Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries)

by Maria Hudgins

  I browsed through the contacts on my phone, then tapped on the photos. I hadn’t taken any recently, and the first ones I saw were those I took that day in Bram’s room after they’d taken his body away. They gave me a little shiver. I shielded the phone display from the fading afternoon light and saw a picture of Bram’s open closet door, another of his bare bed frame strewn with clothes and shoes, and a third of the tea tray on his table. Beside the tray stood a plastic water bottle. I recalled he had been using it as a sharps container. How many used syringes did it hold? I couldn’t see clearly because of the label on the bottle.

  I expanded the photo on the display and zeroed in on the bottle. Three. I thought I could make out the barrels of three syringes resting, needle-end down and at varying angles, in the bottle. That would be about right, I thought. He arrived at St. Ormond’s that day and may have taken an injection of insulin about that time. Another before dinner or, more likely, before the cocktail party. Then the third—when? Before bed? No. He was showing signs of hypoglycemia then because he had eaten nothing at the dinner, and must have realized the situation because there were cookie wrappers, tea bags, and empty sugar packets in his trash, I recalled. He wouldn’t have taken another dose of insulin under those circumstances.

  Unless he was confused.

  I know too well the confusion brought on by low blood sugar. But he would have had to go back down the stairs to the fridge beside the bathroom on the first floor, retrieve a syringe, and return to his room. He had followed me up the stairs and left me at the level on which his room was located, so he would have had to go back down to get his insulin and, given the state he was in at the time, he couldn’t have made it.

  I thought. I couldn’t be sure.

  I had to find that plastic bottle. Where was it now? Our scout would have taken it away when she cleaned the room. Then what? As soon as the cab let me out in front of the college gate, I flew in and asked the porter, “What do you do with sharps?” This made no sense to him, of course, so I explained.

  He nodded and told me, “We have a container where the scouts put sharp objects like needles. Once every week or so, the city picks it up and leaves us an empty one.”

  “When was the last time it was picked up?”

  “I don’t know. To tell the truth, they don’t really pick it up that often. More like once a month, I’d say.”

  What luck! “Where is the container?”

  “They keep it in the broom cupboard . . .” He pointed to a wall of the Porter’s Lodge where I could see no door, then realized he was indicating a broom closet you had to enter from the quad. “Who is your scout?” he asked.

  “Patricia,” I said. “But I can’t wait until she comes in tomorrow. This is urgent. Don’t you have a key? Please?”

  He mumbled and fumbled around with the papers on the small ledge on his side of the window. “We’re not to mess around with the sharps container. Regulations.”

  “I just want to see it.” Not true. I wanted to open it, but one thing at a time. The porter grabbed a key and led me into the quad where he stopped at the first door on the left and opened it. Inside, scores of brooms, buckets, rags, and the distinctive smell of dirty mops. A bright red sharps bin sat on the floor near the back wall.

  “There it is, but it’s against the law to open it.”

  “May I pick it up and shake it?”

  I took his silence as permission. The bin looked large enough to hold several weeks’, if not months’, worth of sharp instruments discarded in a place like this. I picked it up and shook it, listening.

  “It’s empty.”

  Two possibilities. The city had picked up hazardous waste in the last three days or our scout hadn’t put the syringes in the bin at all. I’d have to wait now and talk to her tomorrow morning. I prayed she’d remember what she did with them—and that she’d tell me. Given the black market for used syringes among addicts, I couldn’t count on it.

  Climbing the stairs as far as Mignon’s room I knocked, expecting no answer, but she surprised me by opening the door. “Would you like to go to dinner with me?” I asked.

  This was the night before the end of the conference, and I figured the dinner would be a good one. I hoped they’d have pheasant again. Mignon seemed glad of the invitation. “I was thinking of going out to eat, but this is already paid for, isn’t it?”

  “Certainly. Why waste food we’ve already bought?”

  After a quick change and freshen-up, Mignon and I walked to the dining hall together. I was wearing my last clean blouse and Mignon sported the long, blue, crushed-velvet dress she’d worn the first night.

  Before we walked in, Mignon stopped me with a hand on my arm. “I need to tell you something.”

  We shifted sideways, away from the dining room doors, so diners wouldn’t have to swerve around us. I didn’t want to miss a word of whatever Mignon had to tell me. She looked into my eyes so directly and intently it was a bit uncomfortable.

  “You were right about the bones,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “About us having Arthur’s and Guinevere’s bones. That TVRA you saw on Bram’s notes? It stands for Thames Valley Radiocarbon Accelerator. They do carbon dating. They’ve tested the bones Bram found in Sharpham and they date to four hundred fifty A.D., give or take, so we know they are Arthur’s and Guinevere’s. The size of that leg bone, they figure, would have made the man nearly seven feet tall! Who else could it be? The problem now is that I don’t have money to pay for the lab work, and they won’t give me the bones until I pay them. They ran five tests and I owe them a thousand pounds.”

  “How did Bram plan to pay for it?”

  “He had the money in cash, but I don’t know where he put it after he got here. He must have hidden it, but I’ve searched his room with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “What about Bram’s mother? Did you ask her?”

  “She would’ve laughed at me.” Mignon made an ugly face. “I’ve put the problem to my friends and they’re with me. We’re trying to raise the money, but until we do, I can’t leave Oxford. I can’t leave the bones of our immortal king with people who don’t know or care about their sacred power!”

  I passed over the oxymoron, bones of our immortal king, and asked, “Where in Sharpham did Bram find these bones? How did he know where to look?”

  “Well now, that’s for later. It’ll all come clear in good time.”

  She was refusing to tell me! Saving it for a press conference, I didn’t doubt. Or a book deal.

  “But I know you’re on our side. You’re the one who got Bram on the speaker’s list to begin with! It’s only a thousand pounds. I’m sure you paid more than that for your flight over here. Could you? I hate to ask but I don’t know who else to turn to.”

  She was refusing to tell me where they found the bones and asking me to get them out of hock for her, in the same breath! “Excuse me,” I said. “I need to go to my room.” I backed away from her. “And I wasn’t the one who put Bram on the program. I knew nothing about it until I read it that morning.”

  I left by the north gate of the college and tramped down to the Pret a Manger on Cornmarket Street for something to eat. I resented Mignon’s forcing me to miss the last dinner at St. Ormond’s and realized that hadn’t been her plan, but the nerve of her! Refusing to tell me where they’d found the bones while asking me for money to pay for their tests. From a purely practical standpoint, I’d have been smarter to swallow my fury and try to get more out of her during dinner, but I hadn’t, so that was that.

  I ate in my room, phoned Lettie, and found there was no news about Lindsey, then gathered my things for a trip to the shower. Once there, I draped my robe over the dormant radiator and went into the toilet niche in an L off the shower space. The window was wide open, letting in a cool breeze, and I heard distant voices, probably diners going to or from the SCR. Again, I cursed Mignon Beaulieu for making me miss not only dinner but the last night our group would gather in the SCR. I imagined there’d be a
lively discussion tonight, now that all the papers and workshops were over. A masculine guffaw drifted across the lawn and through the window. I could still go to the SCR. There’d be plenty of wine and it might be the last time I’d see some of these people.

  A huge shadow, a human head and torso, undulated along the uneven stones on the opposite side of the quad. Its shadow legs stretched across the lawn to a spot not far from my window. I stood on my tiptoes and looked down, past the wisteria vine clinging to the wall below, and saw Keith Bunsen ambling past no more than five feet away from me. Actually I saw his head, his lower body obscured by tendrils and leaves. I started to call to him, realized I was in the toilet, and decided a shout-out would be potentially embarrassing. I stepped out and down a few steps to the staircase entrance.

  By this time Keith was in the arched entrance at the main gate. The shadows, I saw, were made by a floodlight attached to the side of the building at a height that played shadows of passersby across the lawn and onto the north wing of the quad. Returning to the shower room, I got a flash of déjà vu. I’d seen the same shadow phenomenon a few nights ago, but I’d spotted no one I knew.

  I intended to go over the day’s events before I fell asleep. So many new pieces had to be fit into a picture that seemed just beyond my reach. It seemed as if the whole thing would come clear if I were only a little bit smarter. As if one or two more observations, correctly interpreted, would bring this whole mess into focus, and make me slap my head. Why didn’t I see it sooner? I climbed into bed, clicked off the bedside lamp, and reviewed two facts I thought were relevant. That Bram Fitzwaring was in Keith Bunsen’s diabetes study, and that he was in the control group, not the experimental group. Keith was worried about losing more subjects in that latter group, because the math—I recalled his mentioning the old chi-square monster—would go wonky, even if most of the remaining subjects were doing well. But what about losing one more person in the control group? My own math skills didn’t include chi-squares, but I’d heard other graduate students back home refer to the test. Students whose work involved statistics—mine didn’t—had to use a certain formula to find out if the results of their work meant anything.

  I sat up, switched my light back on, and pulled my iPad from under my bed. Typing “Chi-square” into Google, I found a site with a truly scary algebraic equation—the chi-square formula—but scrolling down a bit farther I came to a simple little chart where you could plug in numbers and it would do the math for you. It required two numbers each for two different groups (control and experimental.) I played with it until I discovered that smaller numbers in the experimental column could drive the results into insignificance, but smaller numbers in the control column as well could drive it back to significance.

  In other words, it was possible that a researcher could see years’ worth of hard work go down the drain by the loss of a single person from his test group, but it was also possible to fix the problem by eliminating one person from the control group.

  That suggested an ugly new possibility.

  My first thought upon waking Wednesday morning was that my plane home was leaving in a day and a half. Lettie, of course, wouldn’t leave until Lindsey was either recovered from her gunshot wound or . . . well. That didn’t bear thinking about. King Arthur’s bones, if they were Arthur’s bones, would be left in the hands of people who would do God knows what with them. Charge admission to see them? Throw them back to “The Lady in the Lake”? I couldn’t imagine, but I knew Mignon Beaulieu wouldn’t hand them over to history scholars and archaeologists for proper study.

  The morning was one of those bright but misty ones that brought Matthew Arnold’s “dreaming spires” to mind. From my tiny third-floor window, I looked out across domes and steeples that had changed little in hundreds of years. I decided to take a walk before breakfast. This time I went south off the High, down Magpie Lane past Oriel College, and, as on my last early morning foray, met John Fish, the ghost tour guide, trudging up past Merton College. I wondered if he ever slept or if he wandered the streets all night. I turned and joined him.

  He’d already heard about the shooting of a visiting doctor at the Radcliffe Hospital. He knew the victim was going out with St. Giles Bell. He didn’t know she was the daughter of my best friend.

  “Oh.” He stopped and looked at me. “I’m sorry to hear that. Have they arrested the bastard?”

  “Bell? He has an alibi. He was in London.”

  “They’d better look close at that alibi. He’s a slick one. He’ll get people to lie for him.”

  “Maybe I’ll learn more today.”

  He told me more about the circumstances surrounding the death of Bell’s wife earlier that year, while I struggled to separate rumor from fact, and fact from newspaper speculations. As John talked, I found myself looking in vain for anything that would exclude an injection of saxitoxin as a reason why the poor woman fell down the stairs. One of the poison’s first effects, I knew from my recent reading, is the loss of muscular coordination.

  “Are you sure,” I asked, “that your friend only did her Grey Lady act one time?”

  “Bumps McAlister? Sure. Why would she have done it twice? It was hard enough to talk her into doing it once. She weren’t keen on the idea.” He stopped and poked at something on the sidewalk with his skull-headed cane. “Thought somebody might chase her down and hurt her.”

  “Bumps is the wife of the owner of The Green Man?”

  “Right.”

  “But Daphne Wetmore was in on it? Did Harold Wetmore know about it?”

  “I doubt it. He’d probably have put paid to the whole thing if he knew. At first Mrs. Wetmore didn’t like the idea, either. Thought it would be unscholarly. Then she thought better of it and decided it might be just the thing to get Harold’s conference off to a great start.”

  “So it was your idea. For publicity, was it?”

  “For fun. Just to see what those stuffed shirts would do if they saw a ghost.”

  We were almost back to the High. As I looked ahead through the narrow gap that was Magpie Lane, I saw the Grey Lady again. “Whoa!” I ran as fast as I could up the lane and turned left to catch her. “Excuse me?”

  She stopped and turned. It was Georgina Wetmore and she was wearing a plain old black anorak with the hood up. In the misty morning light and in the narrow space at the entrance to the lane, I realized, she had appeared fuzzy and rather ghostlike. She said, “Good morning! Going to St. Ormond’s? Me, too.”

  John Fish remained behind, none the wiser for my silly mistake. He called out to me, “I’ll see you later.”

  At breakfast I sat with Claudia Moss. Some members of our group were already rolling luggage out the gates. Claudia and I talked, mostly about Larry Roberts. I didn’t feel comfortable with this because I knew Larry’s wife personally and, to my knowledge, neither of them was considering a separation or divorce, so this thing between him and Claudia was simply an extramarital fling. Funny thing was, Claudia was perfectly okay with that. She knew Larry was married and, as she calmly drizzled honey on her toast, mentioned that she didn’t plan to ever see Larry again. “I’m taking the train back to London and I may not see him before I leave. If I do miss him, give him my best, all right?”

  Just like that? As if she’d no more than had dinner with him! Am I that out of touch with the times?

  “My PhD is still in limbo,” I said. “Larry’s last words on the subject were, ‘You can forget that PhD,’ but since yesterday at the Wetmores’ tea we’ve sort of made up.”

  “Don’t worry about it. He was in a terrible state earlier. Once you’re home, it’ll all come round right.”

  “I still don’t get why he was in such a terrible state. He’s normally laid back. At this whole conference it’s been as if he was out of control. Totally beyond reasoning.”

  “It’s Harold Wetmore.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Harold. If Harold hadn’t been here, Larry would have been a different
person.”

  “Sorry. I don’t get it.”

  “You know how people are. We all have someone whose approval we require above all others. Someone we have to impress.” Claudia paused for a sip of her tea. “Don’t you have someone who lurks in your brain? I call it my inner audience. I don’t often admit this, but mine is a roommate I had at Cambridge.” She paused again, and I had enough sense not to interrupt. “She was always better at everything, her parents were classier, her beaus were handsomer, her clothes were trendier, her hair was . . . !” Claudia waved the memory away with one hand and lowered her voice. Others were turning to look. “Anyway. However many times I tell myself it’s quite silly, I can’t change the fact that she’s always there in my head and I’m playing to her. My audience.”

  I thought about it. Was she right? Who was my inner audience? Chet Lamb? Much as I deplored the thought, I feared he was. Always there, watching, while I show him I’m doing great without him. “So you’re saying Harold Wetmore is Larry Roberts’s audience?”

  “Larry studied under Harold when he was a student here. He worked like hell to support his ideas in debates with Harold, but Harold bested him every time. He knew so much more. Of course! Harold had been at it longer. Now Larry is more like Harold’s equal in that they both have good posts at good universities, but he’s still trying to prove himself to Harold and he always will be.”

  “And Harold hates the romantics who perpetuate the myths of English history.”

  “Exactly. And Larry tries to out-hate Harold. If Harold is outraged that some of the Glastonbury crowd wormed their way into our conference, Larry is doubly outraged.”

  “I wish we had time to know each other better. If you’re ever in America, look me up.”

  “I won’t look you up unless you promise you won’t tell Larry.”