by Joan Smith
The Herald file on Hugh Puddephat contained only two more cuttings, both considerably older than those connected with the inquest. The first, Loretta was surprised to find, was from a society magazine. How diligent the library staff were, she marvelled. It was a picture, rather than a story, and showed two people at a race-course. ‘Dr and Mrs Hugh Puddephat share a joke between the showers at Ascot’, the caption stated. Although the man was smiling, he looked ill at ease in morning dress, while the woman’s face was all but invisible under a large hat.
The final story had been cut from a newspaper gossip column in 1973. ‘An English Romance For Peer’s Daughter’, Loretta read. The headline was, it transpired, a ponderous attempt at humour. The gist of the story was that the Hon. Veronica Grahame, second daughter of Lord Stonybrook, had met and fallen in love with Puddephat while attending his lectures on Lawrence at Oxford. Love had blossomed, the journalist had written without much originality, among the dreaming spires. So he made a habit of it, Loretta thought to herself. The knowledge that Puddephat had married one of his own students in the first place certainly threw a new light on his protestations of innocence at the inquest into the dead student. Could this womanizing be the reason why his marriage had not lasted? Loretta pulled herself up sharp. Two episodes in, what was it, nine years, hardly amounted to womanizing. Her brief encounter with the Sun had evidently had a bad influence on her. And, in spite of the fact that she now knew a great deal more about the missing man, she still had no answer to the essential question: had she been examining the life of a victim of violent crime, or that of a murderer?
Checking that the cuttings were still in order, Loretta got up. The one thing she hadn’t done was look up Puddephat in Who’s Who. She left the pile on the desk where she had found it, and made her way to where Bill was sitting. He had put away the Morning Star, and was contentedly butchering a copy of that morning’s Guardian with a pair of scissors.
‘See your mate’s in trouble again,’ he said, gesturing to the story which had sparked off her investigation. ‘Funny bugger, if you ask me. They ain’t like other people, though, these dons. A day’s work wouldn’t do none of ‘em any ‘arm.’ Reflecting that the librarian’s opinion of academics was about as low as hers of journalists, Loretta asked politely for the current Who’s Who. ‘Nicked,’ said Bill succinctly. ‘Last year’s do yer?’ Loretta said it would. Bill ambled off, momentarily disappearing from view, and returned with a heavy volume in a red jacket. There y’are,’ he said, opening the page at Puddephat’s entry. ‘That’s what yer wanted, innit?’ Taken aback by his affability, Loretta nodded her agreement. Bill put down the book, and went back to his scissors.
Loretta peered at the bare facts of Puddephat’s life. William Hugh Puddephat was born in 1945 in London, and attended a direct grant school. He was awarded his first degree by the college where he was now a fellow, spent a year in the United States, and came back to the same college to complete his PhD. His marriage, she noted, had been childless. The only detail that gave any clue to his character, his description of his hobbies as ‘the pleasures of Lawrence’s prose and vintage port’, did little to endear him to her. It also, she noted in passing, gave an added edge to Theodore Sykes’s gibe about ‘a storm in a port glass’. Puddephat’s pompous Who’s Who entry had not gone unnoticed among his enemies. If she could think of a good reason to ask questions about the missing don among his colleagues, she might well come up with some interesting answers.
With this thought in mind, Loretta set off for Paddington. She arrived with twenty minutes to spare before her train was due to leave but, after she had queued for a ticket, was only just in time to catch it. She had to walk nearly its full length before finding a seat in a non-smoking carriage. It was only when she sat down that she realized why there were several spaces: her section of the carriage contained a group of unruly Italian teenagers who were obviously well beyond the control of the two middle-aged nuns accompanying them. She sighed, but decided that unless she wanted to stand all the way to Oxford, she had no other choice. Unzipping her overnight bag, she took out a copy of one of Puddephat’s books. By a stroke of luck, she had spotted it on a colleague’s bookshelf before lunch. ‘Take it,’ the woman had replied when Loretta asked if she could borrow it. ‘I can’t make head or tail of it.’ Stowing her bag by her feet, Loretta settled down for an hour’s read.
Hugh Puddephat, she discovered, had certainly moved with the times. The book was stuffed with interminable quotations from obscure American academics who seemed to be in the vanguard of the deconstruction movement. Unlike the names of the French theorists who had laid the groundwork for structuralism - Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, for instance - most of these names were unknown to her. In spite of Puddephat’s enthusiasm for them, she was not inspired to find out more about them. The very name of the movement offended her. She imagined the English departments of various American universities converted into huge breakers’ yards in which was being dismantled the edifice of world literature …
Crunch … ‘There goes Milton’ cried an associate professor, wispy hair covered by a hard hat, in the recesses of her imagination.
‘I hear the bulldozers are moving in on George Eliot Thursday,’ mouthed one of his colleagues in a satisfied Southern drawl.
She was roused from this disturbing fantasy by the arrival on the table in front of her of an Italian youth who was trying to escape the clutches of two boisterous female companions. Loretta put down her book, grasped him by the shoulders, and heaved him back into the arms of his tormentors. She peered round for the nuns, but they were nowhere to be seen. Loretta guessed they had sought refuge in the buffet car. The struggling teenagers, cheered on by their friends, were lurching in her direction again. She stood up, clapping her hands to gain their attention. Several surprised faces looked blankly at her, including those of the chief trouble-makers. Loretta pointed in a deliberate fashion at the teenage boy in the excited trio.
‘Cazzo!’ she said scornfully. This unexpected obscenity drew gasps of astonishment from the teenagers, and Loretta pressed home her advantage by threatening dire penalties in colloquial Italian if a single one of them misbehaved during the remainder of the journey. Chastened, they settled back in their seats and talked in hushed voices until the train pulled into Reading, where they all got off.
Loretta was a third of the way through Puddephat’s book when she arrived in Oxford. She took a bus into the shopping centre, stopped to buy Bridget some flowers, and got another bus to Woodstock Road. Although Bridget was a fellow of a very respectable college, she had sensibly chosen to live in a 1930s semi within easy reach of the centre of town rather than in college rooms. Loretta had stayed there before, although it was more usual for her to see Bridget when the latter made one of her frequent visits to London. The bus stopped only yards from Bridget’s house and, as she alighted, Loretta saw her friend’s 2CV turning into the drive. Bridget had only just beaten her to it. As Loretta drew abreast of the house, Bridget was locking her car door.
‘Loretta!’ she exclaimed. ‘I was afraid you’d be waiting on the doorstep. I’m sorry I’m so late.’
‘Not at all,’ said Loretta, leaning forward to kiss her cheek. ‘You couldn’t have timed it better.’
Bridget opened the front door and led the way into the hall. ‘Put your things in here for the time being,’ she said, pushing open the door to the living-room. ‘Oh God, I’d forgotten about the mess,’ she added, taking in the empty coffee mugs and sheets of paper strewn around the room. ‘We’ve just started a support group for women in the English faculty, and we had a meeting here last night. Never mind, it’ll have to wait. Come into the kitchen.’ Loretta dumped her overnight case on the floor and shut the door. In the kitchen, she found Bridget on her knees rummaging in the fridge.
‘Nothing much in here,’ she said. ‘What on earth’s this? Yuk, that should have gone out ages ago.’ She leaned across and dropped a paper bag into the kitchen bin. ‘I meant
to get some food on my way home, but I got held up at college,’ she explained, examining various other articles in the fridge with distaste. She looked at her watch. ‘I tell you what, why don’t we have supper at Brown’s?’ she suggested, rising to her feet.
‘Sounds fine,’ Loretta said uneasily. Now that she was face to face with Bridget, her mind was fully engaged in a debate as to how much she should tell her friend about events in Paris. With Tracey apparently intent on limiting his own involvement, she longed to talk things over with someone who might offer more active help; at the same time, she felt an almost superstitious reluctance to go through the story again in the kind of detail a confidante would need. As a consequence, the question of where to eat was one that made little impression on her.
‘That’s settled then,’ said Bridget. ‘I’m sorry to rush you out, but we ought to leave straight away if we’re going to get a table. It gets very crowded in the evenings.’
Brown’s was already more than half full, but Bridget and Loretta were able to find a table in a relatively uncrowded corner where an old-fashioned ceiling fan was doing an effective job in keeping stuffiness at bay.
‘I can recommend the salads,’ said Bridget, studying the menu. Loretta took her friend’s advice and then listened in surprise as, in spite of the hot weather, Bridget ordered a casserole. ‘I didn’t have any lunch,’ she explained, registering Loretta’s surprised expression. ‘And the temperature doesn’t seem to have any effect on my appetite.’ It was a mystery to Loretta that Bridget remained so slim. Since her own thirtieth birthday, she had noticed an unwelcome tendency to put on inches if she didn’t keep any eye on what she ate. Bridget seemed untouched by such problems. The waiter arrived with the red wine they had ordered, and Loretta took a decision. She was about to plunge into her story when Bridget spoke first.
‘Before you tell me what you’re doing in Oxford, I must tell you my news,’ she said. ‘Have I ever mentioned a man called Hugh Puddephat to you?’ Loretta stared at her, amazed. ‘You’ve probably come across his work,’ Bridget went on, ‘though I’m sure you’d think it was pretentious rubbish. Anyway, he’s disappeared off the face of the earth. And I seem to be the last person to have seen him.’ Catching sight of herself in a wall mirror, Loretta closed her mouth and waited for Bridget to go on. It had not occurred to her that her friend might be personally involved in the business. ‘That’s why I was late,’ Bridget continued. ‘Two policemen simply turned up at my rooms as I was leaving, without any appointment or anything, and insisted on interviewing me. It was absolutely infuriating. They made me go through the whole thing three times, though I had hardly anything to tell them. And they kept calling me “love”. Even when they left, that didn’t seem to be the end of it. They said I might have to go down to the police station and be interviewed there later in their inquiries. They behaved as if I’d got something to do with the wretched man’s disappearance. You know why, don’t you?’ she added suddenly. Loretta looked blank. She was still trying to take in the fact that Bridget might be a witness. ‘That time at Green-ham,’ Bridget went on. ‘I told you about it. I sat in the road during a demonstration and got hauled off to the police station in Newbury. They didn’t charge me, but I’m on police files. It’s the same force, you know.’
It sounded plausible. Loretta’s occasional visits to the Cruise missile base had never involved her in getting arrested, but she was well aware that some police took a dim view of peace protesters. ‘But what did you tell them?’ she asked, recalling herself to the matter in hand.
‘Nothing spectacular,’ Bridget said. ‘Just that I saw him on a train to London a couple of weeks ago. On the Thursday to be exact. That’s why they were so interested. Apparently their last previous sighting was at his college the night before. Anyway, I’d already found a seat when he jumped on as the train was about to leave. He didn’t look too pleased to see me, but then he knows what I think of his work. There weren’t many people sitting near us, so I tried to make polite conversation, but he wasn’t having any. He had a bag with him, a small suitcase really, so I asked if he was off on a late holiday. He seemed taken aback, and muttered something about having business in Germany. Which is odd, because he was expected in Italy on Monday, apparently.’
This point had already occurred to Loretta, who was doing some rapid calculations. Where on earth did Germany fit into it? Bridget had seen the missing man on a Thursday. If Puddephat had been at the flat in Paris on Friday evening, he could hardly have squeezed a trip to Germany in between. Or was Germany, rather than Italy, his real destination after whatever was due to happen in Paris? She supposed it was equally possible that, for reasons known only to himself, Puddephat had been lying to Bridget. Regretfully, she acknowledged that his behaviour on the train threw no light at all on what had happened at the flat. If anything, it made matters worse. She realized that Bridget was eyeing her curiously, and swallowed a mouthful of wine. ‘I had no idea you’d turn out to be mixed up in all this,’ she blurted out, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ She paused, and then rushed on. That’s why I came to Oxford, you see - about Puddephat’s disappearance.’
At that moment, an extremely thin waiter arrived bearing their food. While he was putting down the plates, Loretta made up her mind. It was as well she had ordered something that wouldn’t go cold. ‘Start eating,’ she told Bridget, ‘and I’ll try to explain.’
Halfway through Loretta’s description of her weekend in Paris, Bridget lost interest in her food. When Loretta finished, Bridget put her hand sympathetically on her friend’s arm and said: ‘How terrible for you. And you think …?’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ interrupted Loretta. ‘I’ve no real proof that Puddephat was at the flat, and I’m only guessing at what went on there. I should have gone to the French police at the time, but I didn’t, and now the evidence has gone. If Andrew’s telling the truth, that is. I’m beginning to suspect everybody.’
‘I think you’re right to be wary of Andrew,’ Bridget said thoughtfully. ‘It doesn’t sound as though he’s involved in it, but it’s as well to be careful. And I can see the problem about going to the police. I wonder if there’s any way we can find out more without drawing attention to ourselves?’
Loretta was grateful for Bridget’s assumption that she would have a part in whatever action they decided upon; she was a more reliable friend than Tracey, she thought to herself. How much do you know about Puddephat?’ she asked eagerly. ‘I’ve read all the cuttings on him in the Herald library but I haven’t yet got much sense of what he’s like.’
‘Not very nice.’ Bridget said briefly. ‘An odd character, really. Very arrogant academically, and one of the people most opposed to the women’s support group in the English faculty.’
‘Wasn’t he involved in some sort of scandal a few years ago?’ Loretta prompted. ‘Something to do with a girl who killed herself?’ She was keen to hear Bridget’s version of the story.
That’s right,’ her friend replied. ‘A nasty business, and the real story never came out. The poor girl was absolutely infatuated with him, not knowing that his tastes lie in quite a different direction. He’s rumoured to be gay,’ she added, seeing Loretta’s surprised expression. ‘Funnily enough, that’s why the whole episode did him less harm than it might have done. When he split up with his wife, a while before, she spread some damaging stories about him, and I think the college was secretly quite relieved to have some evidence that he was het after all. Not that he’s the only gay don at Oxford, far from it, but in his case the rumours were about boys. That sort of thing worries the college authorities no end, as you can imagine. But the inquest put a stop to all that. There was no evidence of actual impropriety, you see, but Puddephat admitted he’d been friendly with the girl and given her extra coaching. He came out of it as someone who might have committed a slight indiscretion, no more, and a heterosexual one at that. They were so relieved at the college that they let him keep his job.’
‘How does he get on with the other fellows?’ Loretta asked, rapidly adjusting her idea that the business of the girl’s suicide had damaged Puddephat’s career.
‘He’s very thick with the new master, Humphrey Morris, which counts for quite a lot,’ Bridget said thoughtfully. ‘And that’s odd, too. He got into the most terrible row with one of the other fellows during the election for master a couple of years ago. He and this other chap, a rather nice English fellow called Theo Sykes, each had their own candidate for the job when the previous master, Lorimer, retired. They both did a lot of lobbying, which you’re not supposed to do, but the college turns a blind eye to it. There are ways and means, you see - discreet supper parties and so on. And Sykes’s man won, Morris, that is. Puddephat was incandescent with rage, apparently. But the strange thing is that, since then, Sykes and Morris have fallen out. No one seems to know why. In fact, Sykes’s fellowship comes up for renewal at Christmas, and the word is he won’t get it. He claims Puddephat is behind it.’
Loretta’s head reeled. The picture that was emerging was quite different from the one she had gleaned from the cuttings. It confirmed her view of the fallibility of newspaper reports. ‘I seem to have got entirely the wrong end of the stick this afternoon,’ she said sadly. ‘Perhaps I should start again from scratch. I had a vague idea of trying to talk to people who knew Puddephat, but I don’t know how to go about it.’
That’s one thing I can help with,’ Bridget said triumphantly. ‘You should talk to a friend of mine who’s a history don at the same college as Puddephat. All you need is a cover story - confiding in Geoffrey is like taking an advert in the Oxford Mail; Loretta laughed, and both women were silent for a moment.