Parting Breath (25 page)

Constable Crosby produced a plastic bag, duly sealed and labelled, and handed it to Professor Mautby. ‘The student who never stopped sneezing said it was because of the new Canadian wheat – that was what reminded me.'

‘We think Henry Moleyns shed a couple of ears of wheat around the place,' explained Sloan to the ecologist more diffidently. ‘Would they tell you anything?'

Professor Simon Mautby adjusted his glasses and closely examined the contents of the package. ‘
Triticum polonicum
,' he said. ‘No doubt about that.'

‘Does
polonicum
,' asked Sloan cautiously, ‘mean what I think it means?'

‘Polish. The wheat isn't confined to Poland. You get it all round that area.'

‘I see.'

‘It doesn't tell us exactly where he'd been or anything like that.'

‘Just the general direction,' said Sloan. ‘Darkest Europe …'

‘Even now' – Mautby stared out of the window – ‘we don't know everything that went on in Europe then. Watkinson will tell you that.'

‘Moleyns was being very careful.'

‘Old secrets,' said the scientist, ‘can be as dangerous as new ones.'

‘Quite.' That was handsome coming from him. If Simon Mautby's creeping defoliant ever got going there would be no food for anyone anywhere.

‘Moleyns might have thought some things are best left unknown.'

‘So must Roger Hedden,' said Sloan astringently.

‘What – oh, yes, of course.' Professor Mautby pointed to the dead student's notes. ‘Otherwise you realise that Moleyns would have told us where this was, and he doesn't.'

‘He did try, didn't he?' said Sloan. ‘But he left it too late.'

‘Too late?'

‘His parting breath,' said Sloan, the last piece of the jigsaw slipping into place.

‘“Twenty-six minutes”?'

‘It means something else besides time, doesn't it?' Sloan said very quietly.

‘A line of longitude!' breathed Mautby.

‘I saw it on a map today.'

‘Of course, Inspector. I never thought of that.'

‘I think “twenty-six minutes” was the first half of a map reference,' said Sloan. He pointed to the notes on the bench. ‘You do realise, don't you, that we're never going to know the second half?'

‘The Vice-Chancellor's compliments, gentlemen' – Alfred Palfreyman's parade-ground voice carried effortlessly across the crowded Almstone administration block – ‘and you're to make your own minds up whether you come out or not.'

His assistant, Bert, was busily working away at the locks.

‘The doors are open from now on,' boomed the Head Porter, ‘and the police don't want to see any of you at all.'

Several hundred pairs of eyes turned his way.

He lowered his stentorian tones a register. ‘And I'm to tell you that Mr Hedden has met with a nasty accident.'

There was a murmur throughout the ground floor.

‘This morning at the railway station. We think he must have dropped his ticket or something.'

There was nothing accidental about Palfreyman's use of the royal ‘we.' It was his way of aligning himself, as always, with the angels.

‘Just before the express went through.' If it was to be put about that the able-bodied Roger Hedden had met his death by mischance, then it was not for him, Alfred Palfreyman, to wonder if the sociologist had fallen or been pushed: but he knew what he thought.

‘He'd gone to catch the local train and forgotten about the express.' You couldn't stop old sergeant-majors thinking but they never gave an opinion – not even after Balaclava.

There was another murmur: this time of sympathy.

Palfreyman lowered his voice still further. His next message was pratically routine. ‘Would someone pass the word to Professor Teed that there's a television crew outside that wants to interview him for his opinion on the sit-in.'

His last message to those sitting-in in the Almstone administration block he suppressed altogether. The sergeant-major in him just would not let him relay it to the students. It had been from the Vice-Chancellor and had shocked the Head Porter to the very core.

Palfreyman had been receiving his instructions about what to say to the undergraduates. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calleshire had been fresh from hearing the whole story of the murders of Henry Moleyns and Peter Pringle from Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan, Head of the Criminal Investigation Department at Berebury Police Station.

‘Tell them, Palfreyman,' said the Vice-Chancellor sadly, ‘that in the long run obedience to authority is more terrifying than disobedience.'

Detective Inspector Sloan, dog-tired now, was consoling a woman on the loss of a letter. A broken épée had been found, which was being examined for bloodstains, and now he was sitting in a pleasant set of rooms in Tarsus College overlooking the quadrangle where so much had happened.

‘I think, Miss Linaker, it is very possible that this letter from Richard Wordsworth to his brother William that Mr. Pringle's note mentioned about their other brother –'

‘John Wordsworth.'

‘ – who you say was lost at sea.'

‘Drowned when the East Indiaman
The Earl of Abergavenny
went down,' she said.

‘Really, miss?'

‘Off Portland on February 5, 1805.'

‘That letter,' said Sloan, ‘about John Wordsworth and Jane Austen …'

‘Yes?'

‘It may never have existed.' He was doing this very badly, he knew; out of his depth in the past. ‘Or at least never been here at Berebury with Algernon Harring's papers.' Sloan took a deep breath. ‘You must appreciate that we have no reason at all, absolutely no reason, to suppose any letter existed. We think it was just a clear piece of opportunism on Hedden's part.'

Miss Linaker sighed.

‘Moleyns wasn't a wealthy student,' said Sloan, ‘so stealing for gain could have been, er, envisaged and he wouldn't have been around to rebut any suppositions. He knew about the Wordsworth papers, too.'

She lifted her head. ‘He did?'

‘The library assistant told him, remember? You and Hedden were both there at the time.'

‘So we were. I'd forgotten.'

Sloan paused, aware that the police view wasn't the only one. ‘The idea of the letter was important enough to serve for motive.
It
didn't have to exist.'

‘You've searched for it?' she asked him gruffly.

‘Everywhere that we can think of.'

‘Roger Hedden's rooms?'

‘It's not there.'

‘The Library?'

‘Not as far as they can tell.' How they could ever tell in libraries was beyond him.

‘What about where Henry Moleyns lived?' asked Miss Linaker. ‘Moleyns comes into it all somewhere.'

‘It's not there, either.' Sloan cleared his throat. ‘And he doesn't come into the picture in that way, either, miss. We don't think Henry Moleyns had stolen it or anything like that – though I think we were meant to think that. That was the whole idea. And a clever one at that.'

‘I see.'

‘Moleyns had – er – other worries, miss.' They weren't going to be shared with anyone else at the University – those worries – beyond the Vice-Chancellor, but Sloan did not say this to the Professor of English Literature.

‘Colin Ellison,' she hurried on. ‘He seems to have been very active over something.'

‘Professor Mautby's research,' said Sloan dryly. ‘He's telling his Member of Parliament about it now.'

‘So Simon's secret is out now, then,' said Miss Linaker unexpectedly.

‘How did you know that he had one, miss, if I might ask?'

She smiled faintly. ‘He never kept his laboratory assistants for very long and he let people put it down to his bad temper.'

Sloan nodded. Actions always spoke louder than words.

‘And he's not really bad-tempered, you know. Only clever.'

Sloan let this pass. He'd always felt that the ability to suffer fools gladly was an underrated virtue. It should have been with the cardinal ones … perhaps it was, though.

‘I suppose,' she sighed, ‘that that puts poor Simon back to square one. Like me.'

‘Professor Mautby,' said Sloan, as bracing as he dared, ‘does not strike me as a man easily deterred.'

She looked up quickly. ‘Oh, I shall publish, of course. “Anne's shudderings were to herself, alone.”'

‘Beg pardon, miss?'

‘That's from
Persuasion
.'

‘I see.'

‘But it would have been a very splendid thing to have been able to name that which is nameless and dateless.'

‘Yes, miss.' Whoever Henry Moleyns had found would remain nameless and dateless, too.

And numberless.

An exceeding great army, thought Sloan to himself (It was his mother who had insisted on his going to Sunday School.) An organised wickedness.

‘Inspector …'

‘Yes, miss?' Out of the window Sloan could see the first of the students beginning to trickle back into Tarsus from the sit-in: the Vice-Chancellor's manifest lack of interest had done the trick there.

‘Why did Roger Hedden pretend about the letter and then kill poor Peter Pringle?'

‘There had to be a plausible reason for Henry Moleyns' being killed – one that everyone could know about, that is. Hedden wanted everyone to think it was because of the theft of a valuable letter.'

‘It would have done the trick, too,' she said expressionlessly.

‘If the Librarian was dead as well,' Sloan hurried on – if that sentiment of hers was the tip of an iceberg he didn't want to see the other end – ‘then, miss, not only did the story about there being a letter hold good but the murder of the Librarian actually lent credence to it.' He coughed. ‘I'm afraid from what I hear that poor Mr Pringle must have put the idea into Hedden's head himself at High Table.'

‘Peter? How?'

‘When he told everyone about the legal letters with the Wordsworth connection.'

‘That's right.' She nodded vigorously. ‘Algernon Harring was a lawyer, and so was Richard Wordsworth. At the Staple Inn.'

‘None of the students could have heard what Pringle said, so it was more likely to be someone from – what do you call it, miss? – the Combination Room.'

‘John Wordsworth could have been the man she loved,' said the Professor of English Literature. ‘All the evidence – what there is of it – fits. It's just the proof that's missing.…'

‘It happens to us, too, miss, sometimes, down at the station,' said the Detective Inspector with fellow feeling. ‘What's evidence is one thing, and what's proof – that's different altogether. Sometimes …' He paused.

‘Yes?'

‘Sometimes,' he said awkwardly, ‘you just have to make do with knowing.'

Superintendent Leeyes was sitting at his desk in Berebury Police Station when Sloan got back from Tarsus College. He looked up at the clock as Sloan walked into the room.

‘Your wife's been on the phone, Sloan. If you look sharp about it you've just got time to get her to her relaxation class at the antenatal clinic.' He picked up a piece of paper and waved it in front of Sloan. ‘Would you say that the university sit-in was “Tumultuous Petitioning”? Because, if so, our legal people say there's an Act of 1661 which says you shouldn't do it.…'

About the Author

Catherine Aird is the author of more than twenty volumes of detective mysteries and three collections of short stories. Most of her fiction features Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan and Detective Constable W. E. Crosby. Aird holds an honorary master's degree from the University of Kent and was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to the Girl Guide Association. She lives in a village in East Kent, England.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The hypothesis advanced by Miss Hilda Linaker, Professor of English Literature at the University of Calleshire, in the course of the story is taken with the kind permission of the author from
Dear Jane
, a biographical study of Jane Austen, by Constance Pilgrim, published by William Kimber, London, 1971.

Copyright © 1977 by Catherine Aird

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1065-8

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com