Scholar's Plot (8 page)

“Why did you tell her you were satisfied?” I asked Fisk. “You could have said you wanted to see him again, and gone back. And taken me in with you!”

He’d already told me about the number of doors on the first floor, the lab on the second, and that Professor Dayless’ office was above the lab. Still…

“I didn’t have to do this much,” Fisk said. “The project is your investigation.”

And what small progress we’d made was due to him, yes, I knew that.

“Very well. We can go to the library next, and you can take a look at that thesis Benton is said to have copied. It must be a forgery, and if you can prove it we might be able to establish his innocence before other applicants for his job even start…”

We’d been walking down the path, away from the tower, but now Fisk stopped.

“What? You were the one who said you wanted to see that thesis.”

“So I may. Eventually. But it’s my turn to investigate Hotchkiss’ murder now, and
I
want to start by checking out the scene of the crime.”

“He was killed in his home,” I said. “As he was leaving to go to the lecture, according to Captain Chaldon. Why do you want to look at the place he died?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to look. That’s why they call it investigating. And you agreed that after you talked to the professor at the tower, it would be my turn.”

“I didn’t even get
in
to the tower.” But that wasn’t his fault. And I had agreed. “All right, ’tis your turn. What next, my … associate? You won’t be able to simply walk into Hotchkiss’ house, you know. ’Twill be locked. You’ll have to get permission from Headman Portner, and maybe Captain Chaldon too. Whereas at the library, they might just let us in.”

Fisk chose to ignore this sensible suggestion. “I don’t need permission, I just need a key. And we will need it — if we burgled Hotchkiss’ house in the middle of the night and wandered around lighting candles, someone would call the scholar’s guard. This is a search we need to do by day.”

“Where are you going to get a key to—”

I was interrupted by a pealing bell, and then doors in all the buildings around us burst open and scholars flooded out and down the paths like … I was about 
to say, like a flock of blackbirds, but the students 
where noisier, and most of them shed their black coats 
as soon as the sunlight heated them. Fisk had to grab one of them, to stop him long enough to ask directions to the office of the university’s chief clerk.

“What makes you think the clerk will have a key? Much less give it to you?” I had to raise my voice to be heard over the clatter.

“The clerk always has spare keys,” said Fisk. “You think the headman wants to be bothered every time someone locks himself out? As for giving me the key… I’ll start out slow, a few questions, a bit of flattery… What man wouldn’t want to help catch a murderer?”

“A man who doesn’t want to lose his job,” I said. “For passing out his keys to strangers.”

“You’d do it,” Fisk said. “If I pitched it right.”

“I did fall for your pitch,” I said. “Once. But this clerk may be a smarter man than I.”

However, when we reached the clerk’s office that proved impossible on the face of it … for the clerk was a woman.

“Are there many women working here?” Fisk asked pleasantly, after we’d introduced ourselves. “We’ve just come from talking to Professor Dayless and, well, it’s unusual to see so many women in positions of authority.”

Nancy Peebles was a plump, middle-aged woman with smooth dark hair and a comfortably worn face. Her office was small, but her desk all but filled it, and a clutter of papers covered the desk. Between that and the file cabinets, there was barely room for Fisk and me. I leaned against the wall, put my hands in my pockets, and prepared to watch the show. Fisk had done little to help with my investigation, after all. I saw no reason to intervene in his.

“There aren’t that many of us,” the clerk said. “Though if I had a sister I’d not hesitate to send her here, Master Fisk. Do you have a sister to enroll?”

“No,” said Fisk. “My associate here is Benton Sevenson’s brother, and since we were accused of Master Hotchkiss’ murder, we’d like to look into the matter.”

The woman’s jaw dropped, small blame to her. I was almost as startled, by the rare spectacle of Fisk telling the simple truth. Though he doubtless had some sneaky reason for doing so.

“Accused…? But I thought… I didn’t know Professor Sevenson had… Wait. If you’re accused of the murder, why aren’t the guards holding you? I thought they decided a burglar did it!”

“They did think that, at first,” said Fisk. “Then they discovered that Professor Sevenson had good reason to hate Master Hotchkiss. And when he had an alibi, their suspicion fell on us. They have no evidence,” he went on, a bit more mendaciously, “so they had to let us go. But you can understand how worrying it is, being suspected of murder. We have to find out who really did it, and clear ourselves.”

I had to admit, ’twas a masterful ploy — surprise, to shake her off balance, followed by subtle flattery, along with seeming candor and genuine need.

But Professor Dayless wasn’t the only one accustomed to seeing through student tales. The clerk regarded Fisk steadily.

“Isn’t that the Liege Guards’ job?”

“Maybe,” said Fisk. “But if they’re focusing on us, they might miss the real killer. For instance, did they talk to you?” Peebles only blinked, but Fisk is better at reading faces than I. “I thought not. And I’ll bet you know more about this university than anyone.”

She picked up a pen, turning it in her hands. The sharpened end was black with ink and the other ragged, as if someone had nibbled on it. Benton did that with his pens.

“How very flattering. You think that will convince me to spill secrets?”

“So there are secrets to be spilled?” Fisk countered.

“If there were, which there aren’t, why should I tell them to you?”

“If they were actual secrets, you shouldn’t.” Fisk smiled, charmingly. First pull the line, then release the tension — it often hooked more answers than continued pressure would. Fisk seated himself on one of the stools before her desk, and after a moment of hesitation I quietly did the same. I was still somewhat miffed, but watching Fisk work a person was more educational than any class a professor might teach.

“But an innocent man’s been murdered,” Fisk went on. “And others are accused of the crime. Surely you can answer some ordinary questions. For instance, do you know if Master Hotchkiss had any enemies?”

“Besides Benton, you mean? No, you needn’t protest. I knew Scholar Benton, as well as Professor Sevenson, and I don’t believe he’d ever forge a thesis — much less murder anyone. I don’t know that about either of you,” she added.

It might have been Fisk’s investigation, but ’twas for Benton’s good. I couldn’t resist stepping in.

“You don’t know us. But if we’d done it, we’d not be so foolish as to hang about asking questions. We’d have run into the next fiefdom, and then two more. By the time they worked through the legal maze of three fiefdoms, we’d be long gone.”

“There is that.” She put the quill down again. “But Hotchkiss didn’t have any enemies. He wasn’t liked, not by most, but I know of no one except Professor Sevenson who had reason to hate him.”

“Did you know him well?” I asked. Fisk had fallen silent, ceding me the conversation with the ease of years of practice. As if we were still a team. The thought hurt, but I pressed on, “Were you and Hotchkiss scholars here, mayhap?”

“I was never a scholar anywhere,” the clerk said. “My son Seymour had the brains in the family.”

Looking at the tidy filing cabinets, I doubted that — but the soft way she’d said his name told me her son was dead, so denying her statement wouldn’t be taken as a compliment. Fisk had caught it, too.

“What did your son think of Master Hotchkiss, then?”

“I don’t think he knew him,” the clerk said. “Hotchkiss was several years behind him, and Seymour… He wasn’t good at making friends.”

Some rich and painful irony lay under those words, but Fisk was doing math.

“If Hotchkiss was younger than your son, he’d be in his … late thirties? That’s very young, to be head librarian in a place like this. I thought he’d be around your age, maybe older.”

“He was young,” she said. “But he invented the alphanumeric system. He could have been head librarian anywhere in the Realm, these last twenty years.”

I had no knowledge of this system, but Fisk clearly did. “The alphanumeric …
he
invented it? What a terrible waste. Now I want to catch the killer even more.”

Her mouth tightened. “You, and all the others who didn’t actually know… Well, a brilliant mind doesn’t have much to do with a pleasant personality, and that’s a fact.”

“Working around here, you’d know that better than anyone,” Fisk agreed.

“Hotchkiss wasn’t always brilliant, either,” she said. “He was originally a history scholar, like your brother, but he struggled to find a thesis. There was even doubt he’d graduate, but then…”

“People often come up with interesting ideas in a field adjacent to their own,” Fisk said. “I remember my father saying…”

Fisk, who almost never speaks of his father stopped, but she picked up the thread for him.

“Professor Dayless, whose study is the mind, she says that not knowing anything about a subject lets you come at it from a fresh direction. But Hotchkiss… He also came up with the notion of getting third and fourth year scholars to write up summaries of books as part of their coursework — at least ten books per scholar per year, and credit if they did more. It let him catalog most of one of the largest libraries in the Realm in less than fifteen years, and other libraries are copying that, too. He’d finished with most of the collection, and was working on the stuff no one’s really interested in, like unpublished dissertations. That’s how he found … ah…”

“This document my brother is said to have copied,” I supplied. “But Benton says he did no such thing. And if he didn’t, someone must have planted it for the librarian to find.”

“And now he’s dead,” Fisk said. “Mistress Peebles, we’d like to take a look around Hotchkiss’ house. Do you have a second key, by any chance?”

“Yes,” she said. “And no, I’m not giving it to you.”

“Not even for Benton’s sake?” I said. “This university, ’tis my brother’s life. If he loses it, he has nothing.”

“My Seymour was the same. But if I lose this job, then
I
have nothing.”

“But what difference does it make if we look around the house?” Fisk persisted. “Captain Chaldon said the law already searched the place. And the servants will have to go in soon and clean up … everything.”

“I should be so lucky. The maids are all saying they won’t go near the place, much less be scrubbing up anyone’s life blood. It’ll be days, maybe weeks … but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you in.”

“Cheer up,” I said as I led Fisk down the hall. “’Twas not likely anyone would give up those keys. Besides, if there was something to be found in Hotchkiss’ house the law would have found it already.”

And besides that, there was nothing left to do now except examine the forged thesis. Which should count as part of Fisk’s investigation, instead of mine.

“I am cheerful,” Fisk said. “I learned what I wanted to know.”