Mr Campion's Visit

by Mike Ripley

  ‘Got you!’ she squealed, awarding herself a large slurp of gin and tonic. ‘You’re the university Visitor, the chap who was here when there was a murder at the Dudley back in the last century.’

  ‘Not quite that long ago,’ Campion chided, ‘though it must seem like it to you.’

  ‘How did you know that?’ Kevin accused her.

  ‘Because I keep my eyes and ears open instead of reading pamphlets and plotting the revolution,’ she shot back, before turning to Campion as if she had just remembered something. ‘Hang on … does your being here mean there’s been another murder? That Pascual’s been murdered?’

  ‘I’m afraid it does.’ Campion adopted his sternest expression. ‘But lest that should be taken as the starting gun for the revolution, I would point out that the campus is positively crawling with policemen.’

  ‘Then we’re well out of it here,’ said the youngest of the group, who by a process of elimination must be Joe.

  ‘Rubbish!’ Kevin almost spat at him. ‘If the pigs are on campus giving our comrades the third degree, we have to go and stand by them. Solidarity! United we will not be defeated!’

  ‘I don’t think anyone is getting the third degree,’ said Campion, ‘nor even the second, but I am not privy to the police investigation.’

  ‘I’m surprised they haven’t descended on us here,’ said Kevin with a hint of regret. ‘They’d love to put us in the frame for something serious.’

  ‘Oh, but the police have been here – if you mean White Dudley, that is. They came to search the professor’s house around one o’clock.’

  ‘Ah.’

  The girl Angie buried her face in her glass, but a telltale bloom on her cheek gave her away.

  ‘I take it that was too early for you,’ said Campion gently, ‘not having lectures or classes to go to.’

  ‘A bit. We must have missed all the fun. Pascual’s cottage is just down the road from our house. We’re practically his nearest neighbour.’

  ‘Really? So you probably got on with him quite well.’

  ‘Not bloody likely!’ Kevin warmed to his theme. ‘The work he was doing was funded by the CIA and the results would have ended up with some big American mining corporation.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’

  ‘It said as much in Socialist Worker!’ Brian blurted in support.

  ‘Then it must be true,’ Campion said dryly, proving yet again that fanatics have underdeveloped senses of irony. ‘Although I did hear that the professor supported the new socialist government in Chile.’

  ‘He wasn’t that interested in politics,’ said Kevin, glaring at Angie. ‘He was mostly into women – as many and as often as he could get.’

  ‘And that’s why you called him the South American heart-throb; somewhat pejoratively, I thought.’

  ‘He made men – and boys – jealous,’ Angie intervened, ‘because he was so charming. There was definitely something of the Latin Lover about him.’

  As she leaned into Campion to confide in him, he noticed that the girl’s unkempt hair had a suspiciously botanical odour, which had not come from her Virginia hand-rolled tobacco alone.

  ‘The Randy Gaucho,’ Kevin sneered. ‘That’s what we called him.’

  ‘I think gauchos live in Argentina rather than Chile,’ said Campion, ‘but I may be wrong. Still, he sounds like quite a character. Did you say you were neighbours?’

  ‘We share a house just down the street from his cottage,’ said Angie, sensing the need to distance herself and her friends from Pascual. ‘Not that we saw him much off-campus, and we’re none of us his students.’

  ‘We would have got more computer time if we were,’ said Brian sulkily, at which the other three flashed warning glances at each other.

  ‘Yes, I understand there has been a certain amount of bad feeling at the university about the allocation of the resources of the Computing Centre.’

  ‘You can say that again!’ Young Brian was clearly not picking up on the unease of his housemates. ‘Just ask Jake Zee or Steph – they were always rowing with him.’

  ‘That would be Jack Szmodics – Dr Szmodics – and Stephanie Silva, wouldn’t it?’

  Angie looked at Campion through narrowed eyes. ‘You’re quite the detective, aren’t you? Are you sure you’re not with the police?’

  Mr Campion was grateful that, at that precise moment, Mr Hopewell appeared from behind the bar holding a steaming plate with a pair of obviously burnt oven gloves.

  ‘My dinner is served,’ he said. ‘Let me leave you, with Cervantes, in peace.’

  Campion settled himself at the small table the landlord had laid for him and began a forensic examination of what he had been served. He had hardly started the autopsy on his meat pie when the students, having rapidly finished their drinks, stood up and trooped out of the pub. As they passed Campion, Angie winked at him, Brian nodded sheepishly, Joe said, ‘Thanks for the drink’, and Kevin gave him the clenched-fist salute of the international revolution. He acknowledged all of them.

  He had just determined that the meat in the pie on his plate was lamb, and actually was quite palatable, when he noticed that he was being observed by one of the locals playing darts. By some unwritten law of pub or darts-playing etiquette, Campion was allowed to finish his meal before one of the players approached him, a pint of mild in one hand and a set of ‘Norwich woods’ – the short, stubby, native dart of East Anglia, made from pine and weighted with lead, with stiff white ‘feathers’ – in the other.

  ‘I know you,’ said the darts player when he stood immediately before Campion’s table.

  ‘Indeed you do,’ said Campion. ‘We met earlier today. It’s Mr Warren, isn’t it? I didn’t recognize you in your civvies.’

  The uninvited guest looked down his front as if to make sure he was still wearing the blue pullover and brown corduroy trousers he had started the darts match in. ‘Oh, the uniform,’ he said, the penny dropping. ‘Glad to be out of it after a day like today. Mr Meade has pulled me off the night shift after my midnight patrol … discovery.’

  ‘That’s perfectly understandable, Mr Warren. University porters see many things which would melt the eyeballs of normal men, but your experience was well beyond the call of duty.’

  Bill Warren nodded in agreement. ‘’Course I ain’t supposed to talk about it, so the p’liceman said. Saw you with them students. We call ’em our local branch of the Angry Brigade.’

  ‘Oh, they’re hardly that,’ chuckled Campion. ‘No more than a Slightly Cross Platoon, I would say.’

  ‘Were they bending your ear?’

  ‘I suppose they were, but not about the … about your discovery. They were in blissful ignorance as they hadn’t been up to the campus today.’

  Mr Warren clicked his tongue against his teeth.

  ‘Don’t surprise me, that bunch. Layabouts they are, and hooligans.’

  ‘I don’t mind lazy hooligans,’ said Campion, ‘they cause less trouble than energetic ones. I’ve known some distinguished hooligans in my time.’

  ‘Aye, you’re ’im,’ said Warren with satisfaction.

  ‘Yes, I probably am,’ said a confused Campion, ‘but who do you think I am?’

  ‘You’re Albert Campion, of course, friend to hooligans, minor royalty and criminals of most persuasions. No time-wasters, please.’

  Campion sat back in his chair and reached for his glass and the last drops of his ale.

  ‘That sounds awfully familiar, Mr Warren, and rather like a testimonial, one I might have written myself. May I ask where you heard it?’

  Bill Warren took a contemplative sip from his pint.

  ‘It was during the war, up in Lunn’un, when I was in the Ambulances.’

  ‘I believe you mentioned your service this morning, but how on earth did I crop up?’

  ‘There was a whole street got flattened by a V-bomb down in Chelsea and it was a three-day job digging the survivors out. Got chatting to a bloke in Heavy Rescue. On
ce I said I was from Suffolk, you couldn’t shut him up about how he thought it was “pure nachure” out here and how he loved the countryside.’

  ‘A big chap, built like a wrestler,’ said Campion wearily, pinching his nose between finger and thumb, ‘bald head the size of a beach ball? Moustache like a walrus’s perhaps? Good with children but you wouldn’t trust him with the keys to your coal cellar?’

  ‘That sounds like him. Good man to have next to you when the beams start creaking and the gas main’s leaking. Funny name, though.’

  ‘Magersfontein,’ supplied Campion.

  ‘No, that wasn’t it. Major Lugg I think it was. Must have been a major in the war previous, as he was too old for active service.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Campion said quietly.

  ‘Anyway, this Lugg said he was partners with a toff – pardon my French – called Campion, though that wasn’t his proper name, and they got up to some right old larks together before the war. He was looking forward to getting his junior partner back in harness after the war for a bit of “private narking”, as he called it. That was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘In a bygone era, it might have been, but I retired a long time ago.’

  ‘You don’t happen to know what happened to Major Lugg do you? I heard he kept pigs during the war and he looked the sort who could wrestle one to the ground with ease.’

  ‘He could certainly eat one into submission,’ said Campion.

  ‘I hope he got through the war in one piece,’ said Mr Warren wistfully. ‘He saved a dozen or more civilians to my knowledge.’

  ‘Oh, he’s still around,’ Campion admitted. ‘He survived the war all right, but sadly lost his mind worrying about the Festival of Britain. The poor old soul is quite mad nowadays and is only allowed visitors on Wednesdays if there’s an “R” in the month.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘A sad fate, but the logical outcome of low living, I’m afraid. Now, tell me about those students I was drinking with. Why are they layabouts and hooligans?’

  Bill Warren wetted his lips with his pint. ‘The four of them share a house in the village and you wouldn’t believe the goings-on that go on there.’

  ‘Oh, I might,’ said Campion casually. ‘I’m very broad-minded.’

  ‘Loud music, visitors at all hours, rubbish strewn all over the front garden, drugs probably; visits by the police and I bet they never bought a round.’

  ‘Well, they were certainly guilty of that, but I didn’t expect them to, being poor students living on toast and baked beans.’

  ‘Pah! Don’t you be taken in. That Angie, she’s got expensive tastes and comes from a good family. When she came to the university a year ago, her parents drove her down here in a Rolls-Royce. They took one look at the pyramid residences and said “our darling daughter’s not staying there” so they came over to White Dudley and bought the first cottage they saw for sale. Paid cash for it and a price none in the village could match. ’Course rich old mum and dad have never been back to see what a mess’s been made of the place.’

  ‘My goodness, I can see why they may not be popular in the village, but I have to ask, Mr Warren, how do you know all this?’

  ‘Gerry Meade lives here, don’t forget.’

  ‘And Mr Meade likes to keep an eye on students who live off-campus?’

  ‘Not so much him as Mrs Meade.’

  Campion did a double take. He could not help himself. ‘Daisey May Meade?’

  ‘No, goodness me, she passed on ten years since,’ Warren reassured him. ‘I was meaning Edwina Meade, Big Gerry’s missus. She doesn’t miss much that goes on around here. I’m surprised the police haven’t co-opted her to help them, instead of you. No offence, of course.’

  ‘None taken,’ said Mr Campion. ‘None at all.’

  Back in his temporary lodgings in the staff flat atop the Durkheim pyramid, Mr Campion stood, with the light off, taking in the sights and sounds of the campus at night. His brain ticked over in neutral, wondering idly what the electricity bill of the university must be, for the library and all three piazzas were lit up, as were the footpaths, as if indicating the location to a passing spaceship. Even Black Dudley had light showing, though beyond the house was only inky blackness.

  The library was, of course, closed, and there was little sign of human activity in the piazzas, though occasionally a figure walked over to the car park and Campion noted that everyone who did so had come armed with a torch. In the morning it might be worth asking Superintendent Appleyard if the professor had carried a torch on his midnight ramble to the car park. The important question, however, was still where was he rambling from?

  Almost imperceptibly the background noise from the residences – doors slamming, muted music from record-players, the occasional inebriated shout – declined and Campion began to consider carefully the problem of how he could comfortably bend his elongated frame into the short and narrow bed provided.

  Painful decision-making was delayed by the very audible sound of a trumpet playing the mournful first notes of the ‘Last Post’.

  Campion consulted his watch. Dead on time; and for once the Phantom Trumpeter’s choice of tune could not have been more appropriate.

  NINE

  Mainframe

  Mr Campion was delighted to find that part of the refectory was open for breakfast at seven thirty but not altogether surprised to discover he was the first customer. The matronly figure behind the counter who served him rewarded him with an extra rasher of bacon on condition that he didn’t tell anyone, and recommended the coffee ‘before it got too stewed’. When Campion thanked her he tipped his hat before sliding his tray towards the cash register and she declared in a loud voice how nice it was to serve a gentleman for once.

  Gradually the cafeteria began to fill with middle-aged women wearing nylon house coats and, from their dawn chorus chatter, Campion gathered that they were the cleaning staff who had completed their allotted tasks in the academic and administrative buildings and were taking a well-deserved break before steeling themselves for the grim task of tackling the student residences.

  The first actual student he saw that morning was as he traversed Piazza 2 heading for Black Dudley, where he was sure the police would be wide awake and open for business. There was little doubt it was a student; as Rupert Campion would have said, he could have come straight out of Central Casting. He wore jeans, baseball shoes, an old school blazer over a T-shirt bearing a famous Disney character behaving completely out of character, and a scarf in the colours of a relatively well-known public school. He was clutching a sheaf of papers, clearly a handwritten essay, and was sneaking up on the entrance to the School of Arts and Humanities in the hope that it would not notice him. Campion guessed this was an attempt to sneak in a piece of coursework for marking even though the deadline had long passed; in fact, Campion realized, this being the first week of term, the deadline must have been sometime in the last academic year which, given the long summer vacation, meant that the essay could be up to three months better-late-than-never.

  He sauntered out of the piazza, taking the footpath to the artificial lake and the curved bridge, now free of its police guards. Once free of the buildings, he buttoned up his jacket as the salty tang of sea breeze struck him. The Suffolk coast was throwing one of its hissy fits that morning, and from the bridge Campion could see, in the distance, white flecks on the grey water. Before it was masked by Black Dudley, he also caught a glimpse of the chapel of St Jurmin jutting up like a broken tooth from the shoreline.

  Superintendent Appleyard had made himself comfortable in the vice chancellor’s office; indeed he had occupied most of Black Dudley as he had brought reinforcements. Every nook and cranny of the ground floor of that gaunt old house seemed to have been crammed with uniformed constables sitting at folding card tables, pecking at the keys of portable typewriters to copy notes on to Rolodex cards. Flitting between the temporary desks, rather like overkeen exam invigilators, w
ere half a dozen plain-clothes detectives, occasionally leaning over a constable to read or correct a card, or to drop cigarette ash all over his uniformed colleague’s painstaking work.

  ‘Glad to see somebody else is up with the milkmaids, even if it’s you,’ Appleyard greeted Campion. ‘If you’ve got something useful to tell me, you’re welcome. If you haven’t, keep out of my hair and don’t pester my officers.’

  Not to be cowed, Mr Campion ignored the superintendent’s threat completely.

  ‘You seem to have increased the size of your staff,’ Campion observed. ‘Special Branch helping out, are they?’

  ‘Who said …? What makes you think they’re Special Branch?’

  ‘I would be very surprised if they weren’t. An officer of your experience would surely have called them in given the sensitivity of Perez-Catalan’s work and the local gossip about student politics and the Angry Brigade.’

  ‘I don’t class such things as gossip, and we have reason to believe there is an active cell operating within the university.’

  Campion shook his head slowly, and set his face with his most beatific smile.

  ‘Oh, come now, Mr Appleyard, if you’re referring to that knitting circle of young radicals over in White Dudley, I’ve met them, and they don’t strike me as dangerous. They may be living in a commune or squatting or whatever young people do these days, and no doubt they are a drain on the rates and not good for property prices, but they seem a mild rather than wild bunch.’

  Appleyard strained his neck muscles as if his shirt collar was strangling him. ‘Our sources on the ground beg to differ.’

  Campion had no doubt he knew who those sources were. ‘I’m sure you know best, Superintendent, and I don’t presume to teach you how to do your job,’ he said. ‘I am here to help if I can.’

  ‘Have you phoned the bishop?’

  ‘Not exactly, but he is constantly in my … thoughts.’

  ‘And you’re in his, or you were at seven o’clock this morning when he rang the chief constable.’ Appleyard’s face strained to adopt an expression of bemusement. ‘And guess who he phoned at two minutes after seven? If you’ve nothing to tell the bishop, have you got anything for me?’