The Senior Common Room had long ago been appropriated by the teaching staff. Originally, it had been built as a bolt-hole for graduates, but few of them ever turned up so the lecturers moved in, lured by the soft leather furniture, the ginger biscuits and the port. All in all, it had the hallmarks of a gentlemen’s club without the exorbitant membership fees and it was the gentlemen’s angle that annoyed Margaret Murray the most. She was usually too busy to go there, but whenever she could, she would make an appearance just because she wore a dress. She would listen to the tuts and sighs from the older dons and wink at the younger ones, most of whom had no problem with her presence at all.
Today, however, she was on a mission and the two birds she would bring down with a single stone sat opposite each other, hogging the fireplace, looking like Tweedledum and Tweedledee – without Mr Tenniel’s caps and tight jackets, of course.
‘Good morning, doctors,’ she trilled, causing both of them to rattle their papers.
Reluctantly, they clambered to their feet. ‘Dr Murray,’ one of them said. He was arguably the more approachable of the two. Henry Sacheverill was an Oxford man, wondering most days how he had ended up so far down the academic pecking order as to be teaching at University College, London.
‘Dear lady,’ smiled the other one. He was Alistair Wishart, a Cambridge alumnus who had long ago learned to lose his native Arbroath accent in favour of the plummier tones of the queen’s English.
‘I hate to bother you,’ Margaret said, plonking herself squarely between them as though she were there for the duration, ‘but I’d like to pick your brains on William Blake.’
The men looked at each other. ‘Why us, pray?’ Wishart asked.
Margaret could gush with the best of them. ‘Because you, gentlemen, represent the finest brains in the English faculty. Where else would I turn?’
Their egos suitably tweaked, the lecturers made burbling noises and Sacheverill rang a little silver bell by his chair. ‘Will you take tea, Dr Murray?’ he asked. ‘Personally, I find Blake too dry for my tastes.’
‘Wasn’t he a great poet?’ Margaret asked. She had been around undergraduates for long enough to know how to play the ingénue.
Sacheverill snorted. ‘He was mad, Margaret,’ he said as a waiter hovered. ‘Teas all round, Weston, and a pile of your best gingers.’
‘Mad is in the eye of the beholder, Sacheverill,’ Wishart said. ‘I see him as a visionary, a pioneer, if you will.’
‘I won’t,’ Sacheverill scowled. ‘Why the interest in Blake, Margaret?’
‘Oh, it’s some random jottings that a student recently made. I’m trying to make sense of them.’
‘Couldn’t you ask him?’ Wishart was ever the champion of the all-too-obvious.
‘I’d love to,’ Margaret said. ‘Sadly, she is dead.’
‘Ah.’
‘I was particularly interested in “Jerusalem”.’
The tea arrived at that moment and there was a great deal of clattering of crockery.
‘Yes.’ Wishart waited until Margaret did what was expected of her and poured for them all. ‘Blake was working on that between 1804 and 1820 – the illustrations, I mean.’
‘Margaret,’ Sacheverill cut in, ‘I really wouldn’t waste your time on this, particularly as the wretched girl is apparently no more. When I said a moment ago that Blake was mad, I meant it. He had delusions from the age of eight. Angels talked to him in Westminster Abbey.’
‘His inspiration,’ Wishart came straight back. ‘His muse, if you will.’
‘He should have been in a straitjacket.’ Sacheverill would not be moved. ‘Do you know he once beat up a Westminster schoolboy for looking at him funny? That’s a Bedlam case, right there.’
‘He was provoked,’ Wishart insisted. ‘The boys were laughing at him.’
‘As well they might.’
‘The man,’ Wishart explained, ‘was profoundly influenced by the Bible; Bunyan; Milton …’
‘Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all,’ Sacheverill sneered. ‘The man was a dissident. Supported the American Revolution, the French. That ghastly woman – oh, no offence, Margaret – Mary Wollstonecraft.’
‘That was in his salad days,’ Wishart countered. ‘He mellowed later.’
‘Gentlemen.’ Margaret held up both her hands. ‘Fascinating though academic differences are, I am trying to understand what Blake meant by his lines in “Jerusalem”.’
The two English lecturers looked at each other.
‘Well, that’s easy,’ a voice called from across the room. ‘He’s wondering aloud whether Joseph of Arimathea ever came to England. And whether he brought his nephew Jesus with him.’
The two English lecturers looked at him.
‘Thank you, Lionel,’ Wishart scowled, glaring daggers at the man. ‘Helpful as always.’
‘But I have to say, Lionel,’ Sacheverill added, ‘as a professor of art history, what the hell do you know about it?’
‘Did that oaf pester you fellows?’ Piers Gibbs was still seething after the week’s events.
‘Who?’ Ben Crouch had long ago ceased to be embarrassed by talking with his mouth full. It was only toast to most people, but to gourmets like Crouch, it was the staff of life.
‘That Scotland Yard chappie.’ Gibbs was lighting his cigarette. ‘Blunt.’
‘Yes.’ Rose answered on Crouch’s behalf. ‘Caught me in the library. Didn’t seem to know the meaning of “silence”. I took him outside into the corridor before the librarian had some kind of seizure. All that shushing can’t be good for a person.’
‘What did he ask you?’ Gibbs wanted to know.
‘Pass me a ciggie, there’s a good chap.’ Rose stretched out a languid hand. ‘Wanted to know how well I knew Norman Minton.’
‘Me too,’ Gibbs said.
‘And me.’ Crouch was in mid-swallow but he carried on regardless. ‘I think his needle must have been stuck in the groove.’
‘But how well do any of us know anybody?’ Rose asked, his face blurring momentarily in a cloud of smoke. ‘What if I’d said “Old Norman was the most boring lecturer on the face of the earth and the entire faculty, led by old Petrie, queued up around the building to smash his head in”?’
‘Was that what happened to him?’ Gibbs had clearly not caught the essentials. ‘I heard he was strangled.’
‘Stabbed, I heard,’ Crouch offered.
‘Bludgeoned, that seems to be the word on Gower Street.’ Rose shrugged.
Crouch was set on his version of events. ‘From what I heard, he had been disembowelled, more or less. Mind you, I heard that from a Smithfield meat porter, so he may have got a bit confused.’
Gibbs blinked. ‘How did you come to be chatting to a Smithfield meat porter?’ he asked.
‘All night breakfast.’ As if there could have been another reason. ‘They work odd shifts. Find a meat market – or fish, or flowers, come to that – and you’ll find an all night breakfast not far away.’
Gibbs got back to the matter in hand. ‘And Blunt wanted to know where I was on … what’s that appalling cliché they use? “The night in question”.’
There were rumblings all round, mostly from Crouch.
‘And where were you?’ Rose asked.
It may have been a trick of the lamplight, but Piers Gibbs seemed to be blushing from ear to ear. ‘Er … I’m not quite sure.’
‘That must have gone down well with the boys in blue,’ Crouch chuckled. ‘They’ll have you in the frame before your boots touch the trapdoors, old son.’
‘I was with a lady, if you must know.’
‘Aye, aye,’ Crouch chuckled, winking at Rose. ‘Anybody we know?’
‘No.’ Gibbs remained the quintessence of the public schoolboy. ‘She’s not from the university.’
‘Excellent choice,’ Rose said. ‘Nothing but trouble, these women students. Did Blunt accept that?’
‘Well, I had to mention the lady in question’s name, of course. I hated doing that, but you can’t be too careful.’
Crouch was licking his plate to catch every crumb. ‘Night in question. Lady in question. It’s all bloody questions, isn’t it?’
‘And not enough answers,’ Rose said. ‘Where were you, Benjamin?’
‘Tuesday, was it?’ Crouch had to think. ‘Now you’ve asked me.’
‘Yes, I have,’ Rose agreed. ‘And so did the police. What did you tell them?’
‘Well, it was either the Cornucopia or the Jack o’ Lantern. It may even have been both.’
‘You weren’t at the Jack,’ Rose said, ‘or I’d have seen you there.’
‘There you are, then,’ Crouch said, holding his hand out for one of Gibbs’s cigarettes. ‘The Cornucopia it was.’
‘They can’t seriously think that one of us killed old Minton, surely?’ Gibbs said. Down to his last three cigarettes, he put the packet away.
‘Don’t build up your part, Gibbsy, my boy,’ Rose said. ‘They were asking everybody, and not just from our faculty either. Only the men, notice; not the women.’
‘Not a woman thing, though, is it, disembowelling?’ Crouch was lolling on the sofa.
‘Strangling,’ Gibbs corrected him.
‘Or even bludgeoning.’ Rose always had to be right.
Crouch ignored them and went on. ‘Poison, that kind of stuff. Look at Helen Richardson.’
‘You think a woman killed her?’ Rose asked.
Crouch sat up. ‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ he said.
‘Well,’ Rose said, lapsing into a perfect Flinders Petrie, ‘I shall have to ask you to justify that speculation, Mr Crouch.’
‘With pleasure, Professor,’ Crouch laughed. ‘Angela Friend told me all the juicy details that she’d picked up from her latest squeeze, that Crawford chap.’
‘He was there, with Blunt, when he was asking his questions,’ Gibbs chimed in. ‘He was in civvies, though. Must have forgotten his uniform.’
Crouch dismissed it. ‘Apparently, Helen was found stark naked, legs apart on the bed.’
Gibbs was blushing again.
‘But all that was staged. Her killer put her like that to make the police think that she had been ravaged.’
‘But she hadn’t?’ Rose checked.
‘No more than you are doing the routine of the day job when you’re in her line of work,’ Crouch said. ‘What actually killed her was poison – a woman’s weapon.’
Gibbs butted in. ‘Did Angela tell you all that? She doesn’t seem that kind of girl. You know, gossipy.’
Crouch waved his objection aside. ‘She might not have said it in so many words,’ he admitted. ‘But the inference was very clear, I thought. Of course,’ he went on, ‘Norman is totally different.’
‘Yes,’ Rose agreed. ‘A man. And not on the game.’
‘Steady on!’ Gibbs didn’t care for the way this conversation was going.
‘That doesn’t preclude women, though, Ben.’ Rose was thinking aloud. ‘All right, from what we know, Norman’s death was altogether messier.’
‘Strangling isn’t messy, particularly, is it?’ Gibbs was sticking to what he had heard.
‘Disembowelling is, though,’ Crouch muttered.
‘Bludgeoning,’ Rose corrected them both. ‘But a woman could have done it. Had a look at Anthea Crossley’s biceps lately?’ Rose raised a knowing eyebrow.
‘I bow to your greater knowledge, Andrew,’ Crouch chuckled.
Gibbs was crimson once again.
‘Then there’s that girl who always sits in the front row in lectures,’ Rose remembered. ‘Convent girl, I reckon. Built like a dray horse. She could crack a skull or two, I shouldn’t wonder.’
They all looked into the fire. It wasn’t pretty, pinning the blame on a woman, any woman, really. But they wanted parity with men, so they could have it, as far as that went. Murder took a lot of thought and effort and there wasn’t much of either on display around Piers Gibbs’s fireside that Saturday afternoon. Crouch yawned and they all followed suit.
‘Oops, sorry,’ Andrew Rose said, covering his mouth. ‘So, we’re agreed then. It is a woman.’
‘And for my money’ – Crouch leaned over and picked up the toasting fork from where he had dropped it earlier – ‘it’s Margaret Murray, spinster of this parish.’ He brandished the fork. ‘Got any more bread, Gibbsy?’
Janet Bairnsfather had had a difficult week. If she were to be absolutely honest, she had had a difficult term. Make that year. The news that she had been accepted into University College had made her mother cry and her father give one of his very Presbyterian harumphs, which meant he was proud and also counting his money at the same time. No one in their family had ever gone into academe before, certainly not a woman. Janet’s auntie Morag was known to be very clever, but also rather odd; she spent her days on a hilltop farm in the Trossachs, working every hour God sent in her mission to breed the first pure white Aberdeen Angus. No doubt when she had begun, it had seemed a worthwhile cause. Now, she was the owner of a feral herd of cows so insanely inbred that they were the scourge of the neighbourhood. No one mentioned Auntie Morag and now, Janet wondered whether she was going to go the same way. She had never even known anyone to die before she came to London, if you didn’t count Uncle Fergus dropping dead of a surfeit of haggis the Hogmanay before last. And now, in a blink of an eye, there had been two murders, of people she actually knew. She blinked the tears from her eyes and tried to concentrate on her darning.
Anthea Crossley was lounging in an armchair, hogging the fire. One leg was thrown carelessly across one arm of the chair and Janet kept her eyes averted from the display of stockinged nether limb. The girl had a book in her lap, but her head was lolled back and if she was looking at anything, it was the ceiling.
Janet was in awe of Anthea. She was in awe of all of the girls she shared a house with, but Anthea most of all. Angela was nice but not in all that much. If she wasn’t with her policeman, she was working in the library – and Janet wondered about that; how did she know what to study? Janet’s head was a whirl of facts and the books just overwhelmed her. How did everyone seem to know which book to choose to find out more? And what was more, anyway? Veronica seemed a pleasant person, but was also a bit of a swot. As for the men; Janet blushed just thinking the word in her head. She sniffed.
‘Must you?’
Janet looked up in mid-stitch and pricked her finger. ‘Ow. Pardon?’
‘Pardon?’ Anthea rolled her eyes. Who on earth asked this strange little thing to live with them? Angela, in all probability. If she had been reminded that it was after all Angela’s house, Anthea would have rolled her eyes some more.
‘I’m sorry,’ Janet said. ‘I didn’t hear what you said. That’s what I meant.’
‘I imagine you couldn’t hear me for the sniffing,’ Anthea said. At heart, she wasn’t a cruel person, but she was bored and needed some sport. ‘And what are you doing there, exactly?’ She raised her head for a better look. ‘Are you mending that stocking?’ Mending was not something that Anthea Crossley had ever had to worry about.
‘It has a hole in it.’ Janet had stockings with more mend than stocking, but there was no need to share that nugget with Anthea. Her father took frugality to levels unheard of by Anthea and her ilk. Every day in London brought something new for Janet to be horrified by. Meals left virtually untouched, simply scraped into the bin. Clothes discarded or, if the girl had a modicum of charity, given to the Salvation Army, simply because a seam had come loose or a hemline was an inch too high or too low for the fashion this week. At home with the Bairnsfathers, nothing was ever wasted. She had heard Cook say that the master would have her use every part of the pig, up to and including the squeak. It was years before Janet had realized that bubble and squeak was just potato and cabbage.
‘How quaint,’ Anthea murmured, and let her head fall back again. But only for a minute. ‘May I ask you a possibly rather personal question?’
‘By all means.’ Janet had been brought up to be polite.
‘Why are you here? I don’t mean it in the philosophical sense, as in why are any of us here? I mean it more literally. Why are you actually here?’
Janet looked up at her, disconcerted. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t asked herself the same thing many times. ‘My … my teachers at the school I went to told my parents I should … well, that I should go to university. I had a place at Edinburgh, to … to study medicine. But my father …’ – Janet dashed away her tears now, quite openly – ‘my father had a rather unpleasant run-in with Sophia Jex-Blake when he was there studying divinity …’
Anthea sat up suddenly, her book sliding to the floor, forgotten. ‘Really? Whatever was it? Did he try to …?’
‘Anthea!’ Janet was horrified. ‘I did say he was studying divinity!’
Anthea spread her arms. ‘That has nothing to do with it,’ she observed. ‘I’ve had some of my best evenings spent with the divinity lot. Very best evenings, I might almost say.’ She smiled and Janet blushed. ‘Not to mention the God Squad from King’s.’
‘Anyway,’ Janet said, wriggling back into position and picking up her mending, ‘I came here because … well, they were the only other place that offered. So that’s why. My father doesn’t know it’s called the Godless Institution. I expect I shall be called home when he finds out.’
Anthea shrugged. That had turned out to be more amusing than she had expected, though she had no idea who Sophia Jex-Blake might be.
‘And anyway,’ Janet suddenly howled, throwing her stocking aside. ‘I hate it here. No one likes me. I don’t like the food. I don’t like the course. I don’t know what’s going on and …’ – the sniff this time could have stripped paint – ‘people keep getting murdered!’
Her Scots accent gave Anthea pause for a moment, then she worked it out. ‘Murdered?’ she said, unhooking her leg and going over to sit next to Janet. ‘People don’t keep getting murdered, though, do they? Hmm?’ She put her arm round the girl’s shoulders and pulled her to her. She would kill anyone who said it, but she would make a lovely mother one day.
‘They do!’ Tears were making Janet shrill. ‘There’s that girl, that girl who used to come to the lectures. And … there’s another one, I don’t know who, but people talk so. And now Professor Minton. I really liked him.’
‘You did?’ Anthea was amazed. Norman Minton had the students’ vote for the most boring man alive year after year.
‘He was … well, he went nice and slowly,’ Janet sniffed. ‘He wrote things on the blackboard.’ Janet was comfortable with blackboards, not so much with the kind of lecturer who stood looking out of the window muttering something.
Anthea patted Janet soothingly. ‘But this has all happened to other people, Janet,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing to do with us.’
Janet pulled away and looked at Anthea. The lovely face was as smooth and unlined as a baby’s. And it had about as much empathy with the human race as a snail has. ‘But …’ She was stuck for how to begin. ‘But they were people, Anthea,’ she said. ‘Someone loved them, surely.’
Anthea shrugged. ‘Well, possibly. But if so, we don’t know them either, do we?’ She looked up at the clock, ticking sonorously on the wall. ‘Oh, my Lord! Is that the time? I must go and get ready. I’m dining with …’ She narrowed her eyes. It was only Janet, but still, one had to be discreet. Some married men were very hot on that point. ‘Dining. So I must go.’ She dropped a kiss a foot or so above Janet’s head. ‘Don’t worry so much, Janet. It will all work out in the end.’ And, on a gust of Heliotrope, she was gone.
‘Professor Inkester?’
‘Ah – leave it outside, will you?’
‘What?’
‘The wildebeest. In the case. Leave it outside. I’ll get to it later.’
‘What are you talking about, sir?’
Walter Inkester adjusted his pince-nez. On reflection, he had to admit that his visitor didn’t look much like a delivery man, still less a purveyor of carcases packed in ice. ‘Aren’t you the wildebeest man?’ he asked. ‘From Messrs Rowland Ward?’
‘No, sir; I am Inspector Blunt of Scotland Yard.’ He duly produced his leather-bound warrant card. ‘I’d like a word with you.’
‘Really?’ Inkester peered at the taller man at Blunt’s elbow. ‘I don’t suppose …’
‘No, sir,’ the taller man said. ‘I am not the wildebeest man either. Detective Constable Crawford.’ Crawford had not been on a detective’s payscale for long enough to afford a leather wallet yet. He had to make do with a piece of paper.
‘Well, gentlemen.’ Inkester ushered them both to chairs. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘The late Dr Norman Minton,’ Blunt said, watching the zoologist closely.
‘Ah, Norman.’ Inkester took off his pince-nez and polished the lenses furiously. ‘Tragic. And shocking.’
‘Mrs Inkester must be distraught.’
‘Dear Elspeth. Any man’s death diminishes her, of course, but why Norman’s in particular?’ The professor frowned.
Blunt smiled and looked knowingly at Crawford. ‘A little bird, Professor,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that, as a zoologist, you are familiar with their habits?’
‘Er … what?’
‘Some of them talk, don’t they?’ Blunt leaned back in his chair. ‘And fascinating tales some of them have to tell, indeed.’
‘Inspector, I …’
‘One of those tales is that the late Dr Minton was … shall we say … close to your wife.’
‘What rot!’ Inkester snapped. ‘That is a slanderous concept totally without foundation.’
‘Yes,’ growled Blunt, ‘and I’m a Boer’s left bollock … oh, begging your pardon, Professor … testicle. Where were you on Tuesday night?’
‘Um … Tuesday? Tuesday? Let me see. Nightjars.’
Crawford stopped in mid-notetake. ‘Nightjars?’ he repeated.
‘Yes. That’s all one word, if you were wondering. Caprimulgus europaeus, if you would prefer the Latin. I’m carrying out a survey at the moment. There’s quite a little colony in Hyde Park but increasing habitations in several London squares. Normally, they’ve migrated by August, but there are signs of a change. Must be the climate.’
Blunt blinked. ‘Are you telling me you were wandering about London looking for birds in the dark?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ Inkester chuckled. ‘Put like that, it does seem rather silly, doesn’t it? But yes, in a nutshell, that’s exactly what I was doing.’
‘Can anybody vouch for that, sir?’ Blunt asked. ‘In the avian community, perhaps?’
‘No,’ Inkester said. ‘No. I invariably carry out my research alone.’
‘Tell me, sir, do the little birdies you were hunting inhabit, say, Bloomsbury Square?’
‘Indeed they do. Very distinctive song, you see.’ And he proceeded to give the officers of the law a demonstration of the whirring chirrup of a nightjar.
‘So, you were around the corner from this very building on the night in question.’
‘Yes, I suppose I was.’
‘Did you actually enter the building, sir? On your nightly prowling, I mean?’
‘No, I … Wait a minute. Yes, yes, I did. It had turned quite chilly, so I nipped in for my hip flask.’ He rummaged in a drawer of his office desk and produced it. ‘Keeps out the cold.’
Blunt folded his arms with the air of a man who was about to close a case. ‘What time was this, Professor?’ he asked. ‘Approximately.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. One … two o’clock? I really can’t remember. You’d have to ask old Jenkins.’
‘Nightwatchman?’ Crawford checked.
‘That’s right. Man was asleep when I arrived, of course, but he muttered something to me as I left.’
‘Constable,’ Blunt turned to Crawford. ‘You know this building tolerably well.’
‘Tolerably, sir.’
‘How far would you say it is from the department of Zoology to the department of Archaeology?’
‘As the nightjar flies, sir, two minutes.’
Blunt smiled and stood up. ‘I’d like you to come with us, please, Professor.’
‘What? Where to? I’m expecting a wildebeest …’
‘Scotland Yard, sir. We can continue our conversation there.’
‘But I’ve got a lecture in half an hour.’
‘You did have,’ Blunt said, and waited while the professor got his coat.
Margaret Murray hung her coat up on the antlers screwed at a rather rakish angle to the wall and turned to the girl intent on a book at the far side of the table.
‘Did I just see your young man escorting Walter Stinkster out of the building?’
Angela nodded. She had stopped telling people that Adam Crawford was not her young man. The truth was self-evident whenever they were within sight of each other. ‘Yes,’ she said, closing her book but keeping her finger in the page. ‘Apparently, Blunt has it in mind that he killed Norman.’
‘The Stinkster? Why?’
‘It is a well-attested fact, according to Blunt, that Norman and Mrs Inkester were more than just good friends.’
‘Well, yes, everyone knows that. It’s been going on for years.’
Angela’s eyes nearly fell out of her head. ‘Norman?’ she said. ‘Why Norman?’
‘You’ve seen Mrs Inkester, I assume? At functions.’
Angela shook her head.
Margaret held her hand some way above her own head, puffed out her cheeks and mimed a bust like a rolltop desk. ‘She’s quite an intimidating lady,’ she said, letting out her held breath with relief. ‘Rumour has it that Walter was looking for a silverback gorilla for his stuffed animal collection and settled for Elspeth when one wasn’t available.’
Angela cast her mind back and nodded. ‘I do know her. I see what you mean, but I think what I meant was, why Norman? Rather than why did Norman choose Mrs Inkester.’
‘Any old professor in a storm, I suppose,’ Margaret said, sitting down and arranging her notes for the forthcoming tutorial. ‘If you had a choice between being bored to death, no pun intended, by Norman or sharing a bed with someone who spends much of his day up to his elbows in exotic animal innards, who would it be?’
Angela shrugged. ‘Not easy,’ she said. ‘Apparently, he’s waiting for a wildebeest.’
Margaret gestured over her shoulder. ‘No, it’s here. He met it on the stairs. He got quite aerated about it, apparently, but Blunt wouldn’t take “Wait, that’s my wildebeest” for an answer.’
‘I dare say someone in the department will …’ Angela didn’t know what one did with chilled wildebeest. ‘Will …’
‘Yes, dear. I dare say they will. Meanwhile, how would you and the detective constable like to come to tea today?’
‘Not today, I’m afraid,’ Angela said. ‘Not that there’s an agenda in your invitation, I’m sure. Tomorrow, though. I’ll make sure that Adam … Constable Crawford … is off duty. Would supper be all right if we can’t make it at teatime?’
‘Even better,’ Margaret said. ‘Mrs Plinlimmon likes company in the evening.’
Walter Inkester had never really noticed the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police before. It stood alongside the Embankment, watching the river with one eye and the Houses of Parliament with the other. Athelgar Blunt had let the zoologist sit all day, filling in the paperwork which was the lot of a detective at the dawn of a new century. He barely had time to nip down to the Clarence to wet his whistle before he nipped back to pursue his enquiries.
It irked him that Crawford was his number two on this one. It irked him even more that he was only there because that interfering busybody Reid had thrown his weight around. It didn’t help that, all around him, the cult of St Edmund was still very much in evidence. They’d be putting up a blue plaque next.
‘Right.’ Blunt had lit his pipe. Now he blew smoke into the suspect’s face. ‘Let’s talk about Mrs Inkester, shall we? How long had she and Norman been at it like weasels?’
‘What?’ Inkester had been kept waiting for hours. He was not in the best of moods.
‘Oh, I thought you would appreciate the analogy,’ Blunt smirked, ‘you being of the zoological persuasion and all.’
‘I find you offensive, Inspector,’ Inkester snapped. ‘That you have the barefaced audacity to infer …’
‘I’m not inferring, sunshine,’ Blunt said. ‘I’m saying it straight out. It’s common knowledge at the college that the late Dr Minton, otherwise boring old fart that he was, was slipping your wife one.’
Inkester was on his feet, fuming.
‘Sit down, Professor,’ Crawford said. He didn’t like Blunt and he didn’t like his methods, but he did take the queen’s shilling and he had a job to do.
Inkester sulked back into the chair.
‘You see,’ Blunt said. ‘My thinking goes something like this. The late lamented and your good lady are enjoying a bit of how’s your father. You found out and … what? Confronted her? We have yet to find out. But you certainly confronted him – on the night in question, while pretending to be birdwatching or whatever – and things got ugly.’
‘No, I …’
‘You argued. Maybe he swung a punch, or tried to. You saw the statuette on his desk through the red mist and wallop! One less philandering bastard in the world. Happens all the time, even in the best academic circles. Now, are you going to come clean, or what?’