Death of an Old Goat (10 page)

‘A party, eh? What time did he leave?'

‘About half past eleven, I'd say. We got him a taxi, and put him in it, so you can probably check with the driver or the taxi switchboard. The driver was supposed to make sure he got to his room all right, but with that sort of person you can never be quite sure if he actually did.'

‘OK. I'll check that. Who was at this party, apart from him? Academic people? University crowd?'

‘Well yes, partly. Some of them were members of the department here, of course.'

‘Of course.'

‘Some private friends of my wife and myself. The Turbervilles. The McKays. Mrs Lullham.'

He brought them out as if they were patents of nobility. For Royle they were.

‘I see. Anyone else?'

‘Doncaster, from the Drummondale School. And Miss Tambly, from the Methodist Ladies' College, who came a little late. That was the lot, as far as I remember.'

‘Do you think he met anyone else much while he was in Drummondale, or would these be about the only people you could say he knew here?'

‘I don't know of anyone else. I shouldn't think it likely. He went to one of the Vice-Chancellor's stand-up lunches, but he didn't talk to anyone except the V-C. You know how he tends to get people into corners. Otherwise I think he mostly kept to the motel. He was very old, you know, and I suppose he slept a lot.'

‘So this rather narrows the field down to your staff and the people at the party last night, doesn't it?' said Royle, with some pride in his deductive capacities.

‘Well, yes, I suppose it does,' said Wickham reluctantly.

‘Any little trouble there? Any little nastinesses?'

‘None at all, Inspector. It was an extremely pleasant occasion which we all enjoyed.'

Professor Wickham said this quite sincerely. His memory had already covered the occasion with a patina of elegant good cheer. Such retrospective optimism was one of his most invaluable assets.

‘So sad it should end like this,' he added meditatively.

‘Who did he talk to there?'

‘Almost everybody who came, I think. Everyone mixed extremely well, you know.' Again, this was said without any twinge of conscience.

‘Well,' said Royle, beginning to extract his bulk from the chair. The dark sweaty patches on his uniform had become still more obvious from the intense intellectual activity demanded of him by this interview in which he could neither bluster nor bully. ‘Well, that's got the outlines clear enough. Now I can begin filling in the details. I'd better have a preliminary word, like, with your people before I go — the lecturers and so on.'

‘You don't think, Inspector, that some marauder . . . some burglar, perhaps . . . could have . . . ?' began Wickham wistfully.

‘No, I don't. Use your loaf,' said Royle exasperated, then he pulled himself up. ‘Sorry, Professor. No offence meant. There was nothing taken, and nothing much to
take. There wouldn't be any need to kill off a feeble old bird like that, even if he had woken up. It wasn't just a question of silencing him, stopping him rousing the place, like: they cut his throat, so they intended to kill him.'

‘Yes, I see what you mean,' said Wickham. ‘Still, there are some funny people about, you know.'

‘Some kind of weirdo with a thing about old men, you mean?' Royle asked with a barely concealed sneer.

‘Well — '

‘We'll keep the thought in mind, sir,' said Royle, and escaped.

The rest of the investigations out at the English Department added very little to his knowledge. Not surprisingly, most of the academics said they went home to bed. No way of checking that at all, though the neighbours might be asked whether they saw cars coming in, and what time it was. Not likely to be much joy there at that time of night, but it was a slim hope. The exception was Bill Bascomb. Royle had had great hopes of Bascomb, since his name had come up twice in the conversation with Wickham. That was enough to make him suspicious in Royle's not very bright eyes. Meeting him for the first time he looked more unappetizing than suspicious. A spotty chap, not long out of short pants in Royle's eyes, and very obviously English, which didn't send his stock up. What was more he had obviously heard from someone that all Australian policemen were corrupt. This was true enough, though it did not stop Australians treating their police with respect, albeit a respect tinged with jocularity. Bill Bascomb seemed to be treating him merely as a joke. His doings after the party were rather different from the others'. He had had a lecture from Lucy Wickham for half an hour after Professor Belville-Smith had been shipped back to his motel on The Whole Duty of Lecturers:

‘Which consists of being not seen and not heard,' he said,
in what Inspector Royle regarded as his clever-clever Pommie way.

‘I see, sir. And what did you do next?'

‘Well, after the silly bitch let me go — '

Inspector Royle could not let that pass:

‘Mrs Wickham is a highly respected member of this community, sir,' he said.

‘Really? What very odd standards your little community must have, Inspector,' said Bascomb.

‘Just cut out the smart-alecky stuff, and tell me what you did last night, will you?' said Royle exasperated.

‘When the lecture finished, I asked Mrs Wickham if I was free to go now, and whether I could phone for a taxi from her house,' said Bascomb in an exaggerated schoolboy style.

‘You didn't drive to the party?'

‘Yes, I did. But I thought I'd had a bit too much to drink to drive home.'

Self-righteous bloody Pommie, thought Royle. You could tell he hadn't been out here long.

‘Very commendable I'm sure, sir,' he said.

‘When we got back to Menzies College — oh, by the way, I'm moral tutor out there, to E block. For the moment, anyway. I'm supposed to sort of Auntie Marge them. Well, when I got back to Menzies there was a party on in one of the corridors, and I went to investigate it, because it was after midnight by then. And I sort of stayed on, you see. I don't know how long, but an awfully long time.'

‘When did you get to bed?'

‘I don't remember, Inspector. In fact, I rather think I must have been put to bed.'

Royle looked at him closely. If ever a story was borne out by a face, this one was. The naturally unwholesome complexion had a greenish tinge, the teeth were stained with cheap red wine, and the eyes were dull and blood
shot. Perhaps he didn't look quite so dreadful normally, then. In an odd way Royle felt better disposed towards him. Clearly with a bit of training Bascomb would become a man who could take his grog.

‘You drank red wine at this party, I'd guess, sir,' he said, attempting friendliness.

‘Yes. Tuppenny headache. Never again.'

‘You'll soon get used to it,' said Royle. ‘If we can get this confirmed, it looks as if you're in the clear.'

From Bascomb and the rest he got fragments of the Professor's conversation during the evening, and a very strange evening it seemed to him to be. He was used to parties where men assembled down one end of the room around the beer keg, and the women talked about plastic nappies and the price of frozen peas at the other end. That was what parties essentially were, for Royle. This didn't seem to have been that sort of a do at all. Effeminate, these academics, he thought.

Nor did it seem to have been quite the happy event Professor Wickham had remembered with such affection. In fact, almost none of the staff seemed to have enjoyed it, and almost all of them seemed to have a grudge of one kind or another. These grudges appeared to centre on Lucy Wickham, whose position as a respected member of the community Royle soon got tired of going into the lists in defence of. He recognized a right bitch when he heard of one, even if she was on the Country Party social committee. The exception to most of these generalizations was, as usual, Dr Day, who was every policeman's idea of a nightmare witness.

‘Don't remember a thing,' he said genially. ‘Never do. ‘Don't go to parties to take notes, or write books, or save up things for use later. I think I got there a bit early, because Wickham kept me in his study talking some rot or other for half an hour or so. Lucy must have put him up to that. Felt really down when we came out, so it must have
been long enough to sober up.'

‘You'd had something to drink before you went to the Wickhams'?'

‘You don't know the Wickhams' parties, or you wouldn't ask. Of course I did. You don't know how much you're going to get with them. When we went into the party Lucy tried to keep us from the booze, bless her well-covered heart, but she didn't succeed.'

‘And you don't remember anything else?'

‘Not a thing. Something may come back later — it sometimes does. Wait a minute — I think I was in the garden part of the time. Yes, I'm sure I was.'

‘With Professor Belville-Smith?'

‘Oh no, I don't think so. He looked as though a breath of fresh air would blow him away. I was probably pissing on the roses. Go and see if they're flourishing. At home we've got the best rose-bed in Drummondale, and that's what I put it down to.'

‘When did you get home?'

‘Haven't the foggiest. You know how it is. Ask the wife — she may have woken up.'

‘Wasn't she at the party, then?'

‘Not on your life. She and Lucy have fallen out — or rather they never fell in. If there's one thing Lucy dislikes more than academics, it's academics' wives. Consequently she always manages to freeze them off, right from the first.'

‘Did you drive yourself home?'

‘I suppose so. Yes, I must have. The car was outside this morning, without a dent in it, too. It's a good car — more or less takes
me
home after a party.'

So there it was. All but Bascomb without a shred of an alibi, and his needed close checking. If Belville-Smith had been done in at some time between midnight and five a.m., as the police doctor had conjectured, then any one of them could have done it. The whole thing need have taken no more than ten minutes. Inspector Royle's elephantine
mind made the logical leap necessary to tell him that he ought to try to pin down some motive which could have made one or other of them — or one of the other guests, though that didn't seem to him very likely — do such a savage thing. But nothing anyone could remember about the corpse's conversation on the previous night gave any clue as to which of them it might have been. Everyone mentioned, with great relish, the little set-to between the distinguished guest and his undistinguished host just before he left, but none of them thought any more highly of this as a motive for murder than he did.

‘If Bobby went around murdering everyone who thought him a lousy host,' said Alice O'Brien, ‘even you would have caught him by now.'

Royle chewed this over in silence for a bit, and wondered whether to put Miss O'Brien down as a sarcastic bitch. She marched in on the progress of his thoughts, however, before he had properly sorted out the implications.

‘If you want to know who he was talking to, and what they were saying, you should pump Doctor Porter, if you can bear the experience,' she said. ‘She's got ears in the back of her head, and she stores it all up, to use later on.'

‘Blackmail?' asked Royle, positively staggered by these depths of academic iniquity.

‘Not in the criminal sense,' said Alice enigmatically.

‘Was she talking to the old guy a lot herself?'

‘Not that I saw. In fact, I'm not sure she spoke to him at all. But she was hovering near him much of the time. She never drinks more than a thimbleful herself, so that she can listen to the rest of us making fools of ourselves, and then throw it in our faces later on. She's a Fellow of Daisy Bates College, and so am I. They say she practises her spying on the girls there.'

Inspector Royle took a hurried leave of Alice, putting her down as the sort who sometimes made mincemeat of
prosecuting counsel if you put them in the witness-box. He liked the sound of this Porter woman, though. That was the sort of witness a policeman liked — one who kept her eyes and ears open. It saved so much questioning, and comparing of differing versions.

Dr Porter was very young to be a Doctor, but nobody ever thought so. She was ageless, and so completely sexless, that she gave even Royle the feeling that he was in some way bandaged tightly from head to toe in her presence. Her lips were compressed, her eyes were sharp, and Royle had no doubt that Alice O'Brien was right about her. But she was a respectable member of a respectable class, in a country which made a cult of respectability, and she intensely resented being interviewed by a policeman.

‘I'm afraid I can tell you nothing, nothing whatsoever,' she said, and she stuck to this line uncompromisingly throughout the interview. A clam was, by comparison, loose-tongued. She had not talked to the dead man herself, and she deeply resented the suggestion that she might have overheard so much as a word of anyone else's conversation with him. No one who was a gentleman could even have considered the possibility of such a thing.

‘But if you didn't talk to Professor Belville-Smith, and didn't hear what he was talking about to other people, you must have been talking to some of the other guests yourself.'

She gave a little silent nod of the head.

‘What were you talking about?'

‘We talked about academic matters, for the most part,' said Dr Porter primly.

‘What sort of academic matters?'

‘Reform of the syllabus,' she said. Inspector Royle simply retired, defeated.

Driving back, tired and frustrated, towards town, Royle saw the students of Menzies College streaming towards their dining hall. They lived in a collection of buildings like
chicken boxes, scattered in a haphazard way around a more pretentious building, where they ate. Clearly the powers-that-be at the university thought eating a more important function than any other, or else the residential blocks had been built at a time when money was short. Royle drove towards the block over which Bascomb had indicated he held moral sway, and got out of the car. He went up to a little group of stragglers, and opened the interview with one of them in his usual way, by putting his enormous hand on his shoulder and lifting him several inches off the ground. Not surprisingly his initial questions about the party the previous night met with hostility, which took the form of complete silence.