‘Of course, my lord. Fortunately I find them very enjoyable.’
‘Ah, intellectual rewards, the sweetest kind, are they not?’
Thomas, George and Charles nodded sagely, each with his own opinion. There were footsteps on the stairs.
‘Though I quite like boxing,’ said George helpfully. Lord Scoggie, smiling, opened his toothy mouth to reply.
The door burst open like a thunderclap. On the doorstep, dressed in unfunereal green, stood Allan Bonar. He was breathless, staring about him.
‘Will someone tell me,’ he gasped, ‘Where is Professor Keith?’
Chapter Nineteen
‘So where exactly were you?’ asked Thomas, unsympathetically.
Allan Bonar hunched over his tankard of ale at the end of the long table. The Black Bull had a good fire going, and steam rose slowly from each of them and from the heap of red wool gowns they had left on the settle beside them: gowns were not to be worn in ale houses. This, combined with an ancient statute that said students must wear their gowns in the town should have prevented them from entering the Black Bull at all, but that statute was in a state of decay and anyway, this was an emergency. Bonar’s face was the colour of the yellowish whitewashed walls, making his hair and brows stand out coal-black. He had already, at Charles’ specific instructions, disposed of one tankard of ale, and this one had emptied more slowly as they told him in detail about Professor Keith’s death.
‘I was ... but to arrive just in time for the funeral ... oh, my,’ said Bonar faintly.
The funeral was over, anyway. When the reluctant feasting was finished Bonar had joined the men following the Professor’s coffin to the town burying-ground beside the Cathedral, where Sybie had been laid so lately, too. The rain had made the clean grave cut a glinting brown cavern, a topaz turned inside out, and the bearers had slithered dangerously setting the coffin down in the mud. It had seemed wrong to let it be soiled like that, with the heavy raindrops turning the mortcloth soggy and soaking into the coffin cover, but after all, they were going to bury it. In a few minutes, it made no difference: the gravediggers heeled earth back in from the spoil heap, clods falling hollowly on the firwood box. The bearers folded the mortcloth with a few neat gestures: the mourners shared a few sips of rapidly-diluting brandy, and hurried away, parting almost in silence. How Thomas and the Murrays had ended up in the Black Bull with Allan Bonar was not clear, but Charles, at least, was determined to make the most of it.
‘When did you last see Professor Keith?’ he asked, trying to make the question sound casual, and failing. Bonar eyed him.
‘At the party, just like you,’ he said.
‘But what about when you went back later?’
Bonar maintained his stare for a moment, then gave it up. His eyes were still bleak with shock.
‘I don’t know that I should talk about that,’ he said. ‘You say they have no one in mind for this murder, and I have no intention of giving them any reason to think of me. I have a reputation in this university, a good one: I’ve built up my position in spite of that bad-tempered old tulyier, and I’ve no intention of doing anything to endanger it now, just when I have the chance to take the next step up.’
Charles could not help glancing at Thomas: it was a similar situation for both of them. Professor Keith’s death had been very timely.
‘But we know you were there at Professor Keith’s house after the party,’ said George, keen for his information to be valuable. ‘And if we know, the chances are half the town knows, too.’
Bonar scowled. His dark hair was lank with damp, and with his pale skin and black eyes Charles fancied that he looked like a demon that had accidentally slipped into a holy spring.
‘It’s true,’ he added, supporting George. ‘If everyone knows you were the last person to see him alive, they’ll all think you killed him.’
‘For pity’s sake, can a man not have a reasoned discussion with his superior without some damned murderer creeping in and ruining his chances?’
‘A reasoned discussion?’ repeated Thomas. ‘I thought this was Professor Keith you were talking about?’
Bonar sighed with frustration.
‘Yes, it is, and no, of course it wasn’t a reasoned discussion. Did whoever told you I was there not tell you we had a shouting match? Or is the Professor’s study door too thick?’
Charles and George exchanged glances.
‘I think there was probably too much else going on in the house,’ Charles ventured. ‘But what were you arguing about? I know it didn’t take much with Professor Keith, but why go all the way back there after the party to quarrel with him?’
‘It isn’t that odd to call on him at that hour of the night,’ Bonar explained. ‘He often worked late, and I was usually welcome. I knew he’d be up making up, as he saw it, for wasting his time at the soirée.’
‘Completely mad,’ muttered George, but no one seemed to agree with him.
‘I wanted,’ said Bonar, choosing his words carefully, ‘to discuss my prospects. I had heard some talk that he wanted me removed from the post of his assistant – you’ve probably heard that, too – and I wanted to make sure my position was sound. You can blame your good bunkwife for that,’ he added to Charles.
‘What, her homemade wine made you bold?’ Charles grinned.
‘In more ways than one. I was bold enough to tackle Professor Keith on this delicate subject, but I wanted to do it, to clear matters up, because I was at last bold enough to ask Mrs. Walker for the hand of her daughter.’
‘You blackguard!’ cried Thomas, leaping from the settle so fast he knocked his tankard over. Ale poured from the fir table in a dark brown pool. George scuttled backwards, guarding his clothing. ‘You contemptible gileynour!’
‘Ach, marry the mother, Thomas, if you’re going to marry one of them,’ said Bonar with almost a smirk. ‘She likes you better than Patience does, anyway.’
‘I’m not going to stand here and listen to this!’ A fine spray of spit escaped his lips in his fury.
‘Then sit down, Thomas, and leave it, eh?’ said Charles, tugging at Thomas’ threadbare coat.
‘I will not. I’m going home for my dinner. It may not be much, but at least the company’s better.’ He tugged his gown off the heap by the fire, tumbling the rest on to the straw on the floor, and stamped over to the door. Then he turned, and made sure his voice was carrying well. ‘And who is it in this town knows the most about poisons, then, eh?’
With that, he vanished into the rain.
‘Well, you, I suppose,’ said George helpfully to Allan Bonar, then shut his mouth abruptly as his mind started working. Allan stared at him. Charles picked up his and Bonar’s gowns, Bonar’s black and crumpled, and George’s cloak. Then he tried to make his voice as unchallenging as possible.
‘So what happened, anyway? When you went to see Keith?’
‘Oh, he was all right at first.’ Allan turned deliberately from George’s apologetic blush. ‘He seemed even to be quite cheerful, as if he had a weight off his mind. He had some sweetmeats in his study, and a jug of claret, and he offered me some. I knew I’d had plenty and I just took a sweetmeat, sort of trying to soak up some of the liquor.’
‘Which kind did you have?’
‘The crystallised fruit things. They looked less chewy than the others, and I wanted to give myself every chance to talk sensibly and clearly, despite Mrs. Walker’s wine.’
George and Charles exchanged glances: in Charles a great bubble of tension burst slowly, seeping relief all through him. The crystallised fruits were George’s, and only one had been missing – that must have been the one that Allan Bonar had eaten. There remained the problem of the missing cantharides from the package he had bought for George, but just for now, he could live with that.
‘Are you interested in this or not?’ demanded Allan Bonar, finishing his ale. Thomas’ was by now mostly on the floor. Bonar raised his hand to call for more, then realised he had no money left
. ‘Let’s go back to my bunk: I have a bottle of claret somewhere.’
They gathered up their gowns and George’s cloak and wrapped up well before venturing outside. They were at the other end of South Street from the West Port, where Bonar’s bunk was, so they set off briskly, finding themselves working against the wind. Conversation was difficult, and Charles was wary of pressing on with it in the hearing of strangers. Instead, they waited until they were established in the parlour he and Thomas had examined only yesterday, with the odd leaves and mysterious bottles. Bonar swept papers off a bench and waved to them to sit down while he looked for the claret.
‘Anyway,’ he said as he moved bottles back and forth, peering at the contents, ‘it turned out he had been trying to have me removed – I’m still not clear why, but you ken what he was like. Anyway, I told him what he could do with his damn’ job – I’m surprised no one came to see what we were shouting about, but maybe they knew better than to disturb him – and I stamped off down the stairs and out into the street and I walked.’
‘Where to?’ asked George, whose expertise in random walking had been honed in these last few days.
‘To Glasgow, as it happens.’ Bonar stopped to watch their looks of surprise with satisfaction. ‘Not all the way, ken. I walked most of the night and waved down the mail coach in the morning. I have a friend in Glasgow, see, at the University there, and I thought maybe I’d be able to find myself a tidy post there, thumb my nose at Professor Helenus Keith and marry Patience. My friend was less optimistic, though: I stayed with him on Saturday and Sunday, and I took the mail coach back again yesterday.’
‘So how did you not hear about Keith, then?’
‘I didn’t want to see him at once, so I went straight to my bunk. The coach was in late, anyway. My bunkwife’s not that well – too many sweets, gives her heartburn – so I just told her I was back and went off to my bed, and worked myself up to see the great high heidyin this morning. Well, I saw him all right, but I think his thoughts were elsewhere.’ Bonar had gone, like everyone else, to see the corpse after his shocking discovery. ‘D’you know, I think I’ll even miss the old man,’ he said. ‘I can’t say we were like brothers, but he was a great scholar.’
They digested this in silence for a while. Bonar finally pulled a dusty bottle of claret out of an empty flowerpot in the corner of the empty fireplace, and wiped out three cups, and they sipped at the wine. Charles, his conscience provoked, tried hard to think of good things he had known Keith say or do, but found that all he could remember were Keith’s temper, his arrogance, his bullying, and his self-aggrandisement. So far he could not think of anyone who had known him who had not benefited in some small way from his death. It was quite an epitaph: Professor Urquhart had probably already rendered it into Latin.
Anyway, did Allan Bonar’s story really help at all? He had quarrelled with Keith and then gone to Glasgow. No one, presumably, had seen him leave the Professor’s study, and no one had seen the Professor after he had left. Charles toyed with the idea of trying to establish the facts about the Glasgow trip, perhaps by finding someone who had seen Bonar on the coach, but on reflection there was no point. Allan could as easily have killed Keith as not, and gone to Glasgow as he had said, either way.
He needed to think about all of this, he thought, staring into the fireplace. The rain beat on the road outside but did not find the little windows of Allan’s bunk parlour, tucked into thick walls. There were lots of questions, and not very many answers. It looked as if he knew now how the sweetmeats had made their way into the study: Keith must have gone and fetched them himself after his wife and family had gone to bed: the claret and the biscuits had already shown that he had a sweet tooth. George’s sweetmeats had apparently been untainted, but some of the cantharides was missing – but Professor Keith had not died of cantharides poisoning. Charles thought back to Saturday morning and the scene in Professor Keith’s study. He still did not know who had taken Keith’s notebook, and why. Professor Urquhart seemed the most likely candidate: Dr. Pagan would surely have had no reason, and Professor Shaw ... well, he might have done it, of course, if he had felt that something in it might have harmed someone. But what?
It seemed that the Sporting Set were the only ones who had not had a clear opportunity to add poison to the wine. Everyone else had passed it at some point: Urquhart had even examined the jug. Professor Shaw had come back for his gloves, Allan Bonar had been near the jug on the landing and later in Keith’s study. Thomas by his own admission had been near the jug for some time, waiting on the landing in the hope of seeing Patience Walker. Perhaps only the Walkers themselves had lacked the opportunity at that point, though certainly not the motive: there was no question but that Patience Walker was the kind of girl who would be quite capable of slipping poison into a jug of claret intended for the man who was at the one time threatening her mother over the rent and preventing the advancement of her preferred suitor. Charles could quite clearly picture Patience doing it, and she certainly had the forethought to carry it out ... not a pleasant thought, when she lived in the same house as he did. And she would certainly know how to obtain arsenic: every good housewife did.
But then there was the question of whether or not the poison really had been arsenic. It was readily available for those who knew the routines of the College Chapel and Ramsay Rickarton’s problems with the rats, but surely it was even easier to boil up, or grind down, or whatever they did in Chemistry, the last yew berries of the season? Particularly when the trees in question were at the end of the Keiths’ garden, or looked at another way, branching over a common footpath. Most people would know, would have had it dinned into them as bairns, that yew was poisonous, but Thomas would have had the information laid out before him, and recently, too: he had studied its similarity to arsenic in his chemistry class, and his favourite seat was directly beneath Professor Keith’s yew trees. The little slices of information kept coming back into Charles’ mind, stacking up, spinning apart, sliding into mosaic patterns like the marble pieces on an Italian table. He was going to have to talk to Thomas. First, though, he had another call he needed to make.
He stirred and set down his cup, and George jumped. All three of them seemed to have been sitting in silence for ages: from the silly grin on George’s face it was easy to see where his thoughts had been, but Allan Bonar’s expression was less transparent, a wave of hair drooping to conceal his black eyes.
‘I must be going, I think,’ Charles said, trying to persuade himself that his afternoon looked appealing. He had an essay to write, he remembered, a translation to do, and some Greek to read, and for once no inclination to do any of it. He suddenly felt very tired.
‘Aye, well, I’d better get on, myself,’ agreed Bonar. ‘There’ll be a good deal to sort out over classes and things. It’ll take a while.’
They stood, without enthusiasm. George looked for somewhere to put his cup.
‘Oh, just stick it on the table, beside that wee white package,’ said Bonar. ‘What is that, by the way?’
‘It’s not mine,’ said George.
‘Wasn’t it here when we came in?’ said Charles.
‘Was it? It’s not mine,’ said Bonar firmly. He stepped over and picked it up. ‘It looks like an apothecary’s package.’ He opened one end carefully. Within the wrappings, which looked hastily assembled, was a fine white powder.
They looked at each other. Bonar’s eyes were dark as pitch.
‘I have no idea where this came from,’ he enunciated clearly.
‘What is it?’ asked George.
‘I think I can guess,’ said Charles. ‘Is there a way of finding out?’
‘There’s a chemical test. I can’t do it here.’
‘I’m going to see Dr. Pagan. Would he be able to do it?’
‘Maybe.’ Bonar held the package tight, then slowly passed it to Charles. Charles examined it.
‘I think this is part of the one from the Chapel,’ he said. ‘But if you haven
’t seen it before, who put it here?’
‘Someone who wants people to think I killed Keith,’ said Bonar, as if he had no wish to say it.
‘But who would want to do that?’ asked George. Bonar and Charles met each other’s eyes.
‘I think I can guess that, too,’ said Charles.
Dr. Pagan’s house was in North Street, down the hill from United College, a modern house set right on the street with three steps up to the white front door proclaiming its importance and prosperity. It would have made Thomas feel inferior instantly. Charles reached up and rattled the knocker – no old-fashioned risp here – and waited politely on the street. Eventually a maid appeared, squinted at Charles’ proffered card, took it and vanished. A moment later, with an almost tangible disapproval of students, she reluctantly showed him in to what appeared to be the doctor’s study-cum-consulting room, though nothing tastelessly medical was on view. The maid took a last look around the room, memorising the contents in case Charles stole anything, and departed.
After five minutes, the dapper doctor hurried in, newly polished.
‘Ah, it is you. I thought I recognised the name. I am sorry to have kept you. I was just changing to go back to the Keiths’ for supper.’ He smiled as though it were an unambiguously delightful social engagement.
‘I hope not to detain you long, sir,’ said Charles, wondering how well the supper would be eaten. ‘A question occurred to me about Professor Keith’s death. I hope you do not mind me asking: I do not study much science and the effect of poisons is not a subject with which I am familiar. A question has arisen in my mind, though: how is it that you can be sure that he died of arsenic poisoning, and not of, say, yew berries?’
‘Well,’ said Dr. Pagan, ‘yew berries are not poisonous. The rest of the tree is, including the seeds inside the berries.’ Charles showed his surprise. ‘Yes, another common misconception. But yew bark, or the seeds, or the leaves ... Both they and arsenic would produce nausea, stomach pains, that kind of thing, and the vomiting and flux we know happened. Of course there’s the burning throat in acute arsenic poisoning, which is probably why he drank so much. On the other hand, yew is reported to dry the mouth. The convulsions, the way he had fallen, I suppose are more common perhaps in yew poisoning, but then it is not impossible that they could occur in arsenic poisoning, either. The stomach pains, you see, can be acute, and a certain amount of, ah, writhing, is almost inevitable.’ The doctor, neat as ninepence, looked as if he would never be provoked into writhing.
Death in a Scarlet Gown (Murray of Letho Book 1) Page 24