The Cambridge Theorem (4 page)

“As usual, there was no reply, so I goes in. I don't take the broom and duster in first because I like to get the old coffee cups and plates out to the kitchen before I start on the room.

“I didn't even see him at first. I looked on 'is desk and by the fireplace and there was no mugs and then I looks by the winder and I seen him 'anging there.”

Here she faltered and began to wring her hands in her lap. The two men waited in silence.

“So then I runs out down the steps to the lodge and I tells Mr. Beecroft that young Mr. Bowles has 'ung himself. Then I waited while he was on the phone and came back 'ere with him and made some tea while Dr. Hawken arrived. Then all these police and ambulance fellas came. But it's no good. 'E's dead, i'n't he?”

“Yes, I'm afraid he is,” said Smailes.

“Such a nice young fella. So quiet and shy and neat, not like some of them. Real slobs they are, officer. You wouldn't believe some of the things I 'ave to clean up.”

Here Hawken interceded. “Well, thank you, Mrs. Allen. Sergeant?”

“No more questions, Mrs. Allen. We may need you to make a statement.”

The remark did not seem to register on her.

“Take the rest of the day off, Mrs. Allen. Just tell Beecroft on your way out that you're going home,” said Hawken.

Smailes stepped out of the tiny kitchen on to the landing as Bert Ainsworth came up the stairs with the DC from the coroner's office and two mortuary attendants. Ainsworth stepped up and said in a low voice, “We told them to bring the wagon up the drive on the Backs. Less of a crowd.”

Derek Smailes had always liked Bert Ainsworth. He was old school; no procedural hand-wringing like Dickley.

Smailes handed him the folded suicide note. “This is the young fella's note. Give it to the coroner's DC will you, Bert, and help them get the body in the bag,” said Smailes. The other officers had already disappeared into Bowles' room. Mrs. Allen made her way gingerly down the steps as Hawken watched her. He turned to look at Smailes, who noticed for the first time how short he was. The disabled arm made him look almost frail. The light from the overhead bulb made his glasses flash like mirrors.

“Sergeant, I suggest we discuss this matter further in my rooms,” he said.

“Certainly,” said Smailes, catching part of the formality of his speech. He turned to Ainsworth.

“Stick around for the SOCO boys, Bert, and then secure the room yourself.” He handed Ainsworth the dead man's keys. “Put these in the personal bag at the station—and keep an eye on Dickley, will you?” He winked at Ainsworth, who grinned.

He followed Hawken down the stairs and out into the court, where the crowd of students had dissipated.

D
EREK SMAILES
had never intended to join the police force. In fact, he had resisted the idea vehemently when his father had begun to suggest it after he entered the sixth form and started seeing Yvonne. His father had liked Yvonne from the beginning. She showed Harry Smailes the frank deference he expected from the world, and her father was a fire captain, well within the canon of his acceptance.

His father, with some justification, had always been skeptical of his chances for University, although Derek resented his pessimism. By the time he was seventeen, he had to deal with the insistent suggestion that he should look around for a career, that he should consider alternatives if he decided to settle down. The prospect appalled him. While he was quite determined to find a strategy to conquer Yvonne's sexual resolve, he had no intentions of settling down. He wanted to leave Cambridge and go away to college, like any other teenager with half a chance.

He resisted the suggestion of police service as a career with the violent mixture of indignation and remorse that always characterized his dealings with his father. It was absurd for someone with his prospects, however modest, to toss them away on a career that did not require even A levels. And besides, he would never try to follow his father's act at Cambridge police station. It would be an impossible task.

At the same time, he realized that a career in the police appealed to him acutely. He was unsure whether the attraction was the tug of a genetic imperative, or that compliance was simply the only way he could ever amount to anything in his father's eyes. He dismissed the idea as ridiculous and told no one of it. He could never fit in over there. For Christ's sake, he liked books. And besides, he would never subject any future offspring of his to the grief and isolation he had suffered as a policeman's child. For some reason he could not explain, Derek Smailes found himself preoccupied with thoughts of his past as he stared at the back of Nigel Hawken's head, the steel-gray hair and the crisp white collar above the blue pinstripes.

Hawken was standing at a modern glass cabinet with his back to the detective. “Sherry?” he asked over his shoulder, the syllables rhyming.

It was only eleven thirty and Smailes was on duty, but he didn't hesitate. You never really got used to it. You just switched something off in your mind, pretending that the deceased was not someone who had shared your humanity, like air.

“Yes, thank you,” he said, resisting the temptation to rock back on his heels and say, “Don't mind if I do.”

Hawken looked more like a banker than an academic. He had led the detective to a large suite of rooms overlooking the main court of St. Margaret's. They were in a spacious sitting room with oak panelled walls and college crests around the picture rail. Former luminaries of St. Margaret's gazed bleakly in oils from the long wall which faced the door. Smailes could see through a partially open door into a cluttered study where Hawken obviously did his paperwork. At the far end was another door, which probably led to a bedroom.

The sitting room was furnished in a combination of sombre traditional mahogany and Danish modern. Two large butcher block sofas faced each other across a low coffee table, on which were stacked copies of National Geographic and Foreign Affairs. The room reminded him vaguely of the headmaster's study at The Crowe School.

Hawken handed him a small crystal glass and indicated the sofa with a gesture of his hand. Smailes declined, reaching into his raincoat pocket for his first cigarette. He took the coat off and laid it carefully over the back of the couch.

He had been right about Hawken's smoking habits, since he had begun stuffing a pipe skilfully with his single good hand and was regarding him steadily.

“Officer, before we proceed, may I ask you whether we can keep this matter out of the newspaper? I see nothing to be gained from a lot of garish publicity, and these things do tend to bring the college a bad name,” he began.

Christ, it was always the same story. Forget the culprit or the victim, what about the reputations of the rest of us? This time he had no inclination to comply.

“I'm afraid not, sir,” he said. “We update the press twice daily from the incident book, and there's no way we could keep a suicide from them. Besides, there will have to be an inquest. The coroner's office has already taken over.”

Hawken shook his head in resignation. The news seemed to worsen his mood of glacial displeasure. Smailes had seen detachment before, but Hawken's response to this tragic death seemed extreme.

“Very well then. How can I help you?” he asked wearily.

“Perhaps I should ask first to see the Master of the college. He is the senior official, I think?” He suspected this inquiry was going to annoy Hawken, and he was right.

“Sir Felix Apsley is indeed the head of the college, but the position of Master is somewhat—er, ceremonial, shall we say. Bestowed by the Government. Sir Felix is up in town, and I shall of course inform him of this unfortunate event. But for all practical purposes, as senior tutor, I am the administrative head of this college.”

“Well, tell me what you can about the dead man. Simon Bowles was his name, I think,” said Smailes baldly.

“Brilliant chap, no doubt about it. One of the highest scholarship papers we had ever seen. Mathematics, you know. But unstable, I'm afraid. You see, he had tried it before.”

“You mean he had attempted suicide before?” asked Smailes, taking out a small notebook. “When was this?”

“Well, I'm not sure. Before his Finals. Must be nearly two years ago. Jumped out the bloody window. There was a terrible fuss. He was in the asylum for a month or so. Thought it might be the last we'd see of him. But he made quite a recovery and the faculty committee went and awarded him a research fellowship, even though he only had the
aegrotat
.”

Hawken became distracted by his attempts to tamp down the tobacco in his pipe with a gadget from his pocket. He walked over to the window and began to stare out at the court.

Smailes stopped scribbling in his notebook. “I'm sorry, sir, I don't follow. What was the illness you say he had?”

“An
aegrotat
? Good lord, no. That's a type of degree. When you're medically unfit to sit your exams, you get an
aegrotat
. Means ‘he is ill,' I think,” said Hawken impatiently. He began to wave a great flare of flame over his pipe.

“I'm sorry, Dr. Hawken, but could you explain further? How long had Simon Bowles been a student here?” Smailes was irritated by the condescension.

“As I said, officer, he came up as an undergraduate with one of the highest marks we had ever seen on an entrance paper. As I understood it, he did as well as expected. First in Part One. Looked like he was heading for a double First when he went to pieces.

“I'd rather forgotten about him at the time—I only ever knew him by sight. Heard the story later from his tutor, Professor Davies. Decent chap. Arch. and Anth. You should talk to him. Knew a lot more about Bowles than I did.”

“Ark and what, I'm sorry?” asked Smailes.

“Archaeology and Anthropology. Davies' field. Anyway, seems he was working frantically, Bowles I mean, and then he had some bad news, I think perhaps his father died, and he started to go off the deep end. Always gets to them, Finals term. The unstable types,” said Hawken at-tempting to sound sympathetic, and failing.

“Had he received help from anyone in the college, or doctors?” asked Smailes.

“Well, Davies knew all about it. Had him under medical supervision. But it didn't do any good. Never does, does it? He was found one night lying in the court. Luckily he had only fallen fifteen feet or so, and broken his ankle. But his mind was completely gone. Babbling about snakes. They took him to the hospital, then out to Myrtlefields.”

The name of Cambridge's famous mental hospital sent a chill down Smailes' spine. Since boyhood, it had been synonymous with the direst of fates. He had lived in Cambridge all his life, but had never even driven past it.

Hawken seemed to have hit a stride. He was standing in profile against the window, the four fingers of his good hand tucked into the flap of his jacket pocket, addressing the portrait of some walrus-faced don in a mortar-board and ermine-fringed gown. Smailes realized it was Harold Macmillan.

“I was involved a little at the time, with the family, but I left most of it to Davies. Family is from Rickmansworth, as I recall. His sister is married to a vicar. I suppose we should inform them. Is it my job to call?”

“No, sir. My assistant, DC Swedenbank, is taking care of that. He will have got the particulars from Mr. Beecroft. We never call. Always send a constable around from the local force. That way there's always someone there, in case of an extreme reaction. You understand.”

Like hell he does, thought Smailes.

Hawken turned to face him directly through a cloud of blue smoke.

“So anyway, he missed the Finals, obviously, and the committee gave him an
aegrotat
, no problem about that. But then they decided that he had been so certain to score the highest in his exams that they gave him the research fellowship after all. There were two or three other chaps in the running, too.

“I said nothing at the time, but I wondered if the committee wasn't backing a bit of a game horse. Wasn't sure he'd take the pace, you know.”

Smailes wanted to get the details straight, so he made Hawken go back over them.

“So, the first suicide attempt was two years ago. He jumped out of a window. The window of the same room he killed himself in?”

“Yes, I'm fairly sure,” said Hawken.

“Then he was hospitalized for a time, then returned to the college as a graduate fellow. How had his progress been since then?”

“Well, I hadn't heard any more about him, so I assumed he was doing all right. Davies was out of the country most of last year, but he took him on again as a tutorial student when he came back. I asked him to let me know if he heard he was having problems.”

Hawken seemed to find the subject of Bowles unusually irritating. Smailes wondered if it was Hawken's obvious military training that engendered this attitude towards self-inflicted death, or whether it was really the prospective publicity that was annoying him. He passed by the detective on his way back to the cocktail cabinet, and Smailes could see the fine web of burst capillaries in his cheeks that gave his complexion its unnatural glow. Such faces were usually the product of healthy outdoor pursuits or less healthy indoor ones. Hawken looked the Labrador-and-shooting-stick type, but the way he was waving his decanter around at this time of the morning made Smailes wonder.

“Did he continue to see a doctor, the people out at Myrtlefields?” he continued.

“I'm afraid you'll have to ask Davies—I'm really not sure.” He held up the sherry decanter and raised his eyebrows. Smailes declined.

“You know nothing that might have precipitated this act—trouble with money, girlfriends, drugs? Was Professor Davies involved in any special surveillance on this man?”

Again, Hawken appeared to take offense.