Rough Justice In Academia (The Ralph Chalmers Mysteries Book 2)

by P. J. Thurbin

  “Rupert asked me to pass along his condolences. Unfortunately he was unable to be here because of some business out of the country that he couldn’t get out of. Much as though he wanted to come, it just wasn’t possible. But he asked me to convey how sorry he is about all of this,” Ralph said, trying to sound convincing.

  Just then Peter and David and their wives came over to join them. They had all known each other more than twenty years earlier and Ralph hoped that it helped Grace to see that so many old friends had come to pay their respects. After the usual exchanges Grace made her excuses and left, and Ralph and his friends made their way to The Griffin Hotel over by the river. Settling into the comfortable lounge, they ordered some tea.

  “Typical Granger not to turn up, but seeing as how he and Grace had such a big row about Jack resigning, I suppose he took the coward’s way out,” said Peter. “You know it seems like only yesterday we were all happily working together with old Jack keeping us on the right track, and now he’s been murdered. Do you remember how shocked we were when he resigned?”

  “What actually caused him to resign? I never fully understood why he took such a drastic step?” Asked Marcia, Peter’s wife.

  “It was all a ghastly mistake,” said Ralph. “Jack was Head of School and had been supervising the final examinations for some 200 students. Well it turned out that a few weeks after the results were announced there was a complaint lodged by the mother of one of the students that her son should have got higher grades than he did. Her complaint was that someone had deliberately swapped her son’s papers with those of another student.

  “We only knew about this when Jack told us he was resigning,” said David. “The shocker was that the student concerned was a very bright kid who was dyslexic. From what I’ve read, many dyslectics are near geniuses who just happen not to be able to learn in the same way as other people. Anyhow, when we pressed Jack to tell us why he was resigning, he told us that this kid’s mother had been Jack’s foster mother some years earlier and she had appealed directly to Jack in making her complaint. Jack, being the sort of guy he was, felt obliged to tell the Vice Chancellor at the time, Sir William Tiverton, about his family connection, and that he couldn’t launch an official enquiry as he would be accused of bias.”

  “But why couldn’t the University just do a normal investigation and leave Jack out of it?” Interjected David’s wife, Mary.

  “It’s the same old story,” said Ralph. “The University hates adverse publicity and will do anything to keep the spotlight off any incident that could cause the public to question the way they run the exam process, or anything else for that matter. They got their lawyers to tell the kid’s mother that they had checked into things and she did not have a case. I think that Jack must have had a word with her as well, and she decided, after a bit of an outburst of swearing in front of Jack, Sir William and Granger that she would drop the matter. Well the VC needed a sacrificial lamb just in case the press got hold of the story, and Jack was led to the slaughter, so to speak. So you could say that he resigned to save the University any embarrassment. He was that sort of chap.”

  “And Granger came out of it a winner since they gave him Jack’s job,” said Peter, with a note of anger in his voice.

  “But did they ever find out if someone had swapped the papers, or at least mount an enquiry or give the poor kid a chance to retake the exams?” Said Marcia. “It would seem only fair.”

  “They did look at the papers that the student had submitted. It turned out that since he was dyslexic he had been given a scribe, someone who types up his verbal answers to the questions,” explained David, who was himself a stickler for process. The scribe and the student sit in a separate room from everyone else and the student just puts his or her name and identification number on the top sheet of the paper at the end of the exam. When they checked his papers, they were an obvious fail so they saw no point in taking it further.”

  “But suppose there was someone else doing the scribe thing in another room, and when they were marking them later the top sheets got mixed up?” Asked an anxious Marcia.

  “That’s not possible,” said David. The sheets are all clipped together. No, I’m afraid he just blew it on the day. It happens. And at that time there were no re-takes like there are today. It was a one shot system. Now students get three goes if they fail, and some even re-take a year later to try to get higher grades. In those days it was a lot more rigorous.

  “I met the student’s mother once and she was certainly someone you would not want to mess with,” said Ralph. I always felt that there was something going on that she was not telling us about. I also remember that I spoke to the student, I think his name was Beret or Berick, that’s it, Berick. Well what struck me was that instead of being upset that he had wasted 3 years of his life and ended up failing, he seemed pretty non - plussed about the whole affair. Seemed that he was embarrassed by his mother’s complaining and was happy to forget the whole thing and just get out in the world and get a job.

  Now I think of it, his father did come in once as well. He had waited in the car park, and as Granger and I were walking to our cars he grabbed him by the arm and shouted something about his wife having been treated badly by everyone, and that he was going to make Granger pay for it one way or the other. He was getting pretty worked up about it but I managed to grab him from behind and prevent him from hitting Granger. Then some of the caretakers heard the noise and ran up and persuaded him to cool off and then escorted him off the campus. You can imagine how shook up old Granger was. White as a sheet and shaking like a leaf.”

  “Serves the bugger right,” said Peter. He got Jack’s job, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had contrived to get Jack to resign; worked on the guy’s good nature and decency to get what he wanted.”

  Ralph had been listening to what his friends had been saying and reflecting on how the attack on Jack, the exam incident all those years ago and the story of The Winslow Boy at the Rose Theatre seemed to be in some way linked. He shared his thoughts with his friends who were now beginning to reflect on what had been a particularly stressful day. “I know it might seem a bit of a stretch of the imagination, but I think what we’ve been talking about is more than a coincidence. Think about it: Jack and Grace just happen to be at the same theatre as Granger and Ruth, the play is about a boy who arguably is wrongly accused of cheating one of his friends out of a cheque, the authorities decide to challenge him without informing his parents, they decide he’s guilty and to avoid any scandal decide to expel him. His father is rightly annoyed and spends a fortune trying to prove his son is innocent. And a lot of lives are ruined.”

  “A clear case of what used to be called ‘rough justice’,” interjected David, the University’s first Professor of Jurisprudence. “The parallels with what happened to Jack are pretty clear. You would make a good lawyer, Ralph,” he said with a laugh.

  “Look folks, we’ve all been a bit shocked by what has happened,” said Ralph. Why don’t we call it a day and let’s not share what we’ve talked about until we have had time to think it all through. Most of it is conjecture on our parts and a lot of it is based on idle gossip of one sort or another. Evidently the police were going to interview Granger again just before he left for France and will no doubt have some theories of their own. Meanwhile I may just try to dig up some of the records in the academic registry and see if there was anyone else taking those exams using a scribe as you suggested, Marcia. I think that might be a good place to begin. I’ll keep you updated on anything I discover.”

  Everyone had their own plans for the afternoon so they bid each other safe driving and headed their separate ways. Ralph was also thinking about calling Jane, whom he had not spoken to for a few weeks. He was interested to find out what she was up to and when they could get together. Even though the hoped for rekindling of their long ago romance had failed to ignite when they were brought together a couple of years earlier when she was brought in as a consultant arc
haeologist at the University, their mutual respect had led to a comfortable friendship. He wanted someone to talk to about his determination to find out more about that incident with the student all those years ago, and her objectivity as a trained research archaeologist would help him think through this terrible affair which was starting to unravel itself. And there was still a murderer at large out there somewhere.

  Chapter 3

  Inspector Robert Linham took his job as the senior homicide detective for the Kingston borough seriously. The recent murder of Jack Royston had taken place only a stone’s throw from his office at Kingston Constabulary Headquarters and he was particularly keen to bring the perpetrator to justice as quickly as possible. But first he had to solve the murder. He and his colleague, Sergeant Wilson, had interviewed Professor Granger and concluded that Granger had arrived on the scene too late to be of help in identifying the man who had attacked and killed Royston. They had spoken with Mrs. Royston soon after the attack, but at the time she was too upset to offer any real help. He decided to have another talk with Jack Royston’s widow in the hope that now that the shock of the attack was less immediate, she might be able to throw further light on the incident.

  As they sat in Linham’s office with the summer rain beating against the smudged windows overlooking the Rose Theater, he reflected on another investigation only a couple of years before at the Gypsy Hill campus when he and Sergeant Wilson were involved in solving a series of attacks. That case had ended in one of the staff being imprisoned on an aggravated assault charge that could easily have been murder. ‘What was it with these academics?’ he mused. Perhaps they just had to spice up their otherwise dull lives. But his thoughts were interrupted when the duty officer ushered Grace Royston into his office.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Royston. Thank you for coming in to see us. Let me again convey my very sincere condolences. You may remember that you kindly spoke with myself and Sergeant Wilson just after the unfortunate attack on your husband.” Linham pulled out a chair for her and waited until she seemed reasonably comfortable before proceeding. He couldn’t help but notice that she seemed quite relaxed for someone who had been so recently bereaved and who had seen her husband stabbed before her eyes in a dark alley.

  “Naturally I want to help in any way I can to find my husband’s murderer,” Grace replied. “But I’m not sure if I can be of much help.”

  “We’ll try to make this as painless as possible, Mrs. Royston, but we find that sometimes once a witness has had time to reflect on things some little detail that either slipped their mind or that they thought wasn’t important at the time is just the clue that we need to solve the case. That’s why we asked you to come in and speak with us again to see if you have any further recollection of that night when you and your husband were attacked.”

  “Thank you, Inspector. I don’t know how much help I can give you, but I’ll do my best.”

  The Inspector knew from the officer who had been at the scene of the crime about the circumstances surrounding the stabbing, but he wanted to see if there was some small detail that might give him a lead about the attacker. He also now had the post mortem results and knew that it was not a case of a heart attack following an attempted robbery, but a clumsy stab wound to the neck that had severed a main artery. Death must have been instantaneous.

  “We had just started to walk down that dark alleyway next to the theatre when this man stepped out from behind a broken fence. He pushed us against the fence and as Jack turned I heard him say something as though he recognized the man. The man hit Jack and then shouted or almost screamed out something about it all being wrong or something like that. Then as he ran away, the next thing I knew was that another man ran up and was trying to help Jack to his feet. They told me afterwards that it was Rupert Granger whom we knew a long time ago back when Jack was with the University. To be honest, I never cared much for Rupert, especially after I learned that when Jack resigned from the University Rupert got his job as Head of the School. Still, I appreciate his efforts to come to our aid, even if it turned out to be to no avail. Everything is hazy after that. Paramedics arrived and I went with Jack in the ambulance to the hospital. They told me later that he never recovered consciousness. We never had a chance to say goodbye.”

  During his long career the Inspector had interviewed a lot of people who had seen their loved ones attacked and murdered before their eyes. No matter how he tried to steel himself he felt their pain and sorrow. But he knew his job was to catch the assailant and that could only be done by asking more questions.

  “Mrs. Royston, is there any chance that you might have recognized your attacker? Or perhaps noticed anything that struck you as unusual?” He waited while she collected her thoughts.

  “Well I can’t say there was anything in particular, except that I think he was an older man. Yes. I’m sure about that. He didn’t look like one of those awful young drug addicts you see in the newspapers, as you would expect,” she replied.

  Linham knew that he was not going to get much more out of the interview and having asked Mrs. Royston if she would be so kind as to look at some photos of suspected muggers and help the photo fit people to construct a likeness of the attacker, he wished her well and had the duty officer show her out.

  He had interviewed Professor Granger the previous week and found it quite a challenge. The Dean proved to be illusive, or at least not the most forthcoming person he had met. Linham disliked academics for no reason he could articulate. It was just something about their air of superiority that stuck in his craw. What puzzled the Inspector was that Professor Granger had said nothing about Jack Royston having been an old colleague of his other than that he had some vague recollection of him having been at the University. And when he had asked Granger if he knew of anyone who might hold a grudge against Jack Royston he had just laughed, saying that lots of people held grudges, but it rarely resulted in murder. Further, he had suggested that it was probably the work of a lunatic or drug addict, or simply a ridiculous accident. The Inspector was puzzled by the way Granger was trying to put up what he saw as a smoke screen, presumably to cover any links Royston may have had with the University. Nothing new there, he thought. He had already concluded from his previous dealings that the University ran a tight ship, and whenever there was a possibility of there being any adverse publicity they closed ranks. He also knew that the University had powerful friends in the local community, so he would have to handle them with kid gloves.

  When Wilson returned from taking Mrs. Royston to the photo fit group the Inspector gave him an update on what was worrying him.

  “We have to tread carefully on this one, Wilson. The local newspapers are sensing a story here that links the murder to the University. They are also trying to paint a picture of Kingston as being an unsafe place for people to wander around after dusk. The Rose Theatre is trying to build up its box office takings and all those restaurants along the riverside are trying to attract the in crowd. A murder and hints of growing crime in the town won’t encourage parents to send their little darlings here. All of this is putting a lot of pressure on the Police Commissioner to button this one up quickly. And you know what they say about muck rolling down hill.” Wilson just nodded and waited for Linham to go on. He had been working for Inspector Linham long enough to know that any input from him would be unwelcome at this stage.

  “The University power players are looking to boost student numbers from abroad and a murder is not a good advertisement for attracting overseas students. So we have got to get this one sown up, and double quick.”

  The two policemen retreated to the canteen for a welcome cup of tea and a chance to find out from their colleagues if there were any high profile local villains on the prowl, particularly any who had ties to the Kingston area. They were interrupted by the desk Sergeant telling them that a Professor Chalmers was asking if he could speak to the Inspector.

  “Just give us five minutes, Sergeant, and we’ll see him in my office.�
� Linham replied, and leaning across to Sergeant Wilson he grimaced.

  “You remember our Professor Chalmers, Wilson. He was the one who fancied himself some sort of Indiana Jones in that shooting case at Gypsy Hill a couple of years ago, and now here he is no doubt wanting to clear this one up for us as well.

  Must be our lucky day. Drink your tea and let’s go and see what he has to say and get it over with.”

  Ralph knew that the police were less than enamored with would be amateur sleuths butting in on their investigations, but he was convinced that the circumstances surrounding Jack’s resignation had a direct link to the assailant and had decided that he ought to share those thoughts with the police.

  “Good morning Professor Chalmers. What can we do for you today?” Inspector Linham said, trying to hide the fact that he disliked it when a civilian tried to interfere with police business and tell him how to do his job.

  Ralph decided that the best approach was to come straight to the point.

  “Well Inspector, I have been thinking about the murder of Jack Royston and there are some things that I think you should know.” He explained about the circumstances surrounding Jack’s resignation all those years ago, and how he saw it as a revenge attack that had gone wrong. He postulated that Granger had been the intended victim. Ralph was now in full flow as his discussions with his friends the previous day were now taking shape.

  The Inspector was soon listening intently as his initial cynicism was swept away by Ralph’s sound reasoning.

  “But what strikes me as chilling, Inspector, is that after 20 years someone may be trying to exact his own form of revenge for the incident surrounding Jack Royston’s resignation. The question is, why Jack? He did nothing wrong and the only people who might be harbouring a grievance are the Berick family.” Ralph went on to explain about an incident involving a student named Ted Berick who was caught up in a cheating scam that precipitated Jack Royston’s departure from the University. He also explained that there was another link between Royston and the Berick boy, as Jack Royston had grown up in foster care and that his foster mother was none other than Alice Berick, Ted’s Mother.