Death and the Visiting Fellow

by Tim Heald

  ‘If we take what you say at face value then you’re telling me that Ashley Carpenter instructed you to concoct a lethal cocktail in order to kill his pregnant girlfriend.’

  Long silence.

  ‘I suppose if you put it like that, then yes.’

  ‘How would you put it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Much the same if I were in your shoes. But I’m not. We’re talking about my oldest friend here.’

  ‘Can you prove that these e-mails were sent by Carpenter?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. That’s what he was saying earlier. He denies he sent them and says we can’t prove it. Even if it’s true.’

  Sanders sunk his head in his hands and came up grimacing.

  ‘God, I hate this modern technology,’ he said. ‘Have you kept the messages?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So we can give them to some computer nerd to hack around with?’

  ‘For what it’s worth.’

  ‘You didn’t know Lorraine Montagu until you set foot in Tasmania, did you?’ Sanders looked as if he liked this idea.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Would be neat,’ said Sanders, ‘if she were someone from your past. Someone you wanted to kill. Someone who had done you wrong in an earlier life.’

  ‘Neat, but not the truth,’ said Tudor. ‘Life and death are like that as we both well know. Messy businesses, both.’

  ‘I’m inclined to believe you,’ said the DCI eventually. ‘Gut instinct. Respect for your reputation. It’s not a professional way of proceeding. My bosses wouldn’t sympathize. Sackable offence.’ He grinned.

  Tudor grinned back. ‘Thanks a bunch,’ he said. He was about to add something about trust and the heart being mightier than reason and the head, but then he thought of his relationship with Ashley and remained silent. His gut instincts hadn’t done him a lot of good recently.

  ‘No,’ said Sanders, ‘I’m not inclined to accuse you of murder and I have to wait for the next stage of the autopsy before I can be sure it was murder. If Watson says death was accidental or even due to unknown causes then I’ll close the file.’

  ‘Watson?’

  ‘Government pathologist. Very good.’

  Sanders stared at his laptop as if willing it to disgorge relevant secrets. His screen saver was the five ages of Rembrandt. Self-portraits of the painter from dashing youth to seedy dotage. They were daily reminders of the transitory nature of life and also of a hinterland, a world beyond the stark business of criminal detection. He would have liked to have been an artist or even an academic. He envied his guest.

  ‘To be frank,’ he said, ‘I’m inclined to think that it’s murder and I’m inclined to think that it was master-minded by Professor Carpenter who set it up but made you the unwitting instrument.’

  ‘Not a very sharp instrument,’ said Tudor. ‘Positively blunt, in fact. I mean I could see that the whole business was eccentric and even batty, but it never occurred to me that I was being made to kill someone.’

  ‘Isn’t it all a bit too straightforward?’

  This from Karen White.

  ‘Straightforward?’ The two men were incredulous.

  ‘It seems positively byzantine to me,’ said Tudor. ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Karen, ‘it’s a hunch again. Very unprofessional I know. It’s just that there are two aspects of the business which bother me. One is that there’s something feminine about it all. Don’t ask me what or how, but this doesn’t strike me as an entirely masculine crime. If it is a crime. And also I feel there’s something conspiratorial about the whole place.’

  ‘You mean St Petroc’s?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know I’m an outsider and I know it’s a closed community and I understand about how nutty professors can be, but even so there’s something about the college which is sort of spooky. I just wonder if it wasn’t in everyone’s interests to have Lorraine Montagu dead. After all she was the only half-way normal person there and because of her skeleton she knew where the skeletons were buried.’

  The first few bars of ‘Click Go the Shears’ suddenly shrilled from Sanders’ jacket pocket. He swore and pulled out a mobile phone.

  ‘This is he,’ he said, then listened. From time to time he nodded. Occasionally he grunted rather as if he had taken something on board and was allowing the speaker to move on to the next hurdle. Once or twice he said, ‘Are you sure?’ Just once he whistled with what appeared to be astonishment. Finally he said, Thanks Arthur. Great work. Be in touch. Love to Sybil.’

  Then he turned to Tudor.

  ‘Looks like murder,’ he said. ‘That was Watson. I told you he was good. It could have taken him weeks if he’d gone by the book and run all the tests according to the rules but luckily he played a hunch.’

  ‘A honey hunch,’ said Tudor.

  Sanders looked at him with surprise mingled with suspicion. ‘What makes you say that?’

  Tudor shrugged.

  ‘I’d read it somewhere. I wondered about wattles and all those other antipodean bush ingredients, but I kept coming back to the Royal Jelly. It’s rare as dodoes though, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s what Watson said. He’s never seen a case before but he’d read a paper in some beekeeping journal or other. Watson reads like no one I’ve ever met. Anyway it’s a one in a million. She must have been allergic to honey and in the pure concentrate form of Royal Jelly that drink would have been lethal. No antidote. Certain death in seconds. She hadn’t a hope. And with all those other pungent additives knocking around she’d never have suspected a thing. The only thing that Royal Jelly transmitted was sweetness. No real taste. Just sweetness.’

  ‘Sweet, sweet, sweet poison,’ said Tudor, smiling softly.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Sanders.

  ‘Shakespeare,’ said Tudor, ‘King John. Not one of the better plays. It was the OUDS major our first summer.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The Drama Society’s production at Oxford. I seem to remember Ashley was involved in some way. A stagehand perhaps. We had a friend who played Lady Faulconbridge. She had an illicit affair with Richard Coeur de Lion. “By long and vehement suit I was seduc’d... to make room for him in my husband’s bed.”’

  He saw that the other two were looking at him strangely.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘All a long time ago. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Sweet poison. You never think of death as “sweet” do you?’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Tudor remembered a story by R. Austin Freeman who had been medical officer at Holloway Prison and a doctor at the Middlesex Hospital in the 1920s. Famous in his day. ‘It appears to be a watery solution of some kind,’ one of his detectives had said, on discovering a corpse with a bottle in one hand, ‘but I can’t give it a name. Where is the cork?’

  Tudor had composed a celebrated lecture on ‘Poisons unknown to medical science’ which he subtitled I can’t give it a name. Where is the cork?

  The phrase now crept into his brain and refused to be dislodged. It was like an advertising jingle or one of those naff Christmas top-of-the-pops. Catchy in a cheap, irritating way which stayed with him like the after-taste of smoked fish. A watery solution of some kind.’ Well, it was a vinous solution of some kind, and it was sweetened with Royal Jelly. Perfectly innocuous except for one person in, what? a hundred thousand, a million, a billion, a trillion? Who knew, who cared? It was what made statistics so meaningless. Lies, damned lies and stats. What did it matter to Lorraine Montagu that she was one in a million, a billion, or a trillion? As far as she was concerned she was one in one. Dead. Bad luck. Oh, Hobart is as safe as houses. Tasmania has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Murder? Here? Not a prayer. But there was just that infinitesimal chance of sudden death. And Lorraine was the person to whom it happened. The one who won the jackpot. Well played, Lorraine. I can’t give it a name. Where is the cork? Allergic to honey? Amazing! Give her the money!

&nb
sp; Tudor kicked an empty Diet-Coke can into the gutter. This was supposed to have been an idyllic sabbatical semester. Instead this. But what was this? The betrayal of an old friend? The murder of the friend’s mistress? A murder in which he himself was the executioner? Oh, give me a break. These things don’t happen to ordinary blameless people, but yes, they do just that and that is what his whole academic life had taught him. That sudden, random horror lights on the least likely person at the least likely moment. One of God’s private jokes. God must laugh a lot.

  * * *

  He was sufficiently self-aware to realize that he was at the end of his tether, wherever that might be.

  As he turned into St Petroc’s a slight figure emerged from the shadows. The person seemed to have been waiting for him.

  ‘Dr Cornwall!’

  It was little Brad Davey, the Principal’s assistant.

  ‘Can I get you a coffee?’ he asked.

  Tudor had heard more enticing opening gambits. He didn’t feel much like a coffee and he didn’t feel much like Brad Davey, but he was a guest in a strange place in a strange country. It would be churlish to refuse. He also presumed that Brad had something more interesting on offer than coffee. Or thought he had. In a college which seemed to suffer from an excess of Character with a capital ‘c’ Brad Davey was the one member who seemed intent on restoring some sense of balance.

  ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘I have some interesting Colombian,’ Davey said, ‘if you like it strong.’

  They walked across the quad and upstairs to Davey’s apartment where it turned out that he was some sort of coffee freak. He had a commercial-sized Gaggia espresso machine and cups from Illy of Trieste. His room was decorated with coffee advertisements, stills from the Gold Blend commercials, and a shot of Humphrey Bogart in a trench coat and a snappy fedora hat holding what was presumably a coffee cup.

  ‘Keen on coffee?’ said Tudor, gazing round the otherwise unexceptional room with surprise.

  ‘It’s an interest of mine. People should have an interest. Mine’s coffee.’

  Tudor wondered whether to revise his thoughts on Davey’s lack of character and decided against it.

  ‘Jazz Trethewey says she tried to apologize but you didn’t seem to take in what she was saying.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I had other things on my mind. Things seem to have moved on.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He fiddled with levers on the coffee machine which hissed obligingly. Tudor decided not to talk over the sibilant sounds and waited until Brad handed him a small quantity of very strong coffee in a very small Illy mug.

  ‘It seemed a neat idea at the time.’

  Tudor frowned.

  ‘How do you mean exactly?’

  ‘Ashley’s disappearing trick. OK, he said, we’ve got this English guy coming as a Visiting Fellow and he’s supposed to be an authority on crime and mysteries and all that, so let’s see what he does when he gets caught up in a real mystery. So he staged this disappearance and we were all supposed to react as if it were no big deal especially. And he asked me to send you these e-mails just to stir the pot. That’s what he said “Just to stir the pot”.’

  ‘E-mails?’ said Tudor. “He got you to send me e-mails?’

  ‘Yup. “To stir the pot”.’ Davey stirred his coffee vigorously as if to emphasize what he was saying.

  ‘Pretending that they came from him?’

  ‘Yup. He gave me all the passwords and that. He thought it would make you even more confused.’

  ‘Well, he got that right,’ said Tudor. ‘And they included the instructions on making a mull for the college competition?’

  The Principal’s deputy looked embarrassed if not quite ashamed.

  ‘He said it would make you even more confused. Also he had some idea it would remind you of when you were students. Said you used to drink that sort of stuff at Christmas.’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ said Tudor.

  ‘Wassail,’ said Brad. ‘“Here we go a-wassailing” was what he said. I didn’t know the word.’

  ‘No,’ said Tudor. ‘Did he write down what you were to say?’

  ‘No,’ said Brad. ‘I asked him but he wouldn’t. He was very insistent. Said the less evidence we left lying around the more difficult it would be for you to solve the puzzle.’

  ‘So it’s your word against his?’

  ‘He told Jazz and Tasman. Maybe Sammy. Not Dame Edith. He didn’t think Dame Edith would see the funny side of it.’

  ‘Nor Lorraine?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Just the Fellows. He seemed to think that was enough.’

  ‘And did all three of you know about the e-mails?’

  ‘No, he said it was a little secret between the two of us. He treated the whole thing like a game.’

  ‘An academic exercise?’

  ‘Yeah. But…’ Brad hesitated. ‘I got the impression he was keen to see you screw up.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, it was more than just setting you a problem. It was a sort of get-even thing. Like he really wanted you to come out looking stupid. He made out you were, well, you know, stuck up, arrogant, needed taking down a bit.’

  ‘He didn’t say that we were old friends?’

  ‘Yeah. He said that.’

  ‘Not a specially friendly thing to do, would you say?’

  The coffee was extraordinarily good. The machine and its steam engine noise was just about justified.

  Brad gave the impression he hadn’t previously considered this.

  ‘Suppose not. But he gave the impression that there was some sort of, you know, academic seriousness about it all. Also that you deserved to be made to look dumb. He didn’t make you sound very nice. Sorry. We didn’t know any better.’

  ‘Thanks. Did you keep copies of the messages?’

  ‘No. But they’ll be there somewhere in the memory. You can always find things if you want to even if you think you’ve got rid of them.’

  ‘That’s not what happens when I lose a file by mistake.’ Tudor grimaced. ‘I can never retrieve them. But I think you’re right. The experts say they can always find stuff, given time.’

  He frowned into the dregs of his coffee, declined a second helping and pondered. Ashley had meant the e-mails to confuse him, but on balance Ashley meant to convince Tudor that they were really coming from him. In this he had succeeded. He had also banked on Tudor carrying out his instructions. And why not? They seemed merely eccentric and batty in a mad-donnish way. Why shouldn’t he do as he was told. And ultimately, if and when the matter became public, Ashley would deny all knowledge of them. As he had already started to do. And whatever anyone believed it would be next to impossible to prove anything. That was the trouble with the electronic, digital age. Everything was forgeable. No one believed the old saw about the camera never lying. And it was the same with the computer. The opportunities for indecipherable deceit were incalculable.

  ‘Why are you telling me this? And why should I believe you?’

  Brad seemed startled by these questions. After a while he said, ‘I guess we all feel it’s gone beyond a joke. I don’t know what Lorraine’s death has to do with it all but it makes it serious. And, if you’ll pardon me saying it, you don’t seem to be quite the sort of guy Ashley told us you were.’

  ‘I suppose I should find that flattering.’

  ‘What Ashley told us in the first place wasn’t flattering,’ said Brad. ‘Not one bit. He made you seem like a real monster.’

  ‘Charming,’ said Tudor. ‘I’ve always spoken very highly of him.’

  This, though delivered in a mock jocular fashion, was perfectly true. Tudor kept puzzling over Ashley’s unexpected outburst about Miranda. There had seemed genuine vicious resentment there. Were there other resentments too? It was true for reasons of geography as much as anything that Tudor was better known than Ashley. He wrote for better known newspapers, got on extra-terrestrial TV more frequently. But he was closer to major newspaper of
fices and TV studios so naturally he got more exposure. Also his generalist approach to criminal studies was, well, sexier than Ashley’s more technically based forensic interests. If you wanted a quasi-academic review of a new movie of Dostoevsky or a think piece on the death penalty, then Tudor was your man. Ashley was the bee’s knees on genetic fingerprinting. You paid your money and you took your choice. Being in such a different time zone from London and New York didn’t help Ashley in this respect either. But they were friends, weren’t they? Maybe that made it worse whatever ‘it’ was.

  Are you sure?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not something I’d make up,’ said Brad. ‘It was strange though. I’d never thought of Professor Carpenter as, you know, like... vindictive. He always seemed easy-going, friendly. Not like him to be so full of... well, hatred isn’t too strong a word.’

  Tudor ran a hand through his hair. He didn’t get it. Could Brad be making it up? He didn’t have him down as an inventive person. Or not until he’d discovered the coffee mania. But why should he make up something like this?

  ‘So, what’s your explanation?’

  ‘I don’t have an explanation.’

  ‘Did you like Lorraine?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I had no problem with Lorraine. Some people thought she knew too much. Was too close to Dame Edith. She was always nice to me.’

  ‘Do you think what happened to her was an accident?’

  ‘Why? Wasn’t it?’

  A shade too quick, thought Tudor. Of course, he suspected there was more to Lorraine’s death than an accident. So would the others. They must have been talking. It would have been weird if they hadn’t.

  ‘What would you say,’ Tudor was choosing his words with care, ‘what would you say if you discovered that between us we’d murdered Lorraine Montagu?’

  ‘I’d say you’d have to be joking. In bad taste.’

  Tudor looked at him carefully. He was telling the truth. He had no idea.

  ‘You didn’t know that Lorraine suffered from some potentially deadly allergies?’

  ‘I knew she had an asthma problem. We all knew that. She had one of those little puffers. But it seemed quite manageable.’