Death of an Old Goat

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Which consists of being not seen and not heard,’ he said, in what Inspector Royle regarded as his clever-clever Pommie way.

  ‘I see, sir. And what did you do next?’

  ‘Well, after the silly bitch let me go — ’

  Inspector Royle could not let that pass:

  ‘Mrs Wickham is a highly respected member of this community, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Really? What very odd standards your little community must have, Inspector,’ said Bascomb.

  ‘Just cut out the smart-alecky stuff, and tell me what you did last night, will you?’ said Royle exasperated.

  ‘When the lecture finished, I asked Mrs Wickham if I was free to go now, and whether I could phone for a taxi from her house,’ said Bascomb in an exaggerated schoolboy style.

  ‘You didn’t drive to the party?’

  ‘Yes, I did. But I thought I’d had a bit too much to drink to drive home.’

  Self-righteous bloody Pommie, thought Royle. You could tell he hadn’t been out here long.

  ‘Very commendable I’m sure, sir,’ he said.

  ‘When we got back to Menzies College — oh, by the way, I’m moral tutor out there, to E block. For the moment, anyway. I’m supposed to sort of Auntie Marge them. Well, when I got back to Menzies there was a party on in one of the corridors, and I went to investigate it, because it was after midnight by then. And I sort of stayed on, you see. I don’t know how long, but an awfully long time.’

  ‘When did you get to bed?’

  ‘I don’t remember, Inspector. In fact, I rather think I must have been put to bed.’

  Royle looked at him closely. If ever a story was borne out by a face, this one was. The naturally unwholesome complexion had a greenish tinge, the teeth were stained with cheap red wine, and the eyes were dull and blood shot. Perhaps he didn’t look quite so dreadful normally, then. In an odd way Royle felt better disposed towards him. Clearly with a bit of training Bascomb would become a man who could take his grog.

  ‘You drank red wine at this party, I’d guess, sir,’ he said, attempting friendliness.

  ‘Yes. Tuppenny headache. Never again.’

  ‘You’ll soon get used to it,’ said Royle. ‘If we can get this confirmed, it looks as if you’re in the clear.’

  From Bascomb and the rest he got fragments of the Professor’s conversation during the evening, and a very strange evening it seemed to him to be. He was used to parties where men assembled down one end of the room around the beer keg, and the women talked about plastic nappies and the price of frozen peas at the other end. That was what parties essentially were, for Royle. This didn’t seem to have been that sort of a do at all. Effeminate, these academics, he thought.

  Nor did it seem to have been quite the happy event Professor Wickham had remembered with such affection. In fact, almost none of the staff seemed to have enjoyed it, and almost all of them seemed to have a grudge of one kind or another. These grudges appeared to centre on Lucy Wickham, whose position as a respected member of the community Royle soon got tired of going into the lists in defence of. He recognized a right bitch when he heard of one, even if she was on the Country Party social committee. The exception to most of these generalizations was, as usual, Dr Day, who was every policeman’s idea of a nightmare witness.

  ‘Don’t remember a thing,’ he said genially. ‘Never do. ‘Don’t go to parties to take notes, or write books, or save up things for use later. I think I got there a bit early, because Wickham kept me in his study talking some rot or other for half an hour or so. Lucy must have put him up to that. Felt really down when we came out, so it must have been long enough to sober up.’

  ‘You’d had something to drink before you went to the Wickhams’?’

  ‘You don’t know the Wickhams’ parties, or you wouldn’t ask. Of course I did. You don’t know how much you’re going to get with them. When we went into the party Lucy tried to keep us from the booze, bless her well-covered heart, but she didn’t succeed.’

  ‘And you don’t remember anything else?’

  ‘Not a thing. Something may come back later — it sometimes does. Wait a minute — I think I was in the garden part of the time. Yes, I’m sure I was.’

  ‘With Professor Belville-Smith?’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think so. He looked as though a breath of fresh air would blow him away. I was probably pissing on the roses. Go and see if they’re flourishing. At home we’ve got the best rose-bed in Drummondale, and that’s what I put it down to.’

  ‘When did you get home?’

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest. You know how it is. Ask the wife — she may have woken up.’

  ‘Wasn’t she at the party, then?’

  ‘Not on your life. She and Lucy have fallen out — or rather they never fell in. If there’s one thing Lucy dislikes more than academics, it’s academics’ wives. Consequently she always manages to freeze them off, right from the first.’

  ‘Did you drive yourself home?’

  ‘I suppose so. Yes, I must have. The car was outside this morning, without a dent in it, too. It’s a good car — more or less takes me home after a party.’

  So there it was. All but Bascomb without a shred of an alibi, and his needed close checking. If Belville-Smith had been done in at some time between midnight and five a.m., as the police doctor had conjectured, then any one of them could have done it. The whole thing need have taken no more than ten minutes. Inspector Royle’s elephantine mind made the logical leap necessary to tell him that he ought to try to pin down some motive which could have made one or other of them — or one of the other guests, though that didn’t seem to him very likely — do such a savage thing. But nothing anyone could remember about the corpse’s conversation on the previous night gave any clue as to which of them it might have been. Everyone mentioned, with great relish, the little set-to between the distinguished guest and his undistinguished host just before he left, but none of them thought any more highly of this as a motive for murder than he did.

  ‘If Bobby went around murdering everyone who thought him a lousy host,’ said Alice O’Brien, ‘even you would have caught him by now.’

  Royle chewed this over in silence for a bit, and wondered whether to put Miss O’Brien down as a sarcastic bitch. She marched in on the progress of his thoughts, however, before he had properly sorted out the implications.

  ‘If you want to know who he was talking to, and what they were saying, you should pump Doctor Porter, if you can bear the experience,’ she said. ‘She’s got ears in the back of her head, and she stores it all up, to use later on.’

  ‘Blackmail?’ asked Royle, positively staggered by these depths of academic iniquity.

  ‘Not in the criminal sense,’ said Alice enigmatically.

  ‘Was she talking to the old guy a lot herself?’

  ‘Not that I saw. In fact, I’m not sure she spoke to him at all. But she was hovering near him much of the time. She never drinks more than a thimbleful herself, so that she can listen to the rest of us making fools of ourselves, and then throw it in our faces later on. She’s a Fellow of Daisy Bates College, and so am I. They say she practises her spying on the girls there.’

  Inspector Royle took a hurried leave of Alice, putting her down as the sort who sometimes made mincemeat of prosecuting counsel if you put them in the witness-box. He liked the sound of this Porter woman, though. That was the sort of witness a policeman liked — one who kept her eyes and ears open. It saved so much questioning, and comparing of differing versions.

  Dr Porter was very young to be a Doctor, but nobody ever thought so. She was ageless, and so completely sexless, that she gave even Royle the feeling that he was in some way bandaged tightly from head to toe in her presence. Her lips were compressed, her eyes were sharp, and Royle had no doubt that Alice O’Brien was right about her. But she was a respectable member of a respectable class, in a country which made a cult of respectability, and she intensely resented being interviewed by a policeman.r />
  ‘I’m afraid I can tell you nothing, nothing whatsoever,’ she said, and she stuck to this line uncompromisingly throughout the interview. A clam was, by comparison, loose-tongued. She had not talked to the dead man herself, and she deeply resented the suggestion that she might have overheard so much as a word of anyone else’s conversation with him. No one who was a gentleman could even have considered the possibility of such a thing.

  ‘But if you didn’t talk to Professor Belville-Smith, and didn’t hear what he was talking about to other people, you must have been talking to some of the other guests yourself.’

  She gave a little silent nod of the head.

  ‘What were you talking about?’

  ‘We talked about academic matters, for the most part,’ said Dr Porter primly.

  ‘What sort of academic matters?’

  ‘Reform of the syllabus,’ she said. Inspector Royle simply retired, defeated.

  Driving back, tired and frustrated, towards town, Royle saw the students of Menzies College streaming towards their dining hall. They lived in a collection of buildings like chicken boxes, scattered in a haphazard way around a more pretentious building, where they ate. Clearly the powers-that-be at the university thought eating a more important function than any other, or else the residential blocks had been built at a time when money was short. Royle drove towards the block over which Bascomb had indicated he held moral sway, and got out of the car. He went up to a little group of stragglers, and opened the interview with one of them in his usual way, by putting his enormous hand on his shoulder and lifting him several inches off the ground. Not surprisingly his initial questions about the party the previous night met with hostility, which took the form of complete silence.

  ‘Look,’ he said finally, ‘I don’t care a monkey’s fart what went on at the party. All I want to know is whether this Pommie Bastard Bascomb was there.’

  There was silence for a moment as the group inspected him, apparently wondering whether they could believe him. Surprisingly one of them decided that he could.

  ‘Came about half past twelve,’ he said, a youth who looked about Bascomb’s own age.

  ‘Did you see him come?’

  ‘Yes. I was under the trees over there with my girl. He came in a taxi, and went straight in. I thought I’d stay out there in case he got shirty about the party, but he was beaut about it.’

  ‘How long did he stay?’

  ‘Bloody hours. He was enjoying himself.’

  ‘What time did he go to bed?’

  ‘About five. We put him to bed. Typical bloody Pommie. Can’t take his booze.’

  ‘You’re sure it was five? And he couldn’t have got up after he’d gone to bed?’

  ‘Not a chance. He was bloody paralytic. He was so pissed he couldn’t have scratched his own arse.’

  That, at any rate, seemed conclusive.

  CHAPTER IX

  KENILWORTH

  IT WAS the next day before Inspector Royle got to call on any of the other party guests. He chose the Turbervilles first, probably from some obscure inklings of the rights of precedence, and he rang up Kenilworth in advance to tell them he was coming. Kenilworth was the property which Mr Turberville’s father had bought from the grandson of a Scottish convict who had stolen sheep from Sir Walter Scott. He thought the Turbervilles would probably be a pleasant relief after a day spent with blood-spattered bodies and bloody academics. In the University world he was never quite sure what pose to adopt. Towards the Turbervilles he knew what his attitude and manner had to be: servile. He had always got on very well with them in the past. There had been the little matter of the youngest Turberville boy — the one at the Drummondale School — who had shot dead a jackaroo in a fit of pique during his summer vacation. It was easy enough to hush up that one as an unfortunate accident. Luckily the jackaroo was just out from England, an ex-Barnardo’s boy, whom the Turbervilles had engaged on conditions not very far from slavery, so nobody asked any questions.

  Then there’d been the occasion when Turberville Senior had run over that child and put him in hospital for six months. It was near the Abo reserve, so he hadn’t been taking care, naturally, but by ill-luck it turned out to be a white child. What he’d liked about both occasions had been the frank way in which Turberville went about getting a handful of notes, large ones at that, from various little nest-eggs he kept concealed about the house in armchairs and drawers. He had handed it straight over without any embarrassment, and Royle had found the whole thing the very model of how a gentleman should behave. There was nothing he found so convenient as bank-notes. There weren’t, he thought regretfully, going to be any bank-notes this time.

  • • •

  ‘No question of cash this time,’ said Guy Turberville, as he and his wife waited in the huge lounge with the dull furniture and the stag’s head over the door. He was a medium-sized, flabby man in his fifties with a military moustache and a rather weak mouth. He frequently sucked at a pipe, more for something to do than anything else, and he often lost his temper with his inferiors, particularly when things went wrong for which he knew himself to be responsible. That was fairly frequent these days.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Nancy Turberville, looking down her smart little navy dress and wishing that her neck was not beginning to look so scraggy. ‘Why on earth should there be? We haven’t done anything, have we? I know I haven’t anyway.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Guy, looking around the room nervously, as if he didn’t quite recognize it. ‘It just seems the thing to do.’

  ‘Silly habit to get into,’ said Nancy. ‘One day you’ll do it to one who’ll refuse and put you on a charge.’

  ‘Never happened to me yet,’ said Guy.

  • • •

  Inspector Royle drove past the semi-regal splendours of the houses for the elder Turberville boys, past the Volkswagen used as a chicken-run and up the drive of the sprawling, much-altered-and-built-on-to colonial mansion, vintage 1895, entry to which was so dearly prized by Lucy Wickham and her like. He was immensely flattered by Guy Turberville’s ‘Walk right in, Royle,’ shouted through the open window, and he came in to them rubbing his hands in a perfect lather of gratified subservience.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Turberville, and g’day to you, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Sorry to have to break in on you like this.’

  ‘Not at all, Inspector,’ said Nancy. ‘We know you’ve got your job to do, same as all of us.’ The Turbervilles were very hot on the police doing their job when they spoke at political meetings, especially if there had been a hint of student unrest at the University. ‘We’re as willing as the next man to help you.’

  ‘That’s very handsome of you, ma’am,’ said Royle, sketching a bow. ‘Very handsome indeed.’

  ‘Not that we can,’ said Guy. ‘Never saw the old . . . chap in our lives before last night.’ He looked round at his wife, who backed him up by nodding vigorously.

  ‘Well now, sir, that’s what I thought would be the case. I thought: they won’t know anything about it, but they will be unprejudiced outsiders. And that could be useful, I thought.’

  ‘Ye-e-es,’ said Nancy. ‘I suppose you might say we were that. But of course, we’d have kept our eyes open more if we’d known. You just don’t expect the person you’re talking to to be bumped off by next morning.’

  ‘But as it was, then, you didn’t notice anything suspicious, nothing that you might have talked about together after the do, like?’

  ‘Can’t say we did. Don’t remember that we talked much after the party, did we, Guy? Dull little affair.’

  ‘You didn’t notice anyone who seemed to know the old boy from before, did you?’ pursued Royle, looking at her scraggy neck with well-concealed distaste.

  ‘No, not that I noticed. Poor old boy seemed a little bit . . . well, dim, to me, if you know what I mean. Not quite on the ball, so to speak. He wasn’t up to much when he came, and by the time he’d had a couple — well! To give you an example:
I was talking to him about the communists, see, and he certainly didn’t seem to be very well up on the red menace to our free institutions. But that’s true of all Englishmen. They’re living in a dream world . . .’

  Inspector Royle cut in hastily. He had been on the receiving end of Nancy Turberville’s obsesssions too often before.

  ‘Have you been to Oxford, ma’am?’

  Nancy Turberville was stopped in her tracks.

  ‘Oxford . . . Oxford, Guy? Have we?’

  ‘Blessed if I know, Nance. All those old places look alike to me. You’re the one who insists on going. Quite happy at the races, myself,’ he added to Royle, with an attempt to work up fellow-feeling. Royle smiled as if to say that he knew what womenfolk were like.

  ‘That black and white place,’ said Mrs Turberville pensively. ‘Sort of patchwork. Lots of little souvenir places with ashtrays, and swans on the river and things.’

  ‘Isn’t that the Shakespeare place?’ said Guy.

  ‘I believe you’re right,’ said Nancy. ‘Not Oxford, no. So I don’t think we have, Inspector. And it can’t have been for more than a day if we have.’

  Royle gave up that line.

  ‘Did you notice him talking to any of the academics particularly? Like it might be getting serious, you might say?’

  ‘Well, most people had a word with him at one time or another. More a duty than a pleasure, I’d say, wouldn’t you, Guy?’

  ‘Didn’t know much about the drought,’ said Guy.

  ‘Anyway, he seemed to get dimmer and dimmer as the night wore on, so that you were expecting him to go out any minute — ’ Nancy Turberville gave a hard little laugh at her own wit — ‘and then just before the end he got nasty with Wickham. It all blew up quite sudden, and I didn’t really twig what was going on. It was as he was going, and he got sharp-like, in that English sort of way. Wickham’s not my cup of tea, but I didn’t see any call for it myself.’

  ‘Other than that had he got on well with the Wickhams during the earlier part of the evening?’