Oxford Blood (28 page)

As she clambered up the high winding stone staircase, Jemima wondered if she would find Saffron too in some kind of passive state of post-revelling (and post-coital) contemplation. Perhaps he had merely gone quietly back to bed after leaving her at St Lucy's. Or perhaps he had found other possibilities for enjoyment at Rochester .
..
Nevertheless the sense of unease which had oppressed her since dawn at St Lucy's became stronger as she reached the top of the stairs and saw that Saffron's door was open. She noticed that several of the other doors on the staircase were shut (although Proffy's on the ground floor was for once open; perhaps he had finally gone home to Chillington Road, having sufficiently slaked his appetite for lobster and champagne).

Jemima went into the room. It was empty. She went through into the tiny bedroom and stared. Saffron was lying on the bed, dressed in his white evening shirt and black trousers, only the white tie had been undone and lay loosely round his neck. His eyes were shut. One sleeve had been rolled up. Otherwise the resemblance to the body of Tiggie was uncanny.

Jemima ran forward and supported his head, realizing as she did so, that Saffron, unlike Tiggie, was breathing; his body was warm. But the pulse, when she felt it, was very faint.

'It's not true!' she cried aloud and started to pull at Saffron's body, slapping his cheek, tugging at his shoulders. Once Saffron's lips opened a little but otherwise there was no movement. He was in a coma, a drug-induced coma, Jemima recognized that only too well. The question was, how did she reverse it? What should she do, now, immediately? Did she dare leave him and fetch help? After that, she would work out how on earth he had got himself into that coma.

'Saffron,' she said aloud again. 'Saffron! Wake up, Saffron, you've got to hear me.'

There was a very faint noise behind her. Jemima realized for the first time that she was not alone with Saffron.

She whirled round. There standing in the doorway of the tiny room, watching her and blinking slightly in his usual mild manner behind the black-rimmed spectacles, stood Professor Mossbanker.

'Profry,' she began, 'thank God. We've got to get help. Will you telephone - you've got a telephone downstairs? We've got to save him—'

Then she stopped. She saw that in his hand Proffy was holding a syringe.

'You found that?' she questioned, still feeling confused. 'What are you doing here, Proffy?' she said in a stronger voice. 'What are you doing with that syringe?'

‘I
didn't expect you to be here,' Proffy spoke with an odd kind of detachment. 'Why did you come?'

‘I
came
back
,'
Jemima spoke urgently, 'and thank God I did. And now we've got to get help, we've got to save him.'

'Oh you'll be able to save him all right.' Proffy continued to speak in the same casual tone. 'If you think he's worth saving, that is.'

Then Jemima for the first time fully understood.

'You!' She hesitated and then said in an uncertain voice: 'You - the murderer?' Jemima took a step backwards. She was not sure at the time whether it was a protective move towards Saffron or a defensive one on her own account.

'Precisely. Rather an unexpected discovery on your part, I fancy.' Proffy spoke in his familiar rapid unemphatic tone; he continued to stand there blinking behind his spectacles. He might have been congratulating - or reproving her - on some slight matter of scholarship. Then he put down the syringe and removed his spectacles. For a moment his eyes, his whole visage, looked naked and rather innocent. Then she realized how cold his real manner was, had perhaps always been behind the friendly bumbling veneer.

Jemima felt an instant of pure panic. Proffy had tried to kill Saffron or was preparing to do so. He had - she grappled with the thought - killed poor little Tiggie. Her thoughts went further back as she struggled with the implications of it all: he had probably also killed Bim Marcus. Proffy: a double murderer. A would-be triple murderer. Was it likely that he would now spare her?

Yet Proffy still made no move towards her. In a way his stillness, his air of ease, was more sinister than if he had displayed openly the violence which must lie within him. She supposed that she ought, nonetheless, to prepare herself for self-defence, some kind of defence. She was tall and quite strong: Proffy was on the other hand, if a lot older, a lot taller and a lot heavier. On his own testimony he was a killer, even if the weapons he had chosen hitherto had been secret ones.

Jemima took a deep breath.

'Why?' she asked crudely. She had some vague memory that hostages were supposed to engage terrorists in conversation in order to defuse a violent situation. Even stronger was her obstinate desire to know the truth - if it proved to be the last thing she ever found out.

'Why?' replied Proffy, twisting his heavy spectacles in his hands. 'I suppose I thought the world would be well rid of him.'

'Wasn't it a case of being well rid of
–
them!’
To her own ears, Jemima's voice sounded distinctly tremulous. Above all, she wanted to give an impression of calm authority.

'Ah yes, them. So you worked that out. Very good, very good.' There was the same surreal atmosphere of academic congratulation.

'The deaths of
Tiggie
and Bim Marcus. Aren't I right? Wasn't it all part of the same—' she hesitated again. 'The same plan,' she finished.

Proffy ignored the question.

'Why?' he repeated, instead. 'Why indeed? A long story, a long story from the past. But not, I think, the story you anticipated, Jemima Shore Investigator. My impression was that you were altogether too carried away by other aspects of it all
...
Ah well, it doesn't matter now.'

Proffy put his spectacles on again and gazed at her. 'You look frightened, I see. Not surprising I suppose under the circumstances. All the same, no need to be frightened, no need at all. It's over, all over.'

'Why?' demanded Jemima desperately.

Proffy continued to consider her. 'Yes, I daresay the enquiring mind ought to be encouraged. In theory if not in practice. Since it no longer matters to me, I will indulge myself - and you - by explaining. We might go downstairs.'

Much later, Proffy said to Jemima: 'While you're waiting for the police I think you'd better let me have the syringe.' He blinked at her one last time. 'I shall go outside. I've always been fond of parties, you know. Give my love to my wife and—' he stopped. Then: 'Eugenia' he pronounced. It was not quite clear whether he was aware of his surprising triumph in getting the names the right way round.

Outside in the College, once the sun was fully up - too late for the ball, it was going to be a beautiful day - strong and competent men in the shape of the porter's workforce, started moving purposefully about. Plates and glasses, innumerable bottles, were collected and packed away, from innumerable suppers, breakfasts, in tent and quad, arcade, staircase and endless sitting-out rooms. It was now time to persuade the few last revellers of Rochester that the Ball was now well and truly over. As Jemima had suspected, one or two of the bodies, whether single or entwined with each other, were extremely reluctant to awake, and even more reluctant to move. One in particular was hard to rouse, the dark head sunk on the chest, a body lying in the corner of the big tent in the main Rochester quad.

'Come along, sir, come along. Time to go now, sir. Come along.'

The porter shook the recumbent reveller by the shoulder without effect and passed on to the next body.

Twenty minutes later there was a call from one of his associates. 'Fred -can't seem to get any reaction out of this one. Out for the count.'

The head porter called back: 'We'll put him to bed, then. If he's one of ours.'

'Fred, come over here will you. I don't like this. He's - well he's cold. Quite cold.' There was a new urgency in the voice. 'Who's cold?'

'It's the professor! Professor Mossbanker. Fred - I think we'd better get an ambulance. Quick. There's this syringe!'

'OK, right then. You go and telephone for an ambulance. That's the second time this morning. Well, we once had three after a Commem. I ask you. And they call it fun.'

'This is serious, Fred. I think he's dead!'

To some of the revellers walking unsteadily in the streets of Oxford, on their way to the river, on their way back from it, the wail of the ambulance passing down the Broad, bearing Proffy's lifeless body on its ride to the hospital, was like the last music of the long night.

21

Purple for the Rich Man

Afterwards, back in London safely reunited with Cass, Jemima still shivered at the thought of what followed. But it was the thought of Proffy's strange mild calm which caused the revulsion.

'He seemed quite fatalistic about everything. Oddly dispassionate. All he really wanted to do was get it over - my questions - and then as we now know, go outside and kill himself. I got the impression that he was hardly interested in me; I certainly don't think I was ever in any danger.'

'I'm glad of that.' Cass put his arm around her shoulders.

'You see, for him the game was over: the
party
was over. He answered my questions, almost with a shrug. Said that he'd drugged Saffron when he came to drink the champagne.' Jemima forbore to mention to Cass the question of the green dress. How ironic, she reflected privately, that Proffy the cool murderer, the former secret agent, the chemist who knew how to kill, should have failed to deduce from the presence of a ball dress hanging up in the sitting room that Saffron was entertaining its former occupant in the bedroom
...
she thought of his formidable mixture of jealousy, ruthlessness and absentmindedness which had defeated her investigation for so long and turned her in the direction of the Iverstones, more especially the ever-decent Jack. Or perhaps Proffy was so used to female clothing draped round Saffron's rooms and even his car (she remembered the Maserati at Saffron Ivy bestrewn with white frilly underclothing) that he paid no special attention to one dress. It was after all part of his picture of Saffron, the careless sexuality of arrogant youth, the picture which he had determined to destroy.

'And now he was coming back to finish off the job. Just as he killed Tiggie,' Jemima said aloud.

'Envy!' exclaimed Cass. 'All that in the name of envy!'

'Envy after all can kill,' said Jemima. 'Can be destructive as well as 
self-destructive. He warned me, and that was his own piece of arrogance, on the night of the Chimneysweepers' Dinner. He was talking about the parable of Dives and Lazarus. What makes you think Dives wasn't happy? he said. Purple and fine linen: who wouldn't want to be dressed in purple and fine linen? What makes you think Lazarus didn't envy Dives his lot? That gave me the clue to the attacks on Saffron - a killing hatred based on envy was at the bottom of them. But I was obsessed by the hereditary element in it all, the fact that the Iverstone family were bound to envy Saffron and, if anyone, would want him removed. That tension I felt at the tennis match - the tension which was really between Proffy and Lord St Ives: I was determined to put it down to Andrew Iverstone's jealousy of his cousin. Andrew Iverstone, Daphne, Fanny, even the ever-decent Jack - they were all present at the various attacks and had an opportunity—' 'But Jack wasn't present at the Chimneysweepers' Dinner,' objected Cass.

'Yes, but he too could have canoed up river, as did Rufus Pember and Nigel Copley. That wouldn't have been impossible. What I knew all along, but failed to connect, was that Proffy had the best opportunity of all. Saffron's car, for example, the original attack, parked outside Rochester and in various car parks near the college; who had better opportunity than Proffy to fix it? And then the death of Bim Marcus: Proffy was even able to report finding the body with perfect impunity. No one needed to enter Rochester and lurk till the small hours, when the murderer actually lived there - right on the same staircase, Staircase Thirteen.'

Cass frowned: 'Why the washing machine? That always struck me as being so odd. If it was Proffy, why didn't he just do the deed and retreat back into his rooms? Why set the machine on and alert everybody to his presence?'

'Of course I should have realized all along the importance of that clue,' agreed Jemima. 'I felt instinctively at the time as you know; thought the police were a little too easy about it all - the machine was on, with Bim's prints on it; ergo he set it off. No, that was Proffy's cunning way of distracting our attention from his presence. The machine was put on deliberately to give him the perfect excuse to discover the body. Any prints or awkward traces he might have left - all taken care of.'

'In view of his feelings about youth - by the way, who said he liked the idea of children and hated the young?'

'Tiggie,' said Jemima.