Read The silent world of Nicholas Quinn Online
Authors: Colin Dexter
looked at their lips and followed their conversations, as though he were standing
almost immediately beside them. He knew instinctively that some of the words must
have been whispered very quietly; but to him most of them were as clear as if they
were being shouted through a megaphone. He remembered one occasion (his
hearing had been fairly good then) when he had picked up a phone and heard, on a
crossed line, a man and his mistress arranging a clandestine rendezvous and
anticipating their forthcoming fornication with lascivious delight . . .
He felt suddenly frightened as Bartlett caught his eye and walked over, with Sheik
Ahmed just behind him.
'Well? You enjoyed yourself, my boy?'
'Yes, indeed. I—I was just waiting to thank you both—'
'That is a great pleasure for us, too, Meester Queen.' Ahmed smiled his white and
golden smile and held out his hand. 'We shall be meeting you again, we hope so
soon.'
Quinn walked out into St. Giles'. He had not noticed how keenly one of the remaining
guests had been watching him for the past few minutes; and it was with considerable
surprise that he felt a hand on his shou1lder and turned to face the man who had
followed him to his car.
'I'd like a word with you, Quinn,' said Philip Ogleby.
At 12.30 the following day, Quinn looked up from the work upon which, with almost no
success, he had been trying to concentrate all morning. He had heard no knock, but
someone was opening the door. It was Monica.
'Would you like to take me out for a drink, Nicholas?'
ON FRIDAY, 21ST NOVEMBER, a man in his early thirties caught the train from Faddington
back to Oxford. He found an empty first-class compartment with little difficulty, leaned
back in his seat, and lit a cigarette. From his briefcase he took-out a fairly bulky
envelope addressed to himself ('If undelivered please return to the Foreign
Examinations Syndicate'), and extracted several lengthy reports. He unclipped his
ballpoint pen from an inside pocket, and began to make sporadic notes. But he was
left-handed, and with an ungenerous margin, and that only on the right of the closely-
typed documents, the task was awkward; and progressively so, as the Inter-City train
gathered full speed through the northern suburbs. The rain splashed in slanting
parallel streaks across the dirty carriage window, and the telegraph poles snatched up
the wires ever faster as he found himself staring out abstractedly at the thinning
autumn landscape; and even when he managed to drag his attention back to the
tedious documents he found it difficult to concentrate. Just before Reading he walked
along to the buffet car and bought a Scotch; then another. He felt better.
At four o'clock he put the papers back into their envelope, crossed out his own name,
C. A. Roope, and wrote 'T. G. Bartlett on the cover. Bartlett, as a man, he disliked (he
could not disguise that), but he was honest enough to respect the man's experience,
and his flair for administration; and he had promised to leave the papers at the
Syndicate that afternoon. Bartlett would never allow a single phrase in the minutes of
a Syndicate Council meeting to go forward before the relevant draft had been
circulated to every member who had attended. And (Roope had to admit) this
meticulous minuting had frequently proved extremely wise. Anyway, the wretched
papers were done now, and Roope snapped his briefcase to, and looked out at the
rain again. The journey had passed more quickly than he could have hoped, and
within a few minutes the drenched grey spires of Oxford came into view on his right,
and the train drew into the station.
Roope walked through the subway, waited patiently behind the queue at the ticket
barrier, and debated for a second or two whether he should bother. But he knew he
would. He took the second-class day-return from his wallet and passed it to the ticket
collector. 'I'm afraid I owe you some excess fare. I travelled back first.'
'Didn't the ticket inspector come round?'
'No.'
'We-ll. Doesn't really matter then, does it?'
'You sure?'
'Wish everybody was as honest as you, sir.'
'OK then, if you say so.'
Roope took a taxi and after alighting at1 the Syndicate tipped the driver liberally.
Rectangles of pale-yellow light shone in the upper storeys of nearby office blocks, and
the giant shapes of the trees outside the Syndicate building loomed black against the
darkening sky. The rain poured down.
Charles Noakes, present incumbent in the key post of caretaker to the Syndicate, was
(for the breed) a comparatively young and helpful man, whose soul was yet to be
soured by years of cumulative concern about the shutting of windows, the polishing of
floors, the management of the boiler, and the setting of the burglar alarm. He was
replacing a fluorescent tube in the downstairs corridor when Roope entered the
building.
'Hello, Noakes. The Secretary in?'
'No, sir. He's been out all the afternoon.'
'Oh.' Roope knocked on Harriett's door and looked in. The light was on; but then
Roope knew that the lights would be on in every room. Bartlett always claimed that the
mere switching-on of a fluorescent tube used as much electricity as leaving it on for
about four hours, and consequently the lights were left on all day throughout the office
—'for reasons of economy'. For a brief second Roope thought he heard a noise inside
the room, but there was nothing. Only a note on the desk which read: 'Friday pm. Off to
Banbury. May be back about five.'
'Not there, is he, sir?' Noakes had descended the small ladder and was standing
outside.
'No. But never mind. I'll have a word with one of the others.'
'Not many of 'em here, I don't think, sir. Shall I see for you?'
'No. Don't worry. I'll do it myself.'
He knocked and put his head round Ogleby's door. No Ogleby.
He tried Martin's room. No Martin.
He was knocking quietly on Monica Height's door, and leaning forward to catch any
response from within, when the caretaker reappeared in the well-lit, well-polished
corridor. 'Looks as if Mr. Quinn's the only graduate here, sir. His car's still out the back, anyway. I think the others must have gone.'
When the cat's away, thought Roope . . . He opened Monica's door and looked inside.
The room was tidiness itself, the desk clear, the leather chair neatly pushed beneath it.
It was the caretaker who tried Quinn's room, and Roope came up behind him as he
looked in. A green anorak was draped over one of the chairs, and the top drawer of the
nearest cabinet gaped open to reveal a row of buff-coloured file cases. On the desk,
placed under a cheap paperweight, was a note from Quinn for his typist's attention.
But Quinn himself was nowhere to be seen.
Roope had often heard tell of Bartlett's meticulous instructions to his staff not only
about their paramount duty for ensuring the strictest security on all matters concerning
question papers, but also about the importance of leaving some notification of their
whereabouts. 'At least he's left a note for us, Noakes. More than some of the others
have.'
'I don't think the Secretary would be very happy about this, though.' Noakes gravely
closed the top drawer of the cabinet and pushed in the lock.
'Bit of a stickler about that sort of thing, isn't he, old Bartlett?'
'Bit of a stickler about everything, sir.' Yet somehow Noakes managed to convey the
impression tha1t if he were on anyone's side, it would be Bartlett's.
'You don't think he's too much of a fusspot?'
'No, sir. I mean, all sorts of people come into the office, don't they? You can't be too
careful in a place like this.'
'No. You're absolutely right.'
Noakes felt pleasantly appeased, and having made his point he conceded a little to
Roope's suspicions. 'Mind you, sir, I reckon he might have picked a warmer week for
practising the fire drill.'
'Gives you those, does he?' Roope grinned. He hadn't been on a fire drill since he was
at school.
'We had one today, sir. Twelve o'clock. He had us all there, standing in the cold for
something like a quarter of an hour. Freezing, it was. I know it's a bit too hot in here but
. . .' Noakes was about to embark on an account of his unequal struggle with the
Syndicate's antiquated heating system, but Roope was far more interested in Bartlett,
it seemed.
'Quarter of an hour? In
this
weather?'
Noakes nodded. 'Mind you, he'd warned us all about it earlier in the week, so we had
our coats and everything, and it wasn't raining then, thank goodness, but—'
'Why as long as that, though?'
"Well, there's quite a lot of permanent staff now and we had to tick our names off a list.
Huh! Just like we was at school. And the Secretary gave us a little talk . . .'
But Roope was no longer listening; he couldn't stand there talking to the caretaker all
night, and he began walking slowly up the corridor. 'Bit odd, isn't it? Everybody here
this morning and nobody here this afternoon!'
'You're right, sir. Are you sure I can't help you?'
'No, no. It doesn't matter. I only came to give this envelope to Bartlett. I'll leave it on his desk.'
'I'm going upstairs for a cup o' tea in a minute, sir, when I've fixed this light. Would you like one?'
'No, I've got to be off. Thanks all the same, though.'
Roope took advantage of the Gentlemen's lavatory by the entrance and realized just
how hot it was in the building: like walking into a Turkish bath.
Bartlett himself had been addressing a group of Banbury headmasters and
headmistresses on the changing pattern of public examinations; and the last question
had been authoritatively (and humorously) dispatched at almost exactly the same time
that Roope had caught his taxi to the Syndicate. He was soon driving his pride and
joy, a dark-brown Vanden Plas, at a steady sixty down the twenty-odd-mile stretch to
Oxford. He lived out at Botley, on the western side of the city, and as he drove he
debated whether to call in at the office or to go straight home. But at Kidlington he
found himself beginning to get caught up in the regular evening paralysis, and as he
negotiated the roundabouts on Oxford's northern perimeter he decided to turn off right
along the ring-road instead of carrying straight over towards the city centre. He would
call in the office a bit later, perhaps, when the evening rush-hour had abated.
When he arrived home, at just gone five his wife informed him that there had been
several phone calls; and even as she was giving him the details the wretched thing
rang again. How she wished they had a numbe1r ex-directory.
On Saturday, 22nd November (as on most Saturdays), the burglar alarm system was
switched off at 8.30 a.m., one hour later than on weekdays. During the winter months
there were only occasional Saturday workings, and on this particular morning the
building was, from all appearances, utterly deserted. Ogleby was on foot, and let
himself in quietly. The smell of floor polish, like the smell of cinema seats and old
library books, took him back tantalizingly to his early schooldays, but his mind was on
other things. Successively he looked into each room on the ground floor in order to
satisfy himself that no one was around. But he was aware of this instinctively: there
was an eerie, echoing emptiness about the building which the quiet clickings-to of the