Murder Is Academic

by Christine Poulson

  The service was nearly over, thank God. All through it I had been thinking off and on of what Merfyn had said. I glanced at him. He was leaning forward with his hands clasped between his knees. With his beaky nose in profile and his thick black hair spiked with silver and standing up on the crown of his head, he looked like a benign bird of prey. What had he meant? There hadn’t been any doubt that it was Margaret in the pool, even though … but I didn’t want to think about those moments after I had dropped the clothes prop. He couldn’t know about that, no one did. I felt a flutter of panic in my stomach.

  I tried to focus on the here and now, to anchor myself in the present, where there was nothing to fear. I looked around the church at the mass of mourners, filling not only the pews, but the Jacobean galleries above. And there was the church itself, the stone, the flagged floor firm under my feet, the glass, the wood. The pew end next to me was decorated with an exquisitely naturalistic carving of a deer. I looked at the tiny ears folded back against the head, the little hoof pawing the ground. I touched it. Its back, cool and smooth under my fingers, was polished by the touch of thousands of other hands over the centuries.

  I’d missed some of what Lawrence had said. He was talking about Margaret’s academic work.

  ‘Her superb book on Anglo-Catholicism in the nineteenth century novel, published when she was still only in her twenties, established her very early on as one of the most promising literary scholars of her generation. Her recent biography of the Victorian novelist, Charlotte M. Yonge, amply fulfilled that early promise. Literature was her life…’

  And her death. The thought seemed to appear in my head from nowhere, shocking me with its incongruity. And yet … it was a literary sort of death in a way. There was Shakespeare of course – ‘too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia’ – and Milton’s Lycidas in his ‘watery bier’. I found myself assembling a list. Shelley, too, that poem about Adonis, but the poet himself as well, lost in a storm at sea, his body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean, an archetypal Romantic death. There flashed into my mind Tennyson’s description of the hand that rises out of the lake to take back Excalibur: ‘Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful’. The poem was on my Victorian poetry course. I realized that I was never going to read it again without thinking of Margaret.

  ‘Yet she was no blue-stocking,’ Lawrence was announcing. ‘She did not see why the life of the mind should preclude a love of clothes. Her elegance and flair, her intellect and sharp wit, that is what we will remember…’

  I saw again the hand rising out the water, the sun striking a brief dazzling light from the diamond ring on its finger. There was a moment when time seemed frozen. Then, as if it were beckoning to me, the hand slowly turned over and disappeared beneath the water.

  Merfyn’s words came back to me: ‘Now you see it, now you don’t.’

  ‘The part she played in the wider Cambridge community,’ I heard Lawrence say, but something seemed to have gone wrong with the volume control. At one moment his voice boomed around the church, the next his mouth was moving soundlessly. Little pinpoints of light were dancing in front of my eyes and there was something sour in my throat.

  I fumbled for my handbag and struggled to my feet. The church and the congregation were flickering before my eyes as if lit by strobe lighting. Someone was touching my arm. ‘Shall I come with you?’ I heard Merfyn say, his voice sounding as if were a long way off. I shook my head fiercely and struggled out of the pew, knocking my knee against the little wooden shelf that holds the hymn books. A woman sitting a row or two in front of me looked round and frowned. Other heads were beginning to turn.

  The sparks were becoming star bursts. I could hardly see the door. Then the iron latch was in my hand. I struggled with it, it shot up, and the heavy oak door swung open.

  I stepped out into the heat of the day. The door closed behind me with a reverberant thud.

  Keeping one hand on the wall, I walked round the side of the church to where I knew there was a bench. It’s often occupied by a group of sociable drunks, sharing bottles of cider and cans of extra-strong lager. Today, thank God, it was empty. I sank down on it and leant forward, bracing myself with my hands on my knees. My straw hat fell to the ground. My shirt was sticking to my body and I was chilly with evaporating sweat. I focused on the flagstones and concentrated on taking slow, deep breaths. I could see the neck of a brown bottle sticking out from under the bench, and there was the sweet, heavy smell of stale beer.

  The church door creaked open. A woman came into view. I looked around and saw that it was the one who had turned to look at me in church. She was still frowning, but I saw now that it was a frown not of disapproval but of concern.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Her voice was surprisingly high-pitched and girlish in its inflexion, but it also had a ring of authority.

  ‘Will be in a minute.’

  She sat down next to me, smoothing her skirt over her knees. A flowery scent overlaid the smell of old beer.

  The drone of Lawrence’s voice ceased. There was a pause, and then the low notes of the organ and the shuffling sound of a large congregation getting to its feet reached us. After a bar or two, I recognized ‘The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended’.

  Slowly I sat up. My companion put her hand on my shoulder and briefly squeezed it. For a moment or two I sat quietly, taking in the bustle of the market, people walking back and forth with bags of shopping and children in push-chairs, Auntie’s Tea-Room and the Internet Exchange, the blessed ordinariness of it all.

  I turned to my companion. Now that I saw her properly for the first time, I realized that she was older than I had thought. Early forties, perhaps. The fair hair had a lot of white in it and her smile brought the lines around her eyes into relief. It was a pleasant face, and a shrewd one.

  She fumbled around in her handbag and brought out a packet of Marlborough Lites.

  ‘Do you mind?’ she asked.

  ‘No, in fact, could I…?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I took one, and she lit it for me.

  I inhaled deeply. The nicotine rush seemed to bring the world into sharper focus. Oh, God, I’d almost managed to forget how good this was. I felt like a schoolgirl who had sneaked out of class to smoke in the lavatories.

  ‘I shouldn’t be doing this. Sets such a bad example to the students for one thing.’

  ‘Me, too,’ she said, ‘though it’s patients in my case. I’m always telling them they should quit. Sheer hypocrisy.’

  ‘You’re a doctor?’

  ‘A GP.’

  ‘Margaret’s?’

  ‘No, just her neighbour. Jane Pennyfeather. I live next door.’

  ‘I’m Cassandra James.’

  Jane tapped the ash off on her cigarette and looked at me thoughtfully.

  ‘Ah, so it…’

  I took a long drag on my cigarette.

  ‘Yes. It was me.’

  She gave a little grimace of sympathy. ‘How awful for you. No wonder you need a fag.’

  Her matter-of-factness, the intimacy of being alone together, set apart from both the funeral continuing behind us and the bustle of the market place in front of us, even the very fact that she was a stranger: suddenly it was easy to tell her.

  ‘I haven’t told anyone … but I just feel so ashamed…’

  I bit my lip hard, but it was no good: tears were welling up. One spilled over and ran down my cheek into the corner of my mouth.

  Jane delved into her bag and brought out a handful of paper tissues. She pressed them into my hand.

  ‘I ran away,’ I told her.

  In my memory there was nothing between the splash of the pole hitting the water and finding myself by the telephone in Margaret’s sitting-room. It was as if I’d been transported there by magic. I rang for an ambulance and the police and went out through the front door to sit on the kerb in the hot sun, head in hands. I was still there when the police arrived. I couldn’t go back into that garden where I
knew that something monstrous was waiting for me under the surface of the water.

  ‘I feel terrible,’ I told Jane, scrubbing at my face and sniffing. I didn’t try to get her out of the water. I didn’t even look to see if it was Margaret in there.’

  Jane dropped her fag-end on the floor and ground it out with her heel. ‘It was Margaret all right, I identified the body. And there was absolutely nothing anyone could have done. She’d been in the water for hours.’

  ‘But how could I have been sure?’

  She leaned forward and took one of my hands in both of hers. ‘Now listen, how long do you think it takes to drown?’

  ‘Ten minutes?’

  ‘Even less than that. The brain can’t survive without oxygen for more than a few minutes. I’m sure you knew that she couldn’t possibly be alive.’

  I thought of the settled silence that had hung over the garden and the house, the sodden exam papers, the water-sprinkler in its pool of water, the brief glimpse of that hand …

  ‘Perhaps I did.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ she said with emphasis.

  But still, I thought, why didn’t I at least go back to the pool and wait there with her? I was afraid; afraid of Margaret, my colleague and my friend. I didn’t want to see what she had become. It wasn’t going to be easy to forgive myself for that loss of nerve.

  Jane was saying, ‘It’s survivor guilt, what you’re feeling. It’s always like that when people die suddenly. I see a lot of it.’

  I remembered my conversation with Malcolm.

  ‘Malcolm’s blaming himself, too,’ I told her.

  ‘Mmm.’

  It was as though a cloud had momentarily hidden the sun. It was like a little drop in temperature, nothing much, just a degree or two, but something had changed between us. I looked at Jane, but she had her head down and was rooting about in her handbag again. She brought out a pair of dark glasses and put them on.

  ‘The police asked me about Malcolm being away so much on business,’ she said.

  ‘But … what did they want to know exactly?’

  In the silence that fell between us, I was aware that it was quiet in the church, too. The hymn had finished.

  ‘They don’t think – they can’t think – that he was having an…’ I couldn’t get the word out. ‘Malcolm was absolutely devoted to Margaret!’

  ‘They have to ask these questions. I’m sure it’s just routine,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Look, they’ll be coming out in a moment. Do you feel up to joining them?’

  I nodded.

  She bent down and picked up my hat for me.

  The church doors opened. The leading pall-bearers emerged, and the coffin with its cargo of wreaths came into view. Malcolm followed it, hands clasped in front of him, head bowed. He was a tall, thin, sandy-haired Scot with that fair skin that marks so easily. Around the eyes his skin was pink and puffy. He had a tendency anyway to stoop, but now he was bending over as though he had been buffeted and bowed by gusts of grief.

  I glanced at Jane. She seemed to be gazing at Malcolm, but it was impossible to be sure or to read her expression behind the dark glasses.

  Chapter Two

  ‘I just can’t believe that Malcolm was having an affair.’

  Stephen groaned. ‘Look, Cass, I thought we’d already been through this – how many times? Three, four?’

  We were sitting on a bench at the end of my garden. It was late on the day of the funeral and it was a glorious summer’s evening. In other circumstances it would have been perfect. The faintest of breezes, no more than a stirring of the air, brought the scent of roses and honeysuckle to us. The long spell of hot weather had brought them fully into bloom. The tall, narrow shape of the house was almost black against a turquoise sky, the weather-boarding no longer visible in the twilight. Light was spilling out of the floor-length kitchen window and laying streaks of gold on the channel of water that flowed beneath the house. The house had been built as a granary across a creek where barges could moor underneath to receive grain through a chute.

  A dark shape detached itself from the eaves, swooped over the flower-beds and darted down to the surface of the water.

  I felt Stephen’s arm jerk against mine.

  ‘It’s only a bat,’ I said. ‘They come out for the insects.’

  We sat on for a while in silence.

  My thoughts plodded round the same old track again and again like a weary old horse.

  ‘Malcolm is the last person … I mean, they were such a settled couple. They’d been together, what fifteen years? Twenty years?’

  ‘Cassandra!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. I’ll shut up.’

  After a minute or two, Stephen said, ‘That in itself doesn’t necessarily mean much, does it, the length of time?’

  I slipped my hand into his and squeezed it. I guessed that he was thinking of his own twelve-year marriage, and the way it had ended four years ago. His wife had left with one of his closest friends.

  He sighed. ‘You can never really know what’s going on in someone else’s marriage. Or even in your own for that matter.’

  I knew that, of course, and, like Stephen, I knew it from bitter experience. But Malcolm and Margaret … they had been one of those couples who seemed as married as your own parents, the kind that makes you think perhaps it can work after all. I gave a sigh and stretched, trying to ease the ache between my shoulder blades. My eyes were sore and I could feel their shape in my eye sockets. I ought to go to bed, but I was too tired to make up my mind to do it.

  ‘Anyway, aren’t you reading too much into what that woman said?’ Stephen went on. ‘Perhaps it was just a malicious little comment.’

  I considered this. ‘No … it wasn’t like that. It was more as though she were warning me about something … or, perhaps not that exactly…’

  My voice trailed off as I realized that Stephen wasn’t listening.

  He was gazing towards the house.

  ‘Stephen?’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ He held up his hand. ‘The telephone, I think.’

  I had to concentrate to hear it. At this distance it was more like a pulse in the air than a sound.

  ‘Oh, God. I should have put the answering machine on. I can’t face talking to anyone now.’

  ‘We’ll just leave it. They’ll probably have given up by the time we get back to the house.’

  It was impossible to talk knowing the phone was ringing on and on. We sat and listened in silence until at last it stopped.

  It was almost completely dark now, and the evening was growing chilly.

  ‘Come on,’ Stephen said, standing up. ‘We’re not going to get anywhere tonight. We’re just going round in circles. Let’s go to bed.’

  He pulled me to my feet and we made our way hand in hand up the garden along the creek. It was almost as broad as the house, but it was silted up now and flowed sluggishly.

  While Stephen stayed in the kitchen to clear away the dinner things, I went up to bed. The first flight of stairs opens straight on to the big, low-ceilinged room that comprises all of the first floor. I really must get round to putting up some more bookshelves, I thought, just as I did every time I came up those stairs. But that day I seemed to see the room with fresh eyes. There were white painted bookcases under the long, low window seats and in the alcoves on either side of them, but it wasn’t enough. There were books everywhere; stacked under my desk, lined up on the window seat, piled all round the edges of the room and up the stairs. Stephen had offered to do some DIY, perhaps I should take him up on it. But this was a familiar thought, too, and I knew I never would. I didn’t want to let him that far into my life, not yet anyway.

  My cat, Bill Bailey, was asleep on top of some books arranged in two adjacent piles: the complete works of Thackeray. When I clicked my tongue at him, he opened sleepy slits of eyes and got to his feet. He stretched, arching his back and yawning. The tower of books swayed. With an air of unconcern, he turned round, position
ed himself in exactly the right place, carefully lowered himself down, and curled up again.

  I went on up the steep oak stairs with its rickety handrail to my bedroom on the second floor of the house. The air was heavy with the accumulated heat of the day. I opened a window to let a current of cooler air flow. Resting my arms on the sill. I gazed out across the fens. The window on the other side of the room looked out onto the little city of Ely several miles away, standing proud of the plain and topped by the floodlit towers of the cathedral. But from this window the only signs of human habitation were the tiny scattered lights of a few distant farmhouses. The vast fields and the long straight drainage channels that ran to the horizon were covered now with a darkness as soft as velvet, and above them stretched the huge East Anglian sky, pricked by a few stars. Down in the garden, white roses glowed. The light from the kitchen illuminated a tangle of green water-weed just below the surface of the creek. The kitchen light went off and the creek, too, was absorbed into the night.

  Stephen clattered up the stairs. Then his footsteps were muffled by the rug on the bedroom floor. There was a click as he switched on the bedside lamp and a warm yellow light suffused the room. I didn’t turn round. I felt his hands on my shoulders. He said nothing, but slowly began to press his thumbs into the sore places of my upper neck. I sighed and pressed my shoulders back against his hands.

  He said, ‘I’ll understand if you’d rather I didn’t stay tonight. I know you sleep better when I’m not here.’

  ‘And you’ve got work tomorrow.’

  ‘Could get up early.’

  I hesitated. We didn’t usually spend the night together during the week.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be … it could be just for company,’ he said.

  I twisted round and looked into his face. He slipped his arms around my waist.

  ‘Sure?’ I asked.

  He nodded. I reached up and stroked the dark hair that was just beginning to show threads of silver. His arms tightened around me. I relaxed into his embrace. His lips touched mine and at that instant, as though the contact had triggered an alarm, the telephone rang.