Death of the Rat

by William McMurray

CHAPTER TEN

  It was nearly mid-night when Janet finished her experiment and walked down to the Department office to leave a letter for the mail pick-up. The campus was fairly dark and empty except for a couple of lights directly opposite in Morton Hall. Possibly there was someone with the same idea as she had -- to take a look through the Selection Committee files while the place was moderately quiet. As she looked one of the lights went out. Janet frowned in recollection that this was the window of the Principal’s suite. The adjacent light stayed on for a few minutes, then it too was extinguished.

  Janet dashed for the stairs and out the door of the Biology Building. Taking a chance she sprinted around the corner of Morton Hall, bringing herself into an alcove in the rear courtyard that shielded her from the back portico just as the door swung open. Under the dim light of the doorway she could make out the shadowy outline and distinctive features of Archibald McManus. She held her breath and pulled back as quietly as she could, while he walked past and out of the courtyard.

  Janet paused for a full minute trying to collect her thoughts and slow her racing heart-beat. If he had entered the Principal's suite on the pretext of examining Selection Committee files, Archie also had some business that had prompted him to get access to the inner office. Or had there been somebody else in the building that he had not known about? She waited for several minutes in the shadows, but no-one else emerged. Silently she let herself into the building and slowly made her way up the staircase, imagining hidden shapes along the passages as she passed the landings. However, the offices seemed truly deserted by the time she reached them. There was evidence of recent occupancy in the form of coffee-cups on a side-table, and an ashtray with a few butts gave evidence of one of the smoking members. She slid the ashtray down the coffee-table and opened the file-cabinet.

  For the next hour Janet pored over the candidates’ records, particularly the file on Dean Tyler. More than once since that morning she had wondered at her own temerity, and a few doubts had lingered over the wisdom of her move at the meeting in nominating the man based simply upon her intuition and instant impressions. Probably she had only reinforced the committee's preconceptions about feminine impetuosity. But the more she delved into the background and qualities of Dean Tyler, the more reassured she was in the correctness of her choice. The entry of a strong outside candidate would allay fears about local favouritism and possibly bring some fresh air into the administration at Essex University. She wearily closed the files and locked up the office with a profound feeling of satisfaction in the day's work. It was tomorrow's work that would prove tricky in the extreme!

  The morning turned out as it had been promised -- dry, breezy, and cool. Janet was off and away in her running attire with the faint pink of sunrise still on the horizon. She left her bike near the bridge and concealed herself in a rough clump of brush that was thickly overgrown with bittersweet nightshade. The heavy vines entangled the trunks of the trees above and provided a well-screened blind overlooking the trail a few metres below. She removed her back-pack, put on gloves, toque and a light windbreaker. Then drawing a long pull from her thermos of hot chocolate, she settled down to wait.

  Of course there was no guarantee that Archie and his companion would pass by on the river-trail. Odds were that they might be indoors instead, or jogging around the stadium track, that is if they really intended to run this morning at all. Janet began to entertain self-doubts about her sanity in taking Archie seriously and subjecting her self to this chilling vigil. She next began to speculate on who Archie's putative companion might turn out to be. On the other occasions that she had encountered him while jogging he had been on his own, The only people she had noticed him with over the past week had been Judy Nicholas and Terry O'Meara, and then only in public settings.

  She had to admit to herself that apart from Kay's sleuthing into his background and degrees, she knew very little really about Archie and his circle of friends.

  Perhaps he was indulging himself in a little sophomoric intrigue with the attractive daughter of the late Acting-Principal. Didn't his comforting of the bereaved girl go somewhat beyond what was required of a casual friend from the faculty? Janet was ruefully aware that her misgivings could be clouded by emotions akin to the two-toned fruit of the bittersweet vine around her.

  Then there was his relationship with the dour Terence. What the two men could have in common she was at a loss to explain. Archie to all outward appearances, constantly buoyant and cheerful; Terence, saturnine, sharp-tongued and cynical. It seemed outlandish to imagine them as being of an accord, and yet --. It was just at that moment that she heard approaching voices along the trail. Janet crouched down as low as she could and still maintain a watch over the path.

  This section of the trail was level and broad, and with the moisture from yesterday's rain in the earth should be ideal for retention of a clear heel-strike imprint. Janet had inspected the area before-hand and noted several flat regions devoid of footmarks. She had prepared these regions by carefully removing most of the fallen leaves. Now to her satisfaction she could see her quarry approaching, the two runners side by side on the trail, too engrossed in their conversation to be aware of her presence. The joggers were now almost directly opposite, one in a brilliant blue track-suit, the other in a non-descript beige outfit. She could only pick up snatches of their somewhat breathless discussion, which was bordering upon a dispute, when they swept past and around a bend out of sight.

  Quickly Janet sprang from her place of concealment. The prints were clear and unequivocal. There on one side of the pair of tracks was a set of heel-prints identically matching those from the scene of the crime at the top of the cliff. The clay in this area was firm and glutinous. Janet drew a sheath knife from her belt and hacked out two of the prints with surrounding clay. She was just setting these into the grass beside the trail and was about to cut out some of the others for comparison when she heard a loud cry of anguish ahead on the trail. Without pausing to reflect she tore off in the direction of the shout.

  It was only a short distance around the bend that she came upon the sight of the two joggers, the beige-attired one standing over the other clad in blue, apparently disabled where he had fallen. Janet let out an angry yell, and impelled by her anger rather than by any plan of action, charged into the fray. Startled by this sudden and unexpected intrusion the attacker fled, leaving his victim groaning on the ground.

  "Tripped me!" The words faintly uttered were an echo of what she had heard such a short time ago, and almost in the same spot. After assuring herself that the victim was suffering only minor injuries Janet set off in pursuit of the attacker. Although favoured by a head start the figure was still in sight running across the field as Janet broke out of the woods at the end of the trail. By now in the open, condition was beginning to tell on her quarry, and Janet put on a burst of speed to close the gap between them. She had no clear idea still of what she might do if she caught up with the attacker. Once or twice the figure looked back in apparent panic or fright. Janet could not imagine why she was evoking such terror until she chanced to look down and realized that she was still clutching the knife in her right hand. Without checking her stride she sheathed the knife, but kept her hand upon the hilt.

  They reached the far edge of the field with only a dozen or so strides separating them. Without pause the figure ahead shot through the bushes fringing the field and onto the roadway running alongside. There was a loud squeal of brakes as Janet reached the thicket. Emerging from the other side she found to her horror a huge transport truck stopped in the road with the driver bending over the broken form of the runner on the pavement.

  "These are really remarkably good impressions," said Tom Audette later that evening. "They match perfectly with the casting we took in the area of the bushes. He held up the two clay slabs which were now commencing to dry out, and lined them up to the cast.

  “Will someone kindly explain to me the significance of these blessed footprints, and their
connection with the dreadful events this morning,” Kay McKay pleaded. She had just cleared dinner dishes where the four had enjoyed a meal prepared by Janet, and returned to find a series of muddy clods, photos, and diagrams laid out on newspapers on her dining-room table.

  "The simplest principle of evidence, namely that every criminal unwittingly takes away from and leaves behind some sign of his presence at the locale," Professor Antwhistle responded. "In this case the footprint, owing to specific areas of wear, was as unique a piece of evidence as a fingerprint,"

  "Even better in this case, because we also have the shoes that were used to make the distinctive prints," Janet added, holding them aloft. "I relieved the criminal of them on the pretext of making him comfortable in the ambulance. Incidentally, I would not be surprised if one of those ambulance attendants should blow the whistle on this affair and raise the necessity for an inquest. After all, three trips to rescue joggers in varying states of injury from the same area, and with the same woman as a witness, and one of the previous witnesses as one of the casualties, may seem beyond the realm of coincidental happenings."

  "And where was the original footprint obtained from?" asked Kay, persisting with her line of questioning.

  "At the top of the cliff amid a clump of bushes where the wearer of the shoes was evidently crouched in concealment. It was Janet's deduction or intuition (if one can use the term without sexist connotation)," continued the Professor, "She led us back to the scene, and we took advantage of Tom's technology to obtain a permanent record."

  "And from this single print, you now feel you have reconstructed the 'crime' if such it may be?"

  "I think it was borne out by today's events, gruesome though they were."

  "Whatever led you to the supposition that the Principal 's death was other than accidental anyway?" she asked Janet.

  "As Professor Antwhistle assumes I make no bones about using female intuition, either in the lab or at home. There were a number of unsettling aspects of that 'accident', which forced me to question what I had observed, or thought I had observed. The first was Archie's reaction of agitation when we realized that Mr. Nicholas was dead. If you pardon another sexist statement, I knew that some men may be unnaturally squeamish at the sight of blood, so I should not have been surprised when Dr. McManus came upon the corpse. There was in his reaction, however, something akin to horror-- the horror of a realization -"

  "A reaction of guilt perhaps?'

  "That was a possibility that crossed my mind later when I thought it over. The second disturbing thing was the attitude of the body. Mr. Nicholas would not likely have moved further-down the slope of his own volition. He knew he was badly hurt, and he knew that help was coming."

  "Perhaps his mind was confused."

  "Possibly. Or perhaps he was trying to escape from someone at the top whom he perceived for whatever reason as menacing."

  "Which led you to think of someone else at the scene who may have had a hand in the 'accident', if that is what it was?"

  "If that is what it was. Exactly. Once I started to think of it as a non-accidental crime the third point had a significance I had passed over at first. When Mr. Nicholas was lying in extremis he managed to gasp a few words, not a sentence, but a few words he apparently thought important enough to convey despite his suffering, and to repeat them. At first I had the order wrong because I caught the second part before the beginning part -- ‘tripped me', then, ‘in the bushes’. It puzzled me that he had said ‘tripped me’ instead of, ‘I tripped in the bushes', but later I recalled that he had repeated 'tripped me' at the end. Since it was illogical anyway to conclude that he had tripped on something by running off the path and through the bushes, the inference was that he was trying to tell me that someone ‘in the bushes tripped me'. So I returned to the locus quo to see whether that could have been a possibility."

  "And you found the tell-tale footprint.”

  "More than that. You see, it was a lack of prints or skid marks at the top of the bank that seemed peculiar. If a person collapses and falls at the edge of a clay cliff you expect to see some signs up there where he went out of control as it were. And there weren't any. That brought me to wonder whether someone had suddenly thrust an obstacle in his path at the critical point in the bend to cause him to vault head-first over the cliff. That would account for the lack of any skid marks. It would have had to be somebody lurking in concealment in the bushes near enough to the trail to be sure he could time the protrusion of a stick or some other obstacle into the path at the right place and instant to give no opportunity for the victim either to side-step or to observe and identify the agent of the obtruded hurdle. When I returned there later that day it was obvious that the bushes right next to the trail would have been too sparse for someone to remain hidden if he were close enough to poke a stick across the path. It didn't take long to find the modus operandi ."

  "And we have some excellent photos to prove it," nodded Tom.

  "Yes, they did turn out rather well," said the Professor immodestly. "My singular contribution to the affair," he told Kay.

  "Not the only one, "Janet contradicted him. "Had you not been a patron of young artists," she noted smiling at Tom, "we would have had no permanent record of the culprit who had been lurking deep in the foliage."

  "If he had been so far back from the path then how did he contrive to trip up Mr. Nicholas?" asked Kay impatiently .

  "A rope," Janet answered simply, "yet not an ordinary one, or rather one too ordinary to be noticed either by the intended victim or by any of us who trampled on it after the event."

  "So there was an element of camouflage or disguise of this particular rope," mused Kay with a puzzled frown.

  "That was the beauty of it. None was required!" declared the Professor. "Everyone saw it, yet it was so natural that nobody noticed until Janet looked more closely and saw the knot."

  "The knot," repeated Kay.

  "Yes," said Janet. "You know the trail along the river at that point is overhung with vines of the wild grape. Which reminds me," she digressed, "I must check with Bob Hayes about some fermentation experiments. From the look of the juicy stains below there must be a bumper vintage up in the canopy."

  "The knot," persisted Kay, trying to keep Janet to the point.

  "The vines become tangled and criss-cross the path, sometimes drooping or even falling to the ground. That's why no-one noticed the one strategic vine lying across the trail at the critical bend. When I returned later I found the end of it stretching far into the patch of bushes, and just nearby the telltale imprint of a cleated running shoe in the soft clay. This was a fairly hefty vine, over a centimetre in diameter, and on the other side of the path, about knee-high, it was wound around a small tree-trunk. However, unlike several other vines along the way it hadn't simply grown that way - the ends were broken so it wasn’t rooted at either end -- a sure indication it had been placed there deliberately. And where it passed around the tree it was actually knotted!" She held up the photograph to show Kay.

  "Looks like a bowline to me," nodded Kay, who knew something of boats and knots.

  "Taken together with the footprint it signified clear intent," said the Professor. "Somebody wanted Jackson Nicholas out of the way, in a cunningly discreet manner which should have avoided detection."

  "Out of the way, yes. I'm not so sure he really intended to kill the man," Janet responded.

  "What was the point then?" inquired Tom. "I thought at the time it was a low percentage way to eliminate someone. In fact I suspected you were both imagining some of the sinister aspects of all those footprints. I really doubted you would ever pin it on somebody."

  "Probably it would have been very hard to do that, especially if that somebody suspected that we had a lead on his motives and actions. Which is why I became very wary about letting anyone else know of my suspicions."

  "Such as Archie."

  "Especially Archie. I had come to feel some pretty strong reasons to link him
to the crime. And now I'm glad I respected those feelings."

  "Poor Archie!" sighed Kay.

  "Poor Archie be damned," snorted the Professor. "His behaviour was quite egregious, bordering on insanity if not criminality! "

  "Ah well, I suppose I shall always have a soft spot in my heart for Archie," she responded.

  "As so many other members of your sex seem to have done. Next you'll be saying that he was motivated by the best intentions!"

  "But speaking of intentions," put in Tom, "if the purpose was not to actually kill Jackson Nicholas, as you seem to think Janet, what was the real motive and the desired end?"

  "To discredit him. To neutralize him as a serious candidate for the job as Principal. To someone who opposed the reappointment of Nicholas to succeed himself in the office, the Acting-Principal must have appeared to be a formidable contender. Admittedly he had angered a number of factions and individuals on and off campus, from the vivisectionists to animal rights people.”

  "In fact," put in the Professor, "some of them attempted to terrify him by hanging a rat in effigy.” and he related his experience upon arrival at the entrance door to Morton Hall.

  "And you know," Janet said, "that could be a complete red herring designed to draw suspicion to persons connected with the animal rights dispute. It's illogical when you consider it -- nobody among the humane society advocates would sacrifice an experimental rat for such a purpose -- and anyone with a bona fide concern to promote animal experimentation would not likely make such a gesture either."

  "Perhaps the person involved in the attempt to discredit, as you put it, was simply trying to intimidate the Acting-Principal," suggested Tom.

  "Well, he picked the wrong animal in that case. Jackson Nicholas was the last person to back away from a situation," said Janet.

  "Perhaps that was his undoing," put in the Professor. "He tempted fate once and escaped by the skin of his teeth."

  "When he had his earlier collapse?"

  "Life gives us small intimations of warning from time to time. Neurotic people pay too much attention to them perhaps. Compulsive obsessive persons like our late-lamented senior administrator tend to ignore them, to their peril," said the Professor philosophically.

  "Then where does Archie fit into all this? I find his motives very difficult to fathom," Kay inquired shaking her head. "Do you think he was responsible for muddying the scene of the crime, casting some red herrings into the case?"

  "Without doubt," responded Janet. "I didn't really want to believe it at first. I guess that was why I was slow to get at the truth. But as you said he first of all showed evidence of guilt, of trying to cover up something about the situation so I should go on thinking of it as an accident. Then his attention to the widow, and especially to Judy was much too familiar for someone who knew them so little, unless he was involved in the death of Mr. Nicholas. The more he seemed to ignore me at the beginning, the more it seemed with time that I should avoid him lest I betray my suspicions and tip my hand. As it turned out it might have been better if I challenged him directly straight off. It could have saved another life plus possible serious injury to an innocent outside party -- well semi-innocent anyway."

  "Poor Archie," murmured Kay again to glowers from the Professor.

  " Yes, poor Archie ," repeated Janet," though one may say he got his just desserts in the end," she continued, eyeing the Professor.

  "And what precisely were his motives?" persisted Kay. "Surely that is the strangest part of the whole case."

  "I didn’t fully appreciate them until we rode back together in the ambulance, and then I talked with him in the hospital later."

  "So he was conscious after the accident?"

  "He certainly seemed lucid enough. And from my own perspectives of his admissions I think I have a picture, though as you say it was a difficult one to envisage. Perhaps the first inkling I had came even before the killing. You may recall 'Archaeopteryx', the anonymous author of faculty critiques?"

  "Ill-fated bird that ever was," intoned the Professor. "Now extinct I believe."

  "Exiled to a self-imposed silence, with some credit to you," said Kay to Janet.

  "Well, it was no stroke of genius to connect Archie McManus with his ornithological namesake, and though I hated to do it, I felt I had to either unmask or silence him. When I threatened the former as you know, he capitulated. Then," she continued rather embarrassed, "I presumed on our acquaintance to ask him to partner me for a tennis party at the Nicholas house. Kay rightly accused me of a form of social blackmail, and I suppose we seemed to be mutually enjoying our new friendship. So I began to go out with him," she admitted. "After all, we were on a couple of committees together, including the Selection Committee. I suppose that was one of the reasons he persisted in seeing me socially, perhaps together with the hold I may have seemed to possess over the threatened revelation of the identity of his nom de plume."

  "He may simply have had an interest in you," said Tom helpfully. "It's not such an outlandish idea!" he attempted gallantly.

  "I'm afraid it is," replied Janet, "and for good and sufficient reason. He had another lover you see."

  She said it simply and directly. To the discerning eye of Kay McKay there was no trace of bitterness in Janet's statement. It was just that, a statement of fact. She might have had a soft spot for Archie and his boyish good looks herself, but it was apparent that Janet had no lingering sentiment that would wound her amour propre. She might, marvelled Kay, have been reading the account at the breakfast table, as she was wont to do, of murders or political scandals not touching herself, in the morning newspaper.

  "And was this his newly acquired infatuation for the grieving daughter, whom he was presumably succoring from feelings of guilt? If so he was not only indiscreet but imbecilic in the extreme, becoming involved with a student, and daughter of the late Principal to boot!" said John Antwhistle with some vehemence.

  "If he had any intensions that way, they were strictly a blind as they may have also been in my case," answered Janet ruefully. "I think he was trying to hide the true liaison that led to so much of this trouble."

  "To whom? Surely not the widow Nicholas?" asked Kay incredulously.

  "You think then that we have a juicy crime passionelle at sedate Essex U?" Professor Antwhistle continued. "0 tempore, o mores!"

  Janet shook her head. "Nothing quite so juicy or obvious I fear. It goes back as I said to Archaeopteryx. Archie McManus was that rare combination of scientist and humanist scholar. The significance of the pseudonym had seemed apparent, yet not fully explained by his given name alone. I think that fact was probably bouncing around in the back of my cerebrum -"

  "Or perhaps in the corpus callosum," put in the Professor eyeing her shrewdly.

  "Then you know what I'm getting at."

  "I have a fair idea. Because it required impulses from the cerebral hemisphere on one side passing to the other via commisural fibres of the corpus callosum that made the final connection in your mind."

  Janet smiled and leaned back in her chair.

  "I do think you some times must have a direct tap into my corpus callosum yourself!"

  "No my dear. Only into your thalamic regions where your emotions are projected fairly graphically.

  "Will someone come to my rescue and explain all this neurological jargon in terms an ordinary person may comprehend, "asked Kay. "Tom and I are spectators," she continued crossly, "and these scientific in-jokes become mighty tiresome to the uninitiated."

  "I'm sorry to bore you, and especially Tom, who is no doubt doubly bored with all the ramifications of my love life or lack of it as well." said Janet.

  "On the contrary," Tom grinned. "I haven't had so much fun since reading 'Pride and Prejudice’. Is Archie McManus really about to turn into your Mr. D'Arcy I wonder?"

  Janet eyed him with new-found respect and affection.

  "If he were I'm afraid I should not ever be his Miss Bennett," she sighed in mock sorrow.
r />   "Then who is this mysterious dark lady who came between you, and what is her connection to the archaic bird, if bird it truly was?"

  "That's part of the riddle of Archaeopteryx isn’t it? Was it a true bird? Did it in fact possess feathers at all, or were they merely scales before our eyes? Was it reptilian actually, or possibly a fake like Piltdown man? The whole construct had parallels to the counterpart in The Review. But to answer your question with a line that is almost as prehistoric 'that was no lady' of the sonnets."

  "Are we never to know her identity then?” moaned Kay in mock exasperation.

  "That is so. Because a lady didn't enter the equation. The continuation of the Archaeopteryx enigma was the combination of two given names -- Archie and Terence." She paused momentarily to let this sink in, then continued. "You see, I should have guessed that Archie was too much of an optimist, too jovial in fact, to express the cynicism that appeared in that column. I suppose that in the sense of opposite charges attracting one another the negative Terry O'Meara held some fascination for his more positive colleague. I suddenly had the connection between the two halves of my brain, the rational and the emotive, or the scientific and the humanistic via the commisural fibres of the corpus callosum as assumed by my learned Professor of neurobiology. As the connections occurred between the two facets of the grey matter they showed me the connection between the critical polltical scientist and the progressive scientific historian. Together they made a formidable duo in the one persona of Archaeopteryx."

  “With O'Meara unearthing whatever scurrilous dirt he could root out about the University administration and McManus putting it into some toned down prose that would evade the laws of libel,” observed Kay.

  "When I spoke to Archie about my original deductions regarding his nom de plume he said nothing at first except that he would talk to the editor of The Review. I assume that he told O'Meara that the jig was up and they would be exposed unless they laid low, then he phoned me later and backed away. Said he agreed in principle that if the faculty had a legitimate voice in matters he would withdraw the column. He seemed amused even that nobody had challenged him earlier about his role in it, but I guess that most faculty members who knew him simply could not identify the acidulous opinions of the column with his genial demeanour.”

  "No more than you could associate Archie with such a heinous act as deliberate disablement of the Principal," said Kay.

  "Yes. That seemed so out of character to me that I tried to brush it away, but his strange reactions kept returning to haunt me with premonitions of his guilt."

  "And then this realization struck like a thunderbolt," said Tom.

  "Just at the end when I was cold and my mind was wandering, I was struck by how complementary those two were in their attitudes. How they seemed to be together a lot. That was reinforced when they jogged around the bend together. Though they were arguing, quarrelling, it wasn’t like two colleagues or two friends -- it was more in tone like husband and wife. When I asked later, as gently as I could, what Terence had meant to him it all came out in a flood of remorse."

  "And was there some sort of death-bed repentance then?" asked Kay impatiently.

  "Not really. Archie told me of his closet relationship with Terry O'Meara. They had both been avoiding an open disclosure of that apparently and they'd had their ups and downs, partly because I suspect Archie is somewhat bisexual, while Terry may not have been able to reconcile that side of his life, even if Archie rationalized his social activities with me or with Judy solely for appearance's sake. Anyway, I was convinced that Archie made a pretty clean breast of his part in the case. O'Meara never spoke to me."

  "Then how and when was it that you figured out who the killer was? You didn't have time to examine all the footprints beforehand did you?" Kay enquired.

  "No. But in a sense the fact that I was cutting them out of the mud at the time had something to do with the final outcome. When I saw the two of them together in their jogging suits I realized that Archie, dressed in that bright blue outfit, could never have remained concealed for long in the bushes beside the trail. When I saw O'Meara attacking him I guessed that Archie must have challenged him about his involvement in the 'accidental' death of the Acting-Principal. Goodness knows what might have happened if I had tried to intervene unarmed!" and she told of her unconscious threat with the knife she had been carrying.

  "Small wonder he took off like a scared rabbit chuckled Tom. "And that propelled him right into the path of the truck?"

  Janet nodded ruefully.

  "It would have been better if he had lived to tell his side of the twisted tale, but he died on the way to the hospital."

  "Without shoes."

  "Yes," Janet admitted, holding them up. "The final testament to his dismal plot. According to Archie it became apparent that 0’Meara was at least present when the ‘accident’ took place, because he'd almost bumped into him leaving the scene. O'Meara was certainly less conspicuous than Archie, but despite his more camouflaged outfit, he had been spotted creeping away. Archie had immediately suspected something fishy because he knew of the bad feelings between O‘Meara and NIcholas, and O'Meara's rabid determination to prevent Nicholas from succeeding to the Principalship. The more he became convinced of Terry's involvement, the more he seemed impelled to cover up for him."

  "That's what I couldn't forgive him for," said the Professor fiercely. "That man has less brain than that Jack0'Lantern!" he exclaimed, indicating the ghoulish grinning pumpkin that Tom and Janet had just finished carving.

  "Well, I suppose we have to make some allowances for the ghosts from the past that haunted him," said Kay gently. "I gather that was what drove Archie to break into the Office of the Principal when you almost surprised him in the act.

  Janet nodded and related what Archie had been in quest of, by his own admission. "It seems that there was a terrific confrontation last year when Dr. O'Meara was brought forward for tenure. The Acting-Principal intervened, to block the tenure recommendation from the lower committee of his Faculty. When the Dean tried to make representations to the Board he was informed of evidence of a damning personal nature which proved that O’Meara was guilty of moral turpitude."

  "Moral turpitude," interpreted the Professor gravely, "would be an action so heinous that it would shock the moral standards of the community, and render a professor unfit to shape the minds of impressionable students."

  "At all events, when the case came up for review, the Acting-Principal had a private interview with Dr. O'Meara, after which he voluntarily withdrew his appeal. It turned out, according to Archie, that the Principal had incriminating documentary evidence against O’Meara in a 'black’ file. When Archie started to connect O'Meara with Nicholas's death he was sure it related to the material in that file. So when he had access to promotion documents in the office adjacent to the Principal’s office he managed to break into his files. Mr. Nicholas was an orderly man and it was easy to locate it."

  "And did the act of moral turpitude justify Mr. Nicholas's actions?" asked Kay.

  "Possibly," Janet replied, "although, more to the point its revelation might have been enough to have O'Meara deported as an accomplice to terrorist actions in his own country of origin. Terence obviously felt that he had to neutralize Jackson Nicholas or his days at this institution, and perhaps in this country, would soon be at an end. Conveniently, the death of the 'Rat' would have forestalled that, if Archie hadn't tumbled to his complicity and tried to force him into an admission of guilt.

  "Poor Archie," sighed Kay once again.

  "Poor Archie was fortunate that he survived with nothing worse than a fractured collarbone!" snorted the Professor. "I take it he was resting peacefully when you left him?"

  "He was peaceful enough, though sore, bruised, and a bit sheepish over the outcome."

  "As well he might be!"

  "Now Professor," said Kay as she cleared the debris from the table and produced a couple of decks of playing cards, "Let's s
ave that vindictive spirit for something really serious, and teach these youngsters some of the fine points of bridge."

  "I'll double that," Janet responded, with a smile for her newfound partner.

  "We'll see about that," growled John Antwhistle, ferociously shuffling the cards.

  Tom Audette grinned back at Janet, then sprang to his feet a moment later as the doorbell rang. "I'll get it. Must be some of the youngsters out trick-or-treating for Halloween."

  "Trick or treat!" sang out a chorus of juvenile voices from the hall. In the doorway could be made out the forms of a witch with pointed hat, a demon with a pointed tail and a furry animal with pointed nose. Tom passed out a few of the treats from the bowl Kay had set on the hall-table, then called to the others.

  "I think you had better come and take a look at these costumes."

  The Professor sighed as he hefted himself out of the chair. "I don't see how we're going to get through a rubber at this rate," he grumbled. "Now what have we here? Shades of the underworld, and a denizen of the forest. Or are you a creature of the laboratory?" he asked of the costumed rat.

  "Take my advice," he continued, "be careful from whom you accept treats, particularly grapes, wild or otherwise, and stay away from the University. It’s a one-way trap for rats," he muttered as he made his way back to the bridge-table.

  William McMurray was born in Northern Ireland and evacuated to Canada during the Second World War. Growing up in Saskatchewan and Ontario, Dr. McMurray followed an academic scientific career which ultimately led to his appointment as Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.

  Cover design by Dr. E.R. Tustanoff