An Oxford Scandal

by Norman Russell

  Anthony Jardine was an avid eater, and was more than content with this meal, which had all the character of an old-fashioned dinner. His host, too, was a good trencherman, but the two ladies brought a more selective enthusiasm to their meal.

  At first, Madame Deschamps confined her conversation to Amy Gorringe, who sat beside her, leaving Anthony and Arthur to talk between mouthfuls about matters collegiate.

  And then she extended her audience to include Anthony, and told him about a certain village near Aix la Chapelle where the embalmed heart of St Thomas à Becket was rumoured to be concealed. Anthony had heard nothing of this rumour, and was instantly absorbed by what she was saying. She began to talk of obscure manuscripts that she had seen, and of an ancient banner found in the church, incorporating in its design the depiction of a human heart with an inscription in medieval French stating that it represented the heart of Becket, drawn just after it had been taken from his body. Rump steak and its accompaniments were forgotten. Had she been able to verify the age of the banner? Was the form of French native to the area where the banner was found? When she suddenly lapsed into French he replied in kind.

  And then, quite suddenly, he caught sight of Munt, who was regarding him with an almost goatish smirk. Dash it all, what did the fellow mean? Madame Deschamps, too, seemed to have caught the mood of unexpressed censure from her host’s servants. Both she and Jardine were being too forward on first acquaintance. It would be assumed below-stairs that they had ‘fallen for’ each other, to use a vulgar phrase.

  Madame Deschamps lowered her head and began to talk to her hostess. Anthony Jardine glanced out of the dining room window, which gave on to the rear garden of the Gorringes’ house. He thought that he saw the young, carefree Dora, standing by a glasshouse, and his eyes were blinded by tears. This, he knew, was not a ghost, but a vivid recollection, and as soon as he acknowledged the fact, the image faded.

  Munt, confound him, had been right. It was inevitable that he and the Frenchwoman scholar would meet again. He knew it. More could be conveyed by a mere glance than a whole volume of speculation. He would attend her lecture, and invite her to visit at Number 7. Jean Hillier could come and act as chaperone – damn it! How stifling these conventions had become! Would they ever be rid of them?

  Meanwhile, he would have to seek out Rachel Noble – dear, staunch Rachel, whose secret company had kept him sane and sober for the last eighteen months. He could see her now, waiting in one Oxford teashop or another for him to join her, always interested in him and his work, a soul twinned with his, a companion who had been a wife in all but name.

  But there, across the table, was Elodie Deschamps, a woman who at first glance had thrilled and fascinated him. Two lines from The Beggar’s Opera suddenly obtruded themselves on to his consciousness.

  How happy I could be with either,

  Were t’other dear charmer away!

  *

  Anthony Jardine sat on his new Regency-striped sofa, reading Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes. It had just come out in book form. What a splendid name for a heroine – Elfride! It was a sad tale, and as Shakespeare said, ‘A sad tale’s best for winter.’ Well, it was still summer, and Jardine had other things to occupy him. He put the book down, and listened to the gurgling of Baby in the cot. Although it was a warm day, a small fire had been kindled in the grate, just in case Baby caught a chill.

  The door opened, and Dora came into the room. As always, Jardine’s surroundings faded, and he saw nothing but his young wife, looking vital in her sprig-muslin dress, and with a gardening basket on her arm. She joined him on the sofa, and they talked quietly about baby John, and the holiday that they would take later in the season on the Isle of Wight. He loved the baby, as any father would, but he was devoted to his wife Dora with all his heart. How pretty she was, how artless, and how loving!

  He felt supremely well that day, but was irritated by a heavy band of pressure across his forehead. Although he altered his position, and rubbed his brow, the pressure persisted.

  Dora laid her head on his shoulder, and for a while they were quiet, gazing at the fire. She was all he desired. His career as a scholar meant much to him, but it gained part of its attraction from the fact that when he left the halls of academe Dora was always there, waiting for him. He closed his eyes, and drifted into sleep.

  He became aware of a chilling wetness on his back which made him shudder. Gradually, he came back into a state of wakefulness. He still felt the crushing pressure on his forehead. He had the illusion, too, that he was drenched with water. Slowly he opened his eyes, and gasped with shock.

  He was kneeling in the mud that covered Dora’s grave, his head pressed against the wooden cross that served as a marker until a stone could be erected. It was teeming with rain, and he was soaked to the skin. Beside him, in the mud, was the bunch of Michaelmas daisies that he had brought with him to Botley cemetery. He straightened up, bemused and frightened. What had happened to him? Had he fainted? Fallen into a trance? Was he going insane?

  He glanced across the cemetery, blinking the rain from his eyes, and saw Dora standing motionless beneath one of the bare trees, looking at him. It was not the girl of the seventies, but the troubled woman whom he had just buried. He closed his eyes, but her image persisted. Holding himself close in an effort to avoid further soaking, Anthony Jardine staggered out of the deserted graveyard into North Hinksey Lane.

  *

  When he let himself into the house in Rose Hill Lane his nostrils were assailed by the smell of decay. On leaving the cemetery he had hailed a passing cab and told the driver to take him out to Cowley. The thought had struck him that Rachel was there, waiting for him to have the wit to call.

  He walked down the narrow hall and into the kitchen beyond. The smell came from the pantry, where a joint of mutton, rancid and tainted, was covered in feeding flies. A large jug of milk on the cold slab had turned sour and curdled. The house had not been occupied for days. He went into the cold sitting room, where he saw a pile of ashes in the grate. This had been their romantic hideaway. It was now a hollow, chilling shell of a life past and over. He saw an envelope propped against an ornament on the mantelpiece, and knew, before he opened it, that Rachel had deserted him.

  He sat down at the table, and read the letter. It was dated 15 November, two days after Dora’s murder.

  Dear Anthony (it ran),

  I do not believe for one moment that you made away with Dora, but you will realize that I cannot allow myself to be compromised by being associated with you any further. I know that you are too honourable a man to expose me to the world, and I wish you a speedy resolution of all your difficulties. I shall always think of you with fond affection.

  Rachel.

  He threw the letter down on the table. ‘Fond affection’! She might as well have signed off with “I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant.’ It was obvious that she believed he had murdered Dora. Of course he would never betray her. But it was clear, now, that he had meant nothing to her at any meaningful level. She had been robbed of her rights as a wife by her desiccated parody of a husband, and had used him to satisfy her needs.

  Like him, she was a scholar, a lecturer in medieval history at the Department of Extension Studies, so that her interest in his work had been genuine. But now that he had succeeded in giving her satisfaction, she would not stay the course and continue to see him. Well, he could not blame her for that. The foetid smell in the house brought on one of his raging headaches, and he quickly made his way out into the street. He slammed the door, knowing that he would never enter that house again.

  Sergeant Maxwell watched him as he made his way across Cowley Road to the Tramway Depot.

  *

  Gregory and Rachel Noble lived in a narrow brick house in Oliphant’s Yard, a little court behind Pembroke College. It contained four dwellings, all occupied by college
lecturers and their families. Jardine had no clear idea why he had decided to call. Perhaps he hoped to see Rachel for the last time, and to protest his innocence of any wrongdoing. He mounted the three steps to the house, and when he raised the knocker, he realized that the front door was half open.

  He had difficulty pushing open the door, because there was a stack of old, mouldering books behind it. The dim hall was awash with boxes of papers and pamphlets. From the ground-floor back Jardine caught the mournful strains of a cello. Making his way through boxes and piles of books he entered Gregory Noble’s study. The student of patristic texts was sitting on a stool, playing the cello. His wild, white hair stood up on his head like a tremulous halo; his eyes were like dark pools.

  The music, whatever it was, dipped and swooped and wailed. The old man looked at Jardine with a kind of wild, uncomprehending stare. Pages of foolscap lay on his desk, and on top of them a plate of stale and curling sandwiches.

  Jardine walked from Gregory Noble’s study, and opened the door of the little sitting room to the right of the hall. Rachel lay there on a settee, covered with a blanket. Fading flowers lay around her in abundance, and an ancient crucifix, one of Noble’s antique treasures, lay on her breast. The room held the sickly smell of incipient decay, and the curious flies were gathering.

  In the study, the music stopped, and then, a minute later, the cello started up again, this time playing a dirge. It was made all the more horrific when the old man’s quavering voice rose to sing the words that went with it, words which Jardine recognized.

  Dies iræ, dies illa

  Solvet sæclum in favilla,

  Teste David cum Sibylla.

  He rushed blindly from the room, and almost fell down the steps into the court. His headache beat away relentlessly, and it was all he could do not to be sick. He could still hear Gregory Noble singing the Dies Iræ. It was like living in a grotesque nightmare. Noble was mourning his dead wife in a way that suggested that he had lost his reason. Had he found out about them, and murdered her?

  Day of wrath and doom impending,

  David’s word with Sibyl’s blending,

  Heaven and earth in ashes ending.

  He glanced across the court, and felt a curious sense of relief when he saw the figure of the stolid Sergeant Maxwell walking towards him. Standing in the shadows behind him was the young Dora, wearing the mauve dress that he had bought her during that holiday on the Isle of Wight in 1873.

  9

  The Ladies of Oliphant’s Yard

  Within an hour of the gruesome discovery, the body of Rachel Noble had been removed to the City Mortuary. A cursory examination while the remains were still lying on the settee in the Nobles’ chaotic house had been carried out by a local doctor, who had darted gingerly around the body while holding a handkerchief soaked in eucalyptus oil to his nose.

  Rachel Noble had been dead for over two days and nights, and dissolution was far advanced. The patch of dried blood below the left breast suggested that she had been stabbed to the heart. More than that, he was not competent to say.

  Gregory Noble, still singing the Dies Iræ, had been declared by the same local doctor to be temporarily insane, and had been removed in a closed van to the Lunatic Asylum at Headington.

  ‘There are mice living in these mountains of paper,’ said Detective Inspector Antrobus. ‘The whole house – all this decay and neglect – is a monument to that poor old man’s obsession with early Church history. He sacrificed himself to it, and apparently sacrificed his wife, too.’

  ‘It’ll need fumigating, sir,’ said Sergeant Maxwell, ‘and all this junk will have to be removed before anyone can live here. I’m surprised that Mrs Noble put up with it. From what I hear, she was a well set-up sort of lady, a teacher in the Department of Extension Studies. How could she live in all this squalor?’

  They had conducted a preliminary search of the house, and had found that every room was a repository for hundreds of books, many of which had been gnawed by rats. There were two bedrooms, with brass bedsteads littered with items of clothing and folders of faded papers. For more than an hour they kept company with rats, mice and well-fed spiders.

  There was no concrete evidence that Rachel Noble had ever lived in the house. One bedroom contained a wardrobe, but it was filled with tattered linen maps of the Holy Land. Only in the kitchen on the ground floor was there anything suggesting that people actually lived there. A kitchen range, cold, and with a heap of ashes on the hearth, held a number of pans, all roughly cleaned, and one lidded pan which contained congealed soup, covered in green mould.

  There was a small plain wooden table, upon which stood two wine glasses and a crusted bottle of old port. Perhaps, thought Antrobus, among all this domestic ruin and mad research into the obscurities of past millennia, the old scholar had kept a decent cellar.

  ‘Sergeant,’ said Antrobus, ‘give me your conclusions concerning this bottle of wine, and these glasses. Somehow I can’t envisage Mr and Mrs Noble enjoying a tipple together in this cheerless place.’

  Sergeant Maxwell removed his black bowler hat, and placed in on the cold range. He sat down at the table, and peered closely at the wine bottle. James Antrobus relaxed in the other chair, and waited for his sergeant to pronounce his conclusions.

  ‘Sir,’ said Maxwell, when he had finished his examination, ‘this is a bottle of fine old port from Justerini and Brooks of St James’s, the London wine merchants. I enjoy the occasional glass of port, but have to admit that a glass of beer, or maybe a pint on occasions, is more to my liking. The bottle’s still half full, and the dregs at the bottom of the glasses are dry, but not dusty.’

  ‘Anything else?”

  ‘Well, sir, I imagine that the two people who sat here drinking wine did so not many days ago. I’ll hazard a guess that one of the two was Mrs Noble, and that she and someone else were celebrating the conclusion of some kind of agreement or deal. I think— Sir, I think that the other person – the murderer, as I take it – had lured Mrs Noble into a false sense of security, so that she would drink a whole glass of wine with him. There’s no sign of a struggle here, so I wonder if the wine was doctored with something?’

  ‘Excellent, Joe, I think you’ve hit on the truth. Do you recall that Dora Jardine was drugged with chloral hydrate before being stabbed? I think it’s one man who has committed both these murders. Yes, Mrs Noble was drugged here, then carried into the parlour, where she was laid on the couch and stabbed to death. We’ll take these glasses, and that bottle, and have them tested for noxious substances. PC Morton can come down later to collect them. Come on, Sergeant, let’s get out of here before we choke.’

  Sergeant Maxwell made no attempt to get up. He seemed to be deep in thought.

  ‘You appear to be in pensive mood, Sergeant,’ said Antrobus. ‘Would you care to share your thoughts with me?’

  ‘I’m just thinking, sir, that here we have Mr Jardine’s mistress dead, and the other day we had his wife dead, and in both instances Mr Jardine had been lurking in the background. I know you’ve taken a liking to him, sir, but if I may, I’d counsel caution.’

  ‘I take your point, Sergeant,’ said Antrobus. ‘Poor man, he was all but demented when you found him stumbling out of this place. I took a chance, and sent him home in a cab. His housekeeper’s devoted to him, and so, I suspect, is that woman friend of his late wife’s – Miss Jean Hillier. They’ll look after him for the time being.

  ‘I know you think I’m treating him too leniently, Sergeant, but I feel that there’s something else underlying this business, something that we’ve not yet seen. I remember you suggesting that we should be looking for an unknown man in a long mackintosh and wearing a trilby hat. It may well be that we should be doing more to look for him. It could be that he was the other person sipping port wine here with Rachel Noble.’

  The two policemen had left
the front door of the little house open, in an attempt to rid the place of the stench of death, and they were aware that a number of curious residents of Oliphant’s Yard were lingering in the little court, watching them. As they left the house and sealed the door with their official gummed wafers, a portly woman in a long black dress festooned with jet ornaments approached them.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘are you the policemen investigating what happened to Rachel Noble? Poor woman, she never really lived in that squalid place, you know. She rented two rooms from me across the court at number 2. It was a sort of pied-à-terre, if you know what I mean. She spent a lot of time at the Department where she lectured in medieval history—’

  The little throng of bystanders was becoming a crowd.

  ‘Do you think we could talk somewhere else, ma’am?’ said Antrobus. ‘I’m very interested in what you’re telling me, but I think we need to continue in private. I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘That’s because I never gave you it,’ said the woman, smiling. ‘My name is Joan Palance. My late husband used to lecture in Slavic languages at Pembroke, over the wall, there. You’d better come in, both of you, and have some tea. It’s rather – er – olfactory in the Nobles’ house at the moment.’

  She led them across the court to her own house, opened the front door, and invited them in. A greater contrast could not have been imagined. The house shared the same layout as that of the Nobles, but it was meticulously clean and ordered. Mrs Palance ushered them into a cheerful kitchen at the back of the house, and filled a kettle from the sink-pump. There was a dresser, with rows of gleaming plates and cups, and a modern paraffin stove, upon which a number of pans were simmering. In a few minutes they were enjoying a welcome cup of tea.