Parting Breath (21 page)

‘You mean,' said Sloan, somewhat at sea, ‘that none of you recognised whoever it was who did this?'

The girl reader flushed. ‘I don't know if I knew him or not, Inspector … You see …'

‘He hadn't any clothes on,' said Miss Linaker abruptly.

‘A streaker, you mean?' exclaimed the twitterer, excited and alarmed in turn. ‘I was working over by the catalogue so I didn't see –'

‘Not a stitch,' declared Professor Tomlin, already beginning to consider how he could best present the fact to his wife. He decided that the happiest approach might be through the Old Testament – that often went down well with Mrs Tomlin, Bishop's daughter.… Some reference to Adam, say … the old Adam, perhaps … no, perhaps not. Her enquiries struck terror every bit as much as Mrs Proudie's ‘Bishop, a word with you.…'

‘The best disguise of all,' said Miss Linaker bitterly. ‘The Emperor's clothes.…'

The woman don seemed to have suffered a sea-change. She had groped her way to a chair and was sitting now with her elbows on the nearest table, her head sunk into her hands. She looked suddenly a lot older.

‘No clothes at all?' said the library assistant, just to be quite sure she had got it right.

‘Actually,' said Stephen Smithers with a certain diffidence, ‘I think he was wearing a stocking.'

Sloan gave him a baleful look.

‘Over his head,' said Smithers hastily.

Sloan nodded. That, at least, made sense. So presumably, would someone's killing of Peter Pringle – unless what they were up against was a psychopath, someone who killed for the lust of killing like a fox decimating a chicken run. Somehow Sloan didn't think they were.

‘But why?' demanded Professor Tomlin. ‘First Henry Moleyns, now poor Pringle here.'

‘I think,' managed Miss Hilda Linaker painfully, ‘I may be able to tell you why.'

‘Well, why?' demanded Superintendent Leeyes truculently.

Detective Inspector Sloan had gone back to the room in Tarsus that he was using as a murder headquarters and picked up the telephone. He'd left Crosby in charge at the Greatorex Library and called over the constables who had spent the night watching the sanatorium to give him a hand. There was much to be done. Battling Bertha he'd detailed to keep an eye on Miss Hilda Linaker. The policewoman had had one of the quietest nights of all, lying guarded in the sanatorium against a danger which did not come.

That fact was something he would have to consider presently: the danger, alas, had been elsewhere.

In the meantime he was concentrating on Peter Pringle's death.

‘Well,' demanded Leeyes, who hadn't taken at all kindly to the news of another murder, ‘why?'

Sloan cleared his throat and began tentatively, ‘There was an old scholar of Tarsus …'

He stopped, aware of undertones.

‘This,' said Leeyes coldly, ‘is no time for limericks.'

‘No, sir.' He started again. ‘Yesterday evening Miss Linaker had a note from the Librarian saying that he had found an important letter among a whole load of books and papers left to Tarsus College by a former undergraduate.'

‘How important?' asked Leeyes. Nobody could complain that the Superintendent couldn't grasp essentials.

‘Valuable, anyway,' said Sloan. The Professor of English Literature hadn't been able even to begin to tell him what the letter would be worth on the open market.

Leeyes grunted. ‘Murder valuable, would you say?'

‘I don't know, sir.' There was so much he didn't know now.…

‘This letter,' said Leeyes, still sticking to essentials.

‘Yes?'

‘What made it so valuable?'

‘According to Pringle's note it was from Richard Wordsworth – he was a lawyer in London, it seems, and these letters that were left to Tarsus were mostly legal ones – Algernon Harring – he was the man who willed them to Tarsus – had read law –'

‘The letter,' said Leeyes impatienty.

‘From Richard Wordsworth to his brother William.'

‘The poet?'

‘Yes.'

‘Letters to poets don't count for much,' said Leeyes immediately. ‘Letters from them might.'

‘This letter was different,' said Sloan. He wasn't in any doubt about that. Miss Linaker's eyes had glowed when she had told him about it.

‘What was different about it, then?'

‘It named Jane Austen's lost lover,' said Sloan impressively.

‘Who?'

‘The man Jane Austen loved.' Miss Linaker's voice had been almost reverent when she explained that there was a growing school of thought that identified the nameless man as John Wordsworth, another brother of William, lost at sea.

‘Apparently,' went on Sloan uneasily, ‘she wrote about a Captain Wentworth in one of her books –
Persuasion
.'

‘For Wentworth read Wordsworth, you mean?'

‘Something like that, sir.'

‘I get you,' said Leeyes unexpectedly. ‘There was a sonnet that Shakespeare dedicated to a Mr W. H. that our tutor told us about. People have been trying to place him, too, for years.'

‘It looked as if this letter might prove the link between Wentworth and Wordsworth,' said Sloan, ignoring the tempting by-paths of other literary detection. ‘To be truthful, sir, I couldn't quite put together all that Miss Linaker was saying. She's pretty shocked finding Pringle like that – and,' he added, always the policeman, ‘excited, too.'

‘This letter,' said Leeyes tenaciously, ‘where is it now?'

‘We don't know, sir. That's the trouble. All Pringle said in his note to Miss Linaker was that he'd found it.'

‘Moleyns,' said Leeyes. ‘Did he know about it?'

‘I don't rightly know, sir. The note to Miss Linaker was in her pigeon-hole in the Porter's Lodge. I reckon anyone could have read it.'

‘Have you got it?' said Leeyes, ‘this note from Pringle?'

‘Yes.'

‘That's something.'

‘Not as much as might think, sir.'

‘Oh?'

‘It's typewritten, for a start,' said Sloan.

‘Signed?'

‘Initials, that's all.'

Leeyes sighed. ‘And this man who Miss Linaker saw running away?'

‘Male and adult, sir. She can't tell us anything more than that.'

‘That was what she said?'

‘More or less,' replied Sloan, the Professor of English Literature's actual words still ringing in his ears: a quotation … Shakespeare, she said … from
A Midsummer Night's Dream.…

‘A proper man, as one shall see in a summer's day …'

Somehow, somewhere, sometime, Alfred Palfreyman had contrived to shave. The injustice of this bit deep into Sloan's consciousness. It was quite illogical that he should feel so disadvantaged by an eighth of an inch of stubble thrusting its way through a police chin when it had been neatly removed from an army one. And as is the way with stigmata, he couldn't keep his fingers away from it.

‘It's been a rough night,' observed the Head Porter, rubbing salt into the wound.

‘Another death,' said Sloan. That spelt failure in a murder case if anything did.

‘Mr. Pringle,' said Palfreyman, who had the sergeant-major's way of being well informed at all times. ‘By a streaker, I hear.'

‘Stripped to the willow,' agreed Sloan.

‘Clever,' said Palfreyman appreciatively. ‘To get down to the buff, I mean.'

‘That's the whole trouble here,' said Sloan. ‘Cleverness.'

Palfreyman did not deny it. ‘And nobody saw anything, I suppose.'

‘I have discovered,' said Sloan dryly, ‘that the great thing about working in a library is the Bingo approach.'

‘You have the advantage of me there, Inspector.'

‘Eyes down.'

‘Ah, yes.' The Head Porter grinned. ‘And no one looked at your chap twice.'

‘If they did,' said Sloan, ‘they aren't saying.'

‘Especially the ladies, I take it,' said Palfreyman slyly.

‘Especially the ladies.'

‘What I have noticed, Inspector,' Palfreyman informed him judiciously, ‘about the ladies here …'

‘Yes?'

‘Is that those who have had a classical education understand pretty nearly everything that goes on.'

‘That I can well believe.'

‘And those that have studied history.' He sniffed. ‘You can't tell them a lot, either.'

‘It's all happened before,' agreed Sloan wearily. That would be no consolation to Miss Marion Moleyns or Mrs. Peter Pringle, of course.

‘Now, the mathematicians …' Palfreyman drew breath. ‘There's one of them that doesn't know Tuesday from Christmas.'

‘What about Professors of Social Anthropology?' asked Sloan. ‘Seeing as how we're over here.'

The Head Porter jerked his shoulder in the direction of the administration block and said scornfully, ‘Him? All our Mr. Teed really knows is which side his bread's buttered on.'

‘None of them could have got out and done for Mr. Pringle, could they? That's what I've really come across to check on.'

Palfreyman patted his pocket and some keys clinked. ‘Take it from me, Inspector, they didn't. You'll have to look somewhere else for your killer. Believe you me, and like it or not, this little lot are in the clear.'

Miss Linaker might look suddenly haggard and concerned but she was still functioning as a thinking human being.

‘Who all knew about the Harring letters, Inspector?' She frowned before she answered him. ‘Let me see, now … everyone who was at dinner on Tuesday evening, any way. That's when Peter Pringle first told us about them … Poor Peter …'

‘What did he say?' asked Sloan persuasively. Lamentations would have to wait upon proper investigation.

‘He was complaining about the quantity, actually – sixty-seven cases of books and three of letters.' She smiled wanly. ‘He wouldn't have complained if he'd known what was in them.'

‘So he didn't mention. Jane Austen on Tuesday evening at all?'

She gave him a pitying smile. ‘Inspector, can't you see that I'd have been over at the Library like a shot if he had. Besides, I'm sure he would have told me first – before anyone else, I mean. A great discovery like this would have to be authenticated before it could be announced to the world.'

‘Quite so, miss.' He'd finally settled for calling the Professor of English Literature ‘miss' for reasons that he would have been hard put to it to put into words. Matron, now, that plump, amiable, compliant woman, he'd happily called ‘madam' without a moment's hesitation.

‘There's another thing, too, Inspector.' Once started talking, Miss Linaker was finding it hard to stop. ‘Peter Pringle could hardly have had time to find the letter by Tuesday evening. He'd only just got back to Berebury after the vacation, too, you know.'

Sloan did know.

He had a report in his file now which told him where everyone had been in their summer break from the University of Calleshire and exactly when they had got back. Professor Timothy Teed had flown to the United States of America to appear on their television (he had worn spats); Bernard Watkinson, Modern History specialist, had led a party of young men over the First World War battlefields in northern France; the Chaplain ditto to the Holy Land (each to his own …). Professor Tomlin had spent some time at the home of his brother-in-law the Dean of Calleford (the Church of England's word for promotion – preferment – was an accurate one). Miss Linaker herself had gone peak-bagging in Switzerland. (Nobody, Sloan reminded himself, had actually seen the streaker carry the bust into the Librarian's room: all that anyone had seen was a man running away. That, too, needed thinking about, but not now.) Professor Simon Mautby and Roger Franklyn Hedden had both stayed on at the University through the summer; Hugh Bennett had attended a left-wing summer school; Michael Challoner had been to Czechoslovakia on a youth exchange visit for unspecified ‘but purely cultural' purposes; Basil Willacy had taken his mother to Torquay; Peter Pringle and his wife and children had gone walking in Scotland.… In fact, Detective Inspector Sloan now knew where everyone had been – except Henry Moleyns.

‘So, miss, the first you knew about this famous letter was …'

‘Thursday. Yesterday.' A cloud came over her face. ‘Yesterday was Thursday, wasn't it?'

An aching tiredness in Sloan's bones confirmed that night had separated Thursday from Friday. He nodded.

‘The first I knew about it was a note in my pigeon-hole,' said the Professor, ‘yesterday. I went round to the Library straight away but of course it was all shut up.'

‘Because of the sit-in,' said Sloan. He didn't know yet if the student protest had anything to do with two deaths on the campus. Some people – the press, too – would be bound to link them. There was so much he didn't know: why there was someone at the University of Calleshire who could kill so expertly … somewhere at the back of his mind was the conviction that if he knew the answer to that a lot of other things would fall into place.

‘And Peter wasn't there either,' she said.

‘He'd gone to Oxford.'

‘So I was told,' she said, ‘but he was expected back first thing Friday morning. For when the Library opened.'

‘Last night, miss. You went missing on us.'

She ran a hand through her hair. ‘I couldn't sleep, Inspector. This letter – you don't understand how important it is – the whole literary world would be interested – the name of the man Jane Austen loved is one of the last secrets of English literature – she wasn't one of those barren sisters chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon, you know.'

‘No, miss.'

The don straightened her gown. ‘She couldn't have written like that if she had been.'