by Tim Heald
‘My new rule is never to believe that any passenger ship will necessarily arrive at the destination advertised,’ said Tudor. ‘Rule for life too. Don’t expect to arrive where you expect when you begin your journey. That way disappointment lies.’
Elizabeth sipped her Bitschwiller thought-fully. ‘Mine’s simpler,’ she smiled, contemplating the leisurely bead of the amber liquid. She fixed her boss with luminous eyes.
‘Never,’ she said, ‘believe anything you are told by a guest lecturer.’
About the Author
Tim Heald is a journalist and author of mysteries. Born in Dorchester, he studied modern history at Oxford before becoming a reporter, and columnist for the Sunday Times. He began writing novels in the early ’70s, introducing Simon Bognor, a defiantly lazy investigator for the British Board of Trade. Heald followed Bognor through nine more novels, including Murder At Moose Jaw (1981) and Business Unusual (1989) before taking a two decade break from the series, which returned with Death In The Opening Chapter (2011).
Heald has also distinguished himself as a biographer, writing official biographies of sporting heroes like cricket legends Denis Compton and Brian Johnston among others.
Also by Tim Heald
Just Desserts
Murder at Moose Jaw
Masterstroke
Red Herrings
Brought to Book
Business Unusual
Death and The Visiting Fellow
Death and The D’Urbervilles
Denis Compton: The Authorized Biography
Brian Johnston: The Authorized Biography
The Character of Cricket
Tim Heald
Death and The Visiting Fellow
A TUDOR CORNWALL MYSTERY
When Doctor Tudor Cornwall, Reader in Criminal Studies at the University of Wessex, arrives for a semester as Visiting Fellow at his old friend’s university down under, he is met with a nasty surprise. Indeed the surprises keep coming and they get nastier as the plot unravels. An exotic cast of suspicious academics includes an ecologically-correct axeman, a professor of wine and the world’s leading authority on an esoteric form of Australian hedgehog. Then there is the student body to consider, too.
This mystery began as a homage to Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodgings, written when he too was a visiting academic in Australia, but this sparkling novel is emphatically set in the twenty-first century.
Chapter One
Death and the Visiting Fellow arrived almost simultaneously.
Or so it seemed.
Doctor Tudor Cornwall, Reader in Criminal Affairs at the University of Wessex, collected his bag from the airport carousel shortly after 0800 hours on 1 October, carried it through the green channel, signifying ‘Nothing to Declare,’ and emerged blinking into the reception area where he stopped. In front of him there was the usual crowd of uniformed chauffeurs, tour company reps, apprehensive relations and black market cab drivers. He gazed around, searching for the familiar figure of his friend and host, Professor Ashley Carpenter. There was no sign of him and Dr Cornwall frowned.
He and Ashley had spoken shortly before his departure from England. Ashley had wished him ‘bon voyage’ (some hope, travelling for over twenty-four hours in economy) and said he’d meet him at the airport. Tudor had said there was absolutely no need and he’d get a cab up to the college and see him there, but Ashley had told him not to be ridiculous. He was always up at six to take the dog for a jog. It was no big deal to motor the half-hour to Hobart International.
They could stop off at the Egg’n’Bacon Diner on the way back into town, have a heart attack on a plate and catch up on the news. They hadn’t seen each other since the Toronto conference. That was nine months ago.
The two men had known each other since Oxford many years before. In those days Ashley was the dashing Rhodes Scholar from New Coburg – a muscular oarsman who stroked the college eight and could have had a Blue for the asking were it not for the long hours in the lab where he was already establishing a reputation as a whizz in the world of forensic pathology. Tudor was reading history and developing a fascination with crime down the ages which was to define his career and make him almost as distinguished in his branch of criminal activity as Ashley in his. Tudor’s interests were catholic, ranging from ‘Who killed Perkin Warbeck?’ to ‘The incidence of rape in the little wars of Queen Victoria’.
In the normal course of events their paths would never have crossed. Unlike Ashley, Tudor was a ‘dry bob’. His sports were racket-based with a particular bias towards the obscure but historically interesting game of Real Tennis. (Frederick, Prince of Wales, was killed by a Real Tennis ball in circumstances which Tudor found deliciously intriguing though eternally baffling.) Their work took them to different destinations. The historian was always in the college library, the Radcliffe Camera or Bodley itself. Ashley was always elsewhere, cutting up corpses, staring at X-rays, specimens and samples. Ashley’s friends tended to be other Australians and New Zealanders; Tudor mixed with friends who, like him, had been to traditional, if minor, English public schools.
It was a girl who brought them together. Both of them pursued Miranda who was a great beauty, famous for her Juliet in the eponymous Shakespearean play, for her eccentric cloaks and striped trousers, for her wit, her charm, her everything. Like half the university, Ashley and Tudor courted her and though for a time they both had more success than most (she actually accepted invitations to dinners that neither man could properly afford) their rivalry ended in rejection and despair. Yet there was a silver lining to this melancholy affair. The two men found themselves ruefully comparing notes, then consoling each other, and before very long finding that they enjoyed each other’s company and had quite forgotten Miranda – who eventually succumbed to a dim philosopher from Trinity. Tudor and Ashley had been friends ever since.
Memories of those early days passed almost subliminally through Tudor’s brain as he scanned the crowd at the airport concourse. Definitely no Ashley. It was not like him. He was normally fastidiously neat and punctual in all that he did. Almost obsessively so. Tudor put down his case and ran a hand through tousled salt and pepper hair. More salt than pepper these days.
‘Doctor Cornwall?’
He looked down from his considerable height and saw a small tubby fellow in a lumberjack shirt and coffee moleskins. The man seemed agitated though relieved to have made contact.
‘They told me you’d be tall,’ he said, ‘and you seemed the tallest fellow around. I’m Davey. Brad Davey.’ He put up a hand which Tudor took and shook hardly realizing what he was doing. ‘I’m Executive Assistant to the Principal,’ said Davey. ‘She said she was sorry not to come herself but she’s sort of tied up. The police. They’re asking questions.’
‘What’s happened?’ asked Tudor. He realized that he was shaking and had broken out in a cold sweat. Intuition as well as his life’s work told him to expect the worst. ‘Is Professor Carpenter... I mean is Professor Carpenter all right?’
Brad Davey looked embarrassed.
‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look too good. They found the car but there’s no sign of the professor. He seems to have vanished. Could be all right. But it’s not like him. The police say they’re treating it as suspicious.’
‘Oh do they?’
Doctor Cornwell picked up his bag.
‘I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation,’ he said. ‘There nearly always is.’
Published by Dean Street Press 2015
Copyright © 2007 Tim Heald
All Rights Reserved
The right of Tim Heald to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2007 by Robert Hale
Cover by DSP
ISBN 978 1 910570 24 1
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk
eald, A Death on the Ocean Wave