She and the children had a great time blowing bubbles in the quad.”

“How very sweet.” Lindsey’s voice oozed sarcasm. “I wonder if the police have found her yet.”

“They have. She was at St. Ormond’s when they came in and told her they wanted her to go with them and help them with their inquiries.”

“That’s what they say when they really mean they’re arresting you,” Lettie said.

Lindsey took a deep breath, winced, and used her elbows to adjust herself against the pillow. “I take it that Georgina and the Wetmores of St. Ormond’s are actually related. I was wondering about that. I only just learned her last name an hour ago.”

I had to think. Lettie hadn’t, as far as I knew, ever met Georgina before yesterday and I didn’t think I had mentioned her last name. She sat forward in her chair, banging one fist on its arm. “The nerve of that hussy! She befriended the children to get closer to Lindsey and find out what was going on. Probably couldn’t stand it that the shot didn’t kill her. I wouldn’t put it past her to sneak a gun in here and finish the job.”

“Lettie! We don’t know anything yet, so don’t jump to conclusions. In fact, I’ve been thinking Georgina was in love with someone else entirely.” I glanced at Lindsey, then back to Lettie. “And nobody says ‘hussy’ anymore.”

Lettie scowled and picked at the arm of her chair.

“By the way, has St. Giles been in to see you?” I asked the young woman in the bed.

“I should hope not! I don’t ever want to see him again. I was told he called the nurse’s station on this floor to check on me.” Lindsey gasped. She tried to cough but couldn’t, and the effort contorted her face. “Lucky for him, he was in London at the time. If he’d been here, he’d have been a suspect. The police wanted to know all about how long we’d been together, and the only neighbor who thinks he saw the shooter said he
thinks
it was a woman, but he isn’t sure.”

I shifted my vase of flowers to one side and rested my butt on the windowsill. “Lindsey, how much do you know about St. Giles’s late wife?”

“She died. Fell down the stairs at their home.”

“The police apparently had their doubts about it being an accident.”

Lettie’s eyes widened. “Where did you hear this?”

“From a perhaps not totally unimpeachable source, but it would be easy enough to get back issues of the newspaper and read about it.”

Back at St. Ormond’s, I realized I’d missed the morning session titled, “Elizabethan Poetry: Faeries, Fiends, and Star-Crossed Lovers,” but by now I was resigned to purchasing the CDs of the meetings I’d missed. I hoped to at least make it to the general session this afternoon.

I tracked down our scout, Patricia, and found her in East Quad broom closet sharing a cigarette with a man from the kitchen. I asked her about the plastic bottle with used syringes left in room four after its occupant died. She acted as if she remembered, but I doubted she was telling the truth.

“We always put sharps in the sharps bin,” she told me.

“That one?” I pointed to the red container behind her left foot.

She mumbled something, bent over, and picked it up. Shaking it, she said, “They musta made the pickup already.”

“Are you sure you put it in there?”

“Not the whole bottle. Just the syringes.”

“And you would have put the bottle, where?”

“In the reg’lar trash.”

“When is that picked up?”

“Thursdays.”

“Tomorrow.”

At this, the man in the kitchen apron stepped forward and pointed the still-burning butt end of their shared cigarette at me. “Hey, if you got a problem with trash, you take it up with the porter. We’s on our break in here.”

“Awfully sorry,” I said. “But this would have happened on Saturday. It should be still here.”

“Talk to the porter.”

Having been summarily dismissed from the broom closet, I did talk to the porter, who told me the trash bins were kept inside the north gate. This took me back to the arched gateway where I’d found the sunken stairs I suspected the Grey Lady of hiding in. I now saw that it contained an array of trash bins in a variety of colors: blue, brown, and green, and the smell in this tight space below the cobblestone floor was foul. Did I really want to do this?

I started with the brown bins and found they held garden cuttings. These seemed to have been recently filled and didn’t smell bad. The blue ones held bags of general trash and smelled awful. I simply didn’t have the stomach to open any of those. Green, I found, was for the recyclables: glass, plastics, paper, and, with a few exceptions, these were fairly clean. I grabbed a sturdy limb from one of the brown bins and stirred. Of the two recycle bins, one contained nothing but empty wine bottles, their liquid dregs now aging from alcohol to vinegar. In the other recycle bin, I found the plastics but after several minutes of determined stirring found no plastic water bottles. I gave up.

Trudging back across the quad toward my room, I decided I’d try a call to the local hazardous waste folks, then I had one more idea. I’d been awakened one night—I couldn’t remember which night—by loud noises from Sycamore Lane beneath my window. Clinks and clanks that could have been someone dumping trash into the large bin I’d seen in a cubbyhole on street level. But the scouts didn’t work after five o’clock. Still, what if a scout had discovered something left undone? Something that needed to be disposed of without going back into the college? Something perhaps squirreled away for possible resale or reuse, then reconsidered? It was a million to one shot, but my OCD tendencies compel me to finish what I start. Wipe that last bit of marker from the whiteboard. Eat that last Cheerio. This was, I believe, the first time in my life it’s paid off.

I walked out the front gate, turned right into Sycamore Lane, and found the large bin. It stood in a space that might have once been an entrance to the East Quad. In this bin, the contents weren’t neatly separated as they were at the north gate. I swung the lid open and stepped back, bowled over by the smell. I simply couldn’t rummage through this mess.

Instead I backed out, closed my eyes long enough to let them adapt to the gloom inside the bin, and took a deep breath. I held the bin lid open and looked as long as I could hold my breath, then returned to the lane for another breath. It only took three trips before I saw a plastic water bottle nestled into the right front corner, as if someone had carefully tucked it there.

Inside the bottle, its plastic cap still intact, stood three small syringes.

I showered and changed clothes before I headed for the police station. The smell of the dumpster clung to me like greasy fog. I zipped the water bottle into a plastic bag and tucked it inside my purse. At the station on St. Aldate’s, I spoke through the bulletproof glass partition to a duty officer I’d never seen before. I didn’t know if this was good or bad because, although the reason for my visit made little sense when presented, cold, to an uninitiated ear, it also enabled me to momentarily escape the nutcase label I’d have gotten from anyone who’d seen me before. I asked to speak to Chief Inspector Child or to Detective Sergeant Gunn.

“They’re both in interview at the moment. Can you speak to someone else? Is it about a charge you wish to file?” This woman looked about sixty. Her wide leather belt cut deeply into the fat around her waist and looked positively painful.

“It’s actually about a crime I’ve already reported. I have some evidence to give them.”

“Evidence?” She paused a minute, as if this was a different matter. “Let me get someone to help you.”

She disappeared into a large room I could see only partially through the glass partition. A minute later, another uniformed officer popped through a side door and waved me through. He led me to a cluttered cubicle with a chest-high partition, no different from a dozen others I saw lining the walls on three sides of the room.

“I talked to Chief Inspector Child yesterday at the hospital. The gunshot victim, Lindsey Scoggin, is the daughter of a friend of mine.” This established a certain level of credibility. I knew someone who knew someone who was a bona fide victim. “But Mr. Child and I also talked about the death of a man at the conference I’m attending. That’s why I asked to see him today. I’m afraid this will all sound a bit strange to you, but Chief Inspector Child knows the background.”

“I’m listening.”

I described the death of Bram Fitzwaring as succinctly as I could, but it was becoming a long story. I felt I had to mention at least a couple of motives and a couple of circumstances that led me, a person of sound mind, to suspect his death wasn’t natural. When I got to my suspicion that the causative agent may have been saxitoxin, I let the name of St. Giles Bell slip.

The officer stiffened as if he’d heard a fire alarm. “St. Giles Bell? Dr. St. Giles Bell from the Radcliffe Hospital?”

“Yes.”

“So how does this . . . I mean, where’s the connection to the shooting of Lindsey Scoggin?”

“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?”

Now I got the look reserved for nutcases.

“I know it all sounds crazy. That’s why I really wanted to talk to Chief Inspector Child. But, look. How about you just don’t worry about it? How about taking the bottle full of syringes I have in my purse, mark it however you’re supposed to do, and take my name and number.”

“Bottle full of syringes?”

As I searched for a better way to explain, Chief Inspector Child himself walked past. “Oh, speak of the devil!” I said. Not, perhaps, the best way to greet a policeman.

He stopped, shook my hand, and asked what I was doing there.