Parting Breath (23 page)

‘He says,' said Leeyes with fine impartiality, ‘that he was late for dinner last night. And he keeps on saying he didn't know about Moleyns' even being dead until then, let alone the fine detail.'

‘Yes,' admitted Sloan, ‘he was late actually. I remember being told.' He'd got that down in a notebook somewhere – as he'd got everything else that everyone had said and done written down in a notebook somewhere. He said very slowly, a little bell beginning to tinkle in his mind, ‘Ellison had been late for dinner each evening that week, as I remember.'

‘Up to something,' said Leeyes promptly.

‘I daresay,' agreed Sloan, though it was changes in behaviour patterns, not similarities, that you had to look for in a murder case – in any case, really. Surely, now he came to think about it, Henry Moleyns had done something different … changed his mind about something.… He groped about in the back of his own mind, trying to recall an inconsistency on the dead student's part – and then it came to him. The boy had been an enthusiastic supporter of the last sit-in but he wouldn't have anything to do with this one … had argued against it in the Library with Hugh Bennett – Roger Hedden and Miss Linaker had both heard him. Vociferous, they'd said. And afterwards, scientist that he was, he'd gone chasing off after the Chaplain and the Modern History man.

‘So,' said Leeyes, ‘if he's to be believed …'

‘Who?' said Sloan absently. An idea had just come to him.

‘Ellison,' said the Superintendent with the briskness of authority. ‘If he wasn't after the Hellewell girl, then nobody was and your set-up with Battling Bertha was a waste of time.'

‘No, it wasn't,' replied Sloan, stung into sharp thought in spite of his tiredness. There was something that Crosby had said that must be true – he could see that now. ‘What it proves, sir, is that Henry Moleyns wasn't in a position to identify who killed him.'

Leeyes grunted. ‘You mean that if Moleyns had known who it was, then whoever killed him would have come after the Hellewell girl in case she had any beans to spill?'

At the back of Sloan's mind was something else.

‘The murderer,' pronounced the Detective Inspector slowly and carefully, ‘didn't have to worry about Henry Moleyns being left not quite dead and being able to tell anyone who had attacked him because Moleyns himself didn't know.'

‘How,' began Leeyes, ‘do you know …'

‘I was told,' said Sloan, light beginning to dawn rapidly now, ‘only it didn't signify at the time.'

‘Who by?'

‘Stephen Smithers. Reading music.'

‘That, I suppose,' said Leeyes sarcastically, ‘comes after “the cat sat on the mat.”'

‘He of the sneeze,' said Sloan, ignoring this.

‘What sneeze?' demanded the Superintendent even more irritably.

‘Hay-fever, actually, sir.' Sloan had forgotten that Leeyes wouldn't know about the sneeze. ‘He'd still got it this morning. Very nasty.'

‘Spare me the medical detail.'

‘He gets it,' Sloan informed him gratuitously, ‘from wheat.'

‘I do not care,' declared Leeyes with something amounting to passion, ‘where he gets it from –'

‘Canadian wheat, sir. Apparently we've got a lot of it over here now.'

‘Sloan, neither physical infirmity nor agriculture –'

‘Canadian wheat is different from ours.'

‘The Maple Leaf for ever,' snarled Leeyes.

‘A new sort of hay-fever, you might say.'

‘As a hardworking police officer – a very hardworking police officer, Sloan – do I need to know that?'

‘No, sir.' He, Detective Inspector Sloan, had had time to think, though: time to place what it was that Smithers had told him that he now knew was so important.

‘And this Smithers boy, Sloan,' continued Leeyes undeterred, ‘who you say can read music –'

‘Not can read, sir,' said Sloan, despairing. ‘Is reading. For a degree.'

‘And who,' carried on Leeyes magnificently, ‘has hay-fever of Canadian origin …'

Sloan gave up the unequal struggle.

‘Yes, sir.'

Leeyes, who could have given points in tenacity to a working ferret any day of the week, carried on. ‘He told you who killed Moleyns?'

‘No, sir. All he told me was what the murderer's disguise was' – another thought came to Sloan even as he spoke – ‘and the weapon he used … and how he could carry it around without any questions being asked … and how it was that Henry Moleyns didn't recognize him.… Crosby thought the same disguise was a ghost.'

‘And,' interrupted Leeyes heavily, ‘am I going to be privileged to be told as well?'

‘For my money, sir, the murderer was dressed in full fencing kit.'

‘Ahhhhhhhh …' A long, slow breath escaped the Superintendent. ‘That's head-to-foot stuff, isn't it?'

‘With mask,' said Sloan for good measure. ‘Just the back of the head shows.'

‘And the weapon a sword,' concluded Leeyes. ‘An épée or whatever you call them.'

‘Smithers told me he'd seen a member of the club in the quadrangle, sir, only the penny didn't drop at the time. Come to think of it, so did Bridget Hellewell. Henry Moleyns would think whoever it was, was just giving him a friendly lunge.'

‘If,' said Leeyes neatly, ‘he's your library man as well, then you might say that sartorially he went from one extreme to the other.'

‘Miss Linaker,' said Sloan, not listening to him, ‘gave me a clue as well yesterday, only I didn't know what it meant.'

‘And what,' enquired Superintendent Leeyes with ill feigned patience, ‘did Miss Linaker say?' The Equal Opportunities Commission might not have made its mark in some quarters, but down at Berebury Police Station Police Superintendent Leeyes was perfectly prepared to believe that Crime as Opportunity included women too.

‘It was something out of Shakespeare, sir.' Of course the Immortal Bard had had a word for it. Like the Greeks, you couldn't catch him without every human situation, every emotion, covered again and again.

‘Not
Hamlet?
' The Superintendent knew his
Hamlet
now as well as he knew the faces of the old lags in Berebury.

‘Not
Hamlet
,' said Sloan. ‘
King Henry the Fourth
.'

‘Don't know it.'

‘Part One, she said.'

‘It's always Part One,' growled Leeyes. ‘Well?'

‘“Young Harry with his beaver on,”' quoted Sloan, as the door of the room – the absent don's room at Tarsus – opened. A police messenger entered with a sheaf of reports. He was clearly a motorcyclist and was wearing the regulation crash helmet: a latter-day beaver, that's what a crash helmet was. He was dressed in the gauntlet gloves that those of that ilk favour in cold weather and the leggings and boots that somehow went with the job. At the time Sloan saw him for what he was. It was only long afterwards that he realised that he had been looking at a thoroughly modern Mercury – a messenger from the gods.

He had, in fact, only come from Berebury Police Station.

Not Olympus.

‘From your desk, sir,' said the man, handing over the papers. And was gone.

Sloan took them with his free hand in much the same way as a Cabinet Minister opens his dispatch boxes: it was part of the routine that went with the job. Come what may, the routine went on.…

With one ear still tuned to the Superintendent, he cast an eye over the top ones. This handful looked pedestrian enough.

The first was from Sergeant Gelven pursuing fraud over at Easterbrook.

The second one was from the constable who acted as Coroner's Officer. Police Constable King had dutifully turned in his report of all that Henry Moleyns had been wearing and had had in his pockets when he was brought into the mortuary.

Detective Inspector Sloan cast his eye down the list of the mundane – until he came to something not quite so mundane.

One receipt for a roll of photographic film left for processing on Tuesday.

At the chemist's shop nearest to the University burgled before midnight.

18 Redoublement

It did all add up.

Lady mathematicians notwithstanding, all that had happened at Tarsus College in the University of Calleshire was adding up. And when he'd done his sums, he, Detective Inspector Sloan, would know the answer – the grand total – and be able to go home to his wife and have a wash and a shave like other men who weren't unlucky enough to be police officers on duty.

A sort of subtotal to the addition sum was provided by Detective Constable Crosby, returning hot-foot from the chemist's shop in Berebury High Street.

‘It was the photographers, sir,' he announced. ‘They do their own processing there. The film that Moleyns left there on Tuesday morning has gone.'

Sloan didn't feel any more satisfaction than he might have done fitting a piece of a jigsaw puzzle into the hole that was waiting for it. The new piece only added to the picture; it didn't complete it.

‘Some bottles of tablets,' went on Crosby, ‘were scattered about, but now they know about the film they reckon that spilling the tablets was just a blind.'

‘It was the film that the break-in was about,' said Sloan with increasing certainty. ‘Had it been processed?'

Crosby nodded. ‘Yesterday. I spoke to the boy who did it.'

‘Well?'

‘He thought – he won't swear to it, mind you – that it was just trees.'

‘Trees?' Sloan couldn't have said off-hand what it was he had been expecting, but it hadn't been trees.

‘A wood,' said Crosby. ‘He thinks that they were photographs of a wood.'

‘Moleyns,' declared Sloan with conviction, ‘had discovered something.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘On his vacation. Abroad.'

‘Somewhere,' said Crosby unhelpfully, ‘but we don't know where.'

Sloan looked at the constable. ‘We can assume – seeing that someone went to the trouble of stealing his passport – that he went somewhere in Europe that you needed a visa for, and that he didn't want anyone to know where that had been.'

Crosby was still unimpressed. ‘He might only have wanted those photographs for his holiday essay that they all had to do. That was about woods, sir, wasn't it?'

He broke off as he saw Sloan staring at him.

‘The essay, Crosby!' breathed the Detective Inspector. ‘Of course, it was because of the essay. All because of the essay,' he said wonderingly. ‘What clots we've been. Come on – hurry – hurry.…'

But Higgins, the porter on the Tarsus gate, was only moderately helpful.

‘Professor Mautby brought them in this morning, sir, as usual. The whole pile. It's a bit like school, the way he does that, I always think, but there's no telling Professor Mautby anything.'

‘No,' said Sloan flatly. ‘The essays …'

‘Over there.' Higgins cocked his head towards a pile of papers. ‘I just put them on that shelf for them to help themselves. Quite a lot of them have gone already.'

‘Not Colin Ellison's, I hope,' said Sloan urgently. He'd been visited by another idea – one of those misleading pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that looked as if it could fit in anywhere – but was, unbeknown to all, the key piece. Key pieces never looked like key pieces.

‘No, sir.' Crosby had been thumbing through them. ‘That's here.'

‘And the one Henry Moleyns did?' Sloan tried to keep his voice even.

‘I known that isn't there,' put in Higgins helpfully, ‘because someone else came down to check on that not five minutes ago. He said it did ought to go back to the poor young gentleman's aunt, so I told him Professor Mautby must still have it. It didn't come back with the others anyway.…'

Sloan spun round on his heel. ‘Where does Professor Mautby live, man? Tell me, quickly.'

Time seemed to stand still while the porter ran his finger down the list and gave them the address of a house in north Berebury. It – time – still had the same crystallised quality for Sloan as their police car set off through the streets at a pace that caused bystanders to stare, and to think – quite mistakenly – about the ancient police sport of stolen car chasing.

As they left the centre of the town behind and swung into the approaches of the residential part of Berebury, Sloan said, ‘Let's have a bit more of our two-tone now, Crosby.'

‘It'll warn him, sir,' objected the constable, ‘tell him that we're on our way.'

‘It might save a life if we're late.'

Even as the police car was swinging into Acacia Gardens a man was leaving Professor Mautby's house. He was apparently taking courteous farewells of the Professor's wife, clutching something in his hand as he did so. Crosby brought the car to a screeching halt at the Professor's gate and shot out of it towards the man.

It was at that moment that the conventional departure scene disintegrated with the suddenness of breaking glass. Mrs Mautby stepped backwards, Crosby ran forwards, the man feinted a run away and then turned and hit the constable hard as he advanced. Sloan, bringing up the rear (his son would play in the defence, that was settled), attempted a tackle. It brought the man down all right but it was like trying conclusions with an eel. Crosby, an unhealthy colour now, drew breath and re-entered the fray but in a flash the man was free of Sloan's grip and, ducking back from the constable's approach, he slipped unexpectedly sideways, leapt the low garden wall and was gone.

A bruised but triumphant Crosby flourished a handful of papers. ‘I got this off him, though, whatever it is.'

‘That,' said Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘is the essay that Henry Moleyns copied from Colin Ellison's work.'

In the end it was Professor Mautby who supplied most of the missing pieces of the jigsaw. Sloan had instructed Crosby to drive straight back to Mautby's laboratory at the University while he himself issued staccato orders into the car radio about a man, last seen making off from Acacia Gardens. ‘Wanted for murder – may be armed – is known to be dangerous – if seen, detain and arrest. Watch his house.…'