Matricide at St. Martha's (20 page)

‘No. He didn’t even show him the letter. I think he didn’t want to hurt his feelings.’

‘And he’s a policeman!’

‘But a believer,’ said Amiss.

‘Well that’s not a sufficient reason,’ said the Bursar, ‘Some of my best friends believe in God and are perfectly sane into the bargain.’

‘Gods of wrath who require unquestioning obedience?’

‘Well, maybe not my best friends.’

‘That’s the difference. Can’t be a copper if you’re not a sceptic, can you, Ellis?’

‘Well it would certainly be a little constraining,’ said Pooley cautiously, still a little uneasy at discussing a superior in the presence of a virtual stranger.

‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Amiss.

‘I thought I’d talk to Miss Braithwaite first.’

‘I’ve got her number.’ The Bursar opened a notepad, rapidly found the right page, copied an entry on to a piece of paper and thrust it at Pooley. ‘I talked to her last night. Be nice to her. She’s very upset.’

‘I’m only supposed to ask her about Crowley. She didn’t by any chance offer anything more on other suspects?’

‘Last night was the weepy telephone call. I thought it would be indelicate to push for any more and I think she’ll be a bit cautious of the police.’ She took another puff and scratched her head. ‘Tell you what. You get the gen from her on Crowley and I’ll ring her later on and pump her more generally. Let’s all meet up tonight. You’re not going to be tied up with your inspector, are you, young Pooley?’

‘Not if I have to murder him to get out of it.’

She beamed. ‘Ah, good, you’re learning sense. OK, Robert?’

‘I’m having dinner with someone.’

‘What, as well as lunch? What are you up to?’

‘Nothing,’ said Amiss guiltily.

‘In that case you can cancel dinner.’

‘You’re a frightful bully, Jack. Oh, all right. I’ll postpone dinner. Where and when?’

‘Private room upstairs in the Gamekeeper Turned Poacher. And mind you arrive separately with paper bags over your heads. Can’t have Pooley being drummed out of the constabulary for associating with perverts.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Amiss. “Bye. See you later.’

‘Who’s he having lunch with?’ Pooley asked as the door closed.

‘He’s being secretive,’ said the Bursar. ‘Not a thing I like in my protégés. It should be one of the privileges of age. I think he might be up to something. Let’s try and get it out of him tonight.’

23

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Amy Braithwaite was distressed but composed. The names and addresses of those who could corroborate the truth about Crowley were produced without difficulty.

‘Do you think, ma’am, that he is a possible murderer?’

‘He is wholly egocentric, amoral and without loyalty. Are those good credentials?’

‘Excellent, I should have thought.’

‘On the other hand, he seems to be used to being thrown out of institutions and moving on; he’s a bit of an adventurer and a risk-taker. Of course, that latter quality could also make him predisposed to murder. Who can tell, Sergeant Pooley? That’s your job. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I have much to do. I am trying to reorganize my teaching so that I can get to Cambridge for Maud’s funeral.’

‘You’re coming a very long way.’

‘When your most beloved friend dies, you have to be there at the end.’

‘You have my sympathy, ma’am. It is a terrible tragedy.’

‘Oh well,’ said Miss Braithwaite. ‘There are worse ways of going. Maud always had style.’

Amiss had not expected Pooley and the Bursar to hit it off, but though Pooley’s eyes occasionally widened with astonishment, his expression never became sanctimonious. It helped that the Bursar was on her best behaviour. Instead of mocking Pooley when she discovered his aristocratic parentage, she used it as an excuse to make common cause with him against Amiss. After the first rush of jokes about noblesse oblige, the duties of lineage, how breeding always told and so on they proceeded to historical chit-chat. The Pooleys and the Troutbecks, it emerged, had been foursquare with Henry VIII at the Reformation but they had followed different paths in the Civil War: the Pooleys had been Roundheads and the Troutbecks Cavaliers.

‘
Plus ça change
,’ said Amiss.

‘Ah, the poor young deracinated Robert,’ said the Bursar sympathetically. ‘What must it be to have no link with your forebears? How wonderful it is, Ellis, not to be a member of the lower orders.’

‘Jack,’ said Amiss, ‘knock it off. I didn’t alter my social arrangements in order to listen to aristocratic triumphalism. I can get that from you any day of the week by just dropping into your office.’

‘I have never claimed to be an aristocrat. We Troutbecks are yeomen – more sturdily independent than the aristocracy, who, after all, only got their titles by selling out to royalty or being screwed by them one way or another.’

She saw Amiss’s glare. ‘Have another drink, Robert. We have something to celebrate.’

‘What?’

‘Another suspect.’

‘Excellent. Amy came across?’

‘She certainly did. I played her like a stringed instrument. Turns out Amy is better informed about what’s going on in St Martha’s than anyone there. She was quite up to date with all the political machinations – nothing new though. But then in Maud’s last letter came a great
crise
over Deborah Windlesham, our beloved new Mistress, and the murky business of the allegedly faked footnotes. I have to say, it was pretty saintly of Maud to keep quiet about this, even to me.’

‘Pretty stupid as well, if it led to her murder.’

‘But then she’d led such a serious life – no crime novels, no television – that she never knew that the first thing you do on finding out someone else’s guilty secret is to make damn sure you blab it to others and let the guilty-secret holder know you have. The really dumb move is secretly to put your thoughts on paper and dispatch them across the ocean.’

‘So what’s the story? And make it straightforward. I’m not in the mood for reading between the lines.’

The Bursar took out her pipe and its attendant paraphernalia, filled it and tamped her tobacco down firmly. Then, after a copious draught of claret, she began. ‘The trouble arose because Maud was a true scholar and a woman of infinite integrity as well as being painstaking to a balls-aching degree.

‘One day, a few weeks ago, having run out of filing-cabinet space, she decided to empty a particular set of drawers that nobody had looked at in years. Most of the contents were the sort of yellowed paper you’d expect in an administrator’s cabinet: ancient applications for places at St Martha’s, records on individual students, various odds and ends relating to disciplinary matters, parental complaints, arguments over interpretation of the statutes and so on. She threw out a lot of it, consigned some more to the archives and then settled down to read through a drawerful of Fellowship applications stretching back twenty or so years.

‘Anyone less conscientious would have binned the lot unread, but Maud skimmed through the papers to see if there was anything potentially useful to historians of the university or of women’s education or whatever and that was when she came upon the 1965 file on Nina Becker.’

‘Sounds quite racy,’ said Amiss.

‘Sshh,’ said Pooley, who was already quivering and was poised to take notes.

‘She certainly would appear to have been a bit of a dish. In fact, that seems to have been at the root of her problem.’

The Bursar picked up her lighter. Amiss, who had experience of this device, moved his chair back slightly. She pressed the ignition switch firmly and a large flame shot out which simultaneously lit her tobacco and slightly singed the front of her hair. Even Pooley’s concentration lapsed. ‘That’s extremely dangerous,’ he said, ‘it’s like a mini-flamethrower.’

‘I like a decent flame.’

‘Oh, get on with it, Jack,’ said Amiss, ‘you’re just trying to keep us in suspense.’

The Bursar puffed deeply and emitted a vast cloud of smoke which threw Pooley into uncontrollable coughing. She waved her hand vaguely through the offending cloud. ‘That’s the trouble with people who don’t smoke. They’ve no resilience.’

‘Jack!’

‘Oh, very well, very well. Don’t fuss.

‘What Maud wrote to Amy was that the academic credentials of Nina Becker were impeccable, that she seemed perfect for a St Martha’s Fellowship and that on the face of it she had been kept off the shortlist because Deborah Windlesham had told lies.

‘In those days, because there were so few Fellowships for women, St Martha’s always had a large number of applicants. Existing Fellows would sift the applications in their area of expertise, read the theses presented, write a brief report on each and whittle the list down to the outstanding. Then three of them would read the work of everyone on the shortlist.

‘Maud skimmed the Becker thesis, thought it excellent and was therefore surprised that Windlesham described it as being of poor quality, sloppily researched, poorly argued, of little significance to scholarship and containing a host of inaccurate references.

‘Now, some of these things are matters of judgement; honest mistakes can be made. I may think my discovery that Odwold the Magnificent had three footmen instead of the two favoured by his father to be of immense importance in discussing the development of the Anglo-Saxon court: you may not. You may think that only a peabrain could fail to see the huge importance of discovering that the holder of the Deanery of Hogswallop in the late fifteenth century was not, as was always believed, a scion of the family of Borspittle but instead someone from the distaff side – a Mugwump who had procured a papal document enabling him to supplant the Borspittles for a whole generation: I may not.

‘But what Maud said to Amy was that while she thought Miss Becker’s thesis extremely useful, it wasn’t that which was the point of contention. It was that she could see no evidence of either sloppy research or poor arguments. She wasn’t suspicious – Maud didn’t have that kind of mind – but she had the curiosity of the true scholar, so off she went to check the allegedly inaccurate footnoting.

‘She started with every tenth footnote and on finding those accurate took a whole chapter and then another and found that everything she had the resources to check was perfect.’ The Bursar drew heavily once more on her pipe. Exhibiting extreme thoughtfulness, she blew the smoke in the opposite direction from Pooley. It caught Amiss and sent him into a paroxysm of coughing.

‘Oops, sorry,’ she said, slapping him vigorously on the back and almost knocking him off his chair. When order had been restored she resumed.

‘She wrote worriedly about this to Amy. The charitable explanation, she concluded, was that having – for some innocent reason – taken a dislike to the thesis itself, Windlesham had made an honest if ignorant error about the quality of the research and on randomly checking footnotes had by a fluke lit upon a couple that were faulty and made a hasty assumption that they were typical. If so, Miss Becker had been done out of a possible Research Fellowship because of her examiner’s fallibility.

‘But having spotted that Becker and Windlesham had been contemporaries at around the same time in the same Oxford college, St Mary’s, Maud was slightly haunted by the fear that there might be something personal involved, especially since Becker’s photograph showed her to be a stunner. “Should I challenge Deborah?” she asked Amy, “or should I let it go?” Amy advised her against causing unnecessary friction by challenging Windlesham and Maud agreed, but her conscience wouldn’t let her leave it at that. Instead, she embarked on a little detective work to see if there was a case to answer.

‘It didn’t take long to come up with the information that Windlesham and Becker had read history in the same year, that Becker had got a slightly better first than Windlesham in her Tripos after which Windlesham had gone on to do her Ph.D and Becker had vanished for a few years, coming back to do postgraduate research a year after Windlesham had moved to Cambridge to take up her St Martha’s Fellowship.’

‘So they must have known each other quite well?’

‘Yes, but that didn’t prove anything. Still, though it wasn’t an absolute rule, it would have been proper for Windlesham to have noted that she knew Becker, so Maud went ahead and rang the Mistress of St Mary’s, who was a pal of hers, with a general enquiry about the Becker woman. After some ferreting about among the St Mary’s dons, Maud was put in touch with an academic who had known Becker well and was occasionally in touch.

‘Under the seal of the academic confessional the story was pieced together and a man turned out to be the problem – a law professor who was young, brilliant and unmarried. He went out for a short while with Windlesham but on meeting Becker fell madly for her. They dallied, she got tired of him and rather than hang around Oxford feeding the fires of his devotion, she did the decent thing and decamped for a couple of years to Paris to teach English. Then, when she reckoned he’d be over it, she came back because she was seriously academically inclined and wanted to do research. Apparently Windlesham could never be disabused of the notion that he would have come round to her in the end had it not been for Becker – even though by the time Becker arrived back in Oxford he had married someone else.’

‘So it was vindictiveness, pure and simple?’

‘Yes, and an understandable desire not to want the person she most hated in her own institution. But it was very rough on Becker, who according to her old pal was a woman who did nothing to attract hatred other than attract men. Becker needed and deserved a Research Fellowship, worked immensely hard on the thesis and was absolutely devastated when she discovered she’d not even been shortlisted. She just threw in the towel.’

‘Well, that didn’t show much backbone,’ said Pooley.

The Bursar puffed meditatively. ‘I think there is something I’d better explain to you that people of your age don’t easily understand. I am not, I think, regarded as a wimp?’