Parting Breath (24 page)

Professor Simon Mautby was less surprised than Sloan had expected.

‘Roger Hedden?' His bushy eyebrows came together. ‘Yes, Inspector, that fits. I did wonder about him.'

‘Did you?' said Sloan tartly.

‘On my account, not yours.'

Sloan waited for enlightenment.

‘Someone,' said Mautby simply, ‘was watching me.'

‘Watching?'

‘Call it spying, if you like. Sounds a bit dramatic, I know.'

‘But that was what it was?' said Sloan, another piece of the jigsaw slotting into place.

‘Research has to be done somewhere,' said the ecologist obliquely. ‘I do mine here.'

‘Yours?' said Sloan.

‘Ours,' said Mautby firmly.

‘That's what I thought,' said Sloan. ‘Hedden …'

‘Hedden stayed on through the summer vacation when I did.' The ecologist grimaced. ‘Sociologists don't usually work as hard as scientists.'

Sloan wasn't interested in academic chestnuts. ‘A sociologist,' he pointed out, ‘wouldn't know what you were doing.'

‘True. That's one of the things that made me start to wonder if Hedden was our resident Red.'

‘What was?'

‘Not many sociologists know the botanical name of the humble baked bean.'

‘And Colin Ellison?' said Sloan, another part of the jigsaw puzzle at hand. ‘He was watching your work, too, wasn't he?'

‘Clever boy,' said the scientist reflectively. ‘Clever enough to spot what I was doing. He was the only one who did, you know. Pity he's a pacifist.'

Sloan reserved his judgment on this. He'd had bigger red herrings trawled across his path in his time.

‘White mice?' exclaimed Constable Crosby suddenly.

‘That was sabotage,' said Mautby soberly. ‘And amateurish, at that. That's when I knew Ellison wasn't the main watcher. If Hedden had been going to destroy my work he'd have waited until I'd finished and stolen it for his people.'

‘His people?'

‘Our future enemies,' said Mautby. His eyebrows came together, and he gave Sloan what in anyone less formidable might have been a half-smile. ‘You don't have anything except friends in peace-time, do you?'

This promising line in university hair-splitting was interrupted by Crosby. ‘But,' he protested, unable to contain himself, ‘you only do plants.'

The Professor turned his way. ‘Plants equal food, my boy. People need food, especially in war time.'

‘And your work?' asked Sloan, suddenly both very tired and greatly saddened. If Ellison knew about it, there was every reason why he should.

‘On a creeping defoliant. One that wouldn't need spraying from the air as napalm does. All you would have to do is to start it off in enemy territory and it would go on destroying crops on its own. Self-perpetuating – like a plague of locusts, only better.'

‘What stops it?' Sloan himself would have used the word ‘worse' there, not ‘better,' but then, as he reminded himself, he was only a working policeman.

‘Ah,' said the scientist chillingly, ‘that still needs some work doing on it.'

‘And where does Moleyns come in?' said Sloan, still sticking to essentials.

Professor Simon Mautby shook his head. ‘I don't know.'

‘His essay …'

‘A straight crib of Colin Ellison's – for what that's worth. Don't ask me why.'

Sloan moved with the bone-weariness of a man who has had no sleep. ‘May I use your telephone?'

‘Who did you say?' Superintendent Leeyes sounded disbelieving.

‘Hedden,' repeated Sloan. ‘Roger Franklyn Hedden.'

‘The sociologist?'

‘Ah, well, sir … that's just it. We think he was a sociologist all right –'

‘That's what I –'

‘But he was something else as well.'

That was when the explosion came. ‘And you two fumble-fingered fools,' bellowed Leeyes, ‘had him in your precious lily-whites and lost him?'

‘You don't take that sort alive,' said Sloan confidently. Hedden hadn't even made the mistake of going back to his rooms in Tarsus.

‘You can at least try,' roared the Superintendent.

‘We did try, sir.' Crosby was going to have a magnificent bruise tomorrow to prove it.

‘And you call yourselves policemen.' Leeyes's vocal vigour was undiminished. ‘What will –'

‘Policemen, sir,' said Sloan with new assurance. ‘Nothing more.'

‘Well?'

‘Hedden isn't an ordinary villain.'

‘Out of your league, were you, then, Sloan?' snapped Leeyes.

‘Yes,' said Sloan firmly. He'd just realised that that was what made the game – life, if you liked – manageable. It was when you stepped out of your league that you ran into trouble. ‘We were – and so was young Henry Moleyns.'

‘And am I going to be told exactly which league this superman Hedden was in?'

‘International,' said Sloan unhesitatingly.

‘I suppose,' conceded Leeyes after a moment, ‘that there's some research going on at all our universities. What is it here?'

‘Work,' said Sloan, ‘on a new method of jungle clearance.'

‘Ah – agricultural purposes.'

‘Strictly not for the birds anyway,' said Sloan ambiguously.

‘Mustn't grumble,' said Leeyes. ‘We used something at Walcheren that some Oxford boffin had invented –'

‘Same sort of thing,' agreed Sloan hastily.

‘And what,' enquired Leeyes, ‘had Henry Moleyns got to do with – er – jungle clearance?'

‘Nothing at all.'

‘Sloan,' thundered the Superintendent warningly.

‘Henry Moleyns,' said Sloan, clarifying his own thoughts as he went along, ‘did his vacation study before he realised he'd stumbled on something sinister.'

‘What was it?'

‘I don't know. Yet. I do know that he hadn't time between getting home on Monday and Thursday morning to do another essay for Professor Mautby, so he nicked all of Colin Ellison's work.'

‘And copied Ellison's essay on Wednesday night?'

‘That's right, sir. And then on Thursday evening he put all of Ellison's things on the fountain parapet.'

‘On his way to the Chaplain.'

‘I can only think he was going to consult him about the implications of what he'd found. We know he tried to see the Professor of Modern History, too.'

‘Bernard Watkinson,' said Superintendent Leeyes. ‘Harpe and his traffic people are always getting on to me about his blood alcohol – he drives like Jehu – but they can never actually catch the blighter at the right moment.'

‘He was in Military Intelligence in the war, so he'll take a bit of catching,' responded Sloan absently. Then he repeated the sentence, as if hearing it for the first time. ‘He was in Military Intelligence in the war … that wasn't a secret.'

‘Doesn't sound as if it was,' said Leeyes caustically.

‘I reckon,' said Sloan undeterred, ‘that when Hedden overheard Henry Moleyns, on top of his row in the Library, try to make appointments with both the Chaplain and a Professor of Modern History who had been in Military Intelligence, he must have wondered what was up with the lad. After all, he was supposed to have been an ecology student.'

‘It's a different ball-game,' said Leeyes, ‘is nature study.'

There were two distinct schools of thought down at Berebury Police Station. One was that the Superintendent possessed a sense of humour: the other was that he didn't.

‘Er – quite,' said Sloan, who wasn't willing to be quoted on this one. ‘As well as that, sir, Moleyns had already had a noisy argument in Hedden's hearing about not going to the sit-in – and another in the Hall that he may well have heard about.'

‘Two and two together …'

‘Make four. A man like Roger Hedden – trained, utterly professional, dedicated – would have followed Moleyns up after that as a matter of course.' Sloan coughed. ‘It is even more likely, sir, that Hedden was acting on instructions from, er, above.'

‘His master's voice?' said Leeyes.

‘They're very thorough.'

‘I expect the boy was kept an eye on while he was over there,' agreed Leeyes tacitly. ‘They're better at that sort of thing than we are.'

‘Either that, or Hedden got Moleyns to confide in him instead.'

‘Then,' said Leeyes colourfully, ‘the beetles would have started to come out of the woodwork all right.'

‘If,' said Sloan, ‘he persuaded Henry Moleyns to tell him the whole story.'

‘Sounds to have been too important for the Chaplain, whatever it was,' grunted Leeyes, who cut a remarkably fine figure at an official church parade, swagger-stick to the fore, theology nowhere in sight.

‘He ought to have gone to Mautby,' said Sloan. ‘He'd have been safe enough with him whatever his secret – I think.'

Leeyes grunted again. ‘It's as well to know your friends as well as your enemies.' He himself had sorted out both on the Watch Committee years ago. ‘By the way, Sloan, I always knew that there was something funny about Roger Hedden.'

‘A state of nature is a very good disguise,' murmured Sloan, ‘but don't ask me why.'

‘Not that, Sloan.'

‘What then, sir?'

‘A proper sociologist would have been at the sit-in.'

19 Remise

‘Third time lucky, sir,' announced Constable Crosby, reappearing in Professor Mautby's laboratory, his latest mission completed. ‘I've got Henry Moleyns' essay notes now. At least, that's what I think they are. They were in Hedden's sitting-room. Well hidden. He'd got a secret cupboard in his drinks cabinet.'

The constable laid out on the laboratory bench a rough notebook and some sketch plans.

‘Half a hectare of woodland in depth – the complete ecosystem,' murmured Professor Mautby, moving over and considering what he saw. ‘That's what I gave all my second year students as a vacation study.'

The laboratory suddenly seemed a very quiet place as Mautby bent over the papers.

‘Yes,' said the ecologist at last. ‘This will be it. There's his preliminary drawing to scale.'

Sloan felt as if he had been playing in some particularly vigorous scrummage as he moved stiffly over to the bench and looked at the sketch plan. It meant nothing to him.

On the other hand, it did mean quite a lot to Professor Simon Mautby.

‘Henry Moleyns,' he began slowly, ‘chose to study a section of forest, Inspector, or more accurately a clearing in an old forest. In a cold climate.'

‘East of Cologne,' volunteered Sloan.

‘And north, I should say. The trees he listed are nearly all coniferous.' He pointed to the notebook. ‘Pines.'

‘I see.'

‘I say, this is curious.' The Professor peered more closely at Moleyns' notes. ‘He found that the ground in the forest had once been completely levelled.'

‘What?'

‘And not naturally.'

Sloan sat down on one of the bench stools.

‘Then,' continued the scientist, head still down, ‘it had been replanted.…'

There was a sudden scrabbling sound behind Sloan's back. He spun round with the speed of light – and a rat moved across the front of its cage and back again.

‘They don't like visitors,' said Mautby.

Sloan exchanged a baleful stare with the rat and then turned back to the bench. ‘How did Moleyns know that the wood had been replanted?'

‘He worked it out. It's not a difficult thing to decide. The trees he examined were all exactly the same age.'

‘Seedlings, you mean?'

‘No.'

‘Then what?'

‘The boy had dug down to several roots.' Mautby was totally absorbed now. ‘The trees he looked at had all been at least two years old when they were replanted.'

‘A plantation, you mean, then?' said Sloan uneasily.

‘Not exactly. That is,' continued Mautby with academic detachment, ‘not according to what Moleyns had written. He records the fact that the trees at the edges of the clearing were somewhat stunted because they had been planted in the shade of older trees.'

‘But …'

‘He'd found something else,' said Mautby quietly, ‘when he checked the roots.'

The silence in the laboratory was almost palpable now.

Sloan's mind was hundreds of miles away from Berebury and the University of Calleshire. It was in a clearing in a wood that had once been levelled and then replanted with two-year-old trees. ‘These pines, Professor,' he said into the stillness. ‘About how old are they now?'

The older man looked up. ‘Between thirty and forty years. All of them.'

‘And when Moleyns dug down to the roots?'

‘I think you can guess, Inspector.'

Sloan met his eye and nodded.

‘Bodies everywhere he dug.' Professor Mautby pushed the dead student's sketch map towards Sloan. ‘Half a hectare's quite a lot of ground.…'

‘No wonder he wanted to talk to the Chaplain and Professor Watkinson. I suppose that's why he was in the Modern History part of the Library, too, when Hedden overheard him.'

‘I think that's what I would want to do, too,' said Mautby baldly, ‘if I were his age and stumbled on a mass grave in a foreign country.'

‘Hedden's country, do you think?' asked Sloan. The police essentials of the case hadn't left him for a single instant.

‘Moleyns very carefully doesn't say where,' said Mautby. ‘So carefully that it must matter. If this is all that he brought back, then I can't tell you any more.'

‘It isn't.' For reasons of his own Constable Crosby had chosen to stand facing the caged rat but he had been listening. ‘There was something else, sir, wasn't there?'

‘Not that I – yes, Crosby, of course there was. I was forgetting.' Sloan nodded. Perhaps they would make something of the detective constable, after all.