The Case of the Missing Bronte

by Robert Barnard

  By the notice board was an office, and as I stood reading I heard a high voice shrieking: ‘I am Professor of English and head of this department, and I insist . . .’ I looked at the name on the door. It was Gumbold. I was grateful to the secretary for warning me off. I strayed down the corridor in search of Timothy Scott-Windlesham. The notice-board had said he was in Room 423, but the numbering system, nominally consecutive, seemed to have been applied on a plan that could only have been the work of a lunatic or a mathematician. There was hardly a soul about. When finally I found Room 423 there was talk going on inside. I knocked tentatively. There was sudden silence, and then the door opened a fraction and a pale face peered out. It said in a high voice: ‘Ten minutes. I’m busy. No, twenty.’ Then it popped in again.

  I walked away. I wondered how one filled in twenty minutes in an English Department. At the end of the corridor the architect, in a burst of generosity, had allowed a window. By it was an open door, with voices coming through. The label on the door said, in small letters, ‘staff room’. The staff of the English Department, presumably. I went towards it, and poked my head around the door. There were four people in the room, lounging around with cups in their hands. A stocky woman with ugly dark hair and a light moustache glared at me.

  ‘Are you a student?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh — sorry.’ She looked genuinely contrite, as if she’d called me a rude name. ‘You never know these days. We get a lot of older people under these retraining schemes.’

  Now she really had insulted me. ‘I am not an older person,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact, my wife has just finished her degree at Newcastle.’

  ‘Really?’ She looked around at the others. ‘I say, do you remember when Newcastle was absolutely the end of the road, academically? Since this place was built it’s practically Oxbridge.’ She looked back at me. ‘Like a cup of coffee?’

  ‘Love one.’

  ‘It’s instant,’ said a burly, bearded, aggressive type, who seemed to flourish the word like a banner and dare me to say that I only drank percolated.

  ‘That’s what I like,’ I said. ‘Just as I prefer my tea in bags and my orange juice from tins with additives. Do I pass?’

  ‘Oh God, a funny one,’ said a languid someone in the corner. ‘Thank God you’re not a student. The funny ones are the ones I can’t stand the most.’

  At this point a thin, silent, middle-aged man with a stoop and an unhealthy skin got up and walked out without a word. I looked at him suspiciously, and suddenly realized it was someone I’d arrested long ago in my beat-walking days for exposing himself in the Charing Cross Road.

  ‘What,’ asked the young woman with the faint moustache, ‘are you actually wanting?’

  ‘What I was actually wanting was a talk with Mr Scott-Windlesham.’

  ‘Lucky old you. Here’s your coffee.’

  ‘Thank you. Oh — real milk. A luxury.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Languid. ‘An ironist. You’ll get on well with Timothy. He’s rather fond of the old irony himself.’

  ‘Flat-irony, mostly,’ said Moustache. ‘Well, your treat is all ahead of you. What can we do for you the while? Recite Shakespeare sonnets?’

  ‘It’s actually a question about Victorian literature I’m seeing him about,’ I said. ‘I spoke to your secretary, and she said Professor Gumbold was . . . that he had . . .’

  ‘Cracked up,’ said Beard. ‘Fallen over the intellectual precipice.’

  ‘Enrolled as a life student of the Higher Lunacy,’ said Languid.

  ‘It’s an awful thing,’ said Moustache contemplatively, ‘when a perfectly average, plodding, third-rate academic goes bang off his head. The collapse of a brilliant mind has something grand, something King Leary about it. The spectacle of Gumbold mad is just dreary and ludicrous.’

  ‘It’s we who suffer,’ said Languid. ‘His lectures used to be competent and dull as ditchwater, and the students didn’t listen. Now they’re totally gaga and the students don’t go. Not a ha’porth of difference for them. But it’s we who have to put up with his tantrums and lunacies. And he’s still supposed to be in charge of the department.’

  ‘His psychiatrist,’ said Beard, ‘suggested his mind needed something restful and soothing in the academic line, to calm it down after all that Carlyle. He’s always been a hypochondriac, and we suggested a project on asthmatics in literature. It’s not working out too well as yet.’

  ‘There are no asthmatics in literature,’ said Moustache. ‘It’s an intrinsically unliterary illness, without the romance of tuberculosis. Well — that’s our life’s burden. I suppose you were told, faute de Gumbold, to go along to Timothy?’

  ‘That’s right. Is he your other Victorian man?’

  ‘Person,’ said Moustache.

  ‘I suppose you could say so,’ said Beard grudgingly. ‘What do you want to ask him about?’

  ‘The Brontës.’

  Moustache hooted with laughter. ‘You won’t get much change out of Timothy on the Brontës. Timothy is a Meredith man. And why is Timothy a Meredith man?’

  ‘Because,’ said Languid, ‘if you study a minor aspect of a great writer — say Fielding’s plays, or something — there’s always the danger someone will read one of them and want to discuss it with you. Whereas Meredith is a respectable name, with acres of novels that nobody has read.’

  ‘And if,’ said Moustache, ‘by some remote chance somebody comes along who has read Harry Richmond or The Egoist, you say: “Oh, that’s the popular Meredith. I can’t think I’ll be spending too much time on that.” That’s the principle Timothy works on. Because he’s a secretive little squirt, and whether he’s actually done any work on Meredith or not I don’t know, but he certainly has no wish to talk about it with any of us. And he absolutely loathes the Brontës.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Beard. ‘I saw him buying a copy of Wuthering Heights in the bookshop the other day.’

  ‘What kind of lecturer in Victorian literature is it who doesn’t own a copy of Wuthering Heights?’ demanded Moustache, with a good deal of reason. ‘He loathes them. When he took over Gumbold’s novel course he struck them right off, first thing he did. They’re too popular for our Timmy. And too local. He calls them Yorkshire Home Industries Limited. Our Timothy is a great cosmopolitan. So if you’re bringing him a problem on the Brontës, you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘The right metaphor would be leaning on a broken reed,’ said Beard, ‘Timothy bearing such an uncanny resemblance to a broken reed. You’d do much better to go to someone in Leeds or Sheffield.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘Mr Scott-Windlesham — or is it Doctor — ?’

  ‘Mr,’ said Moustache firmly.

  ‘Mr Scott-Windlesham hasn’t mentioned, has he, a visit from a lady last week — a lady with a manuscript?’

  ‘No. But then, he probably wouldn’t. He fraternizes, but he never confides, our Timmy. What sort of manuscript was it?’

  ‘Well, that I can’t say exactly, but it’s quite long, and it’s in very small handwriting — ’

  ‘Ho-ho,’ said Beard. ‘Now I see where we’ve been going. Brontë juvenilia, by any chance?’

  ‘Possibly,’ I said diplomatically. ‘As far as I know, nobody with any expertise has looked at it.’

  ‘Bound to be a fake,’ said Moustache, ‘otherwise someone would have been on to it years ago. Even twenty years ago people used to give their right hand for those little books. Today there’s just nothing on the market.’

  ‘Bound to be a fake,’ agreed Beard. ‘Or one of those American collectors would have had it years ago. Or perhaps old Tetterfield in Bradford.’

  They all tittered.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘An absolutely manic librarian. Head of the West Riding Regional Library. Has a mania for collecting everything about Yorkshire writers. J.B. Priestley’s tobacconist’s bills, John Braine’s underwear. He’s just mad to get together a collection
of Brontë stuff of his own, naturally, but he’s come on to the market too late, and there’s practically nothing around. He’s got a bit of a private income to back him up, but it’s not big enough to get him any of the really high-price stuff. He’s as gaga as old Gumbold, as a matter of fact, but it doesn’t notice so much in a librarian.’

  ‘If the lady had come along to you, would you have recommended her to go to him?’

  They all sat around the table in thought. Finally it was Moustache who spoke.

  ‘Well, it would have depended what she wanted, wouldn’t it? If she wanted to sell — and she’d have to be crazy not to — I’d have said call in the experts, but deposit the thing in your bank while you’re waiting, because it will take time.’

  ‘More or less what I said,’ I put in.

  ‘On the other hand, if she was the philanthropic type who wanted to make it generally available and so on, then either she should give it to the Brontë Parsonage Museum or to some library. The British Library would be an obvious choice, or maybe the Brotherton in Leeds.’

  ‘I wonder if that’s what Mr Scott-Windlesham recommended,’ I said.

  ‘Timothy? Timothy’s first thought would be: what’s in it for me? That you can be quite sure of. I can’t quite see what there could be in it for him, though.’

  ‘Unless,’ said Beard, ‘he did her in, and kept the manuscript for himself. Supposing he had the nerve.’

  ‘Why all the questions, anyway?’ asked Languid, languidly.

  ‘I’m Police. The lady was savagely beaten around the head and the manuscript taken. Dear me. Twenty minutes is up. Thanks for the instant. I’d better get along to see Mr Scott-Windlesham.’

  CHAPTER 6

  EXPERT ADVISER

  I trusted my last words had left them goggling in there. Or perhaps Beard had meant the suggestion perfectly seriously anyway. It is not only in academic circles that people will habitually believe the worst of a colleague. Policemen are always being accused of brutality, and I remember only once totally and entirely refusing to entertain an allegation against one of my mates. And he turned out to have beaten a left-wing demonstrator to pulp with a lead-weighted truncheon.

  Anyway, I needn’t have worried that I had missed my appointment with Timothy Scott-Windlesham. When I came out into the corridor his door was just opening. As I walked towards his office the door was shut firmly again, for the conversation to be concluded. I loitered around, pretending to an inexhaustible interest in the names of the staff-members on the various doors. I had heard of none of them. Milltown, it seemed, did not produce telly luminaries, quiz-show panellists, part-time novelists or Parliamentary candidates. Vegetation was sparse in Milltown as a whole, but it looked as if that was what was going on in its English Department.

  Eventually the conversation was concluded, and two large fair men emerged from Scott-Windlesham’s office and, without words of farewell, marched away down the corridor. Remembering the wounding conjecture of Moustache, I wondered if they were adult students, the only breed of student that seemed to flourish in Milltown. Training themselves for a more cultured form of unemployment, probably. I let a moment or two elapse, and then went and knocked on the door.

  ‘Oh — come in,’ said an irritable thin voice.

  Timothy Scott-Windlesham was sitting at his desk, but he swung his chair round to face the door as I entered, presumably so as to look like a writer interrupted in mid-œuvre. He was middling in height, but thin and hollow-chested. He was pasty in complexion, or at any rate he was pasty now, as if he had just been sick: the general effect was of an uncooked dumpling. His hair was long and straight and lank, and had been finger-combed across his head, no doubt in a moment of stress. His tie was askew, his shirt unironed, and he grabbed a packet from his desk and stuck a filter-tip in his mouth.

  ‘Oh, you. You were here before, weren’t you? What is it?’

  Gracious little twit. Them idea that manners maketh man clearly went out of the educational system before he went into it. I suited my behaviour to his, and took the one easy chair in his office, without being asked.

  ‘Mr Scott-Windlesham? I’m sorry to trouble you, since it’s clear you’re busy. I came because I believe you’re an expert on Victorian literature.’

  ‘Ye-e-es.’

  ‘Isn’t Meredith your speciality?’

  ‘Ye-e-e-es’ (still more doubtfully).

  Experimentally I said: ‘I’ve only read The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.’

  With push-button precision, Scott-Windlesham replied: ‘Oh, that’s the popular Meredith. I can’t say I find that very interesting myself.’

  Well, Moustache certainly knew her Timothy Scott-Windlesham. I guessed he was the sort of teacher who is marvellous at communicating his own lack of enthusiasm.

  ‘It wasn’t Meredith, actually, I wanted to talk about,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I’d better introduce myself. I’m a police officer — Superintendent Trethowan.’

  Policemen are always imagining that people go white when they introduce themselves. Often they do, but for no reason relevant to the matter in hand. Anyway, I was pretty sure that Scott-Windlesham went a further shade of pastiness at this point. He said nothing, though, and merely goggled at me in an inarticulate and unacademic sort of way. His hands, on the arms of his desk chair, seemed to be almost gripping them. I was forced to go on without any encouragement from him.

  ‘I’ve come to you because we have a little problem you might be able to help us clear up.’ Timothy Scott-Windlesham nodded, looking helpful, and seemed to have managed to swallow his first reactions. ‘I believe you had a visit some time last week from a lady with a question about the Brontës.’

  Timothy’s face fell again, indefinably.

  ‘Ye-e-es.’

  ‘A Miss Edith Wing.’

  ‘Was that the name? It was Marjory — our secretary — who made the appointment. With Professor Gumbold being . . . far from well . . . an awful lot of extra stuff descends on me that ought by rights to be his pigeon. Not that I’m complaining. And of course, though this Miss Wing wasn’t a student, still, I do think one of the things one has to do, perhaps particularly in a place like Milltown, with no old university tradition, is to keep oneself as open as possible, to the community at large, I mean, because if we are going to serve any real function in the community as a whole — ’

  He went on in this vein for some time. Perfectly unexceptionable sentiments, but they struck me as blather. We get used to blather, in the police. And I served for a time in the Houses of Parliament. Politicians’ blather is to impress, suspects’ blather is to gain time. I thought Timothy Scott-Windlesham wanted to gain time. I waited until the flow had dried up.

  ‘And what exactly was it that Miss Wing wanted to see you about?’

  ‘Well, as you said, the Brontës . . .’ I sat silent, to force him to go on. I thought it possible he was considering whether to tell an outright lie. If so, he decided against it.

  ‘She had this little book, you know: tiny pages, minute script, practically unreadable. As far as I remember, she said she’d inherited it. And it was obviously very old — faded, dog-eared, and so on. Though of course that’s very easily faked.’

  ‘You thought she might be a forger of some kind?’

  Timothy Scott-Windlesham shrugged his hunchy shoulders.

  ‘Just one of the possibilities.’

  ‘And when you had inspected the manuscript, you suggested — ?’

  ‘Well, that it might be — no, wait: I think she brought that up, now I come to think about it. She suggested that it might be a manuscript of one of the Brontës.’

  ‘I see. Did you agree with that?’

  ‘Only in so far as that was certainly one of the possibilities. I wasn’t in a position to do any more than that. One would have to be an expert. Of course the Brontës are a fascinating topic, fabulous writers and all that — I meditate a little piece on Emily’s French essays in the near future — but I’m not myself a sp
ecialist in them. All I could say was that the Brontës were the first names to spring to mind — naturally.’

  It would all have been more convincing if I had not just heard his previously expressed opinions on the Brontës. In any case, the cloak of learning seemed to sit uneasily on his meagre frame.

  ‘You don’t know of any other writers, then, using that sort of tiny script?’

  ‘No, but as I say, I’m not an expert on holographs, not at all. And of course, there is no guarantee that this was by a writer, in the sense you probably intend. Anybody around at that time could have developed a script like that — particularly someone who could not afford to buy a lot of paper.’

  Fair point, that. It had occurred to Jan and me too, but I made a mental note not to underestimate Timothy Scott-Windlesham. I entered a caveat, though.

  ‘True enough. But it would be likely to have been a compulsive writer, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Quite ordinary people, writing letters, wrote two pages on one by writing cross-wise — they turned the paper forty-five degrees and just wrote over what they had just written. Florence Nightingale did, I know.’

  ‘I see. So did you rather pour cold water on the idea?’

  ‘No, no, no, Superintendent.’ He leaned forward in an agony of goodwill and sincerity. ‘Not at all, dear me no. But what I did do was try not to raise false hopes. Surely you can see that that was only kind? Because it would have been an awful let-down if it had turned out to be written by Amelia Smith, a dressmaker’s apprentice from Halifax, or something.’