Crucible (6 page)

I saw her hesitate.

‘Please, Mistress, you must believe me. I am here on the college business, on behalf of Principal Dun, but Robert was also my friend. I do not seek to blacken his name or look for scandal for the sake of scandal. If there is anything you know that might be of help in finding out his killer, I urge you to tell it to me.’

Carefully, she lifted another tray from the oven and then turned to face me. ‘It is little enough. In another man, it would scarcely have taken my notice.’

‘Go on.’

‘In the last few months, since the turn of the year, Mr Sim had taken to going somewhere on a Friday or sometimes a Saturday night, every two or three weeks, perhaps, and not returning until late.’

‘It was not simply that he was working longer in the library?’

She shook her head. ‘I do not think it. On those nights, he would return earlier than usual from his work and take his supper here, rather than in the college, and then go out again. Sometimes he would have his satchel with him, with a book or books in it.’ She paused a moment. ‘And that is another thing. Until this change in his habits came about, he never took books from the library home with
him, never. Only some accounts he worked on for the guilds.’

I did not doubt this. Robert had always been vigilant in upholding the regulations that forbade the borrowing of books from our library. Unlike the scholars and masters of the King’s College, we at the Marischal were restricted to consulting them in the library itself. Not even the principal was permitted to take a volume beyond its walls.

‘Did you ever see what these books were?’

She shrugged. ‘I saw them on his desk when I went in to clean his chamber, but I cannot tell you what they were. I cannot read. My daughter knows a few letters, but she was never in that room – it was for her own sake as well as his.’ She fixed me with a warning look. ‘I will not have burgh gossip about my daughter.’

‘Do not fear for that; there will be none from me.’

Satisfied, she continued. ‘They were not always the same books. They changed from time to time – I could tell by the size, and colour and age of them – but they were of no interest to me, and I doubt if I would know them again.’

I doubted it also, and it would serve little purpose to have the old brewster woman look over the hundreds of books on the shelves and in the presses of the library in the hope that she would recognise those she had once seen in Robert Sim’s chamber.

‘When was the last time Mr Sim went out in this way?’

She needed no pause to think. ‘It was the Friday before last.’

‘Eight days before he died?’

She nodded curtly, and I thought my questions were finished, and was about to ask to see Sim’s chamber when she spoke again.

‘He didn’t come back.’

‘What?’

‘That last Friday. He didn’t come back. Not until the Saturday night. I am a light sleeper: I would have heard him come in. And besides, his bed was never slept in.’

‘Did you question him about it? Did he tell you where he had been?’

She gave a humourless laugh. ‘I am a widow woman, Mr Seaton; I earn a crust brewing ale and by having a lodger sleep in the only decent room in my house. It is not for me to question where the librarian of the town’s college has spent the night.’

She was right, although many a landlady would not have been so reticent. I recalled some of the misdeeds of my own past and darker days, and the righteous fury and many last warnings issued to me by my landlady in the schoolhouse of Banff. I recalled also the nature of some of those nights when I had stumbled late to my own bed, or not at all. ‘Had he been drunk, do you think? Or with a woman?’

She raised an amused eyebrow at me. ‘That I cannot tell. But I think you are more of an age than I to tell how a young man spends his nights away from his own chamber.’

I had no answer for her and she gave me the key to Sim’s room. ‘The baillies have already searched it, but they found
nothing. I took the trouble to go round it with them. Lock the door when you are finished, and put the key back up on the shelf there. I must get on with my work.’

I watched her go back out to her yard and then turned the key in the lock. Sim’s room, with the shutters pulled open on a window looking out on to the thoroughfare, had better light than had the kitchen, and I did not need the tallow candle the widow had given me. I stood in the doorway a moment, looking round at the small chamber. It could have been any man’s room; any unmarried man. There was a bed with a small chest under it, a small fir table and stool, and a simple sideboard below the window. Robert’s winter cloak and the gown he kept for the Sabbath and for college ceremonies, hung from a hook on the back of the door. A pair of riding boots lay under the bed.

I checked the chest first. It contained only two winter blankets and some clean linen.

Above the table, fixed to the wall, was one flimsy shelf. On it were a Bible, a book of psalms, an old childhood catechism, and something I would not have expected to find there: the first of what I knew to be three parts of Luther’s translation into German of the Bible. I opened the volume: it had been printed in Frankfurt in 1595 and gifted to the college by Dr Liddel, Dr Dun’s old teacher from Helmstedt and a generous benefactor of education in our town. The work should have been locked safely behind the glass door of a press in the library along with the rest of Dr Liddel’s benefaction, not sitting openly on a shelf in a
poor room rented from one of the town’s brewsters. I turned the volume over in my hand, prior to setting it down on the bed, that I might not forget to take it with me when I left. I had not known Robert even understood the German tongue.

I went next to the sideboard. Placed on top were a pitcher and bowl, rough local work, nothing to the pieces of Delftware in my own chamber, so treasured by Sarah, gifted to us on our marriage by that same old, loving landlady of mine. Beside them a cloth and a hairbrush. The drawer beneath contained nothing I would not have expected to find there: two clean shirts, a winter jerkin, spare hose and stockings, good winter gloves of sheepskin and a hat, evidently of the same manufacture. In the cupboard below were two plates, a knife and a cup that must have been Sim’s own, an empty leather flask of the sort a man might use when travelling, and a walnut box, bound with leather straps. It was not locked, and the straps were not properly tied: the baillie’s men, I supposed, for Robert would never have been so careless. Inside was a small amount of money, Scots and English, with a few Dutch and French coins of little value. Robert’s contract with the town as the college librarian was there too, along with testimonials from his university teachers and the minister of the parish a few miles away where he had grown up. I took a few minutes to read them, but they were of the sort I had seen many times before, and told me nothing new.

I was about to leave the room when I noticed I had
knocked Robert’s boots askew when moving the chest from under the bed. It could not matter to him now, but the sight of the boots looked wrong in the well-ordered room. I lifted the left one to straighten it, and was surprised by the weight of it. I balanced it against the right and found that it was indeed heavier. I slid my hand down inside the leg of the boot and my hand closed around something hard and smooth which turned out, when I extracted it, to be a small replica of the walnut box whose contents I had already examined. This one, evidently missed by the baillie’s men, was locked. Nowhere in the room, or about the pockets of Robert Sim’s clothing, could I find a key. And then I remembered: I searched in the pocket of my breeches and drew out the library keys found near to Robert Sim’s body. Nestling amongst the larger college instruments was one very small key of finely worked brass. I slipped it in to the lock and it turned without complaint. I had not stopped to think what I might find in that box, but when I opened the lid, I felt only a surge of disappointment, for all that was there was a scrap of paper, folded. When I opened it I saw that there were only two words on it, written in Robert Sim’s own, precise hand. The words were known to me from somewhere, the knowledge of them tantalisingly close and yet I could not place them: Jachin and Boaz. I folded the slip of paper and put it in my own pocket. Then locking the box, I slipped it back into the boot and under the bed once more, not forgetting, as Robert’s landlady had
instructed me, to lock the door of the dead man’s chamber as I left it.

‘All will be as it should be, Mr Seaton?’ was all she said to me as I passed back out into her yard.

‘Yes, Mistress,’ I said. ‘All is at it should be.’ I held up the bible to show her. ‘I am returning this book to the library – it is college property.’

I was about to turn up the close leading from her small courtyard to the street when the silhouette of a man appeared at the end of it. I squinted against the sunlight to make him out. As he emerged in to the light I saw that it was Richard Middleton, a physician not many years older than myself who had settled in the burgh while I had still been in Banff. He stopped short a moment when he saw me.

‘Mr Seaton, I … it is … I had not thought to find you here.’ His accent still held traces of his Lanarkshire childhood, and had not been hardened by our harsher northern tongue.

Nor I you, were the words that came to my mind, but I managed to stop myself from uttering them. Richard Middleton, tall, fair, graceful and elegantly dressed, was known to be a favourite amongst the rising families of Aberdeen; I doubted that he had many patients down here amongst the widows and lower craftsmen. ‘I am here on college business. You will have heard what happened to Robert Sim?’

He nodded. ‘At the sermon, yesterday – the people could
talk of little else. What a horror to happen, within the college walls.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it was.’

We appeared to have reached the limit of our conversation, and Middleton did not look anxious to prolong it.

‘Well,’ I said, putting on my hat, ‘I will leave you to your business. Good day, Mistress. Doctor.’

‘Good day, Mr Seaton,’ said the widow, never for a moment taking her eyes from the physician.

SEVEN
The Register

I was shown in to the principal’s private chamber a little before mid-day. He looked weary, and I guessed he had not slept well.

‘The sight of Robert Sim as we found him is before my eyes every time I close them. It would have been a thing bad enough, had it happened in a back street of the town, some silent and dark alleyway where men forbear to wander after dark, but somebody came deliberately within our college walls to murder him. It is an evil I do not understand.’ He looked at me and his eyes were red-rimmed. ‘But we must seek to understand it, Alexander. What have you found?’

And so I told him of my visit to Robert’s lodgings, and what I had learned from his landlady. He looked a little surprised to hear of Sim’s recent night-time wanderings, but he had been long enough in the world not to be shocked by them.

‘It was a lonely life he led. It may be that he had found some comfort or companionship at the end of it. You will be discreet in your enquiries? It cannot harm him now, but
he was a good man, and I would not see his name maligned.’ I assured him I would, although with regard to the change in Robert’s nocturnal habits, I did not see how I was to proceed further, discreetly or otherwise.

‘As to the matter of the books he was taking out of the library, only Robert himself would have been able to tell us what they were. I wonder at him having Dr Liddel’s Bible in German, though, for he did not have the language, you know.’

‘Perhaps he was learning it.’

‘Perhaps so. It is a pity he had not come to me. I lived so long in Germany that I still wake up some mornings thinking in that tongue.’ He sighed. ‘That is the register you have with you?’

‘That is my task for this afternoon – questioning those who were in the library yesterday.’

‘Good,’ he said, and looked as though he would move on, but he evidently sensed my hesitation. ‘There is something else, Alexander?’

‘The Trades’ Benefaction Book: I cannot find it.’

He opened a drawer in his desk. ‘I judged it best to keep it safe, here. The trade guilds do not like their business to be known, and there is much of their business in these pages.’ He opened the ledger at the Coopers’ page and showed me. ‘Each of the larger guilds has its own account, detailing its payment for the support of scholars here or in the grammar school, who have a call through kinship on the charity of their craft.’

I knew that already. It was the only way that many an orphaned son of a craftsman had any hope of an education.

‘But here,’ continued the principal, drawing my attention to the fine detail of the accounts, ‘you see the contributions of individual members – the amount and frequency of their payments, whether and for how long they have fallen into arrears, the extent of any procedures begun against them. There are names on this list that might surprise you, and not all of these people would be happy for their laxity in payment – their fall in standing within their craft – to be noised abroad.’

‘But it is hardly cause for murder,’ I said. ‘And anyway, surely there are other ways that a craftsman’s financial affairs can be brought to public scrutiny.’

‘Several,’ agreed Dun. ‘All the same, take care where you keep this book.’ He closed the volume and handed it to me. ‘But now,’ he said getting up heavily from behind his desk, ‘while you look into the business of the dead, there are matters of the living I must attend to: Matthew Jack beat the boys too hard this morning, far too hard.’

It had not taken me long to track down the three students whose names were written in the library register for Saturday, and I had them brought to me at the library from their classes, one at a time, in the afternoon.

The first two boys had very little of interest to tell me. They had been in the library from nine in the morning
until eleven. The only other reader to come in during that time had been a regent from the King’s College. He had still been there when they left. They were not sure of his name. But I was; it was there in front of me in Robert’s hand in the register. That would be a more awkward matter, and one I had put off until the evening. Robert Sim, they told me, had been no different from any other time they had been in the library: courteous, but not given to personal exchanges or pleasantries. Each one looked mightily relieved as I thanked him for his help and dismissed him back to his class.