Death of an Old Goat (12 page)

I
NSPECTOR
R
OYLE
drove thoughtfully along the drab, dusty green road towards the Methodist Ladies' College. It was clear that he was thoughtful, because he kept within the speed limit, and had on his face an expression of acute agony, as if he were preparing to use a recently-broken limb for the first time. His mind was slow to receive new impressions, and still slower to palate the unpalatable, but it was at last becoming clear to him that this was a case that could not be solved by just pinning it on someone or other; it was a case that had to be solved by solving. The case, if it were ever to come before a court, would have to be absolutely watertight. The university community as a whole loathed each other's guts, but when they felt themselves threatened from outside they banded together into an impregnable mutual admiration society. Like a band of crows which has lost one of its number, they would indulge in prolonged lamentation and above all make sure of a nasty revenge on the cat who did it. It was all very different from what Bert Royle was used to, and he hated anything novel.

He drew up slowly outside a grim, walled building, something between a barracks and a lunatic asylum. If the high walls had not been there, the buildings inside would have enjoyed a view over nothing, for they had been built on a dry, flat paddock way out of town, donated in 1912 by a pious Methodist grazier who had lost his only son by beating him to death. Since 1920 or thereabouts the
daughters of middle-class Methodists and others had there received an education infinitely inferior to, but — as a compensation — infinitely more expensive than, that provided by the state system. Here they had been drilled, marched to early prayers, and locked away from all knowledge of the opposite sex except what they could pick up at home in the course of the vacations. The vacations were long and hot, and the Australians are an outdoor people; most of them picked up a quite surprising amount.

Royle found a small opening in the wall and pulled a large, flush-like chain which hung beside it. There was a thunderous ring, and then silence, that silence complete and utter which is part of the great Australian emptiness. He waited fuming for some minutes and was just about to exercise his beer-arm again when a door opened at what sounded like a distance of a mile and a half, and he heard a pair of elderly feet shuffling hesitantly towards the gate. Minutes passed, till finally he heard a sharp little voice very close to him shout:

‘If it's Mormons, it's no use at all you calling!'

‘It's not Mormons, it's the police,' yelled Royle. ‘I have to speak to Miss Tambly.'

‘Miss Tambly does
not
like visitors during school hours,' said the voice, apparently still not convinced that it wasn't the Mormons. ‘You'd do much better to come back later.'

‘It's the police, and I have to see her now,' bellowed Royle, now thoroughly out of temper. It generally took about thirty seconds of less than complete obedience to put him that way. There was a pause on the other side of the wall.

‘It's a
man
, isn't it?' said the voice.

‘Of course it's a bloody man,' said Royle, outraged. ‘Have you forgotten what they sound like?'

‘There is
no
need to be impertinent,' answered the voice. ‘Some of Miss Tambly's friends have very deep voices.' There was a further pause for thought, and then the voice
said: ‘I think I'll go and get Miss Tambly. I don't like making the decision myself.'

And Royle was left to gaze at the dirty grass and the dusty horizon, fuming to himself about the opposite sex while the slow shuffle receded into the distance. The consequent silence was eventually broken by a very different tread. Miss Tambly strode purposefully forward, like Joan Hammond at the 18th hole, threw back the six heavy bolts on the door, unlocked the three padlocks, and stood in the opening obscuring all Royle's view of the seat of learning behind.

‘Do you really have to come now?' she boomed to the surrounding universe. ‘It's damned inconvenient.'

‘Yes,' said Royle snappily. ‘This isn't a matter of a doglicence, or a lost bicycle, this is murder. I'm a busy man and I have to see people when I can, and I've already waited twenty minutes to see you. I intend to see you now. OK?'

‘Makes sense,' said Miss Tambly, in a tone which suggested she was not used to hearing sense from the opposite sex. She shifted her great bulk a fraction of an inch back from the gate, and pointed inside: ‘That's my flat over there,' she said. ‘Keep your eyes straight ahead of you, don't look to left or right, and keep your hands behind your back.'

Mesmerized by one who seemed an even bigger bully than himself Royle slipped apologetically in, and walked straight ahead, casting not a glance around him at the chaste surroundings he found himself in. Miss Tambly locked and bolted the gate, and then thudded quickly up behind him.

‘Can't be too careful,' she said, apparently in explanation. ‘Griselda,' she boomed in a voice of thunder to a buxom adolescent emerging from a side door. ‘Turn your face to the wall and count a hundred, and don't let me catch you peeping . . . They smell you, you know,' she said,
lowering her voice to confidentiality. ‘They've got some kind of extra sense. They'll do anything for a look at a man.'

Royle felt awed at the feelings he must be arousing among several hundred girls, all presumably twitching their noses in longing. He wished there were some way of reciprocating.

‘
Any
man,' said Miss Tambly, as an insulting afterthought. ‘God knows how it's come about. It's this modern world, I suppose. I know I wasn't like that when I was at school.'

Royle felt pretty sure she was speaking the truth.

They arrived at Miss Tambly's flat, which was furnished with brown leather chairs, oak tables ringed from innumerable glasses and coffee-cups, and tattered Persian rugs. To add to the gentleman's club atmosphere there was a bored-looking elk-head skewered over the door. Miss Tambly locked the door, presumably to keep the male smell within limits, and marched straight over to an enormous oak cupboard in the corner, which opened to display an awesome array of bottles, most of them whisky.

‘I know what you'd like,' she said, selecting one. Royle, still not entirely soothed, refrained from telling her what he would like. She poured a half-tumbler, went towards the bathroom and made noises with the tap. When she came back there still seemed to be a half-tumbler full of dark brown liquid.

She's trying to get me drunk, said Royle to himself. He decided he was quite willing, until a horrible suspicion of why struck him like a blow in the belly. But he was flattering himself. Miss Tambly merely served herself an equally stiff potion and sat down among her brown leather in a ramrod fashion.

‘Shoot,' she said.

Royle downed a fiery mouthful, hardly blinking, and then clanked the thinking machinery into motion.

‘You were at the Wickhams' party on Wednesday,' he said. ‘Is that right?'

‘Right,' said Miss Tambly, sipping reflectively. ‘Not often I get out, but this was a last-minute invite. One of those grazier friends of the Wickhams' fell out at the last minute, I suppose. In fact I wouldn't mind betting quite a lot did. There weren't many of that crew there. They're probably fed up to the teeth with visiting academics, and I can't say I blame them.'

‘When did you get the invitation, then?'

‘Tuesday morning. Lucy Wickham rang me — you know what hide she has. I pocketed my pride. I like a do now and then. Matter of fact, I was a bit cheesed off with that old goat getting himself done in, because I thought I might get into a bit of strife with the governors for being at that sort of show. A currant bun and an orangeade is about the limit to their idea of a party, you know — and then you have to have a prayer beforehand. But it shows how wrong you can be. As far as I can see they're tickled pink about the murder, though they don't say so. The chairman of the board paid an unexpected visit of inspection and never stopped talking about it. The rest of them keep ringing up to see how I am.'

‘Do you know the Wickhams well?'

‘I see 'em around. Bobby's ex-army too, you know. Gives you a bond,' she added with a touch of sentiment.

‘But you wouldn't usually expect to get invited to their parties?' asked Royle, rolling the liquid around his cheeks.

‘Good God no,' said Miss Tambly. ‘You know the crew they aim at as well as I do. The six months' holiday on the Riviera every two years crowd. The third-generation Drummondalians. They don't send their daughters here, of course; if they did the drought really would be hitting them below the belt. If I see them in the street to touch a forelock to it's as much as I do see of them.'

‘Did you know any of the others there?'

‘I'd met most of the academics. I'm one of the governors of Daisy Bates College, you know. Gets me out of this hole, now and again, which makes a change. Nice of them to ask me really, because I'm not what you'd call the academic type. Have a bit of strife with the old spelling if the word's more than three syllables to tell the truth. They wanted an expert on security, though. So I see Miss O'Brien and Dr Porter when I go to meetings there. Dr Porter's coming on to our board next year if I can get her. She's got the right ideas about morals, that girl.'

‘And the male academics?'

‘Oh, I see them around from time to time. Dr Day is always in Beecher's when I'm there. Can't take his drink, that one. That twerp Bascomb was at dinner at Daisy Bates one night I was there — making filthy conversation with the girls, I don't doubt. Shameful giving someone hardly out of school a responsible job where there are girls around. Most of the others I know by sight. You get to know people in a town this size, as you've no doubt found.'

‘What about the conversation at the Wickhams',' said Royle, who knew all about Dr Day and had already classified Bill Bascomb as more drink than women and wasn't going to reclassify him on Miss Tambly's say-so. ‘Anything of interest that might give me a lead?'

Miss Tambly thought. Clearly she was hardly more accustomed to walking her thought processes than Royle, and he waited with a good deal of sympathy.

‘The academics were talking about syllabuses most of the time,' she said finally, with some disdain. ‘Don't know why they bother about that sort of thing myself. Just lock 'em up and keep 'em at it, doesn't matter what, that's our motto here. Mind you, I got the impression they weren't taking it really seriously. I think most of them were bored, by the look of them. They kept edging towards the bar and Wickham kept edging them back. Whenever one started leaving the circle he'd throw a question at them. Very
dodgy, he was.'

Royle was surprised. He hadn't given Professor Wickham credit for enough smartness to manage things like that.

‘Then the graziers were talking about the drought, of course. Oh, and there was some talk about schools.'

‘How did that come about?'

‘Don't know. I came in in the middle. I expect one of those graziers' wives must have been going on about Doncaster's set-up, how marvellous it was, and all that.'

‘You don't sound as if you agree.'

‘They send boys on survival courses to save money on food,' said Miss Tambly brutally. She snapped her fingers so sharply that Royle spilled some of his whisky: ‘And I wouldn't give
that
for their security!'

‘Anything else?'

‘Doncaster and the old Prof were talking about the Scouts.'

‘Native scouts?' said Royle, puzzled.

‘Boy. Then there was that fuss at the end of the evening.'

‘Yes,' said Royle, ‘I've heard about that. What exactly did you make of it?'

‘Not much. I'd got a fair bit into me by that time. I always have a few before I go, just in case the fill-up process is a bit slow. And with the Wickhams you can be quite sure it will be. So I tanked up on vodka — no smell you know — and by the end of the evening I wasn't functioning too good . . . too well,' she corrected herself. ‘Oh, what the hell.'

‘You didn't think there was anything underneath this last bit of trouble,' said Royle, not understanding Miss Tambly's grammatical dilemmas. ‘You didn't think it might be really about something else altogether?'

‘I didn't think anything,' said Miss Tambly, whose ramrod stance had relaxed considerably, and who was beginning to look as if this was going to be one of those days. ‘I
tell you, I wasn't functioning like I should. I was trying to pull myself together to drive home.'

‘And the old gentleman? What was your impression of him?'

‘Gaga,' said Miss Tambly, firmly, saying openly what everyone else had implied. ‘Completely gaga. Or else just plain drunk — you couldn't tell which. At this party, now — one moment he'd be there, next moment he'd be miles away. One moment you'd think you were talking to thin air, the next moment he'd come back with something quite sharp — then he'd be off again for minutes at a time. He'd latch on to a word and repeat it over and over again. Most of our governors are like that, so I know the signs.'

‘And that was the first time you'd met him, was it?'

‘No. I was press-ganged into some lecture or other he gave in the morning — bloody waste of time. That was pretty crazy too, if you ask me. Started talking about someone called Gaitskell who I'd never heard of, but before I finally dropped off, he was on about Jane Austen. But I don't understand these things. English never was my strong point at Training College. I was in the physical education line myself, you know. Anyway I was thinking about a new kind of alarm system for the girls' dorm, so you'd better get one of the academics to explain the finer points of the lecture.'