Having condoled with Kathryn on her loss, Gee Gee put on his most charming smile to thank her warmly for coming to Datchworth and to make solicitous enquiries about her trip.
Kathryn replied civilly, thinking that English cops were certainly friendly. Pity this one was wearing a charcoal pin-striped suit and a brown paisley tie which, though each was ever so excellent on its own, together clashed so ferociously that Kathryn could scarcely bear to look in the man’s direction.
He was running smoothly through the customary courtesies, commenting appreciatively on the cooperation she had shown in Oxford when she had met with Chief Inspector Lamp the previous day, stressing to her the importance the Thames Valley Police placed upon this case; explaining that Lamp had been called to a triple homicide in Reading or he would be at Datchworth even as they spoke, and finally apologizing for asking her to go through another interview and possibly repeat a lot of things she’d already told the Chief Inspector.
“You don’t need to apologize,” she assured him. “I’m ready to do anything at all that will be useful. Nobody wants to see this—this villain caught more than I do.” It was clear that “villain” was an anemic substitution for what she really wanted to say.
The flash of anger was a mild surprise to everyone there, including Kathryn herself. Until she’d needed to refer to the person who had deprived her—and her aunt and uncle, and the world—of Rob Hillman, she hadn’t realized how furious she was. I must be getting over the shock, she thought.
Griffin nodded sympathetically and said, “Of course, of course. Now, I understand from Chief Inspector Lamp that you and your cousin were, ah, fairly close?”
“Not fairly. Very. We’ve been friends since we were children. We lived a six-minute bicycle ride from each other.” She paused to swallow. “Rob is—was—a year younger than I, a year behind me in school. Once we were out of high school, that didn’t matter, of course. We were always—” She broke off, memories welling up like tears. She struggled to address the policeman in businesslike tones. “Look, you don’t need a biography. What you really want to know is, did Rob tell me any of the personal details of his life. The answer is yes, he did. He—we—tended to confide in each other all those things we would never dream of telling our parents.”
Griffin leaned toward Kathryn with earnest sympathy nicely blended with a slightly conspiratorial air and asked her if she might divulge some of those confidences.
Kathryn was almost back in control of her emotions. “I thought you would be asking something like that, and since I have my laptop with me I made this for you.” She extracted a floppy disk from her handbag and handed it across the table to him. “After I talked to Chief Inspector Lamp yesterday it occurred to me that this might be useful. Rob and I communicated mostly by email. There are two files there; the one named “Complete” contains every email Rob has sent me since he took up his post at Oxford two years ago. To save you time, the other file, “Datchworth,” contains only the messages that mentioned his job here, or were actually sent from here, either back in April during the Easter holiday, or earlier this month. I thought you might like to look at those first.”
Gee Gee Griffin gazed with undisguised amazement and delight first at Kathryn, then at the disk, then at Kathryn again. “Oh, I say! Reverend Koerney, this is brilliant!”
Meera Patel, over in her corner, was equally, if silently, impressed. Tom, unsurprised because Kathryn had told him about the disk on their drive to the Castle, was enjoying the sight of the overfriendly policeman shooting himself in the foot by addressing Kathryn as “Reverend.”
The rest of the interview was uninformative—for the police, at least. Kathryn hadn’t seen her cousin for over a year, as they were seldom “home” (in Texas) at the same time. She had no letters from him: “Rob gave up writing when email came along.” She had no idea who might want him dead. She imagined the only people who profited financially from his death were his parents, who would presumably inherit his modest belongings. Kathryn knew of no quarrels Rob had had with anyone, no jilted lovers, no angry students who’d gotten bad reports from Rob, no enemies of any kind.
“I’m sorry to give you such a run of negatives,” she said, shaking her head, “but I can’t think of anything that you might call, oh, turbulent. Troubled. He was happy; he enjoyed his job in Oxford, he loved working here . . .” Kathryn spread her hands in a helpless gesture and fell silent.
“Did he have any, ah, romantic interest? Anybody special in his life right now?” The second question was delivered with a tiny smile equally compounded of warmth and wistfulness, the Detective Inspector meanwhile making direct eye contact.
She shook her head firmly. “No.” Seeing the next question coming, she continued, “Yes, I’m sure, and yes, I would know. We specialized in minute descriptions of our love lives, or lack of same. As I said, all the things we wouldn’t tell our parents.”
“When was the last time he was seriously involved, do you remember?”
For a moment or two Kathryn gazed past Griffin at the oak paneling on the wall. Then she nodded. “Yes, it’s in there”; she gestured at the disk still in Griffin’s hand. “Soon after he went to B.N.C. Brasenose. One of the dons there, Chris Something. But it’s also in there that they dallied with sexual attraction for a while but then decided, amicably, that friendship would be a better option. Different kinds of friends, was the problem. Chris was a bit of a party animal, and Rob is a pipe—” She broke off abruptly, then took a deep breath and continued, “Rob was a pipe-and-slippers-by-the-fire type.”
Griffin looked at the tight-shut mouth and gave her a moment before asking gently, “And that’s all you can tell us?”
“I just can’t think of anything useful,” Kathryn replied, shaking her head sadly. “I’m sorry.”
Griffin assured her earnestly that there was no need to apologize. He held up the disk between well-manicured fingers and asked, “And everything you’ve heard from him in the past two years is in here?”
“Every word. And if you can find anything suggestive in it”—Kathryn mustered a stronger tone of voice— “you’re a better man than I am.”
Tom, unfamiliar with the quotation known to every English schoolchild, raised his eyebrows at Kathryn’s referring to herself in such unfeminist terms.
But the cop, to Tom’s dismay, promptly responded with mock pomposity: “Gunga Din!”
Kathryn smiled, or tried to.
Gee Gee smiled back.
Tom ground his teeth.
Meera Patel glanced back and forth between Kathryn and Tom, her mind busy behind her beautiful, expressionless face.
Kathryn gathered her inner resources and addressed D.I. Griffin. “May I ask some questions now?”
“Of course! I’d be happy to tell you everything I can.”
“Starting with the big one. Why are you so sure this wasn’t an accident? Chief Inspector Lamp said something about a rock, but I’m afraid my mind wasn’t absorbing information very well at the time.”
Griffin explained about the stone that had fallen on Rob’s leg, when it should have been the other way around. When he finished, Kathryn’s eyes were closed and her mouth was a thin line. Tom asked her if she was all right; she asserted she was. Griffin poured her a glass of water from the pitcher at his elbow, walked around the table, and handed it to her. She thanked him inaudibly and drank several long gulps. Then she looked up again at the policeman, who had perched himself on the table’s edge so close to her that their legs almost touched.
She asked him, “Do you think it was someone from Oxford, or at least, someone he knew before, or do you think it was somebody here?”
Griffin hedged, as was to be expected, with phrases like “early days yet,” but he did go so far as to say that although they were checking Rob’s prior contacts thoroughly, nobody had yet produced a persuasive theory of how a stranger to Datchworth could penetrate the castle, find the muniment room, which could be reached only by a rabbit warre
n of passages, and get up the spiral stairs to the parapet without any of the members of the household catching sight of him or her.
“So,” Kathryn said dully, like a backward child studying a hard lesson, “it was probably someone here.”
The policeman made a noncommittal murmur.
Suddenly Kathryn seemed to rediscover her voice, and cried loudly, “But why?”
“Ah, yes! Why. Before you arrived, we were hoping you might help us on that, Reverend Koerney. But it looks like you can’t. Which means, I’m afraid, that, well . . .”
Meera Patel thought, The phrase you’re looking for, Gee Gee, is, “We haven’t got a glimmer.”
Gee Gee, probably reluctant to be that candid, simply spread his hands and shrugged inarticulately.
There was little left to say. Kathryn rose, as did Tom, more courtesies were exchanged, and D. I. Griffin escorted them—or more specifically, Kathryn—to the door.
When they were about twenty paces down the corridor, Kathryn fetched a big breath and announced a touch more matter-of-factly than she was feeling, “Well, I suppose that wasn’t so bad. Could have been worse.”
Tom looked sour. “Could have been a damn sight better.”
Kathryn regarded him with surprise.
Tom explained, “Guy’s a jerk. Any idiot could see you were upset. No time for unprofessional behavior.”
“What on earth did he do that was unprofessional?”
“Well, I don’t know how they do things in Merry Old England, but where I come from, you don’t come on to the victim’s next of kin.”
Kathryn gaped at him, then pronounced with certainty, “You’re imagining things.”
“You can’t tell me you didn’t even notice?” he asked in disbelief.
She replied with equal disbelief, “For heaven’s sake, Tom! He was being pleasant, that’s all! Think about it: I represent the victim’s family, for what that’s worth, I haven’t a motive in sight, and I have an alibi you couldn’t break with a SCUD missile, since I was verifiably in New Jersey. Why shouldn’t he be nice to me?”
Tom stopped walking and stared at her as though examining a most uncommon phenomenon. “Interesting,” he pronounced.
She had stopped, too. “What are you on about?”
“You’re usually so good at reading people,” he said, shaking his head in perplexity. “Is it possible I’m looking at a case of real, live modesty?”
“Oh, rubbish!” She started walking again. “I know when a man’s coming on to me. Derek Banner, for instance, was coming on to me like gangbusters.”
“That he was,” Tom agreed as he fell into step with her, hoping he’d said it in a sufficiently neutral voice and waiting in some trepidation for her reply.
“Much good may it do him.”
Music to his ears! Uttering silent, heartfelt thank-Gods, and being careful not to sound too pleased, Tom asked, “Not interested? Why, what’s wrong with him? Seems O.K. to me.” Of course, he thought, up to ten seconds ago I was wishing it was Derek who’d been pushed off the tower.
“O.K. for somebody else,” she admitted. “But not for me. I know a bit about him from Rob’s emails. He darkens the door of the church only when somebody’s getting married or buried, and when Rob told him about me, Derek seemed to think that being a ‘lady priest’ would be altogether quaint and terribly cute. Rather as if I were a belly dancer, Rob said.”
Tom guffawed. “Wouldn’t I like to see that!”
“Shut up. Besides, I’ve no fancy to be the Lady of the Manor. Derek is Sir Gregory’s heir. Can you picture me, the mad-about-Manhattan girl, stuck in the middle of nowhere, tied to a man who was permanently wedded to an Estate, capital E—in this case a Castle, capital C—and a title to boot, God save us all! Can you see that?”
Tom, who had been seeing precisely that in nightmarish fantasies for the last three-quarters of an hour, sighed ever so gently and said, “No, I can’t.”
“A place like this,” Kathryn continued, “you don’t own it, it owns you. You might have the cash to take off a year and sail around the world, but can you do it? No. You’re a prisoner. A prisoner of your own wealth, and history, and, oh, how shall I—? Ah! A prisoner of your own standing in the community. No, thanks!”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’re right,” Tom agreed, floating along on a sweet river of relief.
The relief lasted until dinner the following day.
Chapter 11
APRIL 1997
During the Easter Holidays
Three Months Before Rob Hillman’s Death
Rob Hillman was having fun, although an uninformed observer would not have thought so. Rob’s brow was knit in terrific concentration and his mouth was a thin, hard line. If his gaze had been directed at another human being, it would have been unmistakably hostile. The target of this aggressive look, however, was a piece of parchment.
On it was written, in a criminally sloppy fourteenth-century book hand, something that might possibly be a hymn in praise of the Virgin Mary. But the person (presumably a monk) who had written it down had had little consideration for those who came after him. Rob was reminded of a remark by Professor Parks at Oxford about a manuscript in cursive script that looked “as though the scribe took a lot of drunken spiders and ran them through a puddle of ink and then set them loose on the page.”
Drunken Spider Man, thought Rob, I have found your grandfather. Fortunately, bad book hand is easier to read than bad cursive, so it was not more than three minutes before Rob suddenly cried aloud, “Gotcha, you incompetent bastard!”
A particularly puzzling bit of hen scratching, it turned out, was a highly idiosyncratic “g” with a laterally extended tail. Which meant that the bit at the end of line two was in fact “ad virginam.” That cinched it.
“Yes. Yes!” cried Rob, thumping the table in triumph. Taking his notebook, he began to write a neat transcription of the opening lines, muttering quietly under his breath. “Why on earth, you little bugger, did anybody ever let you near the scriptorium?”
Jenny, the maid who usually brought Rob’s tea, had told the kitchen staff that the American bloke talked to himself. She was in error. Rob talked to the scribes of the manuscripts he read. Sometimes they were his friends; the regular letters of a well-written manuscript elicited Rob’s appreciation and even his thanks. “Oh, lovely,” he would murmur as his eyes glided effortlessly along the lines. A poor scribe was an opponent, an unworthy rascal who must be defeated. The easy manuscripts were pleasant, but the conquests were more satisfying.
An intrusive clanking heralded the opening of the door. He looked over his shoulder.
“Mr. Hillman? Am I bothering you?”
“Meg, come in; no, you’re not bothering me, though four minutes ago I would have bitten your nose off.”
“Oh!” she said, taken aback. “Uh, why?”
“Because I was locked in combat with a seriously atrocious scribe and I was losing. However, three minutes ago I made a breakthrough, so now I’m safe to talk to.”
She laughed. “I don’t believe you. I don’t think you’d have bitten my nose off. You’re too polite.”
He smiled back, but wagged an admonitory finger at her. “Ah, but you’ve never walked in on me without an appointment before.”
“I guess that’s true. Well, I have an excuse. A terribly important question.”
“Shoot.”
“What,” she inquired with immense earnestness, “do you want for tea?”
“Ooooo,” he emitted through pursed lips. “That is important.” He closed his eyes in concentration, then opened them again. “How about Earl Grey, no milk, no lemon, no sugar, and a tiny little cucumber sandwich? On second thought, not so tiny.”
“You got it,” she drawled in her best Texas accent, which wasn’t very good.
“Not bad,” Rob said kindly, “but it still needs a bit of work. Thanks, Meg.” He gave her a trace of a wave and turned back to the manuscript.
“You�
�re welcome.” She backed out of the room, pulling the heavy door shut behind her. Almost immediately, however, it clanked open again. “But I warn you,” Meg said mischievously, poking her head back through a ten-inch opening, “I shall continue to walk in on you without appointments as long as you’re at Datchworth. I live here, you know.”
Fortunately, the door closed on her last words, so there was no need for him to reply. Rob grimaced, shook his head slightly, and went back to transcribing.
He finished the first stanza of the hymn to his satisfaction and was starting to slog through the second when he remembered that wasn’t his job—not at this point, anyway.
He had described the manuscript and transcribed the opening lines, enough to indicate the nature and quality of the text; it was time to enter it into the catalog and move along to the next one. With a tinge of regret he laid aside his late opponent, Drunken Spider Man’s Grandfather, and picked up the next manuscript. This one proved to be altogether less interesting; the hand was neither beautifully clear nor beastly challenging, and the text seemed to be a sermon on Saint Mary that would certainly have put its original audience to sleep.
So it was that the clanking of the ancient door came the next time as more of a relief than an intrusion, especially since he was beginning to feel a distinct need for tea. He turned in his chair to greet Jenny, but instead of the thin, plain maid with the nice smile, he saw almost her opposite. The young woman holding the tea tray had a shapely body and a pretty face and had done much to emphasize both. Her smile was definitely not what Rob would have called nice.
“Professor Hillman? I’ve brought you your tea.”
The rural Oxfordshire accent was appropriate to a servant at Datchworth, but the outfit wasn’t. Sir Gregory’s maids did not wear uniforms as such, but they dressed modestly, and there was nothing modest here. Full breasts in a black lace brassiere pushed visibly against a tight but sparsely knit top of bright fuchsia. The black pants were what his mother would have called “sprayed on.” But the principle element of the performance (and it was a performance; Rob had seen enough of them to know) was what she was doing with her full, hot-pink lips. Both the tone of her voice and the quivering smile were unmistakably insinuating.
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