Mr Campion's Visit
Page 31
‘Strewth, with a name like that she better had,’ said Lugg. ‘But ’ang on, who’s this? He’s hailing you like you was a taxi.’
‘Campion! Mr Campion!’
Campion knew instantly that he was being stalked by the chaplain, who was pushing his way through a flock of students to get to them.
‘Quick, hide!’ he said, diving towards the chessboard and filtering himself in between the pieces.
Lugg realized the futility of trying to conceal his bulk behind even the largest of the hardboard pieces, and stood on the edge of the board shaking his head in despair as the chaplain, breathless from his sprint across the piazza, closed in on his prey.
‘Campion! I’ve just seen the most incredible thing: Stephanie Silva being loaded into a police car!’
Mr Campion raised himself to his full height from behind the black rook.
‘Please keep your voice down, Mr Tinkler,’ he commanded with as much gravitas as he could from his rather ludicrous would-be hiding place. ‘Her arrest is not common knowledge and not even the bishop is aware of it yet. Someone should tell him before he hears it on the news.’
‘Oh my goodness, you’re quite right,’ said Tinkler, running a hand through his thinning hair and automatically reaching to adjust the pince-nez he was not wearing. ‘Do you think I should telephone him?’
‘As soon as is humanly possible,’ said Campion, ‘if not sooner. Tell him that the murder of the professor was the result of a sordid love affair and loose morals, but it has so far been kept out of the jaws of the ravenous press. The police and the vice chancellor have done sterling work on that score.’
‘Yes, yes, the bishop must be told, I must see to that immediately. I do hope it wasn’t as a result of anything I said.’
Mr Campion stiffened. ‘What did you say and when?’
‘It was last week sometime, when I told her that Pascual and Heather Woodford were engaged to be married. I thought at the time that she didn’t take it too well.’
‘He’s a right panic, isn’t he?’ said Lugg.
‘Observant as ever, old fruit,’ said Mr Campion.
‘Who was that?’
‘The bishop’s inside man here on campus. No, wait: I’m the bishop’s inside man on campus.’
‘I thought I was,’ said Lugg, aggrieved.
‘No, you’re really here to embarrass me on the orders of my wife.’
‘Oh yeah, that’s right. And a wife outranks a bishop.’
‘In the case of my wife,’ said Mr Campion, ‘always.’
He turned on the chessboard and squared up to the cut-out figure of the black bishop, then put his fists up into a boxer’s stance and delivered a strong right cross to the bobbled head of the chess piece, which wobbled and then toppled over, sending two pawns flying and rocking the black queen on her wooden base.
‘Hey! Stop that!’
Campion recognized the voice as belonging to Oliver Brownlee, the computer chess playing supremo, who had indeed emerged from the centre and was glaring across the chessboard.
‘You’re ruining the computer’s game – again!’
‘I am so sorry,’ Campion apologized. ‘It was a moment of temporary insanity. The last thing on my mind was to disrupt the computer’s programme.’
Normally happy to see Mr Campion caught ‘on the hop’, as he would have said, on this occasion Lugg was quick to spring to his companion’s defence.
‘Don’t you worry about upsetting them computers,’ he pronounced loudly. ‘They ain’t got no future.’
Author’s Note
Albert Campion made his first appearance in The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham in 1929 (The Black Dudley Murder in the USA), though the house was always referred to as ‘Black Dudley’ and never ‘The Black Dudley’. I have tried to imagine both Mr Campion and that ‘great tomb of a house’ some forty years on. I have also followed Margery Allingham’s noble example and taken yet more liberties with the geography of Suffolk including the spelling of Monewdon. In 1970 Suffolk was one of the few counties in England without a university and Monty Python caused outrage by suggesting there was ‘a lecturer in idiocy at the University of East Anglia’, something hotly denied by the university where the Monty Python team appeared live in 1971. I was there.