Murder Is Academic (18 page)

After all my agonizing about whether to tell Lawrence, I couldn't believe that he had known all along. Margaret must have been expecting a very rough ride with Lucy if she'd been driven to confide in Lawrence.

‘Lucy's death appeared to have put an end to the matter,' he continued. ‘And now you tell me that Margaret had kept her letters. Sheer folly quite beyond belief! However, from what you say, it's most unlikely that anyone else knows of them. I can rely on you to be discreet, I know that, Cassandra.'

Lawrence's face was pinched, his skin lined and colourless. In the window behind him the leafless branches formed an irregular tracery through which a dull unemphatic light seeped into the room.

‘But the police…?'

Lawrence's eyes met mine and slid away. He picked up his silver propelling pencil and tapped it softly on the desk.

‘I don't see any necessity to inform the police. The fewer people who know about this, the better. One can't rely on anyone's discretion these days. Just one phonecall to the tabloid press, that's all it would take. In any case, what possible connection can there be with Rebecca's death?'

‘Wouldn't it be better to let the police decide that?'

Lawrence got up and pushed back his chair. He stepped back and leant against the windowsill.

‘I don't think you quite appreciate the complexity of the situation, Cassandra. I have to consider the welfare of the college as a whole. The next year or so will be crucial to our long-term future. We simply can't afford this kind of unwelcome publicity. Applications to your own department in particular are likely to be affected if that relationship becomes common knowledge.'

‘Are you threatening me, Lawrence?'

‘Far from it,' he said calmly. ‘Simply pointing out that with the future of yourself and your colleagues hanging in the balance, you would be ill-advised to rock the boat – if I may mix my metaphors. Of course, I would be the first to go to the police if I felt there was any substance to your concerns, but Rebecca died of injuries sustained outside the college and its grounds, and I really can't believe that there is any connection with the unfortunate business of Margaret and Lucy Hambleton. I don't suppose we'll be able to keep the police out of college altogether, but I don't want to give them any reasons to linger. Is that understood?'

‘I understand.'

Lawrence ignored the edge of irony in my voice. He returned to his seat. I almost expected that if I looked behind the big mahogany desk, I would see that his small feet in their well-polished shoes didn't quite touch the floor. It struck me that he was out of scale, diminished by these grand surroundings.

He put his elbows on the table and made a steeple with his hands. ‘I know how much Rebecca's death must have upset you, Cassandra.' His voice had softened in a way I hadn't heard before. ‘Losing a student is always very hard. And in your condition it's natural that you should overreact a little.'

‘I can't believe I'm hearing this! A student is
dead,
Lawrence! And I'm pregnant, not feeble-minded.'

‘We'll do everything that's proper,' he went on. ‘A memorial service certainly and some form of commemoration: a tree-planting, perhaps. But it is time for other matters to claim our attention. Life must go on: a cliché, but true for all that, like so many clichés.'

Oh, you pompous bastard,
I thought.

‘I don't need to remind you that your RAE submissions must be sorted out before you go on maternity leave. I hope that is well in hand.'

It wasn't, of course. Over the last few weeks, worry about Rebecca had pushed it to the back of my mind.

I thought the interview was at an end, but Lawrence had one more shot in his magazine. As I got to my feet, he said, ‘As you know, the college is getting more and more strapped for cash. Belts will have to be tightened all round. I can't guarantee that I would, after all, be able to redeploy Cathy in the event of our having to close your department.'

‘You told me she'd be all right! I promised her!'

He shrugged. ‘I'm afraid you had no authority to make any such promise.'

I walked back to my office along corridors that were almost deserted. The combination of fluorescent lighting and a dying winter's day created an inexpressibly dreary atmosphere.

Bastard, bastard, bastard,
I thought. As I slumped in the chair at my desk, a hairgrip slipped down inside my shirt. A loop of hair uncoiled itself and slithered down my back. Cursing, I retrieved the hairgrip and skewered it back into place. My face ached with the effort of holding back the tears of mortification and anger that were pushing to the surface. I felt tired and heavy and defeated.

I knew I should be fighting back, but it was all too much: Rebecca's death, the struggle to keep the department open, Stephen's accident, my pregnancy. There was Merfyn, too: I was still waiting for him to come up with the next chapters of his book. I just wanted to run away or barricade myself behind a pile of books and read, read, read. I looked around for something to distract me. My eye was caught by the Russian box on my desk. The delicately painted face of the Snow Queen looked up at me.

She reminded me of someone. I looked more closely. How beautiful she was with her white-blonde hair and her serpentine figure swathed in pale fur. I tried to remember the story. I had a copy of
Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales
somewhere. I got up and searched the bookshelves. Yes, there it was: a cheap paperback reprint that I'd picked up in a remainder shop. I turned the pages and began to read. The story began with a diabolical mirror in which the good appears bad and the bad appears good. It breaks and a splinter of silvered glass pierces little Kay's heart and turns it into ice. I read on. The Snow Queen appeared:

The snow flake grew and grew, and at last it turned into a complete woman, clad in the finest white gauze, which seemed to be made up of millions of starlike white flakes. She as so beautiful and grand, but of ice – dazzling, gleaming ice – and yet she was alive.

I had just reached the part where she kidnaps Kay and takes him to her palace where everything is made of snow and ice, when the telephone rang. I was so absorbed that it took me a second to come to myself. I reached awkwardly across my desk to answer it and knocked a pile of essays over. With the received in one hand, I grabbed at the essays with the other. I caught a couple, but the rest slithered over the edge and fanned out over the carpet.

Sighing, I put the receiver to my ear, just catching the end of what the person on the other end was saying.

‘—Annabelle?' said a light, female voice.

‘I'm sorry. There's no Annabelle here. You must have a wrong number.'

There was a little gasp followed by a short silence. Then she said, ‘No, no.
I'm
Annabelle.'

I heaved a sigh of exasperation. She was talking ‘upspeak': the voice goes up at the end of every line and the speaker sounds like someone in an Australian soap opera. My students did it all the time and I hated it.

‘O?,' I said. ‘We've established that you're Annabelle. Who is it you want to speak to?'

‘Umm, Beth.'

‘Beth who?'

‘You know, I really think I must have a wrong number. So sorry to have bothered you.'

With a bit of clattering the receiver was put down at the other end.

I hung up and sat looking at the telephone. Something about this exchange puzzled me. The name Annabelle sounded familiar, but no face came to mind. Young, certainly, to have picked up that irritating way of speaking, and there had also been a slight drawl that led me to think of one of the more expensive girls' schools from which we occasionally interviewed. It wasn't one of the students in our department, but from elsewhere in the college perhaps?

There was a knock on the door. Cathy put her head round.

‘Do you know anyone called Annabelle?' I asked. ‘In the college?'

She shook her head. ‘Doesn't ring a bell. I'll look through the list, shall I?'

‘It's not important.'

‘Alison left this for you while you were with the Master.'

She handed me a yellow cardboard folder. I wondered if I should tell her that Lawrence was intending to go back on his word and that she might find herself out of a job. Before I could decide, she had gone back to her own office.

Inside the folder was a sheaf of typewritten pages. The top one read: ‘
The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking:
Jane Lead's Apocalyptic Writings' by Alison Stirling. I read the first page of the article and skimmed through the rest, reading a paragraph here and there. Jane Lead, it seemed, was an East Anglian poet and mystic, a kind of seventeenth century Julian of Norwich. This wasn't my period and I hadn't heard of Jane Lead, but I was impressed by the elegance and succinctness of the article. If the scholarship was as impeccable as the style, Alison wouldn't have any difficulty in getting this published.

The sight of that article put new life into me. It was the first hopeful thing to happen for weeks.

I thought of what Lawrence had said. The message was clear and I knew he wasn't bluffing. If I went to the police, it would be another nail in the department's coffin. He would be only too glad of another excuse. The thought of doing nothing at all was seductive. After all, there was a possibility, perhaps a strong one, that I was quite wrong in thinking that Rebecca's death had something to do with the college. Didn't I have enough to concentrate on with my own work and the department and my pregnancy? And wasn't it arrogant to think that the police wouldn't be able to sort it out without my help?

But what if they
didn't
sort it out? What if I let this go and Rebecca's killer was never found? How would I feel then? My eye fell on
Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales
lying open on the desk in front of me. It occurred to me that there were times when a splinter of ice in the heart would be a useful thing to have. Deep inside me, something similar was forming: a hard, cold compact ball of sheer bloody-mindedness.

Was I going to allow myself to be bullied by Lawrence?
Was I hell!
Of course, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Or as the New Testament more subtly puts it,
Be as wise as serpents, as innocent as doves.
I've always like that injunction.

I reached for the telephone.

*   *   *

It was the evening of the following day when I arrived home to find Jim Ferguson drinking tea with Stephen in the kitchen. He stood up as I came in.

He had very short fair hair and a squarish face with blunt, open features. The deeply incised crow's feet suggested a man who laughed a lot. When Stephen introduced us, Jim held out his hand and looked into my eyes. It was like stepping into a force field. His whole attention was focused on me. I felt an impulse to step back, but was tethered by the warm, dry hand that gripped mine firmly. This was a formidable, intelligent man, and there was something else about him …

We sat down and Jim said, ‘Stephen's given me an outline, but I'd like to hear it all from you. And I mean all of it.'

‘There may be nothing to it,' I said.

‘That's right,' he agreed, ‘but don't let it worry you. Let me put it this way. When Mrs Smith's neighbour calls us because she hasn't seen Mrs Smith for a while and she doesn't like Mr Smith's explanation of her absence, ninety-nine times out of a hundred Mr Smith was too embarrassed to admit that Mrs Smith had packed her bags and gone home to mother. But there's always the hundredth time. That's when we find Mrs Smith at the bottom of Rutland Water with weights tied to her arms and legs.

‘And it's worth hearing the ninety-nine stories for the hundredth one. OK, just let me put my thoughts in order.'

Jim and Stephen heard me out without interrupting.

*   *   *

When I had finished, Jim said thoughtfully, ‘I see what you mean. Nothing much you can put your finger on, is there? But it's suggestive all the same. How many people would you say there are in your department, staff and students included?'

‘Including postgraduates? Forty-five? Fifty? It's a small department.'

‘And in the space of – what? – eight months, one woman dies after she falls off a cliff and hits her head, another woman drowns and her body is found to have suffered a blow to the head, and a third is assaulted and left with a fractured skull? Mmm … For a nursing home it might be par for the course, but for a Cambridge college, and none of the women over forty? It seems a little excessive.'

‘So you really think…?'

‘Well, it's hard to say. There can be connections between things without there necessarily being anything sinister. You know the kind of thing: Lucy dies, Margaret is upset, she's careless, falls in the pool. Or it could all be just coincidence. They happen too, surprisingly often in fact. But even so I do think certain aspects of these cases deserve a closer look.'

‘And Rebecca…?' I asked.

‘Her case is still very much active, of course, more so than ever now she's dead. I'm not giving anything away if I tell you that forensics weren't able to come up with anything much at the scene of the crime. The ground was wet and it had been thoroughly churned up by her friends and then by the paramedics. And we haven't found the weapon. Or her bag. A search of the neighbouring gardens didn't turn anything up.'

We sat in thoughtful silence.

Stephen said, ‘So where do we go from here?'

‘I'll pass on what you told me. It'll suggest a closer look at the college and new lines of questioning. Now, have you told me everything?'

I nodded, ‘I think so.'

‘Anything else out of the ordinary? People acting strangely in any way at all?'