Mr Campion's Visit

by Mike Ripley

  ‘Even though she stands to inherit Pascual’s research? If she publishes, that’s surely the making of her academically, isn’t it?’

  ‘You could be right – that would be a much better motive than the old “hell hath no fury” in her case. Still, it’s a theory, and I suspect one that hasn’t occurred to the police. Well done you! I’m so glad I decided to tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.’

  ‘Yet you won’t tell me who your rivals were for Pascual’s affections, however liberally they were spread.’

  ‘I don’t care who they were! There were always going to be other women where Pascual was concerned. Once I realized that – which I did pretty quickly, by the way – it was time to cut my losses. If you want to know about Pascual’s sex life after me, try asking Edwina Meade. She watched what went on in his house more than she watched television.’

  ‘Scurrilous rumour has it that his house in White Dudley was only one of his – what should we call them? – love nests.’

  Miss Silva’s expression, which Campion was observing closely, showed no emotion.

  ‘You mean his “love shack”, the ruined chapel across the park on the beach? Worst-kept secret on campus. It would have appealed to Pascual, thinking if he was out of sight, he was out of prying minds, plus he had a thing about sleeping out of doors. He’d done a lot of climbing and camping in the Andes on his research expeditions. Sleeping bags and oil lamps never appealed to me, I’m a home comforts sort of girl.’

  ‘Curled up in front of the fire with a good book sort of girl?’ Campion said lightly, indicating the leather-bound book in front of her.

  ‘You might say that,’ said Steph, caressing the book’s cover with her fingertips. ‘But Pascual was really only interested in the physical side of things.’

  ‘Have you looked inside?’

  ‘I know what the inscription says. I wrote it.’

  ‘Open the book,’ Campion pressed.

  Miss Silva did as ordered, slowly and carefully, noting her own handwritten dedication.

  ‘Keep going.’

  She began to turn pages and then her fingers became uncertain as she felt, as Campion had, something wrong with the density of the book. When she reached the hollowed-out section, where Campion had placed the key he had ‘borrowed’ from the police evidence table, Miss Silva’s eyes widened.

  ‘That’s not right,’ she breathed.

  ‘An awful bit of vandalism,’ said Campion, retrieving and closing the book. ‘It must have cost you a pretty penny and Pascual made a hidey-hole out of it. I’ll ask the police to return it to you when their investigation is completed. Unless the professor had relatives likely to claim his effects.’

  ‘He had no one as far as I knew,’ said Miss Silva, reacting as if a spell had been broken by Campion removing the book. ‘There were certainly women back in Chile, but whether any had a claim on him I wouldn’t know. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t want it back, and it’s in no fit state to give to the library, so tell the cops they can dump it.’

  She wiped her hands on a paper serviette, as if washing her hands of the matter.

  ‘That was a terrible thing to do to any book, but especially a classic like that one. Have you read it?’

  ‘Not recently,’ said Campion, reaching for the paperback translation Dr Szmodics had given him, ‘but I intend to reacquaint myself with the old Don. I have always thought tilting at windmills was a noble, much derided, occupation.’

  ‘I think you have always known exactly what you were tilting at,’ said the woman. ‘There is a passage in Quixote where the Don says something like: It’s true I’m pretty clever and I’m something of a rascal, but that’s well hidden under this always easy and natural disguise of behaving like a fool. In my opinion, Cervantes had you down to a tee, Mr Campion.’

  FOURTEEN

  The Conclave of St Jurmin

  In the staff flat at the top of the Durkheim pyramid, Mr Campion took off his shoes and his spectacles, lay on the too-short bed and settled down to treat himself to a thirty-minute snooze. It had been a long day and it was not yet over. He awoke with a start, disturbed by the rhythmic thumping of an electric bass guitar, coming from a record player somewhere in the bowels of the residence, to discover that two hours had passed. I am, he concluded, getting far too old for this lark.

  The view from his windows was, if anything, more spectacular by night, with the university buildings lit up like Blackpool’s illuminations. Campion could clearly see figures – students he hoped – walking about and sitting at tables in the lighthouse that was the library and even, at the other end of the campus, two figures braving the night air and sea mist playing chess al fresco. Even the windows of Black Dudley were lit up, as if promoting the message that the police never slept, although Campion suspected that any activity there was more likely to be the university porters coming and going off patrol.

  He washed his face to make sure he was awake, then rummaged through his suitcase for a change of clothing. He had not planned on needing attire suitable for going burglarizing, but he had thoughtfully – or rather Amanda had – packed two ancient pullovers and a pair of corduroy trousers in case Guffy Randall had needed help with his prize pigs at Monewdon Hall. He changed his trousers and pulled on both pullovers, to cover his white shirt and insulate him against the cold night air, hung up his suit jacket in the tiny cupboard which served as a wardrobe and laid his suit trousers under the thin mattress of the bed to maintain a semblance of a crease for the morning. It was, he felt, rather like being back at school.

  Before he ventured out into the night, he removed the key he had secreted in the Cervantes and placed it and his room key in separate trouser pockets, so they did not jingle as he walked, and his wallet in his back pocket. A final check in front of the long mirror on the wardrobe door satisfied him that despite the absence of a mask, a striped jersey and a sack with the word ‘Swag’ printed on it, he looked the part.

  As he descended the stairwell of the pyramid, he experienced a wide repertoire of muffled musical styles coming from the corridors and his nose was assaulted by a variety of cooking smells worthy of a North African spice market, but somehow less appetizing, as well as what he would charitably refer to as the scent of herbal cigarettes.

  Outside the pyramid he waited until his eyes became adjusted to the dark and his body became comfortable with the much lower temperature. He felt, he imagined, as a bee leaving a warm and snug hive on a frosty morning might feel and wondered, not for the first time, what the central-heating bills for the residences must be. Not to mention the electricity bill for keeping the central piazzas lit up all night, even though the campus was eerily deserted, though the fact that the bar in the refectory still had two hours of opening time probably accounted for a large proportion of the student population.

  As a good burglar should, he shunned the illuminated buildings, taking a long, elliptical route to Black Dudley across the park, behind the curved outline of the library, up the slope to the car park and then across to the house where there were no police in evidence but, as he had hoped, the office which served as a porters’ lodge was open for business.

  He was slightly surprised to find that Bill Warren was the porter on duty.

  ‘Have they got you back on night shift already, Mr Warren?’ Campion said as he entered the porters’ lair to find Warren sitting behind the desk, a mug of tea in one fist, a copy of the Ipswich Star spread out in front of him like a tablecloth.

  ‘Oh, hello there. I’m filling in for Gerry Meade until ten o’clock, then Arthur takes over.’

  ‘Arthur?’

  ‘Arthur from Aldeburgh. He’s Gerry’s cousin, been with us for years, and he don’t mind doin’ nights, leastways not when Gerry tells him he has to. By rights it should have been Gerry on tonight, but he’s tied up entertaining a visitor – another visitor – a friend of yours, I hear.’

  ‘And yours, from what you told me of your wartime experiences. A
large gentleman, and I use the term loosely, by the name of Lugg. I suspect they will be well entrenched in The Plough by now.’

  Bill Warren nodded enthusiastically. ‘I’m hoping to join them for last knockings. Be nice to see Major Lugg again.’

  Major? Campion bit his tongue at the rank but reasoned that it was at least shorter than Magersfontein as a Christian name.

  ‘Anyway, what can I do for you, Mr Campion?’

  ‘Do you have such a thing as a torch I could borrow? I fancy a bit of exercise, stretch the legs, take in the sea breeze, that sort of thing before bed.’

  ‘In the dark?’

  The prospect of voluntarily being isolated from central heating and a hot beverage clearly appalled Bill Warren.

  ‘That’s why I need the torch,’ said Campion. ‘I’d like to go along the seashore as far as St Jurmin’s chapel, but I don’t plan on going swimming.’

  ‘Well, I’ll give you the loan of a torch right enough, but you be careful, sir. The pebble beach up by St Jurmin’s is treacherously slippy at the best of times, but at night you can easily turn an ankle.’

  ‘I’ll heed your sound advice, Bill. By the way, is there anything in the paper about our local difficulties?’

  ‘That Superintendent Appleyard’s been getting his name in the papers right enough, and he’s declared the whole campus a crime scene.’

  ‘Which is why we don’t have reporters crawling all over us yet,’ said Campion ruefully, ‘though that can’t last much longer.’

  ‘The poor old vice chancellor’s getting dozens of phone calls – fair driving him crazy it is. Not just reporters, but parents of students wanting to know if their little darlings are safe.’

  ‘I suppose the bishop’s been on the phone as well,’ said Campion with a guilty wince.

  ‘I don’t know who pays His Lordship’s phone bill, but I’m glad I don’t. He must have phoned six times this evening, demanding to know what’s going on. Fair upset Mrs Downes, it has. We’ve had to get the MO to come over and give her a sedative to calm her nerves.’

  Campion was confused for a moment. ‘The MO? Oh, you mean the medical officer, Dr Woodford.’

  ‘That’s right; nice lady, and it’s really handy having her living on site.’

  ‘She lives in the staff flat on top of the Chomsky pyramid, doesn’t she?’

  ‘That’s right, sir, You can see her flat from here, standing outside and in daylight o’course.’ Warren handed Campion a long, truncheon-like rubber-encased torch after testing that it worked. ‘At night I always reckon that you could stand at the window and flash an SOS signal and Doc Woodford would spot it and come running.’

  ‘How interesting,’ said Mr Campion.

  Campion turned back on himself as he left Black Dudley, walking towards the car park until he reached the end wall of the house, where he swung right and followed its dark shadow until he was in open parkland again. There were no lights showing on this side of Black Dudley, and this close to the house he was masked from the unearthly glow of the illuminated main campus.

  Employing his borrowed torch, Campion followed the north walls until his beam picked up a pathway which pointed away from the house and into the darkness. Keeping a circle of torchlight playing on the path about a yard ahead of his feet, he followed his nose and ears as much as the path towards the salty tang and slaps and thuds of the sea lapping hungrily at the low coastline. If there was a moon, it was hidden behind cloud, and Campion could only distinguish the coast to his right by the faintest of changes in the thickness of the darkness surrounding him. It seemed unreal that something as big as the North Sea could be so close and yet indistinguishable from the land, and he hoped that the path, which was unlit and untended unlike the ones on campus, arrived at the chapel before it led him to a watery surprise.

  It did so, but more suddenly than he expected. Without warning the walls of St Jurmin loomed up out of the gloom in front of him. The path ended and, with the aid of his torch, Campion picked his way through a rough patch of fallen stones and bricks, which time and marram grass had turned into booby traps for the unwary pedestrian.

  Campion raised his torch and saw a rough wall stretching up to the edge, he presumed, of a tiled roof. From his room in the pyramid residences, St Jurmin’s had seemed a dark pimple on the horizon, and he had first thought it a ruin, but here, close up, it was solid enough; a rectangular building constructed of stone and bricks almost certainly reused from a Roman site fallen into disuse or destruction. Despite the second-hand building materials, the chapel had withstood the ravages of both time and the wind and tides coming off the North Sea, to which it was totally exposed, for over thirteen hundred years.

  It had no doubt survived the intrusions of raiding Vikings, warring feudal knights, religious reformers and counter-reformers, perhaps even a greedy bishop or two, should such things ever have existed. But now it faced its greatest challenge in Mr Albert Campion, a burglar with a key. All he had to do was find the door.

  A quick survey with his torch told Campion that he was three-quarters of the way along the side wall. As the sea was to his right and the east, where the ‘business end’ of a church was usually located, he deduced he would find the west-end wall and the door to his left, and he edged his way to the corner, his right hand gliding over the rough stone fabric to steady himself. If this was indeed a place where lovers met for secret carnal trysts, then the younger generation were, he decided, a hardier breed than he had given them credit for.

  If there had been a porch on the chapel, it had long gone, but the door remained in place. It was not the original door, though it had considerable antiquity, and the lock was, in comparison, brand spanking new, perhaps less than one hundred and fifty years old, for which Campion was grateful as the original Anglo-Saxon key would have been hefty enough to fell a horse, never mind fit in a hollow book or a trouser pocket.

  The professor’s key fitted perfectly, the lock turned with a satisfying clunk and Campion was inside, out of the wind which had left the taste of salt on his lips, but into a cocoon of darkness even more impenetrable than the night outside.

  If it had originally been a church, what remained to become a chapel was the nave, a rectangle fifty feet long and half as wide, and, Campion estimated, some twenty-five feet in height, though – by the light of a single torch – he put little faith in the accuracy of his measurements.

  The most striking thing about the chapel of St Jurmin was its emptiness. There were exposed roof beams and, high up the walls, windows which during the day would have contributed little to lifting the gloom. There was an altar, a small rustic wooden affair, above which, suspended from a beam, was a large painted crucifix, and a wooden candelabra stand bearing the stumps of a dozen candles.

  Campion walked the length of the nave, his heels echoing from the flagstone floor, sweeping his torch from side to side, the beam failing to pick up any sign of life; not a bat nor a rat, not even a mouse dropping. But there, tucked against the long north wall behind the wooden candelabra was something, and something definitely out of place.

  It was a metal travelling trunk with a gently domed lid, carrying-handles at the side and a metal locking hasp secured with a padlock. The trunk was in good condition for its age, though it lacked the travel agent or shipping line stickers which would have made it a prize exhibit in an antique shop, and the padlock was almost brand new.

  Campion appropriated the multi-headed candlestick, mentally kicking himself for not bringing any matches, and squashed his torch at an angle on to several candle stubs so that the beam pointed down on to the trunk, leaving his hands free.

  He knelt down in front of the trunk and, pulling his wallet from his back pocket, extracted his trusty metal nail file. He was not sure whether to be pleased or worried to find that the padlock resisted for a full minute longer than the doors in the residences to his delicate probing, and when it yielded, he freed it from the hasp and opened the lid fully against the wall.

/>   Campion’s first thought was that the trunk was some sort of dressing-up box, and his second that he had committed sacrilege by disturbing a cache of religious vestments. On closer examination he realized he might have been looking at fabric, but it was not clothing, and there were two distinct layers of fabric, the top one thick and soft, the underlying one cold and rubbery. He reached in and began to unpack, pulling, unfolding and then pushing items behind him as he identified them, his nose wrinkling as he sniffed a mixture of damp and, he was sure, paraffin.

  First came a green sleeping bag of Brobdingnagian proportions, which Campion quickly realized was in fact two quilted sleeping bags zipped together. From somewhere in the depths of his memory he recalled reading that Ernest Hemingway had owned such an item of al fresco slumber, or at least approved of the design. Next, a folded blue rubber inflatable mattress, which Campion presumed would be big enough for two and, under that, a variety of items which could have graced a vicarage white-elephant stall.

  There was a concertina-like bellows foot pump for inflating the mattress, two antique storm lanterns, an empty bottle of Rioja which Campion recognized from the case he had found in the professor’s house, and several plastic hand torches. At the very bottom of the trunk, numerous smaller items rattled around as he reached in and swirled his hand around, as if delving blindly for the mystery prize in a bran tub, as the angle of his torch, jammed in the candelabra stand, did not allow the beam to illuminate to the darkest depths.

  His fingers identified three flashlight batteries, presumably exhausted, the unmistakeable bendiness of some plastic cutlery, a magazine of some sort and a small, hard box which Campion recognized as the sort of jewellery box he kept his cufflinks in. He held his find up into the torch beam to confirm his suspicions and levered the box open to reveal the curve of a silver or white metal ring with a cluster of sparkling stones.

  He closed the box and palmed it into his trouser pocket. Whether it was evidence or not, it was the most valuable item in the trunk, and he was taking it into protective custody. As the police had clearly not searched the chapel, presenting it to Superintendent Appleyard would have to be done tactfully, as would explaining how the professor’s key to the chapel came into Campion’s possession, not to mention the opening of the trunk’s padlock when the key to that remained on the professor’s key ring.