Caroline Minuscule

by Andrew Taylor

  Dougal laughed. ‘Gumperish to the very end,’ he said and then realized that he must sound flippant; but perhaps it didn’t matter for surely the ordinary etiquette of death would be inappropriate here.

  3

  Dougal went west with rush hour crowds, his mind preoccupied with the necessity of establishing an equilibrium between the memory of Gumper and the reassuring presence of 200 pounds in his wallet. Like an automaton, he changed on to the District Line at Hammersmith and got off at Turnham Green. With his eyes half-closed he walked down to Chiswick High Road, where habit drove him into an off-licence. He bought a bottle of Veuve Clicquot – might as well do things properly – half a bottle of brandy and some angosturas. The Scot who managed the place with a grim disregard for the convenience of his customers scratched his red beard, leant his great belly against the counter and said: ‘Having a party, are we? If you’re going to mix those, you’d be far better off with sparkling wine.’ Dougal was too tired to think of an answer. He took the clanking carrier bag and left the shop, banging his thigh on a monolith constructed of beer cans on the way out. A dry Scottish chuckle followed him out into the night.

  Amanda lived on the other side of the High Road, the side nearer the river. You could sense its great grey presence a quarter of a mile away, and even see a tiny square of water, framed by buildings, from the window of Amanda’s room. It was a room with a view, she said, which presumably explained why the Polish landlord felt obliged to charge so much rent for it.

  The house was semidetached and had seen far better days. Amanda had a large room at the back of the house on the first floor. The door was open and he went in. Amanda wasn’t there, which sent a wave of desolation over him. He felt an infantile urge to scream, ‘It’s not fair!’ But the room was as welcoming as ever. It was large, dimly lit and cavernous; there were plants everywhere – they hung from the ceiling, crouched on the floor and occupied most of the available surfaces between the two. A gas fire – of the old-fashioned type where, if you stared long enough, it was easy to see glowing Oriental palaces – hissed light and warmth. Dougal liked the carpet best of all – it was Persian, comfortably shabby, with a dark blue pattern on a red background.

  There was a step behind him. He swung round to see Amanda standing in the doorway looking simultaneously cross and beautiful; she was one of the few people he knew who could combine the two.

  ‘Hullo, love,’ he said, aware of relief oozing out of him like sweat. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘In the loo. Some bugger’s gone and blocked it again. With the Daily Telegraph.’

  The other tenants of the house were a source of endless irritation and interest to her, according to their sex. Amanda was generally on terms of mute hostility towards the women, which occasionally burst into sporadic verbal warfare when Amanda’s record player was thought to be too loud, or when old Mrs Middle, to whom the sweet and sickly smell of death had clung for years, had allowed her portly marmalade pussy to defecate in the bath once more. The male inhabitants of the house, however, venerated Amanda and she returned the compliment by sending them to the doctor when they were ill and disentangling their emotional problems with the clinical competence of a heart surgeon.

  On the whole, Dougal reckoned that Mrs Middle was the most likely culprit for the lavatory, but he wisely held his tongue and changed the subject by letting his carrier bag clink suggestively.

  He left his own news until they were sitting on two large cushions in front of the fire. Amanda made champagne cocktails with swift efficiency, talking of what she had done today. She did freelance work for publishers – her father was managing director of a firm – and had read a couple of tedious manuscripts.

  Dougal found her words almost as reassuring as the alcohol. A part of him had been secretly afraid that the whole world had shifted away from normality at five o’clock this evening, that the earthquake within his own life was merely an insignificant tremor emanating from a more general cataclysm; it was pleasant to find the fear groundless, even if it was the kind of fear which he couldn’t admit to himself.

  When Amanda, her long black hair swinging like a protective shield in front of her face, asked him what sort of day he had had, he told her the truth: ‘Gumper got garotted and I’ve been offered one thousand two hundred pounds for a couple of days’ work.’ He had to tell someone, and she was the only person he wanted to know, in any case. If she found the whole business distasteful – and he wasn’t entirely sure that he didn’t himself – then the sooner he knew the better. As Amanda had been talking, a certainty had emerged unobtrusively from his mind: he cared enough for her to do what she wanted – even if it meant turning down Hanbury’s offer and going through the hideously embarrassing process of talking frankly to the police. It was strange, the way that the events of the evening had clarified, almost crystallized, his feelings – about Amanda and also, to a lesser extent, about dying. Other people dying.

  But Amanda’s reaction, after she had been convinced that she had heard him correctly and that he wasn’t mounting an elaborate hoax, came as a surprise to him: she was exhilarated by it all and pumped him for details. She made him go through everything which had happened, even down to Primrose’s presence in the Common-Room. Dougal found himself wondering if she was one of those people to whom the ordinary routines of daily life were fundamentally boring – whether, had she been born thirty years earlier, she would have looked back on the war as the only time in her life when she had been properly alive. It was an uncomfortable thought and he put it away from him.

  She brought to the surface many of the questions which had been in his own mind.

  ‘Why was that old photograph worth killing Gumper? What do you think it’s all about?’

  ‘God knows,’ said Dougal. ‘I’ve not really looked at it yet. It looks like the first page of some religious book – it’s in Latin. Very pretty, really, if you like that sort of thing. There’s a squiggle in the top left-hand corner – liber something – which might tell us who owned the book at one time. By the look of the script it’s lateish – and maybe written in this country.’

  ‘Lateish?’ asked Amanda.

  ‘I should have said, it’s written in Caroline Minuscule, the script I’m meant to know about. Lateish could mean it was written in the eleventh century rather than the ninth.’ He was rather enjoying being able to parade his knowledge, superficial thought he knew it was. It was the first time it had actually been useful to him, he realized, and he wondered if it would be the last.

  They talked aimlessly for an hour about what might possibly lie behind it all. It was like being in heavy fog in a city, Dougal said – a few square yards of clear vision and that awful feeling of limitless, hidden activity around it. Amanda said, bring on the fog lamps, and mixed another cocktail.

  They were up by ten next morning, rather to Dougal’s surprise; he had expected the stresses and strains of yesterday to keep him asleep for much longer; quite apart from that, he rarely got up before eleven in term-time.

  Dougal made a pot of coffee and sat by the fire. Amanda wriggled into a torn silk kimono, a battlefield for faded yellow dragons, and perched cross-legged on a cushion beside him. She had forgotten to remove her makeup last night (or had they been too drunk to bother with that sort of detail?); her eyes were ringed with blue and swollen with sleep. She looked like a battered innocent and Dougal found the sight so pleasurable that he wondered if he was a latent sadist.

  He had two clear days in front of him. Hanbury had arranged to telephone him at the pay phone outside the Graduate Common-Room the day after tomorrow, Thursday. He decided to go to the University Library today – with luck he might get the whole of it out of the way by this evening. Amanda was in a flippant mood and tried to persuade him to dress for the part by going in disguise. It irritated him, this levity, though he tried to conceal it. To her, last night’s events were only one degree more real than a crime series on the television – more exciting, because it was h
appening to him, but still remote enough to make jokes about it. But she hadn’t seen Gumper.

  He switched the radio on, wondering if the murder had reached Capital Radio by now. It hadn’t – perhaps Gumper’s death was too insignificant for the media to take any notice. Or perhaps – a less comfortable thought – the police had their reasons for biding their time before releasing the news of it.

  Two hours later, Dougal was back in Russell Square. He walked through the car park towards the back entrance of Senate House. The great tower which contained floor after floor of the library dwarfed him; Dougal felt that its architect must have designed it as a perpetual reminder that the way of learning was austere and serious; it made him want to daub slogans all over it with a red paint spray – even WEST HAM RULES would have a humanizing effect on it.

  The lift took him up to the entrance of the library on the fourth floor. He flashed his plastic membership card at the porter, who ignored it, and passed through the turnstile like a sheep into a pen. Turning right he weaved his way through the crowd round the issue desk and walked through the cataloguing hall to the swing doors leading to the northern section of the library. He quickened his pace in the next room, because he caught a glimpse of a thickset back covered with a mustard-yellow tweed jacket going into the Middlesex North reading room. He really couldn’t face a conversation with Primrose at this point.

  The Paleography Room was at the far end of the building. Dougal was glad to see that it was nearly empty. A couple of female archive students were muttering gloomily to one another at the table nearest the door, their heads close together over a photostat. He heard the one with glasses saying with hushed passion, ‘But the ascenders are beginning to fork. And Bastard Anglicana would never be so scruffy . . .’

  Dougal sat down at the table diagonally opposite, close to a window. He took from his pockets a small notebook, a fountain pen and the photograph. The latter was slightly dog-eared after the journey, but fortunately it was a good print. He began by transcribing the first few lines:

  Aurelii Augustini doctoris de pastoribus sermo incipit. Spes tota nostra quia in Christo est et quia omnis . . . ‘Here begins the sermon of the teacher Aurelius Augustine concerning shepherds. Our entire hope is in Christ . . .’

  It didn’t take a doctorate in divinity to recognize one of Augustine’s sermons when it was so clearly announced. The capital S in Spes was either decorated or ornamented: on a black-and-white reproduction it was impossible to tell whether the arabesques which writhed around the letter had been done with ink or paint.

  Still, the script was easy to transcribe. The abbreviations were the standard ones for the period and in any case it would be easy to find a printed text to illuminate any difficulties. But none of this made it any easier to answer the central question – why a medieval sermon should be worth 1,200 pounds and at least one death.

  Although the work was relatively simple, it took well over an hour to jot down the contents of the page; he decided to leave the translation until later. The last line ended abruptly in mid-sentence. On rather an ominous note, too: veniet enim dies – ‘for the day will come.’

  Dougal stretched and wondered which particular day St Augustine had in mind. His neck was aching and he was thirsty; he recognized the familiar signs of boredom which working in a library tended to induce in him. He needed a change of scene, he realized, and picked up the notebook and photograph and went downstairs to the refectory.

  He bought a cup of coffee at the counter and took it to an empty table near the exit. The coffee tasted of mud. Peering into its murky depths, Dougal wondered why the British put up with such an awful travesty.

  He pulled out the photograph and looked at it again. The hardest part was yet to come – getting an idea of the date and provenance of the manuscript. He worked out a few rough guidelines.

  For a start, it was definitely written in Caroline Minuscule, rather than the only other possibility – the deliberately anachronistic Humanistica of the fifteenth century. It was easy to confuse the two. Dougal could remember Gumper being particularly unpleasant to someone (was it Primrose?) who had failed to notice the dotted ‘i’s and the ‘t’s with vertical strokes reaching above their crossbars, which distinguished the later script.

  Caroline Minuscule, then: anywhere between A.D. 800 and A.D. 1200. But probably later – the characters of this script were relatively tall and spiky, the ascenders of some of the letters were wedge-shaped – which might imply it had been written in Britain.

  In the corner of his eye he caught a flash of mustard-yellow cruising determinedly in his direction. Oh, God, Primrose. Dougal flipped over the photograph and looked up with a smile on his face and a feeling akin to hatred in his heart. Primrose was smiling in greeting, too – a toothy grin of satisfaction. His wiry, carrot-coloured hair was smoothed down with Brilliantine and he wore a shield-encrusted tie: he was obviously dolled up for someone.

  ‘Hullo, Bill. Mind if I join you? Don’t see you here often.’

  He chuckled throatily and sat down. Dougal noticed that he had another pimple beginning to erupt on his nose. He hated people calling him Bill; it was only slightly better than Willy. And he hated himself for the way he was pleasant to people he didn’t like.

  ‘Have you heard the news? About Gumper, I mean. Terrible, isn’t it?’

  Dougal’s head jerked up. ‘No. What’s happened?’ Very good, he told himself: just the right note of gossipy curiosity.

  ‘He’s dead. Someone murdered him.’ Pee-Pee waited for Dougal to react suitably.

  ‘Christ . . . you’re joking. When? What happened?’

  Primrose bent forward confidentially. ‘When I got to the Department this morning, the place was swarming with police. The secretary was having hysterics on the doorstep – no one was allowed in, of course. I had a word with the chap on the door, though, and it seemed someone strangled Gumper yesterday afternoon. Just walked in, bold as brass, and did it.’

  Dougal offered Primrose a cigarette, took one himself and lit them both. ‘Have the police any idea who did it – and the motive?’

  ‘They weren’t giving anything away. I knew better than to try to pump them. But as a matter of fact I was able to be rather useful to them.’

  ‘You didn’t see the murderer?’ Dougal spoke more sharply than he had intended and wondered if Primrose had noticed.

  ‘No, not exactly.’ Primrose sounded regretful. He was absorbed in his story. ‘But the police wanted to know everyone who had been in the building yesterday after lunch. I was able to help – I’d been up in the Common-Room from about two to five-thirty. This plainclothes sergeant questioned me for ages in the incident-van – they’ve got one parked outside the main entrance. I had to mention your name, of course.’

  I bet you did, thought Dougal. ‘Yes, I popped in for a few minutes to kill time before the pubs opened.’ Rather an unfortunate choice of verb.

  ‘Just after five, wasn’t it?’ Dougal nodded. ‘I don’t suppose you saw anything?’

  ‘No, I just came straight up. There was no one around that I can remember. Oh, I think I could hear typing from the secretary’s office.’ Primrose was looking a little disappointed, so Dougal stimulated him with a question. ‘Does anyone know more details?’

  ‘Well, there’s lots of rumours flying around. We all went for a cup of coffee afterwards – me, Monica, Judith and a few others – and pooled our information.’ You do surprise me, thought Dougal with elephantine sarcasm, for once a truly sensational carcass for the scandal vultures. ‘Judith had heard he’d been garotted – you know, when they put a thin cord round your neck like one of those cheese slicers they use in shops.’

  ‘Where did she get that from?’ Dougal injected a touch of incredulity into his voice: a certain spur to Primrose’s inclination to confide.

  ‘From one of the cleaners. She’s married to Bert – that porter who doesn’t believe in consonants – he was the one who actually found the body last night, when
he was locking up.’

  They talked for a few minutes more, but Dougal could get nothing else out of him besides a predictable spate of speculation and the forthcoming motion the Students’ Union were planning for the next meeting, deploring violence within the college.

  But as Dougal went back up the stairs to the Paleography Room, he had to admit to himself that he was worried. The business had seemed manageable while knowledge of it was confined to himself and Hanbury – and possibly Gumper, of course. But now it was no longer private, he felt suddenly that anything could happen.

  4

  By the time he had sat down with the photograph in front of him he had argued himself into a more optimistic frame of mind. Really, things couldn’t be better. Primrose would have heard any rumours, true or false: he had a genius for gossip. Everything pointed to the fact that the police were making no progress, just going through the routines of homicide.

  While he was thinking, his eyes were resting idly on the words scribbled on the top left-hand corner of the page – liber . . . His mind, occupied with the police, executed a swift change of direction, one of those sideways strides which make puzzle solving a pleasurable activity. The words were in a later hand than the rest of the manuscript, a crabbed cursive. Suddenly they made sense; the letters and the contractions which confused them unscrambled themselves and became, with miraculous clarity, liber monacborum sancti tumwulfi – a book of the monks of St Tumwulf.

  Dougal had never heard of St Tumwulf, which was a good sign. Even in the Middle Ages, few churches would have been dedicated to an obscure Anglo-Saxon saint. He got the relevant reference book – Knowles and Hadcock’s Medieval Religious Houses in England and Wales – down from the shelf and checked the index. Only two monasteries had been dedicated to Tumwulf – a small pre-Conquest convent in Northumberland, the saint’s birthplace, and the great abbey of Rosington in Huntingdonshire, where Tumwulf had his ministry and found his martyrdom.