Authors: Antonia Fraser
Oxford Blood (6 page)
It was silent on Staircase Thirteen. Visitors were not admitted to Rochester after 11.30 p.m. (although no check was made as to whether all the many visitors freely admitted throughout the day had actually left). Rochester's own undergraduates and dons were of course at liberty to move freely about the college, its two main quadrangles and the newly built library all night if they so pleased. The library, a recent gift of a rich Turk, reposed beyond the Hawksmoor quadrangle, all glass and steel, looking like some vast beached ship or ark which had sailed into classical Oxford on some vast flood tide, and been deposited there unable to float away again. There were still lights burning in the library.
After a while the wooden steps of Staircase Thirteen creaked a little as though someone was ascending. But then the steps creaked sometimes of their own accord when there was no one there at all. When a door opened on the top landing, the noise was considerable. Saffron's voice, indistinct, and his characteristic arrogant laugh could be heard. Tiggie Jones' voice was higher and clearer. She was laughing too, though giggling might be a better word. Tiggie was saying something like: 'Oh Saffer, don't, don't be a naughty boy.' There was scuffling and more laughing. The door shut.
Then there were footsteps, heavy footsteps, descending.
After that, there was a gasp, a stifled cry or shout, then a heavy protracted crash, as of a body rolling over and over down a staircase. Then there was complete silence.
Nothing happened at all. No door opened on the various landings. Professor Mossbanker's door remained shut, which was just as well for something which looked horribly inert and lifeless lay right across it, and it was doubtful that the professor could have managed to open it in any case.
After about five minutes the creakings resumed. Someone was coming very carefully and softly indeed down the stairs. There was a noise as of a body being dragged down the stairs to the basement.
A few minutes later the deep cyclical hum of a washing machine was heard from the depths of the building, the noise loud and sepulchral in the night silence.
The washing machine continued to revolve ardently, but its noise could not of course wake the dead man lying beside it. It was not until sometime later that Professor Mossbanker, in the absence of lights, stumbled down to the basement. In the darkness of the launderette the light of the machine glowed at him. He stood staring at it for quite a long time, as if not quite comprehending what he saw. Then he bent over the dark shape at his feet, much as the prowler had done earlier.
Professor Mossbanker gave a deep sigh, or something more like a sob than a sigh.
6
No Long Shadows
The police came to the conclusion that Bevis Ian Marcus (known to his friends as Bim) had died as a result of a late night fall down a steep staircase in Rochester College.
The nickname 'Bim' was not actually used by anyone at the inquest. It would have doubtless seemed too cosy, too intimate for such a grim occasion as an inquest on a twenty-year-old undergraduate who had broken his neck following some kind of party. Those who gave evidence included Miss Antigone Rose Jones, twenty-three, of Launceston Place, SW, Saffron Ivo Charles Iverstone, commonly known as Viscount Saffron, twenty, of Rochester College, and Professor Claud Lionel Mossbanker, of Chillington Road, North Oxford. Sundry other undergraduates, female as well as male, who had seen Bevis Ian Marcus on the last evening of his life gave evidence. These undergraduates rather selfconsciously also referred to him as Bevis, since that was what the coroner called him. One of the girls, who was at Rochester, sobbed a bit, thinking how Bim had hated the name, virtually denying its existence, pretending his real name was something like Brian, and how he would have hated the coroner announcing it like that, so persistently, for all the world to hear.
But then the girl, Magdalen Mary Irina Poliakoff, twenty, (known to her friends as Magda), was already tremulous with guilt over the death of Bim. It was her belief that if she had not rejected Bim's invitation to the cinema on the grounds that she had an essay to write, he, Bim, would not have fallen down the fatal Staircase Thirteen.
Magda Poliakoff needed little prompting to share this feeling of guilt with the coroner.
'But in any case you thought he was drunk?' asked the coroner, a doctor with a cynical view of the drinking habits of undergraduates. 'Quite apart from the question of your work, Miss Poliakoff, the real
reason he turned you off, as you have just put it, the deceased that is, was because he had been drinking. Drinking, in your opinion, all day.'
'Since lunch,' and Magda Poliakoff shot a defiant look at Saffer and Tiggie Jones sitting on the opposite side of the small court room. 'She -whoever she is - forced him to go to lunch, actually put her arm round his neck, pulled him away. I mean I was just sitting there when it happened. And then of course - well, you know what
he's
like—' She transferred her trembling but still venomous gaze to Saffron! 'Er -
Bevis
wasn't like that. Like them. He was jolly poor. And he worked jolly hard. Most of the time, anyway. If only he hadn't been on the same staircase as
Lord
Saffron. People like him shouldn't be allowed places at university when there are plenty of other people—'
'Now Miss Poliakoff,' said the doctor firmly but kindly. 'We are here to establish the truth about Bevis Marcus' death, if we can, not to discuss the merits or otherwise of the admissions policy of the University.' He paused and then went on: 'Can I take it then, Miss Poliakoff, that by seven p.m., Mr Marcus was in your opinion too drunk to know what he was doing?'
It was the question of the bruises as Jemima reported to Cass Brinsley later that day, sitting in their favourite local restaurant, Monsieur Thompson's, in the dell at the end of Kensington Park Road.
'Certainly he died of a broken neck caused by a fall. The medical evidence is quite clear on that point. But what caused the foil? Was there a fight? At the top of the staircase causing the fall. But of course Bim had had some kind of punch-up, totally drunk, earlier in the day. The police are satisfied it was an accident. A tragic - but not atypical -undergraduate accident, they called it. No second fight.'
'Saffron denied it strongly,' Cass pointed out. 'And Miss Tiggie lones -my God, what a sexy-looking girl! Are those eyelashes real? - Miss Tiggie backed him up. They finished drinking, because they finished the last bottle of champagne, no less, and Bim stumbled away - Saffer's words -to his own room - as they supposed. Shall I ever meet her, do you suppose?'
'I very much doubt it.' Jemima sounded cold. 'Since I hope not to meet her again myself. And I doubt whether Tiggie Jones features a great deal in Lincoln's Inn Fields, wandering about on her own, singing a happy song.'
'Ah well. The point is, does that mean she's a liar as well?'
'To be fair, not necessarily,' said Jemima who saw herself as someone who always did try to be fair. 'It was all very mysterious as well as tragic. But the coroner was sufficiently satisfied to go for accidental death.'
'As you know, Professor Mossbanker, or Proffy, as your beguiling friend Miss Tiggie calls him, found the body in the middle of the night, having been aroused by the noise of what he called the infernal washing machine. Apparently he's always carrying on about the noise it made if used late at night. A few minutes later - he was very clear about it - Saffer accompanied by Tiggie came
down
the staircase. Of course she shouldn't have been in the college so late, but under the circumstances the professor wasn't going to complain. In any case, everybody at Oxford seems to turn a blind eye to that kind of thing these days, officially that is. Their story was that Tiggie wanted to go to the loo on the ground floor and Saffer was escorting her.'
'A likely story?' queried Cass.
'Not altogether unlikely, given the lack of bathrooms and loos in the former all-male colleges at Oxford. I've never seen such squalor. That's one advantage we had in all-women's colleges, bathrooms; but I digress. Not an altogether unlikely story. Look at it like this. If Saffron had really had a fight with the unfortunate Bim, thrown him or caused him to fall down the staircase, I can't believe he would have waited till he heard Proffy emerge, and then come down the stairs plus Miss
T
. He would either have tried to help straightaway, the decent reaction, or kept well clear of the proceedings altogether.'
'Then there's the whole question of Miss Tiggie and the fight, isn't there?' pursued Cass, pouring Sancerre purposefully into his own glass, and after a gentle reminder into Jemima's too. (As Cass normally had excellent manners, Jemima privately put this aberration down to distracting thoughts of Tiggie Jones.) 'I may be prejudiced in her favour by her eyelashes,' went on Cass, unaware of these cross reflections, 'but supposing Bim did fall or was pushed down the staircase in Saffer's presence, would Tiggie really have let him calmly return to his own room, leaving Bim in a crumpled heap at the bottom, right at the bottom, in the launderette?'
'I'm not so prejudiced that I can't agree to that,' Jemima was sipping away happily at her refilled glass. 'She'd have swooped down on him like some dreadful little bat and given him some terrifyingly predatory form of First Aid. However that's not the real mystery. The real mystery to me is why Bim Marcus set the washing machine in motion. The police think he was badly concussed. Crawled there, set it in motion and then died. It's still odd. But concussion - and alcohol - does odd things to you.'
'Interested in this investigation, darling?' Cass was only half teasing. When Jemima's unofficial criminal investigations took over from her official sociological ones for Megalith, she was apt to have even less time for Cass for a month or two: Cass Brinsley, finding himself for some reason put in mind of the big black eyes and long black eyelashes of Tiggie Jones, thought he would like to have notice of an extended period of absence on Jemima's part. To give such notice was not exactly in their (unspoken) contract of a liberated relationship; any more than Cass had given Jemima notice of finding Flora Hereford, the new pupil in his Chambers, astonishingly attractive.
Jemima however had somehow suspected it and reacted by having a devil-may-care affair with a handsome cameraman at Megalith. Well, she was not called Jemima Shore Investigator for nothing. Sometimes Cass even wondered whether some more permanent arrangement might give him yet more joy, much less heartache. In what should such an arrangement consist? There was one obvious kind of arrangement . . . Cass, wryly certain that such a thought had never crossed Jemima's own mind, put it resolutely from his own.
'I'm interested in the investigation, yes,' Jemima, blithely unaware, cut across his thoughts. 'The nurse's story grabbed me from the start, as you know. I'm not talking about exposure here, of course: Saffron's secret is safe with me, if it is his secret. But I can't rid myself of a feeling - my famous instinct rears its head here - that it's not altogether a coincidence that Bim Marcus died on Saffron's staircase, as a result of a quite unforeseen association with Saffron. They weren't even friends. Tiggie pushed Bim into the party. The police won't buy it - evidence not instinct is what we are after, my dear, as Detective Chief Inspector Gary Harwood of the Oxford CID informed me - but I'm privately wondering whether the right man actually fell down that winding staircase. Let's just suppose someone thought
Saffron
was lurching down to his room, and instead got the wretched Bim in the darkness - the two men were quite alike in an odd way, the same height and build - then we have to think of anyone who would wish Saffron ill. Quite a few in Oxford no doubt, though murder is perhaps going a bit far. What is more, if Saffron is or rather was the target,
that
brings us back to Nurse Elsie's death bed revelation,' concluded Jemima triumphantly.
'I follow your argument about Bim and Saffron on the stairs. You mean, no one could have expected Bim to be up at that time? But I still don't get the Nurse Elsie connection.'
'Don't you see, darling? I know you think I'm obsessed with Nurse Elsie - instinct again, and you feel about my instinct roughly as does Detective Chief Inspector Harwood—'
'Not all your instincts,' interposed Cass mildly.
Jemima paid no attention but swept enthusiastically on. 'Don't you see that Nurse Elsie revealed Saffron to be a kind of changeling, the happy accident, whose appearance, late in his parents' life, did horrible Andrew Iverstone and horrible Daphne Iverstone out of their inheritance? And by implication, that nice fellow Jack, I have to admit. That's a lot of enemies. Saffron is not married, has no children; if he died on that staircase, Andrew, and in the course of time Jack, would still inherit Saffron Ivy.'
'That's true whether Saffron is a changeling or not,' pointed out Cass.
Jemima sighed.
'I know. I have to say that I still don't get the connection. I just think there
is
a connection between Nurse Elsie and the Rochester College death. For one thing, there were so many of the Iverstone family at the Hospice those last days - quite out of the blue. Saffron himself revealed that he'd been there, and Daphne Iverstone, she was there too. From what Sister Imelda said, I think she came on the last day of all. She referred to another old friend, "One of Nurse Elsie's ladies", and that could have been Daphne. Then there were the Iverstone brother and sister.'
