Blood Will Tell

by Jeanne M. Dams

  I began to think that this was the equivalent of my kitchen ‘junk drawer’, where one tossed things that might come in handy someday, but usually didn’t. Remembering that I sometimes found lost treasure at the back of that drawer, I rummaged in my purse for the little flashlight I always carry, hoping my fall at the Fitzwilliam hadn’t broken it. No, there it was at the bottom, still working. I shone it at the backs of the shelves, just to be able to tell myself I was being thorough.

  It was just a gleam of light. Something shiny at the back of the next-to-bottom shelf, something about the size of a pen or pencil. It looked as though it had rolled to the back and fallen into the crack where the shelf didn’t quite meet the back of the cabinet. I couldn’t tell what it was; at least half of it was sunk in the crack. Feeling guilty for moving anything, I nudged aside a bottle of Lysol that had drifted there from the top shelf by mistake, and tried to take a closer look.

  And dropped the flashlight.

  I didn’t even stop to find it. I didn’t close the lab door behind me. I pelted down the stairs as hard as a woman my age and build could be expected to pelt, back to the scene of the crime.

  Elaine was leaning against a door frame, looking weary. Her normally tidy grey hair was standing up as though she’d been running her fingers through it. She saw me as I skidded through the door, and stood up straight.

  ‘Come quick!’ I called, breathlessly and ungrammatically. ‘I think I’ve found it!’

  ‘It? What?’

  ‘Maybe a murder weapon! I don’t know. I didn’t touch it, but it looks an awful lot like a scalpel – a knife of some kind, anyway – and it’s got blood on it!’

  FOURTEEN

  There were a lot of assumptions in that remark. I’d never seen a scalpel in my life, only in pictures and on television, and stains that are more or less brown can be anything from chocolate to dried apple juice to just plain rust. I thought I was justified, though. Combine a sharp instrument – and the thing I saw was certainly sharp – with obvious stains, not to mention recent events, and the jump to my conclusions wasn’t all that far.

  Elaine didn’t get excited. She beckoned to one of her team and the two of them followed me up the stairs. ‘You didn’t touch anything?’

  ‘I moved a bottle of Lysol to get a better look at the thing. It’s at the back of a shelf. You’ll see. And I only moved it an inch or so. The shelf is dusty. You can see where it was.’

  Elaine only grunted.

  ‘There’s something else, too. One of the guinea pigs is missing. At least, there are four in all the cages except one; it only has three. I don’t know if that means anything, or if there were only forty-seven to begin with.’

  She didn’t even grunt at that. I decided not to mention the Petri dishes.

  She and the forensics person – I didn’t know the person’s name or even sex, as the garments worn were concealing in the extreme – strode into the lab. ‘Stay here,’ said Elaine, and I stopped. ‘It’s in the open cabinet?’

  I nodded. ‘Next-to-bottom shelf, way at the back on the right.’

  They stood in front of the cabinet, peering in. The one in the white coveralls pulled a large flashlight out of a hidden pocket and shone it inside. She (I had decided to call it ‘she’) nodded to Elaine. ‘Yes, a scalpel,’ she said. (I was right. The voice was female, though low-pitched and rather grating.) ‘Expensive, stainless steel handle. Disposable blade, I think.’

  ‘The shelf is adjustable. Go ahead and remove it if you need to, to retrieve the thing. Do you want help?’

  ‘Yes, send Steve if he’s not busy with something else.’

  Elaine came over to where I was standing in the doorway. ‘You heard. Well done, Dorothy. We’d have found it eventually, but the sooner the better.’ We walked down the stairs.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘No idea. We have to get those stains analyzed first. If they match the ones from the floor downstairs, and they’re both human, then we could have a very nasty case on our hands. But it’s far too soon to make guesses about that. Now, what did you say about a guinea pig?’

  ‘Only that there’s one fewer than I’d have expected. It may have died a natural death, or been taken home by one of the students to pamper it a bit, or maybe it never existed – was never here, I mean. But the fact remains that there’s one cage with only three, and all the rest have four.’

  ‘Hmm. Any sign of trouble in their dormitory, or whatever it’s called?’

  ‘None that I can see. All the little residents seem quite happy and lively. They chirped at me quite a lot when I was in there. I got the impression they expected me to feed them.’

  ‘Probably. I had a guinea pig when I was a child, and, as I recall, she always expected me to feed her. They graze all the time on hay, but they love fruit, too. I don’t know what the lab ones are fed.’

  ‘I knew I was sure to give them the wrong thing, so I didn’t give them anything. They seemed annoyed. Oh, Elaine, they’re such cute little beasts! I do hope nothing awful has happened to one of them. Or to the cat.’

  ‘Or,’ said Elaine with a sigh, ‘to Tom.’ She went into the lab, found the one apparently called Steve, and sent him upstairs. Then she spoke to the crew at large. ‘You can carry on here as long as you need to, and then I’m afraid you need to spread out to the rest of the building. We’ll have to get everything done tonight. I’m going to close off the area until we determine whether or not we’re dealing with a crime, and that won’t be until we get the analyses back from the lab. Unfortunately, however, we’ll have to allow at least some of the students into the building – those who have an experiment at a critical stage, and, of course, the ones who look after the animals. So cover as much ground as you can tonight. When you’ve finished in here, go up to the pathology lab on the first floor. We’ve found something interesting in there; Nora and Steve will tell you about it. If you find something that leads you to another room, follow it. This is an exhausting business, and possibly to no purpose, but we have to be sure. Thank you all, and thanks especially to those of you who came in on your day off.

  ‘I’m off now to talk to some of the students. I’ll want to see your reports on my desk in the morning. Goodnight.’

  We went to the front door of the building and were let out by the vigilant constable. ‘I’m off to the pub,’ said Elaine, smothering a yawn. ‘Terence and Robert may have had some luck by now. Are you coming?’

  ‘No. Alan may be there, if he’s finished with his panel, but me, I’ve reached the end of my energy. I’m going to bed. Maybe in the morning my brain will be working again. Right now I can’t seem to make any connection between missing animals and a missing nephew, and blood on the floor and a hidden scalpel.’

  ‘You’re not alone, my dear. I’ll see you in the morning, then?’

  ‘I don’t know what Alan’s plans are. The conference is over, but we’d like to stay on in Cambridge for a while, if we can find a place to stay.’

  ‘I’ll ring you, then. With good news, I hope.’

  ‘I hope so, too. But remember I don’t have a phone at the moment; you’ll have to call Alan. And would you mind dreadfully seeing me back to my room? Since my experience at the Fitzwilliam, I’ve become a little wary about going places by myself.’

  ‘Of course. My car’s that way, anyhow.’

  We said goodnight at the door to my staircase, and I went in to my room and my long-awaited bed. Alan wasn’t back yet. I wanted to talk to him, and hear what he had learned, but once I was in bed with a sleeping pill it was a lost cause.

  Alan greeted me in the morning with a cup of coffee he’d made in the room, and an almond croissant he’d found somewhere. The coffee wasn’t wonderful, but it was hot. I took a few sips and then stretched experimentally. ‘Hey! Nothing hurts very much!’

  ‘Much as I hate to say it, my dear, it’s a sign of age when that is cause for rejoicing.’

  I would have thrown a pillow at him if not for the cu
p of coffee in my hand. ‘The voice of experience?’ I said instead, and got a grin in return.

  ‘As soon as you’ve completed re-entry,’ he said, nodding at the coffee cup, ‘we should trade reports. You were dead to the world when I came in.’

  ‘I was wiped out last night, for sure. And I’ve got lots to tell you, but do we need to pack first? I don’t know what time we have to get out of here.’

  ‘We don’t. Don’t forget this accommodation is reserved for guests, and the porter told me last night that no conference is booked in for more than a week. So I told him we wanted to stay for at least a few days.’

  ‘Meals?’

  ‘I bought us two meal tickets. We get them scanned whenever we use them. That gives us the flexibility to eat here when it’s convenient, or elsewhere when not. You understand we’ll be having student fare, not the posh meals that were provided for the conference.’

  ‘That sounds perfect. What a relief! I was afraid we were going to have to find a hotel or B & B somewhere, because I simply refuse to go home with the big mess unsettled.’

  ‘Not to my liking, either. So. Would you like a somewhat heartier breakfast before we tell all?’

  ‘No, this is fine. I’ve been eating far too much, anyway.’ I lay back against the pillows, luxuriating in the relative absence of aches and pains. ‘OK, who goes first?’

  ‘You do. My titbits aren’t of great interest.’

  ‘Oh, dear. Well, one of mine is, or could be. Alan, I found a bloody scalpel!’

  He looked taken aback for a moment, and then smiled. ‘I assume that’s a literal description, and not your opinion of the thing.’

  ‘Oh, I always forget. Yes, literal – I wasn’t swearing. Although, in fact, it may not be blood at all.’ I told him all about it. ‘I hope they’ll find it is blood, though. Then I’ll feel we’re getting somewhere at long last. Oh, and Elaine’s crew turned up traces of blood on the floor of the lab, too. The lab, I mean. My lab.’

  ‘Ah. Vindicated!’

  ‘Yes, and it does feel good. Honestly, I’d almost begun to wonder if I’d had an especially nasty and vivid dream. Oh, and speaking of nasty, one of the lab animals may be missing – a guinea pig. Maybe not, but there was one fewer than I expected.’ I explained that, too. ‘I wouldn’t mind so much if it had been a rat, but those guinea pigs are adorable. And don’t give me the lecture about all creatures great and small. I’ve already delivered it to myself. The fact is I can’t bear rats.’

  ‘Nor can I. The wild ones are the worst, but even in a cage – Elizabeth had a pet rat when she was ten or so. Or two, actually. They’re social animals and like to have a companion. When she asked for them, her mother and I had a conference and then told her that she could have them, on several conditions. One was that she kept them out of our sight at all times, another that she alone was responsible for their care. She was diligent about that part, but the more adventurous one of the pair escaped from its cage a time or two. Helen wasn’t best pleased the day she found it under our bed.’

  I shuddered. ‘I’d have screamed the place down. Of course, I’ve always had cats, which would, I think, have meant a short life indeed for an escaped rodent.’

  ‘They don’t live a terribly long time in any case. I think Elizabeth was twelve when Gregory and Wilberforce both died, and by that time she was mad about horses and didn’t mind too much. Helen and I were profoundly grateful. Anyway, I assume Elaine is looking into the case of the missing guinea pig?’

  When I had recovered from ‘Wilberforce,’ I replied. ‘Maybe, when she has time. I think she’s a good deal more concerned about the case of the missing nephew.’

  ‘Yes. Which brings me to my news, or lack of it. As soon as I could get away after the session last evening, I went back to the pub. Everidge was still there.’

  ‘I’d have thought that might put a damper on the students. The master of the college and a high-level policeman joining them for drinks.’

  ‘We didn’t sit actually with the students, but at the next table. The students were far too wrapped up in their own conversation to notice a pair of old fogeys like us.’

  ‘And was their conversation productive?’

  ‘Not very. When the barman called time and everyone left, Terence sat with us over coffee for a few minutes to report. Elaine was with us by that time, plainly tired and distressed, and nothing the boy said made her feel any better. He’d been hard put to bring the conversation around to Tom without spilling a few too many beans, but eventually he mentioned Mahala – hadn’t seen him of late, wondered what he was doing, that sort of thing. The boy is not popular in his college, Terence said. Thinks himself better than the rest, keeps himself to himself.’

  ‘A chip on his shoulder.’

  ‘More like a plank, apparently. Thinks they despise him for being a foreigner, when they simply dislike him because he’s unpleasant. Or so Terence says. He may not be entirely disingenuous, or he may not understand his own motives completely.’

  ‘So he introduced him into the conversation,’ I said impatiently. ‘And?’

  ‘Not much, as I said. One of the students said he’d seen him that morning, from a distance.’

  ‘Seen him where?’ I asked eagerly.

  Alan sighed. ‘In the market. No help at all. Sorry, love.’

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Well, at least he’s still alive and in town. And that means … What does it mean?’

  ‘Not a lot, except that we may be able to find him. I’m sure Elaine is on it, and she has the official resources we do not.’

  ‘And if we find him, we’ll know more about Tom.’

  ‘Perhaps. There may be no connection at all.’

  ‘True.’ After a moment I kicked the covers out of the way and struggled to an upright position. ‘It’s high time I was up and dressed. I can’t think properly when I look like a lazy bum.’

  I showered, dressed for a chilly morning and decided I was ready for a real breakfast, whether or not I needed it. Some protein, I rationalized, would help my brain function. ‘I don’t suppose the dining hall is still serving?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. But the University Arms isn’t far away, and they’re bound to do a good breakfast.’

  After I’d lovingly tucked myself around an excellent kipper, a poached egg on toast, some grapefruit, and a cup of very good coffee, I felt much livelier. ‘Fish is brain food, and this seems to have done the trick.’ I pointed to the denuded skeleton on my plate. ‘I’ve had an idea. Not earth-shaking, perhaps, but anyway a glimmer.’

  ‘More than anyone’s had so far,’ said Alan. He sounded grumbly. I ignored that; he was just feeling frustrated.

  ‘Well, what I’ve thought is we’ve been approaching this from the wrong end and with the wrong attitude. We’re working from what has happened, from the end results, and we’ve been thinking like investigators. But we don’t know enough about the situation to make much progress. So I think what we need to try to do is think like students. We still don’t know if we’re dealing with a prank, or what, but let’s begin with the notion of some spectacular student nonsense, and go from there.’

  ‘Dorothy,’ said Alan heavily. ‘It has been decades since either of us was a student. And though you were a traditional student, I was an adult and already a policeman when I pursued my university work. I can’t possibly get into the mind of today’s students.’

  ‘Nor can I. Especially since I’m American and went to an American college – rather different from Oxbridge, as you reminded me the other day. No, my idea was – ta-da! – Nigel.’

  Alan’s face changed from grumbly to thoughtful. ‘You know, that’s not a bad idea at all. He actually attended King’s for a while, didn’t he?’

  ‘Until he was thrown out for some infraction. I don’t remember what. The point is he’s still young and will remember what it was like here. And he has a decent imagination. I’ll bet he could come up with any number of ideas.’

  ‘Right.
’ Alan stood. ‘Let’s phone him now.’

  ‘I don’t have a mobile anymore, remember?’

  ‘Then it’s time we got you one, a proper smartphone this time. Hie us to the market.’

  It was another gorgeous day, the sort that puts the lie to my theory that it rains all the time in England. It does actually rain quite a lot, particularly in the low-lying fen country near Cambridge. But that makes us appreciate the fine days that much more.

  I thought about Nigel Evans as we made our way to the market. I’d met him my first Christmas in England, when I was newly widowed and immersed in self-pity. He was a student at Sherebury University at the time, and the prime suspect in a murder case I’d become involved in after literally stumbling over the body in the Cathedral. Half English, half Welsh, he had a brilliant mind, a lovely singing voice, a temper, and (now) a wife and two children and a fine job in computer services at the university. He was a close friend, and I thought the ideal person to help us ‘think like a student’.

  Before anything else, I expressed the urgent need for a hat. I really do feel only half-dressed without one. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find anything but a baseball cap, as ubiquitous (oddly enough) in England as in America, but one stall offered a nice line in straw boaters. They’re meant for men, but I found quite a jaunty one that fitted perfectly and made me feel like myself again. Alan shook his head a little at the price, but smiled at my appearance. ‘I’ll have to keep a closer eye on you than ever, love. There will, of a certainty, not be another woman in Cambridge wearing one of those. Possibly not in all of England.’

  ‘Good. Now we can buy me a phone.’

  We found one not in the market itself, but at a shop nearby. I watched as the young clerk tried to explain its many functions to me, and was daunted. It’s not that I’m opposed to technology as a matter of principle. Alan and I each have a computer at home, and we use them regularly for all kinds of things. But I’m old enough that I still consider a phone as a means of talking to someone from a distance, and the concept of this small device as a computer, a camera, a map, a dictionary, and whatever else … well, it intimidated me.