Parting Breath (20 page)

‘Stolen, we think,' said Sloan, ‘from a house in Luston, Calleshire, earlier this evening. There are, er, other troubles.'

‘Ah, I see. Well, our first concern would be that no one uses it to leave the country with –'

‘Naturally.'

‘If you will excuse me for a moment.…'

Sloan hung on. The young man, too, had his priorities. He must have had his accustomed routines as well, because he didn't keep Sloan waiting long.

‘Now, Inspector …'

‘We'd like to know when it was issued,' said Sloan.

‘Two years ago last July.'

That figured. Henry Moleyns' first trip abroad had been with his school. For tasters.

‘And to check that it hasn't been handed in or reported as lost,' said Sloan. He was too old a hunter to be caught chasing wild geese.

‘Moleyns, Henry Arthur …' The young man seemed to be consulting some sort of card index. ‘No, Inspector, we do not appear to have any note of that happening.'

‘It was never likely, I agree,' said Sloan. ‘He only got back home on Monday from his bicycle trip round Europe and he would have needed it then.'

‘Our water guard would have seen to that,' said the young man quaintly.

‘This passport,' said Sloan, firmly ignoring the archaism, ‘tell me how far he could have gone with it.'

‘Any country in the world,' said the civil servant promptly, ‘except those requiring a visa as well.'

Definitely not the same, thought Sloan to himself, as going where the 'ell you liked.

‘Where would he need a visa for?' he asked curiously.

The voice in Petty France drew breath. ‘The Iron Curtain countries … the Bamboo curtain countries …'

It was very nearly, decided Sloan, the same as the lights going out all over Europe, this coming down of curtains around continents.

‘The Middle East …'

Sloan didn't blame them there. A perpetual tinderbox; the only wonder, that there was not more trouble in the Middle East than there was.

‘Most South American countries …'

It was their exit facilities that usually interested the police more than their entrance ones. The small print of extradition treaties was equally closely studied by both the criminal fraternity and New Scotland Yard's legal department.

‘The United States of America …'

‘This visa,' said Sloan. (‘Give me your tired, your poor …') ‘Tell me what it looks like.'

‘It's usually a full-page stamp on the passport.'

‘Done by?'

‘The Consular Office of the country which the passport holder proposes to visit.'

‘And that office,' said Sloan slowly, thinking hard, ‘would therefore be the only place which would know whether such a visa had been issued?'

‘That is so,' said the young man.

‘And without the passport we wouldn't know?' That was saying the same thing in different words.

‘If by “we” you mean the United Kingdom government …'

‘I do.' He didn't always, but he did now.

‘Then that is so.'

Never a man to stand on ceremony, Crosby had finished the lychees.

‘Moleyns had been somewhere,' announced Sloan, putting down the telephone, ‘and my guess is that it showed on his passport.'

‘So no passport,' concluded Crosby simplistically.

‘No passport,' said Sloan, ‘which proves that someone didn't want anyone to know where he'd been.'

‘Even after he was dead,' remarked Crosby, licking a stray splash of lychee juice from his finger.

‘My guess is that he went somewhere you need a visa for,' said Sloan. He looked round the room. ‘Do you suppose the comfort-lover that lives here possesses anything as ordinary as an atlas?'

They eventually found one on the bookshelves. Crosby laid it on the rosewood table. ‘Where do you want to look?'

‘North-west Europe. We think that Moleyns got as far as Cologne.'

‘Cologne.' The constable turned up the index. ‘“See Köln.”'

‘Then do that thing.'

Crosby dived into the index again. ‘Page 48, M 48 + 509.'

‘Latitude and longitude,' said Sloan, putting his finger on Cologne without difficulty. ‘That's where Miss Moleyns had his postcard from.… Wherever he went, I reckon he brought something back with him.'

‘Something flat and thin,' supplied Crosby.

‘Something that would fit in a book.'

‘
Catch-22
,' said the constable.

‘The book is immaterial,' declared Sloan as grandly as Lady Bracknell ever did.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Something that could be used as evidence of where he'd been,' continued Sloan, working it out as he went along, ‘or of what he'd found when he got there.'

‘That he didn't want anyone else to know about,' supplemented Crosby.

‘Otherwise he wouldn't have hidden it,' agreed Sloan.

‘Blackmail?' said Crosby.

‘Blackmailers don't usually make appointments with the Chaplain,' said Sloan, ‘but there's always the first time.'

‘Somebody was ready to tear the place apart, sir. You should have seen Miss Moleyns' house.'

‘So it was important,' mused Sloan. ‘I don't think we need be in any doubt about that.'

‘More important than Henry Moleyns' life,' said Crosby trenchantly, ‘because he got killed for it.'

‘He got killed before he could tell the Chaplain, remember.' Sloan was still pursuing his own train of thought.

‘Before he could tell anyone,' came Crosby's antiphon.

‘He tried, though,' said Sloan, his mind going back to the darkened quadrangle and the girl Bridget Hellewell. ‘Didn't he?'

‘But “twenty-six minutes” was as far as he got.' Crosby tidied up the remnants of their impromptu meal and said prosaically, ‘It's not a lot to go on, sir, is it?'

‘What I think we had better do next,' said his superior, ‘is to concentrate on finding the Professor of English Literature.'

It was quite possible that out of all those of and having business to do with the University of Calleshire only Matron, serene in her calling and secure in her sanatorium, slept really well that night. Certainly the slumbers of Dr Herbert Wheatley were very nearly as troubled as those of Shakespeare's King Richard the Third the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field.

True, Dr Wheatley was not visited by visions of the avenging, but his sleep was still an uneasy one. In the first place, the administrator's chair was no substitute for his own interior-sprung mattress, and in the second, the Almstone administration block did not compare with his own bedroom for peace and quiet.

As the night wore on, the noises off died down and even the more frenetic students sought some sleep. It was quite another sensation that then came between Dr Wheatley and perfect repose.

It was one quite unfamiliar to the good doctor.

Hunger.

In this he differed from the undergraduates. Apparently sustained by a mixture of excitement and coffee, they ate little during their occupation: and were in any case used to eating as and when they could catch a meal. Dr Wheatley's digestive system was accustomed to both regular work and the soporific nightly bonus of the College port (laid down – with an eye to the future – by Professor McLeish when declared vintage). Without either sustenance or quietening mixture, the Dean's digestive juices sent signals of distress to their owner throughout the night.

Another source of disquietude had been Malcolm Humbert.

Malcolm Humbert, sometime student, had come through from the sit-in to have a chat with him. It was many years since Dr Wheatley had enjoyed talking to any man after one o'clock in the morning; and never to the Malcolm Humberts of this world. ‘Talking' was perhaps an exaggeration. Humbert spoke and Dr Wheatley listened – for a time, anyway. Then, with a technique perfected over the years at tutorials and committees, he stopped listening.

It was the nearest that he came to real sleep that night.

Dawn on the Friday morning was observed by more people than those who usually took note of it. For one of them it was to be the last dawn that person was going to see.

The policemen on guard in the grounds round the sanatorium saw it first, shook themselves stiffly and thought about bacon and eggs in their canteen. The Vice-Chancellor saw it from his bedroom window and thought about newspaper reporters. Colin Ellison saw it through his cell window in Berebury Police Station (‘that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky') and thought about what he was going to say to someone later that day.

Dr Herbert Wheatley became aware of it in the Almstone administration block and thought wistfully of the packet of antacid tablets in his dressing-gown pocket in his bedroom at home. It was seen by Peter Pringle, College Librarian and Keeper of Books, rising early in Oxford and breakfasting en route as he drove back to Berebury and the Greatorex Library. Detective Inspector Sloan saw it from his murder headquarters in Tarsus College and thought about Miss Hilda Linaker, who had returned to her rooms from heaven only knew where half-way through the night, insisting that she hadn't been able to sleep and so had gone for a walk.

Detective Constable Crosby saw the dawn, too, and considered – not for the first time – his nocturnal encounter with Professor Bernard Watkinson. In its way it had been memorable – but not for its charity. Professor Watkinson had returned to Tarsus College from Calleford in a highly ebullient mood. The ebullience, however, had turned to belligerence when he was asked to account for his movements after dinner.

He could, it transpired, have driven without difficulty to the Moleyns home in Luston before going on to Calleford to deliver his lecture.

‘On Clausewitz, Constable. Ever heard of him?'

‘Can't say that I have, sir, unless he's one of those gypsies down by the river. They've got funny names and there's one with a turn in his eye –'

‘Clausewitz was a Prussian soldier.'

‘Then I haven't,' said Crosby firmly.

‘He wrote on the nature of war,' said Watkinson a little thickly.

‘Did he, sir?'

‘He said you needed two people to make war.' The Professor seemed to have some trifling difficulty adjusting his glasses.

Crosby had considered what he said. ‘Then I reckon he might be right, sir. It's not war if one side won't fight, is it, sir? It's something else.'

‘True, O wise young constable.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Constable Crosby stolidly. ‘Now, sir, if I might just trouble you for the names and addresses of the gentlemen you spent the rest of the evening with in the Tabard – it was the Tabard, wasn't it, sir? – in Calleford –'

‘War is never an isolated act.' An owlish look had come over the Professor of Modern History.

‘No, sir, I'm sure it isn't.'

‘The result in war is never absolute. Clausewitz said that too.'

‘What about sitting down and having a little rest, sir?'

‘The political object reappears afterwards.'

‘Very likely, sir. Try this chair, sir … No, not that way, sir … That's a cupboard.…'

Professor Simon Mautby saw the dawn from his study window as he marked the last of the vacation studies handed in by the second-year ecology studies. It was one of his cardinal principles that each day's work was done before the next day's work was started. He put his red pencil through something Polly Mantle had written about a Lombardy poplar (‘Just because she was in Italy …') and scribbled. ‘Leave out the bosky, boy' in the margin of the last essay. Then he piled the papers up ready to leave at the Porter's Lodge on his way in to Tarsus College.

All except one, that is.

The contribution from Henry Moleyns, deceased, he put on one side in his study.

Miss Hilda Linaker still had not slept. She saw the dawn from her rooms in Tarsus, made herself a pot of tea, dressed, gathered up her academic gown and went out. There was one person whom she wanted to see very badly before her teaching day began: Peter Pringle, Librarian.

She saw him all right, but by then he was dead.

16 Derobement

Quite dead.

Everyone said so.

In the context of Mr Peter Pringle's death ‘everyone' turned out to mean Miss Hilda Linaker herself, who had been the one to discover the body of the tubby little Librarian in his room, the library assistant who had come when she called out and three assorted university readers who had been working in the library early.

Detective Inspector Sloan confirmed the fact of death as far as he could officially without a medical expert. He wasn't in a lot of doubt. The Librarian was slumped over his desk like a rag-doll, the back of his skull stove in. The murder weapon – unconfirmed, of course – was not far away and had not been hard to find.

Sloan regarded the blood-stained bust of Jacob Greatorex, sometime benefactor of the University of Calleshire, as dispassionately as he was able.

Meanwhile the library assistant emerged as a twitterer. ‘Oh dear, oh dear …'

‘I thought it was all a joke,' said Stephen Smithers, who turned out to be one of the early readers. ‘That's why I didn't take a lot of notice.'

‘I saw him,' Miss Linaker was saying dully. ‘Afterwards. Going down the corridor. Away from me. He was running, of course, but I thought that was because –'

‘So did I!' exclaimed Professor Tomlin censoriously. ‘Naturally. It's disgraceful!'

The third of the early readers in the library was a girl who looked embarrassed. ‘That's why I thought it must be someone from another university. They do come for the bust, you know, quite often.'

‘I thought someone must have some money on it,' said Smithers, who looked as if he was about to start sneezing again. ‘You've got to have a reason for going round like that on a cold day.'