Murder Is Academic (3 page)

‘I feel terrible,' I told Jane, scrubbing at my face and sniffing. I didn't try to get her out of the water. I didn't even look to see if it was Margaret in there.'

Jane dropped her fag-end on the floor and ground it out with her heel. ‘It was Margaret all right, I identified the body. And there was absolutely nothing anyone could have done. She'd been in the water for hours.'

‘But how could I have been sure?'

She leaned forward and took one of my hands in both of hers. ‘Now listen, how long do you think it takes to drown?'

‘Ten minutes?'

‘Even less than that. The brain can't survive without oxygen for more than a few minutes. I'm sure you knew that she couldn't possibly be alive.'

I thought of the settled silence that had hung over the garden and the house, the sodden exam papers, the water-sprinkler in its pool of water, the brief glimpse of that hand …

‘Perhaps I did.'

‘Of course you did,' she said with emphasis.

But still, I thought, why didn't I at least go back to the pool and wait there with her? I was afraid; afraid of Margaret, my colleague and my friend. I didn't want to see what she had become. It wasn't going to be easy to forgive myself for that loss of nerve.

Jane was saying, ‘It's survivor guilt, what you're feeling. It's always like that when people die suddenly. I see a lot of it.'

I remembered my conversation with Malcolm.

‘Malcolm's blaming himself, too,' I told her.

‘Mmm.'

It was as though a cloud had momentarily hidden the sun. It was like a little drop in temperature, nothing much, just a degree or two, but something had changed between us. I looked at Jane, but she had her head down and was rooting about in her handbag again. She brought out a pair of dark glasses and put them on.

‘The police asked me about Malcolm being away so much on business,' she said.

‘But … what did they want to know exactly?'

In the silence that fell between us, I was aware that it was quiet in the church, too. The hymn had finished.

‘They don't think – they can't think – that he was having an…' I couldn't get the word out. ‘Malcolm was absolutely devoted to Margaret!'

‘They have to ask these questions. I'm sure it's just routine,' she said, getting to her feet. ‘Look, they'll be coming out in a moment. Do you feel up to joining them?'

I nodded.

She bent down and picked up my hat for me.

The church doors opened. The leading pall-bearers emerged, and the coffin with its cargo of wreaths came into view. Malcolm followed it, hands clasped in front of him, head bowed. He was a tall, thin, sandy-haired Scot with that fair skin that marks so easily. Around the eyes his skin was pink and puffy. He had a tendency anyway to stoop, but now he was bending over as though he had been buffeted and bowed by gusts of grief.

I glanced at Jane. She seemed to be gazing at Malcolm, but it was impossible to be sure or to read her expression behind the dark glasses.

Chapter Two

‘I just can't believe that Malcolm was having an affair.'

Stephen groaned. ‘Look, Cass, I thought we'd already been through this – how many times? Three, four?'

We were sitting on a bench at the end of my garden. It was late on the day of the funeral and it was a glorious summer's evening. In other circumstances it would have been perfect. The faintest of breezes, no more than a stirring of the air, brought the scent of roses and honeysuckle to us. The long spell of hot weather had brought them fully into bloom. The tall, narrow shape of the house was almost black against a turquoise sky, the weather-boarding no longer visible in the twilight. Light was spilling out of the floor-length kitchen window and laying streaks of gold on the channel of water that flowed beneath the house. The house had been built as a granary across a creek where barges could moor underneath to receive grain through a chute.

A dark shape detached itself from the eaves, swooped over the flower-beds and darted down to the surface of the water.

I felt Stephen's arm jerk against mine.

‘It's only a bat,' I said. ‘They come out for the insects.'

We sat on for a while in silence.

My thoughts plodded round the same old track again and again like a weary old horse.

‘Malcolm is the last person … I mean, they were such a settled couple. They'd been together, what fifteen years? Twenty years?'

‘Cassandra!'

‘Sorry, sorry. I'll shut up.'

After a minute or two, Stephen said, ‘That in itself doesn't necessarily mean much, does it, the length of time?'

I slipped my hand into his and squeezed it. I guessed that he was thinking of his own twelve-year marriage, and the way it had ended four years ago. His wife had left with one of his closest friends.

He sighed. ‘You can never really know what's going on in someone else's marriage. Or even in your own for that matter.'

I knew that, of course, and, like Stephen, I knew it from bitter experience. But Malcolm and Margaret … they had been one of those couples who seemed as married as your own parents, the kind that makes you think perhaps it
can
work after all. I gave a sigh and stretched, trying to ease the ache between my shoulder blades. My eyes were sore and I could feel their shape in my eye sockets. I ought to go to bed, but I was too tired to make up my mind to do it.

‘Anyway, aren't you reading too much into what that woman said?' Stephen went on. ‘Perhaps it was just a malicious little comment.'

I considered this. ‘No … it wasn't like that. It was more as though she were warning me about something … or, perhaps not that exactly…'

My voice trailed off as I realized that Stephen wasn't listening.

He was gazing towards the house.

‘Stephen?'

‘Wait a minute.' He held up his hand. ‘The telephone, I think.'

I had to concentrate to hear it. At this distance it was more like a pulse in the air than a sound.

‘Oh, God. I should have put the answering machine on. I can't face talking to anyone now.'

‘We'll just leave it. They'll probably have given up by the time we get back to the house.'

It was impossible to talk knowing the phone was ringing on and on. We sat and listened in silence until at last it stopped.

It was almost completely dark now, and the evening was growing chilly.

‘Come on,' Stephen said, standing up. ‘We're not going to get anywhere tonight. We're just going round in circles. Let's go to bed.'

He pulled me to my feet and we made our way hand in hand up the garden along the creek. It was almost as broad as the house, but it was silted up now and flowed sluggishly.

While Stephen stayed in the kitchen to clear away the dinner things, I went up to bed. The first flight of stairs opens straight on to the big, low-ceilinged room that comprises all of the first floor. I really must get round to putting up some more bookshelves, I thought, just as I did every time I came up those stairs. But that day I seemed to see the room with fresh eyes. There were white painted bookcases under the long, low window seats and in the alcoves on either side of them, but it wasn't enough. There were books everywhere; stacked under my desk, lined up on the window seat, piled all round the edges of the room and up the stairs. Stephen had offered to do some DIY, perhaps I should take him up on it. But this was a familiar thought, too, and I knew I never would. I didn't want to let him that far into my life, not yet anyway.

My cat, Bill Bailey, was asleep on top of some books arranged in two adjacent piles: the complete works of Thackeray. When I clicked my tongue at him, he opened sleepy slits of eyes and got to his feet. He stretched, arching his back and yawning. The tower of books swayed. With an air of unconcern, he turned round, positioned himself in exactly the right place, carefully lowered himself down, and curled up again.

I went on up the steep oak stairs with its rickety handrail to my bedroom on the second floor of the house. The air was heavy with the accumulated heat of the day. I opened a window to let a current of cooler air flow. Resting my arms on the sill. I gazed out across the fens. The window on the other side of the room looked out onto the little city of Ely several miles away, standing proud of the plain and topped by the floodlit towers of the cathedral. But from this window the only signs of human habitation were the tiny scattered lights of a few distant farmhouses. The vast fields and the long straight drainage channels that ran to the horizon were covered now with a darkness as soft as velvet, and above them stretched the huge East Anglian sky, pricked by a few stars. Down in the garden, white roses glowed. The light from the kitchen illuminated a tangle of green water-weed just below the surface of the creek. The kitchen light went off and the creek, too, was absorbed into the night.

Stephen clattered up the stairs. Then his footsteps were muffled by the rug on the bedroom floor. There was a click as he switched on the bedside lamp and a warm yellow light suffused the room. I didn't turn round. I felt his hands on my shoulders. He said nothing, but slowly began to press his thumbs into the sore places of my upper neck. I sighed and pressed my shoulders back against his hands.

He said, ‘I'll understand if you'd rather I didn't stay tonight. I know you sleep better when I'm not here.'

‘And you've got work tomorrow.'

‘Could get up early.'

I hesitated. We didn't usually spend the night together during the week.

‘It doesn't have to be … it could be just for company,' he said.

I twisted round and looked into his face. He slipped his arms around my waist.

‘Sure?' I asked.

He nodded. I reached up and stroked the dark hair that was just beginning to show threads of silver. His arms tightened around me. I relaxed into his embrace. His lips touched mine and at that instant, as though the contact had triggered an alarm, the telephone rang.

We stood there, frozen. Then I stepped back.

‘Hell and damnation.' Stephen said.

As I moved towards the phone by the bed, he said, ‘Wait. I switched the machine on as I came up. Let's see who it is first.'

Abruptly the ringing stopped and was followed a moment later by my own voice, distorted by the tape and muffled by the floorboards. There was a second or two of silence when I thought the caller was going to hang up, then I heard a sharp intake of breath.

‘Cassandra, if you're there, would you please pick up the phone? It really is urgent. It's the exam papers. Look, I'll, um, well, I'll ring back in an hour or so if I can't get hold of Lawrence. There's no answer from his phone either.'

In his agitation he was about to hang up without giving his name. I reached the phone in time, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway. There was no mistaking those precise Kelvinside tones. It was Malcolm.

*   *   *

Forty minutes later, Stephen and I were sitting with him at his kitchen table at his house in Cranmer Road.

The missing scripts were spread out on the kitchen table. The cover sheet of one of them had been torn in half and sellotaped together. There was a piece of avocado skin stuck to one of the others, something that I guessed was red wine on another, and a strong smell of rotting vegetables.

‘You are sure that they are all there?' I asked anxiously. ‘Every single page? Nothing missing?'

‘I think so. I did go through them.'

‘I just can't believe we've got them back.' I was light-headed with relief.

Malcolm leaned forward and put a finger on the sellotaped cover sheet.

‘I had to stick this back together. And the actual script, that was torn too, but it's all here.'

I began to look through the exam papers.

‘Are you really going to ask someone to mark these in this state?' Stephen wrinkled his nose in distaste.

I plucked a piece of wilted lettuce leaf off one of the pages. ‘No, we'll have them transcribed. That's what we're going to do with the others, the ones that have been…' I was suddenly aware of the swimming pool lying only yards away from me in the darkness of the garden.

‘Anyway,' I went on hurriedly, ‘these don't seem too bad considering that they've been in the dustbin.'

‘They had some newspaper wrapped round them,' Malcolm said.

‘When is the rubbish collected?' Stephen asked.

‘Tomorrow morning.'

We contemplated this narrow escape.

I stole a glance at Malcolm. He had changed out of his dark suit into jeans and a crumpled shirt. His hair was tousled and there was a dusting of pale stubble on the lower half of his face. The lines around his mouth and nose were deeper than I remembered, but had I ever really looked at him before? For me he had always worn a label: ‘Colleague's husband: kind, reliable, not very interesting and out of bounds anyway'. Was there something I hadn't noticed? Certainly that Scottish accent was very attractive and although I didn't really like fair men myself … He looked up and his eyes met mine. I looked away in confusion. I thought, It's the day of Margaret's funeral and I'm sitting here at her kitchen table, wondering whether I fancy her husband.

‘But where are my manners?' Malcolm said. ‘I haven't so much as offered you a cup of tea? Or perhaps a brandy, Cassandra? You look as if you need it.'

‘Tea would be great.'

Malcolm got up and put the kettle on.

‘Are you going to take the papers home with you, Cassandra?'

‘I think, just to be on the safe side, we'd better take them round to the college and get the porter to lock them away.'

Malcolm turned and leaned against the sink with his legs crossed at the ankle as he waited for the kettle to boil. None of us spoke. It wasn't a comfortable silence. I didn't want to catch Malcolm's eye again. I fixed my gaze on the second hand going round on the kitchen clock. It was one of those ultra-modern ones; just a white disc, no numbers, and a stainless steel surround like a porthole. It matched the rest of the expensive, streamlined kitchen. Eleven forty-five. I found myself yawning, but it was as much from nervousness as tiredness. There was something I had to say.