Parting Breath (22 page)

‘You need something to set you alight, miss, don't you?'

She gave him a long, straight look. ‘You're very perceptive for a policeman.'

‘We see as much life and death as the next man, miss. More, probably.'

She shivered. ‘More good and evil, too. That's what it's all about, isn't it? Your work and mine. Good and evil – and love. That's all literature is. I don't know where the love comes in with your work.'

‘About half-way between the good and the evil, miss.'

‘Yes.' She stared at him. ‘There's a bit of both about it, isn't there?'

‘This letter, miss …'

She might not have been listening. ‘My book will have to be rewritten, of course' – a slightly fanatical note had crept into her voice – ‘but that's no trouble. You may not quite appreciate the significance of the letter, Inspector, but the world – my world – will.'

Sloan cast his mind back without difficulty to the dead Librarian, the ebullient, perennially cheerful Peter Pringle lying dreadfully dead over his desk, and said in carefully neutral tones that he thought he did understand.

‘So did someone else,' said Miss Linaker quietly.

‘Perhaps, miss.'

She stared at him. ‘What do you mean?'

‘This note that you said you'd had from Mr Pringle,' he said.

‘Yes?'

‘Could anyone have read it?'

‘It wasn't sealed. Just folded over.'

‘How long had it been in your pigeon-hole?'

‘I don't know. Higgins didn't see it being left there.'

‘When did you last collect your post?'

‘In the morning. After breakfast.'

‘Which morning?'

‘Yesterday, of course.'

‘Thursday.'

‘Yes.'

‘And it wasn't there then?'

‘No. I told you I didn't find it until the evening.'

‘Yesterday evening.'

‘Yes! Higgins saw me collect it. Ask him.'

‘And then what did you do?'

‘I went round to Peter Pringle's house in case he was back from Oxford but he wasn't expected home until first thing today.'

‘So?'

‘So I went straight there this morning as soon as the Library opened. You don't seem to understand how important this Wordsworth letter is.'

‘There's just one thing that doesn't tie up, miss,' said Sloan formally.

‘What's that?' Her head came up with a jerk. ‘I do assure you, Inspector, that any letter about Jane Austen's lost lover is –'

‘I'm not talking about the letter, miss.'

‘No? Then what –'

‘I'm talking about the note from Mr Pringle to you.'

‘What about it?'

‘But he couldn't very well have left it in the Porter's Lodge at Tarsus for you on Thursday, could he? He left Berebury on Wednesday evening after the Library closed. He was in Oxford all day Thursday. At the Bodleian.'

17 Reprise forward

Nothing added up. He would have to send for the lady mathematician at the University about whom Palfreyman had told him, the one who didn't know Tuesday from Christmas. She might not know which day of the week it was: perhaps, all the same, she could put two and two together better than he, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan, could.

He made his way back through the quadrangle to the only place in Tarsus College which he could call, however temporarily, his own. He found Detective Constable Crosby already there waiting for him.

‘It is just as well,' observed Crosby with a certain melancholy, ‘that the chap who lives here is away for a whole year. At this rate we'll be needing it until the night before he gets back.'

‘I thought you were in charge at the Library.'

‘Reinforcements have arrived.'

‘I see'. Sloan could also see that they could do without Crosby over there, and if they could, they did.…

‘Dr Dabbe's in the Library now, sir, deciding that the hole in Pringle's head could just possibly have been made by something of the size and weight of the bust of Jacob Greatorex –'

‘Dr Dabbe was giving evidence in open court, Crosby, while you were still in short trousers.'

‘ – and probably was made by the bust of the said Jacob Greatorex, seeing how it's got Pringle's blood on it.'

‘Carefully cross-matched,' Sloan reminded him. ‘Forensic pathologists don't take chances.'

‘You're telling me,' said Crosby with audible scorn. ‘Do you know what he's done about the time of death?'

‘No.' Actually Sloan didn't care, either. His concerns were elsewhere. He wanted to know who had killed Pringle and why: not where and when and how.…

‘He just asked when he was last seen alive and then he asked when the birthday-suit boy had been spotted.'

‘Well?' Two from four left two just as logically as two plus two made four: Sloan didn't suppose Alfred Palfreyman's lady mathematician would need telling that either.

‘Then,' declared Crosby, ‘he said that death had probably taken place within those two limits! How do you like that?'

‘Bully for him,' said Sloan sourly. ‘You aren't going to catch our friendly neighbourhood pathologist putting his head into a noose.'.

‘Doctors, huh!'

‘They're a cautious lot,' agreed Sloan more cheerfully.

‘You can't beat them for it,' growled Crosby.

Sloan didn't want to beat them for it. And there was one doctor in particular – an obstetrician – who had better not take any risks at all when the time came.… He would telephone Margaret, his wife, presently … but not from any old murder headquarters … and not with Crosby around, either.

‘Do you know, sir,' the constable was saying, ‘what my doctor said when I had this rash on my …'

Crosby's medical scars would have to be dealt with in the same Draconian way as the Superintendent's battle ones.

‘What I want to know most of all,' said Sloan, firmly changing the subject, ‘is why there should happen to be a specialist in murder at this University.' Even as he said it, it came to him that someone else had reminded him that they were ‘all specialists here.' ‘Why? Tell me that.'

‘Something going on? By the way, sir, Colin Ellison doesn't like it in the cells.'

‘There would be something wrong with them if he did,' said Sloan warmly. It was one of the things, the many things, that reformers tended to forget.

‘He's asking for his Member of Parliament.'

‘That makes a change,' remarked Sloan. ‘It's usually their solicitors that they want to see.'

‘Yes, sir. He says he's got something to tell his Member, though. Something important.'

‘Do you happen to know,' enquired Sloan astringently, ‘if Ellison doesn't like it down there enough to be ready to tell us now exactly what he was up to?'

‘No, sir, though whatever Ellison did, he didn't kill Mr Pringle. He was under lock and key at the time. That's what I was checking.'

‘He clobbered P. C. Carpenter, though,' said Sloan roundly, ‘and it all started with his things being stolen, remember?'

‘But nothing taken,' responded Crosby speedily. ‘He swore that it was all there when Miss Linaker and Polly Mantle found it.'

‘Miss Linaker …' She was another factor in the equation he was trying to solve. ‘Crosby, Colin Ellison wouldn't tell us if there had been a valuable letter there that wasn't there anymore, would he, now?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Not if it wasn't his and shouldn't have been there in the first place anyway,' said Sloan. ‘Any more than whoever went hunting for something in Henry Moleyns' room is going to tell us about it.'

‘No, sir. Sir …'

‘Well?'

‘We think it must have been Moleyns that broke into Ellison's room.' He waved a report in front of Sloan. ‘Those ears of wheat are the same sort as each other and we've found some more in Moleyns' room here and in his bedroom at home.… Careless blighter. It's not proof, of course.'

‘Just a straw in the wind,' Sloan heard himself saying. That was the worst of universities – they made you think wit a substitute for wisdom.

‘Moleyns took size eight and a half shoes,' carried on Crosby imperviously, ‘and that was the size of the footmark in Ellison's room.'

‘Moleyns took something,' said Sloan.

‘But we don't know what,' pointed out Crosby.

‘From Ellison's room,' said Sloan.

‘On Wednesday.'

‘Though he may have put it back again.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘And later on, somebody –'

‘But we don't know who.' It was like a descant.

‘Took something.'

‘But we don't know what.' Or a dirge.

‘From Moleyns' room.'

‘And somebody,' continued Crosby in the same pessimistic vein, ‘has taken an old letter which everyone says is valuable from Mr. Pringle's room in the Library, if – here he added his own rider – ‘that's where it was to start with.'

Sloan was saying much the same thing a little while later to the Vice-Chancellor of the University.

Holders of high office the world over are no more immune to human feeling than the next man (however much they may encourage the illusion that they are) and the Vice-Chancellor was visibly shaken by Peter Pringle's murder. He liked his violence on the small screen: ‘The Pink Panther' was never like this.

‘A madman, Inspector,' he said, grave and concerned and totally at a loss. ‘We must have a madman here.'

‘Even that would be something,' muttered Dr Kenneth Lorimer. The Master of Tarsus, a notable warrior in committee, liked his tigers to be of the paper variety.

‘We can't find this letter, gentlemen,' said Sloan, punctiliously sticking to the practicalities, ‘anywhere.'

‘It would be of incalculable value, Inspector,' said the Vice-Chancellor equally practically.

‘And a great gain to the literary world,' murmured Lorimer. He was quoted a great deal in minutes and the fact had affected his spoken prose style.

That, at least, thought Sloan, making a note, tied in with what Miss Linaker had told him.

‘The world of letters,' carried on the Vice-Chancellor fluently, ‘has always cherished the hope that one day the name of Jane Austen's lost lover would be known.'

‘A well-known literary mystery, was it, sir?' asked Sloan. His world had unsolved mysteries too. The Wallace case, for instance: a proper policeman's puzzle that was.

‘Bless my soul, yes. Books have been written.…'

And men have died, said Sloan: but not aloud; and worms have eaten them.

‘Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem about it' – for a moment the Vice-Chancellor put Henry Moleyns and Peter Pringle out of his mind – ‘and every biographer that ever was has speculated about him.'

‘Really, sir?'

‘She was very reserved, you see, Inspector,' explained Lorimer.

‘Times were different then,' said the Vice-Chancellor wistfully. Only the other day someone had drawn his attention to the man-hours spent in student counselling at the university.

‘Nameless and dateless,' said the Master of Tarsus, ‘that's what was said about the affair. She didn't want sympathy or anything.'

‘No, sir.' Sloan could understand that. If anything were to happen to his Margaret …

‘I wonder how Evelyn Pringle feels,' said Lorimer uneasily, recognising that there would be no committee to help him there.

‘This letter,' persisted Sloan.

‘The world of scholarship,' said Lorimer, ‘would expect to see it properly enshrined in its rightful place.'

‘And where would that be, sir?' asked Sloan, interested in spite of himself.

‘A university library. Our university library.'

‘There may have been someone,' said the Vice-Chancellor realistically, ‘not quite so, er, public-spirited.'

‘Private gain rearing its ugly head, you mean?' responded Lorimer. That, at least, never happened on his committees.

‘We get quite a lot of that in our line of country,' said Sloan mildly. He wouldn't like to have to say if the police met that sentiment more often than any other, but it was certainly around much of the time.

‘This letter, Inspector,' said the Vice-Chancellor. ‘It must be somewhere.…'

‘It's not at Mr Pringle's house, sir, either,' Detective Inspector Sloan was saying a little later down the telephone to Superintendent Leeyes at the Police Station. He didn't know whether the Superintendent had shaved – whether, indeed, he had been home during the night or not – and he certainly wasn't the sort of man you could ask.

Leeyes grunted.

‘I've had a couple of men start to go over it,' said Sloan. ‘Mind you, they've not had much time yet.'

‘The widow?'

‘Mrs Pringle?' There had been a suddenness about her transformation from wife to widow that Sloan, let alone Evelyn Pringle, needed time to assimilate. ‘She's gone to her sister's and taken the children with her.' It came into his tired mind that these households where murder had struck were not unlike the violated birds'-nests you came across sometimes in a thicket – empty and cold, deserted after disaster, traces of predators all round.…

‘Your friend,' said the Superintendent with heavy irony, ‘that we're giving hospitality to …'

‘Colin Ellison? What about him?' Sloan had almost lost interest in the student since he'd seen the Librarian lying dead across the desk while Ellison was known to be out of harm's way in a prison cell.

‘He insists he wasn't on his way to clobber Bridget Hellewell in the sanatorium. Says he didn't even known she was there.'

‘Everyone knew she was there – or thought they did,' said Sloan mechanically. ‘We put the word around at dinner last night.'