Murder Is Academic (2 page)

Margaret had been in the water for at least twelve hours and the exam papers had had all night to distribute themselves around the garden. I didn't want to think about that, but I couldn't help myself. I saw the colours of the garden gradually changing to grey, a chilly little wind starting up, ruffling the papers, slowly turning over the pages, gaining enough strength to tumble them off the table. I saw the papers rolling across the pavement, settling on the surface of the water like great flakes of ash, concealing what lay beneath …

I slammed shut that door in my mind.

‘The papers are going to be more or less OK,' I told Merfyn.

‘Bloody good job they all write in Biro. I hate the stuff, but if it had been ink … Of course, the real question is what the hell are we going to do about the others?'

The police had made a thorough search of the garden. One exam script had been found on a rose-bush in a neighbouring garden, another was wrapped round the steel railings of the sports field at the end of Cranmer Road. Those that had been in the water were laid between layers of blotting paper and taken to the paper conservators at the Fitzwilliam Museum. In all the panic and commotion it was some time before anyone had thought to check the papers against the list of candidates. After that another, wider search had taken place. The house had been searched and Margaret's office in college, but to no avail.

At the end of it all, four finals papers were still missing.

‘Margaret would have been horrified,' I said. ‘That just adds to the sheer bloody awfulness of it all.'

I rubbed my forehead wearily with the heel of my hand, almost dislodging my hat. I'd forgotten I was wearing it.

‘You know, I don't think Lawrence'll be able to keep this under wraps much longer,' Merfyn said. ‘Some sort of rumour's obviously circulating. One of the third-years came to see me in my office this morning, and another came up to me in the corridor. They'd heard that there might be a problem about getting their degrees.'

‘What did you say?'

‘I told them to go and see Lawrence. He's the bloody Master after all. Why the devil didn't he come clean about those exam papers straight away?'

‘He's still hoping that we'll find a way round it.'

‘Not very likely now, is it?'

‘You know, Stephen thinks the students might well have grounds for suing the college.'

‘Trust a lawyer to think of that,' Merfyn said grimly. ‘You'd better ask that boyfriend of yours not to make that opinion too widely known.'

I frowned at him. ‘Of course he won't.'

Merfyn glanced at his watch. ‘Come on, time to get going.'

We made our way down Trinity Street in the full glare of the afternoon sun. By common accord we paused outside Heffer's bookshop window to look at the display. Travel books with brightly coloured covers; Bill Bryson, Colin Thubron, Bruce Chatwin. It looked cool and dim inside. All those books, all those other worlds just waiting between the covers, I thought. For a moment the temptation to go in and lose myself among the shelves was almost too strong.

Merfyn put his hand on my arm. We moved on.

I said, ‘You know, I used to think you could find the answer to everything in books, but there are times when even literature can't help.'

Merfyn gave me a look of enquiry.

I hesitated, not quite sure how to put it into words. ‘There are terrible, senseless deaths in literature, of course … Greek tragedy,
King Lear,
lots of modern novels … but somehow, it's not completely senseless, is it? And that's because it's in a work of art … it's stirring, moving.'

‘Cathartic, yes. You come out of the theatre thinking that life is terrible, but it's wonderful, too.'

‘That's just it. But when it's ordinary life, when it really happens, it's not like that at all. There isn't any meaning. It's just a big fat nothing, as the students say. An emptiness. I still can't really believe that it's happened. I mean, she was only forty. It's like a bizarre conjuring trick.'

‘Now you see her, now you don't.'

‘That's it. One moment, they're there, absolutely normal; the next, they're gone, and you can't understand how it could have happened. They can't have just disappeared. You keep looking around … wondering where they are.'

Merfyn nodded sympathetically, but before he could speak we were separated by a group of American tourists who were being led by a tour guide down the middle of the street. When we again managed to fall into step together, the moment had passed, and we walked along in silence.

We emerged from the narrowness of Trinity Street in the broader space of Market Square. On the right, the newly cleaned Senate House was a dazzling bone-white in the sun. On the left was Great St Mary's, the medieval university church, to which other people in dark clothes and hats were also heading.

It wasn't until we were walking up the flagstone path to the porch that Merfyn said, ‘You may have something there, Cassandra.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘The conjuring trick. When the magician makes someone disappear, they don't really disappear, do they?'

‘Of course not.'

We paused at the threshold to the church. I looked sideways at him, puzzled. He was frowning thoughtfully. I couldn't think where this was leading.

‘So?' I said.

Merfyn seemed about to say something, but at that moment a group of people coming up the path behind us forced us to move on. He shook his head as though he were dismissing an irrelevant train of thought and stood aside to let me go first into the church.

Before I could say anything else, a black-coated usher came forward to show us to a pew. The funeral was about to begin.

*   *   *

‘With the death of Margaret Joplin we at St Etheldreda's mourn a greatly valued friend and colleague. She had been with us for ten years, six as head of the English department…'

Lawrence had a surprisingly sonorous voice for such a small man. I couldn't really see him from where we were sitting near the back of the church, but every word was clear and distinct.

The service was nearly over, thank God. All through it I had been thinking off and on of what Merfyn had said. I glanced at him. He was leaning forward with his hands clasped between his knees. With his beaky nose in profile and his thick black hair spiked with silver and standing up on the crown of his head, he looked like a benign bird of prey. What had he meant? There hadn't been any doubt that it was Margaret in the pool, even though … but I didn't want to think about those moments after I had dropped the clothes prop. He couldn't know about that, no one did. I felt a flutter of panic in my stomach.

I tried to focus on the here and now, to anchor myself in the present, where there was nothing to fear. I looked around the church at the mass of mourners, filling not only the pews, but the Jacobean galleries above. And there was the church itself, the stone, the flagged floor firm under my feet, the glass, the wood. The pew end next to me was decorated with an exquisitely naturalistic carving of a deer. I looked at the tiny ears folded back against the head, the little hoof pawing the ground. I touched it. Its back, cool and smooth under my fingers, was polished by the touch of thousands of other hands over the centuries.

I'd missed some of what Lawrence had said. He was talking about Margaret's academic work.

‘Her superb book on Anglo-Catholicism in the nineteenth century novel, published when she was still only in her twenties, established her very early on as one of the most promising literary scholars of her generation. Her recent biography of the Victorian novelist, Charlotte M. Yonge, amply fulfilled that early promise. Literature was her life…'

And her death. The thought seemed to appear in my head from nowhere, shocking me with its incongruity. And yet … it was a literary sort of death in a way. There was Shakespeare of course – ‘too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia' – and Milton's Lycidas in his ‘watery bier'. I found myself assembling a list. Shelley, too, that poem about Adonis, but the poet himself as well, lost in a storm at sea, his body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean, an archetypal Romantic death. There flashed into my mind Tennyson's description of the hand that rises out of the lake to take back Excalibur: ‘Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful'. The poem was on my Victorian poetry course. I realized that I was never going to read it again without thinking of Margaret.

‘Yet she was no blue-stocking,' Lawrence was announcing. ‘She did not see why the life of the mind should preclude a love of clothes. Her elegance and flair, her intellect and sharp wit, that is what we will remember…'

I saw again the hand rising out the water, the sun striking a brief dazzling light from the diamond ring on its finger. There was a moment when time seemed frozen. Then, as if it were beckoning to me, the hand slowly turned over and disappeared beneath the water.

Merfyn's words came back to me: ‘Now you see it, now you don't.'

‘The part she played in the wider Cambridge community,' I heard Lawrence say, but something seemed to have gone wrong with the volume control. At one moment his voice boomed around the church, the next his mouth was moving soundlessly. Little pinpoints of light were dancing in front of my eyes and there was something sour in my throat.

I fumbled for my handbag and struggled to my feet. The church and the congregation were flickering before my eyes as if lit by strobe lighting. Someone was touching my arm. ‘Shall I come with you?' I heard Merfyn say, his voice sounding as if were a long way off. I shook my head fiercely and struggled out of the pew, knocking my knee against the little wooden shelf that holds the hymn books. A woman sitting a row or two in front of me looked round and frowned. Other heads were beginning to turn.

The sparks were becoming star bursts. I could hardly see the door. Then the iron latch was in my hand. I struggled with it, it shot up, and the heavy oak door swung open.

I stepped out into the heat of the day. The door closed behind me with a reverberant thud.

Keeping one hand on the wall, I walked round the side of the church to where I knew there was a bench. It's often occupied by a group of sociable drunks, sharing bottles of cider and cans of extra-strong lager. Today, thank God, it was empty. I sank down on it and leant forward, bracing myself with my hands on my knees. My straw hat fell to the ground. My shirt was sticking to my body and I was chilly with evaporating sweat. I focused on the flagstones and concentrated on taking slow, deep breaths. I could see the neck of a brown bottle sticking out from under the bench, and there was the sweet, heavy smell of stale beer.

The church door creaked open. A woman came into view. I looked around and saw that it was the one who had turned to look at me in church. She was still frowning, but I saw now that it was a frown not of disapproval but of concern.

‘Are you all right?' Her voice was surprisingly high-pitched and girlish in its inflexion, but it also had a ring of authority.

‘Will be in a minute.'

She sat down next to me, smoothing her skirt over her knees. A flowery scent overlaid the smell of old beer.

The drone of Lawrence's voice ceased. There was a pause, and then the low notes of the organ and the shuffling sound of a large congregation getting to its feet reached us. After a bar or two, I recognized ‘The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended'.

Slowly I sat up. My companion put her hand on my shoulder and briefly squeezed it. For a moment or two I sat quietly, taking in the bustle of the market, people walking back and forth with bags of shopping and children in push-chairs, Auntie's Tea-Room and the Internet Exchange, the blessed ordinariness of it all.

I turned to my companion. Now that I saw her properly for the first time, I realized that she was older than I had thought. Early forties, perhaps. The fair hair had a lot of white in it and her smile brought the lines around her eyes into relief. It was a pleasant face, and a shrewd one.

She fumbled around in her handbag and brought out a packet of Marlborough Lites.

‘Do you mind?' she asked.

‘No, in fact, could I…?'

‘Of course.'

I took one, and she lit it for me.

I inhaled deeply. The nicotine rush seemed to bring the world into sharper focus. Oh, God, I'd almost managed to forget how good this was. I felt like a schoolgirl who had sneaked out of class to smoke in the lavatories.

‘I shouldn't be doing this. Sets such a bad example to the students for one thing.'

‘Me, too,' she said, ‘though it's patients in my case. I'm always telling them they should quit. Sheer hypocrisy.'

‘You're a doctor?'

‘A GP.'

‘Margaret's?'

‘No, just her neighbour. Jane Pennyfeather. I live next door.'

‘I'm Cassandra James.'

Jane tapped the ash off on her cigarette and looked at me thoughtfully.

‘Ah, so it…'

I took a long drag on my cigarette.

‘Yes. It was me.'

She gave a little grimace of sympathy. ‘How awful for you. No wonder you need a fag.'

Her matter-of-factness, the intimacy of being alone together, set apart from both the funeral continuing behind us and the bustle of the market place in front of us, even the very fact that she was a stranger: suddenly it was easy to tell her.

‘I haven't told anyone … but I just feel so ashamed…'

I bit my lip hard, but it was no good: tears were welling up. One spilled over and ran down my cheek into the corner of my mouth.

Jane delved into her bag and brought out a handful of paper tissues. She pressed them into my hand.

‘I ran away,' I told her.

In my memory there was nothing between the splash of the pole hitting the water and finding myself by the telephone in Margaret's sitting-room. It was as if I'd been transported there by magic. I rang for an ambulance and the police and went out through the front door to sit on the kerb in the hot sun, head in hands. I was still there when the police arrived. I couldn't go back into that garden where I knew that something monstrous was waiting for me under the surface of the water.