Mr Campion's Visit

by Mike Ripley

  Campion got to his feet and began to repack the items he had removed. He was struggling to refold the double sleeping bags, which had developed a mind of their own, when he was sure he felt a cold breeze on his cheek, a sea breeze, as if the outside elements had come inside. He turned instinctively to where he thought, in the disorientating darkness, the door was, but the light from his torch was still aimed downwards and did little to lighten the far end of the chapel.

  He shrugged off the feeling of unease, and continued to try to stuff the sleeping bags into the trunk, with a growing feeling of frustration as they refused to behave; he even tried using a foot to squash them down while recognizing it as somewhat less than dignified behaviour for a man of his age.

  Fortunately there was no one in that dark, lonely chapel to see him; except there was, and the first Campion knew of it was when he felt something small but solid pressed into the back of his neck.

  ‘Kneel down,’ ordered a muffled voice.

  ‘I’m sorry if I appear to be trespassing,’ said Campion, sinking down to resume his devotional position in front of the trunk, ‘but I have every right to be here.’

  His eyes flicked from side to side trying to catch a glimpse of the shadow – of anything – of the figure behind him.

  ‘Whoever you are, I mean you no harm, and may even be of some assistance …’ He knew it was important to keep one’s enemy talking as long as possible, especially when the enemy had you at a disadvantage. ‘If I have disturbed something personal then I apologize …’

  He took a deep breath when he felt the pressure point on his neck was suddenly relieved. Had it really been the barrel of a pistol as he had automatically assumed? Surely it could not have been the old trick of making a two-finger gun to back up an enormous bluff?

  ‘I am sure we can talk this through, whatever “this” is. I am not of the police, merely a gifted amateur. Well, perhaps not so gifted, for it seems—’

  Campion felt a sharp scratch on his neck below his right ear. His brain had just about concluded that he had been jabbed with a hypodermic needle when his knees folded under him and he collapsed forward over the trunk into a blackness darker than the interior of St Jurmin’s chapel.

  ‘Light another candle, ’e’s coming back to us. Don’t worry about the dopey expression on his fizzog, that’s what passes for normal with him.’

  Mr Campion returned to consciousness to find three torchlit faces looming above him like floating Halloween pumpkins. One seemed as large, as round and as expressionless as a full moon and was instantly recognizable. It took him a moment or two to identify a second face as that belonging to the porter Bill Warren. The third hovering visage he could not place, but he too was wearing a university porter’s uniform, and Campion’s befogged brain did what it did best and remembered the inconsequential before the necessary.

  ‘You must be Arthur from Aldeburgh,’ he said, and then looked around to take stock of his situation.

  He was sitting – or had been sat – on the metal trunk, the contents of which were scattered across the flagstone chapel floor as if a bomb had gone off. He was able to identify all the items he was sure he had repacked by the light, now, of four torches and a handful of candles, and the substantial bulk of Lugg came into sharp focus as he stood before him holding the empty wine bottle as if offering Exhibit A to an unsympathetic judge.

  ‘Been ’aving a good time, ’ave we? Quite a party from the looks of things.’

  ‘Parties there have undoubtedly been,’ said Campion, his throat dry, ‘but I was not present and, as for that bottle of vino, not a drop touched my lips.’

  ‘Pull the other one.’ Lugg held something small up to Campion’s eyeline. ‘Like you pulled this cork.’

  Campion took the cork from him and examined it before handing it back.

  ‘That’s interesting; as is the fact that you are here. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Rescuing you, Mister Ingratitude.’ Lugg turned to his companions in despair. ‘See, not a word of thanks. Typical.’

  Campion bowed his head and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Thank you, gentlemen, one and all. Now, help me to my feet, please, or alternatively, stop spinning this chapel on its axis. I take it I was found in a prone position?’

  ‘Flat on your face, Mr Campion,’ said Bill Warren a little too enthusiastically, ‘with a bottle rolling across the floor. We naturally thought you’d been taken suddenly drunk.’

  Mr Campion allowed himself a smile at the porter’s descriptive powers. ‘Not a drop has passed my lips, Mr Warren, but I’m betting Lugg here can’t say the same.’

  The fat man bristled. ‘Well, you may have been at your devotions in this ’ere chapel; I was at mine down The Plough. When Bill turned up we swapped war stories for a bit and the subject came up of an elderly gentleman, who ought to know better, wandering off to collect seashells on the seashore in the dead of night. I told Bill here that you weren’t supposed to be allowed out on yer own anywhere there wasn’t street lighting, so he rang Arthur who said he’d not seen hide nor hair of you.’

  ‘I could see Maj … Mr Lugg was worried,’ said Warren, ‘so we jumped in my car and shot back over here. Mr Meade offered to drive him, but he wasn’t really in a fit state.’

  ‘You had a good evening in the pub, did you?’ asked Campion.

  ‘It was steady,’ Lugg said reluctantly. ‘Gerry Meade might be a big man, but he’s got no head for beer at all. Buys his rounds, though, and tries to keep up best he can. Anyways, what’s been going on here?’

  On his feet, but steadying himself on Lugg’s extended and rock-hard forearm, Campion bowed his head.

  ‘Shine a torch on the back of my neck, over towards the right, if you wouldn’t mind, old chum. See if you can see anything.’

  After a full minute of careful examination, Lugg said: ‘Looks like you’ve been nipped by a flea or pricked by a wasp, but you ain’t going to bleed to death. What was it, a poison dart from a blowpipe? I told yer: there’s always a second murder in these country house affairs.’

  ‘Clearly I haven’t been murdered,’ said Campion, straightening up and running a finger round the inside of his collar. ‘Somebody took me off guard and put what I thought was a gun to my neck. I realize now it was that cork you found. It was new and virginal and didn’t come from a bottle, but was protecting the tip of a hypodermic needle. The cork came off, the needle went in and I went out … What time is it?’

  ‘Twenty past eleven, sir,’ said Arthur from Aldeburgh, who seemed delighted to make a useful contribution to a confusing situation.

  ‘Then it was probably an anaesthetic, not curare or any other exotic poison; perhaps that new ketamine stuff the Americans are using in Vietnam. It wasn’t meant to kill, just incapacitate.’

  Lugg did not appear impressed. ‘What for? You nicking something? Is this a pirate’s treasure chest? ’Cos it looks more like donations to a jumble sale.’

  Without drawing attention to the movement, Campion dropped his right arm and patted his trouser pocket to reassure himself that the small jewellery box was still there.

  ‘Nothing seems to be missing,’ said Campion, manipulating Lugg’s arm so that the torch he was holding played across the floor. ‘So no harm done. I believe all this stuff belonged to Professor Perez-Catalan and the police need to be informed in the morning.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we report this now?’ suggested Bill Warren. ‘After all, you were attacked, and Arthur here is duty-bound to log that for Mr Meade. Really, we’re supposed to phone him when anything out of the ordinary happens.’

  ‘If you would be good enough to run Mr Lugg back to White Dudley, where he’s staying with the Meades, you can tell him personally.’ Campion adjusted his spectacles, which Lugg knew was a signal for him to play along. ‘After he has escorted me to my room, that is, just in case there are bands of ruffians out there lying in wait.’

  Lugg extended an elbow, as if he was asking a dowager duchess to accompany h
im in the last waltz on the dance card.

  ‘Are you sure you are all right?’ Bill Warren was genuinely concerned. ‘You still look a bit shaky.’

  ‘That’s his natural colouring,’ scoffed Lugg, but Warren persisted.

  ‘I could call out the university medical officer.’

  ‘No!’ said Campion sharply. ‘That wouldn’t be a good idea at all.’

  Bill Warren agreed to share a warming brew with Arthur from Aldeburgh in the porters’ lodge in the entrance hall of Black Dudley, once Campion insisted that only Lugg need see him to the door of his room. Lugg would easily find his way back to the house. If there was a kettle boiling, he would find it.

  They made an incongruous pair, and anyone watching from a distance would have put them down as an elderly married couple, perhaps a masochistic couple, out for a midnight stroll on a cold and damp evening. As they entered Piazza 3, Campion knew it was midnight without having to consult his watch as the first mournful notes of the ‘Last Post’ rang out and bounced off the buildings and across the campus.

  ‘Strewth! You weren’t kidding about ’aving your own Louis Armstrong on tap, were you?’

  ‘I told you, he’s as punctual as ever.’ Campion made no attempt to keep the admiration out of his voice.

  ‘He ain’t got much of an audience; looks like all the kiddies have gone to bed,’ Lugg observed.

  ‘I think that’s rather the point. The Phantom Trumpeter is telling them it’s Lights Out.’

  ‘Hoh, very droll, I’m sure. You any idea who this joker is?’

  ‘No,’ said Campion, steering Lugg out of the piazza and towards the pyramids. ‘Not yet, but I have a good idea where he might be.’

  Observing the four pyramidal residences close up, Lugg was speechless, but not in admiration.

  ‘What school of ark-ee-tek-chewer do they call this, then? Lego with a hangover?’

  ‘That’s not bad, old fruit,’ Campion admitted, grinning broadly as Lugg gazed up at the concrete structures towering over them, ‘but to be safe, just call it “modern”. Face it, it’s far less brutal than some of the things going up in the old London docks, and the students seem to like them. The views from the top are spectacular; on a clear day you can see Walberswick.’

  Lugg turned on him, instantly suspicious. ‘Where’s your room then?’

  ‘Right at the very top.’

  ‘And there’s no lift, is there?’

  ‘The pharaohs never needed lifts in their pyramids.’

  ‘They wus already dead.’

  Once Lugg had got his breath back after his exertions on the stairs, observed that the swinging of a cat in the staff flat would be impractical and grudgingly admired the view, Campion insisted he sat down on the bed – assuming the bed could take his weight – for his interrogation.

  ‘So what have you to report from that hotbed of vice and corruption that we call White Dudley?’

  ‘Give us a chance,’ Lugg complained in his schoolboy-in-detention voice. ‘I’ve hardly had time to get my feet under the table.’

  ‘But you met the awesome Edwina?’

  ‘Oh yes, once met, never forgot. Not a nice person in my humble.’

  ‘Your opinions are rarely humble, chum. Do go on.’

  ‘You know the old saying, which I’ve just made up; the three fastest methods of communication are telephone, telegram and tell-an-Edwina. The woman lives for gossip, hoovers it up wherever she can, then distributes it like one of them muck-spreaders you see on the farms round here. Hardly got my hat off before she was quizzing me about you and what you were doin’ here. She offered to show me round the dead professor’s house like she was running tours for Thomas Cook. And she keeps a pair of binoculars on the windowsill in the front room, just so she don’t miss anything, the nosey old crone.’

  ‘That’s as neat a piece of character assassination as I’ve heard since I got here,’ said Campion, ‘and universities tend to specialize in them. I think you’ve got the measure of Mrs Meade.’

  Lugg shrugged his shoulders in false modesty. ‘Only saw her for half an hour before Big Gerry dragged me off to the pub.’

  ‘Define “dragged” – no, never mind. What did you glean from Gerry?’

  ‘He’s an odd cove, no mistake. Kept mentioning his mother and what she would have said or done. I got the impression his mother was a bit of a strict Christian lady, though more strict than Christian and probably not much of a lady.’

  ‘A little unfair,’ mused Campion, ‘but I’d recognize her from that description.’

  ‘Well, according to Gerry and the ghost of his late mother, this university is an ’otbed of sin and debauchery and it’s Gerry’s duty to report it all to your friend and mine, the bishop. Though since the prof’s murder, Gerry clearly fancies becoming the favourite in Superintendent Appleyard’s class, pushing for milk monitor or to be teacher’s pet. So, old cock, you be careful what you say in front of him.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will. Now what I want you to do is chat up Mrs Meade – perhaps over breakfast and preferably on her own.’

  ‘Do I have to?’ Lugg sulked.

  ‘Yes. Tell her you might be lodging with her for a week; don’t worry, you won’t have to. Say the bishop wants you to stay on and keep an eye on me, that should impress her. Add that the bishop thinks you shouldn’t be a burden on her and that he insists she should take a week’s lodging in advance. Whatever amount she suggests, stick on ten pounds for her trouble, but – and this is important – you have to pay her by cheque. You do have a chequebook on you, don’t you?’

  ‘No I don’t.’ Lugg was belligerent. ‘Never occurred to me, this being a free board-and-lodging job as I was led to believe.’

  ‘Well, in that case, you’d better take mine.’

  Campion opened the sliver of wardrobe where he had hung his jacket and retrieved his chequebook in its brown soft leather case from an inside pocket. He held it out to Lugg but, before the big man’s paw covered it, he pulled it just out of reach.

  ‘I know you can forge my signature, though you’re not very good at it and usually it wouldn’t fool a blind cashier, but that shouldn’t matter as Mrs Meade has no idea what my signature looks like.’

  ‘But she’ll notice the cheque’s in your name, not mine.’

  ‘Tell her it’s a general account used by everybody who does special work for the bishop.’

  ‘And she’ll fall for that?’

  ‘With your natural charm? I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with her. Just remember one thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve counted the number of cheques in the book and I’ll count them again tomorrow.’

  FIFTEEN

  Trumpeter Voluntary

  Despite his exertions the night before, Mr Campion was up, shaved, dressed and the first customer in the queue for breakfast in the refectory. Once again, he had the pick of the tables and was greeted by the cheery hellos of the cleaners in their nylon coats, all homely Suffolk ladies, taking a break between shifts, and the silent and suspicious glares of the few students around, if not fully awake, at such an early hour. Some may have had work to catch up on and were waiting for the library to open, Campion thought; some might be insomniacs or natural early risers, but at least two, he was sure, had not yet made it to bed, or certainly not their own.

  He said his ‘good mornings’ and even tipped his hat when necessary and tucked into a brace of sausages, a greasy fried egg and two slices of toast, opting to wash it all down with a cup of tea, having tried the coffee the day before.

  Suitably fortified, Campion bought The Times in the Students’ Union shop next to the bar where the cleaners were getting to work with heavy machinery on the beer-soaked carpet, and made his way out of the oval refectory, past the Threepenny Bit lecture-theatre complex, and into the square that was Piazza 2. He was headed for the Administration building, which was a long, tall rectangle tacked on to the end of Piazza 3 at right-angles, but which did no
t have a nickname as far as he was aware.

  Mr Campion, seated on the edge of the redundant fountain in Piazza 3, had completed twenty-five per cent of the crossword before estimating that the Administration block was open for business. Once inside he followed the signs for the Estates Office on the third floor and found it open and unguarded by a secretary, but with Mr Gregor Marshall already hard at work behind his desk or at least shuffling papers to give that impression.

  ‘You’re the early bird, Campion. What brings you into my domain?’

  ‘An administrative matter, Mr Marshall. Do you have lists of the residents of the pyramids?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said a surprised estates officer. ‘The students pay rent and we need to know who to collect it from.’

  ‘But you know which student lives in which room?’

  ‘Naturally, we need to know where to deliver post or who is supposed to be where in case of a fire. What’s your point?’

  ‘No particular point,’ Campion reassured him, ‘I would simply like to look at a list of residents in the Babbage pyramid if that’s at all possible.’

  ‘It is possible,’ Gregor Marshall narrowed his eyes, ‘but it is a highly unusual request.’

  ‘Have the police not asked for that information?’

  ‘No they have not.’ Marshall shook his head. ‘I would, of course, make it available if they did.’

  ‘Would you make it available to me? I don’t want the complete census return, I’m really only interested in the current residents of the Babbage pyramid.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘An overseas student called Beverley Gunn-Lewis. She’s from New Zealand and really rather sweet.’