A Little Learning

by J M Gregson

  And when you are nineteen, there are more personal and pressing concerns. For Peter Tiler, these were principally concerned with his ongoing campaign to get a girl into bed. By half-past nine on the evening of the day when Carter’s body was discovered, Peter was oblivious to every other concern.

  It was supposed to be very easy, no more than par for the course for a university student. Girls were sexually liberated now, at ease with their hormones and as anxious to explore sexual experience as their male counterparts. Peter had heard about it, had even read about it, and could remember it quite clearly in print. He was a first-year maths student who had read a lot of print, and was still young enough to believe that all printed material carried the stamp of truth.

  But none of the print had told him that acne did not disappear obediently with university entrance; nor that boys would outnumber girls by six to one in the Maths Department; nor that all the first-year girls would be appropriated by the second-year students in the first week, while he was still finding his feet as a fresher in the university. There were plenty of girls in other faculties, of course, but they all seemed to him articulate and highly sophisticated, with groups of friends who knew each other well. Peter Tiler was finding it difficult to break into the charmed circle of female companionship.

  But he thought of himself as a logical man. So he considered his situation and worked out a plan. With the things he had stacked against him, the things the magazine and newspaper articles hadn’t acknowledged, he needed some sort of artificial aid; something above and beyond his own personality. He tried a little pot, before he went to the disco on Friday night, to give him confidence. And it had worked: he’d found himself a girl.

  Well, some people might have said that was putting it rather too strongly. But he’d found it much easier than previously to talk to girls, had been able to relax and chat with them as if he’d been doing it for years. And he’d eventually succeeded in detaching one from the group, a girl with bright eyes and dark hair who was studying medieval economic history. That was quite a mouthful, but Peter frankly didn’t care what she was studying, so long as she took an interest in him.

  And she appeared to do just that. She had agreed with only a little hesitation to see him again, this Monday night. Kathleen Stevens, she was called. Peter found that he repeated the name to himself constantly over the weekend. It had a pleasantly old-fashioned ring which for some reason he found reassuring. He was glad he had arranged to take her off the campus. He didn’t fancy conducting the tentative moves towards copulation under the critical eyes of his peers.

  He even had doubts about whether he should try for bed, on this first occasion. He wouldn’t mind if it took several meetings, really: not if they got on well with each other. But if he didn’t at least try, he’d probably be thought a wimp. Or even gay. The girl he’d been left with at the end of the Freshers’ Reception, on his first day on the campus, had asked him if he was gay, presumably because he hadn’t made any great physical moves towards her.

  They were going to the cinema, in Brunton, to see Billy Elliot. Peter didn’t know much about it, but Kathleen had said she’d like to see it, and he’d jumped at the chance to get her to himself and away from the campus.

  Now, as he made himself ready to go, he found his confidence ebbing away. His red spots on his forehead looked worse than ever when he inspected them in the mirror over his washbasin. After he had shaved and showered, he put on liberal applications of deodorant and after-shave, but you couldn’t disguise what people could see for themselves. It had been all right on Friday, in the darkness of the disco, but tonight Kathleen Stevens would see him as he really was. He wished they could be transported without sight of each other into the darkness of the cinema. But all he could do was pull the baseball cap he was planning to wear a little further down at the front.

  At half-past six, he smoked a small joint of the pot he had found so helpful on Friday, then slipped the remaining spliffs of it with the tablets of Ecstasy into the pocket of his anorak. No going back now, he told himself. Over the top. Wasn’t that what soldiers said, when they walked towards death? Silly expression, then. He grinned at himself as the pot surged through his veins. No going back now!

  Kathleen Stevens wasn’t quite as beautiful as his imagination had made her over a fevered weekend. Her face was a little larger and her eyes a little smaller than he had thought: the subdued lighting of the disco was kind to other people as well as to him.

  But she smiled at him, and her face lit up from the anxiety it had shown when she thought he might not be there. She was very pretty when she smiled, he thought. And curiously, he found that he was pleased that she was not quite the stunning beauty he had envisaged. It made her easier to talk to. Perhaps, if all went well with the evening, easier to seduce.

  They travelled together on the college bus that ran every half-hour into Brunton, and Peter realized that Kathleen was almost as shy as he was. She insisted on paying for herself at the cinema, pointing out that both of them were students. The film was good, but there were parts of it he hardly saw, because he was so preoccupied with his tactics towards the girl next to him. It was a pity it was so funny, because it was difficult to make progress with a girl who kept bursting into delighted laughter with the rest of the audience.

  But he had his arm round her by the end of the film and she seemed quite contented, even submissive, as they walked hand in hand to the pub he had chosen afterwards. It was an old-fashioned pub, Edwardian he thought, and while it had been expensively modernized in recent years, the brewery had retained some of the original alcoves with single small tables down one of the walls. Peter installed Kathleen in one of these and bought her the glass of white wine she requested.

  He lit up a thin joint as they sat with the drinks and offered it to Kathleen. She looked startled, took a single short puff and blew the smoke out quickly. She refused any further offers and watched Peter puffing enthusiastically, trying to encourage her by his nonchalant air. Eventually, she said quietly, ‘I don’t think you should do that, Peter.’

  He stubbed the joint out in the ashtray: it was almost finished anyway. ‘Your wish is my command!’ he said, emboldened as he had hoped by the little intake of pot. He went without consulting Kathleen to get more drinks. While he was at the bar, he put the ground Ecstasy tablet into her second glass of white wine, keeping his body carefully between the bar and Kathleen, so that she would not see what he was about. It refused to dissolve, remaining fairly obviously a powder at the bottom of the glass.

  Peter seized a cocktail stick from the bar and stirred the wine furiously. It would have been better if he could have got some of this new drug Rohypnol he had read about, which dissolved instantly and was undetectable, the one they used in date-rape cases. But he’d had no chance of getting that, had been lucky to get the six tablets of Ecstasy which the man had called Silver Dollars. And everyone said Ecstasy worked, that it got the girls going and removed all inhibitions. He gave the glass a last, furious stir, summoned his most confident smile, and turned back to the table with his half of bitter and the glass of white wine.

  He had been so preoccupied with his plans and with keeping his movements secret from Kathleen Stevens that he had forgotten the need for any other sort of concealment. He had been completely unconscious of the man in nondescript blue jeans and sweater who watched him with interest from his position five yards to his left at the bar.

  Even when he followed Peter across to the alcove with the drinks, it was Kathleen who noticed him first. Peter Tiler had still not registered his presence when the man said quietly to Kathleen, ‘Don’t drink any of that, love. There’s no knowing what it might do to you.’

  Peter turned in startled indignation, to find himself staring into cool brown eyes, above a thin line of a mouth and a stubbled chin. The mouth said calmly, ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of possession of a Class A drug. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention whe
n questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say will be recorded and may be given in evidence.’

  The mattress in the cell was thin, the bed beneath it hard as concrete. It was not at all the kind of night Peter Tiler had planned for himself.

  *

  The Scene of Crime team took a long time to search the site residence of Dr George Andrew Carter, and ended with an extensive collection of bagged and labelled articles from the five-bedroomed house of the Director. When you do not know what you are searching for, and almost anything may later prove significant, you have to take note of a huge range of items.

  And the death of a high-ranking academic, like that of a high-ranking businessman, means that the place where he conducted his work is almost equally likely to provide clues to his demise. DI Percy Peach descended upon the Director’s personal secretary ‘like the wrath of God’, as she later resentfully described it to her eagerly listening colleagues.

  Peach, sizing up a woman whom he immediately saw as the Dragon at the Gate, was in no mood to be driven off: he drew his sword and charged. ‘I need immediate access to all your files, all correspondence, and the diary you and Dr Carter kept of his weekly appointments,’ he said.

  Ms Angela Burns, forty-five, iron-grey of hair, eyes and manner, donned the mien which had terrified students and sent many a tutor retreating in confusion. ‘I’m afraid that will not be possible. There is much material in the files which is highly confidential. There may be meetings noted in Dr Carter’s letters and diary which are completely private matters and —’

  ‘Good! It is the confidential and private material which is of most interest to us. So if you can assist us in pinpointing the key areas, you will be helping the police in the course of their enquiries — which of course you are only too anxious to do.’ Peach’s eyebrows arched interrogatively above his terrier smile.

  ‘You really must understand, Inspector, that I can’t —’

  ‘No, Ms Burns, it is you who must understand. You must understand that you can’t get in the way of a murder inquiry. We are given wide-ranging powers to go where we want and to see whom and what we think is appropriate.’

  She folded her arms, trying desperately to summon a defence against this assault from a quarter she had never had to deal with before. She said icily, ‘Do you have a search warrant, Inspector Peach?’

  Percy beamed delightedly. ‘I don’t need one, Ms Burns. Not to search the Director’s room; not to go through his files; not to read his correspondence; not to demand and receive the fullest cooperation from Dr Carter’s personal secretary. Not a pleasant thing, murder, but it gets rid of a lot of red tape.’

  Ms Burns’s forehead furrowed like the ridges of a thunder cloud beneath the tightly disciplined grey hair. She wouldn’t retreat. She wouldn’t put up the white flag. She would never openly acknowledge that this bouncy little man from a world she had never encountered before had a victory. But she was an intelligent woman, and she sensed that further resistance would only lead to greater embarrassment. Defer with dignity, if you have to, was always her counsel to more junior members of the administrative staff.

  She didn’t often have to practise it herself, but this seemed like one of those rare occasions. She said stiffly, ‘I shall of course give you whatever help I can, Inspector. I am as anxious as you are that whoever did this dreadful thing should be brought to justice.’

  One of Peach’s virtues was to be generous in victory. He rarely rubbed an opponent’s nose in the dust, especially a nose as worthy as that of the admirably loyal Angela Burns. ‘Thank you. I’m sure you are. And my detective constables know what to look for. They will cause you some inconvenience in going through the files, but no more than they have to. And they are strict respecters of confidentiality. Nothing we collect from here will become public knowledge, unless of course it has a bearing upon a later court case.’ He ushered in the DCs, one male and one female, who had ten minutes before his arrival been brusquely dismissed by Ms Burns, and set them to work on the files with her as their knowledgeable assistant. Then he went through the outer office into the Director’s room.

  Claptrap Carter — Peach had already accepted his right to the epithet — had done himself well. This was a spacious room on the quiet side of the old mansion, with its 1840s stone-mullioned windows still intact. The view was over trees, with glimpses of clipped grass between and beyond them and not a building in sight. Oak and beech, still retaining most of their leaves, showed orange and yellow behind the more delicate tracery of silver birch; despite the frost of Sunday night, the leaves of two mature maples glowed brilliant crimson and amber within a few yards of the late Director’s big curved desk.

  There was nothing on the desk, and little of interest in its drawers, save for a large, red-backed appointments diary on which Peach spent most of his time. You could find out quite a lot about a man from a diary, even when it was merely a record of work scheduled and completed, rather than the more personal and intimate daily chronicle of feelings and reactions which police people always preferred. Even a record of meetings attended and interviews conducted could give a picture of a working existence, which for all they knew at this stage could be just as important as Carter’s private life.

  And there were odd snippets which were not concerned with the work of the UEL at all. Peach confirmed from the entry ‘Lodge Ladies’ Night’ in Carter’s neat, small hand that he was a Mason, and stored it away for future reference. He would have some fun with Tommy Bloody Tucker about his fellow Mason, with any luck. If they drew blanks elsewhere, they might even have to look into Claptrap’s Masonic connections, eventually.

  Peach made a note of those appointments which related to individual tutors rather than more general meetings of committees and working parties. He had picked up a list of staff from the Bursar’s office, and he was able to identify the posts of various tutors on the list. Probably they all had some perfectly sound and perfectly innocent reason for seeing the late Director, but they would all have to be patiently checked out by members of his team.

  The simple initials ‘S.T.’ occurred several times in the diary. Peach looked backwards over the year, as well as at the week ahead, and found no fewer than six recordings of these initials in the preceding three months, which included six weeks of the summer vacation. There was no one on his list of academic staff who matched the two initials.

  He went back into the outer office, prepared to take his sword to the dragon once again, and found that the scaly fire-breather had become a pussy cat. Ms Burns was going through the correspondence file with the young woman DC at her side, explaining what the correspondence was about, searching hard for any mysterious elements in the letters Dr Carter had received and the replies she had typed. He smiled at the neat grey head and the younger, less disciplined brown one in such earnest conversation. Murder, the worst of crimes, had about it a charnel-house glamour; even people initially hostile to the inquiry often became quite excited by it, once they felt they had a part to play in unmasking a murderer.

  Peach showed Ms Burns the diary, prepared for her to bridle at this interference with her late employer’s personal working record. Instead, she asked if she could be of help with any queries. ‘Can you tell me who “S.T.” might be?’ he asked. ‘He or she occurs several times in here, but there doesn’t seem to be any tutor or senior member of the administrative staff with those initials.’

  She took the desk diary from him, flicked over the pages, scanning the entries he pointed out. She frowned a little, then her face cleared and she said, ‘Of course! Those aren’t a person’s initials at all. “S.T.” means Senior Tutor. The man you want is Walter Culpepper.’

  Peach was deliberately noncommittal as he said casually, ‘Friendly with Dr Carter, was he? They seem to have met each other fairly often.’

  Ms Burns became suddenly very formal again. ‘The Senior Tutor oversees all the student admissions to the university. It is inevitable that he and the
Director will meet fairly frequently.’

  Peach pretended to be more ignorant than he was, another tactic in which he was an expert. ‘Important figure in the place, is he, the Senior Tutor?’

  Angela Burns looked at the bland, questioning face suspiciously for a moment. ‘The Senior Tutor is one of the key figures, especially in a new university like this, where we are not certain of the quality of intake we can expect in the different subject areas. He lives on the site and keeps a constant overview of the state of recruitment for the year ahead.’

  ‘So he and Dr Carter saw quite a lot of each other.’

  She picked her words as carefully as a politician. ‘It was inevitable that in the course of their professional duties their paths would cross quite frequently. Essential, in fact, for the smooth running of the institution.’

  Peach grinned. He was beginning to like the dragon, after all. He wished he had someone like her to look after his own interests back at the police station in Brunton. ‘They didn’t like each other, then.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to. I somehow divined it. That’s what comes of being a detective, I suppose. So Walter Culpepper and Dr Carter were at each other’s throats most of the time, and lived on the site together. Makes you think, doesn’t it, when you find one of them lying shot in his house?’

  Ms Burns wasn’t used to meeting men like this strange little inspector, who seemed to be so adept at spotting the things you had meant to conceal. He was teasing her now, as no one in the UEL would have had the temerity to do: she realized that, but she found to her surprise that she was rather enjoying it.

  She found it hard to prevent the corners of her mouth from wrinkling upwards as she said, ‘You’d better decide on that for yourself, Inspector. I’m sure you’ll find Dr Culpepper more than a match for you.’

  Nine

  Carmen Campbell stretched luxuriously in front of the full-length mirror, taking advantage of a facility she could never enjoy in her own tiny flat. She had bra and pants on now, after a leisurely shower. She ran a wide-toothed comb through her thick black hair and allowed herself to relish the beauty of her skin; it had that colour of rich milk chocolate which she revelled in and which men seemed to find so exciting.