Death of an Old Goat

by Robert Barnard

  ‘There’s no need to blaspheme,’ said the girl. ‘I don’t know what the manager will say, I’m sure. I mean, who is going to pay for the room?’

  ‘That’s not my bloody look-out, is it? Now, I’ve got some questions I want answered.’

  ‘I was off-duty, Inspector, so I saw nothing at all,’ she said, looking as if he had made an improper suggestion.

  ‘Would you mind just answering the questions?’ said Royle heavily, ‘then we’ll be through much quicker.’

  ‘Well, you’d better come through to the manager’s sitting-room,’ she said. ‘Police in the reception room would not make a nice impression on our clientele.’

  She led the way into a bright little room with mauve easy chairs and a big bowl of plastic gladioli. Royle remembered it from the case of the manager and that young lass, which he had thought was a very nice type of case indeed.

  ‘Now, then,’ he said, taking out his notebook and making laborious preparations for writing in it. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘His name was Belville-Smith, and he was a Professor,’ said the girl rather sullenly. She had decided she did not like Royle’s type.

  ‘What of?’ asked Royle.

  ‘What of? What do you mean, what of?’

  ‘If you’re a Professor, you’re always a Professor of something,’ said Royle, who had learnt that much since coming to Drummondale.

  ‘How should I know?’ said the girl, doubly resentful for the lecture. ‘Something educational, I suppose.’

  ‘Who booked him in, then?’

  ‘Professor Wickham booked the room by phone a fortnight ago, and he drove him here on Monday.’

  Professor Wickham. Royle knew Professor Wickham. Prominent Country Party supporter, him and his wife. The better sort of Professor, in other words. Took a sticker for his car when they had a ‘Support Your Local Bobby’ campaign a year or so ago. Had a cheeky bastard of a son. Still, could be worse.

  ‘English, then, I suppose,’ he muttered.

  ‘Oh yes, the old man was English,’ said the girl, not understanding. ‘You could tell that by his voice. Very old-fashioned-sounding, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘You met him and spoke to him, then?’

  ‘I spoke to him on the phone. I can’t say I met him, really, because he didn’t get out of the car when he booked in. Professor Wickham did all that.’

  ‘What did you talk to him about on the phone?’

  ‘The silly old b . . . The old gentleman was a little annoyed on the night he arrived over the fact that we do not serve dinner. Got quite worked up about it, he did. Some people expect the moon, really they do. And he was quite nasty when I suggested he might like to eat Chinese.’

  ‘He didn’t eat at Professor Wickham’s on the night he arrived here, then?’

  ‘Oh no. Professor Wickham drove off again just a few minutes after he brought him here.’

  ‘Where did he eat that night?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Anyway, that was Monday. What about yesterday? Did he go anywhere yesterday?’

  ‘How should I know? This is a motel, not a YWCA. We don’t keep a check on our visitors. We have a very nice class of customer, so we don’t need to. Look, why don’t you go and talk to Professor Wickham? He was his host, after all.’

  ‘Don’t try and teach me my job, young lady,’ said Royle as he lumbered to the door.

  But Wickham it is, he thought, getting into his car. God damn these university people.

  CHAPTER VIII

  PROFESSOR WICKHAM

  LUCY WICKHAM was a woman born to rise to occasions. Part of her frustration was due to the fact that the lethargic country town to which she found herself transported (due solely to the fact that there had been no other applicant for the chair) offered her all too few occasions to rise to. Even the Queen had managed to avoid it on most of her visits to Australia, and there were few places in Australia of which that could be claimed. But whatever else might be said about a murder — and Lucy was torn between sheer animal excitement at the thought of it, and the feeling that it didn’t give the town tone — it was certainly an occasion, and it brought out all her latent energy and unreasonableness. At the very moment Inspector Royle was speeding along the dreary flat road to the University cursing his luck, Lucy was on the phone to her husband for the fourth time that day, broaching her latest demand, in her best public-school headmistress voice.

  ‘All I ask,’ she said, ‘is that you don’t mention Peggy Lullham.’ The voice took on the tone of a veiled threat, that tone which Professor Wickham had such a healthy fear of. ‘Leave her out of it altogether.’

  ‘We just can’t do that, dear,’ he said, patiently reasonable, and unreasonably patient. ‘You know what they say in detective stories. If you tell the whole truth, and don’t try to conceal anything, you have nothing to fear.’

  ‘That’s fiction, this is fact,’ said Lucy. She thought for a moment, then added: ‘That’s England. This is Australia.’

  ‘Anyway, what’s it all about?’ asked Wickham. ‘Why is she to be left out of things? Last time I heard from you all your friends were thrilled to bits at the whole business.’

  ‘They were, at first,’ said Lucy. ‘But some of them have been thinking it over. It’s all very well to say “Back your local cop,” but you can’t slip them a fiver in a murder case. All the Press would be on to it in five minutes, you know what reporters are. Peggy didn’t say why she didn’t want her name mentioned. Or rather she said her husband wouldn’t like it. But I suppose it was that shop-lifting business last year that’s made her wary. She thought they might want to bring it up again.’

  ‘Shoplifting! With all the money the Lullhams have got? You’ve never mentioned that before.’

  ‘Everyone knows. Oh, it was pure absent-mindedness. I’ve never forgiven Darcy’s for making all that fuss about it.’

  ‘What was it she took?’

  ‘A lamb’s-wool coat.’

  ‘She must have an infinite capacity for absent-mindedness,’ said Profesor Wickham, impressed.

  ‘It was a short coat,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Anyway, it’s impossible, and you’ll just have to make her see that. Somebody’s bound to mention her before long. One of the people here will, obviously.’

  ‘If you had any control over them — ’

  ‘Or Doncaster. Or one of your friends. I can’t see them all magnanimously forgetting she was there.’

  The truth of this seemed to strike Lucy, and as he was letting it sink in, his secretary knocked on the door, and poked round it an excited middle-aged face. The English Department was quite the most boring department in the university to work for as a rule, since most of the members of it were too lethargic to play at University politics, and she was getting immense cachet from the secretarial sorority over this little business.

  ‘Inspector Royle to see you, Professor Wickham,’ she said. ‘Shall I show him straight in?’

  ‘The inspector is here, darling,’ said Wickham, putting down the phone.

  Royle was sweating in all the places a man does sweat in, and sweating obviously. He was drawing his regulation blue handkerchief round his bull-neck as he came in. It was a warm day, he was nervous as a kitten, and he had been deprived of his normal outlets. He was also in a very bad temper, but he was determined not to vent it on Professor Wickham. Wickham, as a Professor, was ranged in his social register somewhere between the gentry and the shopkeepers, and he was not going to get on the wrong side of him, temper or no temper. He looked around the sparsely furnished room. Bookshelves on two sides, Wickham seated with his back to the window, the Venetian blinds half-closed, to conceal the fact that outside the knots of students were gathering, hoping to see one or other member of the English Department (preferably Dr Day, whose lectures were several degrees worse than anyone else’s) dragged off kicking and screaming to the Police Station. Royle sat down heavily in the easy chair on the professorial length of blue carpeti
ng (two feet by three feet) and took out his notebook and pencil.

  ‘Well now, Professor,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I need occupy you too long this time. I’m just collecting the gen, so to speak. Putting myself in the picture you might say. Now, this old — gentleman who’s been done in: he was your guest, wasn’t he?’

  ‘The department’s guest, Inspector,’ said Wickham rather nervously, ‘the department’s.’

  The distinction took some time to sink in.

  ‘Like, he wasn’t a personal friend or anything you mean?’

  ‘No indeed. Nothing of the sort. I’ve never seen him in my life before to my knowledge, unless I went to some of his lectures in my Oxford days, but if I did I don’t remember them.’ He rather wished he had not made this admission. ‘Anyway, I’m quite certain I’ve never met him before on a social occasion.’

  ‘So he wasn’t a friend. Could you say he was here on — ’ the phrase was brought out rather proudly — ‘academic business?’

  ‘You could put it that way, I suppose. He was on a lecture tour. We often get people going round the country you know, giving lectures at each of the universities. The British Council sponsors them usually, or the Commonwealth Universities Association. Often they are retired English Professors, and such like, and sometimes very elderly indeed, like Professor Belville-Smith. He’d been to Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and so on, and he was due to go on to Brisbane today.’

  ‘So he’d given his lectures here?’

  ‘One. We didn’t want to overstrain him, since we had heard he was — a bit on the feeble side, so he just had the one yesterday, and was due to give the other today.’

  ‘You won’t get any more lecturing out of him,’ said Royle, giving way to his usual vein of humour. ‘What about the other people here? The — lecturers and students, for example?’

  ‘He didn’t speak to any of the students,’ said Wickham. ‘On the whole we thought it better. We did think of arranging a seminar, but we heard from Melbourne he had some difficulty getting on the same wavelength as the students, so we didn’t. Our students are not terribly lively at the best of times, you know.’

  ‘Too bloody lively if you ask me,’ said Royle, who was relaxing from minute to minute as Professor Wickham proved so notably un-uppity. ‘What about your staff, the lecturers?’

  ‘As far as I know he wasn’t acquainted with any of them from the past. At least he didn’t show any sign of recognizing any of them. But he was very old, you understand.’

  ‘Gaga, eh?’

  ‘Well, perhaps not exactly. Or not quite. But I do doubt whether he would necessarily have recognized anyone, even if he had had contact with them in the past.’

  ‘So there’s no reason that you know of to connect him with any particular members of your staff?’

  ‘Not really. I do know he had dinner on the night he arrived with Miss O’Brien and Mr Bascomb. I believe they met up in Beecher’s dining-room — quite by accident, I’m sure. But that’s something you can check up on when you talk to them.’

  Professor Wickham enjoyed this little piece of revenge. Inspector Royle noted down the names.

  ‘I believe you said he was from Oxford,’ he said cautiously, straying dubiously into this territory, as if afraid of revealing his ignorance.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Oxford, England?’

  ‘Oxford, England.’

  ‘Any particular address?’

  ‘St Peter’s College. I’ve wired the Master of the College about the murder, but so far there has been no reply.’

  It was the first thing Wickham had done, and done with some officiousness. He found any contact with Oxford pleasurable and flattering, and he looked forward to prolonged correspondence with the Principal as perhaps a prelude to some closer contact next time he and Lucy had leave.

  ‘Can you tell me which members of your staff have been to Oxford at any time?’

  ‘Mr Bascomb has. He has only just joined us. Graduated a couple of years ago. Still very young and . . . well, you know these English boys. I believe Dr Day was there for a year or so. Not as a student, though — as a librarian, or something of the sort.’

  ‘Nobody else?’

  ‘Not that I can think of,’ said Professor Wickham, thinking hard. ‘Oh yes, there’s Smithson, but he was away last night, and isn’t back yet. He had an external school, somewhere or other.’

  ‘You yourself . . .’

  ‘Yes, of course, I was there, as I think I said earlier. I went up just after the war, before I was married. All the ex-servicemen were up, so the place had rather lost its usual tone.’ (It was one of his great regrets.) ‘I got married there, and my wife and I were there for two years after that.’

  ‘Wife too, eh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Inspector Royle shifted himself massively in his chair at the thought of Lucy Wickham, whose name he had frequently had the notion of adding to his list of Royle’s hostesses, prevented only by the suspicion that she might be out of his class. His mind ran along predictable lines of adultery between her and the dead Professor, but the thought of the withered old body in the bed came to him suddenly, and made even him hesitate. Still, perhaps twenty or so years ago . . .

  ‘Do you happen to know what the old gentleman was doing last night?’ he asked, dragging his mind back to the present.

  ‘Yes, of course. He was at a party in my house. Given in his honour, you might say.’

  ‘A party, eh? What time did he leave?’

  ‘About half past eleven, I’d say. We got him a taxi, and put him in it, so you can probably check with the driver or the taxi switchboard. The driver was supposed to make sure he got to his room all right, but with that sort of person you can never be quite sure if he actually did.’

  ‘OK. I’ll check that. Who was at this party, apart from him? Academic people? University crowd?’

  ‘Well yes, partly. Some of them were members of the department here, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Some private friends of my wife and myself. The Turbervilles. The McKays. Mrs Lullham.’

  He brought them out as if they were patents of nobility. For Royle they were.

  ‘I see. Anyone else?’

  ‘Doncaster, from the Drummondale School. And Miss Tambly, from the Methodist Ladies’ College, who came a little late. That was the lot, as far as I remember.’

  ‘Do you think he met anyone else much while he was in Drummondale, or would these be about the only people you could say he knew here?’

  ‘I don’t know of anyone else. I shouldn’t think it likely. He went to one of the Vice-Chancellor’s stand-up lunches, but he didn’t talk to anyone except the V-C. You know how he tends to get people into corners. Otherwise I think he mostly kept to the motel. He was very old, you know, and I suppose he slept a lot.’

  ‘So this rather narrows the field down to your staff and the people at the party last night, doesn’t it?’ said Royle, with some pride in his deductive capacities.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose it does,’ said Wickham reluctantly.

  ‘Any little trouble there? Any little nastinesses?’

  ‘None at all, Inspector. It was an extremely pleasant occasion which we all enjoyed.’

  Professor Wickham said this quite sincerely. His memory had already covered the occasion with a patina of elegant good cheer. Such retrospective optimism was one of his most invaluable assets.

  ‘So sad it should end like this,’ he added meditatively.

  ‘Who did he talk to there?’

  ‘Almost everybody who came, I think. Everyone mixed extremely well, you know.’ Again, this was said without any twinge of conscience.

  ‘Well,’ said Royle, beginning to extract his bulk from the chair. The dark sweaty patches on his uniform had become still more obvious from the intense intellectual activity demanded of him by this interview in which he could neither bluster nor bully. ‘Well, that’s got the outlines clear enoug
h. Now I can begin filling in the details. I’d better have a preliminary word, like, with your people before I go — the lecturers and so on.’

  ‘You don’t think, Inspector, that some marauder . . . some burglar, perhaps . . . could have . . . ?’ began Wickham wistfully.

  ‘No, I don’t. Use your loaf,’ said Royle exasperated, then he pulled himself up. ‘Sorry, Professor. No offence meant. There was nothing taken, and nothing much to take. There wouldn’t be any need to kill off a feeble old bird like that, even if he had woken up. It wasn’t just a question of silencing him, stopping him rousing the place, like: they cut his throat, so they intended to kill him.’

  ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ said Wickham. ‘Still, there are some funny people about, you know.’

  ‘Some kind of weirdo with a thing about old men, you mean?’ Royle asked with a barely concealed sneer.

  ‘Well — ’

  ‘We’ll keep the thought in mind, sir,’ said Royle, and escaped.

  The rest of the investigations out at the English Department added very little to his knowledge. Not surprisingly, most of the academics said they went home to bed. No way of checking that at all, though the neighbours might be asked whether they saw cars coming in, and what time it was. Not likely to be much joy there at that time of night, but it was a slim hope. The exception was Bill Bascomb. Royle had had great hopes of Bascomb, since his name had come up twice in the conversation with Wickham. That was enough to make him suspicious in Royle’s not very bright eyes. Meeting him for the first time he looked more unappetizing than suspicious. A spotty chap, not long out of short pants in Royle’s eyes, and very obviously English, which didn’t send his stock up. What was more he had obviously heard from someone that all Australian policemen were corrupt. This was true enough, though it did not stop Australians treating their police with respect, albeit a respect tinged with jocularity. Bill Bascomb seemed to be treating him merely as a joke. His doings after the party were rather different from the others’. He had had a lecture from Lucy Wickham for half an hour after Professor Belville-Smith had been shipped back to his motel on The Whole Duty of Lecturers: