by Tim Heald
‘Missing, presumed dead,’ she said.
He did not smile. ‘That’s usually a military usage,’ he said, ‘meaning “neither present after battle nor known to have been killed or wounded”.’
‘Like if you have a body you can prove the person’s dead?’
‘It’s not a laughing matter,’ he said, huffily.
‘I’m not laughing,’ she said. ‘Only it’s difficult to know when someone or even something is really missing. We know that here and I’m sure you know that in Britain. Take your page in the book: there’s nothing to say that the book can’t just have odd numbered pages. Like a street, say. One side’s even, the other side’s odd.’
‘Now you really are being facetious,’ said Cornwall.
‘I’m just saying that without a body it’s not cut and dried. I mean look at your Lucan. It took years for your law to decide he was “missing” enough for his estate to be settled, for his son to inherit the title, for him to be taken out of the reference books.’
‘How do you know about Lucan?’ he asked. ‘You’re far too young.’
‘We did him in college,’ she said. ‘He’s kind of interesting. You know if he’s living in like South America like some people still say then he’s not missing, is he? He’s alive and well.’
‘But he’s still missing from his wife and family and friends. He’s missing from his proper place. He’s missing from where he’s supposed to be.’
‘It’s a free country,’ she said. ‘If he wanted to go and live in South America that’s his business. Doesn’t mean he’s missing.’
‘Except that he was suspected of murder.’
‘That’s correct,’ she said, skidding round another tight corner and then, a hundred yards later, pulling into a layby on the right. ‘Professor Carpenter isn’t suspected of murdering anybody. Not yet anyway. Be interesting if he did murder someone though. Missing presumed guilty.’ She smiled. ‘We’re here. That’s his vehicle.’
Tudor got out and stretched. The air up here was crisp and cool. They had been climbing steadily ever since leaving the college. The city lay stretched out below them to the left like a relief map. The effect was similar to that which Tudor first noticed from his window in St Petroc’s except that being now so much further away the scale was significantly reduced. Another fat bathtub freighter was scudding up the sound at the entrance to the Derwent River. Cars moved up and down the highways like dots. High-rise buildings, which might have seemed imposing from ground level, looked stubby and squat. There was a lot of green; the larger squares presumably parks though it looked as if most Hobart houses had big back yards. The steep slopes of the mountain were wild and unpopulated until the white barked gums and the surrounding scrub gave way to suburban sprawl perhaps three or four miles distant, though it was so steep that if a professional soldier had thrown a grenade it would probably have exploded near the first of the suburban villas, and maybe uprooted a camellia or rhododendron in the shrubbery, or caused a tidal wave in the swimming-pool. All the houses on the city fringe seemed to have pools and shrubberies though they petered out towards the centre. It looked a quiet, affluent sort of place. Not a city where you’d expect to find missing persons. It didn’t look as if you could easily get lost in Hobart.
Up here on the mountain it was different. Here, already it was wild, untamed, no longer smiling.
‘Trust Ashley to drive British,’ said Tudor.
The car was a Land Rover, geriatric to the point of being uncertifiable, a short-wheel-based model with a canvas hood, the sort of thing Tudor associated with black-and-white movies set in occupied Europe. Trevor Howard in a duffel coat and a beret. Ashley affected a sort of old colonial machismo which the Land Rover fitted perfectly. Tudor guessed it wouldn’t have gone down too well with some of his colleagues. They would have found it affected. Tudor wasn’t sure he didn’t agree.
‘No sign of foul play,’ said Karen. ‘Just a parked car.’
‘Been parked a little longer than you’d expect though,’ said Tudor. ‘He’d have had a ticket in town.’
‘He’s not in town,’ she said. ‘No yellow lines out here. No traffic wardens. No regulations. God’s own country.’
Tudor peered through the window. There was an untouched bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut on the passenger seat and a banana on the dashboard. The banana was intact too. It looked blackish and unappetizing.
‘Did he come here often?’ he asked.
‘He came up the mountain most mornings,’ she said. ‘Could have come here; could have gone some place else. The mountain’s full of tracks.’
There was a wooden signpost where the gravel layby finished and the bush began. A narrow sandy track ran steeply uphill. The signpost said ‘High Falls 5k.’
‘High Falls?’ said Tudor.
‘Famous beauty spot,’ she said. ‘Nice morning’s walk. Just enough of a climb to stretch your thigh muscles and raise the pulse rate. About an hour and a half for someone reasonably fit. Which I understand Professor Carpenter was.’
‘Was?’ he said sharply.
‘Is... was... who knows?’ She didn’t seem to care much. Policemen and policewomen seldom did in Dr Cornwall’s experience. Professional indifference induced by over-exposure to dead bodies. He found it slightly shocking in one so young.
‘Does the track end at the Falls?’ he asked. She shrugged and Tudor remarked to himself that she had a cool line in not caring very much.
‘Sort of. Most people would just do the round trip. It’s a popular gentle walk. But if you want to go on you can walk till you hit the sea which is, I’d guess, about five hundred kilometres away at Wittling Point.’
‘Could you do that?’ he wanted to know. ‘Walk all the way from here to Wittling Point?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘It would take a while but there’s no reason why not.’
‘There’s a track?’
‘Not what you’d call a track in the UK. But an experienced bushwalker could do it. No problem. Well, he could, but then again maybe he couldn’t.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Five hundred ks is a long way. You have to carry all you need. There’s no settlement after the first fifty or so ks. It’s all wilderness area. Designated. Protected. Most people fly in by light plane. If you get sick or break a leg there’s no way out.’
‘Other than by aeroplane.’
‘Yeah, but there aren’t many places you can land. Not more than two or three primitive strips all the way between here and WP.’
‘So Ashley wouldn’t have...’ Tudor was thinking out loud, an irritating habit of his which had cost him some otherwise rewarding relationships. Women seemed to prefer it if he kept his thoughts to himself which he often did. But not always.
‘It’s not a picnic. So no way. You don’t just come up here one breakfast time and say “hey jeepers, why not take a stroll down to the ocean?”’
“So in the normal course of events he’d just wander up to the Falls and wander back again?’
‘Guess so. That’s what most of us do.’
‘Hmmm.’
For a while the pair of them stared at the Land Rover as if willing it to divulge its secret. It obviously knew something they didn’t.
‘Shall we walk up to the Falls?’ he asked, ‘I’d like to see them. And you never know.’
Karen shrugged again. Tudor decided it was a habit he might eventually find irritating–if he were ever given the time.
‘Sure,’ she said.
It was a steep climb but the path was well– defined and firm underfoot. You didn’t have to be a Ranulph Fiennes to negotiate it. The scrubby woodland to either side was a different story. It looked impenetrable. Also much of it was higher than he had anticipated. It might not have come up to an elephant’s eye but it would have been near head-height on a man of average build. A diminutive policewoman such as Karen would soon have disappeared from sight.
‘Easy to get lost in that.’ Tudor flicked hi
s head in the direction of the surrounding wilderness.
‘People do,’ she said. ‘Even this close to the city. But not if you know what you’re doing. Out there in the wilderness maybe. That’s a different story. But someone like your friend wouldn’t have any worries here. This is like Regent’s Park for a Londoner, Central Park for a New Yorker, the Champs-Elysees for a Parisian, Unter den Linden for a Berliner...’
‘They teach you that in college?’ asked Tudor waspishly.
‘Maybe.’ The shrug was imperceptible this time but she still smirked.
Tudor was quite fit but the climb was steep, and, he reminded himself, they were at altitude. After a while he didn’t trust himself to speak for fear of sounding breathless. That would have meant loss of face. Normally he wouldn’t have worried much about that, having the self-confidence to dispense with such feeble vanities, but just now with this irritating Tasmanian policewoman he felt an overwhelming need not to appear weak.
After about half an hour they entered a damp area festooned with ferny fronds and frondish ferns glistening in the damp from a trickling stream. The moisture lent a rheumatic quality to the already chill air. The stones had gathered moss which stained his sleeve a luminous green, when he stumbled on a slimy sheet of slate and put out a hand to steady himself. After ten minutes or so of this, the path turned into wooden steps carpeted with thin criss-cross wire to prevent further slippage and then at the top of this metal and pine staircase they emerged on to a small viewing platform.
Ahead and above, High Falls fell silver through green foliage into an iridescent pool illuminated by shafts of sunlight beaming through the leaves of gum and fir and knotty mountain oak. She was a very narrow fall like the mercury in a thermometer but high and gleaming in the thin mountain air. Beautiful in a ghostlike way, thought Tudor, and alive with a sodden drip of intangible threat. In daylight there seemed little harm in this sylvan slippery, slimy stream but at night he could imagine a dank mysterious air of water torture. He shivered and not from cold. He had always been more than usually susceptible to a sense of place. And this place had a sense all right. Mystery and menace, mire and mould.
‘Ssshhh,’ said Karen, unnecessarily, for he was silent as the grave.
He froze and the two of them listened, straining to hear over the trickling sibilance of the falls.
‘Animal,’ said Karen. ‘Dog, I think.’
They listened again and this time Tudor thought he too caught the thin echo of a canine whine over the sound of water falling on rock. Ridiculously he remembered, years ago, seeing a Conan Doyle adventure in a village cinema in southern Spain, the wholly expected but nonetheless chilling bay of El Perro de Baskervilles against a backdrop of full moon, meerschaum and deerstalker. The distant whimper in the watery wilderness of the Wurlitzer had a similar effect. His spine felt chilled.
‘Up there,’ said Karen, pointing halfway up the fall. ‘Dog. Sure of it. Let’s go look.’
And almost at once she was over the pine railing and into the wild scrub, up to her shoulders, scrambling and clambering upwards in the direction of the allegedly doggy cries.
Tudor followed, a shade gingerly as befitted a man of his age and station but nimbly enough for all that.
For ten minutes they climbed, then reached a narrow emerald green plateau of mossy grass, little more than a shelf in the steep mountainside. There, tied with a long rope to a slender, ever-green, larch-like tree, was a mottled heavy-shouldered dog, now all bared lip and wagging tail, pleased to see them.
‘Blue heeler cross,’ said Karen.
The dog wore a metal tag on his collar.
Tudor, a dog person to his fingertips, walked across, knelt, ruffled the heeler’s head with the fingers of his right hand and took the tag in his left.
‘Basil,’ he read out loud, ‘c/o Prof. Carpenter, St Petroc’s college, Hobart.’
He turned to look up at WPC White.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘do you think we have a missing person now?’
Chapter Eight
Basil’s return to St Petroc’s did not go unnoticed.
‘What in God’s name are you doing with that bloody dog?’ asked Dame Edith who was watering roses as Dr Cornwall and WPC White drove into the garden quad. The second Tudor opened the passenger door, Basil leapt out, snarled briefly at the Principal and cocked his leg against an abundant scarlet floribunda.
Dame Edith snarled back.
‘I can’t think what Ashley sees in that mutt,’ she said. ‘Where is he anyway? And where’s he been?’
Tudor sighed. ‘We’ve found the dog,’ he said, ‘but not his master.’
‘Ashley,’ said Dame Edith, ‘never goes anywhere without Basil. Basil never goes anywhere without Ashley. They are, in a word, inseparable.’
‘Not any more they aren’t,’ said Tudor.
‘Police Constable White and I found the dog tied to a small tree near High Falls about three-quarters of an hour off Parsnip Field Road halfway up the Wurlitzer.’
‘I know perfectly well where High Falls is, young man. But where is Professor Carpenter?’
That’s what I am trying to tell you,’ said Tudor. Academics were the same the world over, he thought to himself. They never listened to anyone but themselves. ‘We found the dog but not Ashley,’ he said. ‘The dog was on its own. Tied up. Not happy. No Ashley.’
Dame Edith put down the watering can. ‘That’s not good.’
‘No.’
‘What’s your view, Constable?’
Tudor was afraid Karen was going to do one of her shrugs, but instead she said, ‘I don’t know yet. I have to report back. Off the record, I’d have to say our investigations will have to be upgraded.’ She smiled. ‘So I guess I’d better get back to the office. I’ll leave you to look after the dog. I don’t think he’d be happy in the police pound. See you later.’
She drove away at speed leaving the Principal, the Visiting Fellow and the dog regarding each other warily.
‘I like dogs,’ said Tudor eventually. ‘I’ll look after him till Ashley gets back.’
‘If he gets back,’ said Dame Edith. ‘Still, I’m obliged. I don’t care for dogs. Especially this one.’
She seemed to soften. Indeed, for a moment she seemed almost vulnerable and Tudor was on the verge of feeling sorry for her. Her world was St Petroc’s and St Petroc’s showed ominous signs of instability. From his own experience at the University of Wessex he was only too well aware of the fragility of academic institutions. The academics disliked other academics, only uniting in their hatred of the all-powerful administrators. Academics and administrators in turn only made common cause when it came to their weary contempt for their students. This, in turn, was heartily reciprocated. There were exceptions to this jaundiced view of Dr Cornwall’s but he believed that they only served to prove the rule. He personally had always enjoyed cordial even warm relations with his students, though less so with his colleagues, but he was not usual. In any case, he was old enough to remember the distant days when student revolt had almost destroyed universities. He had seen how vulnerable they could be. Dame Edith would know this better than he which was why she was perturbed.
‘It’s a worry,’ she said.
He agreed.
‘What are we to do?’
‘Let the police try to find out what’s happened. That’s what they’re for.’ Even as he said it Tudor realized that it sounded limp. He also knew that if this had happened on his own home turf he would have taken a more proactive attitude. In Wessex he had contacts, an understanding of how things worked; he belonged, it was home. Here he was a stranger, out of his depth. He had been relying on Ashley to show him the ropes, explain the procedures, introduce him to his network. And now Ashley far from solving his problems had become the problem himself.
‘In situations such as this I always rely on Professor Carpenter,’ she said, sounding prissy.
‘Well, in this situation that’s hardly an option,’ he said, ‘an
d what exactly do you mean by “situations such as this”? I had imagined this was unique but perhaps not. Do members of your senior common room often go missing?’
‘I don’t think that’s funny.’
‘It’s not meant to be funny. You’re telling me that you’ve had other situations in which you rely on Ashley. I want to know what you mean.’
She picked up the watering can and stared at it as if expecting it to give her inspiration.
‘I think you’d better have a word with Lorraine,’ she said. ‘She can explain the ins and outs of college life. Besides, she and Ashley are friends. That is to say, well it’s none of my business and I have no idea exactly what the state of their relationship is. Or was. That’s probably beside the point. You must understand that in a society such as this we are constantly having to deal with situations in which, well, I’ve already told you about our current problems with theft. It isn’t the first time we have had to deal with people stealing things. I prefer that when such problems occur we solve them ourselves. If we go outside for solutions there is nearly always talk and careless talk–’
‘Costs lives,’ said Tudor, wishing he hadn’t.
She gave him a sharp look.
‘There have been two deaths since I became Principal of this college,’ she said, ‘and in both cases we have managed, partly thanks to Ashley’s common sense and to his influence in all manner of quarters, to avoid unwelcome publicity. I’m sorry that’s a tautology. All publicity is unwelcome. The one is synonymous with the other.’
‘What sort of deaths?’ Tudor wanted to know.
‘Let us just say that both were what you might call drug-related. Young people do tend to get into trouble with drugs. They’re also prone to depression. The combination can have disastrous consequences.’
‘You forget,’ said Tudor, ‘that I too work in a university.’
‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘I do forget. Too often these days I’m afraid. Age wearies me and the years condemn.’