Matricide at St. Martha's (18 page)

‘Oh, dear, I should have told you about it really, shouldn’t I? We men should stick together and all that. But there really wasn’t time. You see, the Mistress nobbled me after breakfast while Bobsy and I were having our little walk and,’ Pusey giggled, ‘she made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. If I voted for what she called the dream ticket – well, I don’t want to go into details… ’ He wriggled a bit in his seat. ‘Oh well, I’ll tell you. Have some more sherry. She said she’d give me a three-year contract.’

‘You mean you’re not permanent here?’

‘Alas, no. I’ve been on an annual contract for quite a while and it leaves us very vulnerable, especially now that there’s been all that pressure to change the statutes. If Bridget and her mob succeeded in all that I might have been out of a job and jobs in my world are very few and far between.’

‘Wouldn’t you have been able to get something in… ’ Amiss cast around desperately, ‘the Royal College of Needlework or somewhere?’

‘No, no. They would think what I do old-fashioned. Young people nowadays don’t want old fogeys like me making pretty things; they want their own nasty designs.’

‘And Windlesham has the power to do this?’

‘That’s what she said. And she said that Bridget wouldn’t oppose it if I voted for her. So what choice did I have?’

Not a lot, you poor old sod, thought Amiss. ‘Oh, I do understand, but aren’t you afraid of what Bridget might do to the college now she’s in a position of power?’

‘Frankly, dear boy, I don’t care if they teach theology, women’s studies or windsurfing as long as Bobsy and I are cosy and safe. Now, mind you, I’d have much preferred that bequest to be used to make our lives more comfortable but there’s no point in whistling for the moon.’

He looked at his watch. ‘Goodness, it’s dinner time. Come along.’

‘I’m going out.’

‘Lucky old you.’

Amiss stood up, paid his respects to Bobsy and withdrew. As previously agreed, he caught the Bursar as she went into dinner and they hastily exchanged their news. ‘That’s pretty staggering,’ said Amiss when she had finished. ‘Does he know you know?’

‘Can’t see how he would.’

‘Mind you lock your door tonight, just in case.’

‘Don’t fuss.’

‘If you don’t promise to be careful and to lock your fucking door, I’ll tell everyone your name is Ida.’

The Bursar grinned. ‘I like blackmail. It’s a very efficient way of getting things done. I just wish that at present I was better equipped to practise it on this mob. All right, I’ll be careful. Now go off and carouse with your sergeant. I’ll try and seduce Mary Lou.’

Amiss repressed a pang of anguish at the image that conjured up. As he walked down the drive, he focused his mind on Rachel. ‘ “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”,’ he muttered. By the time he reached the gate he had enumerated at least two dozen things he loved about her. However, the trouble was, he admitted to himself, that Rachel had one major defect: she was four thousand miles away.

21

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‘This job, if I may so loosely describe it, is ruinous to the liver. For a fellow of a temperance college I seem to have to do an awful lot of drinking.’

‘Well, that’s because it’s not actually a temperance college,’ said Pooley. ‘Temperance, after all, is moderation and there’s nothing wrong with moderate drinking. It’s when they interpret temperance as a total ban that the problems arise and people overreact.’

‘Quite,’ said Amiss. ‘Now, what are we going to drink?’

The restaurant was cosy, they had a quiet table and nobody looked familiar. After they had ordered and Pooley was well into his gin and tonic, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

‘I’m knackered.’

‘Why, particularly?’

‘Because it’s exhausting doing anything with Romford; he’s so slow he wears you out. Everything that would take three minutes with Jim takes thirty minutes with Romford and it’s a kind of contagious stupidity. By the end of a day with him your IQ has halved, your energy level is at rock bottom and the whole world seems confusing.’

‘Is that why he runs his home the way he does?’

‘Ah, you mean an oasis of order? I suppose that figures. Fundamentalists like making order out of chaos. I want another gin and tonic. What about you?’

‘Why not? This is most encouraging, Ellis. Spend much more time with Romford and you’ll end up a disorganized alcoholic rather than the anal retentive I occasionally fear you might become.’

‘Does that mean that by spending too much time with you anal retentiveness becomes inevitable?’

‘I expect so. So for perfect balance you should spend your life shuttling between the two of us. Now, what gives?’

‘What gives is that the students and domestic staff appear to be out of it. You can’t get into the library after nine o’clock at night without a key and Primrose Partridge, who was in there about 9.30, is convinced that the end-of-groove stoppers were still in place.’

‘How could she know?’

‘Wasn’t used to them. The steps, I mean. Those back at her school are much heavier. So she climbed off them about three-quarters of the way down the room and gave them a sharp push, intending them to travel a couple of yards. Instead they flew ahead, clanged noisily on the stoppers at the end, shot backwards another couple of feet and hit her on the arm. Indeed, she was able to show us the bruise.’

‘Was she lying?’

‘Give me one good reason why she should.’

‘Pass. And only the Fellows have keys?’

‘Yes. There were some valuable volumes pinched from the library in the last year and it was decided to make it off bounds from the time it ceases to be supervised. So from 9.00 at night until 9.00 the following morning it’s locked.’

‘So any of us could have fixed the steps.’

‘Except Sandra, Bridget and the Bursar, who all have alibis.’

‘Surely Bobsy vouched for Francis? And vice versa?’

Pooley sighed. ‘Shall we order, or do you intend to go on being silly?’

‘Oh, let’s order by all means. Now, let me choose something serious. A boiled egg, perhaps? And maybe a tiny tiny glass of tap water? Or would that be too self-indulgent?’

‘Robert!’

‘Oh, all right. I’ll have the terrine and the
pot-au-feu
and a lot of red wine. I’m told it’s very good for the arteries.’

‘Now,’ said Amiss, when Pooley had ordered, ‘to recap. Do I gather that Sandra and Bridget spent the night together?’

‘So they claim.’

‘Romford must have been dead chuffed about that.’

‘Nearly as chuffed as when he discovered that you had spent the night in the Bursar’s bedroom.’

‘Didn’t you explain the circumstances?’

‘Well, of course I did, but Romford’s got a filthy mind.’

‘I suppose a man who dwells so much on Sodom and Gomorrah has sex on the brain.’

‘I think I did eventually convince him that your motives were altruistic, but he’s not keen on your alibi. Are you absolutely sure that you didn’t sleep heavily enough for Miss Troutbeck to have been able to sneak out unbeknownst to you?’

‘I didn’t sleep at all,’ said Amiss testily. ‘And as to her sneaking out, does she look like somebody who can sneak out? She’s as heavy-footed as a bison.’

‘OK. That’s her in the clear as far as I’m concerned. But
you’ve
no alibi since she slept so well and neither Romford nor I are entirely convinced by the others.’

‘What about alibis for the time when the Bursar was attacked? Or does Romford think she knocked herself out?’

‘I don’t think that’s occurred to him yet. Sandra and Bridget were apparently together again; you were with Francis Pusey; Primrose Partridge says she was with the Mistress and that’s it on the alibi front. But then any number of the students, and even Greasy Joan, could have done that.’

‘Forensic has nothing to offer?’

‘No. Any adult could have inflicted damage with that implement and the Bursar’s head is so peculiar that it’s impossible to assess the force of the blow.’

An elaborate performance by the wine waiter intervened before Amiss asked, ‘Likely suspects?’

‘Romford would like it to be the Bursar but he’s not ingenious enough to find a way round the facts.’

‘And how are you doing on the motive front?’

‘Bridget and Sandra are strong.’

‘Yes?’

‘Deborah Windlesham, seeing as it’s made her Mistress.’

‘Yes?’

‘We can’t think of anyone else, although Romford would like to think that the Bursar was fiddling the college funds and was in danger of being found out.’

‘But her lack of opportunity has scuppered that scenario, has it?’

‘He has suggested that you and she might have been in cahoots.’

‘Christ, he never gives up, does he? I thought I’d won him over yesterday.’

‘The whole effect was spoiled today when he saw you arm in arm with Miss Troutbeck. He’s heard of toy boys and he’s deeply suspicious.’

‘She grabbed my arm,’ said Amiss peevishly. ‘She was feeling affectionate.’

‘Exactly.’

‘He can’t see any career reasons why anyone else should have had anything to gain from the Mistress being murdered? Money doesn’t seem to apply.’

‘She didn’t have a huge personal fortune that she was going to leave to the Rev Crowley?’

‘She had a small nest egg that she left to the college.’

‘Big help. Sex?’

‘Well, Romford worries over that ground diligently enough but she seems to have been a good old-fashioned celibate. Has the Bursar anything to offer on that score?’

‘The Bursar says that it’s a pretty sexless Fellowship even by Cambridge standards. Apart from the capital “D” Dykes and possibly Anglo-Saxon Annie and Miss Thackaberry, she didn’t think anyone did anything to anybody.’

‘Crowley and Pusey aren’t in a gay relationship, I suppose?’

‘It would have to be a troika. And I don’t think that’s Bobsy’s scene.’

‘No vendettas?’

‘Apparently not.’

Pooley disconsolately speared his fish and chewed it without any sign that he realized what he was eating.

‘I can offer you another motive, Ellis.’

‘What? Whose?’

‘The Rev Crowley’s. The Bursar found the incriminating evidence in her in-tray.’

‘Tell me, tell me.’

‘She has kindly provided me with a photocopy.’

He pulled it out of his pocket.

‘Show me.’

‘I’ll read it to you. It took me five attempts to master the handwriting. It’s from a pal of Dame Maud’s in Canada.

‘My dear Maud,

This is a quick letter just to deal with something urgent that emerges from your long letter of today. I was much struck by the few sentences you included anent your chaplain. It wasn’t so much his name; there may be many clergymen called Cyril Crowley. Nor was it even his interest in East Anglian place names. What rang the alarm bells was your description of him as unctuous and linguistically orotund.

Even allowing for the tendency of clergymen to adopt both those habits of manner and speech, it is too much of a coincidence. This has to be the Rev Cyril Crowley we threw out of here a year ago. Does he look like a Trollopian Bishop? Smooth-chinned, pot-bellied, pink of countenance, elegant white hair? Yes? Then read on, for you have been lumbered with a bounder with the twin distinctions of being both a clerical and an academic fraud. He never got beyond deacon because he was thrown out of the Church before ordination, owing to a scandal over diocesan funds, which in the good old Anglican way was hushed up.

He then appears to have popped up at a few institutions throughout the Commonwealth on visiting fellowships. He won the first on the basis of a thesis written by somebody else which he’d appropriated by the simple device of changing the title page and slightly altering the title. Later, he had a lucky break in Australia when a friend of his died leaving a body of work behind him which Crowley raided and out of which he published some articles over his own name in learned journals. He is an attractive proposition for impecunious academic establishments in these secular days, because he can teach as well as being chaplain. However, a few years ago he was unmasked by an old colleague and was thrown out of his Australian university.

At St Ethelfreda’s we found out about him only by accident. He was caught by a visitor from Australia to whom he was known and who found him, you might say
, in flagrante,
performing a service. Even unctuousness didn’t get him out of that one; he was gone by the following morning
.

Get rid of him with all speed, Maud. He is a nasty and corrupt bit of work who deserves no charity.

I’ll write at greater length shortly.

With my love, as ever,

Amy.

Pooley had cheered up greatly by the end of the letter.

‘How did the Bursar get hold of it? What was it doing in her in-tray?’

‘Dame Maud popped it in an envelope with a note on it saying, “I’ll give him a week’s notice. You will want to sort out the financial aspect of this. I propose to offer him the option of resigning for personal reasons rather than drag the college through the gutter. So don’t tell anyone else.” ’

‘But what would have been the point of his knocking off Dame Maud? He would have known she would have told someone else.’ Pooley was suddenly despondent.

‘Not necessarily. If he thought she hadn’t told anyone else he still had a chance of keeping his job. He’d have had plenty of time to search her desk after the body had been found. He could have assumed the letter would have been easy to find. Bad luck for him that she had already sent it on to the Bursar.’

‘It’s going to be difficult to get Romford’s mind on to this. He’s completely and utterly fixated on the notion that the murderer has to be, in his words, “a woman given to abominable practices”, so he’s settled on Bridget, Sandra and Mary Lou as prime suspects and has only reluctantly given way on the Bursar in view of her condition on the night of the murder.’ He paused. ‘You know, I don’t want to be a bigot myself but I’m really not sure that fundamentalists are well equipped to be detectives.’