Monday morning
Unlike the aloofness of most classical busts, the famous stone heads outside Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford—Roman emperors, according to Max Beerbohm, their eyes like pitted olives—glare around with undisguised scorn. And for well over a hundred years, the principal object of their goggling disdain has been St. Basil’s College, facing them across Broad Street, snuggled between Trinity College and the New Bodleian Library.
The bells of the city were striking eleven as Oliver strode into the nondescript main entrance to St. Baz’s, stepping around a cluster of students who were attempting to disentangle the knotted and combined locks that tethered their bicycles to the college railings. After a brief conversation in the murky porter’s lodge with a talking white beard, behind which traces of a human face could just be made out, he scurried around the main quadrangle to an archway in the far corner. Painted on a board was the name Mallard had scribbled down for him: Dr. McCaw. Oliver clumped up the wooden staircase to the third floor and tapped on the double door to Dr. McCaw’s room.
A hand immediately shot out, passing him an electric kettle.
“Fill this up in the toilet down the hall, there’s a dear. It’s just you, is it?”
Oliver confirmed that he was alone, although with a stab of guilt as he recalled Effie’s look of surprise when he’d told her that he wouldn’t be joining the household jaunt to Warwick Castle because of a business meeting in Oxford. But he knew he couldn’t bring her with him or even reveal the true purpose of the outing. Effie had made it clear that she was required to leave the Breedlove case to Simon Culpepper and the Warwickshire CID—a protocol that Mallard clearly shared, although the brief consultation with his uncle the previous day had at least led to today’s appointment.
He returned to the room. Dr. Hyacinthe McCaw took the kettle and motioned him to sit down on the room’s only sofa. She was a short, sturdy woman, probably in her eighties, wearing a garment that was either a high-quality floral housecoat or a low-quality floral dress. She had a tangle of long, gray curls gathered loosely on top of her head that seemed in permanent danger of slipping off, whether or not they were actually rooted in her scalp. Her eyes were also gray and bright in a pleasant, remarkably unlined face.
“I’m old enough to remember Uncle Dennis on the radio,” she said, looking over the text of the blackmailer’s letter. “A shame his life had to end this way. There was no suicide note?”
“No.”
“Is it possible that the blackmailer got wind of the death and broke into Dennis’s home to remove such a note, in case it named him or her?”
“Then he or she would have taken the blackmail letter, too, surely. It was open on the desk, in full view.”
Dr. McCaw nodded and reached up to adjust the pile of hair, which was threatening to spill over into her face.
“Well, since this is clearly the first message Dennis received, there’s precious little to identify the writer. In my opinion, this was composed by a professional, someone who’s blackmailed before. An amateur would get to the demands sooner. So I’d focus on the recipient. What can you tell me about the late Uncle Dennis?”
“He lived a blameless life for thirty years, on his own in a tiny Cotswold village,” Oliver said with a shrug.
“Wasn’t it Agatha Christie who said there was more evil in a country village than in the whole City of London?” She handed him a mug of tea.
“Then Sir Arthur Conan Doyle beat her to it: ‘The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’ That’s Sherlock, in The Copper Beeches.”
“You are Tim’s nephew,” McCaw said, with a smile. “So what about the dreadful record of Synne?”
“If Dennis had misbehaved since he moved to the village, everyone would know. Especially my mother.”
“Then you need to go back further. Much further, from the tone of the letter—‘history,’ ‘the past.’ What about this ‘family secret’ reference? Do you know much about his early life, his relatives?”
“I’d imagine the older the secret, the deeper it must be buried.”
“It may not be as hard to uncover as you think. Foul deeds will rise. Blackmail victims are often the last people to realize their well-tended secrets are, in fact, common knowledge.”
“Then if I’m looking into the dark recesses of Dennis Breedlove’s early days, where do you think I should point my flashlight?”
Dr. McCaw thought for a moment.
“Sex,” she stated.
“Sex. Why?”
“Because whatever happened in the past still bothered Breedlove to this day, to put it mildly. And sex is the only thing the British fixate on forever. A life of crime? We love a reformed wrong ’un. Financial shenanigans? Name an MP who hasn’t fiddled his expenses but still parks his arse on the green leather of the House of Commons. Drugs, alcohol? Everybody adores a reformed hell-raiser. Shame, where is thy blush? No, for the British, sex and blackmail go together like the Lion and the Unicorn. You’ll always remember the front-page peccadilloes of John Profumo and that lovely Hugh Grant.”
She took a sip of tea. “It doesn’t apply to the Europeans,” she continued. “They have an adult acceptance of sexual mores. The American attitude to sex, on the other hand, is positively infantile. But the British, as in so many things, are bang in the middle. They stay mired in their adolescence. They can’t stop thinking about sex, but they never get it right. That’s why the British can be funnier about their sex lives than any other nation.”
Oliver took this in, gazing at McCaw’s bookshelves. On the subject of the British, she had been disturbingly close to home. Although the room he and Effie were sharing in Synne, sanctified by his mother as Oliver’s Room, bore no sentimental value for him, it was still his furtive ambition to carve at least one notch on the figurative bedpost of his late-teenage-years bed. Effie had been in better spirits the previous evening, so Oliver tentatively tried to resume the lovemaking that had been deferred since the Mallards’ arrival in the Shakespeare Race, two eventful nights earlier. He was starting to stroke Effie’s stomach, wondering whether to let his hand drift north or south, when a vixen’s blood-curdling screech from a nearby garden caused him to yell involuntarily, setting off a fit of laughter from Effie that completely destroyed the mood.
Well, there was always tonight. But what role had sex played in Dennis Breedlove’s life? Surely none that would cause him, at the age of eighty, to kill himself at the first hint of exposure? And why are Dr. McCaw’s books all upside down?
He blinked and looked again. And then he realized they were French books, novels mainly, the lettering on the spine running bottom to top, according to French publishing practice. When scanning a bookshelf, the French reader’s head tilts appropriately to the left.
“You like French literature, I see,” he remarked, drinking his tea.
A puzzled expression crossed her face. “I should hope so, dear, since I teach it. My mother was French—my first name is pronounced the French way. Nobody gets it the first time.”
“But I gathered from my uncle that you’re an expert on blackmail,” Oliver stammered.
“C’est bien vrai.”
“So I assumed you’d be a fellow in Law or maybe a Psychology lecturer, with a specialty in criminology or something.”
She shook her head, gazing at him with amusement.
“Then may I ask how you know so much about blackmail?” he persisted.
“Because I’m a blackmailer. Or I used to be, until your uncle arrested me for the first and last time.”
“Good heavens!”
“Ah, he didn’t mention that? Well, it’s ancient history now, of course. Tim Mallard helped me see the error of my ways. Bit of a quid pro quo, you see. Or in my case, fifty quid pro quo, which was how much I was collecting each month from a fellow of Oriel. His shameful lust for one of the more sensitive male undergraduates in his tutorial group turned out, unbeknownst to moi, to have played a peripheral role in a particularly tricky murder. Timmy was only an inspector in those days, quite a dashing flic, but too fond of his wife, alas. In gratitude for my assistance, he dropped the charges, as long as I promised to go straight.”
She took another gulp from the mug of cooling tea. “Rather a pity,” she continued. “The pickings had been fat around these parts. Before the Berlin Wall came down, I made several thousand pounds off a nervous New College don whose affection for the Soviet regime had been bruited around the bathhouses for decades.”
Oliver smiled, making a mental note to take some revenge upon Mallard for not warning him.
“Still, I was going to retire anyway,” McCaw continued.
“Guilty conscience?”
“Dwindling opportunities, mon cher. You see, nobody’s ashamed of anything these days. When I started, I could hide in the bushes on Hampstead Heath with a torch and a notebook, and come up trumps every time. Today, ambitious young political hopefuls are clamoring for Private Eye to find out about their experiments in Eton dormitories, in hopes it’ll lead to a cabinet position. Our indiscretions sometimes serve us well. There’s a glamour in having a past. The aging pop star on the talk show who announces he’s been sober and clean for all of three days now gets a standing ovation, while the poor schmo who’s never touched the stuff in his life is dismissed as a prude. Perhaps they’re the ones I should target.”
There was a hesitant tap on the door. She opened it. A trio of female students was waiting nervously on the landing, clutching essays and textbooks.
“Any last suggestion as to where I start?” Oliver asked her quietly as the young women filed past him into the room.
“Remember the ‘family secret,’” she said. “Go to the funeral. Watch the mourners. A bientôt.”