Parting Breath (6 page)

‘There was a bottle of ink on the windowsill,' said the more experienced Sloan, ‘in full view of whoever came in. A real stirrer would have used that and then gone on to other things.'

‘A real thief would have taken something valuable,' persisted Crosby, still smarting from Ellison's response to the mention of money. Constables weren't exactly rich, either.

‘This one will have done all right,' returned Sloan briskly. ‘You can be sure about that, Crosby. Valuable to him. Not to you or me. Perhaps,' he went on, following a new train of thought, ‘not even valuable to Colin Ellison.'

Crosby started to pack his notebook away. ‘He might have just wanted to hinder him a bit. Hold him back in class and all that.'

‘Ah,' said the Detective Inspector pleasantly, ‘so that's how you got to the top of the Mixed Infants, is it, Crosby?'

‘Sir?'

Sloan sighed. ‘Nothing. The Bursar did say Ellison was one of their bright young hopefuls.' The C.I.D. man looked across at the constable, who wasn't one of theirs, and said, ‘I suppose, to be on the safe side, you could find out if Ellison is in the running for student of the year or the Mortimer Prize or whatever and has a deadly rival.'

‘Will do, sir.'

Detective Inspector Sloan led the way down the dimly lit staircase and into the quadrangle. Its refectory table was not the only link that Tarsus College had with the monastic tradition. The cloister-style covered way that ran round the inside of the quadrangle provided a good way of getting from one part of the College to another with dry feet. ‘Now, the Bursar's office is this way, I think.…'

‘Sir!' hissed Crosby suddenly. ‘Look over there – quickly. That way!'

Sloan lifted his head. ‘Where?'

‘The other side. Across there. I could swear I saw ghosts.'

Detective Inspector Sloan sighed. Far from being a young hopeful, Detective Constable Crosby was not even the brightest of the bright and it was house policy down at the Police Station to try to keep him on the less vital jobs. Then Sloan, too, caught sight of two figures dressed from head to foot in white flitting past the fluted columns of the opposite side of the quadrangle. He strained his eyes in the darkness. They were travelling at a lope that was not running but was not walking either. It was the enviable pace of healthy young men with energy still to spare.

‘They are ghosts,' insisted Crosby, ‘because I can't hear them.'

The Hereward Reader in Logic would have had something to say about this line of reasoning. Even Detective Inspector Sloan, grammar school alumnus, didn't go along with it.

‘Rubbish,' he said briskly, adding in the best empirical tradition (and he had learned
that
from life), ‘What we need is a closer look.'

At first this didn't get them very far.

Constable Crosby peered through one of the bays and then reported with every evidence of melancholy satisfaction, ‘Ghosts, like I said, sir. They haven't got faces.'

Sloan moved forward, too, the better to see towards the other colonnade. ‘Now, my lad, if you'd said that they hadn't got heads …'

The figures, which continued to progress at their steady pace across the side of the quadrangle opposite to the two policemen, were not, however, headless. As they came round the corner of the quadrangle Sloan saw them both quite clearly. He turned and said with some acerbity to his subordinate, ‘You couldn't hear them, Crosby, because they've got rubber-soled shoes on, you couldn't see their faces because they're wearing fencing masks, and you thought they were ghosts because they're dressed from head to foot in white. Satisfied?'

‘Yes, sir,' said the constable stolidly.

‘When you've been in the witness box once or twice,' went on Sloan more tolerantly, ‘against a really nasty piece of legal work, you won't jump to conclusions quite so quickly. Now then, we'll just check with the Ireton College porter on how soon our hero pops across to find two friends to give him an alibi and then we can say good-bye to the Bursar. Time we weren't here anymore. We've all got a heavy day tomorrow if this sit-in goes ahead.…'

The sit-in did go ahead.

Thursday dawned a fresh clear autumn day with a promising wind from the east. The students got to the administration block at Almstone early. They filed in and, ignoring the desks and chairs, squatted on the floor instead.

‘Sitting-in means sitting down, I reckon,' remarked one student to his friend, ‘don't you?'

‘Fundamentally, yes.'

‘Ouch,' he grumbled, ‘do you mind!'

‘Sorry.'

‘It's much too early for puns like that.' He hunched his shoulders. ‘Move up a bit there, can you? There's a girl wants to sit next to me.'

‘Lucky Jim.'

Not far away there was someone who wasn't being quite so lucky: the Dean of Almstone, Dr Herbert Wheatley, who had answered the door-bell of his home to a contingent from the Student's Direct Action Committee.

No thought of anything but genuine negotiation had entered that good man's head when he agreed to interview them. Indeed, he had been hard put to it to remember to temper his natural warmth down to neutral agreement in response to this overture. It had come earlier in the day than he had dared to hope.

He received the six students who comprised the delegation with diplomatic punctilio and invited them to his study, though even as he did so the thought did cross his mind that six was rather a lot for the purpose. From that moment things had gone wrong. The delegation, far from coming to parley, had but one intention and that was to take him hostage.'

‘Until you let Malcolm Humbert come back,' said their leader.

‘Never!' spluttered the portly Dean. ‘And take your hands off me.…'

Alas, odds of six to one seldom favour the one and Dr Wheatley's case was no exception. Besides, one overworked, overweight and highly indignant academic was no match for six fit and active young men.

‘If this is your idea of a delegation,' he snapped at them as they hustled him out through his own French windows and into a waiting van, ‘it isn't mine.'

‘All's fair in love and war,' said one of his captors, shutting the van doors behind him.

‘War!' snorted the Dean, quondam Artillery officer, still struggling. ‘Let me tell you, this wouldn't happen in war. The Geneva Convention –'

‘That's
Boy's Own Paper
stuff now. Things have changed, Daddy-O. Didn't you know?'

They bore their captive back to the administration block at Almstone College, which was by now completely full of squatting undergraduates. The sound of chanting welled up to greet the arrival of the kidnapping party, reaching a crescendo as the Dean was hurried in.

‘Humbert in, Wheatley out, Humbert in,
WHEATLEY OUT
…
OUT
…
OUT
…'

The noise was so great that it was a physical thing, a massive wall of sound that could almost be felt.

‘This is outrageous,' the Dean managed stiffly.

Nobody took any notice at all.

The students established him in the private office of the Head of University Administration and locked the door. As they left, one of his tormenters, an American postgraduate student from a world-famous School of Business Studies, pointed to a little door.

‘Dean, you've got the freedom of the executive washroom. What more do you want?'

The Dean, positively plethoric in appearance now, began to tell him.… But none of the six had stayed upon the order of his going and he found himself talking to an empty room.

Then he realised why. The chanting outside, which had never really died down, was starting to rise to new heights now. It had also taken on a different emphasis.

‘Humbert in, Wheatley out.
HUMBERT IN
, Wheatley out,
HUMBERT
…
IN
…
IN
…
IN
…'

The object of the exercise, concluded the Dean, Malcolm Humbert himself, must have arrived.

It was part of Dr Herbert Wheatley's punishment that he had to listen to the speeches.

Dimly, in what now seemed a distant and quite disassociated past, he remembered listening to – and, might he be forgiven, discounting – complaints from the Administrator about how noisy his office was: how his work was interrupted by the circumstance that he could hear everything that was going on in the main office. Mentally the Dean apologised to the man. He had been quite right. Dr Wheatley, sitting in the Administrator's room, could now hear every word of Malcolm Humbert's speech in the main office only too clearly.

In its own way it was a small masterpiece.

Humbert's approach was deceptively mild.

Others could make the demands, take the hostages: he projected sweet reasonableness in every sentence. As far as he was concerned, the Establishment had nothing of which to be afraid. In fact, he was grateful to the authorities for showing him the error of his ways.…

It was perhaps fortunate that there was no one in the room with Dr Wheatley to hear his comment on this.

The image presented to the seated students was one of a chastened man, Humbert referring almost shyly to a summer spent working hard to catch up with his reading.

(It had, as Dr Wheatley well knew, been spent in the Falls Road, Belfast, where, whatever he had been doing, it wasn't reading.)

And, Humbert asked rhetorically, what was education for if it was not to teach a man to profit by his mistakes?

At this point, Dr Wheatley very nearly had a seizure.

Malcolm Humbert, student
manqué
, went on to say that he only wanted to be taken back by good old Almstone.

Cheers and cries of ‘Good old Almstone.'

You couldn't, reckoned the Dean, still in possession of his teaching faculties, get more illogical than that.

Freedom to learn, continued Humbert in the same oblique vein, wasn't a lot to ask.

The Dean ground his teeth.

And Humbert thanked them. Whatever emerged at the end of the day – success or failure – he thanked them now. Solidarity was a great thing (cheers) – they stood … sorry … sat (laughter)… shoulder to shoulder … well, hip to hip, if they insisted (they insisted: more laughter)… in the cause of the right to learn.

It was perhaps just as well Malcolm Humbert stopped speaking when he did. Sphygmomanometers will measure a middle-aged blood pressure just so far and no further.

And what did emerge at the end of the day was different from what anyone supposed – and unluckier.

It was a girl called Bridget Hellewell who made the discovery that really lifted the day of the sit-in into the University legend league.

She was a tall, ungainly third-year student of Tarsus College, reading mathematics, with prominent cheekbones and an uncertain manner – half unsure, half aggressive. She was really at her best only on a political platform, the light of battle in her eyes, the clarion call to victory on her lips and her strident voice an asset.

So, but for the uncertainty, might Boadicea have been leading her tribe of Iceni onwards. There, however, the resemblance ended, because Boadicea would almost certainly have taken in her stride the discovery made by Bridget Hellewell as she hurried back over to Tarsus from Almstone just after half past seven in the evening.

It was of a man clutching one of the columns of the Tarsus cloister.

As she neared him he slid down to the ground in an untidy heap.

‘Are you all right?' she asked, going closer.

The man, who, even in the half-light of the covered cloister-walk, was patently not all right, shook his head mutely.

She bent down beside him, seeing his chalk-white face for the first time in the dim lighting. ‘What's wrong?' she asked. ‘Are you ill?'

The man moved bloodless lips now in response but no sound came from them save a throaty rasping. He seemed too short of breath for speech.

With some vague idea that it was the right thing to do, she put two fingers on his pulse. A rapid, thready vibration met her touch. It got more rapid even while she felt. She didn't like his breathing, either. It, too, was rapid and shallow, as if a deeper breath was painful or even plain impossible.

‘What was that?' she asked, putting her head nearer and starting to loosen his shirt.

But he had only run his tongue around his lips as if thirst was a problem, too. Speech seemed quite beyond him.

‘A drink?' she suggested. ‘Do you want a drink?'

He managed a nod at that, a nod that was no more than an inclination of his head between gasps of breathlessness.

‘I'll get help,' she said, making to rise. ‘You're ill.…'

Something touched her knee. She looked down and saw that it was his hand … a white, flaccid appendage almost beyond movement but trying to pluck at her skirt.

‘You want me to stay?' she said, showing more sensitivity than her friends would have credited her with.

There was another movement of the head that might have been a nod.

And some moving of the lips that was a definite attempt at speech.

Bridget Hellewell put her head close to his mouth. ‘What is it?'

‘Twenty …' he gasped softly; ‘… twenty-six minutes …'

The sound – such as it was – stopped abruptly.

‘What?' she said. ‘Say that again. I didn't quite catch …'

But this was something that the man – whoever he was – could not do. From looking very ill indeed he changed to looking infinitely worse. And instead of speaking he turned paler still, gave a great convulsive cough and fell back so clearly dead that Bridget Hellewell started back from him.

Then she saw her own hand: the one that she had put near his shirt.

There was something wet and sticky on it.

She stared at it for a long moment in the dim light before she recognised it for what it was.