by Richard King
“What on earth?” she exclaimed. “It was here this morning. It’s always here.” She looked at us, and a blush reddened her face. Was she blushing because she was lying? Or because we might think she was? I couldn’t tell. But I thought she had sounded genuinely surprised and baffled when she saw it was gone.
“Were you in your office all day?” Gaston asked.
“Of course not!” She was beginning to sound agitated, and looked as if she might cry. “I teach, I eat, I go to the bathroom, for God’s sake. But I lock my door when I leave. Even if it’s only for a minute.”
“You’re suggesting that someone broke in and stole your computer without leaving a trace?”
“What else could have happened? It’s no big deal to pick these locks.” A look of fear suddenly crossed her face. “Do you think it could have been the person who murdered Hal, coming back to look for more things to steal?”
“It could,” Gaston dipped his head in a single nod, keeping his eyes on hers. “Or, it could be that you heard from your husband that we found Hilliard’s computer and knowing it was only a matter of time until I came to see you, you destroyed some evidence. Your copy of the letter we found on Hilliard’s computer.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, why would I get rid of the computer? If I wanted to do away with my letters to Hal I’d just erase them. Your accusation makes no sense.”
Now it was Gaston’s turn to look embarrassed. He was stumped, but I knew a little more about computers than he did and I jumped in. “Come on, Professor More, you know that when you erase something on a computer the file doesn’t really go away. You just erase the information that tells the computer where it’s located. You knew that an expert could probably reconstruct anything you erased.”
I wasn’t sure what I was saying was actually true, and I knew I was risking being thrown out, but I wanted to help Gaston make his arrest.
He seemed to appreciate my remark. “I don’t know much about computers. But it seems that you might have had a strong motive to destroy your own computer, no?”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Jane said, anger creeping into her voice. “I didn’t kill Harold. I can prove I’m innocent.” Again, she paused for a long moment, inhaled deeply, exhaled and continued. “But the only way I can do that is to confess to a crime that in my profession is almost as serious as murder. Worse, maybe.” She was sitting train-rail rigid in her chair, her hands folded on her desk and she looked straight at us. There was no blushing or eye averting or any of the other things I associate with guilt. I was impressed by her self-control.
Gaston matched her cool stare with one of his own. “What crime do you mean, Ms. More?”
“The rumours were right. I did plagiarize my doctoral thesis. But I’m not a murderer. Do you want to hear my story?”
“I very much want to hear your story,” he told her. “But wouldn’t you rather tell it to me privately?” My mind instantly began racing through all kinds of reasons why I should be allowed to stay in the room with them, but I was saved by Professor Miller-More.
Looking over at me, she said, “Actually, I think I’d like to have a witness. I would appreciate it if what I’m about to tell you never leaves this room. But I understand that you may not be able to respect my strong desire for confidentiality. If you can’t do that at least I want a witness, a disinterested witness, who can corroborate my side of the story. Can I count on your discretion, Mr. Wiseman?” I guess she knew that Gaston would do what he had to do. But if she needed an ally, she might be able to turn me into one — provided I believed her story.
“Yes,” I said firmly.
“OK, then,” she said with a note of resignation in her voice. She looked at a spot on the wall over our heads again, as if she were looking for notes up there. After a moment she began to speak, as calmly as if she was telling us something that happened to someone else. “I was in the final stages of working on my dissertation. My research had been complete, I had written a comprehensive outline, I was well organized. All that was left was to write the thesis itself. I thought that would be the easy part. It wasn’t. I had to write some of my chapters two and three times to satisfy my thesis adviser. I had a Canada Council grant, but it only had one more year to run. After that there would be no money coming in and it was beginning to look like the writing and revising was going to take another two years. I knew there was no hope of getting funding for an additional year: I had already spent every penny I could squeeze out of the grant process. I had no family I could turn to for money and my friends were just as poor as I was. I was angry, almost hysterical, at the thought of having to work outside my field for a couple of years to get enough money together to continue. I was afraid that if I gave up working on my thesis I might never get it done and even if I did finish I would miss the first round of job opportunities, and even if I did get a job I would be much older than my colleagues at the same level and my career would be held up by a couple of years.”
“Not a prospect a young, ambitious, bright graduate student wants to face,” I said. I was beginning to feel some sympathy for Jane. I’d been a desperately poor young graduate student once myself.
“No. Then I had a stroke of luck. While prowling the stacks of the University of Toronto Library I discovered an unpublished thesis on my topic: artisans’ political organizations in France at the time of the 1848 revolutions. At first this seemed like the worst possible luck. If my work turned out to be an echo of the unpublished thesis I would have to start over to find something original to say. Bad luck turned to opportunity when I tried to check the thesis out of the library. I discovered that it was uncatalogued. I did some checking and discovered that there was no record of a thesis by Theodore Renard anywhere. I checked dissertation abstracts and the catalogues of other academic libraries. Nothing. The thesis, ‘Artisans and Politics in France in 1848,’ was written during the Second World War and fell through the archival cracks. I could barely find anything out about the author. What little tle I did discover confirmed my belief that the thesis was, in effect, lost forever. Renard was awarded his PhD in 1942 and went on to serve in the Canadian military for a couple of years and then to a career as a professor of modern history at the University of British Columbia. He published little and what he did publish had nothing to do with the revolutions of 1848. He seemed to have spent the whole of his career teaching graduates and undergraduates at a time when a good teacher could teach and not perish if he didn’t publish. In fact he had died a year previously and I could not even find an obituary in any of the professional publications.”
Excited and fearful, Jane slipped the thesis out of the library and read it; large parts of it, although written forty years before, came to the same conclusions as she did. She calculated the risks and decided to take a chance. “All I had to do was plug Renard’s passages into my research and I had a well-written, well-researched finished product. I told myself that it was the work I would have done myself if I had had the time and the funding, and it was true. I was able to complete my thesis to my advisor’s satisfaction within the year I had left.”
Things got even better, she told us, when she was offered a tenure-track appointment at McGill. This was unusual, as most universities don’t like to hire their former students for their first job. But both Hilliard and her future husband, Fred More, who was chair of the history department at the time, were very impressed with her work. She was so sure that she had it made that the way in which she made it began to recede from memory. She came to believe that she earned her success. Even her relationship with Hilliard was perfect for two ambitious people. It offered her plenty of professional support: access to people that she would not have on her own as a young assistant professor, enough
romance to keep her happy but not so much as to make her feel trapped.
“Fred, as history chair, should have read the whole of my dissertation before I was hired, instead of skimming the first couple of chapters and relying on the abstract of
the thesis and the opinions of the others on the hiring committee. It’s not that Fred was lazy, he was just too busy to read it at the time. Unfortunately for me, he did get around to reading it and was sure that he recognized parts of it from his graduate student days. It was my bad luck that he had studied with the ‘totally forgotten’ Ted Renard. Fred was one of the last doctoral students he took on. Fred took the time to read Renard’s doctoral dissertation because he so much admired his mentor.”
I mentally translated that to “because he was a toady.” Jane’s next words confirmed my judgement of More.
“It served him well as a graduate student, making him one of Renard’s favourites, and he never forgot Renard’s elegant writing style. He recognized it as soon as he read it again when he finally got around to reading my thesis. I’d tried to alter Renard’s style to disguise my heavy ‘borrowings’ but when something has been said so well it’s hard to resist using the same words. And I really didn’t think it would ever be discovered.”
This is where the story took a turn that I hadn’t anticipated. I had theorized, and I suspected that Gaston had too, that Jane had allowed herself to be blackmailed into marrying Fred to avoid exposure as a plagiarist — that to save her own skin she had left Hilliard at the altar, figuratively if not literally, and that after a couple of years Hal started to put pressure on her to leave Fred, not knowing that she had married him under psychological duress. I had further speculated that she was afraid to leave More because he had knowledge that could ruin her, and was angry with Hilliard for continuing to pursue her. I assumed, in fact, that she hated both of them, her husband and her former lover, and that it was possible she had killed Hilliard because he would not get out of her life. Maybe it was premeditated, maybe it happened spontaneously during an argument; either way, I was almost certain that she was the murderer.
The story Jane Miller-More now told us was more or less the opposite of all that. She had broken up with Hal because after years of struggle to get her career launched she wanted a secure profession, marriage, and a home, with the possibility of children somewhere in the future. Hal was ambivalent, and when pushed he became stubborn. He didn’t want that kind of life, he told her. When Fred More showed an interest, Jane was grateful and flattered. Fred represented all the things Jane wanted from life — all the things that Hilliard was not prepared to commit to.
“Maybe I loved the security Fred offered more than I loved Fred himself, even then,” she told us. “But he said he loved me enough for the two of us. I came to believe that my ideas were too romantic, and that Fred and I could have a good marriage. And we did. I didn’t feel the passion I had felt for Hal, but in a way that was a comfort too. Hal had hurt me so much by his coldness.”
. Fred had only got around to reading Jane’s thesis after they were married and he only read it because he was sincerely interested in Jane and her work. He recognized the plagiarized chapters almost as soon as he read them but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He was truly happy married to Jane and didn’t want to ruin their relationship or her career. He was well aware that he loved her more than she loved him and that made him even more cautious about rocking the marital boat. In fact he didn’t even mention what he had discovered for the first year of their marriage.
Inevitably, Hal Hilliard realized what he had lost. He decided that he was ready to offer Jane the things she wanted. In typical Hilliard fashion, he didn’t see the fact that Jane was married, happily married so far as any one knew, as a deterrent — just an obstacle to be overcome. He asked Jane to come back to him.
“And I realized I had never really stopped being in love with Hal,” Jane told us. She looked calm but there were tears in her eyes. She dabbed at them with a tissue. “And of course Fred knew something was wrong. He knew I was in love with somebody else, but he didn’t know who it was. And he made a stupid mistake.”
In his hurt pride and anger, Fred told her that he knew that she had plagiarized part of her thesis and he expected her to remain married to him. If she didn’t, she could guess the consequences: he would expose her. But Jane realized more quickly than Fred that covering up for a plagiarist is almost as bad as being a plagiarist. The fact that Fred hadn’t exposed her before now meant that he never could; the assumption would be that he had condoned the plagiarism until she asked for a divorce. Denouncing her at that point would only make him seem spiteful and petty. He would be a laughingstock. More was a man who cared very much for his public image, his reputation, and that would be destroyed along with his career. As he was farther up the academic ladder than she his fall would be farther than hers.
“But I could never forgive him for threatening me. I knew I no longer loved him, but then I began to despise him. I was was living for the day when I could get a divorce and Hal and I could be married. Fred tried to tell me — it was the last card he had to play — that if I left him my reputation would be ruined. That was a laugh. Divorce in the academic world is grist for the gossip mill, no more than that. The faculties at some universities are so interdivorced and intermarried that they made soap operas look like nursery rhymes. Hal and I started seeing each other in secret. It was only a matter of time before I worked out a divorce agreement with Fred. He would have agreed in the end, as long as I promised not to cause what he called a scandal.”
Gaston asked the obvious question: “Do you have any evidence to support your story? The only person who can confirm that you were planning to leave your husband is dead. That is, unless you already told your husband of your plans.”
“No, I hadn’t told him. He didn’t know anything about it. He still thought we could ‘get past all this and have a great marriage.’ His words. I was working up my courage to tell him he was a fool. I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”
“The plagiarism can be checked so I tend to believe it,” Gaston said, watching her closely.
“Why would I confess to plagiarism if I was also a murderess? Wouldn’t it be smarter for me to keep my mouth shut and see what happened? In my profession an act of plagiarism is worse than murder. If word of this ever got out I would be finished.”
“Exactly, Professor,” Lemieux said. “But being exiled from the academy is a lot better than spending the next twenty-five years in jail, no?”
“Of course it is,” Professor Miller-More responded.
“Then why confess to anything?” Gaston asked.
“You all but accused me of murder and I want you to understand that I am basically an honest person who made mistakes in her life but I also am at the point where I can no longer continue to live a lie. Harold and I planned to be together again and I had to hope that my secret would remain hidden but I was prepared to face the consequences of Fred exposed me. Now that Harold is gone I see that I wasted too much time — time that Hal and I could have shared. His death, as much as his life, made me realize that I am not going to settle for less than I want, less than I deserve for myself. And if it means that I’ll be exiled from the academy, as you put it, at least I’ll be in control of my life. I’ll find other things to do. I owe at least that much to Hal’s memory and to myself.” She leaned back in her chair and looked at us without blinking, almost daring us to challenge her statement. “Believe me, I’ve told you the whole truth.”
I wasn’t sure what to believe. Was her story true? Was it a red herring? The tale of her secret love affair with Harold Hilliard was impossible to prove. Could it be a smokescreen to disguise her motive for killing him?
Gaston stood, and looking down at Miller-More, he said, “You’ve saved yourself from being arrested while I look into your story. But you are still a suspect in a murder investigation so I expect you to make yourself available when I need to talk to you again. Do you understand?”
Jane nodded.
“One more thing,” Gaston added. “Where is your computer? These damn things keep disappearing and they’re important. If you had your computer I could verify at least part of your story ri
ght here.”
“I know,” Jane replied. “I don’t know who stole it. Probably the murderer but it could just be a coincidence.”
“I don’t think so,” Gaston said. “It’s also possible that you got rid of it yourself if there was something incriminating on it. No?”
Jane said nothing but looked Gaston in the eyes without blinking. For my mother that would have been a sure sign of innocence, but I wondered. It could also be a sign that Miller-More was a very cool, in-control person.
Gaston looked at his watch. “It’s probably too late to find your husband in his office and maybe too late to start looking for your computer. I’ll be back to see you sometime tomorrow when I’ll have had a chance to do a little more checking. If you locate your computer don’t touch it. Call me.” He handed her a card. “Call me on my cell phone. The number is on my card.”
We went out into the Montreal night, and walked across the campus together not saying a word. Just as we were passing through Roddick Gates to Sherbrooke Street, Gaston turned to me and asked if I needed a lift somewhere. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go but I was sure that I didn’t want to be excluded from the rest of the case.
“Do you think she’s telling the truth?” I asked, avoiding his question.
“I don’t know. It has the ring of truth but I’m not sure that the confession to plagiarism is proof that she didn’t commit murder. It could be the other way around: a ruse to throw us off the scent. Confess to plagiarism to avoid being charged with the more serious crime. If her plagiarism becomes public the worst that can happen is that she’ll lose her job. That’s a lot better than going to jail for murder. I’ve got to find a way to check her story. And that’s the damnable thing. How on earth do you check a story like that?”