Matricide at St. Martha's

by Ruth Dudley Edwards

  ‘What, as well as lunch? What are you up to?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Amiss guiltily.

  ‘In that case you can cancel dinner.’

  ‘You’re a frightful bully, Jack. Oh, all right. I’ll postpone dinner. Where and when?’

  ‘Private room upstairs in the Gamekeeper Turned Poacher. And mind you arrive separately with paper bags over your heads. Can’t have Pooley being drummed out of the con stabu lary for associating with perverts.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Amiss. ‘’Bye. See you later.’

  ‘Who’s he having lunch with?’ Pooley asked as the door closed.

  ‘He’s being secretive,’ said the Bursar. ‘Not a thing I like in my protégés. It should be one of the privileges of age. I think he might be up to something. Let’s try and get it out of him tonight.’

  Chapter 23

  Amy Braithwaite was distressed but composed. The names and addresses of those who could corroborate the truth about Crowley were produced without difficulty.

  ‘Do you think, ma’am, that he is a possible murderer?’

  ‘He is wholly egocentric, amoral and without loyalty. Are those good credentials?’

  ‘Excellent, I should have thought.’

  ‘On the other hand, he seems to be used to being thrown out of institutions and moving on; he’s a bit of an adventurer and a risk-taker. Of course, that latter quality could also make him predisposed to murder. Who can tell, Sergeant Pooley? That’s your job. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I have much to do. I am trying to reorganize my teaching so that I can get to Cambridge for Maud’s funeral.’

  ‘You’re coming a very long way.’

  ‘When your most beloved friend dies, you have to be there at the end.’

  ‘You have my sympathy, ma’am. It is a terrible tragedy.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Miss Braithwaite. ‘There are worse ways of going. Maud always had style.’

  ***

  Amiss had not expected Pooley and the Bursar to hit it off, but though Pooley’s eyes occasionally widened with astonishment, his expression never became sanctimonious. It helped that the Bursar was on her best behaviour. Instead of mocking Pooley when she discovered his aristocratic parentage, she used it as an excuse to make common cause with him against Amiss. After the first rush of jokes about noblesse oblige, the duties of lineage, how breeding always told and so on they proceeded to historical chit-chat. The Pooleys and the Troutbecks, it emerged, had been four-square with Henry VIII at the Reformation but they had followed different paths in the Civil War: the Pooleys had been Roundheads and the Troutbecks Cavaliers.

  ‘Plus ça change,’ said Amiss.

  ‘Ah, the poor young deracinated Robert,’ said the Bursar sympathetically. ‘What must it be to have no link with your forebears? How wonderful it is, Ellis, not to be a member of the lower orders.’

  ‘Jack,’ said Amiss, ‘knock it off. I didn’t alter my social arrangements in order to listen to aristocratic triumphalism. I can get that from you any day of the week by just dropping into your office.’

  ‘I have never claimed to be an aristocrat. We Troutbecks are yeomen—more sturdily independent than the aristocracy, who, after all, only got their titles by selling out to royalty or being screwed by them one way or another.’

  She saw Amiss’s glare. ‘Have another drink, Robert. We have something to celebrate.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Another suspect.’

  ‘Excellent. Amy came across?’

  ‘She certainly did. I played her like a stringed instrument. Turns out Amy is better informed about what’s going on in St. Martha’s than anyone there. She was quite up to date with all the political machinations—nothing new though. But then in Maud’s last letter came a great crise over Deborah Windlesham, our beloved new Mistress, and the murky business of the allegedly faked footnotes. I have to say, it was pretty saintly of Maud to keep quiet about this, even to me.’

  ‘Pretty stupid as well, if it led to her murder.’

  ‘But then she’d led such a serious life—no crime novels, no television—that she never knew that the first thing you do on finding out someone else’s guilty secret is to make damn sure you blab it to others and let the guilty-secret holder know you have. The really dumb move is secretly to put your thoughts on paper and dispatch them across the ocean.’

  ‘So what’s the story? And make it straightforward. I’m not in the mood for reading between the lines.’

  The Bursar took out her pipe and its attendant para phernalia, filled it and tamped her tobacco down firmly. Then, after a copious draught of claret, she began. ‘The trouble arose because Maud was a true scholar and a woman of infinite integrity as well as being painstaking to a balls-aching degree.

  ‘One day, a few weeks ago, having run out of filing-cabinet space, she decided to empty a particular set of drawers that nobody had looked at in years. Most of the contents were the sort of yellowed paper you’d expect in an administrator’s cabinet: ancient applications for places at St. Martha’s records on individual students, various odds and ends relating to disciplinary matters, parental complaints, arguments over interpretation of the statutes and so on. She threw out a lot of it, consigned some more to the archives and then settled down to read through a drawerful of Fellowship applications stretching back twenty or so years.

  ‘Anyone less conscientious would have binned the lot unread, but Maud skimmed through the papers to see if there was anything potentially useful to historians of the university or of women’s education or whatever and that was when she came upon the 1965 file on Nina Becker.’

  ‘Sounds quite racy,’ said Amiss.

  ‘Sshh,’ said Pooley, who was already quivering and was poised to take notes.

  ‘She certainly would appear to have been a bit of a dish. In fact, that seems to have been at the root of her problem.’

  The Bursar picked up her lighter. Amiss, who had experi ence of this device, moved his chair back slightly. She pressed the ignition switch firmly and a large flame shot out which simultaneously lit her tobacco and slightly singed the front of her hair. Even Pooley’s concentration lapsed. ‘That’s extremely dangerous,’ he said, ‘it’s like a miniflamethrower.’

  ‘I like a decent flame.’

  ‘Oh, get on with it, Jack,’ said Amiss, ‘you’re just trying to keep us in suspense.’

  The Bursar puffed deeply and emitted a vast cloud of smoke which threw Pooley into uncontrollable coughing. She waved her hand vaguely through the offending cloud. ‘That’s the trouble with people who don’t smoke. They’ve no resilience.’

  ‘Jack!’

  ‘Oh, very well, very well. Don’t fuss.

  ‘What Maud wrote to Amy was that the academic creden tials of Nina Becker were impeccable, that she seemed perfect for a St. Martha’s Fellowship and that on the face of it she had been kept off the shortlist because Deborah Windlesham had told lies.

  ‘In those days, because there were so few Fellowships for women, St. Martha’s always had a large number of applicants. Existing Fellows would sift the applications in their area of expertise, read the theses presented, write a brief report on each and whittle the list down to the outstanding. Then three of them would read the work of everyone on the shortlist.

  ‘Maud skimmed the Becker thesis, thought it excellent and was therefore surprised that Windlesham described it as being of poor quality, sloppily researched, poorly argued, of little significance to scholarship and containing a host of inaccurate references.

  ‘Now, some of these things are matters of judgement; honest mistakes can be made. I may think my discovery that Odwold the Magnificent had three footmen instead of the two favoured by his father to be of immense importance in discussing the development of the Anglo-Saxon court: you may not. You may think that only a peabrain could fail to see the huge importance of discovering that the holder of the Deanery of Hogswallop in the late fifteenth century was not, as was always believed, a scion of
the family of Borspittle but instead someone from the distaff side—a Mugwump who had procured a papal document enabling him to supplant the Borspittles for a whole generation: I may not.

  ‘But what Maud said to Amy was that while she thought Miss Becker’s thesis extremely useful, it wasn’t that which was the point of contention. It was that she could see no evidence of either sloppy research or poor arguments. She wasn’t suspicious—Maud didn’t have that kind of mind—but she had the curiosity of the true scholar, so off she went to check the allegedly inaccurate footnoting.

  ‘She started with every tenth footnote and on finding those accurate took a whole chapter and then another and found that everything she had the resources to check was perfect.’ The Bursar drew heavily once more on her pipe. Exhibiting extreme thoughtfulness, she blew the smoke in the opposite direction from Pooley. It caught Amiss and sent him into a paroxysm of coughing.

  ‘Oops, sorry,’ she said, slapping him vigorously on the back and almost knocking him off his chair. When order had been restored she resumed.

  ‘She wrote worriedly about this to Amy. The charitable explanation, she concluded, was that having—for some innocent reason—taken a dislike to the thesis itself, Windle sham had made an honest if ignorant error about the quality of the research and on randomly checking footnotes had by a fluke lit upon a couple that were faulty and made a hasty assumption that they were typical. If so, Miss Becker had been done out of a possible Research Fellowship because of her examiner’s fallibility.

  ‘But having spotted that Becker and Windlesham had been contemporaries at around the same time in the same Oxford college, St Mary’s, Maud was slightly haunted by the fear that there might be something personal involved, especially since Becker’s photograph showed her to be a stunner. “Should I challenge Deborah?” she asked Amy, “or should I let it go?” Amy advised her against causing unneces sary friction by challenging Windlesham and Maud agreed, but her conscience wouldn’t let her leave it at that. Instead, she embarked on a little detective work to see if there was a case to answer.

  ‘It didn’t take long to come up with the information that Windlesham and Becker had read history in the same year, that Becker had got a slightly better first than Windlesham in her Tripos after which Windlesham had gone on to do her Ph.D and Becker had vanished for a few years, coming back to do postgraduate research a year after Windlesham had moved to Cambridge to take up her St. Martha’s Fellowship.’

  ‘So they must have known each other quite well?’

  ‘Yes, but that didn’t prove anything. Still, though it wasn’t an absolute rule, it would have been proper for Windlesham to have noted that she knew Becker, so Maud went ahead and rang the Mistress of St Mary’s, who was a pal of hers, with a general enquiry about the Becker woman. After some ferreting about among the St Mary’s dons, Maud was put in touch with an academic who had known Becker well and was occasionally in touch.

  ‘Under the seal of the academic confessional the story was pieced together and a man turned out to be the problem—a law professor who was young, brilliant and unmarried. He went out for a short while with Windlesham but on meeting Becker fell madly for her. They dallied, she got tired of him and rather than hang around Oxford feeding the fires of his devotion, she did the decent thing and decamped for a couple of years to Paris to teach English. Then, when she reckoned he’d be over it, she came back because she was seriously academically inclined and wanted to do research. Apparently Windlesham could never be disabused of the notion that he would have come round to her in the end had it not been for Becker—even though by the time Becker arrived back in Oxford he had married someone else.’

  ‘So it was vindictiveness, pure and simple?’

  ‘Yes, and an understandable desire not to want the person she most hated in her own institution. But it was very rough on Becker, who according to her old pal was a woman who did nothing to attract hatred other than attract men. Becker needed and deserved a Research Fellowship, worked immensely hard on the thesis and was absolutely devastated when she discovered she’d not even been shortlisted. She just threw in the towel.’

  ‘Well, that didn’t show much backbone,’ said Pooley.

  The Bursar puffed meditatively. ‘I think there is some thing I’d better explain to you that people of your age don’t easily understand. I am not, I think, regarded as a wimp?’

  She looked enquiringly at her audience. ‘It’s not the first term of abuse I would hurl at you, Jack,’ said Amiss.

  ‘Yet I have no difficulty in understanding how the sheer number of obstacles that until recently stood in the way of becoming a female university teacher would break your heart. I was all right because I joined the civil service, which treated you more or less equally, but the opportunities for women were a joke in the old universities. For God’s sake, it wasn’t until 1948 that a woman could actually be conferred with a degree in Cambridge. You couldn’t join the Union until the sixties. And to this day women cannot even be full members of the Oxford and Cambridge Club.

  ‘There were so few places for women in Oxbridge that only a tiny percentage of the best of them ever made it there in the first place and their colleges were so miserably poor that jobs were few and conditions spartan. Can you imagine how high-minded you had to be to crave the kind of life they’ve been living in St. Martha’s for decades, while around them were countless male colleges full of overfed dons swilling vintage port and wooing privileged male under graduates who would go out into the world, where they would become successful and rich and in turn leave legacies to their old colleges.

  ‘Women were tenth-class citizens in Oxbridge. They were patronized by many of their male lecturers and made to feel highly unwelcome by others: it wasn’t that easy to acquire the effortless self-confidence that made one take rejection light-heartedly. Becker had shot her academic bolt because a member of her own sex was jealous of her but she didn’t know that was the reason—she assumed she simply wasn’t good enough.’

  ‘So what did Dame Maud do then?’

  ‘Told Windlesham that the injustice must be remedied and the Becker woman hunted down and, if possible, tempted back to St. Martha’s.’

  ‘My God,’ said Amiss, ‘she was a hardliner, old Maud. What was the point after so long? Didn’t she owe more to a longstanding colleague, even if she is a cow.’

  ‘Maud believed in the simple principle of truth, justice and intellectual integrity. In her way, she was a fanatic.’

  ‘I suppose I understand intellectually, but not emotionally.’

  ‘I do,’ said Pooley. ‘It’s the same debate as in Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night—intellectual integrity as against the feelings of flesh and blood people.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said the Bursar. ‘You and I might go for the flesh and blood people in many instances, but we’re not scholars. The point of scholars is to give scholarship priority. You want honest cops, honest scholars, honest Bursars.’ She looked at Amiss. ‘How do we describe you?’

  ‘“Honest scrounger”. Pour me some more wine, Ellis.’ As he emptied the bottle in his companions’ glasses, Pooley asked, ‘Do we know what she was proposing to do if Windlesham didn’t play?’

  ‘Bring the matter up before the College Council and tell Becker the whole story when she tracked her down.’

  ‘Preserve me,’ said Amiss, ‘from the mercilessness of the good.’

  ‘What next?’ asked Pooley.

  ‘I’m handing it over to you. I suggest you go back now when we’ve finished here, ring Amy and get the facts officially, so to speak. Then you and the blithering fool can decide tomorrow morning what to do about it.’

  ‘I have to say, in defence of my boss, that for once this is something he might just about grasp. Idiot though he may be, he is honest and I think he’d be more in sympathy than Robert with a sea green and incorruptible like Dame Maud.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not entirely out of sympathy,’ observed Amiss. ‘We need people like that. I’d be worrie
d about public standards if everyone was a wishy-washy liberal like me who likes being liked. You need the whistle-blowers and the people who don’t mind being unpopular and the people with tunnel vision.’

  ‘But not too many of them,’ said the Bursar. ‘They’re almost all Roundheads.’

  Chapter 24

  Pooley was right about Romford: he seized on the story of Windlesham and Becker with cries of joy. ‘Ah, this is more like it, Pooley. I’d say it’s pretty open and shut. The woman’s got a double motive. If the Mistress stayed alive, Windlesham would be ruined, whereas if she died her reputation is saved and she becomes Mistress as well. Go and get her. The thing to do is to lean on her. Someone like that, she’ll soon crack up. They’re not used to pressure in their ivory tower.’

  ‘Quite a lot of them seem pretty tough to me, sir.’

  ‘Well, those impertinent young perverts, yes.’

  ‘And the Bursar?’

  ‘She’s not a proper woman. At least Dr. Windlesham is a normal woman; they crack easier.’

  The familiar sensation of grinding rage gripped Pooley’s vitals. He breathed deeply. ‘I’ll go and look for her, sir.’

  ***

  Ten minutes in, Pooley wished it was possible to shoot senior officers for incompetence. Even in his most anti-Romford moments he could not have envisaged that the man would throw away a set of excellent cards by simply placing them face up on the table in front of his opponent. There was no attempt to trap the new Mistress into a lie.

  Impotently, Pooley ground his teeth as he thought of how he would have conducted the interview, coaxing out of her assertions of a warm, happy relationship with no trouble and no friction and then finally beating her over the head with proof of her own falsehoods. Romford’s approach—‘I have reason to believe, ma’am, that you and the late Dame Maud had words over a Miss Becker,’ had enabled her to produce a competent and unincriminating version of the dispute. Over and over again Romford tried to get her to alter her version and over and over again she refused to budge.