Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) (22 page)

“But I know you’re on our side. You’re the one who got Bram on the speaker’s list to begin with! It’s only a thousand pounds. I’m sure you paid more than that for your flight over here. Could you? I hate to ask but I don’t know who else to turn to.”

She was refusing to tell me where they found the bones and asking me to get them out of hock for her, in the same breath! “Excuse me,” I said. “I need to go to my room.” I backed away from her. “And I wasn’t the one who put Bram on the program. I knew nothing about it until I read it that morning.”

I left by the north gate of the college and tramped down to the Pret a Manger on Cornmarket Street for something to eat. I resented Mignon’s forcing me to miss the last dinner at St. Ormond’s and realized that hadn’t been her plan, but the nerve of her! Refusing to tell me where they’d found the bones while asking me for money to pay for their tests. From a purely practical standpoint, I’d have been smarter to swallow my fury and try to get more out of her during dinner, but I hadn’t, so that was that.

I ate in my room, phoned Lettie, and found there was no news about Lindsey, then gathered my things for a trip to the shower. Once there, I draped my robe over the dormant radiator and went into the toilet niche in an L off the shower space. The window was wide open, letting in a cool breeze, and I heard distant voices, probably diners going to or from the SCR. Again, I cursed Mignon Beaulieu for making me miss not only dinner but the last night our group would gather in the SCR. I imagined there’d be a lively discussion tonight, now that all the papers and workshops were over. A masculine guffaw drifted across the lawn and through the window. I could still go to the SCR. There’d be plenty of wine and it might be the last time I’d see some of these people.

A huge shadow, a human head and torso, undulated along the uneven stones on the opposite side of the quad. Its shadow legs stretched across the lawn to a spot not far from my window. I stood on my tiptoes and looked down, past the wisteria vine clinging to the wall below, and saw Keith Bunsen ambling past no more than five feet away from me. Actually I saw his head, his lower body obscured by tendrils and leaves. I started to call to him, realized I was in the toilet, and decided a shout-out would be potentially embarrassing. I stepped out and down a few steps to the staircase entrance.

By this time Keith was in the arched entrance at the main gate. The shadows, I saw, were made by a floodlight attached to the side of the building at a height that played shadows of passersby across the lawn and onto the north wing of the quad. Returning to the shower room, I got a flash of déjà vu. I’d seen the same shadow phenomenon a few nights ago, but I’d spotted no one I knew.

I intended to go over the day’s events before I fell asleep. So many new pieces had to be fit into a picture that seemed just beyond my reach. It seemed as if the whole thing would come clear if I were only a little bit smarter. As if one or two more observations, correctly interpreted, would bring this whole mess into focus, and make me slap my head.
Why didn’t I see it sooner?
I climbed into bed, clicked off the bedside lamp, and reviewed two facts I thought were relevant. That Bram Fitzwaring was in Keith Bunsen’s diabetes study, and that he was in the control group, not the experimental group. Keith was worried about losing more subjects in that latter group, because the math—I recalled his mentioning the
old chi-square monster
—would go wonky, even if most of the remaining subjects were doing well. But what about losing one more person in the control group? My own math skills didn’t include chi-squares, but I’d heard other graduate students back home refer to the test. Students whose work involved statistics—mine didn’t—had to use a certain formula to find out if the results of their work meant anything.

I sat up, switched my light back on, and pulled my iPad from under my bed. Typing “Chi-square” into Google, I found a site with a truly scary algebraic equation—the chi-square formula—but scrolling down a bit farther I came to a simple little chart where you could plug in numbers and it would do the math for you. It required two numbers each for two different groups (control and experimental.) I played with it until I discovered that smaller numbers in the experimental column could drive the results into insignificance, but smaller numbers in the control column as well could drive it back to significance.

In other words, it was possible that a researcher could see years’ worth of hard work go down the drain by the loss of a single person from his test group, but it was also possible to fix the problem by eliminating one person from the control group.

That suggested an ugly new possibility.

My first thought upon waking Wednesday morning was that my plane home was leaving in a day and a half. Lettie, of course, wouldn’t leave until Lindsey was either recovered from her gunshot wound or . . . well. That didn’t bear thinking about. King Arthur’s bones, if they were Arthur’s bones, would be left in the hands of people who would do God knows what with them. Charge admission to see them? Throw them back to “The Lady in the Lake”? I couldn’t imagine, but I knew Mignon Beaulieu wouldn’t hand them over to history scholars and archaeologists for proper study.

The morning was one of those bright but misty ones that brought Matthew Arnold’s “dreaming spires” to mind. From my tiny third-floor window, I looked out across domes and steeples that had changed little in hundreds of years. I decided to take a walk before breakfast. This time I went south off the High, down Magpie Lane past Oriel College, and, as on my last early morning foray, met John Fish, the ghost tour guide, trudging up past Merton College. I wondered if he ever slept or if he wandered the streets all night. I turned and joined him.

He’d already heard about the shooting of a visiting doctor at the Radcliffe Hospital. He knew the victim was going out with St. Giles Bell. He didn’t know she was the daughter of my best friend.

“Oh.” He stopped and looked at me. “I’m sorry to hear that. Have they arrested the bastard?”

“Bell? He has an alibi. He was in London.”

“They’d better look close at that alibi. He’s a slick one. He’ll get people to lie for him.”

“Maybe I’ll learn more today.”

He told me more about the circumstances surrounding the death of Bell’s wife earlier that year, while I struggled to separate rumor from fact, and fact from newspaper speculations. As John talked, I found myself looking in vain for anything that would exclude an injection of saxitoxin as a reason why the poor woman fell down the stairs. One of the poison’s first effects, I knew from my recent reading, is the loss of muscular coordination.

“Are you sure,” I asked, “that your friend only did her Grey Lady act one time?”

“Bumps McAlister? Sure. Why would she have done it twice? It was hard enough to talk her into doing it once. She weren’t keen on the idea.” He stopped and poked at something on the sidewalk with his skull-headed cane. “Thought somebody might chase her down and hurt her.”

“Bumps is the wife of the owner of The Green Man?”

“Right.”

“But Daphne Wetmore was in on it? Did Harold Wetmore know about it?”

“I doubt it. He’d probably have put paid to the whole thing if he knew. At first Mrs. Wetmore didn’t like the idea, either. Thought it would be
unscholarly.
Then she thought better of it and decided it might be just the thing to get Harold’s conference off to a great start.”

“So it was your idea. For publicity, was it?”

“For fun. Just to see what those stuffed shirts would do if they saw a ghost.”

We were almost back to the High. As I looked ahead through the narrow gap that was Magpie Lane, I saw the Grey Lady again. “Whoa!” I ran as fast as I could up the lane and turned left to catch her. “Excuse me?”

She stopped and turned. It was Georgina Wetmore and she was wearing a plain old black anorak with the hood up. In the misty morning light and in the narrow space at the entrance to the lane, I realized, she had appeared fuzzy and rather ghostlike. She said, “Good morning! Going to St. Ormond’s? Me, too.”

John Fish remained behind, none the wiser for my silly mistake. He called out to me, “I’ll see you later.”

At breakfast I sat with Claudia Moss. Some members of our group were already rolling luggage out the gates. Claudia and I talked, mostly about Larry Roberts. I didn’t feel comfortable with this because I knew Larry’s wife personally and, to my knowledge, neither of them was considering a separation or divorce, so this thing between him and Claudia was simply an extramarital fling. Funny thing was, Claudia was perfectly okay with that. She knew Larry was married and, as she calmly drizzled honey on her toast, mentioned that she didn’t plan to ever see Larry again. “I’m taking the train back to London and I may not see him before I leave. If I do miss him, give him my best, all right?”

Just like that?
As if she’d no more than had dinner with him! Am I that out of touch with the times?

“My PhD is still in limbo,” I said. “Larry’s last words on the subject were, ‘You can forget that PhD,’ but since yesterday at the Wetmores’ tea we’ve sort of made up.”

“Don’t worry about it. He was in a terrible state earlier. Once you’re home, it’ll all come round right.”

“I still don’t get why he was
in
such a terrible state. He’s normally laid back. At this whole conference it’s been as if he was out of control. Totally beyond reasoning.”

“It’s Harold Wetmore.”

“What?”

“It’s Harold. If Harold hadn’t been here, Larry would have been a different person.”

“Sorry. I don’t get it.”

“You know how people are. We all have someone whose approval we require above all others. Someone we have to impress.” Claudia paused for a sip of her tea. “Don’t you have someone who lurks in your brain? I call it my inner audience. I don’t often admit this, but mine is a roommate I had at Cambridge.” She paused again, and I had enough sense not to interrupt. “She was always better at everything, her parents were classier, her beaus were handsomer, her clothes were trendier, her hair was . . . !” Claudia waved the memory away with one hand and lowered her voice. Others were turning to look. “Anyway. However many times I tell myself it’s quite silly, I can’t change the fact that she’s always there in my head and I’m playing to her. My audience.”

I thought about it. Was she right? Who was my inner audience? Chet Lamb? Much as I deplored the thought, I feared he was. Always there, watching, while I show him I’m doing great without him. “So you’re saying Harold Wetmore is Larry Roberts’s audience?”

“Larry studied under Harold when he was a student here. He worked like hell to support his ideas in debates with Harold, but Harold bested him every time. He knew so much more. Of course! Harold had been at it longer. Now Larry is more like Harold’s equal in that they both have good posts at good universities, but he’s still trying to prove himself to Harold and he always will be.”

“And Harold hates the romantics who perpetuate the myths of English history.”

“Exactly. And Larry tries to out-hate Harold. If Harold is outraged that some of the Glastonbury crowd wormed their way into our conference, Larry is doubly outraged.”

“I wish we had time to know each other better. If you’re ever in America, look me up.”

“I won’t look you up unless you promise you won’t tell Larry.”

On my way back to my room, I met Daphne, scurrying across the lawn like a little mouse. “Will you be needing help moving your luggage out, Dr. Lamb?”

I told her I wasn’t leaving yet and, at any rate, could manage my own luggage.

“This poor woman who was shot yesterday. Harold tells me she’s Mrs. Osgood’s daughter? How is she?”

At first I was taken aback, then realized all Oxford was probably talking about it. Would it be in this morning’s
Daily Mail
? “I haven’t talked to them this morning but I’ll call in a few minutes.”

“Give them my best, will you? And tell Mrs. Osgood the room here is hers for as long as she needs it.”

“Thank you. I’ll tell her.” It hadn’t occurred to me that the rooms here might be unavailable past the time for which we’d rented them. “Oh! If you see Georgina would you ask her if she wants to go out to see Dr. Scoggin’s children again? She was so nice to help me with them yesterday.”

Daphne looked puzzled. “I’ll give her the message.”

Of course, Georgina would have talked to the Wetmores about the shooting if she’d seen them. I knew Daphne wouldn’t have seen her niece this morning because the young woman didn’t go to the Master’s Lodgings after we came in. She went to Keith Bunsen’s apartment.

My phone buzzed in my pocket as I was opening the door to my room. It was Lettie. “My God, Dotsy! You’re not going to believe this! But first, Lindsey is awake and it looks like everything’s okay. No fluid in her chest and her lungs are in good shape.”

“Oh, I’m so glad!”

“But after she got her bearings, and yesterday started coming back to her, she wanted to talk to the police. She knows who shot her. It was Georgina!”