The Late Scholar

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘You will have to justify that statement, Vearing,’ said Peter. ‘It is a controversial one. Why do you think so? Don’t you teach Modern Literature? How is the Boethius MS within your expertise?’

  ‘David told me,’ said Vearing, looking wan. ‘His expertise was sufficient.’

  ‘David Outlander?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Ah. Someone has been talking. There is no privacy in our lives here. No merciful forgetting and moving on. Who told you?’

  ‘Outlander’s death is public knowledge, Vearing,’ said Peter, speaking gently. ‘Reported in the Oxford Mail. Not a secret – it could never have been that.’

  Vearing was silent.

  ‘Didn’t Outlander’s book claim the opposite of what you now say?’ asked Peter. ‘Didn’t he say the MS was genuine, had been used by King Alfred, perhaps had been glossed for him by his scholars?’

  ‘His thesis was wrong,’ said Vearing. He opened his briefcase, and brought out an old and slightly yellowing copy of the TLS. ‘Read this,’ he said, putting it down on the table.

  ‘We have read it,’ said Harriet. ‘That is an evidently personal attack; not the usual magisterial calm and accuracy of the TLS.’

  ‘David was convinced by it,’ said Vearing stubbornly. ‘He thought it was right.’

  ‘And so all this time you have been opposed to the sale of the MS because you feared it would lead to the thing being discovered to be a fake? Not because you thought that it was an incomparable antiquity that the college ought to hug to its bosom for ever?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Yes, that is so,’ said Vearing.

  ‘And not because you despised and hated somebody in the faction who wishes to sell it?’

  Vearing looked startled at that, and coloured up. ‘Who, me?’ he asked. ‘I am not a man for hatreds. Whereas they—’ He broke off, and then said, ‘I think I had better go. I have said enough.’

  ‘Please stay,’ said Peter, ‘long enough to tell us what David Outlander thought was correct in that review.’

  ‘He was mortified by it,’ said Vearing. ‘Humiliated.’

  ‘But why do you say he thought it was right? Did he tell you that?’

  ‘He must have thought so. He would have defended himself – fought back – if he had had grounds to do so.’

  ‘That is speculation, surely,’ said Peter, ‘however well you knew him.’

  ‘I am not alone in thinking the MS is a fake,’ said Vearing obstinately, pointing at the TLS. ‘As you can see.’

  With a sudden hunch, Harriet asked him, ‘Mr Vearing, do you know who wrote that review?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘How could I? All anonymous. Always.’

  With that he took his leave, retrieving his copy of the TLS as he went.

  ‘Whew!’ said Peter. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘I don’t quite know,’ said Harriet. ‘But I notice that he offers a new reason in support of the position he has taken all along. Is it possible he is trying to push you into supporting his side in the dispute with a fairy-tale?’

  ‘This much is true,’ said Peter, ‘that the putting up for sale of the MS would cause many experts to examine it on behalf of possible buyers. I think it quite likely that a consensus would emerge about the gloss which might be that it was uncertain if it ever had any direct connection with King Alfred. Proving that it did not is quite another thing.’

  ‘Oh, bother the manuscript!’ said Harriet. ‘It’s a red herring – I’m sure it is. Charming and arcane and Oxonian though a question like that may be, it feels like wool-gathering to me; not something that might generate all this sturm und drang extending to homicide. If I were writing this investigation, my lord, I would think it time to uncover some serious grounds for murder.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ said Peter. He was only half listening to her as he scribbled a note, folded it, and tucked the folds into one another. He called Bunter and asked him to put the note in Jackson’s pigeon-hole.

  Then he returned his attention to Harriet. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘what have we got?’

  ‘Who knew about Oundle’s illness, and about Oundle’s sword?’ said Harriet.

  ‘Who, if anyone, found out who was the author of that review?’ said Peter.

  ‘Why was Mrs Cutwater apparently frightened?’ offered Harriet.

  ‘Is the MS kosher, or is it dicey?’ said Peter.

  ‘Was Enistead felled by a bit of banister loaded into a catapult?’ said Harriet.

  ‘Is that all?’ asked Peter. ‘No – I’ve got another one: who is it who buys his books in Heffers instead of in Blackwell’s, and is he a fellow of St Severin’s?’

  ‘And finally,’ said Harriet, ‘where is the Warden, alive or dead, and why is he wherever he is?’

  ‘Well,’ said Peter dryly, ‘that should keep us busy for a day or two.’

  ‘Where shall we start?’ asked Harriet.

  But the starter’s pistol was about to be fired in a new direction. There were footsteps hammering up the staircase to the door, and the head porter rushed into the room past Bunter, saying as he came, ‘You’re needed at once, Your Grace, please come, please come . . . poor Mr Trevair has fallen and broken his neck, sir!’

  Chapter 12

  Trevair was lying sprawled on his back, on the chapel floor below the organ loft.

  He appeared to have hit a spreadeagled angel on his way down, for a gilded wooden wing lay under his body. One of the porters made as if to climb the tiny winding staircase to the organ and the minstrels’ gallery. ‘No,’ said Peter, ‘leave that completely untouched for the police.’

  ‘It did ought to be locked, that door to the stair,’ remarked one of the porters. ‘’Oose got the key?’

  ‘God forgive me, I have,’ said Peter, reaching into his pocket and producing it. It was an ordinary key for a modern lock fitted to the door quite recently. ‘Is this the only one?’

  ‘Mr Dancy has one,’ said Thrupp. ‘There’s only the two. Did you lock up behind you, Your Grace, when you had finished your bit of playing?’

  ‘I’m afraid I forgot,’ said Peter miserably.

  ‘And I forgot to come and get it from you, sir,’ said Mr Thrupp, sounding fatherly. ‘I knew as it was you what had it.’

  Seeing the expression on Peter’s face, Harriet took Peter firmly by the arm, and led him away. Once she got him into their rooms she said, ‘First telephone Charles.’

  He did that and returned to the drawing room ashen-faced, and sat down silent.

  ‘So, Peter, you forgot to lock up the organ loft. People do forget things,’ said Harriet. ‘People forget to lock up their sporting guns; people leave their car keys in the lock while they dash into a shop. Silly women leave their jewels around for the room-maid to see. Does that make them responsible for murder with a shotgun, for a car-chase in which someone gets killed, for a theft of a family heirloom?’

  ‘Implicated,’ said Peter. ‘They are, I am, implicated.’

  ‘The responsibility for Trevair lying dead on the chapel floor lies entirely with whoever pushed him off the minstrels’ gallery,’ said Harriet firmly. ‘People are implicated if they should have foreseen the consequences of their negligence. The worst you could have foreseen was someone making an ugly din on the organ, or throwing paper darts made with the sheet music. Be reasonable, Peter.’

  When he did not reply, she said, ‘This is turning into a massacre, Your Grace. Someone needs stopping. Time we found him.’

  ‘Yes, Harriet,’ he said. ‘You are right. So which of our questions shall we tackle first?’

  ‘Easiest first,’ she said. ‘Who buys his books in Heffers?’

  ‘All right, m’dear. You take that one; I’ll take the one about who knew about Oundle and his sword.’

  ‘I think I would have to go to Cambridge for my clue,’ she said.

  ‘That’s survivable,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll run up to Denver while I’m that way,’ said Harriet, ‘and just see how your mother
is.’

  ‘You are a woman in a million,’ said Peter. ‘And I am the luckiest dog in England.’

  ‘Piffler!’ said Harriet, smiling at him.

  ‘I would help if I could,’ said Dick Fox, the bookseller in Heffers. ‘But I’m not at all sure that I can.’

  ‘Doesn’t he pay you? Isn’t there a name on his cheques?’

  ‘Well, no. He pays before leaving the shop, and he pays in cash. And before you ask, no, he doesn’t have them sent, even when he has taken quite a few. He carts them off in bags.’

  ‘How do you know he’s from Oxford then?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘We wouldn’t know if he hadn’t bumped into a friend in the front shop once. The friend was surprised to see him, and made a small to-do about it. “Whatever are you doing here?” sort of thing. Our man didn’t seem pleased to see his chum at all. “Visiting friends,” he said. “Anyone I know?” chum asked. “Extremely unlikely,” said our man. By this time we were all listening. Chum then noticed the bags full of books. “Those are for your friend, I suppose,” he said. “You wouldn’t need to lug them home, would you? There are bookshops in Oxford.”

  ‘Our man first said, “Mind your own business,” and then said, “My friend is a voracious reader. Shot up in the war. Can’t walk into the shop himself.”’

  Harriet saw her trail going cold before her. An Oxford man could have a disabled friend in Cambridge for whom he bought books . . . a man in Cambridge who didn’t have any obliging local friends? That wouldn’t be very Aristotelian; didn’t Aristotle prefer the probable to the possible improbable? But that was about fiction, of course, and this was real life.

  ‘So you are telling me that you don’t know anything about him?’ she asked. ‘Just that he’s from Oxford; not that he is an Oxford don, not his name, nothing?’

  ‘He’s probably a don,’ she was told. ‘Donnish sort of speech; and then once or twice he has bought a book that isn’t detection.’

  ‘Aha!’ Harriet said. ‘In what subject were his non-fictional books?’

  ‘Pass,’ said Dick Fox. ‘I’m a fiction buyer. But I could ask some of my colleagues and let you know if any of them remember. If it would help, of course.’

  ‘Anything might help; we would be very grateful,’ said Harriet, and then a thought struck her. ‘You wouldn’t fancy a trip to Oxford, would you?’ she asked. ‘At my expense, of course. Because you might recognise him, mightn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I’d recognise him all right,’ said Dick Fox. ‘But I don’t get a lot of time off.’

  ‘Have you been to Oxford?’ Harriet asked him.

  ‘I haven’t, as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘Not on my trade routes, somehow.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Harriet said.

  ‘So is Cambridge,’ he told her.

  ‘Indeed,’ she conceded. ‘Look, I won’t press you to come on the off-chance; but if matters come to the point where we really need an identification, and if I asked you then, would you come?’

  ‘Yes, if you twist my arm, I’ll come,’ he said. ‘But, Miss Vane, he can’t really be a murderer you know; he’s too, well, dithery for that.’

  And, looking round her, Harriet realised at once that the splendid selection of books on the shelves could not have been achieved by a man who had time to wander over to Oxford on an off-chance.

  Harriet took the train to Denver, and was gratified to find that in her absence and that of Peter – and more to the point that of Bunter – everything was ticking along nicely. The Dowager Duchess’s maid, Franklin, who was getting old and cranky, was well able to keep things in order, and had even acquired the knack of fending off Helen, the younger Dowager Duchess. There were of course things to see to, but the best bit of being home again for a few hours was seeing how Peter’s mother was doing.

  ‘Are you having a lovely time, dear?’ her mother-in-law asked her. ‘Do you have to wear those horrid black gowns all the time?’

  ‘We wear them if we dine in Hall, Mother, and we would wear them if we went to lectures; but we can cavort in punts, or go shopping without them. I don’t mind wearing mine at all.’

  ‘Well, of course, dear, I never went to university. Finishing school in Switzerland was what I got. I don’t think I knew any woman friend who got a degree. Did I miss much, do you think? I wouldn’t have wanted to be draped in black bombazine. So unflattering.’

  Harriet wondered what best to say to that. Her delectable mother-in-law would not have got into Oxford, except possibly reading French, which she spoke with complete fluency, and would have looked gorgeous in a gown, however little she fancied one. Subfusc would have set off her blue-eyed blonde colouring to perfection.

  ‘I didn’t mind it,’ she said at last. ‘It took so much hard work to win the right to wear it. I don’t remember even wondering if it suited me.’

  ‘Of course you were proud of it, Harriet dear,’ said the Duchess. ‘Silly of me. But then in my day we were rather encouraged to be silly, in case being clever put off the men. I suppose it would always have depended on the man, really, though; a silly wife wouldn’t have suited Peter.’

  ‘Peter,’ said Harriet thoughtfully ‘is unusual in that.’

  ‘Is there anything at all in which my second son is ordinary?’ the Duchess wondered aloud.

  ‘If I detect him being ordinary I will let you know at once,’ said Harriet. ‘I shall go back to join him tomorrow, unless you need me urgently for something.’

  ‘I always like it best when you are here,’ the Duchess said, ‘but I don’t need you at the moment. The time will come, I dare say, but for now don’t indulge me; it makes me feel old.’

  Next morning in Oxford Peter was bending his thoughts to the question of who could have known the necessary about Oundle. Just the knowledge, of course, fell a long way short of proving that he-who-knew was the murderer; and now he came to think about it, not having known would not entirely prove a person not to be the murderer; the murder could have been committed with no intent to rely on alibis in the Oxford Gazette and elsewhere about teaching duties in St Severin’s. Peter stood at the window of his room, looking over the back quad, eating toast, and musing.

  Why had he and Harriet assumed that poor Oundle’s haemophilia was an important part of the scenario? Because they had assumed that the murderer was one murderer, a serial killer of great malignity, who was using the methods of murder described in Harriet’s novels.

  If that were the case, then of course Oundle’s haemophilia was relevant; the murderer was using the fictional account of the murder at Wilvercombe where conspirators had been wrong-footed by the time it took for blood to clot.

  We must, in that case, Peter thought, be looking for a lunatic. If I wanted to murder somebody, and I needed to know how it might be done, I would be looking at a manual of forensic medicine, not one of Harriet’s novels, brilliant though they are. Then he asked himself in exactly what way were Harriet’s novels brilliant? Certainly not in the gritty realism of the modes of death. Peter’s own cases were not run-of-the-mill affairs, but the odd ones. The ones where the police had been baffled. And Harriet had, naturally, chosen the most peculiar and exotic murders from that already recherché selection. In real life, he thought, sadly, for the most part murders were a matter of blunt instruments, drunken fists, ligatures round the neck . . . done using things that were handy in nearly every place, done on impulse from obvious nasty motives. No fun at all. Then he pulled himself up abruptly. Was he telling himself that Oundle’s death had been fun?

  Stick to the point, Peter, he told himself. I think we can believe the college nurse that Oundle’s colleagues would probably not have known of his illness; he was at pains to keep it from them. But what about friends outside Oxford? What about school friends, for a start? He prowled into the Warden’s part of the house – he was using only the guest suite in that house – and looked for the shelf of reference books. He found Who’s Who? easily, but Oundle, in spite of his doctorate, was no
t eminent enough on the wider stage to figure in it.

  Peter got dressed and went in search of the Warden’s secretary, who had a little ground-floor room on the front quad, shared, at St Severin’s, with the fellows’ secretary.

  ‘I suppose when you appoint someone to a fellowship, you get a CV from them?’ he asked. ‘Do you have them on file somewhere?’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace, we do,’ said the Warden’s secretary. ‘You’ll find them all over on that bookshelf. It’s the file called the Domesday Book.’

  Peter took down the thick folder, and laid it on the table.

  ‘You want to know where poor Mr Oundle was at school, I suppose?’ the secretary asked.

  ‘How do you know that?’ asked Peter, surprised.

  ‘Mr Bunter asked me that yesterday, Your Grace,’ she said, smirking.

  ‘And what answer did you give him?’ Peter asked.

  ‘The Salter’s Grammar School in Woodford,’ she said.

  Peter would have asked her the next question, but preferring to play his cards closer to his chest, he thanked her and went in quest of Bunter.

  He found that gentleman industriously polishing shoes.

  ‘The Salter’s School,’ Peter said to him. ‘And who else was there?’

  ‘I could find no other senior member of this college who was at Salter’s in Mr Oundle’s time,’ said Bunter.

  ‘Blast!’ said Peter. ‘Another red herring bites the dust.’

  ‘That, my lord,’ said Bunter affectionately, changing from shoe brush to polishing cloth – it was a pair of Harriet’s shoes he was cleaning, Peter noticed – ‘if you will allow me to say so, is a mixed metaphor.’

  ‘I will allow you to say so, Bunter,’ said Peter, ‘but only since you already have.’

  ‘Thank you, my lord,’ said Bunter. ‘So, as you would expect, I looked at the files about undergraduates. Of course there are very many more of those, and I would have been all day at the task had I not been afforded some help. It seems that for the most part Salter’s sends its boys to Cambridge; but David Outlander was at Salter’s, though of course long after Mr Oundle. They did not overlap there as schoolboys.’