Murder Is Academic (7 page)

‘Really, Cassandra, for an intelligent woman, you are remarkably stupid sometimes. For all you know Lucy could have had a string of jealous lovers. She might have married, too, like Margaret!'

Chapter Five

From a bench outside the French windows of the Senior Common Room, I could hear a murmur of conversation from within. The end of term lunch of salmon and mayonnaise, strawberries and cream was over and I had slipped out with my cup of coffee. The storm of the previous night had cleared the air and the fine weather had returned. The carefully tended garden with the trees, its shaved lawns and its flower-beds spread out before me in the sunshine. When I came for my interview at St Etheldreda's, I had been charmed by the domestic scale of its neo-Georgian revival architecture, and red brick and white paint, like an immense doll's house. It was comforting to think that so many students and teachers had wandered in this garden for so long. The size of the copper beech testified to that. Probably it had been here before the college.

I leaned back, closed my eyes and let the sun soak into me.

First thing that morning I had gone into the college registry and got out Lucy Hambleton's file. I looked at the next of kin box: Angela Hambleton. It was scrawled in a casual hand, one that was familiar to me from the letters. I felt a pang at the sight of that routine entry, which she little suspected would one day be needed. I skimmed the rest of the form. There was nothing to suggest she had ever been married. I noted that she was twenty-eight, a mature student in fact. I remembered now that she had been a bit older than the normal postgraduate. That made me feel a bit better about her relationship with Margaret. I saw she had been working as a qualified librarian at Durham University before being accepted to do a PhD at St Etheldreda's, working under Alison Stirling, our specialist in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature. Because Lucy wasn't working on the nineteenth century, I hadn't had much to do with her. I looked at the photograph attached to the form: a narrow, bony face with a nose that was very slightly crooked, shoulder-length dark hair swept back from her face. Her chin was tilted up a little: there was something confident, even challenging, in her expression. The knowledge that she had less than a year to live added a poignancy, a kind of innocence to the photograph.

A shadow fell on my face. I opened my eyes.

‘You look as if you need a drink.'

Alison was standing next to me, holding two glasses of wine. I squinted up at her. She was one of those big women who suit being a little overweight.

‘Are you OK?' she said.

‘Mmm, just came out to be on my own for a few minutes. The social effort was just too much.'

‘Know what you mean.' She made a face. ‘Still, I suppose it wouldn't have done to cancel the end of term party. Want me to leave you alone?'

‘No, no,' I patted the bench next to me.

She handed me a glass and sat down.

‘At least it means the year's over, and what a hell of a year it's been,' Alison said. ‘First, Lucy – one of the most promising postgrads I've ever supervised by the way, tragic waste – and now Margaret. Makes you think, doesn't it?'

I shot a sideways glance at her. She had lifted her face up to receive the sun. Her hair fell back from her forehead. She was nearly fifty, but her hair was still so dark, nearly black. There was just one white streak, so striking that you might have thought she'd dyed it.

‘
What
does it make you think?' I asked.

‘Well, you know,
carpe diem
and all that, gather ye rosebuds while ye may. We none of us know how long we've got.'

I relaxed. It wasn't likely that she knew about Lucy and Margaret, but just for a moment I had wondered …

‘Too true,' I said.

Alison looked at me with an expression so consciously sly that it was comical.

‘So, how about you and that boyfriend of yours, Cass?' she said. ‘You've been hanging about long enough. Why don't you get married? How old is he, forty? Just right for you. No point in hanging about, especially if you want to have children.'

She was a little drunk, I realized. I was feeling light-headed, too, less from alcohol than from tiredness.

‘There's just the small point that he hasn't actually asked me. A technicality, I know…'

‘Oh, come on. If you gave him the
slightest
encouragement … I've seen the way he looks at you when he thinks no one's looking. Don't look at me like that, you know I'm right.'

I had a mental image of Stephen sitting up in bed with an outraged expression in his face. We had made things up, but our goodnights had still been cool. I had decided I wouldn't ring him for a few days.

‘I don't think we're all that well suited, to tell you the truth. Anyway, I've got no intention of getting married again. Twice is enough, too much even.'

‘Twice? Oh, yes, I'd forgotten. But the first time: that was when you were a student, wasn't it? Just boy-and-girl stuff. A false start.'

‘To lose one husband may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.'

Aiden emerged from the other French windows further down the façade. With an air of manifest relief he took a packet of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and lit up. I found myself wishing that some of the smoke would drift my way.

I was about to beckon him over to bum a fag off him, when Alison shook her head and frowned at me.

I was amused. ‘You really don't like him, do you?'

‘I know we needed new blood in the department, but why did Margaret and Lawrence have to choose Aiden?' she grumbled.

‘That book on Coleridge – very impressive. And he's popular with students.'

‘Too popular. Thinks he's a cross between Lord Byron and Jack Nicholson.'

I smiled. He did look a bit like a young Jack Nicholson.

‘He does have a certain louche charm.'

His hand went to his hair in an automatic smoothing gesture. He did this so often that it seemed as though it might account for his receding hairline.

‘I asked him why he always wears black – such an affectation,' Alison said.

‘A lot of young people do that.'

‘He's not that young – must be at least thirty. Anyway, he said, “I'm not in mourning for my life, if that's what you're thinking”, and he positively leered at me.'

‘Leered? How very Edwardian! Pity he hasn't got a moustache to twirl!'

Alison laughed. ‘Oh, I know I'm an intolerant old bat, but I do like the students to be students and the members of staff to be members of staff. I've seen him in the bar, surrounded by giggling girls. I only hope he's not sleeping with any of them – or all of them.'

Lawrence appeared at the French windows a few feet away.

How much had he heard, I wondered.

‘Ah, Cassandra, there you are,' he said, his tone carrying the implication that it was quite unreasonable of me to be sitting here in the sun when he had been searching for me inside. ‘I wonder, could you spare me a few minutes? In my office?'

*   *   *

‘I want to offer you the position of Acting Head of Department.'

Strangely enough, this possibility hadn't occurred to me before. I'd never thought of myself as an administrator, and if I'd thought at all about who would replace Margaret – and my feet had hardly touched the ground since she died – I'd just assumed that after a decent interval her job would be advertised. Of course, it could take months to get the right person, so it made sense that someone would be in charge in the meantime, and why shouldn't that someone be me? I had a much stronger publication record than either Merfyn or Alison, and I was senior to Aiden, who'd only been with us a year. But still, there was something I didn't understand here. It was more to do with Lawrence's manner than his actual words.

‘So … just for a few months, until we find a replacement?'

Lawrence was sitting in a high leather chair behind a huge mahogany desk, and I was sitting in an armchair on the other side. The arrangement, intended to disguise the fact that he was several inches shorter than me, actually made me more aware of it. It was warm in his office, but he hadn't unbuttoned the jacket of the pinstriped suit he always wore.

‘A little longer, say a year? There'll be a few hundred a year on your salary, of course.'

I didn't say anything.

‘And perhaps a grade up the scale. I can't really offer you more than that,' he said, misinterpreting the puzzled expression on my face.

The gleaming surface of his desk was bare except for a pad of paper and a silver propelling pencil. He picked it up and began to slide it up and down between his fingers.

‘But – a year? I don't understand. We'll have someone in place before then, won't we?'

What he said next was even more unexpected.

‘As the only department that doesn't teach a language, the English Literature Department has always been something of an anomaly. And a relatively recent one at that.'

It was true that the college had always specialized in languages. The English department dated only from the 1950s when the place had been run by a power-mad literary critic intent on founding an empire. St Etheldreda's had been founded in 1920 by a manufacturer of patent foods and pills as a memorial to his only son, killed in the First World War. He had intended to promote internationalism by educating the future wives and mothers of the nation in the language and cultures of other countries.

Lawrence leant forward, hands clasped in front of him on the desk. The pale blue eyes looked into mine. He was waiting for a response.

‘You surely haven't called me to discuss the history of the college?' I said.

‘Quite right. It's the future of the college that I have to consider, rather than its past, Cassandra. As you know, the next Research Assessment Exercise takes place in approximately eighteen months' time. Our future funding is absolutely dependent on our performance. By this time next year, I want absolutely every single academic in this college to be able to contribute publications of some significance for our submission to the RAE.'

‘Ah.' The penny had dropped.

‘I see we understand each other.'

Lawrence opened a drawer in his desk and took out a folder. ‘A few months ago I requested members of staff to submit details of their publications to me as a dummy run. You will remember doing that yourself, Cassandra.'

He pulled out a single sheet of paper and held it out to me.

‘This is Alison Stirling's submission.'

There were a couple of book reviews and an article for a middlebrow journal,
Writers and their Times.

‘Woefully inadequate, you'll have to agree. And as for Merfyn…' He spread his hands in a gesture of dismissal. ‘Worse than inadequate: embarrassing. It used to be possible to build a whole career on a book that hadn't been written. No longer.'

‘This really isn't fair,' I protested. ‘They're both excellent teachers, first-rate in Alison's case.'

‘That doesn't cut any ice with our lords and masters these days, unless it's backed up by publications. I can't give you more than a year to turn things round.'

‘And then what?'

Lawrence shrugged.

I gaped at him. ‘You can't do that!'

‘I think you'll find that the board of trustees will back me up. Of course, we'd be sorry to lose you and Aiden Frazer, fine academics both of you, but—' He shook his head. ‘Two out of four, it just isn't enough.'

I was having difficulty taking this in.

Lawrence said, ‘Do you accept my offer, Cassandra?'

He leant forward, hands clasped, and looked into my eyes. I needed time to think. I shifted my gaze. My attention was caught momentarily by a flicker of light at the edge of my vision: the Virginia creeper around the casement window sifted the sunlight into dappled patterns on the carpet. A perplexed bluebottle was throwing itself against the window and buzzing fiercely. Lawrence cleared his throat. My moment of indecision had gone on too long. I thought of Merfyn and Alison, who had a sick husband dependent on her. They were both pushing fifty and neither of them would ever get another job. Even for me it would be touch and go. I thought of my bank balance, my mortgage and my book-laden house out in the fens. Academic life is like a game of musical chairs these days; every now and then someone takes a chair away. I couldn't risk being the one left standing when the music stopped.

‘I'll do it.'

‘You'd better move into Margaret's office so that you'll have Cathy at hand.'

Cathy! Why hadn't I thought of her? She was struggling alone to raise a teenage daughter and was as vulnerable as any of us.

‘What about Cathy? Would she also have to go, along with the rest of us?'

Lawrence shook his head. ‘Secretarial skill is transferable. She could be deployed elsewhere in the college.'

As I was getting up to go, another thought struck me.

‘Did you tell Margaret that you were thinking of closing the department?' I asked Lawrence.

There was a pause. He pushed his chair back into a patch of sunshine. The strong light behind him blurred his features so that I couldn't read his expression.

At last he said. ‘Not in so many words. But she would have been a fool if she hadn't realized that the writing was on the wall. And, whatever else she might have been, Margaret was no fool.'

*   *   *

‘Why didn't Margaret tell me what was going on?' I asked Cathy.

It was the following day and we were sitting over a cup of coffee in Margaret's office. The night before, I'd slept twelve hours and woken up feeling as if I'd been under an anaesthetic. I still felt groggy. Cathy didn't look too good either. She was pale and her eyes were bloodshot. I'd never seen her so subdued. Even her dark, springy hair seemed flatter than usual.