‘What about it?’
‘This friend of the Rector’s said that all the wood in the church tower was chestnut except for the bell-stay. Chestnut doesn’t rot—or at least hardly at all—especially in the dry.’
‘So?’
‘This bell stay was pitchpine.’
‘Well?’
‘Bell stays are always made of ash.’
‘Are you going to come to the point while I’m still on duty, Sloan?’
‘Pitchpine, which is highly subject to woodworm into the bargain, wouldn’t hold. It hasn’t got the spring of ash. This chap—the visitor—said it must have been put there with malice aforethought and was there any reason for anyone wanting to kill Donnington.’
‘And was there?’
‘Oh, yes. He’d been carrying on with Wilderspin’s wife.’
‘Sloan, what did the Rector call this friend of his?’
‘Sui generis.’
MEMORY CORNER
‘He said what?’ echoed Detective Inspector Sloan in disbelief.
‘Would we kindly step round,’ repeated Detective Constable Crosby, ‘when we had a moment, because he’d just killed a man.’
Sloan groaned. ‘A nutter?’
‘To Almstone College at the University.’
‘An academic nutter, then?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Detective Constable Crosby. ‘That’s all he said.’
‘And who, might I ask, is he?’
Detective Constable Crosby glanced down at his notebook. ‘Edward Francis Mainprice Linthwaite. He made me write it all down and read it back to him. Very particular about it, he was.’
‘H’m.’
‘Most murderers don’t bother about the spelling of their names, do they, sir? And the exact time,’ said Crosby. ‘He made me write that down, too, sir. He said he always understood that in these matters time was’—the Constable frowned at the effort of recollection—‘time was of the essence.’
‘Sounds to me,’ said Sloan resignedly, ‘as if what he needs are two little men in white coats, not a pair of heavily overworked detectives. All right, Crosby. Let’s go.’
This baleful view was reinforced by the total calm prevailing in the Porter’s Lodge at Almstone College. Enquiries for an Edward Linthwaite produced a response in which lay the gentlest of reproofs. ‘The Professor of Twentieth-Century English Literature, gentlemen,’ said the porter, ‘has his rooms in the main quadrangle.’
Sloan, who at another time might have wondered aloud whether there was any such thing at all as a literature of the twentieth century, followed the porter’s pointing finger with his eye.
‘See—over there on your right—the first-floor rooms with the bay window,’ said the porter, who, having no great faith in the Force, added: ‘You can’t miss the quadrangle archway.’
‘On your mark, Crosby,’ said Sloan in quite a different tone of voice. ‘Get set. Go.’
The door to Professor Linthwaite’s rooms was opened to them by a short spare man, who looked worried.
‘If that’s the police, Arthur,’ called out a deep voice from behind him, ‘let them in.’
‘It is,’ said Sloan.
‘Good, good,’ boomed the voice, its owner still unseen. ‘No point in hanging about at this stage, is there?’ There was a movement inside the room and a stout, untidily dressed figure hove into view. ‘Besides, his people will have to be told as soon as possible, won’t they?’
The college room was a very beautiful one, the walls panelled in oak and lined with books. Its largest piece of furniture was a great Knole sofa facing the fireplace. It was tastefully upholstered in a material and design that owed more than something to the great medieval tapestry workshops of the Low Countries. What was less appealing was the body of a young man lying on it with much of his head covered in blood.
On an elegant sofa-table set behind this piece of furniture lay—on top of an academic journal—a blood-stained poker. On the floor, almost hidden by the frill of the sofa, was a lady’s handbag.
‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ said the stout man, as if reading Sloan’s thoughts. ‘I’ve never killed a man before.’ He seemed to collect himself. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. This is Professor Arthur Maple, who is Calle Professor of Moral Law here at the University. He happened to come round just er—afterwards.’
‘And you are …?’ said Sloan, concentrating on the stout figure. He was wearing a flowery-patterned shirt without a tie. There was something odd about his shirt, but Sloan wasn’t sure quite what.
‘Professor Linthwaite, Inspector. Edward Francis …’
‘Mainprice Linthwaite,’ finished Detective Constable Crosby for him.
‘And who,’ enquired Sloan frostily, ‘is the dead man?’ The edge of the coloured silk shirt was peeping out untidily from under one of the professor’s cuffs.
‘Good question,’ said Linthwaite as one encouraging a backward pupil.
‘You don’t know?’ asked Crosby in spite of himself.
‘I know his surname naturally, officer. It’s Carstairs. But not his Christian names.’ Linthwaite waved a hand. ‘The Dean will know, though, won’t he, Arthur? The Dean’s very good about that sort of thing—besides, he’ll have a list. Bound to.’
‘So the dead man is a student here,’ said Sloan, half-expecting the Mad Hatter to drop in at any minute to join the throng. Or perhaps, in view of the handbag, Mrs Linthwaite. If there was a Mrs Linthwaite. He was beginning to doubt it.
‘Oh, yes, Inspector.’ Linthwaite looked surprised. ‘That’s the whole trouble. Didn’t you know?’
‘Not quite the whole trouble,’ said Sloan with a touch of acerbity. ‘Suppose you start at the beginning …’
Linthwaite beamed. ‘Good, good. Primary sources are so important … I always tell my students to go back to first things.’
‘Edward,’ warned Professor Maple, ‘this is not a lecture.’ He glanced at the body of the dead man and then averted his eyes. ‘Nor even a demonstration.’
‘I know that,’ said the stout man indignantly. ‘Well, the whole business began, Inspector, at the beginning of the academic year when a University Senate Sub-Committee decided to institute a series of inter-disciplinary lectures and meetings.’
‘Leading, it was hoped,’ augmented Arthur Maple, rolling his eyes heavenwards, ‘to some cross-faculty thinking.’
Detective Constable Crosby, who had had to have cross-dressing explained to him very carefully indeed, looked totally bewildered.
‘Not, though, surely,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan with some irritation, ‘Professor Linthwaite, leading to a dead man on your sofa.’
‘Oh, yes it did,’ retorted Professor Linthwaite vigorously. ‘You see, these lectures were designed to bring scientists and artsmen together. The theory—decussation, it might well be called—was that nuclear physicists should know about Wittgenstein and so forth …’
‘Edward,’ warned Professor Maple, ‘I think you should leave Wittgenstein out of this.’
‘Not a help?’
Arthur Maple shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Oh, all right, if you say so. I can’t leave Darwin out, though, because he comes into things.’
There were those down at the Police Station, thought Sloan, who would agree with that. They had no quarrel at all with the Darwinian view of the origin of the species. Especially on Saturday evenings after a home football match.
‘He comes into the evolution side—with Lamarck, of course,’ puffed Linthwaite. ‘Well, I gave the lectures myself. On Orwell and Huxley, mostly …’
‘And this man Carstairs was in the audience?’ hazarded Sloan.
‘So he said.’ Professor Linthwaite nodded. ‘That was when he came to see me afterwards. He was a human biologist.’
‘Ah,’ said Sloan. Carstairs didn’t look like a human anything any more: just a very dead young man. ‘What did he come to see you about?’
‘Something I’d said in my lectures.’
‘About Orwell and Huxley or Darwin?’ Sloan had never even heard of Lamarck.
‘Huxley. Only being a scientist he’d got the wrong Huxley, of course.’
‘There were two?’
‘Three actually, Thomas Henry and Julian, who were biologists, and Aldous who was the author of a famous work called Brave New World.’
‘So …’
‘In that book,’ explained Professor Linthwaite, ‘Aldous Huxley had postulated a future state in which it would be possible to program people’s minds to think in a particular way …’
‘I see.’
‘And George Orwell had gone a bit further than that in his works by hypothesizing the Thought Police from whom—if I might paraphrase the Collect for Purity—no secrets are hid …’
‘And?’ Detective Inspector Sloan would have been the first to say that although he knew nothing about twentieth-century English literature he did know whom he liked. It was therefore a couple of chilling lines from a poem by Rudyard Kipling which then came into his own mind:
There is neither Evil nor Good in life
Except as the needs of the State ordain.
‘… and,’ went on Linthwaite hortatively, ‘as you probably know, the Thought Police were there to check on possible subversion before it happened.’
Detective Constable Crosby’s head had come up at the first mention of the word ‘police’ but he still looked puzzled.
‘I was really lecturing,’ said the Professor, ‘on the great divide between the literature of the past and what writers—not scientists—imagine will be discovered in the future …’
Sloan looked down at his notebook and then at the body. It was a quite different—but infinitely greater—divide that young Carstairs had already crossed: thanks entirely, apparently, to Professor Linthwaite.
‘Should,’ enquired the Detective Inspector, ‘your lecture have been so very—er—upsetting, then?’ He’d just worked out what was odd about the man’s shirt. It was the buttons.
Sloan got an oblique response.
‘I understand, Inspector, that Carstairs was a particularly gifted student in his own field.’ Linthwaite turned to Professor Maple. ‘Is that not so, Arthur?’
‘He was a quite outstanding human biologist,’ concurred Arthur Maple at once. ‘Undoubtedly Nobel Prize material of the future—although,’ he added cautiously, ‘I must say you can never be absolutely sure with the Nobel Prize Committee these days.’
Sloan, whose own view was that no sensible man could always be sure of any committee ever, said: ‘So Carstairs was gifted …’
‘In my lecture,’ said Linthwaite, ‘I’d spoken of memory and how there must be an anatomical or physiological basis for it even if science hadn’t yet discovered a way of reading it. The nature of consciousness has always been very much thought about—William Shakespeare, for instance, put memory in the pia mater of the brain. Well,’ he paused impressively, ‘Carstairs went away and found it.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that, Inspector. He came up with the answer to the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse’s famous question, “How can you know what I know?”’
‘So you killed him?’ interjected Crosby in the tones of one anxious to get everything absolutely clear.
Professor Linthwaite might not have been accustomed to murder but he knew all about enquiring young men to whom matters had to be explained. He turned to Crosby. ‘I gave him what the poet called “the lead gift in the twilight”,’ he said patiently, ‘because it wouldn’t have done for men to be able to read other men’s memories. Never.’
Detective Inspector Sloan turned over a fresh page of his notebook and let the Professor carry on. The groves of academe were obviously as sinister as all the other groves he had ever known: including the old oak ones at the edge of Berebury Common.
‘You see,’ carried on the Professor, ‘Carstairs went home after my lecture and did a lot of thinking and then set up some experiments on his own account.’
Sloan could see, all right. Now.
‘The memory cells,’ said Linthwaite, every bit as didactic in his own way as Superintendent Leeyes down at the Police Station, ‘must be there or none of us would be able to remember anything. Right?’
‘Right,’ responded Crosby, clearly fascinated.
‘Well, Carstairs therefore reasoned that what was needed was merely a way of getting at those cells and then reading them …’
‘Easy if you say it quickly,’ said Crosby.
‘Then, gentlemen, when he’d demonstrated that he’d discovered how to see into the human memory, he came to see me. It was all in the cells, he said, but I can’t say exactly which cells because I’m not a scientist.’
‘You are a murderer, though,’ pointed out Sloan, with quite a different sort of cell in mind.
‘My goodness, yes,’ acknowledged Professor Linthwaite readily. ‘It seemed the only course of action open to me when Carstairs told me that from now on it would be possible for everyone’s memory to be read as easily as if it were a cinematograph film …’
‘Did he attempt to prove it to you?’ asked Sloan curious to know what Linthwaite would say.
‘Not only did he try, but he succeeded,’ said Linthwaite, shuffling his feet and looking disconcerted for the first time. ‘And very unnerving it was, too. Told me exactly what I thought about the Master of Almstone.’
‘That’s hardly a secret,’ said Arthur Maple acidly.
‘But that means,’ blurted out Crosby, ‘that we wouldn’t need oaths or juries …’
‘Or examinations either,’ said Linthwaite, ever the dominie.
‘It would be the lie detector to end all lie detectors, too,’ said Sloan thoughtfully.
Arthur Maple, Professor of Moral Law, coughed. ‘Actually, gentlemen, if you consider it for a moment, I think you will agree it would be the end of all investigative and judicial processes as we know them now.’
‘Make politics a bit difficult, too, wouldn’t it?’ said Crosby cheerfully.
‘More than that. Society would run the risk of breaking down entirely,’ insisted Linthwaite warmly. ‘There was an essay of G. K. Chesterton’s in which everyone had had to tell the truth.’ He shook his head. ‘Led to some pretty nasty situations, I can tell you. And that was only fiction.’
‘And Carstairs had told nobody of this discovery of his?’ barked Sloan, light dawning as he took another look at Linthwaite’s shirt.
‘Nobody. He assured me of that. He said he wanted me to be the first to know, before he sent anything off for publication.’ Linthwaite frowned. ‘But I’m afraid he wasn’t prepared to see the terrible implications of what he had established.’
That, thought Sloan to himself, hadn’t stopped Alfred Nobel’s work on dynamite either.
Crosby muttered: ‘They wouldn’t ever need psychologists or psychiatrists, either, would they? They’d know what was going on in a man’s mind anyway without asking.’
Detective Inspector Sloan ignored the tempting luxury of considering a world without trick-cyclists. ‘You tried to reason with him, I take it?’ he said to the professor. ‘After you’d realized the profound implications of what Carstairs had found out?’
‘I did indeed but he was very arrogant,’ said Linthwaite. ‘He wasn’t interested in the dangers of a destabilized society at all. He insisted instead that all knowledge was ultimately valuable to humanity and should be available to all researchers on principle.’
They had Records Officers in the Calleshire County Constabulary Headquarters—and no doubt in government offices, too—who thought along similar lines … power lines.
‘It’s a great pity that young Carstairs wasn’t less like Galileo Galilei and more like Copernicus,’ remarked Professor Maple, still not looking at the sofa.
‘Sir?’ Sloan looked in his direction.
‘Galileo announced his discoveries about the force of gravity to the world,’ the Professor of Moral Law inform
ed him, ‘and got hauled up in front of the Inquisition for his pains. Copernicus only let them find out he was right about the earth going round the sun after he’d died.’
‘Much safer,’ agreed Sloan shortly. He was thinking about something curious that was more local.
‘And Arthur here,’ persisted Linthwaite, ‘agreed with me that most human beings would find it intolerable for other people to have access to their innermost thoughts and recollections.’
Professor Maple said hastily, as if expecting to be charged as an accessory after the fact, ‘I dare say in the fullness of time—several generations, perhaps—the human race would accustom itself to the new situation but to begin with …’
‘Bargaining would be difficult,’ Crosby observed to nobody in particular, ‘wouldn’t it? I mean, you’d know to start with exactly how far someone was prepared to go before you started.’
‘Blackmail,’ said Sloan tersely, ignoring the implications of a disintegrated commercial world as not his problem. Crime was.
‘Er … precisely,’ said Maple.
Linthwaite said nothing.
‘What we might call Carstairs’ working papers …’ Sloan began aloud.
Professor Linthwaite’s gaze turned way from the two policemen and in the direction of the fireplace. Fragments of very burnt paper—sere and friable—fluttered about in the old-fashioned open fire. ‘I had to use the poker to get the fire going after I’d killed him but I put it straight back on the table as soon as it had cooled.’ He looked quizzically at the policemen. ‘You’ll be wanting that, won’t you?’
The police were going to want a great deal more than the poker but Sloan did not say so. Instead he said formally that they would be taking the Professor in for further questioning in connection with the death of young Carstairs, Christian name unknown.
‘Of course,’ said Linthwaite readily. ‘Arthur will see to things.’ He turned. ‘Won’t you, Arthur? I’ve a book in the press, you see, and there’ll be proofs coming from the printers and so forth …’
Detective Inspector said nothing but he had to admire the man’s quick thinking. Already in his mind’s eye he could see and hear the special pleading of Counsel for the Defence … ‘Not so much diminished responsibility, members of the jury, but more an enhanced responsibility for society as befits the distinguished academic who stands before you now … acting, as he perceived, in the best interests of humanity … who shall say how any one of us would have—should have—acted in the same daunting circumstances in which he found himself?’
Injury Time Page 5