DI Huss looked at the crime-scene photos from the Jessica McIntyre murder with increasing puzzlement and irritation. She’d been infuriated by Hanlon’s sceptical attitude at first, but was growing more and more uncomfortable with some of the points she’d raised, both directly and indirectly.
She had tried ignoring Hanlon’s objections, but she was too honest and too good a policewoman to succeed. She would have to deal with them somehow; she couldn’t sweep them under the carpet.
Could Fuller’s room have been accessed after his arrest? The brutal answer was yes, it could. The discovery of McIntyre’s underwear after the room had been searched once was worrying. It could have been planted. It was certainly what any defence lawyer would argue. So the admissibility of the underwear as evidence was highly problematic.
Then there was this other problem. There were two doors to the room where Jessica’s body had been found: the heavy outside one, the ‘oak’ as they called it, and the internal one. She looked at Laura’s statement again.
The outside door had been locked, as had the inside one. But the inside one had a Yale lock, you could just pull it closed. The oak door had an old-fashioned mortice key. And there was the key, clearly photographed by forensics, lying on the desk in front of the window. How had the killer locked the door, from the outside, and made the key appear back inside the room?
She hunted for Laura’s mobile number and called her. Per- haps the girl could help.
Half an hour later she was in the Junior Common Room with the absurdly young-looking philosophy student.
‘It was so strange,’ the girl said to Melinda Huss. ‘I thought it was a joke at first, well, momentarily anyway.’ She would make a great witness, thought DI Huss. Laura’s replies to questions were measured and thought out; she considered her words before she spoke. She was utterly credible. ‘Then it was more like something from a horror film, those bruises around her neck.’ She shook her head in disbelief, her eyes large and serious behind the severe frames of her glasses. ‘I haven’t been back in the room since. Well, obviously. I don’t think I really want to. Do we have to go back right now?’
Huss shook her head. ‘No, Laura, no, we don’t, but if you would I’d be very grateful. A couple of things don’t really add up.’ Laura stood up. She really was remarkably small, thought DI Huss, who rose too, feeling large and lumbering by contrast.
She put a determined face on.
‘Oh well, DI Huss, maybe no time like the present.’
The two women walked together round the cloisters that surrounded the quad and then stopped outside the staircase. The college was projecting its usual aura of deep calm. It was hard to imagine a more unlikely setting for a murder. To Huss, her surroundings radiated an almost tangible sense of privilege. Huss, despite her reasonably privileged background on a large, commercially successful farm twenty miles from Oxford, felt the familiar stab of resentment that the non-student population of Oxford usually feel towards the student body. It was the Hooray Henry mentality. The percentage of students who belonged to the Bullingdon Club was statistically negligible, but they cast a very long shadow indeed. Privilege rather than ability was suggested by the Oxford brand.
The university students all seemed so smug, although she exempted Laura from this.
They stopped outside the staircase and Laura’s fingers pushed at the mortar between the honey-coloured bricks. She worked a small fragment of cement loose and looked at it critically.
‘It needs repointing,’ she said to Huss. ‘Sorry, Dad’s a builder.
I was brought up to notice these things.’
Huss felt a stab of contrition. She had written Laura off as the by-product of privilege. It hadn’t occurred to her that her background might be one of good old-fashioned proletarian graft.
They walked up the stairs and stood in front of the heavy outside door. ‘This was closed and locked when I arrived,’ said Laura. ‘Is it OK to go in?’
‘Yes, we’re finished here,’ said Huss. Laura unlocked it with her key. ‘How many keys are there to this door?’ Huss asked. ‘Two,’ said Laura. ‘I left one for Jessica McIntyre at reception;
I had the other one. I guess they keep a master copy there too.’ They entered the room via the secondary, internal door. ‘What are the things that are troubling you?’ she asked
Huss. She shivered slightly. She didn’t know if she’d ever want to return here again.
DI Huss indicated the window desk. ‘That mortice key, or rather its twin, was found lying there on that desk. So it’s an interesting question as to how the killer left the room, other than by climbing out of the window.’
Laura raised a conspiratorial dark eyebrow. ‘It’s easy if you know how,’ she said. Huss looked puzzled. ‘Let me show you,’ Laura said.
The study walls were panelled with wood and Laura walked over to where the mirror hung. ‘Can you give me a hand to move this?’ she asked Huss.
The two women propped the mirror up against the other wall. The panel behind it had a small circular knob. Laura tugged at this and the panel, which was obviously some kind of cupboard door, opened on its hinges. The edges of the door were so well tailored to the panelling they were practically invisible.
We should have found this, thought Huss angrily. Which dumb ass was in charge here? For some reason she thought of Hanlon. It’s not the sort of thing Hanlon would have missed.
Inside the cupboard a rope suspended from a pulley hung down, disappearing into the depths below. ‘It’s a dumb waiter,’ said Laura. ‘This room used to be for one of the dons here; they had to live in college by university law. Anyway, this connects down to the kitchens. I think it was so that the don could get food and drink any time he wanted, otherwise he’d have been stuck with High Table in the Senior Common Room.’
Huss noticed a faint flush of embarrassment to her cheeks.
‘How do you know where it goes?’ asked Huss.
‘Well, you can fit in it, you see,’ said Laura, glowing red with shame. ‘And get lowered down and maybe, well, liberate some food and get hauled back up again.’
‘Not booze then?’ asked Huss. Laura shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, with a tinge of sadness. ‘They store that locked up in a kind of cage to keep the chefs away from it. You won’t tell the college, will you, I only did it a couple of times.’ She looked anguished.
Huss shook her head. ‘No, I’m not going to tell the college. But I will need you to make a statement and I do want you to show me where the thing comes out at the bottom in the kitchens.’
As they walked down the stairs Huss got on her phone to set the wheels turning to bring back a forensic team to examine the dumb waiter and help for interviewing all the kitchen personnel.
Fuller had been lecturing from seven o’clock that evening, but if he had threaded his way through the kitchen, he’d have blatantly stood out from the chefs in their whites or the waiting staff, who for a start, were almost all half his age. He would have stood out like a sore thumb. How on earth could he have got away without being noticed? What else have we missed? thought Huss angrily.