Death of an Avid Reader (16 page)

There, seated at the breakfast table, was Mr Lennox, in his dressing gown, Sunday papers on the table. Opposite him was Mrs Carmichael, deputy librarian, also in her dressing gown.

They had not seen me as they were gazing at each other.

Time for me to give up and go home.

As I drove, I considered asking Sykes to come with me to the library and bring his skeleton keys so that we could gain entry, but I could hear his arguments. The front is too exposed and with iron gates. Change Alley attracts vagrants, prostitutes and the attention of the beat bobby. Sykes would question my judgement, remind me that I have not slept, tell me that although it is Sunday, people will be out walking to and from church, and window shopping. He would tell me that police are keeping an eye on the place.

Besides, I had already interfered with the Mr Castle's Sunday mornings. Sykes must be allowed his day off.

Feeling in low spirits and the tiredness of a sleepless night beginning to creep up, I set off for home.

As I drove, words popped into my head.
The Big Bothy, Weetwood:
Dr Potter's address.

As if it had developed a mind of its own, my motor sped on, beyond Headingley, in the direction of Weetwood.

Fifteen

Big Bothy, Dr Potter's dwelling, was in one of those out of the way nooks. If I had not happened upon a couple of girls exercising their ponies, I might be looking still.

Leaving the car in a narrow lane, I walked along a track. On the curve of a bend, I saw the dwelling, a single storey, octagonal house with two chimneys, a roughcast finish and latticed windows. It stood in a meadow that in spring and summer must be glorious but now looked a sorry sight. Close by were two outhouses, presumably one of them housing the earth closet and the other a shed. A little way beyond was a paddock and stable.

Close up, I saw that the roughcast finish on the walls of the house had been decorated with tiny pebbles and fragments of coloured glass, giving the building an idiosyncratic appearance.

When no one answered my knock on the firmly shut oak front door, I peered through the nearest of the latticed windows into a library. Under the window, a sturdy desk held an oil lamp and cut glass pen and ink stand. The surface was strewn with notebooks and sheets of foolscap paper. An exceedingly large tabby cat leapt onto the desk and stared at me.

Through the next window I looked into a kitchen-cum-dining room. The window after that revealed a bedroom, furnished with a walnut bedroom suite. Beside that was a parlour or sitting room where a low fire burned. This room was comfortably furnished with large Persian rug, and well-worn chintz-covered chairs and sofa. Alcoves on either side of the fireplace housed bookshelves. In front of one set of bookshelves to the right of the fireplace, an ornate cage on a stand held a handsome parrot. Through the last window, I saw a small bedroom with cast-iron single bed, chest of drawers with jug and bowl, shaving kit, hair brush and clothes brush. On a wicker chair, lay an open book.

Every room had at least one oil lamp. Neither gas nor electricity had been brought to this spot.

I waited a few more moments, looking about to see whether anyone would return. No one did.

Following a well-trodden path to a gate in the fence, I crossed the paddock, towards the stable.

Through the half-open stable door, I heard a sound and peered inside, ready to introduce myself.

A man of heavy build and medium height had his back to me. He was hatless and wore a dark coat that was a little on the small size, pulled tightly across his shoulders. A pony stood beside him, flicking its tail. In front of them was a freestanding blackboard, the kind normally seen in a schoolroom. It was covered in large, boldly-written numbers, some of them simple, the kind children might learn in their first year at school, and others more complicated, including equations that meant nothing to me.

The man whispered into the pony's ear.

He waited.

I watched.

He whispered again, and waited.

I waited.

Nothing happened.

After a moment I backed away from the stable door, returned, and made a show of knocking on the door and pushing it open.

I cleared my throat and made myself known, apologising for interrupting him.

Man and pony turned their heads.

‘Hello, sir.'

‘Hello.' The man gave a deep sigh. ‘Be with you in a moment, madam.' He spoke in a soft Welsh lilt to the pony as he led it back to the stall and gave it a pat.

The pony nudged his pocket.

‘Right you are, Archie, though you don't deserve it, mind.' He produced an apple and held it towards the creature who took it from his hand.

As the man walked towards me, I saw that he was smartly dressed, his coat well-brushed, brown boots polished to a high sheen, his trousers a little too short. Ample grey wavy hair, centre parted, and one of those melancholy drooping moustaches gave him the appearance of an inventor of improbable machinery. He could have been any age between thirty-five and fifty.

‘I'm Mrs Shackleton from the library. We were all shocked and sorry about Dr Potter's death.'

‘That is kind. Thank you. I wondered if someone would come.'

‘And you are?'

‘I beg your pardon. I forget my manners. I am Richard Morgan, Dr Potter's manservant, man and boy, my service interrupted only by the business that interrupted us all.'

He closed the stable door and we fell into step together on the path that led towards the house.

‘Is there anyone else here with you? I'm sorry that I don't know Dr Potter's circumstances. We were acquainted through the library but I realise now how little I know about him.'

‘Just the two of us here it was and powerful well we were suited.'

‘It's very peaceful here.'

‘Out of the way some would say, but there is a bicycle in the outhouse, see you, which takes me where I need to go. And sometimes Dr Potter pedalled his way to the university or walked to the road as far as the tram stop. That is what he did on Friday. I told the police when they came to break the terrible news and ask their questions.'

‘You must have worried when he had not come home.'

‘Well I did not worry, Friday night being so heavy with the fog. I was not surprised when the doctor did not return for supper. I thought the fog had pressed him into stopping at his gentlemen's club and that I would see him on Saturday. No cab driver would have inclined himself to drive up here on such a night.'

‘He sometimes came home by cab?'

‘Heavens no, not as a rule, but on Friday morning he let it drop that he would be coming in style, see you, and he seemed very pleased about something.'

‘He must have relied on you a great deal.'

‘I like to think so.'

Ingratiating oneself into a person's confidence is a despicable habit but on occasions useful. I shamelessly invented a courtesy aunt who had relied for forty years on a companion who would then have been left bereft without some assistance as to how she might find her way from her lonely situation.

He invited me indoors.

We entered a spic and span hallway with polished floor, threadbare carpet and a vase of evergreens on the table.

‘Please step into the parlour. I am just about to make tea.'

I sat down on one of the chintz-covered chairs that I had seen through the window. As I did so, the giant cat stalked into the room and leapt on my knee, its weight cracking my thighbones. I stroked its head. As if in protest, the parrot by the bookcase began to squawk. The cat purred.

The parrot's squawk turned into a low chant. ‘Ones two is two, two twos four, three twos six, how's your father?'

The cat's purr mounted to a deafening crescendo.

‘Two and six,' the parrot squawked, ‘stupid bird, stupid bird, three and four.' It then lapsed into silence, broken only by the rattle of the cage as it pecked seed.

The volume of the cat's purring increased so much that I found it disconcerting. I stopped stroking its head. It butted my hand and continued its high volume signals of contentment. Never in my life have I heard even a baritone reach such a pitch. It was the kind of unearthly sound that might make one believe in reincarnation, the reincarnation, in a single creature, of a Welsh male voice choir.

‘Eleven twelve,' the parrot said, just as Mr Morgan arrived with the tea tray. He set it down, picked up a damask cover from the back of a chair and placed it over the cage.

He then turned to the cat. ‘Down, Dunce!'

Dunce ignored him.

I lifted the cat gently to the floor. It weighed as much as a trunk packed for a month's voyage. ‘Why do you call him Dunce?'

‘His name is Toby. We call him Dunce because he pays no heed. He doesn't try. Oh, he sits on the desk as though pretending great interest but there's nothing behind it.'

‘I see.'

I did not see. Not one little bit did I see.

Mr Morgan drew up a low table, set it with a china cup and a plate of homemade biscuits. ‘How do you like your tea, Mrs Shackleton?'

‘As it comes, Mr Morgan.'

‘One lump or two?'

‘None, thank you.' Having become used to going without sugar when it was in such short supply, I had lost the taste for it.

He poured the milk, and tea of a goodly colour, and hot. ‘Thank you.' I took a biscuit. ‘You have a cook?'

‘Oh no, madam. It is all my own work. Wouldn't do to have women about the place, begging your pardon. Not with the professor concentrating so hard on his subject.'

‘What was his subject, precisely?'

‘Well mathematics, of course.'

‘A difficult subject.'

‘Indeed, it is a subject chill and severe, with the beauty and truth of an ancient carving. But my master turned mathematics into poetry and his interests spread much wider and warmer.'

‘In what way?'

‘We did not say much about it, not yet. It is a great pity that so much of his work is left undone.'

‘Did the police ask you about his work, the work that was left undone?'

‘No, madam. They wanted to know about his acquaintances, what took him to the library that day, why he may have been in the basement. I am afraid I was not much help.'

‘I should think you were in a state of shock.'

‘Indeed I was, and most upset by their insinuations.'

‘What did they insinuate?'

‘One can never be sure with insinuations as they are exactly that and lacking in precision as you might say. It would shame me to repeat what I think they were implying.'

‘Tut-tut. How awful for you.'

‘As if he would, as if Dr Potter would take as much as a match that did not belong to him. Every book here is owned by Dr Potter or legitimately borrowed and none overdue.'

‘They thought he may have books that did not belong to him?'

‘My poor master, struck down at the height of his explorations and they asking me what books he has and where. Would you credit that?'

‘I would not.'

‘I will see that the good doctor's wishes are carried out, that his books are donated to the university, and the borrowed ones returned. Perhaps you will be so kind as to take his Leeds Library books with you.'

‘He took some back only on Friday.'

‘He has a special dispensation for wholesale book borrowing. There are more.'

‘Yes, if you wish, but do not rush yourself. I can come back another day.'

‘I will not have aspersions cast on his good name. He never returned books anything but early in all his life.'

‘Your loyalty does you credit.'

‘He deserves no less. He was good to me, took me into his confidence occasionally. He usually passed on his clothing to me. We are much of a size except that he was taller. But I am a dab hand at shortening trousers.'

I tried not to glance at Mr Morgan's trousers that ended somewhere above the tops of his grey socks. I looked around the room. ‘And the property?'

‘Rented, furnished, and paid up until the end of April.'

‘And then? Do you have family?'

He shook his head. ‘I have not had much time to think about my future. But I will not work for another gentleman because there would be none so interesting and important as Dr Potter.'

‘What will you do?'

‘It is too soon to say.'

‘Of course.'

‘But two possibilities present themselves. I have learned something of mathematics, have taught myself Latin and German. A man could not live with a genius and fail to catch a glimpse of life's mysteries. Some families who may not be able to afford a full-time tutor may engage a person on an hourly rate to help their children learn.'

‘That sounds a good idea.'

‘Education is the foundation on which we will build a new and better world.'

‘And the other possibility?'

‘I am not sure how I could do it. And if I could, I am not sure how I could turn it into a living.'

‘Try it out on me.'

The cat stalked the room, stopping only to sniff Mr Morgan's shoes. The silent parrot sent waves of dark reproach from under its tent.

I took a wild guess. ‘Does this other possibility have anything to do with teaching animals to count?'

His tea went down the wrong way. He tapped his chest, stood up, wiped his watering eyes and left the room, motioning me to excuse him. For an uncomfortable length of time, he coughed and choked in the hall.

A few moments later he returned.

‘How did you know, about the animals?'

‘The parrot has an inkling of its times tables, the blackboard in the stable is covered with sums and you were encouraging the pony to respond I believe.'

‘No one told you then?'

‘Oh no. Well, not unless you count the parrot who seems to know more questions than answers.'

‘Polynesia is a terrible show-off. She learns by rote, that is the top and bottom of her ability, with not a jot of understanding.' He refilled our teacups. ‘I hope you will keep this to yourself, Mrs Shackleton. Dr Potter was not yet ready to reveal his findings. It would have been his life's work, had the Lord spared him. He believed that animals are clever, quick-witted, and some of them more intelligent than many humans.'