The Late Scholar

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘That’s only right and proper,’ Peter said. ‘Just the same, there is something you could do that would be very helpful. Could you take note of anyone who comes visiting? Just their names. I don’t think the police would object to that.’

  ‘I will if I can, sir,’ the nurse said.

  Peter walked, musing. Someone had poisoned the Warden; the arsenic had to be in the bottle the guest had brought, because Miss Manciple had eaten the food without harm. Someone the Warden did not want to name. Peter had no doubt poison would be found in one of those samples. Who taught chemistry in St Severin’s? Bunter would need apparatus to perform a Marsh test for arsenic. Probably wisest to confide in Charles, and get official help.

  As he crossed the quad, he encountered Ambleside. ‘I’m just going to drop in on Vearing,’ Ambleside said. ‘He didn’t turn up to give a lecture this morning. On the Gothic novel, I believe. I’m just going to make sure he’s all right.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Peter.

  Chapter 19

  Vearing was ‘sporting his oak’: that is, the outer door of his room was closed, the traditional sign that the occupant did not want to be disturbed. Peter knocked on the wooden panel, tapping against it with his signet ring to make a sharp sound. There was no answer.

  But the outer door was not locked. They stepped through it and knocked on the inner door. Likewise, no result. Ambleside called through the door; silence; then a faint groaning sound, which they both heard. The inner door was locked.

  ‘Are you all right, Ex?’ Ambleside called. ‘Come to the door, old chap, and let us in.’ After what seemed several long seconds they heard the key in the lock the other side of the door, and it was opened. Vearing faced them unsteadily on his feet, looking greenish-white, and with his clothes stained with vomit. Then he collapsed to the floor at their feet.

  Peter and Ambleside between them picked him up and laid him out on his sofa. There was a telephone on Vearing’s desk, and Peter lifted the receiver. The porter answered at once. ‘Call an ambulance,’ Peter said, ‘Mr Vearing has been taken ill.’

  The ambulance didn’t take long to come. But before it arrived Vearing began to rave at Peter. ‘You stinking hypocrite!’ he cried. ‘Don’t touch me – don’t come near me. I know what kind of man you are, you lying duplicitous devil!’

  ‘In the name of God, Ex, what has possessed you?’ said Ambleside.

  ‘He knows what I mean,’ said Vearing, waving at Peter. ‘Ask him why he wanted to marry a murderess; ask him that! He cooked up a wicked, wicked, false story to nail an innocent man, and get himself a woman out of a hangman’s noose! I know it wouldn’t work, I know what he said was a farrago, but someone hanged on the strength of it, and she didn’t.

  ‘It doesn’t work, does it, Your Grace – Your lying conspiring Grace! Look at the state of me – you can’t tell me it works! Putting about rubbish like that amounts to murder . . . but you don’t mind that, do you? You sleep every night in the arms of a poisoner, a sloppy unscholarly poisoner who can’t be bothered to get her facts right, and pretends to be a virtuous woman. Nothing in common with me that she knows of, that’s what she told me, the slut! We’ll see about that, we’ll . . .’ He began coughing, and vomiting. There was telltale blood in the vomit.

  Peter stood rooted to the spot, thinking only, Thank God Harriet isn’t here to hear this.

  His ordeal didn’t last long. Soon the ambulance men were clattering up the stairs, issuing orders, getting Vearing on to a stretcher, carrying him away.

  Ambleside said, ‘He has gone mad.’ Ambleside himself was looking white-faced and shaken.

  ‘I think he has been mad for a long time,’ Peter said.

  ‘What is wrong with him now?’ asked Ambleside. ‘I never heard that madness makes a man vomit blood.’

  ‘What is wrong with him now is arsenic poisoning,’ said Peter. ‘Let’s get out of here, Ambleside, and I’ll tell you about it.

  ‘I feel as though I smell,’ said Peter, as they emerged into the quad. ‘Let’s stay in the open air.’

  Ambleside led the way into the Fellows’ Garden, and they found a bench near a flower bed planted lavishly with tobacco plants and bordered with lavender.

  ‘Why did you call him Ex?’ Peter asked.

  ‘I’ve known him a long time,’ said Ambleside. ‘Of course we use just our surnames usually. Or when anyone else is present.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t follow you,’ said Peter.

  ‘Oh, Vearing’s first name is Xenophon,’ said Ambleside. ‘His friends call him Ex.’

  ‘That’s pretty conclusive, then,’ said Peter. ‘Look, Ambleside, I’m glad to fill you in on all that somewhere where my wife can’t overhear us. And this is in confidence.’

  ‘Thank you for trusting me,’ said Ambleside. ‘In the context that’s a compliment.’

  ‘What Vearing was accusing me of was manufacturing a false story that implicated a man in murdering his nephew, and thus exonerating my wife and obtaining her acquittal. His deduction was that because the method of murder I had uncovered would not work, it followed that Harriet was in fact guilty, and was, and is, a murderess.’

  ‘Why does he think the method you suggested would not work?’ asked Ambleside. ‘He has to my knowledge no medical expertise at all.’

  ‘He has tried it himself,’ said Peter, ‘with the result that you see.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand what I see,’ said Ambleside. ‘Was he trying to kill himself?’

  ‘No. Not himself; someone he was sharing a meal with. What the abominable Urquhart did was to ingest arsenic over a long period in very small but increasing amounts. Treated like that the human frame acquires tolerance. Eventually it is possible to eat a lethal dose of the stuff without coming to any harm. Then you can share a meal or a bottle of wine with your victim, and he dies while you are unscathed. Plainly the poisoning of the victim cannot have been due to the shared meal – or so it would seem to the police and the courts. The blame can be thrown on someone else. In the case he refers to the person framed and in danger of hanging was Harriet.’

  The first words out of Ambleside’s mouth were not about Vearing. ‘How terrible for her,’ he said. ‘And, I should think, for you. I didn’t know about this.’

  ‘For a long time she was inclined to think that everybody knew about it,’ Peter said.

  ‘I won’t mention it. You can trust me for that,’ said Ambleside. ‘But I am still in the dark. Are you saying that Vearing was acclimatising himself to arsenic? But we have just seen him in dire straits because of it.’

  ‘He has botched it,’ said Peter. ‘Probably by trying to achieve his immunity too quickly.’

  ‘How did he know about it?’ asked Ambleside ‘Is it in one of your wife’s books?’

  ‘Yes. Eventually she achieved the objectivity to write about it. There’s no denying it’s a good plot. And the case also is in several legal textbooks, and books of forensic medicine.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You don’t tell me that your dear friend could not have been capable of such a thing?’

  ‘No. I find him a very odd character. And if I had not known and liked him long ago I doubt I would like him on meeting him newly now.’

  ‘You haven’t asked about the victim,’ said Peter.

  ‘Are you telling me he got round to trying it on a victim?’ said Ambleside in obvious horror. ‘Was it Troutbeck?’

  It was a double botch,’ said Peter. ‘Vearing did not escape unscathed, and the victim did not die. And it wasn’t Troutbeck. It was the Warden.’

  ‘How does one poison a missing man?’ asked Ambleside. ‘That poor old chap . . .’

  ‘He isn’t missing now,’ said Peter. ‘He is in the Radcliffe, pulling round from a near-death experience, with a copper for company. No doubt he would like a visitor with a friendly face.’

  ‘I’ll go at once,’ said Ambleside.

  Peter remained seated on the bench, thin
king. He thought so long that Harriet came looking for him. The porter told her where to find him, and she came and joined him. They sat for a while in companionable silence.

  ‘How did Troutbeck come to know?’ he said in a while.

  ‘How did he know what?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘Oh, lord,’ said Peter. ‘Sorry, Harriet. You live so closely in my mind I had for a moment forgotten that you need to be filled in. A lot has happened since lunchtime.’

  He began to tell her about what the Warden’s notebook had contained, and then about Vearing. He toned down what Vearing had said to him as much as he could.

  Harriet became thoughtful and sad. ‘The past has long claws,’ she said.

  ‘But we have escaped them,’ he said. ‘We struggled free into happiness. I don’t tell you often enough, Harriet, what it means to me that you are happy with me.’

  ‘It isn’t my happiness that is my escape from the past,’ she said, ‘it is yours.’

  ‘There never was a better bargain driven?’ he said.

  ‘Just so. Now to our sheep, my lord. Where are the loose ends in this dreadful tangle?’

  ‘The one that presents itself to me most prominently,’ said Peter, ‘is the question how Troutbeck got to know what Vearing knew. Plainly Vearing wouldn’t have told him.’

  ‘It’s that carbon copy of the review,’ said Harriet. ‘That’s the dangling thread. Where is it now?’

  ‘Last heard of in Vearing’s possession,’ said Peter.

  ‘Can we go and look for it?’

  ‘I think we can. The Visitor can do most things around here.’

  ‘Let’s start there, then,’ said Harriet.

  Vearing’s room was just as they remembered it; in perfect order. His scout had cleared it up and nobody would gather that the occupant had nearly died in it only a few hours before. Peter began by opening desk drawers, and then drawers in that lovely inlay table.

  ‘Basically we are looking for something stolen,’ Harriet reminded him. ‘Nobody would keep such a thing in an open and obvious drawer.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Peter said.

  A short passage led from Vearing’s drawing room to his bedroom. The passage was lined with deep bookcases full of box-files, but box-files all covered with beautiful art nouveau wallpapers. They made a lovely patchwork effect. Harriet resolved to imitate that in her own study. ‘Somewhere among these?’ she asked. They were all labelled with subjects and dates. Peter began to check; the subjects and dates were all correct – the contents matched the labels. Vearing had been an assiduous note-taker and lecture-giver for many years. But it would plainly take days of work to be sure that the notorious carbon was not in any of these files.

  Harriet walked through to the bedroom. It felt intrusive to enter it; it contained not much other than the bed and a large chest of drawers, on top of which there were half a dozen framed photographs. A man and a woman in a park somewhere with a little boy holding a cricket bat. A sporting picture of a rowing eight. A picture of a woman in ATS uniform. A glamorous-looking portrait of a young man in a silver frame . . . it was this last that caught her attention.

  Peter said to her from the passage, ‘You said, “Nobody would keep such a thing in an open drawer.” ’

  ‘Yes, I did. Come and look at this.’

  ‘But what you should have said surely was: nobody would keep such a thing. Vearing had stolen it from the Warden’s papers. Wouldn’t he have destroyed it?’

  ‘Perhaps he would hang on to it as evidence.’

  ‘Why would he need evidence? It had told him what he wanted to know. You don’t need evidence to attempt to murder someone. It was Troutbeck who needed evidence; it’s certainly useful to a blackmailer.’

  ‘So it isn’t here – somehow Troutbeck got hold of it?’

  ‘Not easily, though. Think how long it would take to search this place thoroughly. And Vearing might have returned to base any minute. Or the scout might have arrived. He’s got it somehow, but not like that. I think we are wasting our time here, Harriet.’

  ‘Just look at this a minute,’ she said to him, pointing out the photograph of the young man on the chest. ‘Who is he? He looks vaguely familiar to me, but I can’t place him.’

  ‘Hang about; it’s signed.’

  ‘I missed that,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Very black ink, right against the frame,’ said Peter. ‘Warm regards, David. David Outlander, I presume.’

  ‘Why does he look somehow familiar? We haven’t either of us met him.’

  ‘He’s just a generic handsome young man,’ said Peter. ‘Firm chin, neat ears, nice eyes . . . matinee idol sort of fellow. They come by the dozen.’

  ‘No, they don’t, Peter,’ said Harriet. ‘Every one is different.’

  ‘Well, he looks vaguely familiar to me too,’ said Peter. ‘Perhaps we bumped into him at some London party thrown by one of your publishers. Or sat opposite him on a bus or train.’

  Harriet, having thought of something else, wandered back into the drawing room to see if the book hidden in the window-seat cushions was in fact one of hers, or only something with a similar yellow dust-jacket. The book had gone, but in disturbing the cushions she noticed that the window-seat was a box with a lid. She thrust the cushions aside, and lifted the lid. The base of the box was covered with modern books, spines upwards, like a bookshelf lying on its back. Among many other authors’ works there was a line of Harriet Vanes. She pulled one out, and opened it. On the purple endpapers that her publisher used to give her books a distinctive look and style was the little green and white round sticker of Heffers bookshop in Cambridge.

  ‘But we already know,’ said Peter, coming up behind her. ‘We know he is a murderer. The game has changed. It is the other murderer we are after. It is fish for the Troutbeck now.’

  They closed the door behind them, and left.

  ‘Shall we quit this pit of vipers for a while?’ Peter asked. ‘Let’s have dinner at the Rose Revived.’

  ‘The pub Charles scorned in favour of a glimpse of C.S. Lewis?’

  ‘The very one. Unless you would prefer the Ferryman at Bablock Hythe.’

  ‘You obviously had a car when you were up,’ said Harriet. ‘You’re the expert.’

  ‘If I am to choose,’ said Peter, ‘let’s seek the pure spirit of the Scholar Gipsy, crossing the stripling Thames at Bablock Hythe. A few pure spirits wouldn’t come amiss.’

  ‘There’s John Ambleside,’ said Harriet. ‘And the swarm of worker bees at Shrewsbury College, and surely Balliol is full of pure spirits?’

  ‘I stand rebuked,’ said Peter. ‘Come. Let’s be off.’

  The stripling Thames is beautiful. It flowed calmly, full of the reflected skies of the summer evening, and it was pleasant to sit outside at rough-cut wooden tables, and listen to a nightingale somewhere in the bosky woods on the further bank. They drank draught beer, and ate roast rabbit, and allowed themselves to reinhabit themselves as if all the world were young.

  They let their contentment last into the dusk, but eventually Peter said, ‘Come, Shepherd and again begin the quest.’

  Harriet said, ‘Can we hear out the nightingale?’

  Peter held his peace. But soon the nightingale sounded more distant, and then fell silent.

  ‘Fled is that music, do I wake or sleep?’ he said.

  ‘Change of poet,’ said Harriet crisply.

  ‘That’s allowed,’ he said.

  ‘How does your interim report go, Peter?’ she asked.

  ‘I think we know what Vearing did,’ said Peter. ‘He started with two assaults, presumably intended to kill. He trapped Dancy in the bell-chamber, and he injected Cloudie with air into a vein. He had literary licence for both of those, but neither of them worked. His third attempt did work; he killed Enistead by using a catapult on him through an open skylight. That did work.’

  ‘It worked in the sense that it killed the unfortunate man,’ said Harriet. ‘So why didn’t it fix th
e vote?’

  ‘Because they appointed Trevair, and he took the side in favour of the MS,’ said Peter. ‘So then Oundle had to die.’

  ‘Peter, is Vearing strong enough to have dealt a blow like the one that killed Oundle?’

  ‘He’s an oarsman,’ said Peter. ‘And still rowing, I think. I believe I saw him on the river the other morning. Good for arm muscles as well as legs. And that sword was ultra-sharp.’

  ‘But what about the alibi? Didn’t he need to know that Oundle was a haemophiliac? And wasn’t that a well-kept secret?’

  ‘I suppose he could have risked it without knowing that,’ said Peter. ‘But actually I think he did know. I think somebody who was at the same school as him might have known. Remember Macmillan?’

  ‘Gossip down the generations, you mean?’

  ‘Outlander was at the same school as Oundle. And Outlander was a buddy of Vearing’s.’

  ‘And haemophilia was a strand in one of my books.’

  ‘That young man seems to be at the end of many a line of thought,’ said Peter.

  ‘Including playing a part in the show-stopping finale,’ said Harriet, ‘in which Vearing diced with death by arsenic, and lost on two counts.’

  ‘It’s Trevair who is the odd one out,’ Peter said. ‘A newcomer to the college, of whom John Ambleside said he had not yet acquired enemies.’

  ‘And killed in a fashion that I have not written about,’ said Harriet.

  ‘And declaring that he would vote to retain the MS,’ said Peter. ‘The odd one out in three ways at once.’

  ‘Four ways,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Your most excellent reason?’ Peter asked.

  ‘It’s the only one that could not have been planned,’ she said. ‘And spontaneous murder is a different kind of thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, I suppose someone might be seething with rage and hatred, and ready to kill, and then suddenly find they had a chance . . . Planners might have to be full of rage and hatred too,’ said Peter. ‘Cold-blooded, though.’