Death of an Old Goat

by Robert Barnard

  Jim Timmins was a journalist who believed in saturation coverage. He was usually sent by his editors to investigate problems of incredible complexity, which kept him away from the office for weeks. The results usually appeared when news was short, either because it was the silly season, or at other dry times such as the last days of December. His investigations of the state of college kitchens had once made the whole town throw up its Christmas fare. He was the only journalist on the paper who could make two columns out of a minor motor accident. Certainly his literary merits hardly included the pithy saying or the apt summing up. He had filled up page after page with what he had discovered, such as it was, and his commentary was as voluminous as a Hamlet editor’s, though hardly as imaginative. Bill Bascomb spread it all out over his coffee-table, took a couple of quick gulps of sherry, and settled in to it. As he read on, he was surprised to find that he was not surprised. Somehow, all this was very much what he had expected from these people. There was a dull shock of recognition, but little leaping of the heart at the manifold variety of human folly.

  Professor Wickham, as befitted his status, had by far the largest folder. His university career had begun in 1948, when Oxford was still full of ex-servicemen. For his first year he had been unmarried, though he was already engaged to Lucy, whom he had obstinately insisted on calling his ‘forces’ sweetheart’, to everyone’s embarrassment. He had lived in college — the college being Oriel. He had come there with a first-class degree from Australia, but in spite of this he had made very little impression. ‘Of course, the competition was hot in those days,’ said one of his contemporaries, now a city-councillor and Liberal candidate somewhere in East Anglia, ‘but even in an average year, you got the impression he’d have to work hard to be mediocre.’ Apparently he had only scraped through Prelims, but that was not uncommon for bright students, and at the end of his first year he had married. Lucy Wickham had been escorted from Australia by some Caroline-Chisholm in-reverse, an arrangement master-minded by Professor Wickham’s family who suspected her morals, but after the wedding ceremony she seemed to have reverted to the happy amorality of the milieu from which she came.

  ‘Here I’m having to rely a lot on gossip that can’t be checked,’ said Jim Timmins, with unjournalistic caution. Uncheckable gossip had it that after the Wickhams had set up house in a flat in Cowley Road the family budget had been eked out by Lucy, who had made herself discreetly available to a few selected ‘friends’ while her husband fought for a place in the cold and crowded libraries and lecture-rooms. This activity was pleasantly arranged on a quite un-professional level, and no one was quite certain how far her husband was aware of it. Uncheckable gossip also had it that Wickham’s old scout at Oriel had helped in making this service known to various gilded youths whose family fortunes had survived the war and the aftermath of socialist austerity (austerity which Lucy was apparently in the habit of comparing rather bitterly to conditions back home, which had not endeared her to those healthy young men living on near-starvation rations who were her husband’s contemporaries). Jim had visited the aforementioned scout, now retired, but beyond the fact that he had a disreputable eye, and was living in a poverty less extreme than that usually ordained by the Oxford colleges for their faithful servants, he had been able to get out of him almost nothing of substance.

  ‘Confidentiality is everything in our job, just like with doctors, and lawyers, and gossip-writers,’ the worthy old retainer with the disreputable eye had explained, downing the last drops of a pint of thick and expensive beer; ‘and if you once let that go by the board, where are you? I mean, where are you? Yes, I will have another pint, thank you very much. Same again, Charley. No, what I will say of Mr Wickham is this: he was a very nice gentleman. A very nice gentleman indeed. And that’s what I’d say of all the other gentlemen I’ve served. Very nice gentlemen all. And if that’s any use to you, you’re welcome to it, I’m sure.’

  More beer had made him repetitive, but not more informative.

  After this disappointment, Jim had had to rely further on the assertions and conjectures of the Wickhams’ fellow-students and contemporaries. They maintained that after a term or so of offering discreet daytime entertainment to various young sprigs of the aristocracy, Lucy had become disillusioned, perhaps because she had hoped to entrap one of these good friends into a more lasting arrangement. She had then changed her tactic, and had accommodated a series of dons, virtually all of them teachers of English, and all of them, presumably, in a position to further her husband’s career. How far this was a successful move was not known for certain. However, it had been gradually mooted round the college and the literary clubs of the university that Wickham, far from being the intellectual booby that he had first been thought, was in fact one of the most promising brains of his year. The fact that this reputation was belied by appearances was not of any great importance, since such reputations almost invariably are belied by appearances at Oxford. Luckily all his tutorials were enjoyed alone with his various tutors, so there was little that his fellows could do in the way of checking up on the current gossip, even if they had been interested enough to do so. Most of them were simply after a quick degree, so they were not.

  Certainly his conversation did not betray his hidden genius, though several fellow-students, now mostly sunk into alcoholism and schoolmastering, remembered a memorable night when he had got stinking drunk at the Lamb and Flag, had talked about what his wife was currently engaged in with a Fellow of St John’s, had gone into considerable detail about that gentleman’s sexual tastes and practices (which had nothing to do with swans) and had been arrested by the Martyrs’ Memorial, telling it kindly that he was not allowed home until eleven-thirty. A brief newspaper report of his appearance in court was appended in photo-copy.

  But if there was method in Lucy’s spare-time work, it apparently had not paid off. Perhaps the reason was that two of the examiners in the year of Wickham’s finals were raging homosexuals who could not by any stretch of the imagination have laid themselves open to Lucy’s blandishments. At any rate Wickham got a second, which some thought was better than he deserved, and speedily returned to that haven of Oxford seconds, his home land. He had tried to maintain his contacts for some time, but the dons and contemporaries to whom he wrote seemed to have stored his letters in out-of-the-way nooks or seldom-opened drawers, or perhaps they simply forgot who he was — at any rate they had not replied. Nothing at all had been heard of him in recent years.

  At the end of his report, Timmins had to address himself to the relevance of all this to the murder of Professor Belville-Smith. He had to admit right away that as far as he could see, there was no connection between the two whatsoever. All the obvious possibilities had been checked. He could find no record of Wickham having gone to him for tutorials, and no record of tender friendships formed at Parson’s Pleasure; nor had Belville-Smith been on the examining board when Wickham took his Finals. He had made diligent enquiries as to whether Belville-Smith and Lucy had been rumoured to have had any scandalous relationship, but he had been met with nothing but amused incredulity. ‘My God, man,’ said one of Belville-Smith’s fellow dons, ‘the old man must have got over that sort of thing round about nineteen-twelve.’ Nor had anyone been able to take seriously the idea of Belville-Smith as the practiser of secret vices, a furtive visitor of ladies who did him unmentionable services. ‘Everyone knows everyone else’s business here,’ said this same source, ‘and as far as that kind of thing goes, Belville-Smith had no business.’

  Bill Bascomb rummaged through the pile for more, but was disappointed. He was surprised to find that his glass was still full.

  • • •

  ‘No, not a bad headache,’ said Alice O’Brien into the phone, automatically wrinkling her forehead to give verisimilitude, ‘not a really bad one. I think I’ve just got a bit run down, what with this murder, and everything. I’ll be all right . . .’

  The Principal of Daisy Bates College had had a strong
suspicion that Alice was wallowing in the murder, but she was a woman with a strong leaning towards pharmacology, one who at exam time turned herself into a travelling quack, haunting the corridors and curing and causing minor ailments. Alice knew that the way to her heart was through a trivial symptom, and she readily received permission to skip dinner, even though tonight was a guest night.

  ‘I’ll come and see you after they’ve gone,’ promised the Principal. ‘I’ve got some new pineapple-flavoured dispril I’d rather like to try out on you.’

  Alice repressed her usual reply about throwing physic to the dogs, and uttered soft words of gratitude. Then she sat behind her study curtain waiting for her and Dr Porter’s little flock to get their gowns on and go up the hill towards Hall. It took longer than usual, since on guest nights there was a chance that one of the young lecturers, either presentable or eligible (they were seldom both), might spot one of them through the crowded room, and look on them with the eye of passion. So as they went in a giggling gaggle up the hill, their gowns were thrown back around the armpits, to reveal figures in various stages of over-development. Alice sat behind her curtain, noting the occasional face:

  ‘Janelle Whyte — clumsy child . . . Ruthie Martin . . . that little bitch Dodds . . . Jaynie Taylor (wipe that silly smirk off your face, for God’s sake) . . . Prue Parsons . . . Soo Wong, or is it Woo Song? . . . Pippy Warren . . .’

  When she got to twelve, the college was at last still, and she breathed a sigh of relief. All Dr Porter’s flock were gone to dinner. She felt purposefully in her hair, and pulled out a hairpin.

  The Porter lived a couple of corridors away. Alice had to resist the impulse to slink or skulk, knowing that this invariably resulted in the members of her moral tutorial group being caught when they tried their hand at shoplifting. So she marched in Dr Porter’s direction with a brow so furrowed that anyone could have guessed that her purpose was to borrow an aspirin. There was not a cockroach stirring as she went along, but when she came to the door she gave a regulation sharp tap on it — the sort of knock that intimates to any watcher that the knocker knows that the occupant is not there, but is doing it for form’s sake. Then she inserted her hairpin in the lock after the briefest of looks around, and disguised it as best she could with the key to her own door. Alice had a strong wrist. It was miraculously easy. In a matter of seconds she was walking confidently in, shutting the door, and looking around in the half-light of the early evening.

  She had, she thought without surprise, not been in Dr Porter’s room since the early days of the latter’s fellowship at Daisy Bates — days when a few feeble attempts had been made at an all-girls-together atmosphere. They had speedily found they had nothing whatsoever in common beyond their sex and their department, and had dropped anything more than distant courtesy (and frequently that too). Her first impression of the room now was that it was fantastically, disgustingly tidy. It was the most unlived-in room she had ever known. All the cushions on the sofa had been plumped up, all the curtains fell in neat parallel folds, the mat had been placed four-square in the middle of the room. She had not expected dirty undies, but this was going too far.

  She moved over to the desk. Pens and pencils of various kinds and colours were ranged in parallel lines on a desk-set of very good plastic. There was a neat hole for an inkwell, a square for rubbers, and grooves for plenty of writing implements. In the centre of the desk was a blotter, but the usual obligingness of blotters in the matter of yielding clues when read backwards was missing here — it was hardly marked. Alice shook her head at the unacademic tidiness of it all, and made a tentative pull at the drawers down either side of the desk. Writing paper, typing paper, paper tissues, exercises from external students, internal essays spattered with various red marks of disapproval (‘wild generalization’, ‘hardly vouched for by the facts’ and so on) — and then one drawer that was locked, on the bottom right-hand side. Such a challenge was not to be resisted. Alice immediately sank to her knees, and dived for another hairpin. A little reluctantly the lock gave way to her twistings.

  It was not quite the conflagration she had been banking on. At the top of a little pile was a booklet called Simple Sex-Talks for Girls, issued by the Church of Scotland Moral Welfare Committee; two large colour photographs of Donny Osmond and one of a pop group so physically repulsive that one might have guessed they were sponsored by the Pope were the next exhibits; under them was a pulp magazine, very old, entitled The Eighteen Loves of Lana Turner (the true story told by a friend); lastly came a copy of Song of the Red Ruby, and underneath that, a carefully folded pull-out from a magazine. Gingerly removing and opening it, Alice found it to be a well known art-work, featuring Burt Reynolds, apparently without clothing.

  As she meticulously put each piece back in its place, she speculated distastefully on the personal meaning of this little collection. Could it be that the repulsive Beatrice actually drooled over cut-outs of Burt Reynolds in the privacy of her own study? Could she have crushes on pop groups, an intense curiosity about the private lives of faded film stars? Reluctantly she decided that this could not be the case. Could it be, then, that she was so infected by the general atmosphere of girls’ boarding school which afflicted the college that she confiscated, actually confiscated anything regarded as likely to corrupt the little dears’ rural simplicity? Reluctantly she decided that it could. She felt that the Church of Scotland Welfare Committee would be surprised to find itself classed as objectionable, along with Agnar Mykle and Burt Reynolds. She considered they ought to feel flattered.

  • • •

  Bill Bascomb was interrupted in the reading of his Oxford dossier by a call to exercise his powers as a moral tutor. There seemed to be a party in the block, and as he had not been given the statutory ten days’ notice in triplicate, he felt the need to go and investigate. There was always a danger that the affair would be reported to the Master by one of the students from the Evangelical Union. As he might have guessed, the party was an impromptu one given by a crowd of enormous rural science students, one of whom had just received an alcoholic tuck-box from the ancestral vine-yards. As the least of them was apparently three times his size, he swallowed his principles and volunteered to type a retrospective request for permission when he returned to his room. It was generally agreed that he was a good sport. He then accepted a couple of glasses of Australian whisky, did severe damage to his insides by actually drinking them, and left the party at the point where some of the bawdy songs — very rural, if not very scientific — were being repeated for the ninth time. He then poured himself a couple of quick sherries to take the taste of iron filings out of his mouth, and settled down to do justice to the dirt on Peter Day.

  Peter’s stay at Oxford had been comparatively short. He had apparently arrived there early in the summer of 1954, and had somehow managed to get a temporary job at the Bodleian Library. Luckily a young librarian who began there only a month or so later was now in a position of some influence in the library, and he remembered Day very well. Day had a degree from Leeds, and a letter of recommendation from the Head of the English Department there which seemed, with hindsight, to be cunningly ambiguous — one of those letters which doesn’t stop you appointing someone, but allows the writer to imply that he had warned you if any disaster occurs later. Day had also done some tutoring for the Adult Education people in Sheffield and Leeds, and some of his stories from that period of his life were still remembered:

  ‘Indeed, I could tell you them word for word,’ his old coworker, now deputy chief cataloguer, had said, ‘because I heard them so often, as did everyone who worked here at the time. I very much doubt their veracity. I’ve been to Sheffield.’

  He had claimed to be engaged in a research project centred on Victorian theatrical adaptations of Dickens novels, and had even done a bit of unearthing — several dreadful travesties of Oliver Twist and some ridiculous continuations of Edwin Drood. This had all been done in his first summer. However, soon after that he set
tled down to a life of pub-crawling with the undergraduates, who apparently accepted him as one of themselves. He very soon had a regular circle of cronies in most of the well-known hostelries. The cataloguer had come across many who believed he was a member of their own college. In the course of the next year he had changed his research topic several times, and usually hit on some unfathomable topic on which he was unlikely to meet with anyone who would insist on engaging him in troublesome conversation — subjects like the later novels of Fanny Burney, or the dramas of Bulwer-Lytton. Nothing was known to have come of these studies. Very little, indeed, emerged from his professional activities as a cataloguer, and it was a great relief to his superior (who had a rather squeamish distaste for his post-alcoholic breath and the stale tobacco aroma sticking to his clothes) when he was on one and the same day found to have been sleeping for the past month in a very large drawer in one of the cellars, using a medieval illuminated manuscript as a head-rest, and also accused by one of the young lady librarians of attacking her sexually in the middle of the eleventh century. This last accusation was disbelieved, since accusations of this sort are made by all librarians every three or four months, but it had proved a happy excuse for giving him the sack.