Parting Breath (5 page)

‘And all we did,' he remarked in tones of wonder to his wife, ‘was to send the man down. In my young days he'd have been horsewhipped.'

‘Yes, dear,' said Mrs Wheatley soothingly, more concerned these days about her husband's increasingly choleric colour than about the activities of the students.

The Vice-Chancellor read the file and drafted a statement for the press in which, though horsewhipping was not mentioned, it was implied; toned it down in the next draft; left it out altogether in the third: discarded the fourth as plaintive, the fifth as petulant and the sixth as litigious. His secretary, a realistic young woman with other things to do, did the seventh herself and got him to sign it before he went home.

‘What,' enquired the Vice-Chancellor's wife with genuine interest as she passed him the vegetables, ‘do you imagine Timothy Teed will do this time? I hear he's back.'

Her husband groaned aloud.

The Vice-Chancellor's wife wasn't the only one to wonder.

Michael Challoner was wondering too.

As he hastened to point out, he hadn't attempted to recruit Professor Teed to the sit-in.

‘He just told me he would be there,' he said uneasily, looking around at the other members of the Students' Direct Action Committee.

‘Makes for interest, I suppose,' said one laconically.

‘Anything for a laugh,' said another.

‘Will he come in plus fours, do you think?' enquired the Secretary.

‘He doesn't like them called plus fours,' they were informed; ‘it's incorrect.'

‘Is it?'

‘Golfing knickerbocker suit,' supplied the Vice-Chairman of the Students' Direct Action Committee, who was reading Social Anthropology and thus was exposed to the Professor more than most.

‘And that funny jacket – Norfolk or something? Will he wear that?' asked a young man whose own garb of his mother's old musquash fur coat, his great-aunt's bandeau, tennis shoes and beads might have been thought to have distinguished him in a crowd but didn't.

‘Will he wear his boots? That's what I want to know,' drawled another young man who never wore anything on his own feet stouter than moccasins. Actually he, too, resented always being upstaged in the matter of outrageous dress by a don who dressed from a pre-war gents' outfitters' catalogues; but he couldn't bring himself to say so. ‘I just love his boots.'

Michael Challoner hadn't been able to say: hadn't in fact wanted to contemplate Professor Teed at all. The Professor's support could well end up by being an albatross around the neck of any organiser.

‘Why is he coming?' asked the Treasurer. By rights the question should have come oddly from the lips of one dedicated to the Cause, but it didn't.

‘Search me,' said Challoner wearily. Like many another organiser before him, he was finding his energies sapped by side issues and his own supporters more trying than a thoroughgoing opposition. ‘Come on. It's time we got going.'

‘It's to see how we behave,' said the Vice-Chairman of the Committee darkly. ‘We'll all be in his next book, you see.'

‘Species
Studentius cremondii
,' said the only man there to regret the passing of a university entrance qualification in Latin.

Wednesday evening was devoted by all the supporters of the coming sit-in to the practising of the Ho Chi Minh shuffle throughout the six Colleges of the University: and by one man to the breaking and entering of Colin Ellison's room in Tarsus College.

4 Lunge

At least, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan was of the opinion that it was one man who had done the breaking and entering. He and Detective Constable Crosby had responded to a call from John Hardiman, the Bursar of Tarsus, made when the break-in was discovered by an indignant Ellison.

‘And an amateur at that,' added Sloan, looking round the disturbed room more dispassionately than Colin Ellison had been able to bring himself to do.

‘But why me?' wailed that young man, much struck by the unfairness of having his room wrecked while other rooms remained just as their owners had left them.

‘We don't know yet,' said Sloan, while Constable Crosby set about a routine search for traces of the intruder. ‘He hasn't done any real damage, has he?'

‘No damage?' squealed Ellison, his complexion a rapidly mounting red. ‘Look at the mess! Just wait until I lay my hands on the blighter who –'

‘Mess, yes,' agreed Sloan, unmoved. ‘Real damage, no.'

‘But why …?' Ellison's curly hair went oddly with his crossness.

‘We will need to know exactly what has been taken before we can tell you why,' explained Sloan firmly, ‘and perhaps not even then.'

‘I'm a pacifist' – Ellison jutted his chin in the air – ‘but when I catch –'

‘What is missing?' repeated Sloan.

‘My course work, for a start,' groaned Ellison, starting to prowl round the room.

‘No, don't move or touch anything. Just tell me about anything that isn't here.'

‘My lecture notes,' said the student, looking about him. He stood awkwardly where he had stopped, like a child caught in the middle of playing the game of Grandmother's Footsteps. ‘My vacation study – God, I meant to hand that in today – heaven knows what old Mautby'll say if he doesn't get that in on time – it's not funny, crossing him, I can tell you – some library books – they flay you alive here if you lose library books – all my microscope slides – all my microscope slides,' he repeated shakily, the enormity of his loss only just beginning to strike him.

‘Money?' asked Constable Crosby with the air of one getting down to brass tacks.

This remark at least had the merit of stemming the catalogue of loss.

‘I haven't got any money,' said Ellison, turning to the detective constable.

‘Oh,' said Crosby, falling silent: perhaps even Mr Oscar Wilde's celebrated cynic would have had difficulty in putting a price on this particular student's losses.

‘My grant hasn't come through yet,' explained Colin Ellison bitterly, ‘and, man, am I going to need it now.' He waved a hand round the room. ‘At least this might make sense if I were a millionaire.'

Sloan forbore to tell the student that – for a variety of reasons – millionaires tended to get burgled less often than non-millionaires. Instead he asked him if he had any enemies.

‘The Direct Action Committee don't love me anymore.'

‘Ah.'

‘I won't go to their precious sit-in and I said so.'

Sloan nodded.

‘I don't believe in aggression,' added Ellison rather priggishly.

‘I see,' said Sloan. And he did. Non-aggressors were great provokers of violence. He often wondered if they ever knew how great: especially in matrimonial causes.

‘And where were you this evening when all this happened?'

‘Out,' said Ellison quickly.

Too quickly.

Much too quickly. Sloan took another look at the young man. It was a cool evening but he had suddenly started to sweat.

‘Oh?' said Sloan unhelpfully.

‘Yes, I …' Ellison couldn't keep still any longer, either. He started pacing up and down.

Detective Inspector Sloan, arch-interviewer, waited, deliberately allowing the tension to rise. Police in Great Britain didn't have guns but they did know how to handle tension and to use it as a weapon: to the manifest surprise of a succession of takers of hostages.

‘It's like this,' Ellison began again.

Sloan said nothing, professional ear fine-tuned to recognise a falsehood. He'd slay Crosby if he spoke now.

‘I watched a bit of Rugby,' said Ellison at last.

‘And then?'

‘Then I met a couple of fellows from Ireton and had a coffee with them.'

Sloan's face couldn't have been more unresponsive.

‘Do you want their names?' asked Ellison uneasily.

‘Yes, please,' said Sloan, adding smoothly, ‘and after you left them?'

‘Then,' said Ellison after another pause, ‘I went into Bones and Stones.…'

‘Where?' asked Crosby involuntarily.

‘Sorry.' He jerked his head. ‘The University Institute of Anthropology and Archaeology.'

‘And' – Sloan resumed the initiative – ‘you stayed there until you came back here and found this?'

It wasn't, the policeman consoled himself, really and truly verballing. Verballing was putting words into a man's mouth – and statement. But it wasn't cricket either, what he was doing, let alone playing the game according to Judges' Rules: not leading someone on to complete what Sloan strongly suspected was a tissue of lies.

‘Yes, that's right,' said Ellison with such patent relief that Sloan knew that he was right: his copy of
Judges' Rules and Administrative Directions to the Police
could stay on the shelf for a little longer. Ellison said firmly, ‘I did stay there until they closed and then I came back here.'

It could only have been thought transference that prevented Crosby from looking at his watch.

Or will-power.

Sloan's will-power.

Every man who'd ever been on the beat knew that all the University Institutes closed at half past seven. It had been nearly nine o'clock when Ellison had come back to his room and reported the damage.

‘What I was getting at,' continued Sloan untruthfully, ‘was whether anyone would know for certain that you were out and that it would be safe to break in here.'

There was no mistaking Ellison's relief now. His frown cleared. ‘Ah, I see.'

‘Well, would they?'

‘What – oh, I don't know. I'd have to think about that.'

‘Did you see anyone you knew when you were out?'

‘Oh, yes.… A lot of people.'

‘Supper?'

‘Skipped it.'

‘I see.'

‘Not hungry.'

Sloan nodded and turned his attention back to the room itself: Children in arms knew everything about fingerprints nowadays, but they'd have to be searched for, all the same. Before very long, infants at their mother's knee would know all about germ prints, too. These days even veritable tyros at crime knew that you could tell a man's blood group from his saliva – funny that, when you came to think of it, because people had been talking about a man being the spitting image of his father since time began. Long before anyone found out about blood groups; long before they knew that father and son and mother and daughter were linked by the likenesses in tiny platelets of blood.

Or that a signpost to that blood group was contained in every deposit of spittle. Had the ancients guessed that, too, he wondered briefly, his attention caught by something small on the floor.

A dead spit, they would say, he thought, moving towards it. As alike as if the man had been spat out – not born. None of your Adam's-rib touch, he thought to himself, and then grinned. He was hypersensitive to the matter of birth just at the moment. His wife, Margaret, was going to have a baby – their first – and, just as all roads lead to Rome, so all his trains of thought ended up with the subject of birth.

He still couldn't see exactly what it was, it was so small, this thing that had caught his eye. He stooped and peered at it. It could have been a large seed of grass or an ear of corn – wheat, perhaps.

‘Been helping with the harvest?' he enquired of Ellison casually.

‘Not me.' The student shook his head. ‘I'm not one of your cow-cocky ones, thank you very much. I went on the buses.'

‘I see. A city type, eh? Well, we'll have that in a plastic bag, Crosby, whatever it is.'

‘Yes, sir.'

It was quite late by the time the two policemen had collected what information they could from Colin Ellison's room. Nobody could call it a lot.

‘He was somewhere he shouldn't have been when it happened,' pronounced Sloan. ‘That's for sure.'

‘And whoever did it wore gloves,' contributed Crosby.

‘Who doesn't?' said Sloan wearily.

‘And size eight and half shoes.'

‘So do half this mob, I should think.'

‘As for the lock,' went on Crosby, ‘it was pathetic.'

Sloan wasn't surprised. The locks here were meant to keep out the casual interrupters of work and sleep: not the dedicated intruder. He stood for a moment on the deserted landing near the top of the staircase leading down to the quadrangle. In the distance he could hear noise.

‘What's that?'

Detective Constable Crosby cocked an ear. ‘The procession, sir. I reckon it's still going on.'

Sloan frowned. ‘What is it they're shouting now?'

‘Rah, rah, rah?' suggested Crosby, who was an aficionado of the American silver screen.

‘It's not that,' said Sloan, listening intently for a moment to the far-off chanting.

‘Could it be “Humbert” something, sir?' asked the younger man.

‘It could,' said Sloan, mindful of the morrow. ‘Easily.'

‘It's “Humbert in, Wheatley out,”' pronounced Crosby as a sudden change in the wind carried the sound more clearly towards Tarsus. ‘That mean anything, sir?'

Sloan sighed. ‘It does. Humbert is the student they want back. Dr Wheatley is the Dean of Almstone.'

‘Oh,' said the constable, losing interest. ‘Well, the people who were still in their rooms in this corridor didn't hear a thing except for the procession – nothing from Ellison's room at all. I checked.'

‘I shouldn't think they did with that racket going on,' said Sloan absently. ‘It was a good moment to choose.'

They started to descend the staircase.

‘I wonder,' mused Sloan, ‘what our man was really after.…'

‘Perhaps,' offered Crosby, ‘he just wanted to stir things up a bit.'

Sloan shook his head. ‘I don't think so.'

‘He had stirred things up,' observed the constable studiously. ‘All those papers on the floor and books everywhere.'