Death of an Old Goat (15 page)

Bill shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. He was mentally kicking himself for sending the cable off from the University Post Office — but then who could have imagined it would have been shown to his boss? In civilized countries telegrams were a private matter, like one's prayers or one's bank balance. Here, obviously, it was different altogether. Here it was the done thing to go around blabbing people's telegrams over the entire campus.

‘What? The Inspector?' Wickham's voice boomed through the processed cardboard partition. ‘Inspector Royle? Why should he be coming to talk to you? I told him all that we could give him — there's nothing you could add. Yes, I suppose he has to, as routine, still . . . All right, I'll ring you back later. Be nice to him.'

Bill took himself off as the receiver was bashed down on to its holder. Whichever way you regarded it, this was a set-back to his investigations. Here was one suspect who obviously wasn't going to be unburdening his soul to him in an unguarded moment. In fact it looked at the moment as if he wasn't going to be talking to him for the rest of the term. He would have to pin his hopes on the rest of the staff, at least until he heard something from Oxford. Perhaps he and Alice would be able to pick something up during the coffee break.

Alice's reception of the news of his new position as sidekick to the unimpressive Inspector Royle had been less than flattering. She had let out an eldritch shriek of laughter, and had run through a collection of fictional characters — Watson, Bunter, Lugg and Fox — which was designed to suggest that as a detective combination she didn't find him and Royle very impressive. She was inclined, too, to be snooty about his being in the clear, and was taking some
pleasure in herself still being a suspect. Nor had she been very hopeful about picking up anything by pumping the other members of the department, trying to catch them in an unguarded moment.

‘It's not as though the art of conversation is being revived in this remote spot,' she said. ‘I've never noticed any eighteenth-century expansiveness.'

‘I agree some of them will be difficult,' Bill had replied. ‘Merv Raines, for instance. The Porter won't be any walkover either — she still confines herself to words of two syllables when she's talking to me.'

‘Have you got that far?' said Alice. ‘She must have her eyes on you, unlikely as that may seem.'

‘But the others talk enough — and even Raines can do when he's got a few beers in him. In the end they're bound to let something slip that gives the game away.'

‘The precept of Miss Marple, if I remember rightly,' said Alice. ‘Watch it, or your own precious little throat may be in for a shave. They always do it a second time, according to Aunt Agatha.'

‘I did lock my door last night, I must admit,' said Bill.

‘So did old Belville-Smith on the night in question, I expect,' said Alice cosily.

‘Anyway, we Fearless Five never worry about our own throats,' said Bill. ‘Give up the pouring-cold-water lark. There's got to be something somewhere, and the likelihood is it's among the academics. Whichever way you look at it, some guilty secret shared between Belville-Smith and the Turbervilles is a non-starter. Someone's got something to hide, and it's pretty sure to be one of us.'

‘I've no doubts about that, believe me. If I snuffle around in the Porter's private life or her academic career I'd be disappointed if I couldn't fetch up something pretty murky. But how is that going to help? There can't be anything to connect her with that poor old goat, and we're just going to land up with a lot of useless dirt.'

‘Since when have you despised useless dirt?' asked Bill.

‘Fair enough,' said Alice. ‘All right, I'll give it a go.'

So when the department gathered for coffee — minus Professor Wickham who always absented himself when he could not look on his staff with the eye of favour — Bill and Alice turned the talk to the murder, and kept it there. It didn't need much turning or keeping. The talk for the last few days had been of very little else. At first the members of the department who had not been at the Wickhams' gathering had been rather unpleasantly self-congratulatory about it. Smithson, the only other remaining young Oxonian, had been at Bathurst, conducting a weekend school for external students, and his presence there throughout the night in question had been vouched for by a very willing young external. The other two absentees had been the two tutors, who had apparently been deemed too junior, or perhaps too crude, to be invited. The slight had given them one of their rare, brief, us-against-the-rest moods, which were a relief from the us-against-each-other ones. By now they were beginning to get bored by the whole thing, and to wish they had had a part in an event which was obviously destined to be the major topic of conversation in Drummondale for the next couple of years. Their presence would also have given them immense cachet in the poky little country towns from which they came. The consolation was that, if there was a certain glamour about being a suspect, there was also a certain danger, particularly in Australia. Though the police force of Drummondale was probably no more stupid and vicious than the police forces of any other small town, one still needed more than innocence to protect oneself. So Spokes and Finlay sat around only vaguely listening to the conversation, mentally rearranging their card-indexes and being congratulated by Professor Wickham on their method.

‘Did you ever read any of the old boy's stuff?' said Bill Bascomb to Dr Porter.

‘Never.'

‘Not even when you knew he was coming?'

‘Never in my vocabulary means on no occasion,' said Dr Porter, with a smile to freeze the Pacific.

‘Sorry,' said Bill, ingratiatingly. ‘I just thought it was your area — Wickham said something about the eighteenth century when he was introducing him, didn't he?'

‘The eighteenth century,' said Dr Porter through her tight lips, ‘is a considerable area of study.'

‘What
had
he written on, do you know?' asked Alice.

‘I have no idea, I'm afraid,' said Dr Porter. ‘Certainly not on Akenside.'

Akenside was the subject of Dr Porter's thesis, a poet so utterly minor, so totally lacking in any spark of originality or fire, that he had been well within the scope of her mind. The thesis had been virtually unexamined, since nobody in Australia could be found willing to waste their time reading the outpourings of her subject. However her footnoting and her bibliography had been found to conform in an exemplary fashion to the commandments of the MLA style-sheet, and she had been granted her doctorate like many another, through a sort of academic exhaustion. She drank her coffee in moderate, regular sips, with the air of one who did not let a little thing like murder upset her academic routine, unlike other more volatile souls. Bill gave her one more look, and turned toward Merv Raines, who was sprawled over two chairs, a heavy, ugly grey pullover adding to his ungainliness, glowering into his coffee cup, and mentally cosseting the chip on his shoulder.

‘The old boy didn't do anything in your line, anyway,' said Bill, ‘not to judge from what you were saying at the party.'

‘That's for sure,' said Merv.

‘You said he wasn't well up in Australian literature at all, didn't you?' said Bill. Merv unbuttoned the corner of his mouth a little further, remembering his grievance.

‘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.