Murder Is Academic (4 page)

‘How do you think—'

‘It must have been—'

Malcolm and I had spoken at once.

‘Sorry,' I said. ‘Go on.'

‘I don't know how this could have happened, Cassandra. Margaret was so careful, meticulous even, about anything to do with work. All I can think is that the exam papers got in amongst the newspapers by accident. She put them in the bin without realizing that she'd picked up the scripts along with the newspapers.'

The click of the kettle switching itself off was loud in the silence.

‘I suppose that could have happened,' I said doubtfully.

Malcolm busied himself with tea bags and mugs.

Out of the corner of my eye I was aware of Stephen tapping his fingers very gently on the table.

‘All the same, there is something a bit odd here, isn't there?' he said. ‘How was it, I wonder, that the police didn't find them when they searched the garden?'

His voice was perfectly pleasant and sympathetic, but there was something in it that I hadn't heard before.

Malcolm put down three mugs of tea on the table, and sat opposite me.

‘They were down between the black plastic bag and the side of the bin,' he explained. ‘It was a fluke that I found them myself. When I pushed the rubbish down to make room for more, I saw the edge of one of the papers sticking up.'

‘Also,' I reminded Stephen, ‘we all assumed that the papers had blown away. Probably no one thought to look in the dustbin.'

There was a short silence.

Then Stephen said, ‘You know, Cass, it's time I took you home to bed.'

I looked at my undrunk mug of tea.

‘Don't worry about that,' Malcolm said.

‘I am terribly tired,' I admitted.

We all stood up. Malcolm emptied our mugs into the kitchen sink and left them there. He wouldn't have done that in Margaret's day, I thought. Looking around the kitchen I saw other signs of her absence: crumbs on the table, a dirty tea towel crumpled up on one of the work surfaces, an unwashed frying-pan on the hob.

Malcolm packed the papers in a plastic carrier bag and handed the bag to me. He ushered us out of the kitchen and we walked ahead of him down the hall. I glanced back and saw that he was pressing his lips together in an effort to keep control. The skin round his mouth was white and his face was a mask of misery.

I turned and put my hand on his arm. ‘Malcolm, are you going to be all right?'

He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose vigorously. ‘I'll be OK. My sister's here with me, actually. She went to bed before you got here.'

‘Well, if there's anything I can do…'

I gave him a hug. I only came up to his chin and the narrow bony back felt strange beneath my hands after Stephen's solid, stocky body. He gave me a quick awkward squeeze.

‘I'll give you a ring in a day or two,' I said.

As Stephen started up the engine of the car, I looked back at the house. Malcolm was framed in the light from the doorway. He raised his hand in farewell.

We drove down Cranmer Road in silence. It was as if we didn't want to speak within sight of the house. We turned left into Grange Road. The long, narrow street was dark and almost deserted. There was just one couple, with their arms around each other, loitering outside the rugby ground. The big houses that were set back along the road were muffled by shrubbery and mature trees, and the streetlights were dimmed by the dense canopy of leaves.

Stephen said, ‘So what do you make of that?'

‘I don't know what to think.'

‘Can you imagine Margaret dumping those exam papers in the bin even by accident? Can you imagine her taking so little care of something so important? And why was she putting newspapers in the bin? I noticed a box of them in the corner of the kitchen, obviously waiting to be recycled.'

I looked down at my lap. I had both hands on the bag of exam papers, almost as if I thought they might fly off into the night if I didn't keep tight hold of them.

I shook my head. ‘No, I can't. But what else could have happened?'

Stephen shrugged. ‘She did it deliberately? A breakdown of some kind?'

‘Breakdown? Margaret?'

‘Perhaps she'd been drinking. That might explain how she ended up in the pool.'

With the suddenness and vividness of a slide throwing an image onto a screen, I saw the cast-iron table in Margaret's garden, and remembered securing the exam papers down with a wine bottle. I tried to remember what it had felt like in my hand. I didn't think it had been empty, but I wasn't sure. I'd never seen Margaret even a little bit drunk before, but perhaps that would explain the accident …

Stephen said, ‘What that woman said to you outside the church – what if Malcolm had been having an affair and Margaret had found out?'

‘But … Malcolm … he seems so upset…'

‘You're not thinking, Cass. Of course he's upset. If it's true, he'll be eaten up with guilt. And, besides, even if there was someone else, it wouldn't necessarily mean he didn't love Margaret, would it?'

He slowed down to turn into Madingley Road.

‘It's all balls to think that you can't love two people at once,' he added.

He was right, of course. A wave of fatigue swept over me. It was all too much. I wanted to put my head on the dashboard and go to sleep.

‘Will the university want to conduct an inquiry into what happened to the papers?' he asked.

‘Mmm, probably not, now that they've all been recovered.'

‘They might at least want to tighten up their procedures for dealing with the papers in future.'

My eyes were closing, my body beginning to let go … I woke up as the car bumped over a sleeping policeman in the college drive. I could only have been asleep for a minute or two, but I got the impression that I had missed something important.

‘— pretty intensive questioning, I imagine,' Stephen was saying. ‘At the very least, they'll be entertaining it as a possibility. I think you should be prepared for that, Cass.'

My stomach flopped over. I sat up as if I'd been prodded. The plastic bag began to slither off my knees. I slapped a hand on it..

‘Prepared for what?'

Stephen pulled up outside the porter's lodge. He turned to look at me, his face pale in the darkness of the car. He put his hand on mine.

‘For the possibility that it wasn't an accident, that Margaret might have committed suicide.'

Chapter Three

Malcolm's feet in their highly polished brogues mounted the steep staircase ahead of me. It was several days since the evening when Stephen and I had collected the exam papers. I had dreaded going back to the house, but I hadn't been able to put it off any longer. The college paperwork that Margaret had been working on at home – provisional timetables and student reports – was urgently needed before term ended.

Malcolm paused on the top step outside a white-painted plank door.

‘Actually, this is the first time I've been up here since … well, it was so much Margaret's domain…'

‘Would you rather I…?'

‘No, no, got to face it sometime.'

He lifted the wooden latch and pushed open the door.

It was a long, low room tucked under the eaves of the house. The rambling red-brick house had probably been built for some turn-of-the-century don. This must have been the servants' quarters. More recently it had been Margaret's study. The window at the front looked out onto Cranmer Road and a side window looked onto the playing fields of Corpus Christi College. The room was sparsely furnished and immaculately tidy. There was a
chaise-longue,
a swivel chair and a desk with a table at right angles to it. On the table were piles of papers, neatly squared off and laid in orderly rows. The desk held only a computer, a transparent case of floppy disks, a black and red lacquer tray containing pens and pencils, and a framed photograph.

The room was full of the light and sleepy heat of a summer's afternoon. The distant sounds of young men playing a boisterous game – sporadic clapping and cat-calls – only accentuated the stillness inside the house.

Malcolm walked over to the desk and picked up the photograph.

‘I didn't know she had this up here,' he said.

I followed him and stood by his elbow. The photograph showed Malcolm and Margaret against a backdrop of cliffs and sea. He had his arm around her shoulder. The wind was pulling at their hair and clothes. They were laughing and squinting into the camera.

‘Last year in Cornwall,' he said.

He lowered himself heavily in the chair, his eyes still on the photograph. Then he turned his face away, but not before I had seen that his eyes were full of tears. To give him time to recover, I leaned over the table and began to leaf through the papers.

A few moments later I heard him sigh, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him push his chair back from the table.

He said, ‘Cassandra … about the exam papers…'

I turned and leaned against the table.

‘It's all right,' I said. ‘They've been marked now. It's all been a bit of a rush – well, that's an understatement – but we're not much behind. The results will be out by the end of the week.'

He nodded. ‘Lawrence told me on the phone. That is just such a relief, but that's not what I meant. I wanted to say: the other night…'

He hesitated.

Oh, God, I thought, he's going to tell me something I'd rather not know.

‘I wasn't myself,' he said finally, ‘or I'd never have thought that Margaret could have put those papers in the bin. She'd never, ever have been so careless. I think I know what must have happened. After the accident, when the wind blew everything off the table, some of the exam papers must have got mixed up with the newspapers when they were blown across the garden. They could have ended up against the dustbin. That could have happened, couldn't it?'

I thought about that. Newspapers on table, exam papers on table. I saw them tumbling together across the lawn, becoming entangled. Well, why not?

‘That could have happened,' I said slowly. ‘But then…?'

‘How did they get inside the bin? I wondered about that for ages. Then I thought, there must have been a lot of people around the place – after you called the police.'

I nodded. The garden and house had been swarming with people.

‘Thinking to be helpful, one of them might have dumped the newspapers in the dustbin. Not knowing that the exam papers were inside, obviously.'

I considered this. I wanted to believe it. It was improbable, yes, but was it as improbable as the idea that Margaret had done it? I thought of the woman I had known for the last five years: meticulous, orderly, self-disciplined.

Malcolm's eyes met mine. He had pale blue eyes, the sort that often go with sandy hair. As he looked steadily at me, I felt myself blushing as if he could somehow have overheard the conversation Stephen and I had had in the car.

He looked back at the photograph.

‘I've known Margaret since we were both eighteen,' he said. ‘I met her on my first day at university. She was my first girlfriend. My only girlfriend. There's never been anyone else.'

There was a pause. He went on gazing at the photograph.

It occurred to me that already I was forgetting exactly what Margaret looked like. In the photograph she had a hand up to her hair. It was very short and bleached. She had worn it like that for years. Sometimes it had given people the wrong idea, made them think she was laid-back and easy-going. They didn't make that mistake for long. It seemed to me that just as my mental image of her was beginning to blur, so I had been losing touch with my sense of her as a person. It seemed so obvious now. The idea that Malcolm could have been unfaithful, that Margaret might have killed herself: this was just a paranoid fantasy of the early hours. I'd been suffering from shock and exhaustion, and as for Stephen: it just showed what a cynical breed lawyers are, and, of course, he didn't know Margaret and Malcolm as I did.

‘You're right,' I said. ‘That must have been what happened.'

Malcolm nodded, without taking his eyes off the photograph.

After a few moments he squared his shoulders as if bracing himself to move on.

‘I'll leave you to it, shall I, Cassandra?' He glanced at his watch. ‘I did say I'd drop in at the office sometime this afternoon. Just for half an hour. Would you mind?'

‘Of course not. You go ahead.'

‘Thanks.'

He touched me briefly on the arm and turned to go. His footsteps were loud on the bare floorboards of the stairs. I heard the distant thud of the door closing and went over to the window to watch him get in his car and drive off.

Now that Malcolm had gone, the room seemed strangely empty. There was an air of expectancy about it as if Margaret had just stepped out and would be back any moment. I realized that I was standing with my head cocked, that I was actually listening for footsteps on the stairs. I shook my head impatiently. But, all the same, I swung the swivel chair round so that my back wasn't to the door.

I looked through the papers, sorting them into college business and Margaret's personal research. It didn't take long. Everything was in apple-pie order. I stowed the relevant papers in my briefcase and stood up. I arched my back, stretched, and gave a yawn that almost dislocated my jaw. I was so tired. What to do until Malcolm got back? I thought of going down to the kitchen and making myself a cup of tea, but I didn't like the idea of roaming around the house alone.

The
chaise-longue
against the wall caught my eye. I kicked off my shoes and sat down. I plumped up one of the cushions, laid down and put my head on it. As I shifted about, trying to get comfortable, I felt something sharp dig into the back of my neck. I sat up and felt the cushion. There was something inside, something familiar with a hard narrow ridge. I unzipped the cushion cover, pushed my hand inside and pulled out a handful of computer disks.