The Late Scholar

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘Not at all, Mr Jackson. Far from boring me you are educating me. Will you have another drink?’

  ‘Better not, thank you. I have a tutorial this afternoon.’

  ‘A daunting one?’

  ‘You bet! It’s with Mary Fowey at Shrewsbury. She’s bloody terrifying.’

  ‘Don’t you have a tutor in St Severin’s?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Oh, yes. I have Mr Cloudie. But he’s a Shakespeare scholar. When you do an unusual course you get farmed out to someone who specialises in it. It’s good in a way, but those women tutors are ferocious.’

  ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male?’

  ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘So if St Severin’s sells its Boethius, your plan of studies can’t take place, you say. Surely whoever buys it will make it available to scholars?’

  ‘When they’ve finished “accessioning” it. When their own people have had first go at it. And anyway it will go abroad. Somewhere in the United States, probably. And I can’t possibly afford to study abroad.’

  ‘Couldn’t you study something else?’

  ‘Possibly. But this is what I really want to do. Being blocked would be like losing a girl one loved.’

  At this point a newcomer entered the courtyard – an old acquaintance of Peter’s, Helen de Vine. ‘Lord Peter, by all that’s marvellous!’ she said, coming across to him at once.

  ‘I’d better go,’ said Jackson, jumping up and offering his chair to the newcomer.

  ‘What are you doing in Oxford?’ Miss de Vine asked Peter.

  ‘Travelling incognito as the Duke of Denver,’ Peter said. ‘I do hope young Jackson didn’t hear what you just called me.’

  ‘Well, you can’t keep THAT secret,’ said Miss de Vine. ‘Wait till I tell the others! When will you come to tea with us? Or will you be my guest at High Table?’

  ‘Either would be lovely,’ said Peter. ‘And soon. Very soon. I would like an introduction to Mary Fowey.’

  ‘You shall have that as soon as I can arrange it,’ said Miss de Vine. ‘And is dear Harriet here too?’

  ‘She’s on her way,’ said Peter. ‘I expect her soon.’

  On returning to his rooms Peter found Ambleside waiting for him, with the list he had asked for of recent deaths and mishaps.

  ‘Come and sit down with me, and let’s look at this together,’ Peter said.

  Ambleside had noted at the top of the list that the question of selling the Boethius had first been discussed eleven months ago. ‘It’s all taking too long,’ he told Peter. ‘The offer to us to buy the land will expire shortly, and we will have to buy it on the open market, or do without it.’

  ‘Who is offering us this chance to buy?’ asked Peter.

  ‘The vendor wants anonymity. I must admit I can’t see why – donors usually want something named after them. But not this time.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Peter. ‘For the moment let’s stick to death among the fellowship.’

  ‘Well,’ said Ambleside, ‘the first of those was Robert Smithy. He died suddenly of a heart attack, two days after the first tied vote on the dispute. Not unexpectedly, Your Grace; Mr Smithy had had heart trouble for some months.’

  ‘And Mr Smithy had voted to retain the MS?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Yes, he did. So his death left the balance of advantage with the selling party.’

  His death had also left a vacancy among the fellowships. A Mr Trevair had been appointed. He had been a non-controversial choice: the college had had until then no fellow in economics, and it would save money to be able to teach the PPE students in house.

  ‘However,’ Ambleside said, ‘I think many people assumed that an economist would vote against keeping the MS. That was part of the support for his appointment. It would clinch the matter. But it turned out otherwise. Mr Trevair very greatly angered some people by voting on the next occasion to keep the MS, thus again leaving it to the Warden’s casting vote.’

  ‘So it was stalemate again?’

  ‘Yes, it was. By this time, Your Grace, the college was becoming a very unhappy place to live and work in.’

  ‘And then someone called Enistead?’

  ‘Fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck.’

  ‘Two deaths, so far,’ said Peter. He saw a little involuntary tremor pass over Ambleside’s face at the words ‘so far’. ‘One natural; one a nasty accident. Not a massacre, Ambleside.’

  ‘Well, there were also a couple of incidents,’ said Ambleside, not meeting Peter’s eyes.

  ‘What were those?’ Peter asked. ‘I need uberrima fides in your account, Ambleside. Tell all.’

  ‘Dr Dancy got accidentally locked into the bell-chamber – you know, Your Grace, that we have a ring of six bells – when a group of bell-ringers were about to start a trial run of Grandsire Doubles. There had been complaints from Wadham College next door about the disturbance of the ringing when students were studying, so the flanges were closed to mute the noise. Dancy had the presence of mind to turn the clock hands continuously, using the adjustment mechanism, and someone passing on Parks Road noticed and stepped in to tell the porter. The ring was stopped, and Dancy was rescued, in a distressed condition. But he has been left with ruptured eardrums.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Peter. ‘Any idea how it happened?’

  ‘The bell-chamber is usually locked during a ring,’ said Ambleside. ‘I suppose it was not realised that he was up there.’

  ‘Was Dancy in favour of keeping, or of selling the MS?’ Peter asked.

  ‘He wanted to sell it. He was afraid for the future of music in the college if no money could be found to deal with the financial crisis.’

  ‘You said there were a couple of incidents,’ said Peter. ‘What was the other one?’

  ‘I’m not sure about this at all,’ said Ambleside. ‘It might be just moonshine. But we have an unfortunate fellow who needs sleeping pills, our Senior Fellow, Cloudie. He’s been on them for years; I think they must be addictive. They give him nightmares, but he can’t get himself off them. He’s a bachelor; he lived in college. And he woke up one night, he told everybody, thinking there was someone in his room; someone leaning over him, holding his wrist. Of course he was dopey from his pills, and the room was dark – just a faint glow from the lamps in the court outside his window. He thought the intruder was wielding a syringe – a very large one. When he woke he supposed he had had a nightmare; but there was a puncture in the vein in his inner elbow. Everyone was talking about it at the time.’

  ‘And what was everyone saying?’ asked Peter.

  ‘That it was a case of self-administered drugs of some sort.’

  ‘And this chap – did you say it was Cloudie? – was not seriously harmed? And had been voting to sell the MS?’

  ‘Cloudie. Not seriously harmed, but seriously frightened. He moved out of college. And yes, he was and is of the sell the MS party.’

  ‘He teaches English?’ asked Peter. ‘That’s odd, then.’

  ‘Cloudie thinks that there is too much Old English in the syllabus,’ said Ambleside. ‘He thinks if there were less medieval material we might be able to get beyond Matthew Arnold. I believe he is writing a book about Joyce Cary.’

  ‘So a decision was made to invoke the Visitor.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it a decision,’ said Dr Ambleside. ‘To call in the Visitor doesn’t require a general decision. Any two fellows can do it on their own.’

  ‘And Cloudie and you yourself decided to exercise that right. How had you been voting?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Rather ironically,’ Ambleside told him, ‘Cloudie was in favour of selling, and I in favour of keeping. But things had reached a state when most of us on both sides merely wanted the matter resolved.’

  ‘Tell me about Mr Enistead,’ said Peter.

  ‘He fell down the stairs, I’m afraid, here in college,’ said Ambleside. ‘A horrible thing. One of his own undergraduates found him. That boy is still in a state of
shock.’

  ‘I have a distinct impression,’ said Peter, ‘that Mr Enistead’s death was not a matter arousing deep distress. Certainly Mr Troutbeck, who heard of it while in my house, seemed, shall we say, less than heartbroken?’

  Ambleside found it necessary to lower his gaze, and study his own shoes for some moments. ‘Enistead was a long-standing and conscientious fellow of the college,’ he said at last. ‘Not a man to set the world on fire, I admit. He was an unmarried man who lived in college, and took a good deal of care of the undergraduates. He used to say his students were his children, and his students were his books. I’m afraid Troutbeck, who is another kind of man altogether, must have allowed his partisanship over the MS to affect his judgement.’

  Privately, Peter rather agreed, but he held his tongue. ‘Troutbeck seemed to think that the next vote would be to sell the MS and buy the land; he thought that my services would not be required.’

  ‘I would very gladly invite you to depart and leave us to our own devices, Your Grace,’ said Ambleside, ‘were it not for the dark suspicions that you have aroused in my mind. For the moment I would rather that you stayed.’

  ‘Never fear, old chap,’ said Peter. ‘I’m staying for a while yet. And since I’m here, would you like to show me the staircase down which Mr Enistead so unfortunately fell?’

  That staircase was in a new building, rather tightly squeezed along one wall of the gardens, with a covered walkway to connect it to the east quadrangle. The stairwell where the accident had happened had a bare appearance – concrete steps, and a simple handrail decorated at intervals by round brass knobs topping off the uprights. Ambleside explained with visible queasiness that the nature of Enistead’s injuries suggested that he had banged his head, in falling, against one of these brass knobs.

  ‘Which knob?’ asked Peter.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ said Ambleside. ‘It’s all been cleaned up now. I’ll see if one of the scouts is around. I expect they know.’

  The scout he brought to the foot of the stairs was a young man with a brisk and practical manner. He pointed out to Peter a knob on one of the turns in the stair, about two-thirds up from the ground level.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Peter asked him.

  ‘Pretty sure, sir,’ he said. ‘It had been knocked off, sir, and we found it lying right down there, rolled into the corner opposite the exit door. When the alarm was raised about poor Mr Enistead, sir.’

  ‘An undergraduate found him, I understand?’ said Peter.

  ‘Yes, sir. And it being rather early in the morning there were scouts around to come running to help.’

  ‘Early in the morning?’ Peter asked.

  ‘When he was found,’ said Ambleside. ‘It seemed he must have been lying there all night, the accident having happened the previous evening.’

  ‘So you concluded that Mr Enistead had dislodged it when he struck his head against it?’ Peter asked the scout.

  ‘It looked like that, sir. The knob had blood on it. And there was only one post missing its knob – that one what I showed you.’

  ‘Are these knobs loose?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Not to speak of, sir,’ the scout told him, ‘not usually. We can polish them where they are without they come off in our hands.’

  Peter began to grip and turn the knob nearest to the step where he was standing. When he took both hands to it, it turned, and with several turns it came off. About the size and weight of a cricket ball, he thought.

  ‘It must of been loose to come off when the poor gentleman hit against it,’ said the scout.

  Peter seemed lost in thought. He was looking up, at the large skylight that lit the stairwell. ‘That glass must need cleaning from time to time,’ he said. ‘Where is the access to the roof?’

  ‘Top of the other staircase, sir,’ the scout told him. ‘I could show you.’

  He led the way to the far end of the building, where a second staircase led up to a similar skylight. A small flight of steps to one side led to a door out to the roof. The three of them emerged through this door on to a flat roof the length and width of the building, surrounded by a low parapet, and featureless apart from the two skylights.

  ‘Are those skylights fixed shut?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Oh, no, sir,’ said the scout. ‘When it gets very hot we have to open them up for a bit to let the heat escape. This building does get very warm in hot weather.’ As he spoke he stepped forward and opened the nearest light, simply by lifting the entire pyramid of glazed sections, and propping it up on a rod, just like opening the bonnet of a car. ‘Easy!’ he said.

  ‘And is the door to this roof usually open as we found it just now?’ asked Peter.

  ‘’Tisn’t supposed to be,’ the scout said. ‘But there’s too many people has a key. The undergraduates like to hold parties up here – pyjama parties mostly – and now and then somebody worrits about it in case they throw themselves over the parapet, and the door gets locked for a week or two. But then it gets left open again.’

  ‘Does anyone know what Mr Enistead might have been doing on this staircase so late at night that he could lie here undiscovered until morning?’ Peter asked.

  ‘We thought he must have come to inspect the new paintwork,’ said the scout. ‘And we had moved the young men out of their rooms on this staircase while the paint dried on the stairs. There was nobody around, sir, till the following morning, when one young man came back to fetch his lecture notes.’

  ‘Do you ever find stuff up here?’ Peter asked. ‘Leaves and twigs and the like – perhaps a stout twig with a fork in it?’

  ‘There’s leaves blow up here in the autumn, sir. And one of the scouts, sir, found a pair of women’s knickers up here once. Stout twigs I haven’t seen.’

  ‘All the scouts have a key?’

  ‘And all the senior members, sir.’

  ‘I thought senior members cavorting about on the rooftops was confined to All Souls,’ said Peter.

  ‘This is Oxford, sir,’ the scout said. ‘You never know who will get up to what.’

  All this time, and all the way back to the main building, Ambleside had said not a word.

  On reaching Peter’s room he said, ‘Perhaps, Your Grace, you would like to tell me what all that was about.’

  Peter hesitated, and then decided on candour. ‘I was wondering if the brass knob that stove in Mr Enistead’s head had been used as a projectile from above, rather than simply being passively hit as he fell upon it,’ he said. ‘I don’t quite see how a falling man could have unscrewed a knob so that it fell free.’

  ‘The one he hit must have been loose already,’ said Ambleside. ‘I don’t see how anyone could have dropped it through the skylight with enough force.’

  ‘I was thinking about catapults,’ said Peter.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Ambleside. ‘Catapults are none too easy, especially aimed at a small target.’

  ‘Were you a boy-expert in them?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Not at all. But we have a medieval tournament in college in the summer term, and catapults are among the ancient artillery that gets used. I am hopeless at it, but some people are better . . . but it’s very far-fetched, Your Grace. Where did you get such an idea? Where would anyone get the idea?’

  ‘It is the murder method in one of my wife’s detective novels,’ said Peter, ‘which has, I believe, sold several thousand copies.’

  ‘Oh, detective stories . . .’ said Ambleside. ‘Anything goes in popular fiction.’

  ‘But in this case the murder method was based on a case of mine,’ said Peter. ‘That was real enough. When my wife arrives tomorrow you must put your proposition to her that anything goes in detective stories. I shall enjoy hearing her discuss it with you.’

  The following morning Mr Cloudie was run to earth reading the Telegraph in the Senior Common Room. Peter asked him for an account of his nasty experience the previous term.

  ‘I’m amazed to find anyone taking me ser
iously,’ said Cloudie. ‘All my colleagues have written me off as a lunatic. Who told you about it?’

  ‘John Ambleside,’ said Peter.

  ‘Ambleside’s the best of us,’ said Cloudie. ‘One can trust him.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me what happened to you?’ Peter asked him.

  ‘I’m glad to discover that you think something actually happened,’ said Cloudie. ‘I take sleeping pills, you know. They are necessary to me; that doesn’t mean I am crazy.’

  ‘I have taken sleeping pills myself,’ said Peter sympathetically, ‘to carry me over a bad patch. Best to get off them when you can.’

  ‘I was in the unit that liberated Belsen,’ said Cloudie. ‘There are things I need not to remember at night. Just the same, I can tell the difference between nightmares and events. Someone assaulted me in my sleep.’

  ‘Would you mind describing the assault to me?’ Peter asked.

  ‘It’s just what I told Ambleside,’ said Cloudie. ‘I half woke, because someone was holding my wrist, and turning my arm so the inner elbow faced upwards. The room was very dark, and the person was masked, I think; certainly there was only a black blur for a face. Then a car passed outside, and the headlights briefly lit the room, bouncing off the ceiling – you know the effect. I was looking down at my arm, trying to work out what was happening, and I saw a syringe being pointed at my elbow. A big syringe, large enough to dose a horse I should think. I felt the needle go in quite deep, and I let out a sort of squawk; as a cry for help it was pathetic, but I was still only half awake. He fled at once; I heard the door bang behind him. I couldn’t get up; I could only fight off sleep for a few moments, and then I was gone again. But when I woke in the morning there was a nasty puncture in my arm; it had bled a bit on to my pyjama sleeve.’

  ‘That puncture was the evidence that you weren’t dreaming,’ said Peter. ‘Did anyone else see it?’

  ‘My doctor saw it. I was in a flat panic; I didn’t know what I had been injected with.’

  ‘What did your doctor say?’

  ‘I think he didn’t believe me. He offered to get me help with drug addiction . . . he did clean up the puncture and put a plaster on it. And he told me to watch in case it became infected. I’m afraid I was so angry at the suggestion that I had been injecting myself with heroin or something that I stormed out of his surgery. And I found myself lodgings on the Cowley Road, so I need never spend the night in college again.’