Death of an Old Goat (24 page)

‘A yew English, or somethin?'

‘I'm afraid so,' said Bill.

‘No need terpologize,' said the man generously. ‘Takes all sorts, arfterawl.'

‘ 'Sright,' said his mate.

‘Ya like Strylian beer?' said the first, in the condescending manner of a Florentine asking a visitor if he admired the ‘David'.

‘Yes, very much,' said Bill, who knew which side his bread was buttered. ‘It's just the bubbles I can't get used to.'

The conversation lapsed for a few minutes while his new friends pondered whether he had intended to insult the Australian nation as a whole. Luckily they decided he was just ignorant.

‘Yer werkear, do yer?' asked the first, turning to him again.

‘Yes, I'm up at the university,' said Bill.

That explained it. It was just ignorance.

‘Nice set-up yerve got there,' said the man.

‘Yes, real nice,' said Bill, who had been long enough in the country to know all the conversational ploys.

‘Some pretty funny characters, though,' said the man.

‘Too right,' said Bill, from his heart.

‘Some real drongos,' said the man.

‘Yeah, some real no-hopers,' said Bill.

‘Yeah, some real ning-nongs,' said the man. Bill hoped this wasn't some sort of competition. But his friend managed to hop out of the groove he was lugubriously ploughing:

‘Not that they're all English, by any means,' he said, bringing out his new thought expansively.

‘No, that's true,' said Bill.

‘Lotter them er New Zealanders,' said the man.

‘Yes, New Zealanders are the worst,' said Bill.

‘Yer couldby right,' said the man. ‘There's a right lotter drongos comes from New Zealand.'

‘Yeah, a lot of no-hopers,' said Bill, who knew his cue by now.

‘Wa wud yew say, Charlie,' said the man, turning to his mate, who was gazing pensively into his brown, bubbly glass. ‘Would yer say New Zealand or Britain produced the biggest load of ning-nongs, taking it by and large?'

‘Oh, New Zealand,' said the second station-hand. ‘Not a doubt of it. Now, yer meet some real nice Englishmen, once in a while.'

‘That's true,' said the first, including Bill in the compliment. ‘A real nice type, setches yerself.'

‘Much obliged,' said Bill.

‘Then there's that other pommie,' said the second man. ‘The one that usually comes in here round about four o'clock. Yew know, that one from the Uni.'

‘Harf the bloody Uni's in here at four a bloody clock,' said the first man, after pondering a while. ‘Which one do yer mean, Charlie?'

‘That one who's always half-pissed before he arrives, Dave,' said the other. ‘You remember, told us all about Oxford, some libry eruther. And about some place called Sheffield, or something . . .'

‘Oh, you mean Peter Day,' said Bill Bascomb.

‘That's it,' said Charlie. ‘Peter Day. Bloke innis fifties. That's the one. Yer know him then?'

‘I should do. He's a colleague of mine,' said Bill, thinking this was one place where he didn't have to feel ashamed of the fact.

‘Well, I'd say he was a real good sport,' said Charlie.

‘Yes, a real good scout,' said Dave.

‘A real good cobber,' said Charlie.

‘One of the best,' said Dave meditatively. ‘Here, where are yer going then?'

They gazed at the fast-retreating form of Bill Bascomb, who had pushed open the swing-doors into the foyer and fallen head first over the fringes of the tattered carpet.

‘Must be gointerbe sick,' said Charlie. ‘E lookeda bit greener bout the gills.'

‘All these bloody pommies do,' said Dave.

But in their insular prejudice they did Bill Bascomb an injustice. As they spoke, he was already half-way to the emergency telegraph office of the Post Office, a few yards down the main street.

• • •

Inspector Royle had had a rather up and down time since the night of the rain making (which had not produced rain). The next two days had been spent in bed, recovering from the unaccustomed exercise, and grunting at intervals with pain and bad temper. What he was mainly worried about, apart from the possibility that his morning dates would be looking round for more reliable partners, was the ridicule which he anticipated from the rest of his loyal team when he returned to the station. However, he had obviated that by the simple device of telling them nothing about the events of that evening at all. He calculated rightly that not one of them would have turned up at the right spot, so that if they didn't hear the details from him, they wouldn't hear them from anyone. Thus, he maintained an enigmatic silence, broken only by mysterious hints of secret knowledge, and all his underlings said among themselves that Royle was a deep one, and no mistake.

Now he was sitting bolt upright in his desk chair, very inspectorial, and furrowing his brow. He was also groaning inwardly. He hadn't had to think so hard since he had been on the track of the mysterious graziers' conspiracy, and since the failure of that little piece of detection (failure so far as the murder investigation went, that is, for he had some thoughts of making a good thing out of it, banking on the local graziers' hatred of appearing ridiculous) he
had not held thinking in particularly high esteem.

‘I just can't get what you're getting at,' he said wearily. ‘Let's start again at the beginning. Cut out the smart-aleck stuff and give it to me straight. And you'd better make it convincing, because he is one of our most respected figures.'

‘Not for long he won't be,' said Bill confidently. ‘Look, from 1938 until 1941 he was a scout at Jesus College, Oxford. That's what this telegram from my mate on the
Oxford Mail
means.'

‘Fine body of boys,' said Royle, in an apparently automatic response. ‘I can't for the life of me see what that's got to do with murder.'

‘A scout,' said Bill slowly, ‘is a college servant. That's why the damned word kept buzzing around in my brain — every time I saw him handing someone drinks, it started again. A scout is a man who cleans out the students' rooms, washes up for them, fetches their meals —
waits on
them, if they can afford to pay him. That chap was a trained waiter, and you could see it in his whole body.'

‘So what?' said Royle. ‘A man can't help it if he hasn't had your chances. This is a democratic country. You've got a down on him because he's not out of the top bracket. You aristocrats!'

Bascomb's parents came from Dulwich, but this didn't seem the time to bandy around family trees.

‘He was a scout at the college until 1941,' he said, ‘and then he went into the army. Do you get it now? And he came to Australia as soon as the war ended, in 1946.'

‘Well, so bloody what?' said Royle exasperated. ‘Is it a crime not to have had much of an education? Why, even I myself . . .'

‘You don't put MA Oxon after your name,' said Bill.

‘Eh?'

‘You don't claim to have a degree from Oxford.'

‘Well I've never heard him claim that either, come to that,' said Royle. ‘Who says he claims it?'

‘We established right at the beginning that the prospectus of the Drummondale School says he has an MA from Oxford. Obviously they got their information from him. At any rate, they can hardly have got it from Oxford. He always says he went to St Catherine's, which hasn't got any college buildings, so no one knows anyone else there. If anyone else came along who was there at the same time, he wouldn't necessarily be exposed.'

Royle took some time to digest this.

‘So, what you're saying is that he's claiming a degree, and he hasn't a right to it — is that it?'

‘You've got it in one,' said Bill.

‘Well, now, even you would admit that something like that is hardly a matter for the police, surely?'

‘It is if he kills someone to keep his secret,' said Bill.

‘Now, you've got no cause to say that. Where's your proof? I ought to warn you that Mr Doncaster has some very powerful friends in this town. What evidence have you he killed the old bugger?'

‘Firstly, he's the only one with a shadow of a motive, right?'

‘You don't get a conviction on motive alone, you know. You can't go along to a judge and say “this man had a motive — convict him” ' (though God knows he had done just that often enough — and got his conviction at that). ‘You've got to have other things — bodies and weapons, and things,' he concluded lamely.

‘He had the opportunity as well. You've got no check on his movements after he left the Wickhams'.'

‘Nor on anyone else's except yours,' said Royle, keeping his end up well.

‘But the vital clue is the conversation at the Wickhams'. It's there he'd break down. All I'm asking is for you to go along and question him again, and then bring this casually up, just in the middle of the conversation, and watch his reaction.'

‘You're joking. All hell would break loose if it was wrong.'

‘It's not wrong. Don't you see, it all hangs together. Let's go over the whole thing. Doncaster is a scout at Oxford, just before the war, and in the first months. We have definite proof of this from Timmins. He's a bright boy, but there aren't many chances for a bright boy in the thirties. While he's there, he keeps his eyes open, gets the manner off pat, gets the accent, gets the walk — everything. Now Belville-Smith is a don at another college, but they've never seen each other as far as Doncaster knows. He's a pretty dim figure in Oxford life in any case, so he wouldn't make any impression on his memory. At any rate, when he turns up here as a visiting Professor, and Doncaster is invited to the Wickhams' party, he doesn't think for a moment that there is anything to fear from him. Simply doesn't give it a thought. He's met plenty of Oxford people in his time in Australia, and no one has thought to question his claims.'

‘How come he gets to be a headmaster in Australia?' asked Royle. ‘You can't just walk into a job like that.'

‘Well, not quite, but very nearly,' said Bill. ‘He comes out with the early migrants after the war. Applies for a job in a private school. Claims an Oxford degree. Nobody checks up. It's as easy as pie. Nobody's ever checked up on my degree, and I'm at a University. Those private schools are so hard up for competent staff that they practically beg people to fool them. And with a manner like that, he probably had them queueing for his services.'

‘Then no one checked up afterwards either? I can't believe that. He's been in schools all over the country — real good schools at that. He had a couple of terms at Geelong.' He pronounced it as if it were Valhalla or Nineveh.

‘But once he was in, he was in. Nobody was going to check up after that. He had excellent references from his previous school, and that was that. And frankly, you don't need much knowledge to get by in most of these schools, so
you can be pretty sure the references were always good. Then along came old Belville-Smith, he was invited to meet him, and he was so sure of himself that he went along.'

‘And you think Belville-Smith recognized him?'

‘Well, I shouldn't think he did anything as positive as that. In fact, as far as I can see, it could be that he didn't make any connections at all. You remember what happened: the conversation turned to scouting, and the poor old bugger's state of mind being what it was, he sort of “went off”, and kept on repeating the word over and over again. He was pretty squiffy by then, remember, though nobody was quite sure how much was drink and how much was natural. Perhaps there was a little bell rang in the back of his mind — sometimes it does with very old people. But I wouldn't mind betting there was nothing in it at all: he was just vaguely repeating things. I noticed he did it once or twice when he was talking to me, just saying the word over. He wasn't focusing, couldn't concentrate properly. But obviously Doncaster didn't take it like that — you can see how it affected him.'

‘You think he just upped and murdered him.'

‘Yes. Panic reaction. But on the whole he hadn't very much to fear. Firstly, there was nothing on the surface to connect them; then the obvious people whom the police were likely to investigate most thoroughly were all in the English department, people who'd been in contact with him for some days and had studied in his own field.' He wanted to add ‘and then, he knew what the Drummondale police were like', but he thought better of it.

Royle sat there for a minute, slowly thinking.

‘Well, it could be. I'll give you that,' he said. ‘There'd be plenty of knives and what-not around in the rural science labs at the school. I've been around and seen 'em.'

‘And a bloody lab coat wouldn't cause any particular comment,' said Bill.

‘No. They do some pretty nasty experiments there, some
of those little buggers,' said Royle, with envy.

‘Exactly. Easy as falling off a log.'

‘Yeah . . . But as far as asking me to go to him with a lot of conjecture like that — well, I just couldn't do it. It'd be more than my job's worth, you must see that.'

‘I thought your future depended on finding the murderer?' said Bill.

‘On finding
a
murderer,' said Royle. ‘It might be different if he wasn't the head — just a teacher, or someone at the high school. But then again, he's on the executive of the Country Party. If I went to my superiors with a story like you've concocted about a chap like that, one of the big shots around here, well, they'd practically clap me in my own cells. If you're going to arrest a chap in his position, you need three or four actual witnesses — all of them ministers of religion at that.'

‘I'm not suggesting you consult your superiors. Just you go and have it out with him.'