Murder Is Academic (22 page)

‘What?'

‘It's OK. It was only Bill Bailey. He must have got shut in.'

‘Oh, the cat? No, but you—'

Even as he spoke, the same thought occurred to me. Bill Bailey had left the house with us that morning. How had he got back in? It was the middle of winter: all the windows were shut. Anyway, none of them was accessible to a cat. He
must
have come in through the front door. That meant someone had let him in. What if the thud hadn't been Bill Bailey? Perhaps even now someone was waiting in my silent house, breathing very quietly, listening as I spoke to Stephen. As these thoughts flashed through my mind I jumped to my feet. Bill Bailey rolled off my knee and landed on the floor with a thump and a yelp.

The receiver was still at my ear. I heard Stephen say, ‘Get out of the house! Lock yourself in your car and ring me from your mobile.'

What I did next is a blur in my memory. I don't remember scrabbling on the table for my car keys and phone or running down the stairs. But I must have done, because seconds later I was sitting in my locked car, panting for breath.

I kept my eyes on the house. I'd left the door open and light was spilling out onto the path. Bill Bailey appeared on the doorstep. He sat down, stuck one leg up in the air and began some energetic bottom-washing. It seemed very unlikely that there was anyone still in the house. I thought about what must have happened. Bill Bailey would have been waiting in the laurel bush. As soon as the front door was opened, he would have streaked in and hidden behind the plastic carrier bags in the space by the cooker. The intruder hadn't been able to find him when they wanted to leave. He was a timid cat. He would have stayed in hiding until the stranger had left. All the same, when my mobile phone rang, I jumped in fright.

‘Cass, what the hell's going on?' It was Stephen.

‘I'm fine. I am in the car, but I think whoever's been in the house is almost certainly long gone.'

‘All the same, stay where you are. Look, I'll ring for a taxi and come straight home.'

‘But your appointment?'

‘Sod that.'

It seemed a long time before I saw the headlights of the taxi appear from the main road and come jerkily along the uneven track.

Together, Stephen and I searched the house, not believing that we would find anyone, but looking for signs that things had been disturbed or that something was missing. Everything seemed just as we had left it that morning.

‘I'd better check the wine cellar,' I said.

I got the key and shone a torch into the gloom. It illuminated a row of bottles and the cardboard box in which I keep my computer disks. I flicked through them. The sight of Margaret's backup disks reminded me that I really had to get down to trawling through them for publishable material. I mustn't let all this business about Rebecca distract me from the RAE. I heaved a sigh.

‘I don't think there's anything missing.'

‘God, I could do with a drink,' said Stephen.

We sat down at the kitchen table. I poured half a glass of sherry for myself and a full one for Stephen.

‘Do you think we've overreacted?' he said. ‘I panicked when I realized that you were alone in the house. Could Bill Bailey have doubled back and slipped in while we weren't looking?'

I thought back. ‘I pulled the door shut before I let him go. I think.'

‘How many sets of keys are there?'

‘Yours and mine and there's a spare set.'

‘Where are they?'

‘Oh.' I stared at him. ‘They're in college. I keep the spare set in a drawer in my office. In case I lock myself out.'

‘And who has a key to your office?'

‘There's one at the porter's lodge. Cathy has one, too. But it wouldn't be difficult for someone to take the keys from my office drawer. I often leave my door unlocked for a few minutes if I'm just popping out to the loo.'

Stephen looked grim. ‘We'd better have the locks changed.'

‘I'll ring a locksmith first thing in the morning. Meanwhile I'd better make supper.'

‘I'd better ring that client. Make my apologies.' He went up to the sitting-room to use the phone on my desk.

As I assembled the ingredients of a meal I could hear the low murmur of conversation over my head. Then it stopped and a few moments later Stephen called down the stairs. ‘Cass? Where's that piece of china I bought you?'

‘I put it on that shelf in the bookcase with the others. By my desk.'

‘It's not there now.'

I went upstairs. Stephen was right: the bowl with the print of the mother and child playing at horses was gone. It wasn't immediately obvious because the remaining pieces had been rearranged so that there wasn't a gap.

‘You didn't decide to put it somewhere else?' Stephen enquired.

‘No. I like to keep them where I can look up and see them when I'm working. Is it on the carpet somewhere? Perhaps Bill Bailey climbed up and knocked it off.'

We looked at each other.

‘I think I can get down there more easily than you can,' I said.

I got down on my hands and knees and searched around, moving piles of books to look behind them.

‘If it was a bit tidier around here…' Stephen remarked.

‘Not there,' I said. I got awkwardly to my feet.

‘You know, even if it was Bill Bailey, he's hardly likely to have moved everything to close up the gap, is he?' Stephen pointed out.

I had a vision of two white paws gently patting the cups and saucers and plates into place. I snorted with laughter. Stephen looked at me anxiously. There was an edge of hysteria to my mirth, I thought.

‘Apart from us, who's been in the house over the last few weeks?' he asked.

I had to think about this. ‘There were the men who came to install the security lights. They had to come in to use a power point. There was the man who came to read the meter a couple of weeks ago, and there was Jane, of course, but she didn't come up here, did she?'

‘When was the last time you remember seeing the bowl?'

‘I simply can't remember.'

‘I really don't like this. I'm going to speak to Jim. I'll phone him now.'

He wasn't at home. Stephen left a message for him and we went down to the kitchen. Stephen sat down at the table and watched me lining up three plates on the work surface next to the gas hob and pouring olive oil into a frying-pan. I took a fillet of cod from the first plate, wiped it through the lemon juice on the second plate, then through the flour on the third. It went into the pan with a hissing and spitting of hot fat.

Stephen said, ‘Term ends tomorrow, doesn't it? Normally you'd be working at home after that, wouldn't you? Why don't you stay with your mother for a while?'

‘What about Bill Bailey?'

‘Take him with you. He's been before, hasn't he?'

‘Only for a day or two at a time. And then there's my work. I really need the university library.'

‘Won't the British Library do?'

‘Well, maybe.' I added another fillet to the pan.

‘Think it over. I really don't like the thought of you here on your own, while I'm at work.'

‘My mother's out at work all day, too.'

‘Yes, but her house isn't as isolated, is it? We don't have to tell anyone where you've gone. I can tell people that you needed to get away and have a complete rest – which is nothing but the truth.'

I shook a packet of pre-washed salad into a bowl. The thought of my mother's thoroughly urban little house in Kew, centrally heated and snugly situated in the middle of a mews terrace, certainly had its attractions. But all the same …

‘Oh, I don't really think so.'

‘I can't make it out about you and your mother. Don't you get on?'

‘Oh yes…' I said vaguely.

‘Well, when am I going to meet her?'

I didn't want to be having this conversation now.

‘All in good time,' I said, putting a plate of fried fish in front of him.

By the time Jim rang back, we were in bed. Anne Tyler had been abandoned; I was reading E. Nesbit's
The Enchanted Castle.
I always turn to my old childhood favourites when the going gets tough. Stephen was reading Redmond O'Hanlon's
Into the Heart of Borneo,
which was just as escapist in a more masculine fashion.

Stephen answered the phone. I heard him outlining the situation and watched him listening to the response. The conversation seemed to be developing in unexpected ways. There was an exchange of goodbyes, and Stephen hung up.

He turned to me. ‘The results of the post-mortem have come through.'

I sat up. ‘And?'

‘It didn't establish the cause of death. They don't know why Rebecca died just when she did, but so far there's no evidence of foul play, other than the original attack, of course.'

‘And the fire?'

‘No proof that it was arson.'

I tried to take this in. I had been so sure that I had been used as a decoy, that the fire alarm had been contrived. Had it all been a coincidence after all?

‘Is Jim satisfied? And Chief Inspector Hutchinson?'

‘No, they're not. The very uncertainty about what killed Rebecca is odd in itself. To all intents and purposes she seemed to be recovering, and it's not difficult to set a fire and leave no traces. On the other hand the police have to follow the evidence in targeting their resources, as Jim put it. So they're concentrating on finding out who hit Rebecca over the head.'

‘What did he think about what's just happened here?'

‘Not enough to justify sending out a crime scene officer. I didn't think there would be, because there's no sign of forcible entry, the cat
could
have sneaked in behind our backs, and a visitor to the house
could
have taken the bowl on an earlier occasion. But he certainly thought it was a good idea to change the locks.'

‘Oh, great.'

He stretched out his arm. I settled myself with my head on his shoulder, taking care not to lean against his chest.

‘I've got a bad feeling about all this,' I told him. ‘I think there's something we're not seeing. Do you remember when we went to the Monet gallery in Paris and stood in front of the pictures of water-lilies?'

He nodded. ‘Up close all you could see were patches of colour.'

‘You had to stand well back for the painting to make sense. It's like that now, I feel I'm too close to everything. I can't see what it means because I'm standing in the wrong place. Or perhaps it's more like being on the wrong side of a tapestry, lots of dangling threads.'

Long after Stephen had gone to sleep I lay awake beside him in the dark, listening to the tiny noises that are part of the life of any old house: the creak of contracting floorboards, the gurgle of water in the pipes. I knew the house was securely locked and bolted, but in my mind's eye I saw a shadowy figure flitting from room to room, touching my possessions, perhaps even sitting at my desk, rifling through the drawers.

Was this the first time he or she had been here? Or just the first time they had been found out?

At last I fell into a heavy, uneasy sleep. I dreamt I was running down the corridor of the hospital, pursued by someone in a white coat and surgical mask. My belly was huge. I was about to go into labour and I had to find a safe place. I turned a corner and found myself outside the Intensive Care Unit. I pushed through the swing doors and ran down the ward, past beds with occupants swathed like mummies. At the very end was Rebecca. I wasn't at all surprised to see her sit up and gesture urgently to me, inviting me to hide under her bed. The fire alarm went off, screeching and clanging in my head. I froze in terror. I knew what this meant:
the killing was about to start.
I woke up, shaking, unspeakably relieved to find that I was in my own bed. After a while I fell asleep again.

I woke up in the morning, feeling drugged and clogged with sleep, the menace of the dream still somewhere in the back of my mind.

The weather reflected my mood. A thick grey layer of cloud blotted out the light. As we drove across the fens, I felt as though the sky was bearing down on us, pressing us to the ground.

I arrived at college to discover that Merfyn had disappeared.

*   *   *

The first indication was a note on my desk.

I didn't read it until I'd looked in the drawer for my spare house keys. They were in a tangled heap at the back mixed up with rubber bands and old salary slips. I left them there. After today they wouldn't be any use to anyone. I looked through the Yellow Pages and rang a locksmith who agreed to go out to the Old Granary that day.

I then turned my attention to the note. Cathy's handwriting informed me that Merfyn's wife had rung to say that he wouldn't be coming in to college again before Christmas. She had put a sick note in the post.

That was all I needed. I opened the door into Cathy's office. She was tapping away at her computer keyboard. It couldn't have been a migraine yesterday after all; she was back to her usual, energetic self.

‘Did Celia say what was wrong with Merfyn?' I asked her.

She paused with her hands suspended over the keyboard. ‘No, but she left a number in case you wanted to speak to her.'

I tried the number only to be told by her assistant at the Home Office that she was in a meeting with a minister.

I didn't manage to get through to her until after lunch.

‘Ah, Cassandra,' she said briskly. Her accent was slightly clipped, emphatically upper-class. The girl from Roedean and the boy from the Valleys. Thirty years ago, she and Merfyn must have seemed an unlikely couple.

‘Merfyn thought it was only fair to let you know that you are unlikely to see him again before the middle of next term,' she said.

‘The middle of next term?' I was incredulous.