by Maxine Barry
Lisle looked at the man, guessing him to be somewhere in his mid-fifties. He was solidly built, and the eyes now watching him were steady, if still slightly shadowed, no doubt due to the residue of shock. But, all in all, he made a favourable first impression.
‘Did you know the deceased, Mr. Jenkins?’ Lisle asked, wasting no time on pleasantries.
‘Yes. I did. But not well. Sir Vivian wasn’t around college much of late,’ Tom confirmed, his voice calm but still just a shade unsteady. ‘When I first saw him, I didn’t recognise him. Not right off. He was lying face down, see?’
Lisle nodded. Although he had nothing to go on yet—no clues, no doctor’s examination, no eyewitnesses, nothing but the fact that there was a dead body where there shouldn’t be one—Lisle was beginning to feel that there was far more to this than at first met the eye. Call it instinct—call it experience. Of course, he’d go only on the facts. But he’d be very careful to make sure he got all the facts first.
Lisle was not naive. He hadn’t climbed as high as he had by not watching his back and knowing the rules. And Lord Roland was a friend of the Chief Constable. The Principal had a potentially embarrassing body on his hands, and had called his old friend for help. The message was clear, to all concerned.
Be quick. Be discreet. Be careful.
But Lisle wondered if it was going to be that simple. Already there was a mystery. If he’d fallen out of the window, how could he fall, face first, right up against a wall? He wasn’t much on physics or the laws of velocity or aerodynamics, but surely the body wouldn’t have fallen in the position in which it was found?
He gave a mental shrug. No doubt he’d find out soon.
Lisle stepped further into the flat’s small living room, then turned in the doorway, subtly blocking the way. ‘Thank you, Sir Roland. I take it you have rooms in college where I can reach you, should I need anything further?’
Sin Jun took the obvious dismissal in good part, gave the inspector directions to his rooms in Webster, and assured him he’d be available any time, night or day.
He left, still feeling deeply uneasy. There was a rough edge about Lisle Jarvis that was more than the sum total of his looks, Sin Jun was sure.
Inside, Tom was thinking much the same thing, as he gave the policeman a good long look. The man was built, there was no doubt about it. He obviously worked out, and had that air of being as fit as a butcher’s dog that only those with hard-earned stamina were able to generate. His clothes weren’t expensive, but he looked good in them. As his old mother would have said—DI Jarvis was a man’s man.
His short-cropped hair was a rich shade of nut-brown, and wide hazel eyes looked at Tom with no discernible expression in them at all. He looked tough. He had a pugnacious chin, a nose that had been broken once, perhaps in his younger days, when he’d patrolled the streets and had had to handle some thugs. His forehead was broad and strong.
All in all, the overwhelming impression was one of toughness. But instead of feeling intimidated, Tom felt reassured. It was a reaction that Lisle inspired in most people.
Except in crooks of course. Crooks were never pleased to see Lisle Jarvis heave into view.
‘So, Mr Jenkins,’ the voice was softer than he’d expected, ‘I know this has been a nasty shock for you, but perhaps you can tell me exactly what happened, right from the beginning?’
Without being asked, Lisle sank into one of the two old but comfortable armchairs that flanked a gas fire, and got out his notebook. Tom took the one facing him, and glanced uneasily towards the closed door that led to the main bedroom. It had taken a good deal of persuading to get his wife to go to bed, and he wondered if she was listening at the door.
‘Well, Sir, it was like this,’ he began, struck by the air of tough competence about the policeman, and for the first time that night began to breathe easier.
Carefully, missing out nothing, Tom took him through his actions that night, whilst Lisle, in rapid and fluent shorthand, took it all down. Only when Tom had finished did he start asking the questions that intrigued him most.
‘Did you see Sir Vivian arrive tonight?’
‘No, Sir. But then, if people don’t come into the lodge, I wouldn’t always notice them going by. I have the switchboard to see to, you see, and that puts my back to the window. Then again, Sir Vivian could have come in by either of the side gates. And it was a very busy night, what with the big Prize Dinner and everything. I might not have remembered him, in the crowd, even if I’d seen him.’
Lisle sighed. ‘Right. When was the last time, to your knowledge, that Sir Vivian last came in to college?’
But Tom didn’t know. Weeks, he thought.
‘And on your rounds, you saw or heard nothing out of the ordinary?’
‘No, Sir.’
No, Lisle thought, he wouldn’t. He would probably learn nothing much until morning—when he got the chance to question the others, and build up a picture of Sir Vivian’s last few hours.
He glanced at his watch, saw that it was getting on for the early hours, rose and thanked Tom and let himself out. By now, the doctor would have arrived. He’d have to supervise the removal of the body, do a preliminary check of the victim’s college rooms, then ask the Principal if he could make some sort of announcement at breakfast that the police wanted to speak to anyone who’d seen or spoken to Sir Vivian at any time on the day or evening of his death.
So far, he had no clear idea about the character of the dead man. The Principal had said he’d been a well-liked man. But then, he would, wouldn’t he?
Half of him hoped for a simple and straight forward ‘natural causes’ verdict. Another part of him sensed something more sinister was afoot. He sighed and glanced uneasily around the dark and deserted quad.
* * *
In her bed in Holywell, Nesta stirred and sighed in her sleep.
The dark stranger was back.
CHAPTER FIVE
Nesta rolled out of bed, sleepy-eyed and yawning. It was a grey sort of day, with a drizzling cold sky guaranteed to depress even the most bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
She brushed her teeth and changed, shivering, into her faithful pair of denims. She reached automatically for a striped green, blue and gold sweater that did wonders for her geometric cut of deep red hair. The green was the exact same shade of emerald as her eyes.
Nesta couldn’t afford to have a huge wardrobe, but what she had looked good on her. Unlike a lot of redheads, she actually liked her colouring, and had learned, over the years, how to dress to suit it.
She made herself a cup of coffee and shivered some more. The one constant thing about cheap rented accommodation, she’d always noticed, was how inefficient their heating was, come the winter time.
She left the cheerless bedsit, shrugging into her see-through plastic raincoat as she went, and walked through the gloom towards a little coffee shop near the centre of town. She didn’t mind the rain, and rather liked the cheerful hues of the umbrellas, the bright car headlights, and the general feeling of all-mucking-in-together, that assailed the British public in times of downpour.
She waited patiently in line for the local morning paper at the nearby newsagents, and carried it into the cafe with her. The cheap and cheerful yellow Formica tables and the gum-chewing insouciance of the waitress combined to lift her mood even further. She ordered a coffee, a couple of rounds of toast, and settled back in her window to seat to peruse the news. Wherever she was, Nesta always took a local paper. The national press more often than not carried only news of disaster, death and destruction. Or tales of the rich and glamorous, whose lifestyles failed to move her, or even touch her. She much preferred the day-to-day stories of ordinary, real people.
She read and munched and sipped quite happily for half an hour. A local lady had just retired as Dinner lady at a primary school, after 51 years of solid service. Fifty-one years! Nesta couldn’t imagine working in the same place for so long. A local boy scout had saved a neighbour’s dog f
rom drowning. A charity worker had died at the ripe old age of 92, and the town’s grateful residents were busy fund-raising for a memorial in his honour.
Because the newspaper’s deadline had long since passed when news had begun filtering in about a death at St Bede’s, a local reporter, roused from his bed, had only just been able to cobble together the bare details. And, because it was too expensive for a small paper to chop and change the front page once the presses had been set, Nesta almost missed the four inch paragraph, tucked away on page 7.
As it was, the dark bold little side headline caught her eye, in between a piece on a village fete, and an advertisement for car tyres.
‘OXFORD DON SLAIN IN CAR PARK’
Nesta, who’d just been raising her second mug of coffee to her lips, froze. Slowly, as she read, she put the mug back down on the table, her hands shaking.
She read the piece through twice, not quite believing what she was reading.
‘Police confirmed last night, that the body discovered in the car park of St Bede’s College, was that of the noted psychologist, Sir Vivian Dalrymple. Sir Vivian was a well-known lecturer and author of many well received works in the field of Experimental psychology.
It is believed that Sir Vivian was attacked by a mugger between the hours of 11.30 and 12.30, after attending a Dinner at the College. Police sources confirmed that the main gates, and the postern gates that led into the car park were, unusually, unlocked at the time of the slaying, and the police are not ruling out the possibility that Sir Vivian was killed by a drug addict, stealing to maintain his habit.
Lord Roland St John James, Principal of St Bede’s, has expressed his shock at such a thing happening in the College, and has offered his condolences to Sir Vivian’s family.’
And that was it.
Nesta sat and stared at the paper for a long time before stiffly rising to her feet, paying her bill and heading out once more into the cold and damp. It was too far to walk to Park Town, so Nesta returned for her VW Beetle, coaxed it into life, and twenty minutes later, was turning off the Banbury Road and parking more or less opposite Sir Vivian’s home.
Her mind, after a sluggish start, had begun functioning again.
As an ex college student herself, she knew about the tragic and insidious drugs culture that plagued University cities. The police obviously suspected Sir Vivian had been the victim of either a junkie (student or otherwise) or an opportunist thief, who’d found the doors to St Bede’s unlocked and had wandered in, too see what could be stolen. And Sir Vivian was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
All of Nesta’s previous feelings of wellbeing fizzled out into a depressing sense of anger and despair. It was so pointless! That lovely old man, a victim of some crazed or evil parasite! She supposed that, as a psychologist-in-the-making, she should be more tolerant, but . . . Hell! Being a shrink didn’t mean you couldn’t believe that some people were just downright ugly.
She sighed, trying to control her frustrated anger, and forced herself to calm down. She made a mental note to have a look around St Bede’s at some future point, but not just yet. First, she had to get back her father’s papers.
She brushed a tear away as she parked, locked the car and stood indecisively on the pavement, high hedges towering over her, dripping cold droplets of water down the back of her neck.
She shuddered, and glanced at his house. She should have been prepared for all the police cars parked outside his residence, of course, but in her shock, she hadn’t really been thinking straight.
She hedged around the small gaggle of curious people, who were standing outside the front entrance, and glanced, with the rest, through the closed wrought iron gates.
The garden looked just as she remembered it. Was it only a week or so ago that she’d stood there, watching him dead-head his roses. And now . . . She drew in a ragged breath, feeling ashamed of herself for coming here. And she really should have known better. As if it was likely that she’d really have been allowed to just waltz in and reclaim her things. Even something as important as her father’s thesis.
Nesta chewed on her lip uncertainly, and retreated across the road, back to her car with a head full of whirling thoughts. Her papers had to be in the house. Unless Sir Vivian had taken them to his office at St. Bede’s, his old college? But why would he do that?
For a long while Nesta stood there, uncertain what to do next. She supposed she could simply ask the policeman on duty when she might see someone in charge, and set about claiming back her property. But on the other hand, she was reluctant to interrupt the police at this important time. More than anything else, she wanted the man responsible for killing Sir Vivian caught and punished. Which meant giving the police plenty of room to do their job. And they wouldn’t be interested in her problems, unless they related to their investigation.
Which they obviously didn’t.
Nesta was still chewing her bottom lip, a habit of hers when she was anxious, and was moving restlessly from foot to foot, when Lisle Jarvis walked down the path and out through the gates.
The uniformed constable on guard nodded at him respectfully, but Nesta didn’t need this silent salute in order to pick him out as the man in charge. In spite of looking tired enough to drop, there was a raw, rough energy about the man that, even from across the distance of the road, reached out to her and teased at her femininity. All of a sudden, her heartbeat quickened.
‘All quiet, Constable?’
She heard the quiet, weary voice, even above the dim drumming of the rain and the murmur of the ghoulish sightseers. The constable nodded, and then, to her utter astonishment, said something and nodded in her direction. Instantly, a pair of brown eyes turned and focused on her.
Nesta had had no idea that her state of worry and agitation had been picked up by the constable, but then, in a sudden flash of comprehension, she realised that her body language must have been fairly screaming ‘anxiety’. And, of course, the police were trained observers. No doubt she’d stood out from the rest of the crowd, keeping herself a little apart, and looking more upset than merely just curious.
Nesta took her hands out of her pockets as the tall, tough-looking plainclothes policeman started across the road towards her. For one insane moment, she had the urge to bolt. Why, she couldn’t have said.
Perhaps it was a combination of shock and the fight-or-flight instinct, when faced with a tough predator. Certainly, she had to force herself to stand firm and calm as Lisle Jarvis walked purposefully towards her. His eyes, she noticed, were hazel. Deeply and thickly lashed, wonderful and sharp. They were looking at her with all of a policeman’s suspicion.
‘Good morning, Miss,’ Lisle began.
He was dog tired. He’d been up all night, supervising the removal of the body, and organising his small but experienced team. In just a few short hours he’d got a full guest list of last night’s Dinner from Sir Roland, as well as the addresses of all those concerned. He’d set his team into groups of two, who were even now beginning the preliminary interviews of all the potential witnesses. He was waiting on the forensics reports, and had arranged for another forensics team to go over the archery range at St Bede’s with a fine tooth comb. Not that he expected much. The room was too public, too well used. The trouble would be not that there was no evidence, but that there would be too much of it. Unless they could match a fibre from Sir Vivian’s body to a fibre in the room, he doubted that he would even be able to prove that the murderer had used a weapon from the archery room.
If, indeed, they had.
A little later on he’d be getting the autopsy report. Later on still, he would have to go and see Lady Dalrymple, which was something he was not looking forward to one little bit.
He’d been about to go home to get a few hours much needed rest, but had decided to take a quick look at Sir Vivian’s home first.
It was already full of policemen, going about their business, and, as he’d half-expected, coming up with nothing useful. So
when he’d trudged tiredly back to his car, and the constable on duty had pointed out to him a pretty, redheaded spectator who seemed to have a lot on her mind, he’d been both disgusted and hopeful. So far, even though it was such early days, they had nothing concrete to go on. Not even a motive.
But a pretty redhead always had potential. Could she be the murder victim’s mistress, perhaps?
Now, drawing up in front of her, Lisle could see that this redhead had an awful lot of potential indeed.
Her hair, cut in the shape of a bell, and coming to sharp points either side of her well-shaped mouth, was sprinkled with raindrops. Her figure, even beneath the see-through plastic raincoat, looked curvaceous and full. Her eyes were the colour of Irish fields.
Lisle dragged in a quick breath, taken by surprise by the tug of sexual pleasure and interest that suddenly started stirring, deep in his abdomen.
Since his divorce, he’d been living a celibate lifestyle, and hadn’t even noticed it much. Suddenly he was very much aware of a woman’s power. She’d nudged awake the dragon that had been sleeping within, and he wasn’t best pleased.
‘Can you tell me what you’re doing here?’ he asked, as usual, getting straight to the point. He was too damn tired to start making polite conversation.
Nesta blinked, opened her mouth, and then shut it again. What, after all, could she say? Explaining about her father’s thesis would involve a long, complicated, and totally irrelevant story, and she could already see this man was practically dead on his feet. As a psychologist she could see the symptoms of fatigue in his hollow eyes and gruff voice, and inaccessible approach.
So she smiled and shrugged one shoulder. ‘Nothing really. I just saw the crowd and wondered what was happening.’
But that sounded even worse. It made her sound like nothing more than a ghoulish sightseer. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t want to belittle herself in front of this man. She felt herself flush in shame and, unable to meet the disappointed look in his eyes, glanced down at her wet feet. Her shoes, she noticed belatedly, had a hole in them.
