5 - Murder on Campus

by Hazel Holt

  ‘So he must have been the last person to see Loring alive,’ I said. ‘Except for the murderer, I suppose. Does Rick Johnson have an alibi?’

  ‘Yes, he was giving some sort of movie show in the little theatre,’ he replied. ‘There were quite a few students there.’

  ‘I still can’t get over anyone teaching film,’ I said irrelevantly. ‘So I suppose that lets him out. Anyway, he was rather a Loring supporter, especially now that there was this idea of re-equipping the theatre, all those plans. I suppose,’ I said regretfully, ‘we really can’t pin Max Loring’s murder on his brother now?’

  ‘Too soon to say yet if the murders were done by the same person.’ Mike poured some more water on to the mound of ice in my glass. ‘Max Loring was shot, his brother was knifed. Different methods. It could be that Carl Loring killed his brother—for money, perhaps, though there may be other family reasons we haven’t found yet. Then someone seized the opportunity to kill Carl, someone who had a really sound alibi for Max’s murder who might hope we’d think the murders were both done by the same person.’

  ‘Or,’ I said excitedly, ‘someone like Walter Cleveland, who had a motive for murdering Max Loring, might have killed him and then someone who wasn’t anywhere near the Institute that night could have killed Carl for totally different reasons.’

  ‘There’s a lot of work to be done,’ Mike said. ‘We’re only just at the beginning.’

  We all went about our business as usual at Wilmot. Most of us felt (guiltily) a sense of relief that now we could get on with things peacefully.

  ‘Not having to look over our shoulders,’ Sara said, ‘to see if Loring is going to stab us in the back. Oh, my God! I shouldn’t have said that, should I? But you know what I mean.’

  Gina telephoned Linda to say that she was ill.

  ‘She was sick in bed when I called the other morning,’ Linda said, ‘she said she couldn’t get to the phone in time. Some sort of virus. She hasn’t been able to get down to the doctor’s office yet.’

  ‘But surely he’s been to visit her?’ I said. ‘If she’s feeling so bad.’

  ‘This is Allenbrook,’ Linda said, ‘not Taviscombe. Here, you’re either well enough to go to see the doctor, or else you’re in the hospital. No one makes house-calls.’

  ‘But that’s awful! I said, thinking of my own splendid Dr Macdonald. ‘I couldn’t have survived Michael’s childhood—tonsilitis, mumps, scarlet fever, you name it, he had it, all usually flaring up at eleven o’clock at night!—if my doctor hadn’t visited. Shouldn’t one of us go round and see how Gina is? I mean, she might need medicines or something.’

  ‘I did offer,’ Linda replied, ‘but she said she had everything she needed and just wanted to stay in bed for a bit.’

  ‘Oh well,’ I said, ‘perhaps that’s why she’s been so odd lately. She must have been sickening for this.’

  The next morning I was going through some class papers in my room at Wilmot when the fluorescent light over my desk went. Although I had a rather fancy Anglepoise lamp that looked like some strange prehistoric bird, there wasn’t really room for it on my desk when I had my papers all spread out. Reluctantly I got to my feet and went in search of one of the janitors.

  There were two janitors who looked after the department building, Ben, who was young, cheerful and obliging and Gus who was old, disagreeable and unhelpful. There was no sign of Ben but I finally ran Gus to earth in the furnace room where he was engaged in some mysterious ploy that necessitated his moving a pile of boxes from one side of the extensive space to the other. I greeted him with that bright, false jollity I always find myself employing when I want to propitiate people.

  ‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘if you could be very kind and replace the fluorescent light in my room. I’m afraid it’s too high up for me to manage it myself,’ I went on, as if such a course of action on my part were possible, though both of us knew that it wasn’t.

  Gus paused in his manhandling of a particularly large box. ‘I got all this to do,’ he said sourly, ‘and no help. That Ben, he’s off somewhere—I shouldn’t be doing heavy work like this here. Due to retire next year, I’m an old man. It ain’t right I should be hauling boxes at my age ...’

  He subsided into muttering and I tried again.

  ‘Well, perhaps if you came and changed the light for me now, by the time you’d done that, Ben would be back and could help you with these.’

  He paused and considered this.

  ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘These here boxes got to be shifted right away. That’s what they said, right away.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said helplessly, ‘what am I going to do?’ He ignored this feminine appeal with an ease, no doubt, born of practice and went back to his boxes.

  ‘You don’t know where Ben is, then?’ I asked.

  He regarded me scornfully, ‘If I’d known where Ben was I’da had him here helping me with this.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I replied.

  I looked about me. The furnace room was a cavernous place with pipes running round the walls and an enormous heating apparatus rearing up at one end, like some tribal god. Several doors led out from this space and I suddenly thought of something.

  ‘Are all these doors always locked?’ I asked.

  He looked up from his task and said laconically, ‘Should be.’

  ‘Were they locked last Monday?’

  He straightened up. ‘You mean the day that guy was killed?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, noting that I seemed to have caught his attention at last. ‘I gather they were locked that day.’

  ‘Who says they was locked?’ he asked truculently.

  ‘Well,’ I replied, slightly taken aback by his manner, ‘I think Professor Huron told the police ...’

  He gave a snort of disgust. ‘They’d no business asking him about them doors. He wouldn’t know if they was locked or open. He’da said they was locked, because that’s what they was supposed to be and he ain’t ever going to admit things round here ain’t perfect all the time.’

  From the heavily accented references to Rob Huron I deduced that Gus shared the general view of the department about their Chair.

  ‘If they’da come to me,’ Gus went on, ‘I’da told them. But no,’ he continued with heavy irony, ‘they wouldn’t ask nobody who knows what goes on in this place.’

  ‘So the doors weren’t locked that day?’ I asked. ‘Not the one leading to the commons room kitchen, for instance?’ ‘Nope. Couldn’t be. Not when that Ben’—he brought out the name of his hated rival triumphantly—‘broke the lock and it ain’t been fixed yet.’

  ‘I see,’ I replied. ‘And what about this main door here?’

  ‘Can’t keep it locked all the time,’ he said defensively. ‘When you’re in and out all day, you can’t go off getting the key every Goddam time you want to move some boxes’—he scowled at the pile in front of him—‘and junk like that.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said soothingly.

  ‘You tell me,’ he demanded, ‘how I’m going to be in and out with boxes and stuff when I got to go and fetch the key every five minutes?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘certainly not. You’re absolutely right.’

  ‘What he don’t understand,’ Gus went on remorselessly, ‘is that I ain’t got but one pair of hands.’

  He turned back to the boxes again and, feeling myself dismissed, I went away to look for Ben.

  ‘So you see,’ I said to Linda that evening as we washed up after supper, ‘someone could easily have got through that door from the furnace room into the kitchen without being seen. They wouldn’t have had to go through the department as such at all. So it could have been anyone!’

  ‘Well, I know Loring was pretty unpopular,’ Linda said wryly, ‘but I don’t think—do you—someone just came in off the street and murdered him.’

  ‘Idiot!’ I said. ‘You know what I mean. It doesn’t actually have to be someone in the department. It could have been—oh, someone
from the Institute, perhaps, who had a reason for killing Max Loring and Carl found out somehow and so whoever it was crept in and killed him to keep him quiet.’

  ‘Still,’ Linda said, scraping away at the baked bits of lasagne that still clung to one of the dishes, ‘it would have had to be someone who knew Wilmot fairly well, otherwise how would they know about the door from the kitchen to the boiler room?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so, but it would open up the field of suspects, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Are you going to call your friend Mike and tell him?’ Linda enquired.

  ‘Oh dear, I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose I better had.’

  ‘Well, he ought to know,’ she said reasonably.

  ‘Well, hello!’ Mike sounded pleased when I rang.

  ‘I’ve just found out something you ought to know,’ I said and told him what I had gleaned from Gus. ‘He’s right, of course, Rob Huron never would admit that anything wasn’t as it should be, so he’d automatically say that the doors were locked without actually checking that they were.’

  ‘Yes, well, I guess I slipped up there,’ Mike said. ‘I should have checked for myself. Thanks, Sheila, that was neatly done!’

  ‘But it does open up the field of suspects, don’t you think?’ I asked.

  ‘And, even more important,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘it helps with the timing. It’s been bothering me how the murderer could have been in and out so quickly, if that guy Hunter was telling me the truth—and it would be an odd kind of thing to lie about, because it would increase suspicion on him. Though I still can’t figure out why he changed his story.’

  ‘You mean,’ I exclaimed, ‘that the murderer might still have been in the kitchen when Dave went into the commons room?’

  ‘I’d think that was quite likely,’ he replied.

  ‘Goodness!’ I said. ‘It must have been quite a scary moment for him.’

  ‘Or her,’ Mike suggested.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ I said. ‘So he—or she—came and went through the furnace-room door. Come to think of it, nobody would notice anyone going in and out of the furnace room, it’s pretty well off the beaten track at Wilmot, and I’ve got a strong suspicion that Gus and Ben aren’t in there very much. Ben, I know, likes to be around the department chatting to anyone who’ll listen, and Gus spends quite a lot of time in a sort of little shack by the parking lot, doing goodness knows what!’

  Mike laughed. ‘For a newcomer to Wilmot you’ve certainly got most people pretty well figured out.’

  ‘You don’t really suspect Dave Hunter, do you?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I know it’s the classic “last person to see the victim alive” situation, but Dave wouldn’t have a real motive.’

  ‘It seemed to me,’ Mike said, ‘that his hatred of this Loring guy was rather more than just colleagues bickering. Wasn’t there a real chance that he might lose his job?’

  ‘No, Dave had tenure,’ I replied. ‘Loring couldn’t get him dismissed.’

  ‘But there was real bad blood between them,’ Mike persisted. ‘When he spoke to me he got pretty well worked up about various issues they’d fought about.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ I said quickly, ‘Dave does get carried away sometimes.’

  ‘A constant friction, going on for some time, especially at a bad time for him, when he’d just lost his wife. People can go to pieces at a time like that.’ Mike spoke quietly and with feeling. ‘You don’t think too straight when something like that happens, you don’t have a sense of proportion. Sometimes you just have to lash out at whatever seems to be a source of aggravation.’

  ‘It still doesn’t seem enough of a motive for murder,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘A really little thing can lead to murder,’ Mike said. ‘You’d be surprised. What did surprise me with Hunter,’ he went on, ‘was the way he almost wanted to draw suspicion on to himself. Now that really did get me wondering.’

  ‘You mean,’ I said curiously, ‘as if he wanted to draw it away from another person? But why should he want to do that?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the obvious reason would be that he was trying to protect someone.’

  ‘Someone he might have thought had actually done the murder, you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It has been known.’

  ‘Well,’ I said roundly, ‘I can’t think of anyone in the department he felt that strongly about!’

  But I knew very well who Dave might be wanting to protect and that was something I had no wish to think about too deeply.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘I must remember to order a cake from Schmidt’s,’ Linda said. ‘It’s a sort of thing, when it’s your birthday, to provide cake for the department—silly, really, but we all do it.’

  ‘Even Loring?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she laughed, ‘usually something very fancy, so that he could make a show, of course.’

  ‘Don’t order one,’ I said on a sudden impulse. ‘Let me make one instead. How would you like a rich fruit cake? A Dundee, perhaps?’

  ‘Wow!’ Linda said. ‘A genuine Malory cake, like those you used to give me in Taviscombe?’

  ‘If you’d like it,’ I replied. ‘I think perhaps I’d better make two, while I’m about it, so there’s enough to go round. I don’t suppose,’ I went on, ‘you have any sort of cake-tin for me to bake it in? I thought not. Well, I shall buy one—no, two—and leave them with you in the hope that one day you’ll take up cake-making yourself. It’s highly therapeutic and probably much better for you than jogging. I don’t believe anyone ever died of a heart attack while making a cake!’

  I had a free morning so I thought I’d go down to the local supermarket and get the ingredients. I love American supermarkets, not just because the products on the shelves are so rich and strange, but the atmosphere and, indeed, the whole shopping ethos is quite different. As I said to Anna once, when we were in D’Agostino’s in Brooklyn, if I told people in Taviscombe that I was buying an enormous T-bone steak at ten o’clock on a Sunday night, they simply wouldn’t believe me!

  I was looking with my usual feeling of wonderment and awe at the immense slabs of meat that seemed to make up a normal American portion, when a voice behind me said, ‘Somebody else doing the shopping too!’

  It was Dave Hunter.

  ‘That’s some basketful you have there,’ he said. ‘Can I give you a hand?’

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I think the entire female population of England, over the age of fifty has one arm longer than the other from carrying heavy shopping baskets. It’s all those years we spent going from shop to shop on foot before we had supermarkets!’

  ‘I’m just picking up some ground beef for the kids,’ Dave said. ‘My mother’s out tonight and hamburgers are about the limit of my culinary capacity.’

  We made our way to the checkout and, as our things were being packed away in those lovely strong brown paper bags, I said, ‘Now I must go and find some sort of tin to bake all this in. I suppose Katy’s Kitchen will have one. I wonder,’ I went on tentatively, ‘have you got a spare half-hour? Do you feel like having a coffee? There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.’

  Dave looked slightly surprised at this request but said agreeably enough, ‘Sure, I’d like that.’

  As we sat down in the little café and ordered our coffee he said, ‘This is nice, I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. I just seem to gravitate to the Blue Moon Diner like the rest of the department.’

  ‘Oh, I love that too,’ I said. ‘It’s just like the movies. So many of our ideas of America, all the things we expect to find, are coloured by what we saw in films way back in our youth!’

  We conversed politely for a while about the differences between England and America, but I could see that he was curious to know why I had asked him to come. The trouble was, now I was actually face to face with Dave Hunter it seemed increasingly difficult to find the words to ask him the questions that were in my mind.

&nbs
p; ‘They do very good doughnuts here ...’ I was saying when he interrupted me.

  ‘What exactly did you want to talk about?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘this is rather difficult!’

  He gave me a reassuring smile.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’m quite approachable. I don’t bark, bite or take offence.’

  I finished off the remains of my coffee to give me confidence and plunged in.

  ‘It’s about what you told the police,’ I said ‘about finding Loring—well, not that exactly—it’s changing your mind and saying that you were in the commons room at ten fifteen.’

  The smile faded from his face. ‘What’s so strange about that?’ he replied. ‘I made a mistake about the time when I first spoke to the lieutenant. When I thought about it later, I realized I was there earlier than I’d said.’

  ‘With everyone else going off to their classes at ten o’clock,’ I said, ‘leaving Loring behind, and you going into the commons room at ten fifteen—well that doesn’t leave a lot of time for the murder to be committed. You must have known that telling Lieutenant Landis you were there just fifteen minutes after Loring was left alone must make you the prime suspect.’