Death of an Old Goat

by Robert Barnard

  ‘He didn’t say much, but I guessed. I don’t think he’d even heard of Henry Handel Richardson. I had to give him, like, a bit of a resumé of Richard Mahoney. And I bet if I’d er gone on to Lawson, Clarke and Judith Wright it’d er been the same.’

  ‘I should think it would,’ said Bill, conscious that a year ago he hadn’t heard of them either.

  ‘Bloody condescending bastards,’ said Merv.

  ‘Perhaps Merv did him in as part of the fight against colonialist condescension,’ said Alice. ‘An ideological murder. They’re pretty fashionable these days.’

  ‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ said Merv, swilling down the last of his coffee and relapsing into renewed glower.

  ‘The trouble with this murder,’ said Bill, ‘is that nobody at all has a shadow of a motive. It’s not like that in detective stories. Look at Aunt Agatha, for instance. Usually it’s some ghastly old bugger gets done in that everyone else in the book would have been only too happy to stick the knife into.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Smithson; ‘and even then it usually turns out to be the policeman.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a fast one,’ said Alice. ‘I suppose there’s no hope that it could be the policeman in this case, is there?’

  ‘You mean Royle in his younger and more idealistic days wanting to go to Oxford like Jude the Obscure, and getting the cool brush-off from Belville-Smith?’

  ‘The mind boggles,’ said Alice. ‘Anyone less like Jude the Obscure than Inspector Royle I cannot imagine.’

  Dr Day was getting rather restive.

  ‘I’m bored with this whole business,’ he said. ‘Quite apart from anything else, I can’t remember a damned thing about what happened the whole night. It’s the only time in my whole life I wish I’d been less drunk than I was.’

  ‘Doesn’t it frighten you, that?’ asked Bill. ‘It would me. I think I’d get nightmares thinking what I might have done while I was under the influence.’

  ‘I’ve been under the influence practically continuously since I was thirty, and for quite a bit of the time before that,’ said Day. ‘I’ve done a lot of funny things in my time, but murder isn’t one of them, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t take the carving knife and hare off in the direction of the Yarumba Motel. When you’ve been drunk so often you know the sort of things you do and the sort of things you don’t do.’

  ‘I suppose you would learn by experience,’ said Alice.

  ‘Anyone going to the smorgasbord lunch?’ asked Day, without any particular air of wishing to change the subject.

  ‘You without a doubt,’ said Bill.

  The smorgasbord lunch was a weekly affair at the students’ union — but only for the staff, of course. You could eat and drink as much as you liked for a dollar, so it attracted all those who couldn’t resist an apparent bargain. Various unappetizing messes of a peculiarly unScandinavian nature were provided, and you could drink limitless glasses of tuppenny headache wine. It was not the food that attracted Dr Day.

  ‘Course I’m going,’ he said. ‘Never missed one yet. I’ve got a tutorial at two. You’ve no idea how much better they go since they started these lunches.’

  ‘Actually, we had heard rumours of how they were going,’ said Alice, who believed in keeping sober until the approaching horrors of high table made a few glasses inevitable.

  ‘I find it releases the mind,’ said Peter Day, with his cunning, self-depreciating little smile. ‘One can range more widely. It’s a liberal education for these students. After all, they don’t meet a really well-travelled man every day.’

  ‘Do you ever actually talk about the topic you’re supposed to be dealing with?’ asked Dr Porter.

  ‘How should I know? I never remember a thing about them. Anyway, how would I know what we were supposed to be talking about?’

  ‘It is posted up on the departmental notice-board,’ Dr Porter pointed out.

  ‘What departmental notice-board?’ asked Dr Day, hearing of it for the first time.

  ‘So it’s a bit of a lucky dip, coming to your tutorials, is it?’ asked Alice.

  ‘Well, what they need, I think, is to see the book in a wider context. Anyone can talk about a book, after all. And they have read the thing themselves. What I give them is the wider context.’

  ‘Along with sexual reminiscences, analyses of Spanish politics in the thirties, accounts of your travels with a donkey on three continents, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, I believe,’ said Alice.

  ‘Really?’ said Peter Day, genuinely interested. ‘Is that what we’ve been talking about? You see what I mean, then, about a liberal education. It must have opened their eyes immensely. It’s the sort of thing you never get in Australian schools.’

  Bill was somewhat depressed by the results of his first little efforts at drawing his colleagues out. He had the impression that even if he had been able to get everything down on tape and play it over to himself later, he would get very little out of it except a stupendous boredom. If one of his colleagues had something to hide, the general level of conversation gave them plenty of trivia to hide it under.

  He decided to pocket his principles and partake of the smorgasbord lunch. He had only done so once, and had been very publicly sick afterwards, so he was rather reluctant, but there was no knowing what Day might not reveal when drunk. True his mind usually travelled along drearily predictable lines at such times, but if he had done the murder, the reason might be lying fairly close to the top of his jumbled mind, and there might be some chance of it emerging as the alcohol level rose. The only question was, whether he would be able to recognize it and disentangle it from the rest.

  So, at half past twelve he trudged up the hill to the union, observing Dr Day’s car parked at an impossible angle just by the union door (the walk was only one of a minute and a half, but Day had been affected by the general Australian desire to be the first nation to be born without such useless members as legs). Clearly Day had, as usual, managed to get in at opening time.

  Bill walked disconsolately along the trestle table along which the Australo-Scandinavian delicacies were ranged. There was a large stewing-saucepan full of bits of pork sausage and tinned peas. There was another labelled ‘Spaghetti Neapolitan’, full of brilliant red and white goo, rather like gory entrails in a Hammer film. There were cold mutton chops with baked beans poured over them. As an enterprise, this was not calculated to persuade the Australians that the Swedes were on to a good thing. Luckily there were no Swedes present to protest against the aspersion on their national palate. Bill spied a pyramid of plates containing some rather wilted ham-and-salads. He took one, and looked around for Peter Day. As he expected, Peter had bagged a seat in the corner where the flagons of red and white wine were — making sure they were within easy reach of his right hand. The warden of the union was looking at him in disgust, wondering whether there ought to be a change in the regulations for these affairs. Others less involved financially were simply avoiding him.

  ‘Thought I’d try it again today,’ said Bill apologetically. ‘Chef doesn’t seem to have got any new ideas.’

  ‘Oh, are you eating?’ asked Peter.

  ‘I thought it was the idea.’

  ‘The secret,’ said Peter, ‘is not to start until after you’ve had three glasses.’ He waved his large tumbler. ‘Then you don’t notice the food.’

  ‘I suppose you wouldn’t,’ said Bill.

  ‘This is my third now,’ said Peter, draining off half a tumbler. ‘Keep my place. Everyone wants to get near the grog.’ And he weaved off towards the table, as usual looking like a music-hall comic doing a parody of a drunk asked to walk a white line. He returned in the same fashion, carrying a plate piled high with a bit of everything, and spilling gravy and little bits of spaghetti over himself as he went. As he sat down he reached straight for one of the flagons and tucked into both food and drink with appetite.

  ‘People make a fuss about their food,’ he said, ‘but I find that most things go down.’ />
  ‘As far as these dos are concerned I find that most things come up,’ said Bill.

  Peter Day laughed, and a little more gravy spilled over his trousers.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about the girl from Sheffield I met at my adult education classes?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bill, ‘innumerable times. So often that the story is engraved word for word on my memory like the Lord’s Prayer. So often that I wake up in the morning muttering it by rote.’ It was as well to exaggerate a little with Peter Day when he was drunk, since he was inclined not to take no for an answer. ‘Don’t you have any reminiscences drawn from any other period of your life?’

  Peter took the invitation perfectly seriously, thought a little, then launched into a story about a brothel in Khartoum, which somehow became a brothel on the left bank in Paris about half-way through. This in turn gave way, without any obvious transition, to a story about illicit love in Argentine in the days of Evita Peron. By this time Peter Day had had seven tumblers, had got rid of his plateful partly down his mouth and partly over his person, and was beginning to show signs of wear.

  ‘Must have been a change after Oxford,’ said Bill, desperate for a change of subject, quite apart from his supposed investigations. Peter Day’s eyes refocused, as if trying to remember what or where Oxford was. Finally some sort of light seemed to strike.

  ‘Paris was before Oxford,’ he said firmly. ‘Canada was after, and Khartoum was after, but Paris was before. Went to Ox . . . Oxford late, you know. Not like you young sprigs of the aristocracy.’

  Bill accepted the implied insult, though it was untrue.

  ‘What exactly were you doing at Oxford?’ he asked.

  ‘Research,’ said Peter, very definitely. Then he made another attempt to focus his eyes, on what Bill was not quite sure. ‘Research into the poetry of George Eliot. Or the plays of Dickens. Or was it the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward? I’ve forgotten which. Done ’em all in my time. I’ll say this, I’ve never wanted for a good subject. They ought to send the honours students to me for ideas.’

  ‘Weren’t you working at the same time?’ asked Bill.

  ‘Worked at the Bodle . . . Bodleian for a bit,’ said Peter, not noticeably reluctant to tell. ‘In the background, you know. In the . . . background. Getting the books up for the readers. Bit of cata . . . cataloguing too. That sort of thing.’

  He was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate. He had something else on his mind, and his eyes kept straying round to the flagons, and jealously fixing a look of hatred on anyone who came near them. On one occasion they had run out, and he was going to make sure that this time they ran out into his glass.

  ‘Was it interesting?’ asked Bill.

  ‘Eh? Was what interesting?’

  ‘Working. In. The Bodleian.’

  ‘If you liked books, I suppose,’ said Peter, as if trying to be fair. ‘I didn’t go much on it myself.’

  ‘Pleasant company, though.’

  ‘If you call librarians pleasant company, you must have some kind of a . . . some kind of a — ’ Peter searched at his leisure for a word, and finally found one — : ‘some kind of a kink.’

  ‘Still, it must have brought you into contact with all the academics,’ said Bill.

  ‘Best academics never went near the Bodleian,’ said Peter firmly. ‘Same everywhere. Good academic should b’able to go to the lecture hall and talk for an hour on any subject under the sun. If he can’t, he’s wasting his time.’

  ‘And if he does, he’s wasting the students’ time,’ said Bill, but he wasn’t being listened to.

  ‘Anyway, I’m glad to say I can, and I do.’

  Bill knew he did, and he also knew he shouldn’t. He switched the subject back again.

  ‘So you didn’t meet Lord David or any of those?’

  ‘Christ no. Anyway I was down in the slacks . . . down in the . . . stacks. Didn’t meet anyone. Not a soul. Not the ghost of a soul. Not the ghost of a . . . ghost.’ His voice was getting far away, as if he was talking of a long time ago. ‘Only the odd little librarian lass, burrowing away there . . . burrowing away there, like a little . . . mole . . . a little, snuffling . . . mole. Get me another drink, will you, Bill? I don’t think I could lift the bloody flagon. And you’ve got to get your money’s worth.’

  Bill got him another drink, and then half-walked, half-carried him over to the fresh air. He was already ten minutes late for his tutorial. Quite suddenly, as the heavy afternoon sun revived him, he shook off Bill’s protective arm, and shot off determinedly down the hill, only to trip over a small hillock in the grass. Half an hour later Bill saw him through the window holding forth, and he thought he heard the name Mintinguette. He could not see if there were any students in his room, but he rather suspected not. At least that was one tradition he had picked up at Oxford.

  • • •

  When Professor Wickham came down to the department from his sandwich and coffee lunch, he rang his wife to see how the interview with Inspector Royle had gone.

  ‘All right. Quite all right,’ said Lucy in a rather surprised manner. ‘He was very nice. I’ll tell you this evening. I’m busy now. I’ve got something on the stove.’

  Professor Wickham was puzzled, because he thought he could hear heavy breathing behind her voice.

  CHAPTER XIII

  WOMEN OF PROPERTY

  AS ROYLE drove from the Wickhams’ residence towards the outskirts of town, and thence on to the gravel road which led to the Lullham property, he had a secret source of self-congratulation which had nothing to do with the progress of the case. Several times he came near to smiling, and frequently he passed his tongue around his lips, as if he had been eating ice-cream. This secret source, and preparing his approach to Peggy Lullham, kept him pretty happy throughout most of the long, bumpy drive out to Tara Magna. He had two different manners with the grazing aristocracy: for the most part he was servile, as befitted his dependent station, but when he had recently conferred favours, he adopted that hearty benevolent-paternal manner which is one of the law’s best cards. Sometimes this manner could wear a little thin, and a distinct trace of his natural bully-boy manner show through, it is true, but in this he differed in no way from most benevolent paternalists, and he did try to keep it in check. After all, these were people with money.

  The landscape became drier, dustier, more choking the farther he went. The Lullham property seemed to be in no condition to resist the rigours of the drought. A knot of cattle-men and jackaroos gathered by a crossroads looked as if they could do with a cold Grafton’s. The paddocks looked the same way, but they wouldn’t be getting one. Royle drove up to the Lullham residence, a long, low, much-built-on-to old house, which looked comfortable and homely. The front door stood open, and as he got out of his car he was conscious of a curtain falling back into place at one of the downstairs windows. He thought to himself with some satisfaction that he must have been waited for for some time.

  Mrs Lullham came hesitantly towards the open front door as he walked up to it, and he could tell by the nervous flutter of her hands that she was expecting an ordeal of the most ferocious kind. Her hair looked as if it was used to weekly attention from someone expensive, but hadn’t had it very recently — it looked dead and perfunctorily brushed, and the woman’s skin looked tired, the make-up carelessly applied. Royle didn’t feel anything that could be identified as pity, but he did get a certain satisfaction in acting the part of deliverer from worry and fear. He held up his hand in a manner which derived largely from his experience earlier in his career of stopping the traffic in the high street on Saturday mornings. He had always felt good doing that.

  ‘Now, before we get under way,’ he said in his best Dock-Green manner, ‘let’s get this clear. I’m not in the least interested in that other little matter any longer.’

  ‘Really, Inspector?’ said Peggy Lullham hopefully, experimenting with a little-girl flutter of the eyelashes, for she had heard of Inspector Royle
’s reputation.

  ‘Not at all, ma’am,’ said Royle, showing disappointingly little reaction to her advances. ‘That’s over and done with as far as I’m concerned, and has nothing to do with this murder in any case. I haven’t been a policeman all these years without knowing that people can do some funny things at times’ (and profiting from this fact, he might have added), ‘and anyone can see you must have been off your head with worry about this drought.’

  As a matter of fact Peggy Lullham had refurnished the living-room on the drought-relief payments, and her main worry was whether she and her husband would be able to get away for their bi-annual trip to The Old Country next year, but she entered wholeheartedly into Royle’s little fiction and breathed a theatrical sigh of relief.

  ‘You’re so understanding, Inspector. As you say, it was a case of complete absence of mind, but it’s difficult to make someone like John Darcy understand that. The shopkeeper’s mind, you know. You must see an awful lot of it. Come in, won’t you, Inspector, and I’ll try to remember anything that could be of any help.’

  She led the way through the hall into the sitting-room, which was large, expensively furnished, but comfortable. As she motioned Royle into one of the large luxurious arm chairs, tailor-made for policemen, she stood by the mantelpiece — a heavy, capable woman who looked as if in the past she would have been able to turn her hand to anything. Now she was running a little to fat, and the remains of a nervous diffidence sat oddly on her, as if she were uncertain of her role. Royle remembered her penchant for shoplifting pretty, feminine clothes, and began to conjecture whether she wore frilly underwear. On this occasion he was not particularly anxious to be given the chance of finding out.

  ‘Have a beer, Inspector. I’ve got some on ice,’ said Mrs Lullham.

  ‘I’d love one,’ said Royle before she had finished. ‘I’ve had a thirsty day, so I’ll forget the rule book for once.’

  ‘You won’t find me reminding you of it, anyway,’ said Mrs Lullham, bustling towards the kitchen.