Scholar's Plot

by Hilari Bell

  “But an amateur murderer might have,” Michael murmured. “Most in that situation wouldn’t be thinking clearly enough to notice the crate.”

  “Or think about finding a pail, or something else to stand on in that shed between the compost heap and the privy?”

  Michael said nothing, so I led the way to the front door and tried the key. It took a bit of jiggling, as if it hadn’t often been used in that lock, but it turned and I swung the door wide.

  In this house the stairs started up from the front hall, in the usual way. Off to the left, through an open door, I saw the legs of an overturned chair and a corner of the hearth. Farther down the hall were two more doors, closed — kitchen and dining room, probably. The window with the muddy streaks would open into the dining room.

  The hall itself held a coat rack laden with coats, cloaks and professorial robes, all in the university colors, and a bench where you could put on or remove boots in bad weather. And lastly, a rug that would have been quite nice, if not for the huge red-brown stain that marred one corner.

  Michael, who for all his softness is less squeamish than I, knelt and lifted the edge. The blood beneath it was still wet and red. I didn’t blame the maids.

  “He bled a lot,” Michael said.

  “Head wounds do.”

  “That’s how it seems, when ’tis bleeding into your eyes in a fight. But most scalp wounds clot, eventually. This blow must have broken the skull, as well as the scalp.”

  “I wonder what he hit him with.”

  “Whatever ’twas, the guards will have taken it for evidence. What are you looking for, Fisk? Captain Chaldon told us how he died.”

  “I know. I’m looking for why he died.”

  And there might be no evidence of that, but I saw no need to admit it, yet.

  The front room, to the left of the hall, held formal furniture, much of it overturned, and a number of expensively bound books. Whether they belonged to the university and came with the house, or belonged to the librarian I couldn’t say. But they’d been thrown off the shelves and were lying on the floor, some face down with their pages crumpled beneath. My father had taught me to care for books, and I suppressed an urge to pick them up and rescue them.

  Someone had ransacked this room.

  “If he knew about the lecture, and everyone in town seemed to, why didn’t the killer wait till Hotchkiss was gone?” I asked. “When murders happen during a burglary, it’s usually because you’ve made too much noise, and the homeowner wakes up and confronts you. If he’d waited a while Hotchkiss would have been gone, and he could have taken the place apart in peace.”

  “You’re right,” said Michael. “I understand, now, why Captain Chaldon thinks murder was intended from the start.”

  “Then why take time to wreck the place, after he’d accomplished his goal?” This violent search couldn’t have taken place before the murder. It had been done while Hotchkiss’ blood was seeping into that carpet, and the thought made me shudder.

  “Mayhap ’twas a robbery after all, but Hotchkiss was running late? The killer thought he’d gone to the lecture, but Hotchkiss then came down and surprised him?”

  It wasn’t impossible. Figuring out what had happened by looking around a room was harder than the ballads made it seem.

  “Was he looking for valuables?” Michael went on. “Or something else?”

  “Hard to be sure. Something else would be better for us.”

  There were few signs of search in the kitchen, though several cupboard doors had been pulled open. Neither valuables or secrets are stored in a room where the maids might be looking for something at the back of a drawer or shelf.

  “He’d not only finished dinner, he had time to wash his dishes.” Michael gestured to a basin of cold, dirty water. A clean plate, cup, and assorted silverware sat on a towel beside it, along with an empty tea strainer.

  “But he didn’t get around to throwing the water out. Or putting the dishes away.” There was a kettle sitting on the hearthstone, with a thick pad beside it. “Did he make himself tea while he washed up?”

  “No tea pot,” Michael said.

  “Not here.”

  The killer hadn’t disturbed much in the pantry, and the search in the dining room looked perfunctory.

  Michael pulled open a drawer full of silverware and met my eyes. “So, ’twas a search for secrets after all.”

  I picked up a spoon, judging the weight. “It’s plate over tin, and thin too. But if it was a burglar, he’s pretty fussy.”

  “And Master Hotchkiss was well paid,” Michael said.

  Even silver plating is expensive. “I told you, any university in the Realm would want him. He was probably the best paid librarian, ever.”

  And he’d cared enough about possessions to spend money on them. The dining room rug was almost as good as the one in the front hall had been.

  It was in the upstairs rooms that the search had got-ten serious. The bed had been torn apart with absurd thoroughness. It’s only in ballads that people hide things under their mattresses — paper crackles, and anything else is too lumpy to sleep on. All Hotchkiss’ clothing had been pulled out of the big wardrobe and thrown on the floor. The linen was rather fine for a librarian, and while there was no lace on his cuffs — anyone who works with quill and ink knows better — the lace on his collars made up for it. It wasn’t overlarge, but intricate, and soft as spider silk.

  “A burglar would have cut this off. It would fetch a copper roundel a foot from a fence.”

  There was no point in going through the bureau — the killer had already done it.

  The back bedroom had been simply furnished, for a guest or a valet. It was full of boxes of papers, most of which had also been dumped on the floor. But it was in Hotchkiss’ office that the storm had really struck.

  You could tell this was the room he’d lived in, the chairs not only padded, but comfortably worn. A candelabra, now lying on the floor with its candles snap-ped, was coated with the drippings of long evenings of reading.

  The desk was sturdier than the rest of the furniture and older, not only well made, but stained and scratched. The bare shelves behind it told me where the clutter on the floor had come from.

  “He didn’t find what he was looking for,” I said.

  “How can you know that?” Michael bent to pick up a teacup that had fallen from a small table, which had once held the candelabra near the reading chair. Its saucer had broken in half, but the cup was intact.

  “Because we’ve been in every room, and they’ve all been tossed. If he’d found what he was looking for he’d have stopped. There’d be at least part of some room untouched.”

  “And nowhere is. Here’s the teapot, what’s left of it.”

  Unlike the thin cup, its thick ceramic had shattered into a dozen pieces.

  “Someone smashed this,” Michael said. “Deliber- ately.”

  “Maybe he was frustrated, and wanted to smash something.”

  “Mayhap.” He picked up a fragment of the bottom and sniffed it. Then he went and sniffed the teacup. “Spice tea.”

  “He died from a blow to the head,” I said. “Not poison.”

  “Then why smash the pot?”

  “Because it would be pretty frustrating to kill a man, and then not be able to find what you came for. In fact…” I reached down and pulled a paper from under a tumbled book. “Look what I found.”

  It was a pass to last night’s lecture, a bit sloppily printed. Understandable, in something that only had to last a few weeks. I watched Michael’s face change as comprehension dawned.

  “If he was leaving for the lecture, as Captain Chaldon said, why was that not in his pocket? He must have been killed earlier,” Michael said. “After dinner, but before ’twas time to depart.”

  “Then why was he dressed to go out when he was killed? Did he plan to go somewhere else first?”

  “Either that or the killer dressed him, to make it look as if he was on his way
to the lecture. But why?”

  We stared at each other in bafflement.

  “We don’t know enough,” Michael said.

  “Then let’s see if we can learn more.” I went to the desk, righted the chair, and began running my hands over the frame and under the belly drawer. “People who are frustrated, they miss things.”

  It wasn’t that well-hidden, once you started pulling out the drawers, though the lower drawer was deeper than the others, making the fact that it didn’t slide out as far less obvious. I had to do some searching to find the catch that released it from the desk, but once you removed the drawer, the narrow compartment at its back was visible. How to remove the lid fitted over the top wasn’t so obvious, and the light was beginning to dim. I carried it over to the window, to see better.

  “How did you know ’twould be in the desk?” Michael asked, as I felt and pried at the panel.

  “I didn’t. But there’s no reason to build a secret compartment in a house meant for your mother-in-law, so it would probably be in the furniture.”

  “Why not the bed, or the bookshelves, or—”

  “The desk doesn’t match the rest of the furniture, which I’m guessing came with the house. Some past librarian might have moved it in, but it was a logical place to—” The lid came off in my hand.

  The drawer was deep enough he’d only had to fold the papers once to fit them in, all four sheets, with symbols and letters on the outside. Once they were unfolded…

  “Ledgers,” said Michael. “They’re not supposed to look like it, but those are the initials of all the months, Hollyon, Junipera, Crocusa, Grassan.”

  “The numbers after that are amounts paid,” I said. “But it doesn’t say by who, or for what.”

  “That’s on the other side,” Michael said. “’Tis a code.”

  I turned the pages over once more. “Not a code. Just a symbol and letter so he can tell which sheet is whose. Heart, ‘PN.’”

  Master Hotchkiss’ writing was as neat as you’d expect from a man who spent his days painting numbers and letters onto book spines. The small heart drawing, and capital P and N were quite clear.

  “Professor N?” I speculated. “There’s a PB as well.”

  “Professors? Surely not.”

  “Why surely? Do you know the difference between a professor and a bandit? You usually forget what professors teach you. The lessons you learn from a bandit stick.”

  Michael grimaced — and I have to admit, I’ve done better.

  “‘D,’” he said. “And hammer, ‘A.’ But the D’s crossed out.”

  “There’s only one set of payments on this sheet,” I said. “Looks like D refused to pay. Here’s a quill pen, but the ‘PS’ has been crossed out too … and no payments at all. Professor Sevenson, by any chance?”

  “Benton didn’t say anything about … whatever this is. Scales, ‘M,’ 87? And ‘PB’… S 20, that’s a year, isn’t it? The 20th year of Stephan’s reign. Eight years ago. But what does the 87 mean?”

  “No idea.” I turned that sheet over and looked. “But you’re right, two sets of entries, and they run for just nearly eight years. It’s not the largest account, either. ‘AH’ has been paying for almost twelve years now. Though it looks like AH is just one person.”

  The A was a bit off too, with one longer leg and the cross stroke curling past the second leg. The string of numbers and letters after these initials was incomprehensible, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t hold back the words any longer.

  “You do realize what this means, don’t you?”

  “Master Hotchkiss was blackmailing these people.” Michael looked gloomy. “How sad for a brilliant man to stoop to such a thing. And why? You said yourself that any university would have hired him. This house is a fine one! He had no need to prey on other men’s secrets.”

  “It doesn’t have to be need,” I said. “Though he certainly spent the money. None of these sums are huge — not even Professor N’s, and he pays more than the others — but they’d add up nicely over time. At this point, I’m surprised the silverware was only plated. But blackmail is often as much about power as it is the money. And this demolishes your theory about the project being behind it. If Hotchkiss was a black- mailer, that’s almost certainly why he was killed.”

  Which left me in charge!

  Michael looked even gloomier, but he rallied bravely. “Then why did someone plant that fake thesis, to frame Benton? The ‘PS’ was crossed out.”

  “Probably because Benton didn’t pay him,” I said. “Which might explain why he brought the forged thesis forward… It would take some nerve, to fake that dissertation, and then try to blackmail someone with it.”

  It wasn’t how blackmailers usually worked either. It was their victims’ knowledge of their own guilt that kept the money flowing.

  “If he tried to blackmail Benton, and revealed his secret when Benton wouldn’t pay, then your brother really does have a motive.”

  “But he’d have told me… No, this is Benton. Besides, he has an alibi. He was sitting with friends waiting for the lecture to start.”

  “That alibi only works if you assume Hotchkiss was on his way to the lecture when he was killed. And since he didn’t have the pass with him, we’re assuming that someone killed him earlier, and then tried to make it look like he was killed when the lecture was about to start. So they’d have an alibi.”

  “Then that lets Benton out,” Michael said firmly. “He was with me before the lecture started. We came onto the campus together, and he went into the lecture hall while I headed for the library. But even if he didn’t, Benton would no more murder a man than … than I would. In fact, I’d be more likely to kill than Benton.”

  For all his faults — and he had them — Michael wouldn’t kill anyone, even a blackmailer. On the other hand, one of those faults was to see the best in people, particularly people he cared about.

  Look who he’d picked to be his squire.

  “If he was with you, then he’s got an alibi for the time before the lecture as well,” I said. We didn’t know how long before the lecture Hotchkiss had been killed, but it wasn’t likely Benton could have sneaked away from Michael and Kathy long enough to commit a murder. And only a monster could have then gone back and pretended nothing had happened so well neither of them would suspect him. “But while I’m willing to take your word for it, Captain Chaldon won’t be. This makes you both look a lot more guilty than you did this morning. Which means we can’t tell the law what we found here.”

  “I realized that,” said Michael, “from the moment we broke in. Without permission.”

  “It’s a good thing we did,” I pointed out. “If Chaldon had found this…” My gaze went to the lecture pass, sitting on one corner of the desk. “He must only have glanced at this room, or he’d have found the pass and asked the same questions we did. And how did Benton get a lecture pass? It’s not as if he’s welcome on the campus these days.”

  Michael frowned. “I don’t know. He had it, and was planning to attend when I arrived. Mayhap he got it before he was dismissed, and decided to go anyway. ’Twas open to anyone with a pass, even the townsfolk.”

  “Maybe.” But I tucked the lecture pass in with the blackmail notes, and was about to leave when I remembered something else I’d seen in a desk drawer. I opened it again, and pulled out Master Hotchkiss’ keys.

  “Fisk! You promised not to… Well, even if you didn’t, ’twas implicit that we’d not rob the house!”

  “I’m not ‘robbing the house.’ I’m making it possible for us to get into anyplace Hotchkiss could go without having to burgle it. Including the library you want to get into so badly. We still need to look at that thesis, and I want to search his office. If Hotchkiss was the kind of man who’d commit blackmail, it’s likely he was in on framing your brother.”

  Michael sighed, but evidently brothers came before knightly principles. He said nothing as I refolded the papers, and tucked them inside my vest si
nce neither of us wore coats on this warm day. I would have left then — it was almost dark — but Michael led me down to the kitchen, and went to the compost pail that sat below the basin. I could smell the contents when he removed the lid, fresh and rotting at the same time. He reached in and pulled out a mass of damp brown gunk, then looked around helplessly for something to carry it in.

  I went into the dining room and pulled a clean napkin from one of the drawers. It might stain the linen, but Hotchkiss wouldn’t care.

  “Was the tea magica,” I asked, as Michael folded damp grounds into the cloth. “Is that what’s bothering you?”

  “No.” Michael could see magic, as well as feel it, so he’d know. “But there’s a scent to it that’s … off. I just… ’Tis not right, Fisk.”

  Whether they’re related to magic or not — and I think they are, no matter what the scholars say — Gifts are quirky, vague, unpredictable … and they work. So I nodded, and was grateful that the slowly dampening napkin would end up in his pocket instead of mine.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s almost dark, and I want to return Peebles’ keys before we tackle the library.”

  There were fewer students in the commons behind the library when we left Master Hotchkiss’ house, locking the door behind us and strolling off as insouciantly as we’d gone in. Since there was no longer enough light to read by only the debaters remained, almost invisible in their black coats, for ’twas finally turning cool. Their topic had shifted from natural science to whether Mistress Selina could be brought to notice Tommy’s attempts to court her, and most didn’t think the odds were in his favor.

  Several windows in the library glowed faintly, proclaiming that a few scholars had lit lamps to finish up their work. So I made no objection when Fisk insisted that our next task was to return Mistress Peebles’ keys. We’d have to wait till the library was deserted before we broke in, since…

  “Why would Professor Dayless set a scholar to keep us out of the library? Has she some reason to dislike Benton? He said nothing of it.”

  “More likely she doesn’t like us,” Fisk said. “I did try to break into the tower last night, and you came back this morning, snooping around her precious project. Or it could be she’s just following the rules. You told her we were going there next, and most universities restrict access to their libraries.”