Mr Campion's Visit

by Mike Ripley

  Again, Mr Lugg had surprised the bishop. It would not be the last time that morning.

  ‘Yes, well, that was a most unfortunate experience for all concerned. The man was an MP and a junior minister; a bit left-wing, but then aren’t all politicians these days? How were we to know he was spying for the communists?’

  ‘Albert had his doubts about him and said so on several occasions over a pint down the Platelayers’ Arms, but that’s by the by. One thing’s for sure, Albert couldn’t be a better bet for this visitation lark of yours.’ The big man gave the idea some thought. ‘He could certainly keep your students amused with some of his anecdotes. He’s good at telling jokes and they’re mostly clean.’

  The bishop was not sure he was reassured. ‘Would you say Mr Campion has led a colourful life?’

  ‘Technicolour.’

  ‘I see,’ said the bishop. ‘Could you tell me anything more about him? His character, his career, his values, perhaps his outlook on life?’

  ‘I could tell you enough to fill a book – half a library of books – but that sort of thing is best done over a glass of something, don’t you fink?’

  For the bishop, the morning was starting to look up and his response was immediate. ‘Well, we wouldn’t be in the Brewers’ Hall without being offered a glass of beer, would we?’

  ‘Oh we can do better than that.’ Lugg grinned, reaching into his jacket pocket. ‘We can offer you ale, certainly, but you look like a claret man to me, my lord, and as Beadle of this h’establishment, I ’appen to be in charge of the keys to the wine cellar.’

  The bishop’s eyes brightened. ‘Lead on, Mr Lugg, lead on.’

  It was almost five p.m. when probationary Police Constable Osgood checked in at the Love Lane station at the end of his shift and reported to Sergeant Dillon on the incident he had witnessed around the corner on Aldermanbury Square.

  ‘Has there been a do on at Brewers’ Hall, Sarge?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of. Something amiss?’

  ‘Not really,’ said the constable. ‘There was a taxi outside and Lugg, the beadle, was helping a very jolly gentleman into the back of it, but it was like the gentleman – a substantial chap, though not in Lugg’s weight division – didn’t want to go as he’d been having a good time. Lugg had to manhandle him and it was like he was trying to put an oyster in a slot machine.’

  ‘Nobody hurt? Nobody in tears? Did they frighten the horses? Did the cabbie object to the fare?’

  ‘Didn’t seem to. Lugg shouted, “Liverpool Street, toot sweet” and gave the cab a cheery wave as it set off.’

  ‘Well then, nothing for us to worry about.’

  ‘What was going on?’

  Sweetheart Dillon drew on his years of experience as policeman and diplomat. ‘Some sort of job interview, I think. Let’s just keep this to ourselves, eh, lad?’

  ELEVEN

  The Crime at White Dudley

  Mr Campion had not seen White Dudley in daylight before and quickly concluded that as Suffolk villages went, this one was unimpressive. It was not that the brick-and-tile cottages or even the more modern bungalows were out of character, it was just that the houses individually and collectively were not very characterful. The only building of any distinction was The Plough, with its huge hanging inn sign, which in the light of day looked more like a medieval implement of torture than a ploughman’s sturdy tool, and which was likely, in a high wind, to fall and decapitate anyone walking underneath it.

  Campion drove slowly down the single street, observing house numbers; odds on the left side, evens on his right, until he spotted number eleven and parked the Jaguar outside a green garden gate leading up a short path to a front door painted bright blue. Even as he climbed out of the car, he was aware that the curtains in a ground-floor room of the cottage opposite had begun to twitch.

  Just as he had been determined to show the students on campus that he had every right to be there despite being clearly a fish out of water, now was the time to ooze confidence, act boldly and literally as if he owned the place. He had the key in his hand, aimed at the front door Yale lock even as he strode towards it, so that gaining entry to the cottage was swift and smooth.

  Once inside he consulted his watch and only then began to explore his surroundings. The front door had opened into a small lobby, the sort of area used in country cottages for storing outdoor shoes and gumboots, walking sticks, raincoats, torches and the occasional shotgun.

  The late Professor Perez-Catalan had left only a sheepskin coat hanging from a wall hook, and used the remaining space as a makeshift wine cellar with three cases of Rioja Alta Viña Arana, the top case opened and half full, with empty bottles having been replaced in most of the slots from which they had been plucked. Pascual had certainly liked his wine, mused Campion as he idly went through the pockets of the hanging coat and, unable to obtain supplies of Chilean red in England, had opted for Spanish.

  Finding nothing in the coat but a small battery torch, and noting from the way the dust on the tiled floor had been disturbed that the police had presumably checked the stack of wine cases, he concluded that Appleyard’s men had conducted a thorough search. As he entered the living room, he decided that he must search where a policeman would not look if he was to find anything hidden. If, that was, there was anything to hide.

  The living room had exposed beams and a fireplace with an iron dog grate containing logs, laid but not lit for some time, given the amount of dust surrounding it. There was a television set in one corner and a modern record player with stereo speakers on the floor in another. The furniture, chintzy and mismatched, had probably come with the cottage, and the only indication of the professor putting a personal stamp on the place was in the contents of a small bookcase against one wall.

  There were three shelves to the bookcase and none was full, but then Pascual had come from the other side of the world and books are heavy and expensive to transport. Besides, he had at least two offices on campus, and no doubt his own section in the university library for academic texts, so this collection, however small, might give a clue to his private existence; and Campion was becoming more and more convinced that his death was a very private matter.

  Campion dropped to one knee and scanned the bottom shelf, running a finger along the spines of large reference books on geology and computing theory filed indiscriminately with a well-thumbed AA Book of the Road, several Spanish–English dictionaries and three cookery books published by a well-known women’s magazine, which appeared never to have been opened. There was also a copy of Len Deighton’s Continental Dossier, with ribbon bookmarks marking a recommended driving route from Madrid to Badajoz, but whether that meant anything was another matter. Moving up on to the middle shelf, Campion found himself in the fiction section, mostly paperbacks, the majority being garish thrillers in something he translated as ‘the library of spies’, published in Barcelona, almost all being Spanish editions of English crime writers, some of whom he had heard of. There were, inevitably, a smattering of Agatha Christie and Peter Cheyney titles in English, which did not surprise him as he had come across many a foreigner who claimed to have learned the language by reading Christie and Cheyney, which could explain a lot.

  The top shelf was obviously the serious, read-for-betterment section, with a newish Bible (Revised Standard Catholic edition) an elderly Complete Works of Shakespeare, a battered paperback of Bleak House and an almost pristine two-volume set of War and Peace, plus a thick hardback copy of Don Quixote de la Mancha, at which Campion allowed himself a chuckle, as he had now seen more copies of the adventures of ‘that valorous and witty knight-errant’ in the backwater of White Dudley than they probably had on display in the Spanish Embassy in Belgravia.

  Out of nothing more than idle curiosity, he was reaching for it when he heard the lock in the front door being turned.

  He consulted his wristwatch. Three minutes twenty seconds. In White Dudley it seemed you didn’t get the regulatory four-minute warning
.

  ‘Who be you?’

  ‘I am, madam, the university Visitor,’ said Campion, rising to his feet, ‘and I am, well, visiting.’

  ‘’Ow did you get in?’

  ‘With a key, madam, as, it appears, did you, although I think you saw that with your very own eyes from behind a nervous curtain.’

  ‘Are you now a policeman?’

  ‘I am not of the police, but I appear before you with their blessing.’

  The woman looked nonplussed, on the cusp of bemused. She was a small woman, perhaps in her late fifties, with a weather-beaten, slightly simian face, and frizzy black hair which had suffered from too much contact with heated rollers. She wore a nylon housecoat which Campion suspected gave off enough static to power a street light and, incongruously, a pair of men’s carpet slippers. Perhaps they had rubber soles and were useful insulators.

  Mr Campion, realizing that an embarrassing standoff was in the air, opted to parlay.

  ‘My name is Campion and I am here to take stock of Professor Perez-Catalan’s personal possessions.’

  ‘Ain’t nothing missing!’

  ‘My dear lady, I never suggested there was, but might I ask who you are and what your interest in this house is?’

  The woman could not have looked more surprised if Campion had stood on one leg and recited the periodic table.

  ‘I did for him,’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I did his cleaning, sometimes his washing, laid the fire, kept an eye on the place.’

  ‘That’s why you have a key.’

  ‘’Course I do. Had to have one in order to perform my duties for the university.’ Campion’s quizzical look clearly required further explanation. ‘The university owns this cottage. Bought up half the village when they came here and I does for all of them. The ones with students in are the worst, what with all their goings-on, as I often tells Gerry, but he says he can’t do anything about it with it being off-campus.’

  Campion held up a finger to pause the woman in mid-flow. ‘Would that be Gerry Meade?’

  ‘It certainly would. He’s been my husband for better or worse these past thirty years.’

  ‘And let me guess,’ Campion said with a smile, ‘you live across the road at number eight.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Meade, wide-eyed, as if Campion had done a magic trick.

  ‘And going for double-or-quits if I may, that would have been Gerry’s mother’s house.’

  ‘Well, it was until she moved out to the churchyard, so she could be nearer to her God. After nigh on twenty years of married life with her under the same roof, it was a bit of a blessing, I don’t mind saying. How come you knows Daisey May?’

  ‘I don’t – didn’t – well, not really; I spotted her name in a leaflet recently saying she was a key-holder for the chapel of St Jurmin up beyond Black Dudley.’

  Mrs Meade dug her fists into her hips and planted her feet apart, prepared to take a stand on the matter. ‘Well, it had better say Edwina Meade now, not Daisey May, ’cos I inherited them duties, for which I gets paid a pittance, I might add, for my trouble. Not even a pittance – half a pittance!’

  ‘I will make sure your efforts are reported to the proper authorities, Mrs Meade, though I have no powers of negotiation on the size of your pittance,’ said Campion, displaying his second-best concerned face. ‘But tell me, how often were you asked for the key to St Jurmin’s?’

  ‘Once or twice a summer maybe, not often, but it was the inconvenience, that’s what I should get credit for.’

  ‘Quite so. I totally agree, and I will make sure the Bishop of St Edmondsbury appreciates that.’

  Edwina Meade’s expression softened. ‘You know the bishop?’

  ‘You could say I represent him in the unfortunate matter of the death of the professor.’

  Now Edwina was genuinely impressed. ‘Gerry’s mother, Daisey May, spoke very highly of him. They used to write letters to each other; proper pen-pals they were, according to Gerry.’

  ‘The bishop remembers her fondly,’ said Campion, another white lie, ‘and has often said he could not think of a better guardian for the key to St Jurmin. Just out of interest, did the professor ever borrow the key?’

  ‘Just the once, but he had it for nigh on a week before he dropped it back. Said he was always leaving it in his office at the university and forgetting to bring it home. I told him he could have given it to Gerry, but he was always rushing around keeping his head down too much to worry about such little things.’

  Edwina’s tone was tinged with disapproval and Campion decided to capitalize on it.

  ‘Keeping his head down? Was the professor avoiding someone?’

  ‘Probably all those women he kept entertained,’ said Mrs Meade, but offered no further clarification.

  ‘Did he do a lot of entertaining here at the cottage? Living just across the road you could hardly have failed to notice …’

  ‘He always had students calling on him at all hours and the doctor came once when he must have been poorly, but he didn’t spend much time here these last six months. He’d come back late at night and be off again by eight o’clock.’

  ‘So when you said he kept women entertained, you meant in the biblical sense rather than entertaining by giving a dinner party or a bridge evening?’

  For a moment Campion thought he had gone too far and certainly, from what he knew of her, he would not have risked any biblical reference in front of Edwina’s late mother-in-law. The latest generation of Mrs Meades did not take umbrage or express outrage; she put her head on one side and observed Campion with sly cunning.

  ‘How would I know what the professor got up to with his lady friends? You think I spent all my days watching his comings and goings?’

  Mr Campion thought that was precisely what Edwina Meade had done to fill her days, and he wished he could remember who it was who had said: ‘If cunning was equated with intelligence, then a cat would be Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ He was sure the woman was itching to tell him something, but her animal instinct for self-preservation held her back.

  ‘I merely thought that as his cleaner,’ Campion picked his words carefully, ‘you may have seen signs of lascivious or wanton behaviour. He did have a reputation on campus of being something of a ladies’ man.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’ Edwina’s jaw jutted out defiantly. ‘But it’s not my place to pass judgement on them that ’as no morals, especially them that’s supposed to know better – them that ’as positions and reputations they should be thinking about.’

  ‘So the professor did have female visitors.’

  ‘I never said that, and you can’t prove I did!’ Campion did not have to, but already Edwina was on the attack. ‘Anyway, ’oo exactly are you, coming in here snooping?’

  ‘I told you, I am the university Visitor.’

  ‘No, you ain’t.’

  ‘I assure you, madam, that I am, and I probably have references to prove it.’

  ‘You can’t be, the visitor’s coming this aft’noon. Gerry rang and told me half an hour ago, so I can’t stand here blathering, I’ve got to go and get the horse ready.’

  You had to hand it to her, Campion thought. Edwina Meade’s exit had been as dramatic and enigmatic as her entrance had been stealthy.

  That the woman knew something about the late professor was clear, but how to extract it from her without breaking several clauses of the Geneva Convention was beyond Campion for the moment. He did, however, draw one conclusion. Edwina Meade’s reaction to discovering a complete stranger in a house she was nominally responsible for had produced the required initial burst of indignation but that had quickly faded. To Campion this suggested that Mrs Meade was not in the slightest bit worried about anything he might find there. Given the impression she had left on him, Mr Campion was in no doubt that the woman had been through the cottage with a fine-tooth comb and could probably recite an inventory of the professor’s sock drawer.r />
  It seemed pointless to continue searching; but then, he had never really had an idea what he was looking for. Perez-Catalan’s research and his valuable algorithm were safe enough back at the university and surely the police would not have missed any scientific papers left lying around? Unless, of course, Edwina Meade was an undercover agent for the CIA or the KGB and had spirited them away after bumping off the professor.

  He resumed his examination of the bookcase, if only to take his mind off such fantasies, and his fingers strayed back to where they had left off, hovering over the sumptuous leather-bound edition of Miguel de Cervantes’ most famous book – and, it seemed, one of the most popular works of literature in White Dudley.

  Campion lovingly ran the tips of his fingers over the gilt embellishment on the leather and then hefted the book, all six hundred pages of it, in one hand, concluding that it was a substantial read, even though this was only Volume 1. The title page showed it was a 1930 Spanish edition, printed in Barcelona, and Campion guessed it would fetch several hundred pounds from an ardent bibliophile. It had therefore been an expensive present, but a gift it had certainly been, as the inside of the front carried a loving inscription – or had been defaced, if you were a book collector.

  Reading that luxurious edition of Don Quixote might have been beyond Campion, but even his elementary Spanish ran to Con todo mi amori, written in a large, elaborate and blotchy red ink cursive script.

  That anyone would desecrate a valuable book was always a disappointment to Campion. The signature which accompanied the rather splattered inscription, along with two ‘x’ kisses came as a surprise: Estephanie.

  Yet that was not the only surprise the book contained.

  Even as he held the volume, Campion knew – could feel – something wrong. It was not in the weight, which was considerable, but the fact that something seemed to be moving or sliding within the pages. He closed the book and examined the gold-painted edges of the pages, and when he could see nothing out of the ordinary, he put the book down on the nearest flat surface – the seat of a fiddle-back chair – and carefully began to flip the pages. At page 103 he discovered an even bigger piece of bookish vandalism.