Parting Breath (15 page)

‘The angle was very interesting, Sloan.'

‘Not an upward thrust, then?' Upward thrusts were what they usually had on Saturday nights outside the pubs at the railway end of the town.

‘Almost dead straight.'

‘That's odd.'

‘There was something else,' said Dabbe.

‘What was that?'

‘The depth.'

‘What was so odd about that?'

‘It wasn't too deep,' said Dabbe slowly; ‘or too shallow.'

‘But just right?' There had been an advertisement once, Surely.…

‘Exactly right,' said Dr Dabbe, totally serious now. ‘So exactly right, Sloan, that whoever caused it either got everything spot on just by accident or …'

‘Or,' finished Sloan for him, choosing his words with care, ‘it was a highly skilled job.'

‘Very,' agreed the pathologist. ‘By someone who'd done it before or been taught how. Sleep well, old chap.'

11 One – Two

He did not sleep well. He was not the only one.

There were other people destined to have an unquiet night at the University of Calleshire as well as Detective Inspector Sloan. All might have seemed outwardly serene but all was by no means still. For one thing, events of the day were being brought to the official notice of various highly-placed persons in the county.

The Vice-Chancellor, duly apprised by the Bursar of the true seriousness of the situation, saw his own duty as happily clear. He at once passed the buck upwards in two directions – spiritual and temporal.

He telephoned the Bishop's Palace first.

‘My Lord …'

The Bishops of Calleford had by long custom held the position of University Visitor. The present incumbent heard the news from the Vice-Chancellor and offered appropriate words of comfort as befitted his office but nevertheless included the third Psalm – ‘Lord, how are they increased that trouble me!'– in his own devotions that night.

The Vice-Chancellor politely acknowledged the words of comfort, though they were likely to avail him little against the strictures of either the national press or the University Senate – the Scylla and Charybdis of his life – and it was not accidental that he put Scylla first. He rang off and telephoned the University Chancellor, the Duke of Calleshire, at Calle Castle.

‘Your Grace …'

At other less pressing moments the Vice-Chancellor was wont to ponder exactly why custom and usage demanded that he address two such eminently different characters – albeit each of them in his own way exalted – by archaic forms of address that seemed to have got themselves transposed.

His Grace the Duke of Calleshire fortunately considered over-reaction to be the mark of Common Man and took the news calmly enough. As a father of six he was in any case by now pretty well inured to the shocks that youth can inflict upon the middle-aged. He at first took an eighteenth-century view of the cause. ‘Some girl, I suppose.…'

Police Superintendent Leeyes, one eye on the clock and more experienced in having to wake people when the night was really advanced, also decided to put his own superior in the picture at a relatively decent hour. He put in a call to the Assistant Chief Constable: like the Vice-Chancellor, keeping the problem within the family but going upwards.

‘At the University of Calleshire, sir,' said Leeyes grittily. There were no problems of title and mode of address here.

‘Ah, yes. In Berebury.'

‘That's right.' The Superintendent let out a sigh of relief. At least the Assistant Chief Constable (Magdalen College, Oxford, as well as the police one) wasn't going to pretend not only that he'd never heard of the University of Calleshire – a lot of people did that – but also that there were only two universities in England, one of which he'd been to. A lot more people did that.

‘A sharp instrument, did you say? More of that about these days than there used to be.' There were no words of comfort from this quarter. Only a completely professional view. ‘At least,' he qualified this, ‘the Home Office statisticians say there are, and they should know, I suppose.'

‘And what is there less of, then, sir?'

‘Still looking on the bright side, Superintendent?'

‘They say,' replied Leeyes without conviction, ‘that every cloud has a silver lining.'

‘Blunt instruments haven't gone up much. Not as a means of killing, anyway.' With the prerogative of high authority he changed the subject abruptly. ‘What about the sit-in?'

‘Still going on.'

That was the point in time at which Detective Inspector Sloan managed to get through on the telephone to Superintendent Leeyes with Dr Dabbe's report.

‘He said what?' demanded the Superintendent explosively.

‘That whoever stabbed Moleyns knew exactly what he was doing.'

For once his superior responded with total silence.

‘Down to the last centimetre,' added Sloan weakly – finding to his surprise that Leeyes's silences were more unnerving than his peppery utterances.

‘There's something going on there,' said Leeyes at last – and profoundly.

‘It does put a different face on things, sir, doesn't it?' agreed Sloan.

‘Call it a new dimension,' said Leeyes, who had once struggled through the opening chapter of Mr J. W. Dunne's well-known work,
An Experiment with Time
.

‘An experienced killer,' mused Sloan. They didn't get many of those in Calleshire.

‘In our manor,' said Leeyes. ‘Ay, there's the rub.'

‘Beg pardon, sir?'

‘
Hamlet.'

‘Oh.'

‘Science,' announced Leeyes suddenly.

‘Sir?'

‘They do science there, don't they?'

‘There are a lot of laboratories and things around,' said Sloan vaguely.

‘Then I reckon there's something going on there,' said Leeyes again.

‘Someone did let some white mice out,' remembered Sloan. ‘Yesterday. If yesterday was Wednesday …' De Chirico's metaphysical paintings were unnerving things to have on the wall of a living room. Distracting wasn't in it. The only one that he thought he could understand was the print nearest to the telephone and that looked to him like Harlequin and Columbine. There had been a police pantomime for the kids once at Christmas with Harlequin and Columbine in it – with Harlequin bent on frustrating the knavish tricks of the Clown who was in love with Columbine. A proper police set-up that had been – plot and all, now he came to think of it – with Woman Police Constable Perkins – Pretty Polly – as Columbine, a tall lad with good legs from Traffic Division as Harlequin – not that Columbine's legs hadn't been good too, they had – and a crafty-looking type from Plain-clothes Division as the Clown. He'd have to brush up on pantomimes too now, with the baby coming – next year would be too soon, of course; it wouldn't be old enough – but after that …

‘Experiments,' Leeyes was declaring firmly, ‘that's what they've got the white mice for.'

Sloan gritted his teeth. Even Crosby wouldn't have supposed Professor Mautby was keeping white mice in his laboratory as pets. Not knowing Professor Mautby, that is. The students were another matter. He wouldn't be too unbearably surprised from the look of them if one or two had their teddy bears up with them.

‘Research,' Leeyes said. ‘They do research in universities sometimes, Sloan, don't they?' He remembered the Assistant Chief Constable and qualified this. ‘In some universities, anyway.'

‘I wouldn't know, sir, except for the white mice.'

‘If,' said Leeyes tartly, ‘it's the sort of research that involves people getting killed in the practised fashion that Dr Dabbe suggests –'

‘He only said –'

‘Then,' swept on Leeyes regardless, ‘no one's going to know except whoever's paying for it.'

‘The government, do you mean, sir?' asked Sloan, trying not to sound too obtuse.

‘As long as it's our own government,' said Leeyes piously, ‘and not someone else's then that's what I do mean.'

‘How do we find out?'

‘Ah,' said Leeyes grandiosely, ‘that's a different matter. The forces of law and order on the ground are never told anything by government until the cat's out of the bag and someone wants somebody caught. Not that one half of the government ever knows what the other half's up to anyway.'

‘Yes, sir.' Parliamentarians – like everyone else – haggled over the price of bicycle sheds, not what was going on inside defence contracts – in public, that is. As for the research being done for someone else's government …

‘Universities,' said Leeyes didactically, ‘are hotbeds of dissent. You've only got to read the newspapers …'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘To say nothing of things like this sit-in,' growled Leeyes. ‘Students are always agin the government.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Sloan. His father used to go on about that. Something about their having been agin the government in Stanley Baldwin's time, too, that his father had brooded on at Munich and afterwards: ‘That this House will in no circumstances fight for King and country.' ‘Doesn't mean much, sir,' he said reassuringly. ‘The only thing that's different is that nowadays, as well as the students, some of the lecturers are against the government too.'

Police Superintendent Leeyes said something distinctly unparliamentary about dissenting lecturers that would have pained those highly-educated souls had they been privileged to overhear it.

‘Yes, sir,' said Sloan automatically, ‘but where does that get us over this research business?'

‘Man-eating mice?'

‘Professor Mautby,' said Sloan a trifle stiffly, ‘is an ecologist.'

‘Man-eating plants, then,' responded Leeyes upon the instant.

Suddenly De Chirico's metaphysical prints seemed ordinary and familiar while more terrifying visions as yet uncharted by artists drifted through Sloan's mind.

‘Popular with the Treasury, of course,' said Leeyes.

‘Sir?'

‘Saves ammunition. You should have seen them dole it out before Walcheren.…'

The seaborne landings at Walcheren had been the highlight of Superintendent Leeyes's war-time career. They came into the conversation on the slightest pretext – not for one moment did Sloan suppose that the wherewithal of war had really been in short supply there.

‘Professor Mautby might be doing some work on plant-borne diseases,' suggested Sloan hastily. Reminiscence had to be stemmed at least once a month.

‘Germ warfare with a difference?' mused Leeyes, considering this.

‘Buy your own seeds?' suggested Sloan lightly: the further they moved from Walcheren the better.

‘You never know what scientists will get up to next,' said Leeyes darkly. ‘Two-headed dogs …'

‘Making two ears of corn grow where one had grown before …' began Sloan. No, that wasn't science: that was politics, he was sure.

‘Instant villain cure,' said Leeyes revealingly. ‘Perhaps they're working on that.'

‘It's what we want,' Sloan endorsed this.

‘Some of that
Alice in Wonderland
stuff,' said Leeyes.

‘Sir?'

‘One dose and they grow smaller.'

That was something else Sloan would have to bone up on for his son. Inexplicably
Alice in Wonderland
had grown in importance over the years. He didn't know, though, that he would ever be able to explain ‘Jabberwocky.'

‘That's the idea, sir,' he said heartily. ‘Smaller villains.' Actually, petty criminals were usually small men, anyway, and on the undernourished side too. Or was it just that policemen and prison officers were big ones by comparison? They said small people were more highly sexed than tall ones – perhaps a tendency to crime went that way too. That was a nice point for the moralists.…

‘“Let me have men about me that are fat,”' said the Superintendent in his quoting voice.

‘
Hamlet?
' hazarded Sloan. If it wasn't Walcheren it would be
Hamlet
these days.

‘
Julius Caesar
,' said Leeyes. ‘Where is all this getting us, Sloan?'

‘Nowhere, sir. All that Henry Moleyns has done so far that we know about is duck out of the sit-in, probably nick some things from the boy Ellison's room …'

‘And leave them where we were bound to find them.'

‘Have a row with another student, Hugh Bennett.'

‘Which may or may not mean anything,' said Leeyes.

‘Make – and break – an appointment with the Professor of Modern History.'

‘But about what we don't know,' said Leeyes with scant regard for syntax.

Sloan hadn't finished. ‘Make – and not be able to keep – an appointment with the Chaplain.'

Leeyes hadn't finished either. ‘And get himself killed,' he said.

‘That, too,' agreed Sloan as he rang off.

He paused by the print on the wall that had seemed to him like Columbine and Harlequin and read the caption for the first time. It said ‘Hector and Andromache.' He turned off the light and stepped out of the room. He hadn't time for the ancient Greeks just now.

12 Counter-Riposte

Detective Inspector Sloan began his night round with a visit to the University Sanatorium.

It was a curious Victorian building – midway in architectural style between Fairfax and Ireton Colleges and the university's two modern ones. The edifice owed its position – isolated from all other College buildings – to what was known to medical science about infectious diseases at the time it was built, and its design to the influence of William Butterfield and his Keble College at Oxford.

Matron lived in the building in similarly splendid isolation. As it happened, this nicely reflected her situation among the academic community. Being both properly qualified for her job (at one of the oldest teaching hospitals) and a member of a noble profession, there were some social activities from which she could not very well be excluded and some (notably those involving good provender) from which she would not.