[Master Mercurius 02] - Untrue Till Death

by Graham Brack

  My dear grandmother would be so thrilled to hear that I had achieved the rank of professor that she would overlook the fact that my life was irrevocably ruined.

  ‘For example,’ the Rector murmured softly, ‘we currently have a vacancy for a Professor of Botany.’

  ‘I know nothing whatever of botany,’ I protested.

  ‘Neither did the last one,’ answered the Rector. ‘That is why we have a vacancy.’

  Van Looy was still in the crypt of the Hooglandse Kerk, covered with a white linen sheet. Nobody seemed to be taking any responsibility for burying him. I kicked myself for not having asked Pieters whether Van Looy’s cousin Abraham had been traced, but whether he had or had not, Van Looy could not stay here much longer.

  I said a few prayers at his feet and was just rising when I became aware of a sinister presence behind me. Turning slowly, I discovered the verger was standing there, which explained my creepy feeling. Vergers do that to me. They have a knack of sneaking up on you silently that must be part of their training.

  ‘You’re one of the gentlemen from the University,’ he said firmly.

  ‘I am,’ I agreed. ‘I am Master Mercurius.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he replied. ‘We did as the Rector asked and washed and shrouded the poor gent.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, though that was going to stop me examining the body again.

  ‘What should I do with the gent’s things, Master?’

  ‘His things?’

  ‘Yes, his clothes and the stuff he had on his person.’

  ‘I will take them for safe keeping and return them to his family. Do you need me to sign for them?’

  ‘If you would, Master. The Minister’s day book will do nicely.’

  I followed him to the vestry where we wrote an entry in the Parish Journal and I signed it, whereupon the verger delivered a bundle to me.

  ‘There you are, Master. Will his family be at the funeral tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. We have not managed to find them.’

  ‘Ah.’ He sounded disappointed.

  ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘Well, the Minister was hoping to discover the gentleman’s Christian name. It seems nobody in Leiden knew what it was.’

  It was bad enough that he was perforce being buried under a false surname. I could at least ensure that the right Christian name was used. ‘I can help you there. It was Carolus.’

  The verger’s face brightened. ‘The Minister will be pleased to know, Master. I’ll tell him as soon as may be.’

  ‘Perhaps you can help me in return,’ I said. ‘I’ve been away for a few days, so I have not heard the funeral arrangements. What time is the service tomorrow?’

  ‘Why, bless you, Master, at eleven o’clock. The body is being brought to the Academy tonight and will lie there before the procession.’

  ‘He’s to have a procession?’

  ‘The Rector was insistent. He was a University official, after all.’

  A procession meant that we would all be expected to wear full dress. In the case of Master Hubertus, his best clothes were not appreciably more elegant than the rags he normally wore, but the Professors of Law would be in their element, each bedecked with all manner of badges and sashes, enjoying every minute of the pomp. One of them, who had two doctorates, had been known to wear one cap and carry the other just to make a point. It would be tedious, but I suppose that the Rector was right; we owed it to Van Looy.

  And a little voice in my head was suggesting that it was just possible that the killer would show up to crow over his success.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When my time comes, I wonder if I shall have a funeral as grand as Van Looy’s. A number of staff and students had left for the summer, but the majority of the staff had been summoned to return, so as the bedellus lined us up in order of seniority there was a fine show of bright robes and elegant caps. As expected, the law professors were dolled up like peacocks on heat, strutting their way around the hall to ensure that their gowns were flowing in the most attractive way. Even Master Hubertus appeared to have combed his hair and beard, which is why I almost failed to recognise him until he spoke to me.

  ‘Have you found those rabbits you were looking for?’ he asked.

  ‘Er — no. I’ve abandoned rabbit farming,’ I replied. It seemed easier than trying to correct his ramblings.

  Hubertus seemed content and dropped the subject, but remained beside me, obviously thinking of something else he might say to make polite conversation. I believe I may have been one of the few members of staff disposed to be polite to him.

  ‘Did you know the deceased?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes, I did. Didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Name rings a bell, but…’

  ‘The Rector’s secretary.’ Hubertus still looked puzzled. ‘Tall chap, bald on top, fringe of brown hair.’

  ‘Looked like he was sucking a lemon?’ suggested Hubertus.

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Ah! I’d wondered who had died. Can’t have been very old.’

  ‘He was murdered.’

  Hubertus had evidently not heard this before. ‘Murdered? You mean — killed?’

  ‘Completely. Blunt object to the back of the head and pushed down the stairs.’

  Hubertus frowned. ‘Must have been a tall fellow.’

  ‘Van Looy? Yes, he was.’

  ‘No, I meant whoever bashed him. He was probably the tallest person in the university. Hitting him on the head can’t have been easy.’

  I stroked my chin in thought. The wound on the back of Van Looy’s head was actually above the bit of the skull that sticks out at the back. You can tell I am no anatomist, because that probably has a name of some kind. Anyway, the blow had come down on Van Looy from above. Now, a long-handled club or weapon might have been used, so we could not deduce the height of the assailant, but another thought struck me. Van Looy was well built. I know he could have simply toppled forward, but if he had been pushed, you would need to give the great ox quite a shove to get him all the way down the stairs, given that there was a small landing.

  To explain better, the stairs went up a few steps to the first platform, then turned left and went up again to a second landing before turning left once more and completing the ascent to the upper floor. Being servants’ stairs, the turns were quite tight. The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed that he had not stopped on the first landing or become wedged partway down.

  I’m a fool! I thought. How did I not see it before?

  Van Looy had been lying on the stairs and I had paid no attention to his clothing, but now I recalled that he was wearing his cloak. If I had thought about it at all I might have guessed that he was going out, but it had been evening and he rarely went out at night except to find me — and I was already there. And his cloak had not been clasped at the neck. I had assumed — if I had thought about it at all — that he had wrenched it open in the fall. But suppose he had been struck somewhere else, such as in his office, then wrapped in his cloak to make him easier to drag to the stairs, and thrown down by it. That would keep his arms in.

  This line of reasoning was disquieting. If I had missed that, what else had I missed on first inspection? I resolved that as soon as the service was over, I would return to the staircase to examine it properly this time. And I would examine Van Looy’s clothing which, by happy chance, I had kept in case his cousin turned up to the funeral.

  My musings were interrupted by a tap on the shoulder.

  ‘The bedellus is glowering at you,’ muttered Hubertus. ‘You’re too high up the line for your seniority.’

  He was right on both counts. I rushed to take my rightful place. And nobody can glower like a bedellus.

  We paraded through the city to the Hooglandse Kerk behind poor Van Looy, who must have been getting bored of the journey by now, and I was touched by the number of townsfolk who bowed their heads reverently as we passed. Some even crosse
d themselves in the Catholic fashion.

  The bedellus, who is a sort of jumped-up janitor, but who loves all the ceremonials of the university, showed us to our allotted places. The Rector delivered a eulogy of sorts, but that he could do it at all given how little we knew of Van Looy was quite remarkable. Looking back later, I could see that it was an all-purpose eulogy, which might have fitted any number of people but was cleverly crafted to appear personal to the corpse in question. After some prayer, the senior professor of theology delivered himself of a sermon. He took as his text the First Book of Samuel, chapter 2, verse 6: ‘The Lord kills and makes alive; He brings down to the grave and brings up.’

  Whether this was entirely appropriate for a victim of murder I leave to the reader to decide; unless, of course, it was an accusation of guilt, though I hesitate to think how the Stadhouder would take the news that Van Looy’s death was an Act of God. I admit to a certain impatience during his address because I was keen to return to the scene of the crime to repeat my examination, more carefully this time, so it was a relief when the professor decided that fifty minutes was long enough and quit the pulpit.

  A place had been found for Van Looy near the northern wall, but the actual interment was to take place after we had filed out. This was necessary because experience had told the church authorities that leaving a hole in the floor, however well signposted, was asking for trouble, so they would lift the slabs after we had left.

  We duly lined up as before and processed past the coffin as it lay on the trestles, each pausing and turning to incline our head slightly in the direction of the deceased as we reached his heart. For some reason this affected me considerably, and I found myself silently promising Van Looy that I would find his killer.

  I have a really bad habit of making promises when I have no idea how I will keep them.

  My examination was delayed further when I discovered that the Rector had arranged a meal for us all in the dining hall which we were all expected to attend. The bedellus made sure we managed to sit in order of precedence as well, which meant that I was sitting very near the door.

  I was delighted to see that Albrecht had been given some temporary help in the kitchen, so much of the food was edible. I noted the cook from Steen’s Inn and one or two others as the doors opened to allow the food to be carried in, so I decided that if I was going to miss a meal today, this was not the one to avoid, and tucked in accordingly. I was hampered a little by the fact that it was a Friday, but fortunately there were plenty of non-meat platters from which I could serve myself, and in the general hubbub and confusion nobody seemed to notice that I was avoiding the meat. I did, however, take a large slab of beef and privily tucked it in my sleeve for consumption first thing on Saturday morning.

  The bedellus rang a small bell and the Rector rose to his feet. He welcomed the guests, repeated some of the remarks he had made at the funeral about the sad loss of Van Looy, commented upon the difficult times in which we were living and the need to put old dissensions behind us now that the Stadhouder was firmly in charge, and then caused me to splutter over my wine as he somehow inserted the information that I had seen the Stadhouder only that week and had returned bearing the Stadhouder’s greetings to the university and his commendation upon our work, not to mention a new pay scale for the staff.

  I was conscious of many eyes turned in my direction, made worse when the Rector invited me to stand and be recognised; which doing, I glanced around the room, and found myself surprised to see Van der Horst in the doorway. He smiled as our eyes met.

  It seemed that my examination of the scene had been better than I had feared, because I learned nothing new from it, except, perhaps, one thing. I had assumed that the killing happened when Van Looy had left his office and was facing the stairs. His assailant came up from behind, clubbed him, and then rolled him down the stairs.

  There were obvious difficulties with this idea. Van Looy’s office was in a long corridor, and the attacker would have to face Van Looy. As a result, he could not know whether anyone was watching. Why risk being seen in the act?

  Second, it presupposed that Van Looy was wearing his cloak as if he were going out. But it was late in the evening for Van Looy to go anywhere, he being a man of regular habits, and he was always careful to lock his office door; yet my recollection was that the door was open when I examined the scene immediately after Van Looy was found.

  For these reasons, I formed the alternative explanation that Van Looy had been assaulted in his office, probably with the door shut. The killer had then taken his cloak from the peg, wrapped the body in it to pinion the arms, looked out to see that nobody was about and dragged the body a couple of paces to the stairs. He had then probably used his feet and arms to shove poor Van Looy down them. This would explain the blood smear at the top of the staircase, where Van Looy’s wounded head had rested.

  If I was right, there should be some sign of a struggle in the office. I hastened to the Rector to request the loan of the key, and was gratified when he insisted on coming with me. Two heads are better than one, as they say.

  We scouted the room carefully, and then we found it.

  In the corner of the room under the window Van Looy had a strongbox, a sort of chest bound with hoops of iron and secured with a large lock. It was unlocked, though it had been carefully closed, and the contents were disarranged. Somebody had rummaged through them, and not in any systematic way.

  ‘So whatever they were looking for,’ said the Rector, ‘they must have found and fled without bothering to secure the chest again.’

  ‘I think not,’ I answered. ‘Observe, Rector, that the books on the shelves have been pulled forward. Our man looked for something there too; and since the strongbox was the obvious place to start, I conclude that he did not find what he was looking for there and continued his search elsewhere. After all, the papers in the strongbox all seem to me to be university papers. There is nothing of a personal or private nature there, so Van Looy must have had an alternative place for those. And since it is unlikely that Van Looy trusted entirely to memory, we might suppose that he had notes about the conspiracy against the Stadhouder somewhere, and I suggest that those notes were what the culprit was looking for.’

  ‘And did he find them, Mercurius?’

  ‘Well, Rector, if he didn’t, we will.’

  We had as much time as we needed, so we succeeded where the assailant had failed. I have no idea how long we had been looking when the Rector sat in Van Looy’s chair to take a rest.

  ‘Mercurius,’ he said, ‘there are papers in this cushion.’

  He was right. We upended the chair and found that the underside was only lightly tacked in place. Prising it free revealed that the seat pad was resting on a small bundle of papers wrapped in canvas.

  The Rector locked the door to the office. ‘We must be careful. Somebody was prepared to kill to get these.’

  It was a sobering thought.

  Unwrapping the bundle we found a number of letters that must have been received from The Hague. I guessed that Van Kamerik had delivered these, though why Van Looy had kept them rather than burning them was an interesting point to ponder. So far as we could see, they mostly acknowledged packages received, beginning “The Stadhouder thanks you for your report…” but they contained no information as such. Perhaps he retained them as evidence that he had made timely reports.

  The gem was a small piece of paper, barely a scrap, written in English. It bore a diagram rather like a family tree, with a grandfather, a father and three children, and underneath were words which I carefully copied onto another piece of paper.

  ‘Does those words mean anything to you?’ the Rector enquired.

  ‘I don’t speak English,’ I answered.

  ‘Neither do I, but there are plenty of people in Leiden who do. Let us find one.’

  So saying, he made for the door and since he had the key, I was obliged to follow. We descended by the main staircase and the Rector marched resolutel
y onward. Within a hundred paces we found ourselves in front of the Pieterskerk, and the Rector pushed open the door of one of the workshops opposite. He made some enquiries and was directed to a man who was arranging the type in a small printing press, whom he addressed in Dutch.

  ‘Mijnheer Cooper? I hope that you can help us.’

  The small man looked up at us suspiciously. His face was smeared with ink, though I believe that his thick eyebrows were naturally jet-black. ‘How so?’

  ‘I am the Rector of the University and this is Master Mercurius. We have found a paper that we believe may be important but we have no English. I understand that you are English.’

  ‘Scottish!’ snarled the little fellow. ‘I’m Scottish. But I have the English. Let me see.’

  We handed him my copy, over which he pored for a moment before handing it back.

  ‘It’s nonsense,’ he told us.

  ‘But it must say something?’ I persisted.

  He translated it into Dutch for us.

  ‘You do not need to grind the nest?’ I repeated.

  ‘That’s what it says,’ insisted Cooper.

  ‘But that makes no sense.’

  ‘I told you that, but that’s what it says.’

  The Rector plucked at my arm. ‘Come away, Master. It must be a quotation or a cipher of some kind.’ He thanked Cooper for his help and we stepped outside. ‘Or the man is raving,’ added the Rector. ‘Let’s find another English speaker and see if he believes it to say the same thing.’

  The streets of Leiden contain quite a few English and Scots people, many of them Puritans who fled after Charles II returned and came to the Low Countries to find religious freedom. At Rotterdam they had their own church, but in Leiden they shared the use of the Pieterskerk, which is why it did not take us long to find another.

  His name, though spelled Brough, was pronounced Bruff, he explained. I find English names very difficult to say sometimes. Why they can’t have honest Dutch names like Terhoeven, Van Leeuwenhoek or Gijsbert Voet I have no idea. Anyone can pronounce those.