Murder Is Academic (8 page)

‘I think she was trying to get Alison and Merfyn up to speed first,' Cathy said. ‘And that was starting to happen. At least, I know that a couple of weeks ago Alison gave Margaret an outline for an article that she thought she might write.'

‘Every little helps.'

The cornerstones of our RAE submission would have to be Margaret's biography of Charlotte Yonge, I thought, and my own book on Victorian poetry that was nearly finished.

‘And then there's Aiden,' I said, thinking aloud. ‘No problems there.'

Cathy seemed about to say something, then she shook her head.

‘What's up?' I asked.

She shook her head. ‘Margaret did say something about Aiden. I can't quite remember what, but I know she thought there was a problem.'

I'd have to look into that.

‘But Alison and Merfyn know what the situation is?'

Cathy nodded. ‘She put a rocket under them. I don't know exactly what she said, of course, but I saw Merfyn when he came out: he looked a bit shaken up. He was supposed to come and see her again before the end of term.'

‘When exactly?'

Margaret's office diary was lying on the desk beside us. Cathy reached for it and flicked it open. She ran her finger down the pages for the previous week.

‘Oh,' she said.

I gave her a look of enquiry. She turned the diary towards me and pointed to the entry.

3.30 p.m. on the previous Friday.

The day of the funeral.

The entry had been made in Margaret's own neat hand. After it, in brackets, she'd written
‘with first chapter of book.'

I sighed. ‘I'd better find out what's going on.'

‘I'll ring him and ask him to come and see you, shall I?'

‘No, no, I'll do it. I don't want him to feel that I'm … well, that I'm…'

‘Pulling rank?' She looked at me quizzically.

‘I want to tread carefully.'

Cathy pushed her glasses up onto her hair, got to her feet, and collected the coffee mugs. She stood there hesitating and frowning. I wondered what she wanted to say. She'd worked closely with Margaret, and had probably known her better than anyone else in the department. If anyone had known what was going on between Margaret and Lucy, it would have been Cathy.

She put the mugs back on the table, but still didn't speak.

‘What is it, Cathy?'

‘Would I still be kept on if, you know, if things came to the worst? Margaret told me that I'd be OK. She knew I was worried about Hannah – with her still being at school – and I don't get much from her dad in the way of maintenance.'

‘Sorry, of course, I should have mentioned that earlier. The college would keep you on. Lawrence said so. You'll be all right, I promise.'

When she had gone, I let myself have a few minutes to gather my thoughts. Margaret's office was a spacious room on the first floor of the college. The sun was striking through the Venetian blinds onto a deep red Persian rug. That wasn't college issue, nor was the single painting on the wall, an abstract of red, black and white squares. I'd have to take them round to Malcolm, along with her other personal possessions. There wouldn't be much. Unlike most academics – my office was a chaos of books and paper – Margaret was a minimalist. I opened the desk drawer. There was a box of Tampax, a toothbrush in a case, a small tube of toothpaste, a packet of Fisherman's Friend, and nothing else. The desk was almost bare, too. The only decorative object was a small round black lacquer box containing paperclips. I looked at it more closely. On the lid was a painting of a woman swathed in white furs standing in a sleigh pulled by a dappled horse. The strong, clear colours – red, yellow, orange – stood out sharply against the black background. It looked like an illustration to a fairy tale, but I couldn't quite think what.

With an effort I turned my attention back to the matter in hand. What was I going to say to Merfyn?

When I'd first met him about fifteen years ago, he was a dashing young lecturer with a penchant for wearing cloaks and fedoras, and I was a humble research student. I was in awe of him. He'd recently published some groundbreaking articles on the super-natural in Victorian fiction and was known to be working on an important book on the subject. He seemed light-years ahead of me, in a different league altogether. He'd been something of a mentor. But over the years there'd been a gradual shift in our positions. Merfyn's book didn't appear – and people stopped expecting it to. When my own book on Victorian women poets was published, I suddenly realized that I hadn't just drawn level with Merfyn, I had overtaken him. Merfyn still talked as though the book would be finished one day, but I didn't really believe it any more and I wondered if he did.

Putting this discussion off wasn't helping. I punched in the number of Merfyn's extension, cravenly hoping that he wouldn't answer or that, if he did, he wouldn't be free. But he did, and he was; he would come straight round to my office.

When he arrived, he was wearing the same linen suit, even more crumpled, that he had worn on the day of the funeral. I gestured towards two armchairs on either side of a coffee table. He sank into one and placed a decrepit briefcase at his feet. I took the chair opposite.

There was a moment when neither of us seemed to know what to say.

‘How's Celia?' I asked. Merfyn's wife was a high-flying civil servant in the Home Office.

‘Oh, fine. She's always complaining about her minister, but she loves it all really.'

‘And the girls?'

‘Oh, fine, fine.'

There was a short silence.

I took a deep breath, but before I could plunge in, Merfyn said, ‘I don't suppose you'll feel that congratulations are in order, Cass, under the circumstances, but for what it's worth, I'm sure you're the right person to take over from Margaret.'

‘Thanks, Merfyn. Yes, it's something of a poisoned chalice. You know, we really have got our backs to the wall.'

He nodded. ‘The RAE, yes, I know.'

He delved into his case and pulled out a bulging blue cardboard folder. He presented it to me with a flourish.

‘I think this will relieve your mind to a certain extent.'

Pulling out the top page, I saw it was headed ‘Chapter One'.

‘What's this? It's not…?'

Merfyn was beaming all over his face.

‘It is? It's your book? But that's…'

For a few moments, words failed me.

‘It's, well, what can I say? It's just great!'

‘No need to hide your amazement,' Merfyn said. ‘I'm pretty surprised myself. And my publishers must have despaired of it years ago. I'll have to break it to them gently, they might have a collective heart attack!'

I read out loud the title of the first chapter. ‘
“Is there anyone there?” Spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century.
Wow! How much is there here?'

‘First four chapters. I'll push on with it over the summer. And I've got a few weeks' study leave in the Lent term next year. I've got masses of material, some of it partly written up. I've never quite been able to work out how to put it all together until now. It could be finished in the spring if I really go at it.'

I flipped over the pages of Merfyn's typescript, reading a sentence here and there.

‘This looks absolutely fascinating. Didn't people like Ruskin and Tennyson and Browning attend séances in the 1860s?'

‘Absolutely right. They really took it seriously. Of course mediums were often exposed as charlatans, but not always by any means. Have you heard of the American medium, John Dunglas Home?'

I shook my head.

Merfyn leaned forward, clasped his hands between his knees and prepared to give me a little lecture. ‘He took London society by storm in the 1860s. The most extraordinary things happened at his séances; the room vibrated, objects flew about, people were chilled by cool breezes, music was produced by invisible instruments. On one occasion, reputable witnesses claimed to have seen him float in through a first-floor window.'

‘Some sort of hypnosis?' I hazarded.

‘Perhaps. Or maybe some sort of superior conjuring trick.'

Absently, I went on turning the pages. Hadn't I heard him say something like this before? Something about a conjuring trick? When had that been?

‘Actually,' he was continuing, ‘in Home's case, no one managed to prove that he was a fraud.'

A picture was forming in my mind: Merfyn and I pausing on a threshold, about to move from the brightness of a sunny day into a dim interior.

‘One has to approach all this with an open mind. Just occasionally, the evidence is extraordinarily compelling. In fact…' His voice trailed away.

When had that been? And what exactly had he said to me?

Merfyn was asking me a question.

‘What was that?' I asked.

‘I said, have you ever been to a séance, Cassandra?'

I shook my head.

‘You don't believe that … well, that something of us could survive after death?' he asked.

‘I don't say that exactly. But surely the whole spiritualism thing – mediums and séances – that's all phoney isn't it?'

With an air of decision Merfyn sat up straight and said. ‘Can I confide in you, Cassandra?'

Oh dear, I thought. When someone asks you that, it's never really a question, is it? He scarcely paused for breath, before plunging on.

‘That's how my writer's block was cured, Cassandra. At a séance.'

‘At a séance?'

My voice carried more disbelief than I had intended. Merfyn flushed.

‘I might have known you'd react like this. Conventional academic thinking is so blinkered. Are you going to let me explain, or are you just going to shoot me down in flames?'

‘OK, OK. All right, go on.'

‘Look, I was desperate. I'd had so many false starts with the book, given up so many times, and then Margaret told me that I was jeopardizing the future of the department, so I
had
to produce something.'

‘But why did you think going to a séance would help?'

‘I thought I might begin the book with a description of a séance. I was as sceptical as you are. I thought it might be a way in, that's all. To begin with, nothing happened. There were one or two messages for other people – breathtaking in their banality, to be perfectly honest. And then something quite different happened.'

Merfyn narrowed his eyes in concentration, as if he was visualizing the scene.

‘What?' I said. ‘What happened??'

‘The medium started groping around the table. One of the others seemed to know what she wanted. There was a pen and some paper in the middle of the table. He pushed it towards her and then, well, something extraordinary happened.'

Despite my scepticism, I was sitting on the edge of my seat.

‘She pushed it towards me,' Merfyn said, ‘and the man sitting next to me nudged me to let me know that I was meant to pick it up. Then, well, it's difficult to describe, but I seemed to slip into a kind of trance, my hand started moving of its own accord, and I just found myself writing, on and on. And when I'd finished there were several pages. What I'd got was the beginning of my book, more or less as it is there.'

He gestured towards the folder that I was still holding on my knee.

I stared at him, speechless.

And it was at that precise moment that there was a knocking sound, scarcely audible. A gentle rat-tat-tat. Merfyn's eyes widened. My mouth went dry. Neither of us spoke and then it came again, a little louder. Our heads swivelled towards the door. The handle turned, it slid open, Cathy's dark curly hair and then her face appeared round the edge of the door.

‘I'm frightfully sorry, I wouldn't have interrupted you, but I've got Lawrence on the line. He needs to know immediately if you can attend a meeting for departmental heads at ten o'clock on Monday morning.'

‘OK, don't worry, tell him that's fine.'

She closed the door.

Merfyn caught my eye and grinned. I couldn't help grinning back.

‘I don't know what the hell I thought that was,' I said. ‘But, look, Merfyn, this isn't a laughing matter, is it? What exactly are you trying to tell me? Where does the medium come into it?'

‘Oh, she's just the channel,' he said. ‘You must have heard of automatic writing.'

‘So you think someone else, someone who's dead…?'

He nodded. ‘And from various hints that he's dropped, it's pretty clear who it is.'

‘So…?'

‘I think it's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.'

Was he pulling my leg? One glance at Merfyn told me that he was entirely serious.

‘You really mean to tell me that you think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is dictating your book to you?'

Merfyn looked uncomfortable. ‘Not exactly that, that would be cheating really, wouldn't it? It's more like a collaboration. I've done all the research, he helps me to put it all together, get it down on paper. It's not really so surprising, Conan Doyle was a fervent believer in spiritualism, you know. He wants to make sure I get things right.'

We sat in silence as I tried to work out the implications of this. There had been a pair of women writers at the end of the nineteenth century – Somerville and Ross, was it? – didn't one of them claim that they had gone on writing together after the death of the other? I felt a powerful resistance to the idea and the more I thought about it, the more problems I could see. There was the question of academic detachment, for one thing. If the book turned into a polemic in support of spiritualism, no reputable academic publisher would touch it with a bargepole. I fingered the blue cardboard folder, which was still on my lap.

‘Perhaps we could meet again when I've had a chance to read this?' I said.