Deadly Stuff

by Joyce Cato

  Back in the incident room, Trevor, Trent and Jenny were discussing the young reporter’s information. Trent had just picked up something from the floor and was looking at it with interest.

  ‘You know these people better than I do,’ the inspector said to the cook. ‘Does it sound likely to you?’

  Jenny smiled ruefully. ‘I know them better than you do by about twenty-four hours,’ she pointed out with some exasperation. Then she sighed. ‘I did get the feeling that the bursar is the big Indian chief around here though,’ she conceded. ‘And I have to say, when Art interviewed me, I wasn’t exactly quaking in my boots. He’s a nice man, but I got the impression that he was, if not exactly in over his head here, then at least not really happy in his work. But then, he’s one of those people with a nervous disposition anyway, so having someone like Glover-Smythe undermining you at every turn….’

  She trailed off and shrugged helplessly.

  ‘Right then, we’d better get him in and have a word then,’ Trevor said. ‘See what this argument was about and see how serious it was, if nothing else. If McIntyre’s job is looking as dicy as they say, and if Raines did threaten to go over his head to his boss, then things might have turned nasty.’

  ‘Right, guv, I’ll go get him,’ Trent said. And it was then, when Jenny turned to look at him, that she realized just what it was that the sergeant was handling.

  Seeing her notice, the older man smiled and held out his hand. ‘I’ve been coming across these things all over the place,’ he said, holding out the exhibit for their inspection. ‘It must be the conference-goers forgetting about them and leaving them lying about. It was a stuffed mouse this morning. Sitting on a table out near the JCR. Gave me a start, I thought the damned thing was real at first, but it was a white one. Some old dear with a blue rinse and glasses like Dame Edna came rushing in, looking for it. Apparently small mammals are her thing,’ Trent mused indulgently.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Trevor said. ‘I came across a stuffed red squirrel on one of the window ledges not so long ago. For a split second I thought the poor blighter had somehow got inside and was trapped.’ Trevor looked down at the offering in his sergeant’s hand. ‘That’s the first reptile I’ve seen though. Apparently, they’re hard to do because their skin is so fragile, or so some old duffer was telling me just after breakfast.’

  Jenny looked down at the familiar, small green chameleon sitting on the sergeant’s palm. Norman swivelled around one conical eye to look at her questioningly.

  ‘Er, Sergeant….’ Jenny said.

  When she got back from delivering the escape artist known as Norman to one very relieved James Raye, Art McIntyre was already in the incident room. That he’d only just arrived, Jenny could tell, from the way he was arranging himself carefully on the seat.

  ‘Ah, is there something I can help you with?’ Art was saying. If he noticed Jenny’s silent approach and continuing presence, he pretended to ignore it.

  ‘If you could just clear up one or two points for me, sir,’ Trevor said amiably. ‘Is it true that you had an argument with Mr Raines on the night that the taxidermy society first arrived in college?’

  Art McIntyre froze in his place for a second; then his shoulders slumped just a little in defeat. ‘Dear me, word does get around here, doesn’t it?’ he said mildly, but Jenny, and no doubt the others also, could clearly hear the underlining tinge of bitterness in his tone. ‘Yes, there was a minor disagreement,’ he agreed flatly.

  ‘About, sir?’ Trevor prompted gently.

  ‘Mr Raines wasn’t happy to have so many of the society staying in one residential house – over half of them in one building, in fact. He had requested that they be more widely scattered throughout the college campus. He said something about not wanting them to form cliques, and that it made for a better dynamic.’ Art shrugged. ‘It all sounded like psychobabble gobbledegook to me.’ Art sighed. ‘But it’s just easier for the scouts to clean rooms if college guests aren’t scattered far and wide. But Mr Raines wouldn’t see reason, but I didn’t take it personally. It was nothing, believe me,’ Art tried to reassure them, looking from one policeman to the other and smiling ingratiatingly. ‘You should hear some of the non-consequential things some of our conference-goers complain about.’ He gave a short, pitifully unconvincing laugh.

  Jenny’s eyes narrowed in sudden thought. Now just why would Maurice Raines want his people to be scattered about here and yon? Unless it was because he wanted to make sure that they weren’t all congregated under his feet, of course. The inspector’s theory that maybe he was conducting an affair during the conference, and wanted room and privacy in order to do so, was looking more and more likely.

  Unless…. Jenny frowned and began to think. Hard.

  ‘And that was all, was it, sir?’ Trevor carried on the interview smoothly, letting the scepticism show in his voice. ‘There was nothing else?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. He made some comment about one of the windows in the lecture room being stiff, I think,’ Art said vaguely.

  Trevor nodded. That might be interpreted as inadequate ventilation, he supposed, with some amusement. ‘And did Mr Raines threaten to take his complaint to the bursar himself?’ Trevor persisted, again in that mild, amiable way that was so clever at luring the unwary into a sense of false security.

  Art flushed. But whether in remembered anger, or because he was embarrassed by the question, it was hard for either policeman to tell. ‘Oh, they all do that, Inspector,’ Art said, waving a hand dismissively in the air. ‘I never take it seriously. The bursar knows what clients can be like. I wasn’t in the least worried. I’m sure Mr Glover-Smythe would have backed me to the hilt, if it had ever come to it,’ Art lied magnificently. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that he was sweating uncomfortably, and looking rather like a disconcerted bullfrog, his feigned nonchalance might have been even halfway believable.

  Trevor decided to let that show of bravura go, and nodded instead. Now might not be the best moment to push it. ‘All right, sir,’ he agreed with a small smile. ‘Just for the record, you were in your office all morning yesterday, isn’t that what you said?’

  Art instantly went pale with fright. ‘Yes,’ he said feebly. He’d never before had to account for his whereabouts at the time of a murder, and the experience was making him feel distinctly faint. He wondered, with a hint of hysteria, if he was going to be sick, and swallowed convulsively.

  The inspector didn’t seem to notice his sudden discomfort. ‘All right, sir, that’s all for now. My sergeant will walk you back your office. Thank you for your time.’ To Trent he quickly whispered some instructions into his ear, and watched the pair depart.

  Then he turned to his companion. ‘So, what do you think?’ he asked. Then, receiving no reply, looked over at the impressive cook. Today she was wearing a long, red, crushed-velvet skirt and a red, blue and green flowered blouse over a white background. With her thick, dark hair and lovely blue eyes, curvaceous figure and pale complexion she was a sight to raise any man’s spirits. James Raye, Trevor Golder couldn’t help thinking, was a lucky man to have attracted her attention.

  But, right now, his thoughts weren’t on the vagaries of romance. ‘Miss Starling!” he said again, slightly louder. That the woman was deep in thought was obvious, and with this particular woman, he wanted to know exactly what she was thinking.

  Jenny started. ‘Hmm? What? Sorry Inspector, I was miles away.’

  ‘Yes, so I could see. So spill it, then. What’s on your mind?’ he demanded shortly.

  ‘Stuffed bears,’ Jenny said promptly, nonplussing him totally.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I was just wondering why a man as vain and as full of himself as Maurice Raines,’ Jenny explained patiently, ‘did all the shifting and hauling of that stuffed bear himself, on the morning that he gave his opening speech.’

  ‘Oh,’ Trevor said. But for the life of him, couldn’t see the relevance.

  But Jenny was ba
rely paying attention. Because now her mind had gone on to something else that was worrying her. Something to do with the two full cups of coffee on the table that had been beside Maurice’s dead body. Something about that hadn’t ever made much sense and she should have known at once what it was. Now that she had remembered something that she’d overheard at breakfast that first morning, those cups of coffee could only make sense in one particular way. But could it really be true? Wasn’t she taking two and two and making twenty-two, instead of four?

  And yet…. How else could it have been?

  Trevor, seeing that he was going to get no sense out of her, turned back reluctantly to his paperwork, whilst Jenny, with all thoughts of James Raye and the prospect of a pleasant lunch all but forgotten, continued to sit and think.

  Over and over again she went over the facts and, time and again, she came back with only one solution that made sense. But, if she was right, then it was all too fantastical for words. No, she must have got it wrong, she told herself, giving a mental head shake. But the strands fit. Well, sort of fit. Well, up to a point. And they all definitely pointed one way. Yet, that simply could not be right, because what should have happened, hadn’t, in fact, happened.

  She frowned, and was so deeply engrossed in going over her theory and pulling huge holes in it, that she missed Peter Trent’s return. It was only when he started to talk, that she pulled herself out of her reverie, and began to listen.

  ‘So, what’s the set up like over there?’ Trevor began briskly by asking his sergeant.

  ‘Mr McIntyre has one of the ground floor rooms in the Cotswold stone building down by Walton Street,’ Peter Trent said. ‘Most of the admin offices are in there, apparently. It’s one of those set-ups whereby you have to go through his secretary’s smaller, outer office before you get into his. The toilet they both use is off her room. I had a word with her, and she swears up and down that our friend never left his office after he started work at his usual time of eight-thirty that morning.’

  Trevor sighed. ‘She strike you as reliable?’

  Peter Trent grinned. ‘My granny wouldn’t have been able to find fault with her, guv,’ he said sadly. ‘In her early sixties, and devoted to her hubby and three cats. I’d say she likes our Mr McIntyre all right, but she’s hardly that fond of him that she’d perjure herself.’

  ‘Right. And the loo’s in her office you say, and they both use it?’ Trevor prompted.

  Trent, with all the weight of his years working with this man behind him, easily read his thought process. ‘Yes. So even if he had left his office for a few minutes, say, with the excuse of a call of nature, he’d still not have left her sight.’

  ‘No windows in the loo, I suppose?’ Trevor asked despondently.

  ‘Only one of those small, high up ones, that you’d need to be as lithe as a weasel to get through, guv,’ Trent confirmed, unhelpfully. And both men grinned at the thought of the short, fat Art McIntyre trying to wriggle through such an aperture. Then the inspector’s face tightened.

  ‘You said his office is on the ground floor, was the door between the secretary’s office and his shut when you went in?’

  ‘Yes, and it usually is kept shut; I checked,’ Peter said, and then added, ‘but if you’re thinking that he might have climbed through the window in his office and out into the garden, I don’t think so, guv,’ he added regretfully. ‘Granted it is one of those much bigger, sash-window affairs, so it’s big enough, but I checked, and right outside is a well-planted flowerbed. Mostly roses too, with a few pretty bushes and marigolds for good measure. None of them has been trampled down. I’d be willing to bet a month’s wages he never waded through them.’

  ‘So, unless our little bursary man launched himself from the window ledge and managed to sail unseen over the shrubbery, there’s no way he could have got out of his office and stuck the knife into our murder victim,’ Trevor concluded.

  ‘Seems not, guv,’ Peter Trent said sympathetically. ‘And I can’t believe that somebody wouldn’t have noticed him either. It’s not often you see a grown man clamber out of a window! And there’s always people milling about inside and out around this place, what with it being open to the public and all. So another perfectly good contender bites the dust,’ Trent finished in disgust.

  ‘It makes our little Mrs Dawkins mystery man look better and better by the minute, doesn’t it?’ Trevor mused. ‘Even if he wasn’t conveniently bloodstained. But if, by some chance, he isn’t the killer, what’s the alternative?’ He threw the question out to the floor. ‘He was there during the right time-frame, and so far we haven’t a clue who he is.’

  ‘Perhaps our Mr X came across Maurice’s dead body just shortly before I did,’ Jenny took up the call to play devil’s advocate, ‘and simply wasn’t as public-minded as me, and decided to just skedaddle instead of reporting it. People do that, don’t they? Panic, I mean?’

  And, she added silently to herself, especially if they had a good reason to want to keep out of it all, as she strongly suspected their Mr X would have wanted to do. Supposing her fantastical theories were correct of course, she reminded herself ruefully.

  ‘Always possible,’ Peter Trent acknowledged. ‘People do do funny things if they have a sudden shock. And if our Mr X had dodgy reasons of his own for being out and about, he’d not want to come to our attention, that’s for sure.’ Like his boss, it had occurred to Peter Trent to wonder if their mystery man had been someone checking out the place with possible burglary in mind. There had to be many pieces of art and other goodies that would attract the seriously light-fingered in an Oxford college, after all.

  ‘You don’t think that the man Debbie Dawkins saw is our killer, do you?’ Trevor said flatly to Jenny, making his sergeant regard the cook thoughtfully.

  But once again, Jenny Starling was thinking hard, trying to put herself in the killer’s place, and, whilst it all fit, there was one little piece that didn’t.

  ‘You didn’t find a second mobile phone anywhere in Maurice’s room, did you?’ she asked, seemingly out of the blue.

  Peter Trent quickly consulted his notes, but was pretty sure that he already knew the answer. ‘No, we didn’t,’ he said. ‘But then, we found his mobile phone on him.’ The older man was sure that the cook had been present when he’d told Trevor as much. ‘Perhaps you’d forgotten?’ he asked kindly.

  But Jenny hadn’t forgotten. And it was not the victim’s own mobile phone that interested her.

  Trevor, who didn’t for a moment believe that the sharp-witted cook forgot a single thing, opened his mouth to ask her just what she was getting at, but Jenny forestalled him.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Jenny said. ‘About the coffee. I think you’ll find that it—’

  Just then, one of the constables who’d just taken a telephone call, came rushing over, obviously in a lather of excitement, and waving a piece of paper in the air. ‘Sir, that was labs. Forensics have just got some results through, and the man in charge over there thought you’d like to know. One of the cups of coffee, found next to the victim, had enough drugs in it to kill an elephant!’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Inspector Golder froze for a second, and then slowly reached out to take the piece of paper from the young constable’s hand, and read the message for himself.

  ‘I don’t speak scientific, but it seems clear enough,’ he said at last to his intensely interested audience. ‘One of the coffee cups contained nothing but coffee, milk and sugar, and the only potentially deadly thing in it was the usual amount of caffeine. The other had … er….’ Trevor squinted at the multi-syllabic chemical formula that the constable had conscientiously written down and grunted. ‘Says in the summary, that it’s something that’s available on prescription and is usually given out to people, mainly the elderly it seems, with a certain heart condition. Administered in the form of a drug called digi— something-or-other.’

  Jenny nodded, without surprise. She’d been about to say that she
thought one of the coffee cups must contain some kind of poison, but she didn’t think that it was politic of her to say so now. Not only would it smack of boasting – a proclivity that had never been one of her favourite pastimes – but it wouldn’t do to interrupt the inspector in full flight.

  However, she did need to tell Trevor Glover something very important and cleared her throat to get his attention. When she had it, she smiled briefly, almost as if in apology. ‘When I was at breakfast, I overheard Maurice Raines say that his mother had a bad heart condition,’ she said. ‘You might find it useful to contact her GP and find out if she was prescribed the same drug.’

  ‘You think Mrs Raines, the wife, I mean, might be in the frame then?’ Trevor said sharply. ‘She’d probably have access to her mother-in-law’s medication all right. Providing they were on visiting and speaking terms, that is,’ he modified, after a moment’s thought. Not all in-laws got on, as he well knew.

  Jenny Starling opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it. After all, having an outlandish and unproven theory was one thing; sticking her neck out without more proof to back it up was another.

  ‘It makes sense in one way,’ the inspector carried on, not noticing the cook’s hesitation and waving the still-hovering and excited constable away. ‘The spouse and immediate family are always the first suspects when it comes to killing your nearest and dearest. But in this case, we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of the lady,’ he added grimly. ‘And I would imagine that most of the conference goers here probably know their chairman’s wife by sight and, if she had been sneaking around, surely she’d have been spotted?’

  ‘Not necessarily, guv,’ Peter Trent pointed out. ‘Not if she picked her time. When Maurice Raines was killed, everybody was out of the way doing their own thing, remember? The conference people at lectures and what-not, and the college staff doing their cleaning rounds and so forth.’

  ‘Yes, but how would she know when the time was right unless she had access to some sort of timetable, or was holed up somewhere waiting for her opportunity?’ Jenny felt compelled to point out. ‘I find it hard to believe that she could have even found her way around college without thoroughly checking it out first, let alone manage to find the one time that her husband was on his own, without either a lot of luck, or the sort of planning that would be bound to leave traces. And you haven’t found anyone who admits to seeing a strange woman hanging about, have you?’