5 - Murder on Campus

by Hazel Holt

  He was fiddling with his coffee-cup and didn’t meet my eye.

  ‘I didn’t murder him,’ he said eventually. ‘I promise you, I didn’t murder Loring.’

  ‘No one in their right mind would ever think you had!’ I said briskly. This had the effect of bringing his head up. His grey eyes looked anxious behind the heavy rimmed glasses.

  ‘I do have a sort of motive,’ he said. ‘And I really hated Loring. I expect the lieutenant will have latched on to that.’

  ‘It’s not the sort of motive that would really stand up in court, now is it? A lot of academic squabbles! And as for hating Loring, well, you’re only one among many!’

  We sat in silence for a moment, then I said, ‘It seems to me, and I think it may have occurred to the lieutenant as well, that you’re trying to shield someone.’

  ‘No!’ The word was almost jerked from him.

  ‘And,’ I continued, ‘it seems to me that the only person in the department you might want to shield is Linda.’

  He gave a little laugh. ‘Is it that obvious?’ he said ruefully.

  ‘Well, I am a very old friend,’ I said, ‘and I notice things.’

  ‘Yes, well, Linda has been a real lifeline for me since Elaine died. I guess I sort of found myself caring for her more and more, you know how it is? I know she doesn’t feel the same way about me ...’

  ‘Oh, she’s very fond of you,’ I said quickly, ‘really devoted.’

  ‘I’m a dear friend,’ Dave said sadly, ‘nothing more. You know, Linda, I don’t think she’s ever felt much more than friendship for anyone—except this guy ...’

  ‘You mean the one in Oxford, David Hamble?’ I said. ‘He was nice, but I always felt it was like an experiment, on Linda’s side, anyhow. Something she knew wasn’t going to last.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was thinking of someone else.’

  ‘Really?’ I looked at him in astonishment. ‘I’d no idea!’

  ‘It was last year,’ he said. ‘A mature student. Doug Chapman. She was supervising his master’s thesis—Tennyson, I forget the exact title. He was a remarkable man, had been all over the world, lived in the Kalahari among the Bushmen for a time, up and down mountains in the Himalayas, that sort of thing. He’d been injured, thrown from a horse in South America somewhere—he’d lost an arm and had some sort of metal plate in his head, but great company, lively and very entertaining, we all liked him.’

  ‘He sounds almost too good to be true, a real storybook hero!’ I said.

  ‘He was certainly larger than life,’ Dave agreed.

  ‘So what on earth was he doing at Wilmot working on Tennyson, of all people?’ I asked.

  ‘He said he’d turned to literature when he was in the desert. He had a really fine brain—I guess he was the sort of person who could have mastered anything he set his mind to. But he was broke, he said, and had to earn some sort of living, not really easy with his disabilities. He’d been teaching part-time at a state college in Tennessee and he needed his master’s for the full-time job they wanted to give him.’

  ‘And you think Linda felt something special for this Doug?’ I asked.

  ‘They were very close, away from Wilmot as well as in the department,’ Dave replied. ‘Anna was away in Italy just then, so I guess she was glad of the company, but it wasn’t just that, she was really ... infatuated.’ He brought out the word with difficulty.

  ‘So what happened?’ I asked. ‘Where’s this man now?’

  ‘Tennessee, I guess. He got the job.’

  ‘But Linda?’ I asked.

  Dave took off his glasses and polished them with a tissue.

  ‘Just before he went,’ he said, ‘they split up, never saw each other again. It hit her pretty hard.’

  ‘But why did they break up?’ I demanded.

  ‘You’d have to ask her that.’

  I looked at him sharply but he met my gaze steadily.

  ‘Dave,’ I said after a moment, ‘has all this something to do with why you were trying to shield Linda?’

  He was silent for a while and then, as if he had suddenly come to a decision, he said, ‘I suppose I’d better tell you. You’re a good friend to Linda, I know, I believe I can trust you and I do need to tell someone.’

  He rested his elbows on the table and leaned towards me.

  ‘I was just turning into the corridor,’ he said quietly. ‘That was around ten thirty, when I saw Linda coming out of the commons room. She turned the other way and didn’t see me. When I first spoke to the lieutenant I hadn’t really taken in the timing of the murder and I didn’t realize that Linda hadn’t told him she’d been in the commons room then. No one else went into that room after I did, and I found the body ten minutes later.’

  ‘There’s no way,’ I said firmly, ‘that Linda could murder anyone! Anyway, she had no motive. Just the usual academic rows with Loring that everyone else had.’

  Dave was silent and I said sharply, ‘That was all, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Honestly, Sheila, I can’t say anything,’ he said wretchedly. ‘You must ask Linda.’

  ‘You mean there was something, but surely ...’

  ‘I can’t say any more,’ he repeated, ‘I’ve probably said too much already.’

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ I said. ‘Linda is one of my dearest friends and I can’t believe she’d kill anyone, whatever sort of motive you may think she has. Besides,’ I suddenly realized, ‘the fact that you saw no one else in the commons room isn’t conclusive! No, I’m not mad, listen. The door from the kitchen into the furnace room wasn’t locked that day, so the murderer could have escaped that way while you were actually in the commons room.’

  Dave looked startled. ‘You mean the murderer might have been in the kitchen while ...’

  ‘Think hard,’ I urged him, ‘did you hear anything?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing I can remember.’

  ‘But if there was someone in the kitchen, they must have heard you coming into the commons room,’ I said. ‘I guess so,’ he replied.

  ‘Anyway,’ I went on, ‘it does mean that although Linda seems to have been the last person in the commons room before you found Loring, there’s still a good possibility that the murderer was still in the kitchen with the body when you went in.’

  He buried his head in his hands. ‘I’m all mixed up now,’ he said. ‘You may be right about the murderer escaping through the furnace-room passage, but that still doesn’t explain why Linda hasn’t said that she was in the commons room then.’

  ‘She may just have put her head round the door,’ I said, ‘not actually gone in. She was looking for Gina, remember?’

  There was a short silence and then I said, ‘I’ll have a word with Linda. Perhaps there’s a perfectly simple explanation.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Dave looked at his watch. ‘Hell, I’ve got a class in half an hour. I’ve got to go. Let me know how things go with Linda, will you? And thank you, Sheila. I feel a whole lot better now I’ve spoken to you.’

  He went away and I drifted off to buy the baking tins but now, I realized, I had something else to hide from Mike and that made me feel very uncomfortable.

  Linda didn’t get back until about seven o’clock.

  ‘Hey!’ she cried as she came into the kitchen. ‘Will you look at those cakes!’

  ‘Are they all right?’ I asked. ‘Do you think there’ll be enough to go round?’

  ‘They’re great,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘And what’s all this? You’ve got supper, too?’

  ‘Oh well, while the oven was on I thought I’d make us a shepherd’s pie.’

  ‘A shame Anna’s gone back to New York,’ Linda said. ‘She adores your shepherd’s pie.’

  ‘Made with real shepherd!’ we both chorused, echoing an old joke.

  I had thrown myself into an orgy of cooking that afternoon to try and sort out my thoughts and feelings about Loring’s death and Linda’s possible part in it. But I had come to no sort of rational
conclusion, my mind squirrelling around as I went through the well-worn ritual of creaming the butter and sugar, beating the eggs, and greasing the tins. Now Tiger, attracted by the smell of cooking, came into the kitchen and began weaving round my legs demanding food.

  As I took his tin out of the fridge I summoned up my resolution and said to Linda, ‘I had coffee with Dave today. I wanted to ask him why he changed his story and told Mike he was in the commons room at ten fifteen. I mean, he couldn’t have been, could he?’

  Linda paused in the act of unscrewing a bottle of tonic water.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Well ...’ I bent my head over Tiger’s tin, easing the catfood out on to the dish and carefully mashing it with a fork. ‘Well, Dave told me he saw you coming out of the commons room at ten thirty, though apparently you didn’t see him. That’s why he changed his story. He was protecting you.’

  Linda sat down suddenly. ‘Oh God!’ she said. ‘What a mess!’

  I put Tiger’s food down on the floor and went and sat beside her.

  ‘Linda,’ I said softly, ‘my dear, what’s going on? Please tell me.’

  ‘I need a drink,’ she said, and poured two large gin and tonics. ‘Here,’ she said and pushed one towards me. ‘Yes, I was in there around then.’

  ‘Looking for Gina?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’ She finished her drink and was pouring another. ‘Good old Dave, he certainly is one hell of a guy, don’t you think?’

  ‘He’s really devoted to you,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah—that’s a shame, too.’ She turned her tumbler round and round, seemingly totally absorbed in the movement of the liquid against the glass.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone you’d been in the commons room?’ I ventured at last.

  ‘You mean your friend Mike?’

  ‘Well, yes. Or me or Dave, or any of your friends at least.’

  ‘I was scared, I guess,’ she said. ‘I really wanted Loring dead, you know. I had one hell of a motive.’

  ‘All that departmental bickering?’ I exclaimed. ‘No way is that a real motive for murder!’

  ‘Oh, there was something a lot more compelling than all that stuff,’ Linda said with a little laugh. ‘Dave knew about it, that’s why he tried to cover up for me.’

  ‘Can you tell me about it?’ I asked gently.

  ‘What about Mike?’ she said, looking at me quizzically. ‘Won’t you feel obliged to pass it on? I mean, you are supposed to be helping him.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Linda,’ I cried, ‘you’re my friend, my very dear friend. How can you think for one moment that I’d pass anything on that might hurt you in any way!’

  She smiled and laid her hand briefly on my arm. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘silly of me to ask. I guess I’m just finding it hard to tell you about something I bitterly regret, about making a fool of myself ...’

  ‘Dave told me,’ I said tentatively, ‘a bit about someone called Doug Chapman—has all this anything to do with him?’

  Tiger, having finished his food, jumped up on to the table and rubbed his head against her arm. Linda picked up the cat and held him close for a moment, then she put him down on the floor and said: ‘Sure. It was. I don’t really know where to begin. Dave probably told you a bit about Doug, he really was something special. You’ve known me long enough to realize I’m not drawn to that sort of macho, outdoor hero type, so at first I was a little bit scornful ... I thought the literature bit was just an act, maybe what he thought was an easy option to get some sort of teaching job. But it was genuine, all right. His mind—oh, it was so clear, he just absorbed things and made them a part of himself, do you know what I mean? A sort of empathy that goes hand in hand with a clarity of critical judgement. It’s a rare gift, I’d never met anyone like that before. Working with him on his thesis was, how can I put it, thrilling. It was on Tennyson, did Dave tell you? Not exactly promising, you’d think, but he brought the man alive for me, the whole period, for that matter.’

  ‘That must have been wonderful!’ I said softly.

  Linda gave me a little, painful smile. ‘I guess I really made a fool of myself over that guy,’ she said.

  ‘But why?’ I asked. ‘Did he not feel the same way about you?’

  ‘Oh, he said he did, perhaps he really did, I don’t know now. But then it was all so fantastic, something I never thought could happen for me ...’ She sat quietly for a moment, her thoughts far away, then she said briskly, ‘It didn’t help, I suppose, that Anna was abroad, there was no one to tell me to think about what I was doing.’

  ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘if you were happy?’

  ‘Fool’s paradise,’ she said and got up abruptly to pour another drink.

  ‘So what happened? I asked.

  Linda came back slowly and sat down again beside me. I could feel the tension in her as she slowly sipped her drink. At last she said, ‘Doug had finished his master’s thesis and handed it in to me. He’d never let me look at it before—not till it was done. It was brilliant, of course, as I knew it would be. There was just one thing, though. The main argument depended on one important piece of evidence, and ...’ Her voice broke slightly. ‘He’d falsified it.’

  We were both silent, then I said tentatively, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ She spoke very softly so that I had difficulty in hearing her. ‘Not many people would have known, but I’d seen the Benson papers, the ones that have just been released at Cambridge. There’s a mass of material, not properly classified yet, but—well, ironic, isn’t it, that almost the one person in the States who would have known what he’d done had to be here at Wilmot, had to be me.’

  We were silent again. It’s difficult to explain to non-academic people, really, just how strongly one reacts to something like that. ‘For Heaven’s sake!’ they say impatiently. ‘What does it matter! It’s all ancient history anyway, so who cares?’ But it does matter, in an almost emotional way. When you come up against something like that you get a real feeling of pain and—it sounds silly—of loss.

  ‘Oh, Linda,’ I said, ‘how awful.’

  She shook her head. ‘That wasn’t the really awful thing,’ she said.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What did he say when you confronted him with it?’

  Linda looked at me, her eyes level with mine, so that I was somehow unable to look away.

  ‘You did confront him?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t you?’

  Her eyes filled with tears and she turned her head away at last.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not at first, not then. I ... I couldn’t. It would have been a denial of all that wonderful time we’d had together, having to admit to myself that the person I cared so much about could have done something like that. And then, well, I was infatuated, I guess, and you don’t think clearly when things are that way. I kind of closed my mind to it, wouldn’t confront it, even in my thoughts. So the thesis went through and Doug got his job.’

  She sat very still, her head bent now as if she couldn’t look at me. I put my hand over hers.

  ‘Poor Linda,’ I said, ‘my poor girl!’

  Linda looked up and gave me a grateful smile.

  ‘It was only when he told me that the job had come through that I faced up to what I’d done, and even then I tried to make excuses—he was brilliant, he’d be a fine teacher, able to inspire his students as he’d inspired me. And then, he was disabled, it might not be easy for him to get anything else ...’

  Her voice trailed away. I knew how difficult it must have been for her, more than for most people. Linda had a fierce integrity, quick to condemn falseness in others. With herself she would have been—well, I could see the pain even now.

  ‘And by then it was somehow too late. I couldn’t say anything, it was something I’d have to live with. But, quite suddenly, I found I hated him. No, not hated, despised! He had so much going for him intellectually, he didn’t need tricks like that. I found I couldn’t bear to see him, even, I
couldn’t bear to think that I’d been ...’ She hesitated. ‘In love,’ she brought out the phrase with difficulty, ‘with someone I couldn’t respect.’

  She gave a short bitter laugh.

  ‘I guess it was a judgement on me for getting involved with a student, however mature—wholly unprofessional, something I’ve always felt very strongly about. Maybe I’m old fashioned, I don’t know, but whenever it’s happened here I’ve said I think it’s wrong. I certainly proved my point the hard way!’

  She laughed again, the laugh turning into a sob. I couldn’t think what to say so I simply pressed her hand again.

  ‘Doug was puzzled, of course. He kept calling me and writing notes asking what was up. Eventually I realized I had to see him. It wasn’t a meeting I’d ever want to go through again.’

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked.

  She gave a short bitter laugh.

  ‘He said thank you. As if all I’d done was pass him the cream for his coffee. He didn’t understand, you see ... I still have this picture of him standing there, smiling—that fantastic warm smile, that made you feel he was giving you a part of himself, saying it meant so much to him and wasn’t I great to do this thing for him and he’d never forget ... crap like that!’

  Her voice broke and the tears poured down her cheeks. I put my arm round her shoulder.

  ‘Oh, Linda,’ I said, ‘you poor child!’

  She found a tissue, wiped her eyes and said, ‘Sorry, Sheila, I thought I was all over it ...’

  ‘You don’t get over something like that,’ I said, ‘not really.’

  ‘Yes, I guess so. I listened to him for a while, just to prove to myself, maybe, just how worthless and insensitive he really was. Then I told him how I felt.’

  ‘How did he react?’ I asked curiously.

  She laughed, the same bitter sound.

  ‘He couldn’t see it, he simply didn’t understand what I was making such a fuss about. He thought we could still

  be ... friends. I think he felt it bound us together somehow. Conspirators, maybe, us against the world. He was that sort of person, he loved to be different, apart from the common herd.

  ‘I told him I’d say nothing and sent him away. He still couldn’t believe that part, couldn’t believe that his charm wasn’t proof against something he regarded as unimportant. Unimportant,’ she repeated. ‘He actually said that the two of us were more important than some lousy technicality.’