Peter spoke in a grave and level tone. ‘I believe that the college is in more trouble than has yet been acknowledged among you,’ he said. ‘I am here to resolve a dispute; but that dispute is rooted not in simple disagreement, but in rivalries of an impassioned kind that date back to before the question of selling your Boethius was ever raised. Of course you, or some of you, know and understand quite a lot about these rivalries, which you are reluctant to divulge to me. I understand that. But things have gone far beyond a question about buying or selling college assets. We are now looking at an undoubted murder of one of the college fellows. And that murder makes it likely that the accidents and supposed assaults that have recently occurred must be re-examined as possible attempted murders. In this new and darker state of affairs the absence of the Warden – coming up to four months now – also arouses grave concern; graver than ever. I am asking you now for your own collective safety as well as your collective honour to set aside any considerations except the need to find and stop the murderer who is in all probability one of you. If you do not wish to talk to the police, you may talk in the first instance to me. You know where to find me.
‘Any information you can give is likely to be helpful. Remember that information is as likely to exculpate someone as to incriminate them. For the moment I have a question to ask. Did anyone here present know that Mr Oundle suffered from haemophilia?’
No hand was raised.
After a pause Peter said, ‘Mr Oundle has been a fellow of St Severin’s for many years. It is likely that someone knew about his health problems. If, on reflection, there is somebody who you think would probably have known about it, then will you in confidence name that person to me? And in the meantime, please keep your doors locked. Do not walk back to the college alone after dark; take care on staircases. And should any of you who served in the war have kept weapons as souvenirs, please keep them under lock and key.’
As he left, stepping rapidly down the centre of the room and making for the door, an uproar of voices broke out. Mostly, Harriet thought, angry voices. Certainly she heard among the hubbub somebody saying, ‘. . . has no right to talk to us like that! No right!’
Chapter 11
Angry they may have been, but Peter’s appeal produced a number of visitors to his rooms with whom he had not yet had a one-to-one conversation. The first of these was a junior fellow who suggested that the college nurse had probably known of such a dramatically dangerous condition. She might have had to intervene. Come to that, surely the college servants would have been alerted, and once something was known to the college servants, the whole of Oxford knew.
Peter thanked him for his insights and said he would investigate the college nurse.
The next visitor was Tom Ranger, the fellow in medicine.
‘I didn’t know about poor Oundle, but I’m not surprised,’ he told Peter. ‘There were indications; but the man wasn’t my patient, so I didn’t think hard about it and put two and two together.’
‘What are the two and two you didn’t connect?’ Peter asked him. ‘Were they anything very obvious?’
‘Reasonably obvious, but capable of less exotic explanation,’ said Ranger. ‘He used a stick, and moved rather stiffly for his age – he wasn’t above fifty. His hands were rather gnarled – thick joints like arthritis; in fact I thought it was arthritis. But when you asked your question of us all just now, I remembered an incident in which Oundle bumped his face against one of those pestilential self-closing doors, and got a nose-bleed. We offered the usual remedies – key down the back of his shirt, head tipped back, holding nose between finger and thumb – but he took himself off to the college nurse very promptly. He seemed rather bothered about it. But you see I didn’t think of any of this until you mentioned haemophilia. I’m rather kicking myself for obtuseness.’
‘You don’t think the signs you now recall were obvious enough to allow somebody else to guess?’
‘As I say, I saw some signs. I thought he had severe arthritis. That’s very common, and haemophilia is very rare. Medical students like to diagnose rare conditions, but experienced doctors usually don’t. I’m afraid this is not much help.’
‘On the contrary, Dr Ranger, it is very helpful. Background information is often the source of insight, I find,’ said Peter.
When Ranger had left, feeling that he himself had better sit and wait for any further visitors, Peter asked Harriet to find and interview the college nurse.
That lady’s services were shared between nearby colleges: between St Severin’s and Wadham, and Keble and Shrewsbury. Harriet ran her to earth in Keble. Miss Havershaw was as stiff and formal as a hospital matron, and clearly capable of terrifying the undergraduates out of hypochondria. The mention of Mr Oundle’s name, however, upset her.
‘I wasn’t surprised he had passed on,’ she said to Harriet, when Harriet had introduced herself, confessed to being an emissary for Peter, and explained her errand. ‘The poor gentleman was always at risk, even from a slight accident. But when I heard what had happened to him, I was horrified. Horrified is the word.’
‘We need to find who did it, and quickly,’ said Harriet. ‘And what I have come to ask you is if you know how many people knew about Mr. Oundle’s haemophilia?’
‘If you mean, did I go around telling people—’ said Miss Havershaw, bristling.
‘No, of course not,’ said Harriet. ‘But since, as you say, he was at risk, he might have let some of his colleagues know, just for safety.’
‘That would have been sensible, yes,’ she said. ‘I told him so more than once. But he wasn’t having it. He said he couldn’t live a normal life if people knew. He wanted to be left alone to take his own risks. And he was a brave gentleman; he could have been exempt from call-up in the war, but he kept it all dark, and served as a soldier. You have to respect that.’
‘I do respect that,’ said Harriet. ‘But are you saying he took no precautions at all?’
‘Precautions wouldn’t have helped him having his throat cut,’ Miss Havershaw said with asperity. ‘That would have killed a healthy person. But there was one precaution he did take; or rather it was what he didn’t take. No aspirin. He considered his condition was mild. But I worried about him. He left with me an infusion of certain herbs he had learned about in the Far East which were supposed to assist in blood clotting. I was to keep it handy, which I did. It’s in the case I carry from one college to another when I do my shifts.’
‘Did you see that work?’ asked Harriet.
‘Either the herbs, or pressure applied to the cut and maintained for a considerable time,’ she said. ‘It was always a crisis if he cut or grazed himself.’
‘So as far as you know his illness was a well-kept secret,’ said Harriet. ‘You don’t think he would have told anybody in the college?’
‘I’m sure he wouldn’t,’ said Miss Havershaw. ‘He wouldn’t even let me put his name on the herb extract. I had to have the bottle handy in case he came running for it, but it wasn’t to have his name on the label, not by any means. I had to put “Tincture of Comfrey” etc.’
‘For that to work,’ Harriet said, ‘it would have to be a powerful clotting agent – have I got that right?’
‘Quite right,’ said Miss Havershaw. ‘And as I say I have no idea if it was a potent concoction or a folk legend. You seem knowledgeable, Duchess. Unusually so for a non-medical person. Or were you a nurse in an earlier life?’
‘I’m a GP’s daughter,’ Harriet told her, ‘and I write detective stories.’
‘Do you write under your own name?’ Miss Havershaw asked.
‘Yes. Or my former name, rather. Harriet Vane.’
‘I’ll look you out next time I am in a library,’ said Miss Havershaw.
‘Thank you,’ said Harriet meekly.
On her return she found Peter in conference with a very young man; he looked hardly out of school, but he was, it turned out, Timothy Smith, one of the junior research fellows.
�
�This chap has been telling me that the junior research fellows have been making bets on the voting,’ said Peter, ‘as though the MS and the land were a pair of horses in a race.’
Peter sounded extravagantly shocked, but young Smith looked perfectly at ease. ‘We junior research fellows don’t have a vote,’ he told Harriet apologetically. ‘So where’s the fun in it all for us? We just laid bets on how it would go each time.’
‘Are there enough of you disfranchised folk to make a worthwhile kitty?’ asked Peter, ‘or are you telling me that fellows both voted and bet on their own votes?’
‘Oh, no, not that,’ said Smith. ‘They were all pretty stiff about it. But there’s a bookmaker in Jericho who would take the bets. And some of the undergraduates like a flutter now and then . . . and there are people in other colleges who were interested. And we began to try to research the form, you see – we took to asking everyone how they were going to vote each time the thing was due to come up. And when you asked for help I just thought you might like to see how our polls turned out.’
He put a file down on the side-table, and pulled out of it some scrappy sheets of paper. ‘I’m afraid they’re not in any sort of order,’ he said.
‘Can you leave those with us?’ asked Peter. ‘I think they might be very helpful indeed.’
‘Oh, you can have them,’ said Smith. ‘Nobody has the heart to bet on this now.’
‘Look here, old chap,’ said Peter, ‘I think it would be much better if you didn’t tell anyone, not even your fellow junior fellows, or any of your fellow punters, that you have left these papers with me. I think for your own safety you had better have lost them. Do you understand?’
Smith went pale. ‘Oh, surely not . . .’ he said.
‘Probably not; but not surely not,’ said Peter.
Smith said, ‘I think perhaps I’d better go now.’
‘Bunter will show you out the back way,’ said Peter, ‘by the Warden’s back door on to the street. Then you can just walk round and get back into college through the front gate.’
‘Thank you, Your Grace,’ said Smith, and then added with a lopsided smile, ‘I’m a socialist. I do feel silly calling anybody that.’
‘I’m right out of sight from your position,’ said Peter, ‘but I feel silly being called it. Thank you for your help. And take care.’
When he had gone, Peter spread his notes out on the table. The fellowship had been polled four times. Nearly all of them had taken a position and stuck to it, but not quite all. The Warden, who might have been above it all, or might have decided to play his hand close to his chest, had intended each time to vote for the keeping party.
‘Our mysterious Warden seems to have two votes,’ said Peter. ‘One in his own right, I suppose, and one ex-officio, the casting vote. Well, at least he wasn’t voting for both sides each time. Oh, ho, Harriet look at this . . .’
It was the name of Mr Enistead that Peter was pointing out to her. In each of the first three polls he had declared he would vote to keep the MS. But on the fourth occasion he had said he would vote to sell it.
‘So where did that leave things?’ Harriet asked.
‘It would have left a decision to sell the book, and acquire the land,’ said Peter.
‘And the Warden’s votes?’
‘He would have had only one vote,’ said Peter. ‘His casting vote would not have come into play; it is only available to break a deadlock, and Enistead’s shift across the divide moves two votes – one less for the keeping party, one more for the selling party. No deadlock – no casting vote. But all that is subjunctive, not factual. There would have been a majority enough to settle things if Enistead had not unfortunately fallen downstairs and brained himself after he told Smith and co. how he meant to vote, and before the vote was taken.’
Harriet sat down abruptly. ‘Peter, I’m hating this,’ she said. ‘Poison pen letters at Shrewsbury were bad enough, but murder . . . In Oxford! It’s horrible.’
‘Sick roses, you mean? The invisible worm that flies in the night? It will take more than this to destroy Oxford, my dear,’ he said. ‘But for once in my life I shall be glad to get out of it when this is over. Where shall we go?’
‘Could we go to Venice?’ she asked him. ‘I’ve never been there . . .’
‘A thousand years their cloudy wings expand About me, and a dying glory smiles,’ he said. ‘Sounds rather like Oxford, but with gondolas. Very well, Domina, Venice the most serene it shall be. Soon, let’s hope.’
But for the present they were sitting in the Warden’s guest suite, available to be visited with information. For an hour they sat and read. Then Peter said, ‘Harriet, will you hold the fort for me? I’m having keyboard fidgets. I’d like to slip across to the chapel, and play the organ for an hour.’
‘Off you go then, Peter,’ said Harriet cheerfully. ‘I can always send a visitor across there to find you.’
Shortly after Peter had gone, there was another knock on the door, and Troutbeck appeared. ‘I was looking for the Duke,’ he said, on seeing Harriet sitting alone.
‘You’ll find him in the chapel playing the organ,’ said Harriet.
Troutbeck pulled a face, and sat down uninvited. ‘Perhaps conveying my meaning through you would be more effective,’ he said.
‘I doubt it,’ said Harriet coolly, ‘but convey away if you so wish.’
‘It seems to several of us,’ Troutbeck said, ‘that your lord and master is exceeding his rightful role. He has appraised the situation; but instead of giving us the decision he is entitled to give, he is entrenching himself in the college, apparently pursuing a private hobby and investigating a murder – one that happened in London and has in all probability no connection with college business. Perhaps you can induce him to go home and leave us to settle matters by simple vote—’
‘Before you go on, Mr Troutbeck,’ said Harriet, ‘I must correct you. There has probably been more than one murder; and one of those was on college premises.’
‘Whatever do you mean?’ he said. ‘Are you referring to poor Enistead? That was an accident. The coroner found accidental death. This is exactly the sort of melodramatising that some of us object to . . .’
‘I don’t suppose you are a reader of detective stories, Mr Troutbeck?’ said Harriet.
‘That rubbish? Certainly not!’ he said. He was red-faced now, and clenching his fists. He seemed to be someone living very near the limit of his power to contain his temper. Had Harriet not felt pretty certain that Bunter was within call, and probably within earshot, she might have quailed; Troutbeck was a big and powerful man, and plainly used to dominating.
‘There are special reasons for fearing that Enistead’s death was not an accident,’ she told him.
‘Kindly inform me what those reasons are,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Harriet. ‘You must take my word for it.’
‘I wouldn’t hang a dog on your word,’ he said, ‘with your past.’
‘Thank you,’ said Harriet. Her quiet tones seemed to infuriate her visitor further.
‘Are you going to get the Duke to leave us alone?’ he demanded.
‘No,’ said Harriet, ‘I am going to suggest that you reconsider that request. Perhaps you do not realise that the Duke has a formidable reputation as an investigator, and has powerful friends in the police. They are content at the moment to leave matters in his hands; if he were to leave Oxford, as you seem eager to have him do, a full-scale murder investigation would at once be launched by the police. You have had a mild taste of what that would entail when the Met sent officers into the college to record a number of alibis. Believe me, that is as nothing compared to a full police investigation. I do not believe for a moment that my husband would accede to your request; but I think also that if he did you would have good cause to regret having made it.’
‘I see that I had better wait until I can talk to him man to man,’ said Troutbeck.
‘Good day, Mr Troutbeck,’ said Harriet, stan
ding up.
Bunter appeared instantly, holding the door open for Troutbeck’s departure. He went in a dash.
‘Are you all right, Your Grace?’ said Bunter.
‘I’m not quite sure that I am,’ said Harriet, who found herself to be shaking. She felt ashamed of herself. Troutbeck had not actually threatened her, had he? It was all in tone of voice and demeanour.
‘Let me bring you a stiff drink, Your Grace,’ said Bunter, ‘and fetch the Duke from the chapel.’
‘No, don’t fetch him, Bunter,’ said Harriet. ‘I’ll walk across myself and bring him. I could do with the fresh air.’
She stepped across the quad, and opened the chapel door. At once she was engulfed in the cascading notes of a fugue by Bach. She sat down in the nearest pew. It was like having all the tangles of one’s soul combed out straight. Or like being a beach washed smooth by a gentle, lucid wave. It calmed her utterly. She sat quietly waiting for Peter to finish. He was not as good an organist as he was a pianist, but that had an effect she had noticed before: tiny errors or hesitations made the listener hear how difficult the piece was, and that was part of the truth about it. By the time the fugue had ravelled and unravelled its complex patterns to the end she was completely calm, and ready to tell Peter what Troutbeck had said.
But they did not talk of that as they walked back across the quad; they did not talk of anything, but enjoyed the dreamlike trance the music had left them in. And when they reached their rooms Troutbeck had to wait; Mr Vearing was waiting for them.
Of course both Peter and Harriet expected Mr Vearing to make an impassioned case for the retention of the manuscript. But what he actually said startled them.
‘I was hoping not to have to tell you this, Your Grace,’ he said, addressing Peter with a steady gaze. ‘But I see that I must. To sell the Boethius will disgrace the college utterly. It is a fake.’
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