Parting Breath

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Parting Breath

A C. D. Sloan Mystery

Catherine Aird

For Caroline Susan Muire McIntosh

– with love

Oh, what is death but parting breath?

“Macpherson's Farewell” by Robert Burns

1 Salute

‘The trouble with universities,' pronounced Professor Tomlin, ‘is the undergraduates.'

‘Couldn't agree with you more, old chap,' said his colleague Neil Carruthers cheerfully. ‘Pass the salt, though, would you, there's a good fellow. I can manage very well without the students, bless their tiny hearts, but not without the salt.'

‘You must admit,' put in Bernard Watkinson, Professor of Modern History, casting an eye over the dining hall, which was thronged with young men and women, ‘that they do lend a certain savour to the place.'

‘Quieter without them, though,' said Tomlin, obliging Carruthers with the salt cellar. It was a very fine salt cellar – part of a set in modern silver gilt, a legacy from a former student of Tarsus College who had made money, if not good, in the world of commerce, and who had bequeathed his collection of silver to his old College. The table along which Professor Tomlin slid it was a genuine refectory one bought by an astute Bursar of his day at a knockdown price from a monastery disestablished by King Henry the Eighth. The chairs, which led a harder life, were reproduction and were renewed at intervals by the present Bursar, John Hardiman.

A sudden burst of noisy chatter from the Buttery end of the Hall provoked Professor Tomlin into speech again.

‘Much quieter without them,' he said.

‘That's true.' Neil Carruthers always made an especial point of agreeing with people whenever he could. As he was Reader in Moral Philosophy this was not, in the nature of things, very often.

‘They always do take a little time to settle down after the summer vac.,' observed Roger Franklyn Hedden. He was a lecturer in sociology and always seemed to be making allowances for something or someone.

‘And we always take a little time to get used to them again,' grunted Professor Simon Mautby. ‘At least, I do.' Mautby was by far the most authoritarian member of the teaching fraternity of the College, and the least popular. On his part he was widely known not to be a student lover.

‘Oh, yes,' said Carruthers pleasantly, ‘you stayed on through the vac., didn't you? I don't know how you can manage without a break, Mautby. I certainly couldn't.'

‘Can't leave my plants and animals,' said Mautby, who held the Chair of Ecological Studies at the University of Calleshire. ‘They need proper care and attention all the year round. Experiments don't always finish exactly at the end of term and you can't get a good lab steward these days for love or money.'

Nobody said anything to this. Everyone present knew that Professor Mautby's standards were so exacting and his views on discipline so strict that he rarely kept any of his lab staff for long.

‘It's all right for the rest of you,' the scientist added a trifle acidly into the little silence that had followed his pronouncement; ‘dead subjects are different.'

The experienced Carruthers did not rise to this. Moral Philosophy, in his view, was very much alive, anyway, and likely to be kept alive by human vagary, which was not – by any stretch of the imagination – dead. Instead he remarked to Hedden, ‘You stayed up, too, didn't you, Roger?'

‘Part of the time,' said the sociologist. ‘I was working on my book. You know how it is – publish or perish.'

Peter Pringle, College Librarian and Keeper of Books at the Greatorex Library, gave a mock wince. ‘I could wish there were a few more perishers about, then. I just don't know where to put books next. We've just inherited another Old Tarsusian library.…'

‘Anyone we know?' Old Professor McLeish, Professor Emeritus of Oriental Languages, had been at the University of Calleshire longer than anyone else and therefore constituted himself the corporate memory.

‘Algernon Harring.'

‘Harring, A.,' murmured McLeish, who always thought in terms of College lists. He shook his grey head. ‘Before my time.'

‘I should say so,' responded the ebullient little Librarian briskly. ‘He was about ninety-five when he died. He read law. Bit of an antiquarian and collector in his time but' – Pringle shook his head at the ultimate bibliographical sin – ‘no order, I'm sorry to say. I don't even know what's there yet and heaven knows when we'll get it all sorted out. Sixty-seven cases of books and three of letters.…'

‘Anything interesting?' someone wanted to know.

‘Law mostly. Some nineteenth-century letters.…'

I'm working on them now. They say he specialised a bit in Wordsworth but I haven't come across anything yet.…'

The conversation veered in still another direction.

‘Is Timothy Teed not back yet?' enquired Neil Carruthers, looking round the table.

‘Not due until tomorrow,' Tomlin informed them generally. ‘He's been to Borneo or West Irian or somewhere. He did say,' drawled Tomlin with deliberation, ‘that he was going to see a tribe out there that only fights on fine days from nine to five.…'

‘Having us on, I expect.'

‘No,' said Tomlin. ‘He says they're afraid of the dark and that the rain spoils their martial hair-dos, so they stop fighting when it starts.'

‘You can tell that to the Marines,' said Carruthers.

‘And the War Office,' added Watkinson. ‘We might save a bit on defence.'

‘I should imagine,' contributed Peter Pringle dryly, ‘that what Teed will do is to tell it to his publishers.'

Professor Timothy Teed was not only Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Calleshire but a famous face on television, and a popular writer on his subject. He was also an ultra-conservative dresser, so that when someone at the table offered odds of five to one that he changed for dinner in the jungle there were no takers at all.

‘And John Smith?'

‘Back.'

‘Ah.'

John Smith was an undergraduate so daunted by his undistinguished name and so determined to make his mark that he had sought individuality the previous academic year by affecting to live by the Julian Calendar.

‘Thirteen days too soon.…'

There was a general shaking of heads. Eccentric students, they agreed, weren't what they used to be: Smith ought to have had the courage of his convictions and come up late.

‘I remember …' began old McLeish.

A moment later another gust of sound from the body of the Hall interrupted conversation at the High Table. It was of laughter this time.

Professor Tomlin winced.

The only woman don present, Miss Hilda Linaker, turned her head and gazed calmly over the assembled eaters. As someone started to complain about the noise again, she reverted to their earlier topic and said, ‘Don't forget that a third of them are new boys this week.'

‘And girls,' Bernard Watkinson was quick to remind her.

Too quick.

She smiled faintly. ‘And girls, Bernard.'

Professor Bernard Watkinson was one of those on the academic staff of the University of Calleshire still not truly reconciled to there being girls everywhere. He had spent a life-time in the then wholly male preserves of public school and older university college, forsaking them only for wartime service with Military Intelligence – another notably masculine stronghold. By then the monastic outlook had him in its grip.

‘Better girls than enemies, Bernard,' said Tomlin. ‘You're the one who's always seeing resident Reds under the beds.'

‘Sleepers,' said someone adroitly. ‘That's what they're called if they lie low, isn't it?'

Tomlin said, ‘Ha, ha,' in a token sort of way and Hilda Linaker went on talking.

‘We've got to put the girls somewhere,' she said ironically, knowing she could tease here with impunity: without overtones. With his long, lean, ascetic face, Bernard Watkinson would have made a good monk of the strong kind, eschewing the world but not without knowing all about it – and the flesh and the devil, too: he was no teetotaller. ‘And it might as well be where you can keep an eye on them.'

‘Girls!' he exploded as she had known he would. ‘We've got trouble enough without girls.'

A token handful of women students at the University's two newest Colleges – Gremond and Almstone – he would have been able to understand (even historians have to move with the times), but the admission of girls to the other four more ancient foundations – Tarsus, Princes', Fairfax and Ireton Colleges – he still found hard to accept. Unfortunately for him, such is the perversity of women that his patent dislike of young ladies only made him more attractive to them. There was never any shortage of female undergraduates at his lectures. On the contrary, in fact.

‘You shouldn't mind,' said a very young don called Basil Willacy, well aware of this. ‘They sit at your feet.'

They did not yet sit at Mr. Willacy's feet and he resented it.

‘I'm not so sure that they listen to what I say, though,' said the historian sharply.

‘Ah,' said Neil Carruthers, the moral philosopher, returning the salt cellar, ‘that's the penalty of belonging to the academic profession. Not to be listened to.'

‘I'm not so sure that it's not a greater penalty to be heeded,' remarked Miss Hilda Linaker, picking up her knife and fork. ‘After all, we could all be wrong, couldn't we?'

Discussion of this novel concept lasted the High Table right through their first course.

The table next to the Buttery was undoubtedly the noisiest of all the tables in the Tarsus College dining hall, and the man with the shoulder-length hair sitting half-way down the table was undoubtedly the noisiest of all those dining at it. He was presently expounding loudly and at length against a rigidly structured pattern of society and a monetary system that relied on the work ethic.