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An Advancement of Learning
Reginald Hill
All is not well at Holm Coultram College.All is not well at Holm Coultram College: lecturers having affairs with students, witches’ sabbaths, a body buried under a statue.Detective Superintendent Dalziel, despite his cynical view of academics, doesn’t feel murder fits in here – let alone a rash of killings. But when he and DS Pascoe are sent to investigate a disinterred corpse at Holm Coultram College, that’s exactly what they find…



REGINALD HILL
AN ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING
A Dalziel and Pascoe novel



Copyright (#ulink_3b3dea45-158b-5e69-8816-8d08645fd880)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © Reginald Hill 1971
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN 9780586072592
Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN 9780007373987
Version 2015-06-18

Dedication (#ulink_bd339a5b-2891-5497-bd38-c30da1782296)
For Malcom & Anne
Mike & Jo
Jim & Kathy

Contents
Cover (#u0685b363-a8b3-516a-8a68-9953b0369461)
Title Page (#ud96d27fc-7c82-5828-879f-f77e391d0dd9)
Copyright (#u7fc1962f-571e-57db-bbce-ea64277a5f08)
Dedication (#u594ee66d-ccb5-58ee-bcea-d36904a9fc0a)
Epigraph (#u309e144e-1ae5-56b8-aa91-77eca67f47d2)
Chapter 1 (#u4c2bd21e-66bd-5247-b3fe-ad532882036c)
Chapter 2 (#u6dc9e9fd-4a6d-5d00-9cfc-ad143ceb0573)
Chapter 3 (#u9ebfe88b-7c22-541a-996e-6e8e63684fc0)
Chapter 4 (#u9d9320cc-a99a-5690-b790-1c96b22061b2)
Chapter 5 (#u99410f92-6fe0-5a21-97fa-5b32c245cc0f)
Chapter 6 (#u20572bdf-f902-5a67-b7e6-42d4ad6cad24)
Chapter 7 (#u91b49d76-b689-585f-ad5a-07518dc0d27e)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Epigraph (#ulink_908f3e55-7b1d-521c-8c3c-0341efd30455)
… to have the true testimonies of learning to be better heard, without the interruption of tacit objections, I think good to deliver it from the discredits and disgraces it hath received, all from ignorance; but ignorance severally disguised; appearing sometimes in the zeal and jealousy of divines; sometimes in the severity and arrogance of politiques; and sometimes in the errors and imperfections of learned men themselves.

SIR FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning

Chapter 1 (#ulink_c9a591e3-6a36-5154-b8f0-6e5e916546b8)
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
SIR FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
There had been a great deal of snow that December, followed by hard frost. A few days before Christmas a thaw set in, temperatures rose steeply, the snow became slush. The sun greedily sucked up the moisture till it saturated the air and impinged on all the senses.
Fog.
You could smell it in the great industrial towns, its edge of carbon and sulphur biting into the windpipe.
You could see it clearly wherever you looked. But it was all you could see.
You could taste it if you walked out in it without a scarf or kerchief wrapped round your mouth.
You could feel it, damp and greasy, on your skin. Almost under your skin.
And you could hear it. No sound passed through it that it did not muffle and crush and make its own.
It made driving difficult but not impossible. If you drove with care, if your motivation was strong and impelling, it was possible to get to your destination.
Flying was impossible.
Airport lounges filled. And overfilled. And over-spilled. Till the atmosphere of damp and smoke and noise and frustration was almost as bad as the fog outside.
Occasionally it raised itself off the ground. Sometimes long enough for a plane to taxi out on the runway. Sometimes long enough for a plane to get away, which made the waiting even more unbearable for those still crammed in the restaurants, bars and lounges.
Confusion breeds confusion. People found themselves separated from their baggage, their tickets, their passports and sometimes even other people. Some went home and bought a frozen turkey the next day. Some cancelled their flights at the airport, some claimed refunds later. Passenger lists became as scrappy as leaves from the Delphic oracle.
Finally a light wind breathed out of the southwest a couple of times and brought back the reassuring stars.
It was a warm wind. It blew gently over half of Europe, melting what remained of the great snows at sea-level.
Higher up, however, it proved more difficult. Which was good, for it was the snow that most of the thousands marching in still dubious queues across black, wet runways were seeking.
But sometimes the wind’s breath blew long enough and hot enough to loosen the grip which the long, frozen fingers of snow had fastened on the side of steep and deep.
Which was bad.
Merry Christmas.

The hot June sun glinted merrily on the placid blue sea, the long white sands, the unconscious sun-bathers and a little farther inland, the balding head of Douglas Pearl, solicitor, through the open windows of the long committee room. A neurotic motion to close the windows in the interests of security had been ignored by the chairman, who now waved Pearl and the girl who accompanied him to their appointed seats.
‘Forgive me, sir,’ said the solicitor, standing up immediately he and the girl had been seated, ‘but before we begin, may I formally establish that all those present are members of the governing body of Holm Coultram College of Liberal Arts and Education?’
‘Of course we are,’ said Captain Jessup, his grey eyebrows twitching in surprise.
‘And you, sir, are Captain Ernest Jessup, the Chairman of this body?’
‘I am indeed, sir,’ said Captain Jessup with greater acerbity, understandable as he and his questioner had played golf together only two days earlier.
‘And I take it, sir, that there is present here today a quorum of that body?’
‘You would not be here else,’ snapped the Captain. ‘Is that all?’
‘I think so, sir,’ said the solicitor, unperturbed. ‘In cases like this it is always as well to establish the standing in law of the body involved right at the beginning. There have been cases …’
‘I’m sure, I’m sure,’ said the Captain. ‘Let’s get a start. I may add I’m quite willing to accept that you are Douglas Pearl, solicitor, and that this is your client, Miss Anita Sewell.’
He smiled frostily at the girl who sat with her head bowed forward so that her long blonde hair hung like a curtain over her face.
‘Now,’ said the Captain. ‘As you all know, this meeting has been convened to hear the appeal of Miss Sewell against a decision of the Academic Board of the college.
‘The Academic Board at a meeting held on May 20th of this year decided that Miss Sewell should be instructed to withdraw from the college. In other words, my dear,’ he said, addressing the girl directly and in a kind voice, ‘you were dismissed.’
Pearl rolled his eyes upwards till the whites showed, a movement Captain Jessup did not miss.
‘The grounds for this decision were that Miss Sewell’s work in all subjects was of a standard sufficiently low to cause concern, and that in one subject, biology, she had sunk below a point from which it was possible for her to attain the lowest pass level by the end of her course. Miss Sewell was informed of this decision and the grounds of it. Later she decided to make use of her right of appeal to the Board of Governors, pending which appeal she has been, I believe, suspended.’
The girl nodded.
‘Now,’ said Captain Jessup, pressing his hands flat on the table before him. ‘Now. We have already seen the academic evidence on the basis of which Miss Sewell was dismissed.’
‘Suspended,’ said Pearl.
Jessup ignored him.
‘So I think the best interests of all would be suited if we passed straight on to the grounds of your appeal, my dear.’
Pearl coughed.
‘Miss Sewell has asked that I should lay out the general grounds of her appeal to start with, Mr Chairman. Then, under my advice, of course, she will be willing to answer questions.’
‘I see. Well, I suppose that’s in order?’ said Jessup. No one seemed disposed to question this.
‘Good. Then carry on.’
The solicitor shuffled a couple of papers in front of him. Under his polite, rather mild exterior there had long lurked a desire to try his hand at the kind of histrionic advocacy popular a century earlier. Magistrates’ courts offered little opportunity. Or encouragement. And looking at the row of attentive faces before him with Jessup’s challenging glare in the middle, he decided reluctantly that in the interests of both his own reputation and his client’s appeal this was not the time to start.
But he wasn’t too worried. What he had to say contained enough built-in drama to take the complacency out of their faces.
‘Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,’ he began quietly, ‘my client has been following a bipartite course at the College and the main ground of the Academic Board’s decision to instruct her to withdraw was failure in one part of the course, that concerned with biology. The main evidence to this effect was given by Dr Fallowfield, Senior Lecturer in that subject and Miss Sewell’s principal tutor.’
The girl stirred slightly at the name and with an almost unconscious movement of her left hand brushed the hair back from her face. She was very attractive.
Pearl paused for effect. Captain Jessup made a moue of distaste at even this slight bit of dramatic business and Pearl was glad he had tried no more.
‘Today her appeal comes before you,’ he went on flatly, avoiding any undue stress, ‘and it is based on two things. A piece of information and an allegation. The information requires no comment from this body, I feel. We live in a modern era. It is this: for the past two years, until last term in fact, Miss Sewell was the mistress of Dr Fallowfield, the lecturer I have just mentioned. It is with reluctance that my client reveals this. It is with greater reluctance that she asserts that Dr Fallowfield has deliberately falsified her assessment grades to bring about her apparent failure.’

The man on the ladder rested his elbow unselfconsciously on the shining brown breast.
‘We could saw her off at the ankles,’ he said reasonably. ‘That’d be easiest. Otherwise she’s likely to come apart almost anywhere.’
One of his mates guffawed. The man on the ladder shot him a disapproving glance.
Marion Cargo ignored him and concentrated all her attention on the eight-foot-high bronze nude which towered before her. She (Marion, not the bronze) was in her late twenties, as slim as the nude was Rubenesque, dressed in black slacks and a loose grey sweater, her only concession to the fact that she lectured in Art at the college being her ear-rings, two crystals dangling at the end of long silver chains.
‘There’s a solid block of concrete down there as a foundation, you see, miss,’ explained the man. ‘This thing’s set in it. Pretty solid too, I’d say, otherwise it’d have keeled over long since.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Marion. ‘But I’d rather the legs weren’t cut.’
‘No one’d know,’ assured the man. ‘We’ll dig the base out separate and they can be stuck back together later somehow if the thing’s not going for scrap. She might lose half an inch or so, but she can spare it, eh?’
He slapped the nude affectionately.
‘Like I say, who’d notice? No one, except the joker who made it, perhaps, wherever he is.’
He laughed.
‘That was me,’ said Marion calmly. ‘But it’s not just that. We’ll have to think of a way. I don’t want her cut. There are other reasons.’
She bent down and looked at the inscribed plaque set into the shallow platform on which the statue rested.

TO THE MEMORY OF
ALISON GIRLING
1916–1966
Her memorial is around you.
She was conscious of the overalled men regarding her with semi-amused eyes, but she made no attempt to brush the tears from her eyes before standing upright again.
‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t want her cut. There must be a way.’

Chapter 2 (#ulink_ce687054-bdd6-51a8-8b14-c5c33a190b8b)
There is yet another fault often noted in learned men, that they do many times fail to observe decency and discretion in their behaviour and carriage.
SIR FRANCIS BACON
Op. Cit.
Conversation stopped for a moment when Fallowfield came into the Common Room. He moved swiftly to the coffee-table and waited till Miss Disney had poured herself a cup. A smile played around his lips as she replaced the coffee-pot firmly on the table and moved away without a glance at him.
He poured a cup and made a bit of business out of taking a couple of sips while he surveyed the constitution of the various groups scattered around the room.
Grouping tended to be by departments for morning coffee. The geographers sat huddled together as though plotting some government’s overthrow. The English Department lay back easily in their chairs, not speaking, but with faint smiles on their faces as though someone had said, or was just about to say, something elegantly witty. Three mathematicians looked gloomily at each other like unwilling companions on a long train journey. At the far end of the room, the historians were quarrelling again, just before the stage where objective social discussion became personal infighting. Henry Saltecombe, their departmental head, almost recumbent in the deep armchair which was his own, surveyed them benignly over his swelling paunch. Glancing round, he caught Fallowfield’s eye and made a pouring motion with his hand.
Fallowfield picked up the coffee-pot and went across to join him.
‘Hello, Sam,’ said Henry cordially. ‘Pour us a cup, there’s a love. You’re a silly fellow to be here when you could still be pigging it in bed.’
‘There are things to do,’ said Fallowfield non-committally. He sat down and refilled his own coffee-cup.
‘Anyway,’ he added, melting a little to Henry’s cordiality, ‘it’s a rare experience to be able to feel like Lord Byron after the scandal. Though nobody actually got up and left!’
‘Not quite,’ muttered Arthur Halfdane, one of the young historians at the table, jerking his head so that his long hair tossed like a girl’s.
Fallowfield followed his gesture and saw the slight angular figure of Jane Scotby, the Senior Tutor, wriggle out from under the menacing overhangs and promontories of Edith Disney and move across the room towards him.
‘Mr Fallowfield,’ she said in her high precise voice. ‘I wonder if I could have a word with you?’
Fallowfield stared thoughtfully into her small brown wrinkled face whose bright blue eyes stared back as unflinchingly at his round, rather solemn features.
‘Of course, Miss Scotby,’ he said. ‘Won’t you sit down?’
‘I would prefer that we were private,’ she said.
‘I find that hard at the moment,’ said Fallowfield equably.
‘Very well,’ said Miss Scotby. ‘It has been suggested to me …’
‘By Miss Disney?’
‘… that your suspension from duty makes it improper for you to be present in the Senior Common Room or indeed in the College.’
‘This is outrageous,’ spluttered Henry. The younger historians, constitutionalists to a man, sat forward in their chairs, eager to offer an opinion at the drop of an amendment.
‘I am unable to pronounce authoritatively on the legality of this,’ Miss Scotby went on inexorably, ‘but on other grounds I can see good reason why it might be better if you weren’t here.’
She halted, just a little breathless. Fallowfield suspected that beneath the brown parchment skin a flush might be struggling to break out.
‘Miss Scotby,’ he said kindly, ‘I have merely been temporarily suspended from my teaching duties here. I certainly do not intend trying to teach anything except perhaps a few lessons in corporate feeling and loyalty.’
He raised his voice slightly and glanced round the room.
‘I am suspended. I haven’t caught leprosy. So I won’t wear a bell. And I shall continue to use this room as of right until I am shown why in law I should not.’
‘And if that happens, you shall be my guest,’ added Henry Saltecombe, his jowls shaking in emphasis.
The historians glanced at each other and raised their eyebrows in wry humour. Miss Scotby nodded as though she had expected nothing else. Which was probably true, thought Arthur Halfdane. Or at least she had the art of always giving the impression that whatever happened was expected.
A pretty young woman with a determined chin, Eleanor Soper of the Social Science department, came across in pursuit of the coffee-pot, apparently unconscious of the tension. Halfdane smiled at her and pulled up another chair beside his own. She sat down.
Miss Scotby nodded again as if this, too, were expected, turned on her heel and, avoiding Miss Disney’s imperious beckonings, walked smoothly out of the room.
‘Nicely timed,’ said Halfdane to Eleanor.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘What’s up with Scotby?’
‘Gone to earth,’ said Henry with a chuckle. ‘Walt’s furious.’
He was the only person in the college who actually addressed Miss Disney as ‘Walt’ to her face.
‘Now, Sam,’ he said, ‘what’s the latest? If it’s not sub judice or something.’
He rubbed his podgy hands in mock-enthusiastic expectation.
How mock is it? wondered Halfdane.
‘There’s nothing new. I’ve agreed to go before the governors to make a statement, but not while the student governors are present. They’re still trying to sort out the legalities.’
‘Well,’ said Henry dubiously. ‘The students are after all legally elected members of the governing body. In any case, I’m surprised that you are bothering, Sam. Points of order and matters constitutional have always bored you to tears in the past.’
A general movement towards the doors prevented any reply from Fallowfield.
‘What’s on?’ asked Halfdane.
‘By Christ!’ said Henry, pushing his fifteen stones breathily out of the chair. ‘They’re going to shift Hippolyta, her of the golden tits, begging your pardon, Miss Soper. This we mustn’t miss!’
‘What?’
‘The statue. Al’s statue. Acres of thigh swinging on high! Coming, Sam?’
‘No, thanks,’ said Fallowfield, shaking his head moodily, his recent liveliness in the face of the enemy now completely evaporated. ‘I don’t think I will.’
‘See you later then.’ He puffed cheerily away, followed by the slight figure of Halfdane. Soon there was only one other person left in the Common Room. She came to a halt by Fallowfield’s chair.
‘Yes, Miss Disney?’ he said without looking up.
‘Mr Fallowfield,’ she said loudly, as though speaking to someone much more distant. ‘Whatever the outcome of this business, I should like you to know I consider your admitted conduct to be absolutely deplorable. You have debauched a charming and delightful young girl. Should you be acquitted …’
‘I’m not on trial,’ observed Fallowfield, but it wasn’t worth the effort.
‘… and stay on at the college, I warn you there are other matters I may have to speak of. Other matters. You follow me, I have no doubt.’
She left in a shudder of flesh and a crash of door.
Fallowfield whistled a couple of bars of ‘The Dead March’.
‘Glass houses to you, Miss Disney,’ he murmured. ‘Bloody great glass houses.’
He finished his coffee and poured himself another cup even though it was cold.

The giant mechanical shovel-cum-crane lumbered through the herbaceous border on to the lawn of the staff garden. Miss Scotby winced visibly and Miss Disney took a step forward as though to lay herself beneath its tracks.
It was as well she didn’t. The ground was baked hard by the summer sun, but still the vehicle’s metal teeth left a deep imprint in the level green turf.
The college gardener, who had tended it and watered it to the last, spoke a word which normally would have caused the Disney bosom to push indignantly against the Disney chin. Now she nodded sadly as though in full accord.
‘What happens now?’ asked Halfdane.
‘I think they’ve drilled most of the base out of the concrete,’ said Henry, pointing with his much-chewed pipe. ‘Now they’ll take the strain with that thing, finish the drilling and haul away. Look. Here comes Simeon.’
The long, wirily energetic figure of Simeon Landor, the college principal, came striding from the mellow, castellated sandstone building known as the Old House which backed on to the garden.
‘Hello, Principal. Come to see the fun?’
Landor shook his head in reproof.
‘No fun, Saltecombe. A sad moment, this. For us all. Very sad.’
He raised his voice slightly. Miss Disney, who was standing some yards away, shot him an indignant glance and turned her back.
Halfdane had come in at the tail-end of this particular saga, but as usual with the help of the inveterate chronicler by his side he was in full possession of the facts.
The college had expanded rapidly since Landor had taken over as principal five years earlier on the death of Miss Girling, whose services to the college were commemorated by this very statue.
When he came, the place had been a teachers’ training college for some two or three hundred girls, though for the first time men were being admitted the following September. Now it covered a much wider range of courses, vocational and academic, some leading to degrees from the new university of East Yorkshire, situated some fifteen miles to the south. Numbers of students, staff and buildings had risen rapidly, and now the Old House, the early nineteenth-century mansion which once housed the entire college, was the centre of a star of concrete and glass. But it was an incomplete star. In one direction lay half an acre of cultivated beauty which had once been a source of pride and joy to Miss Girling and still was to Miss Scotby and Miss Disney and many others. It was like an artifact created for a nurseryman’s catalogue. It had everything, including a fringed pool and a ferned grot, and from the first crocuses in spring till the last dahlia in the autumn it was ablaze with colour. Above all, it had the long, level lawn, the finest Solway turf, five thousand square feet without a blemish. Till now.
For the Landor plan needed the garden. Where the blushing flowers had once risen in such profusion a new growth was going to gladden the eye, or some eyes at least. A biology laboratory.
The principal had tried to soften the blow by pointing out that an integral part of this was to be a hot-house for experimental husbandry. And that the fish-pool would likewise be preserved as a source of water insects and algae.
But the bruised feelings of many of his staff were not so easily salved.
And when he announced that Miss Girling’s memorial would have to be shifted this seemed the central symbol of an act of needless and unwarranted desecration.
Now the moment had come. A canvas sling had been wrapped around Hippolyta, one strap passing between her legs, another two crossing beneath the magnificent breasts.
‘Note how they shine,’ said Henry. ‘Some student wit paints a bra on them at least once a year and they always get a good polish when the paint comes off.’
But neither Halfdane nor Landor was listening. They were watching Marion Cargo, who suddenly ran forward anxiously and spoke to the man in charge of the tying operation. He nodded his head reassuringly and moved her away with a gentle push at her shoulder.
Then he waved to the man in the cab, who began to take the strain. Slowly the great arm of the machine pulled back towards the sky. The statue resisted for a second, gave a little jerk, then was swinging free in a stately semi-circle towards the truck which was waiting to take it into storage till a new site was prepared. A little trail of powdered concrete fell off its feet like talcum powder whitening the green lawn.
‘A fine sight!’ breathed Henry.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Landor.
Halfdane turned his attention from the statue to the watchers. A contingent of students had gathered and with an instinct for the end of prohibitions were using one of the larger rockeries as a grandstand. Franny Roote, the student president, a large, quiet-mannered youth, was there, marked out by his height and his very blond hair. As usual he had three or four attractive girls crowding around him. Most of the staff were standing in a semi-circle on the edge of the lawn nearest the building. Jane Scotby looked as if she were praying. ‘Walt’ Disney was looking with contempt at the man next to her. He was three or four inches shorter than she was, a little man with a big, loose, Glasgow mouth. This was George Dunbar, Head of Chemistry, who shared with Henry Saltecombe the distinction of being the first man appointed to the staff. The older women hated him.
Marion Cargo had moved back to the edge of the lawn. Her face was set and tense, but no less attractive because of it. Halfdane felt a slight stirring of interest and resolved once again to get to know her better. He noted with surprise that Fallowfield had appeared beside her, though he didn’t seem to be looking at the moving operation. Curious, he followed his gaze over to the students’ rockery and found the answer. Behind Roote had appeared the tall long-haired girl who had been pointed out to him as Anita Sewell.
‘There she goes,’ said Henry as Hippolyta was deposited gently into the back of the truck.
‘A perfect operation,’ said Landor, gratified. ‘Now there’s just the base.’
Halfdane had turned to go but he stopped when he saw no one else was moving. The tackle had been taken off the shovel-arm and it was now swinging back along the white path left by the statue. A workman was busy at the concrete base which remained sticking forlornly out of the ground. He was removing the commemorative plaque. When he had it in his hand, he turned uncertainly towards the staff.
‘Over here!’ called Miss Disney peremptorily, but Landor made a small motion with his hand and the man came directly to him.
Now the mouth of the grab was opened wide, like some monster in a horror film. The driver was manoeuvring it carefully into position over the base, following the foreman’s hand signals. Finally both were satisfied and the foreman stepped back.
‘He’ll never drag that thing out!’ said Henry, amazed. ‘It must weigh …’
The rest of his sentence was drowned as the arm went slack and the gaping grab crashed down with all the violence of its huge weight on to the concrete slab. The shining metal teeth dug gratingly into its sides as the driver manipulated the controls.
‘They can lift almost anything,’ said Landor, making it sound like a personal boast.
The arm began to pull up, the machine bucked forward slightly on its tracks and Halfdane began to have doubts.
Again it tried and again the same happened.
But the third time, just when it seemed the machine must capsize itself with its own strength, the concrete block stirred, the exquisitely mown turf, which ran up to the base as though the mower had gone right through it, began to buckle and tear, the great machine sat back triumphantly on its haunches and the solid cube began to slide slowly out like a cork. The rich dark earth clung tightly to its sides, and even more solidly to the bottom, it seemed, as the great block swung free in the air. It followed the same semi-circle as before, only this time earth fell to darken the white trail below.
Earth, and something more solid than earth.
‘Hold it, Joe!’ cried the foreman who was nearest. The machine halted, the concrete maintained its momentum and swung forward like a pendulum dislodging yet more of the substance that adhered to its base.
‘Oh, my God!’ said someone as the foreman stooped, then stood up gingerly with something long and thin in his hand.
It was a shin-bone.
He poked at the underside of the concrete with it. Something like a narrow grille fell down. It might have been part of a rib-cage, but no one watching was ready to believe it. He poked again, dislodging an even more solid something. The earth fell away as it hit the ground.
Now they were ready to believe it.
It was a skull, grinning empty-eyed at them. And most hideously there was a mop of dark red hair hanging rakishly down over where had been the left ear.
Jane Scotby’s hand went to her mouth, but only the dilating of her pupils showed she was not just stifling a little yawn; Marion Cargo was white as death, Henry Saltecombe gripped Halfdane’s shoulder with unconscious violence, while Ellie Soper seized his other hand so he could not move.
‘It’s Miss Girling!’ shrieked Miss Disney.
‘Yes, it is,’ she added in a matter-of-fact way as though someone had denied it. Then, unbelievably, she fainted into the reluctant arms of George Dunbar.
‘Clear a space,’ he shouted. ‘Hey, Fallowfield, give us a hand here.’
Fallowfield was the staff medical expert, having done two years of a medical degree course before abandoning it in favour of straight biology.
But when they looked for him now, he was nowhere to be found.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_8a242881-315a-5e0e-a61b-18b731c2103d)
… they are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea.
SIR FRANCIS BACON
Op. Cit.
‘This is what they spend my bloody taxes on, is it?’ said Detective-Superintendent Dalziel, peering out of the window of the principal’s study.
Sergeant Pascoe said nothing and kept his gaze fixed firmly on an area of neutral space midway between the balding, taurine figure at the window and the long, spare frame of Simeon Landor seated at his desk.
‘I sympathize,’ said Landor, smiling. ‘I feel much the same when I see the way you go about your work, Superintendent.’
‘Sorry?’ said Dalziel turning. ‘What’s that you said?’
He cupped a large hand to a proportionally large ear.
If the buggers get clever, he had once told Pascoe, pretend you can’t hear. Then pretend you can’t understand. Nothing’s funny if it’s repeated and explained.
Landor shook his head, still smiling.
‘Now, Superintendent,’ he said. ‘We want to help your enquiries in every possible way, of course. So just fire away with any questions you like.’
Oh God, groaned Pascoe. Honours even, so he extends the hand of friendship. Give the bull a scratch!
‘What was going on out there?’ asked Dalziel, pointing to the staff garden which the room overlooked. The mechanical digger had gone now but the deep furrows of its progress were still clearly visible. Over the cavity left by the removal of the concrete base a canvas shelter had been erected. Men were moving slowly, efficiently around, watched by a silent crowd of students on the edge.
‘We’re extending on all sides as you can see,’ said Landor. ‘A new biology lab is planned there, so naturally we had to move the statue.’
‘Who was out there watching?’
‘The principal was good enough to make out a list, sir,’ said Pascoe smartly in his best young executive manner, making a feint towards his brass-bound genuine-leather document case, an object of some derision from Dalziel when it first appeared.
‘Of course, it’s almost certainly incomplete,’ began Landor, but Dalziel waved aside his apologies along with Pascoe’s contribution and, by implication, any further interest in the list.
‘Why were they watching?’ he asked, scratching his inner left thigh voluptuously.
‘I’m sure I don’t know, Superintendent,’ laughed Landor, still pursuing his sweetness-and-light policy. ‘In most cases it would merely be the old hole-in-the-road syndrome …’
‘What?’
Landor was wise enough not to explain. Pascoe gave him a mental tick.
‘Was that all?’ asked Dalziel as if an explanation had been given.
‘Well, no. There were emotions other than mere curiosity on display, though I don’t see what they can have to do …’ He tailed off thoughtfully, then started again with renewed vigour.
‘Miss Cargo of our Art Department was there for a special reason. Concern, I suppose you’d call it. You see, she had designed the statue and was naturally concerned to see it suffered no damage.’
Pascoe was taking shorthand notes, a skill Dalziel mocked as feminine.
‘Then there were some older members of staff who were there to express their disapproval, I felt.’
‘Disapproval? Because their garden was being dug up?’
‘Partly that. But partly also because the statue was a memorial. They felt it smacked of sacrilege to pull it up.’
‘A memorial? Who to?’
In answer Landor picked up the bronze plaque from his desk and handed it over. Dalziel read it carefully with an expression of grotesque devoutness. Like a close-up in Songs of Praise on the telly, thought Pascoe.
‘Alison Girling,’ he said, enunciating each syllable with great care like a child reading.
‘My predecessor,’ explained Landor.
‘She wasn’t old,’ observed Dalziel. ‘What happened to her?’
‘A tragic accident,’ said Landor, doing with his voice what Dalziel had done with his face. ‘On holiday abroad at Christmas. She was a close friend of some of the senior staff here. They felt it deeply when the statue had to be moved.’
‘Who are they, Mr Landor?’ asked Dalziel. ‘And how deeply did they feel it?’
‘Well, Miss Scotby, she’s my Senior Tutor, and Miss Disney, who’s in charge of our divinity department, and very much the moral conscience of the college.’ He gave a snort which might have been amusement or amazement. ‘It was rather bizarre when those bones started to fall from the base of the statue. Miss Disney let out a kind of shriek and screamed, “It’s Miss Girling!” A Gothic notion, don’t you think?’
‘Bizarre,’ echoed Dalziel, as though savouring the word. ‘Gothic. Get that, Sergeant? You mean she reacted as if it was Miss Girling’s tombstone rather than just a memorial? Where is Miss Girling buried, as a matter of interest?’
‘I’m not certain. Austria, I believe. That’s where she died. It was all several months before I first came to the place, of course.’
‘Of course. Were you here when the memorial was erected, Mr Landor?’
The question was dropped very casually. Landor answered it just as casually.
‘No. No, I wasn’t. I didn’t take up the post till the beginning of the following academic year, September that is. And now I come to think of it, I’m sure the statue was up when I came for an interview here the previous March.’
‘Good, good,’ said Dalziel, suddenly expansive. ‘Very good.’
He came to a halt before an oil painting of a large amiable woman with warm blue eyes and bright red hair.
‘Why, it’s Miss Girling,’ he said, peering closely at the frame. ‘She’s well remembered, isn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ said Landor drily. ‘She is.’
There was a perfunctory knock at the door and a large well-rounded woman burst in. She had a formidable chest development, but it looked quite solid with no hint of a central cleavage, and seemed the natural descendant of a series of fleshy outcrops which began with her lower lip and progressed downward and outward through three chins.
She looked indignant, but this meant nothing, Pascoe decided. Her features didn’t seem equipped to deal satisfactorily with any other expression.
It turned out, however, that she was indignant.
‘Good morning, Miss Disney,’ began Landor. ‘I’m rather busy …’
‘Principal!’ she interrupted, ‘I really cannot tolerate this. I am scheduled this afternoon to conduct an extremely important seminar on Isaiah. But there’s no one there. No one!’
She paused triumphantly.
Landor eyed her warily.
‘Where are they, you ask? I’ll tell you. I’ll show you. They are there.’
A dramatic arm was stretched out towards the window and the garden beyond.
‘Look at them! That boy Roote, he should have been reading a paper at my class. He has degenerated visibly since becoming President of the Union. I knew it was the beginning of the end when we admitted men in the first place. We never had this kind of trouble in Miss Girling’s day!’
Once again Landor showed his quality.
‘I’m glad you called, Miss Disney,’ he said blandly. ‘We were just talking about you, the superintendent and I. I know he wants to ask you a few questions. Please use my study for any interviews you care to make, Superintendent. I’ll be with the Registrar if needed.’
He was out of the room before anyone could reply. Miss Disney seemed ready to pursue him through the door, with or without opening it, but Dalziel stepped forward smartly.
‘Please sit down, Miss Disney. You have had a trying day. These things hit some of us more than others, I know. It’s a question of sensitivity.’
Oh Christ, scribbled Pascoe in his neat shorthand. Extreme Unction. Oily Dalziel oozing over stormy Disney.
Neatly he scratched it out and waited.
Miss Disney glared at Dalziel, decided here was a soulmate, and made her way round to Landor’s chair behind the large desk, which seemed to swell visibly as though to take on the proportions of its new incumbent.
‘Well?’
‘Mr Landor told us how distressed you were this morning.’
Miss Disney was obviously reluctant to agree with any diagnosis from the principal, but Dalziel pressed on.
‘I believe you were against the despoiling of the garden?’
It was a good word. Disney nodded emphatically, her chins and jowls tossing in sprightly dance.
‘Indeed I was. I am! For many reasons. It has always been a place of comfort and repose for those of us not utterly unresponsive to natural beauty. It is almost the only remaining link with the college as it was before all this. And if this were not enough, it is in its own way, which is a very real way, a shrine to the memory of dear Miss Girling.’
She sniffed and took an absurdly small lace handkerchief from her capacious sleeve. Pascoe would have been less surprised to see her pull out the flags of the nations of Europe all strung together.
Dalziel clucked sympathetically.
‘Forgive me for asking,’ he said in a low, vibrantly sincere voice television interviewers use when questioning the tragically bereaved, ‘but why did you say that it was Miss Girling when the – er – decedent’s remains came into view?’
‘It was silly, I know,’ said Miss Disney almost girlishly. ‘But dear Alison was so much in my mind, as you might imagine. And when I saw the bones and the hair …’
She broke off and looked up at the portrait on the wall.
‘She had such lovely red hair, you know. You can’t imagine how it used to be here in the old days. Just a handful of staff and a hundred or so girls. We knew them all by name. Al’s gals, we used to call them. Such nice, decent girls too. Whereas now …!’
‘So it was the hair …?’ prompted Dalziel.
‘Yes, Superintendent. It was as if Alison had risen from her distant grave to reproach me for permitting all this to happen.’
‘So you passed out?’ Dalziel’s tone was suddenly casually conversational again.
‘I fainted,’ said Miss Disney, moving just as rapidly from the submissive female to her previous role. ‘I must say, Inspector, that I cannot really see how this line of enquiry is relevant. It’s not the uncovering but the burying of these bones which is surely of interest. And that must have happened at least six years ago. Now I must go and teach the remnants of my class.’
She stalked to the door, but paused there a moment as if reluctant to exit on an altogether damnatory note.
‘I’ll tell you one thing, Superintendent,’ she said, reinstating him in his proper rank. ‘Those bones are not all that is buried here. This is no longer a happy place. There is godlessness at work in this college, on all levels. Good day to you.’
Pascoe managed to get the door open before she walked through it. He closed it gently behind her.
Dalziel had seated himself at the principal’s desk and was dialling a number on the internal phone.
‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘Any chance of some tea for a thirsty policeman? In the principal’s study. Oh, he has, has he? That’s nice. For two? That’s right, tea for two.’
He put the phone down.
‘They’re making us welcome,’ he said. ‘Well now, Sergeant, this is more your kind of scene, as they say. I’m out of my depth here in all this academic intellectual stuff. So what do you make of it?’
Pascoe did not believe a word of this modest disclaimer, but he knew better than to say so. He had a degree in Social Sciences, a qualification Dalziel frequently treated with mock-deference. But when he asked you a question, he listened to what was said, despite all appearances to the contrary.
‘It’s not an unusual kind of situation here,’ he said. ‘The educational expansion programme of the sixties took places like this used to be by the neck and shook them up a bit. Government started thinking industrially about education, that is in terms of plant efficiency, productivity, quotas, etc. Small colleges such as this was could become four or five times larger in as many years.’
‘Could? You mean there was a choice?’ Dalziel sounded faintly incredulous.
‘To some extent. You can’t be too autocratic with an educational system based on liberal principles. Really what it boiled down to was the willingness of those in charge to co-operate. If you dug your heels in, progress was slow. If you went out after money and expansion, it could be relatively rapid. Landor’s obviously an expansionist.’
‘And her?’ Dalziel nodded at the portrait.
‘It sounds as if she was the other kind. A digger-in of heels.’
Dalziel suddenly seemed to lose interest.
‘What do you think Disney meant by “godlessness”? Are they groping each other during her lectures, or something?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Pascoe thoughtfully. ‘Probably just that. Your modern students have come a long way from “Al’s gals” I should imagine. But I can probably find out. I’ve been looking at the staff-list. There’s someone here I was at university with. She’s a lecturer in the Social Sciences department.’
He kept his tone casual but Dalziel, as always, was on to him in a flash.
‘She?’
‘Yes. She. It was a mixed university.’
‘She,’ said Dalziel again, nodding as if some dreadful fear about his sergeant had been confirmed. ‘A close friend?’
‘Close enough. What’s next on the agenda, sir?’
‘Still close?’
‘Hardly. It’s several years now, and …’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you know, sir? I became a policeman.’
Dalziel let the sarcasm pass unreproved, though not unrecorded. But at least he left the subject.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now check them all. I want to find out who was here five years ago.’
‘I’ve made some enquiries already,’ said Pascoe. ‘Very few.’
‘Fine. Similarly with clerical and domestic staff. Next, a list of everyone who was here five years ago and has since moved on.’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said Pascoe deferentially. ‘Can we really make the assumption that five years is the significant period?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Can we be certain that this body was put into the hole which had been dug for the statue in the short period between its being dug and the base being dropped into it? Couldn’t the body have been in the ground already when the hole was dug? Or isn’t it even possible that it was buried there later, a hole dug down the side of the base, a groove scraped in the earth underneath the base, and the body pushed into this?’
Dalziel groaned dramatically.
‘It’s all possible, lad,’ he said. ‘It’s possible this was a lost pot-holer trying to dig his way to the surface. But it’s unlikely. I just think it’s unlikely, but then I’m a simple soul, not over-gifted intellectually. But you’re different. And when you’ve done all the other things you’re going to do, just get yourself out there and find me half a dozen good reasons why we can discount your possibilities. Right?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Pascoe.
‘Good. Next, I want a list of all persons reported missing in the area between, let’s see, when was that blasted statue put up, January let’s say, all right, between the previous October and the following April. Better make it the whole year, from July to July. And make sure I get the lab-report on the bones as soon as it’s ready. I don’t want any ambitious young officer working at his career prospects through it for a couple of hours first.’
There was a tap at the door. A pretty, young girl in a blue nylon overall came in carrying a tray which she placed on the desk.
‘Thank you, my dear,’ said Dalziel with a beam. ‘We’ll just be needing one cup. The sergeant has to go out.’
Pascoe ushered the girl out in front of him, then stopped and turned as Miss Disney had done.
‘By the way, sir,’ he said. ‘Did you get a look at the statue when we arrived?’
‘No,’ said Dalziel, without interest. ‘It’s the base that concerns us here.’
‘Of course,’ said Pascoe. ‘It just seemed a little strange, that’s all.’
He made as if to go. Dalziel’s expected bellow stopped him.
‘In what way strange?’
‘Just strange that the memorial to a woman like Miss Girling should be an eight-foot-tall bronze nude.’
He closed the door quietly behind him. Inside, Dalziel sipped his tea with noisy relish and eyed the portrait of Miss Girling with interested speculation.

Chapter 4 (#ulink_1fd48b8d-b960-5b48-8969-dc94198f8ab2)
Men’s weaknesses and faults are best known from their enemies, their virtues and abilities from their familiar friends.
SIR FRANCIS BACON
Op. Cit.
Franny Roote lay back along the window-sill, his still form blocking out the sunlight. He was wearing his usual summer dress of white beach-shoes, light cream-coloured slacks and a white shirt which was almost a blouse. This colour scheme combined with his own fair colouring somehow blurred the edges of his frame. Without moving, he dominated the room. Only twenty-three, he had developed a repose and still self-sufficiency beyond the reach of many twice his age; and these things put together gave him the indistinct almost inhuman menace of a figure magnified and blurred by sea-mist. It was an image he worked at.
‘You heard nothing more, Elizabeth?’ he asked quietly.
‘No, Franny,’ said the pretty girl in the blue nylon overall. ‘Just about the lists.’
She sounded apologetic, almost distressed, at having so little to tell.
‘You did well, love,’ he said, nodding once, still not looking at her.
‘Franny,’ said the girl. ‘Tonight. It is tonight, isn’t it? May I come again?’
Now he turned his head and looked full in her face with his light blue eyes.
‘Of course you may. We were expecting you.’
Flushing with pleasure, the girl slipped out of the door with the expertise of one used to leaving rooms unobtrusively.
‘Is that wise?’ asked a long-haired sallow-faced girl with low-slung breasts.
‘Is what wise, Sandra?’ he asked patiently.
‘Her, Elizabeth, coming along. I mean, outsiders can mean trouble.’
‘What you mean is, she’s a kitchen-maid,’ said a small, dark-haired, moustachioed youth fiercely. This was Stuart Cockshut, the Union secretary and Franny’s right-hand man. ‘God, what’s the point of trying to do anything if you can’t shake off your reactionary concepts of an elitist society?’
‘Belt up,’ said Anita Sewell who was sitting on the floor staring moodily into the empty fireplace. ‘Stop talking like a colour-supplement student. It’s not politics that’s bothering Sandra. It’s sex. And she’s right. Franny knows when he’s on to a good thing. He gets an extra slice of juicy meat at dinner. And all the gravy he can manage, don’t you, ducky?’
‘Nervous, love?’ Franny said to her gently. ‘Don’t be.’
‘She’ll be all right on the night,’ said Sandra viciously.
Stuart sniggered. Franny spoke again, reprovingly.
‘It has nothing to do with appetite of any kind, my loves. Nor with politics, Stuart. We do live in an elitist society, despite all you say. But the elites have nothing to do with class, or intellectualism.’
He swung his legs down off the sill and stood up.
‘This business interests me. I’ve always had a feeling about that statue. Something compelled me to it.’
Suddenly he laughed and ran his fingers through his hair, looking for a moment about eighteen.
‘I thought it was just the tits.’
The others laughed too, except for Sandra who was seated on the floor next to Anita. He looked down at her thoughtfully and moved his leg till his calf touched her shoulder. She leaned into his leg and closed her eyes.
‘I wonder whose bones they are,’ said a petite round-faced girl from a corner.
‘The police will find out soon enough,’ said Stuart, making it sound like a fault.
‘Perhaps we can beat them,’ said Franny.
They looked at him puzzled for a moment.
‘Of course!’ said the round-faced girl, jumping up and opening a cupboard behind her. From it she took a large box which she put on a low coffee-table. Out of the box she produced a Ouija board which she quickly set up on the table.
Franny knelt down and put his index finger on the planchette. He contemplated Sandra’s pleading gaze for a moment, shook his head minutely and said, ‘Anita.’
The girl touched the other side of the planchette.
Slowly it began to move.

Eleanor Soper was immersed in her favourite recurring day-dream in which her first novel had met with tremendous critical and popular success. Her elbows rested lightly on the untidy sheets of closely scribbled-on foolscap which were scattered over her desk. She was modestly accepting the plaudits of her colleagues and in particular, like a television instant replay machine, her mind kept on bringing Arthur Halfdane forward to offer his obviously deeply felt congratulations.
She was brought back to reality by a knock at the door.
‘Shit!’ she said. Her own subconscious was capable enough of diverting her energies away from her novel without the additional annoyance of external interruption.
The knock again.
Angrily, she opened the door.
‘Hallo, Ellie,’ said Pascoe.
‘For Godsake,’ she said, motionless with surprise.
Pascoe reached out his hand. She took it and they stood there holding hands, looking at each other.
Pascoe felt relieved and disappointed at the same time as he took in her short black hair cut to the contours of her finely structured head; her grey eyes, questioning now; her strong chin, raised slightly aggressively. He had not known what to expect, had half-feared an immediate return of all the old welter of emotions and passions. Looking into his own mind, he could find no trace of them. That was good. But still he felt sorry that something so strong could have gone so completely.
He looked again at the once so dear and familiar features. Nothing. But he knew he was keeping his mind well away from the equally dear and familiar curves and hollows lying beneath the old sweater and the threadbare slacks.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Sit down. This is – well, Christ, it’s a surprise. I don’t know … what are you doing here?’
‘Combining pleasure with business.’
‘Business? Oh. You mean the statue?’
‘I’m afraid so. But you’re the pleasure.’
They both laughed and when they stopped, the atmosphere had become easier. They spent the next few minutes exchanging news of old university acquaintances. Or rather Ellie provided most of the news and Pascoe most of the questions. He was surprised to find how eager he was for information.
‘You haven’t kept in touch with anyone then?’ she asked finally.
‘Christmas cards. Wedding invitations. That sort of thing.’
‘Summonses. Warrants. That sort of thing,’ she answered, half-joking, half-serious.
‘I’ve been spared that,’ said Pascoe, wholly serious.
She looked embarrassed for a second, a faint flush touching her cheek-bone.
Pascoe began to reach out a hand to touch her face but stopped himself in time.
‘Well, you’ll be spared it here too,’ Ellie said emphatically. ‘The statue had been up for five years or so when I arrived. What’s it all about, anyway?’
‘We’re still trying to find out. Who has been here since the thing was put up, then?’ asked Pascoe casually. He didn’t need the information. He had a list in his document case which told him exactly.
‘I’m not sure. The oldest inhabitants, obviously. Jane Scotby. And Miss Disney. Not Landor, though. That’s obvious. He came when Miss Girling died. The history man, Henry Saltecombe. And George Dunbar, head of stinks. There might be others, we’re a large staff and I haven’t got to know them all yet. But what’s your interest? You don’t think someone on the staff then was responsible?’
‘Responsible for what?’
‘Why, for killing whoever got killed and burying them in the garden,’ said Ellie in surprise.
‘Someone’s responsible,’ replied Pascoe. ‘Any likely runners?’
The atmosphere was changing again.
‘I should have thought that your best approach was to discover who it was that got killed,’ said Ellie a little stiffly.
‘We’re working on it,’ said Pascoe cheerfully.
He glanced at his watch. Dalziel would be expecting some kind of report soon.
‘I must be off. Look, any chance of seeing you later tonight? There’s lots to talk about.’
Ellie hesitated a moment before saying, ‘Yes, surely. I’m dining in tonight and I usually pop into the bar afterwards, about eight. You’ll still be around then? Good. Anyone will direct you.’
‘Right,’ said Pascoe at the door. ‘It was nice to see your name on the staff-list. See you!’
He went out with a casual wave.
‘No doubt,’ said Ellie to the closed door.
She picked up her pen again but did not start to write for some time. She was trembling slightly. He looked at me like a bloody suspect! she thought. Not a sign of emotion. A useful contact! Sod him.
Convinced soon that all her trembling sprang from indignation, she began to write again but had to stop soon to light one of her infrequent cigarettes. Sod him!
Rather sticky, thought Pascoe with some regret as he walked down the corridor from Ellie’s room.
But I won’t work at not being a policeman. Not just to be liked. Not by anyone. It’s not worth it. He congratulated himself once again on his self-possession during the encounter. Then he bumped into a large beautifully rounded girl in a frivolously short skirt.
‘Sorry,’ he said. She smiled and massaged herself voluptuously. He felt his self-possession crack.
Well, sometimes it may be worth it, he emended cautiously.
When he reached Landor’s room, it was empty. He took the lists Dalziel had requested of him from his case and laid them neatly on the desk.
Then he stood back to view the effect. Dissatisfied, he readjusted them minutely to attain perfect symmetry.
‘You’ll make someone a lovely housekeeper,’ said Dalziel from the door.
Five witty answers and several bluntly obscene ones ran through Pascoe’s mind, but he used none of them, merely bowing Dalziel with as much irony as he dared to the desk.
‘What’s this lot then? Lot of bloody names. No good till we know who got the chop, are they?’
‘This might help,’ said Pascoe, delicately touching the central list.
‘Let’s see then. Persons reported missing between … well, you tell me, eh? There might be long words I’d have trouble with.’
It would be nice to think the sneers derived from an affectionate respect. Or perhaps not. Dalziel, according to oral tradition, had destroyed whatever lay between him and his wife despite, or because of, his almost canine affection for her. That had been before Pascoe met him. He had learned the hard way just how much of Dalziel’s invitations to familiarity to accept.
Now he picked up the list and gave it an unnecessary glance. It didn’t do to appear too efficient.
‘Only two real possibilities so far, sir,’ he said. ‘Mrs Alice Widgett, aged thirty-three, housewife. Last seen leaving her home on August 27, destination unknown. She left a tatie-pot in the oven and two children watching television.
‘Secondly, Mary Farish. Widow. Aged forty-five. She’s the nearest. Lived all alone on the outskirts of Coultram. She had a dental appointment at 3 P.M. on November 9th. She left home at 2.15, but never reached the dentist.’
‘That’s what I feel like, too,’ said Dalziel, sticking a nicotine-stained forefinger into his mouth and sucking noisily. ‘Best reason for disappearing I know. Well, the dentist’s a help. He’s still around?’
‘Yes, sir. I’ll take details of the jaw along as soon as we get them from the lab.’
‘Who are taking their bloody time. Why no one else? It looks a fair list.’
‘Yes. Some of them are men, of course.’
‘Why? We know the sex, don’t we? Even I can tell the difference between a male and a female skeleton.’
‘Of course,’ said Pascoe soothingly. ‘I just thought it would be useful to know which men felt it necessary to disappear quietly about that time. And the other six women were either seen boarding trains or long-distance buses, or some subsequent contact has taken place, a postcard, a telephone call. This doesn’t cut them out altogether, of course.’
‘Worse bloody luck,’ said Dalziel gloomily. ‘Have you got someone contacting parents, family, friends, again?’
‘No,’ said Pascoe. ‘It didn’t seem necessary. I’ll get their files of course.’
‘On which you’ll find nothing’s been done for five years. Naturally. We can’t spend our precious bloody time chasing around after runaway adults. But you’ll probably find half the sods have turned up again and no one’s thought to tell us. They usually don’t.’
‘I’ll get on to it right away,’ said Pascoe.
‘By the way. Did they have red hair?’
‘Mary Farish did. And the other’s described as auburn.’
‘It might help. But then she might have come from a thousand miles away.’
‘A Central European, you mean?’ asked Pascoe against his better judgment. ‘That would narrow things down.’
Dalziel squinted at him calculatingly for a moment.
‘Shove off,’ he said. ‘We’ve all got work to do.’
‘Hey!’ he called after him. ‘What about that bint of yours? Get anything there?’
He backed up the double entendre with a toothy leer. Pascoe answered straight.
‘Not much. I’m seeing her tonight for a drink. All in the line of duty, of course. She hasn’t been here long enough to know much. I did gather they’re having a bit of excitement at the moment. Some lecturer’s been knocking off a student and there’s a bit of a rumpus.’
‘Who?’
‘A fellow called Fallowfield. Biologist.’
‘That figures. Was he here five years ago?’
He answered the question himself by running his gaze quickly down the list before him.
‘No. Then he’s of no interest. Dirty sod. Though it must be a temptation. There’s a lot of it around. I think I’ll take a walk and see what’s going on. You can stop here. You’ll need the phone.’
Jauntily he left the room. Pascoe had to close the door behind him. He jerked two fingers at the solid oak panels.
When he turned round he found two students solemnly staring at him through the large open window. They nodded approvingly, each tapped the side of his nose with the forefinger, and they went on their way. Despite the heat, Pascoe closed the window before he started his telephoning.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_b9801647-a2ad-5d03-8ba7-c61d46631561)
Who taught the raven in a drought to throw pebbles into a hollow tree, where she espied water, that the water might rise so as she could come to it?
SIR FRANCIS BACON
Op. Cit.
Sam Fallowfield sat in a deckchair in front of his cottage which looked down over the shingle to the level sands and the very distant sea. When the tide went out here, it kept on going till an onlooker could have doubts whether it ever meant to return. The cottage was solidly built of massive blocks of dark grey stone. It had been whitewashed at some stage but the salt and sand-laden winter gales had long ago stripped away this poor embellishment. It was an end cottage of a block of four, each of which had a small garden at the front and a shared cobbled yard behind. The other three were used only as holiday bases, one by the owner of the block only, while the other two were rented out by the week during the summer. Fallowfield alone lived there all the year round and had done so for the past five years ever since arriving at Holm Coultram.
It was early evening. Soon the holiday-makers, temporarily his neighbours, would be returning from whatever exciting expedition they had so noisily launched that morning. But for the moment he had the place to himself. One or two featureless figures were distantly visible in pursuit of the sea. And away to his right a thin flag fluttered on an elevated plateau to mark the outermost boundary of the golf course. The college was completely out of sight more than half a mile inland.
It was a situation to make a man as indifferent to society as Fallowfield sigh with contentment.
He sighed.
‘That sounds as if it comes from the heart, Sam,’ said a voice behind him.
‘Come and sit down, Henry,’ he said without looking round. ‘You’ll find a beer and another chair behind the door.’
Gratefully Henry Saltecombe lowered himself in the deckchair which he erected with a deftness unpromised by his podgy hands.
‘Hope I’m not obtruding, my dear fellow, but I felt like a constitutional before driving back to the bosom of my family.’
Henry had a pleasant detached house on a modern estate about eight miles down the coast. It overflowed with four children, a dog, a cat, and his wife. He loved them all dearly but was rarely in a hurry to return home to them. He had married late when the habit of peace and solitude had long since moulded itself comfortably around his shoulders, and it was not easily to be torn away.
‘What happened to you then?’ Henry asked after he had opened a can of light ale and jetted it expertly into the O of his mouth. ‘I noticed you disappeared when all the excitement started. The Law has arrived in all its majesty, controlled by a corpulence in excess even of mine. There have been comings and I have no doubt there will be goings. I have even seen one or two students with facial expressions distantly related to alert, intelligent interest. Simeon suspects it’s an act of Walt, and Walt firmly believes it’s an act of God.’
‘And the police?’
‘The police are less public about their suspicions. But it is exciting. At first I thought it was merely some animal remains. But it appears to be certainly human. I myself think the solution is simple.’
‘How?’
‘I have no doubt it will turn out to be a student jape. They knew all about the garden controversy. It was no secret and even if it had been, they have a supremely efficient intelligence system, if only in the military sense. So they get some bones, an anatomical specimen perhaps, and they bury them beneath the statue. What fun! Something to enliven a long, dull, very hot term.’
Fallowfield grinned wryly.
‘I should have thought the term had been sufficiently enlivened already.’
Henry was immediately apologetic.
‘My dear fellow, I never thought … that business is far too serious for anyone to be entertained by it.’
Fallowfield twisted in his chair so that he could see the other’s face. Its rotundities were set in a pattern of sympathetic seriousness.
‘Come off it, Henry. It’s the most entertaining thing that’s happened here in years. One of the few consolations I have in it all is the pleasure I know I am giving my colleagues.’
Henry shook his head in protest, then began laughing. Fallowfield joined in.
‘You see,’ he said.
‘No, Sam,’ said Henry. ‘It’s you. You just don’t strike one as a career man, so how can I worry about your career being ruined? It’s the effect on you personally that matters and you give a damn good impression of not giving a damn. Which makes it easier to spectate.’
‘Enjoy yourself as much as you can,’ said Fallowfield. ‘Who knows whose turn it’ll be next?’
He said it lightly, but it stopped the conversation for a minute.
‘You did bed the girl, didn’t you, Sam?’ asked Henry finally.
‘I’ve never denied it,’ replied the other.
‘Here?’ He indicated the cottage.
Fallowfield shrugged.
‘Up against a tree. Out among the dunes. In the principal’s study. What difference does it make where?’
‘She always struck me as a nice sort of girl.’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘Every detail makes some difference, Sam,’ said Henry earnestly. ‘There’s a difference between casual promiscuity and a real love affair. And between malevolence and malleability. She says you conspired to get rid of her. I know this couldn’t be true. Now, does she really believe it, or is she merely being used?’
‘Used? How?’ Fallowfield’s tone was sharp.
‘Politically, I mean. Things have been quiet here for a while. They seem to have got all they wanted. But people like that youth Cockshut are never satisfied. And there’s something about Roote I don’t like either. They could be looking for another excuse to start trouble again.’
‘Is that all?’ Fallowfield laughed. ‘I suppose it might be something like that.’
‘You don’t seem much concerned.’
‘Why should I be? It’s all a game, isn’t it? It’s about as real as that.’
He pointed towards the distant flag which was being held now by one unidentifiable figure while another tried to strike an invisible ball into the hole. From his demeanour it seemed likely he had missed.
‘You’re talking of the game I love,’ said Henry, glad to be able to shift from the seriousness of the past couple of minutes.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Fallowfield with a smile. ‘I try never to be frivolous about other people’s games, then they won’t be amused or offended by mine. Games are all metaphors after all, and often euphemistic at that. Ah, here comes happiness.’
A large shooting brake was jolting down the track which curved for a couple of furlongs from the metalled road down to the cottages. Even at a distance the car windows seemed incredibly crowded with faces.
‘Four adults, seven children,’ observed Fallowfield, ‘I still don’t know who belongs to whom. Adults or children. They go soon, thank God.’
‘I must be off this minute,’ said Henry, rising. ‘Thanks for the beer. Oh, by the way, I brought you some mail from your pigeon-hole. I didn’t know whether you would be in tomorrow. Not much. And one looks like your luncheon bill. You must come and have a bit of supper with us one night next week. Let me know when’ll suit you. ’Bye.’
‘I will. ‘Bye.’
They both knew he wouldn’t. He never did.
Henry made his way back through the cottage and out into the courtyard, waving his walking-stick with mock ferocity at the tidal race of small bodies which poured out of the now arrived car.
Behind him on the other side of the house, Fallowfield’s face had once more lost all trace of the animation it had held during Henry’s visit.
He was staring down at the single sheet of paper he had taken from the first envelope he had opened.
It was headed by that day’s date. The message was simple.
‘I must see you tonight.’
It was signed ‘Anita’.

Dalziel did not receive the report on the bones until after 7 P.M. Pascoe, anticipating fall-out from his superior’s wrath, had rung the lab at 5.30 to discover the report had been sent to the superintendent’s office. He re-routed it before reporting to Dalziel, who was much less condemnatory than might have been expected.
‘Limited minds,’ he said. ‘Specialization means you can only think about one thing in one way. I’m not specialized.’
‘No, sir,’ said Pascoe.
‘Traffic problems to pornographic films at Buckingham Palace. I’ll deal with them all. Now you, Pascoe. You’re in a dangerous position.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Dalziel had had another half hour alone with Landor. Pascoe reckoned the principal had been foolish enough to bring out the bottles. We all learn from our mistakes.
‘You’ve got specialized knowledge. Or think you have. Without being in a specialized job. You’ve got this … whatever it is …’
‘Degree, sir,’ said Pascoe helpfully.
‘I know it’s a bloody degree. But in something, isn’t it?’
‘Social sciences.’
‘That’s it. Exactly. Which equips you to work well in …’
‘Society, sir?’
‘Instead of which you have to work in …’
‘Society, sir?’
There was a long pause during which Dalziel looked at the sergeant more in sorrow than in anger.
‘That’s what I mean,’ he said finally. ‘You’re too bloody clever by half.’
Neither ‘yes’, nor ‘no’ seemed suitable here, so Pascoe preserved a diplomatic silence.
‘I’m stopping here,’ said Dalziel suddenly. ‘Landor’s fixed me up with a room. It’s a long drive home.’
To nothing, thought Pascoe. Dalziel seemed to read the thought.
‘You might as well stay too. There’s no reason for you to go back, is there?’
‘No, sir.’
Pascoe had had a date that night, but he had put it off hours earlier as he saw the way things were going. It had been a pity. He had felt certain he wouldn’t have had to spend that particular night alone in his flat.
‘Right. Then you’ll be at hand. They’re going to give us dinner in here. I think we’re a bit low for High Table. Conversation-killers, that’s what we are. Even you, Pascoe, who might have been One Of Them.’
Pascoe again skirted round the comment.
‘What about the principal, sir? Isn’t he going to want this room back pretty soon?’
Dalziel frowned.
‘I hope we’ll be able to give it to him pretty soon. But evidently part of these flash new buildings you see going up around the place is a new administrative centre. He’s quite happy to have an excuse to start in there ahead of schedule.’
‘Odd,’ said Pascoe. ‘This is … nice.’
He looked around the comfortably proportioned, panelled room.
‘Doesn’t fit the new image, I expect,’ said Dalziel. ‘We’re still in Miss Disney-Land.’
He laughed loudly at his own joke, his flesh shaking till he started an itch in the small of his back. This he erased against the corner of the desk, grunting with satisfaction.
Dinner arrived early, about 6.45, and they were sawing through some rather stringy beef when the lab-report was delivered.
‘You read it,’ said Dalziel carrying on with his meal.
‘Well?’ he said through a mouthful of apple crumble a few minutes later.
‘Female, middle-aged, been in the ground a few years, five or six would fit nicely. Skull is fractured in two or three places, probably the result of blows with a heavy instrument and almost certainly contributory factors in the death, there’s a lot of technical stuff about the bones which isn’t going to be of much help, she wasn’t a hunchback, or lame or anything like that. Height about 5′ 6″. A big-boned woman, normal weight expectation 9 to 9½ stone, but they can’t make a guess at whether she was relatively fat or thin, size 5½–6 in shoes, size 7½ in gloves. That’s interesting, left leg has been broken twice, but old breaks.’
‘Accident prone,’ volunteered Dalziel, scraping the remnants of custard from his plate noisily. ‘What else?’
‘The mouth should be a help. No less than three gold fillings, one a fairly complex job.’
‘We’ll need that dentist. Your Mrs Farish is the only one of your probables that the age fits. Anything more?’
‘Yes. That red hair. It was a wig. Or what was left of a wig. Real hair, mind you, but treated, and remnants of the binding fabric still remained. That could help.’
Dalziel was unimpressed.
‘Too many bloody wigs about these days. You never know whether what you’ve got hold of is going to come away in your hand or not. What about clothes etcetera?’
‘Well, there were traces of fabric in the earth samples we sent along and they’ll let us know if they can make any definite pronouncements on the buttons, bits of metal and so on we picked up. They reckon the body was fully clothed and wrapped up in something, a blanket or a piece of curtaining. But they’re still working on it.’
Dalziel poured himself a cup of coffee and stirred in two large spoonfuls of sugar.
‘The first thing then is for you to go and see that dentist. It’s a long chance, but at the least it will eliminate Mrs Farish. And then …’
‘Then?’
‘Then we’ll have to visit every dentist and doctor in the area. And eventually between here and Central Europe if necessary. Unless we get something else. Well, you might as well be off. You won’t want to finish that, will you? It’s cold.’
‘I thought it was a bit off as well. Didn’t you?’ was the best Pascoe could do as he pushed back his chair.
Dalziel merely grinned, then grimaced as he took a mouthful of hot coffee.
‘Shall I make you an appointment while I’m there?’ asked Pascoe, and closed the door without waiting for a reply.

The dentist’s name was Roberts. He was a round-shouldered gangling man with a small head and a hooked nose. Spider-like, was the thought which came into Pascoe’s mind. He shouldn’t have cared to be loomed over professionally by this sinister figure.
Roberts was not happy at being removed from in front of his television set. It was a song-and-dance show. Perhaps it was close-ups of the singers’ mouths he found so interesting, thought Pascoe, his stomach moving uneasily as the smell of the surgery caught at his imagination.
Roberts had been warned on the telephone that there might be an interest in Mrs Farish’s dental record.
‘You’re lucky,’ he said in a high-pitched voice. ‘I can’t keep things for ever. It would have gone soon. It took me forty-odd minutes to find it as it was. And I don’t need to look at it again to tell you it’s nothing like this.’
He waved the piece of paper on which Pascoe had copied down the relevant details from the lab-report.
‘Really, sir? Why?’
‘Well; those gold fillings. Now this one, at the front here, that was probably essential, nothing else would do the trick. So you’d get it on the National Health, you see? But these two. Not necessary at all. Someone paid for that work.’
‘And it wasn’t you that did it?’
‘No. Well, as far as I can remember. But I think I would, wouldn’t I?’
‘I’ve no idea, sir. I’d be grateful if you could have your records checked. We’ll be asking everyone.’
‘More work. All right then. I’ll have a look.’
He turned to the door. Pascoe didn’t budge.
‘Now, sir, would be as good a time as any. While we’re here. It’ll save me coming back.’
Roberts was displeased.
‘Look, here! I’ll get my receptionist … this is out of working hours.’
Pascoe felt his own resistance stiffening, which he knew was foolish. He just was not in the mood for the Robertses of the world that night.
‘Hello, Julian, here you are,’ said a voice from the door. ‘I saw a light so I came through. What’s this? An emergency?’
The newcomer was in his forties, a strongly-built distinguished-looking man with an engaging smile.
‘Oh no. It’s nothing. The police. This is my partner, James Jackson. This is …’
‘Sergeant Pascoe, sir. We’re hoping that someone in your way of business will be able to help us by recognizing this set of teeth. Unfortunately it will probably be more than five years ago since they received treatment.’
Roberts seemed to have diminished since the arrival of his partner.
‘James is more the man for you,’ he said irritably. ‘He gets most of our private patients.’
Jackson laughed.
‘You’re too modest, Julian,’ he said. Pascoe doubted it. ‘Let’s have a look.’
He took the description of the dead woman’s jaws from the sergeant’s hands and glanced at it, casually at first, then with growing interest.
‘Now wait a minute,’ he said.
‘You recognize it?’ said Pascoe, hardly daring to hope.
‘It rings a faint bell. The gold work, you see. But it’s absurd … let’s see.’
He glanced rapidly through the drawers of the filing cabinet before him.
‘No, no,’ he said, nonplussed.
‘Perhaps where Mr Roberts got Mrs Farish’s record …’ prompted Pascoe.
Roberts pointed wordlessly to the bottom drawer of an old wooden cabinet shoved almost inaccessibly into a corner. Jackson got down on one knee and began to toss out an assortment of papers with gay abandon.
Suddenly the fountain of stationery ceased.
‘Now wait a minute,’ he said again, this time triumphantly. ‘How about that? The artist always recognizes his own work!’
He held a record card in his hand. As he stood up, his expression turned from triumph to polite bewilderment.
‘Tell me, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Just what is the nature of the enquiry you’re making?’
Pascoe didn’t reply, but almost rudely took the card from the dentist’s hands.
The diagram and its symbols meant little to him. He’d have to take the dentist’s word that it checked with his own written description. And of course it would be double-checked by a police-surgeon.
But the name at the top of the card took him completely by surprise. Expert though he was at keeping a poker-face, the two men facing him would have no difficulty in reading the shock in his eyes.
The middle-aged woman, the vicissitude of whose teeth were recorded on the card in his hands, was Miss Alison Cartwright Girling.

Chapter 6 (#ulink_65627404-1f1a-5381-9e6b-caf3645e215e)
… sometimes a looker-on may see more than a gamester.
SIR FRANCIS BACON
Op. Cit.
‘You’ll never believe this,’ Pascoe had said.
‘I’ll believe anything,’ Dalziel had answered. ‘But let’s make sure. I don’t trust dentists.’
‘Who then?’
‘Doctors. I trust doctors. And policemen.’
It hadn’t been difficult to find out who Miss Girling’s doctor had been.
Yes, the general description of height and proportions seemed to fit. Yes, Miss Girling had twice broken her left leg while ski-ing. She was an enthusiastic ski-er, went to Austria every Christmas.
And yes, he knew about the wig. It wasn’t merely vanity. In one of her ski-ing accidents, she had hit her head against a tree and torn part of the scalp away. The result had been a scar and a small bald patch. Hence the wig.
‘Now we can ask the question,’ said Dalziel. It was nearly 10 P.M. He was sitting at Landor’s desk. In his hands was the commemorative plaque removed from the base of the statue.
‘And the question is, what is Miss Girling doing here, under her own memorial, when best report places her firmly in some Austrian cemetery?’
‘That’s a good question,’ said Pascoe. ‘Mind you, it did strike me as odd that she should have been left over there in the first place. Why not bring her body back to be buried in the land of her fathers with all due military and civic honours?’
‘Expensive.’
‘She can’t have been short of a bob or two, a single woman with a job like this. Someone must have got it.’
‘What do you know about the way she died?’ asked Dalziel. ‘Or was supposed to have died?’
‘Nothing. I just assumed she’d run into a tree or over a cliff or something. If I’d known she’d had two broken legs and a stripped scalp, it wouldn’t even have surprised me. It’s not possible, I suppose, that she could have cracked her head in the accident and some nut had her corpse brought home and secretly buried here?’
‘It’s bloody unlikely,’ said Dalziel. ‘Listen, we can’t sleep on this. Someone must know. There must be a doctor’s report. A death certificate. Something. I know. That woman, the senior thing.’
‘Miss Scotby?’
‘That’s right. She was a great mate, wasn’t she? Get her over here.’
‘I thought it was Miss Disney who claimed to be the bosom friend, sir?’
Dalziel groaned.
‘I couldn’t bear them both at once. Scotby preferably, but Disney if you must.’
There was a list of staff numbers beside the internal phone. Neither Miss Scotby nor Miss Disney answered.
‘They keep later hours than I’d have thought,’ said Pascoe.
‘Or else they’re in bed. Look, scout around see if you can dig up either of them. I’ve got some phoning to do.’
Pascoe left, not certain where he was going. The building they were in seemed completely deserted. Outside, his gaze was immediately attracted to a row of brightly lit windows in one of the new buildings. The curtains were only partly drawn and inside he could see what looked like a colourfully decorated lounge bar.
Ellie! The memory of their appointment for a drink after dinner rushed back into his mind. Their first encounter had not gone particularly well. This could kill it dead, he thought as he pushed open the door.
He was certain she would have left long before. Five minutes had always been her limit even in the days of their closest relationship.
But she was still there. His mind had become used even in their short previous meeting to the changes half a dozen years can make; and now, comparisons over, he was suddenly reminded of how attractive she was. She looked up and smiled. For a moment Pascoe thought she had seen him, then he saw a tall, slim young man moving from the bar clutching a couple of glasses before him.
He would have retreated at this point, not wanting to compound unpunctuality with unwanted interruption, but Eleanor glanced his way and he was forced to go on, though the smile had faded and the line of her jaw became set in an aggression as memory-stimulating as her beauty.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘There was work to be done.’
‘A bore,’ sympathized the young man putting a gin in front of Ellie. He looked with interest at Pascoe.
‘I’m Halfdane,’ he said. ‘Arthur Halfdane.’
‘This is Sergeant Pascoe. I was telling you about him,’ said Ellie, making it sound unpleasant.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ asked Halfdane.
‘No, thanks,’ said Pascoe.
‘Duty,’ murmured Ellie. ‘Like on the telly.’
‘It’s quiet in here,’ said Pascoe, attempting the light touch. ‘I expected wild revelry.’
‘It usually is pretty quiet mid-week. But even the regulars haven’t turned up tonight. Roote and his mob haven’t been in, have they?’
‘No,’ said Ellie. ‘Not since I arrived and that was a long time ago. Perhaps there’s a party.’
‘Roote?’ said Pascoe.
‘Franny Roote, the student president. A man of power.’
‘Oh. One of those.’
Ellie and Halfdane exchanged glances.
‘Better clap him in irons before he demonstrates against you,’ said Ellie.
Pascoe shrugged. He reckoned he’d just about compensated for being late.
‘I must be off,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Miss Scotby and/or Miss Disney. Do you know where I’ll find them?’
‘Next block,’ said Halfdane cordially. ‘First left through the main door. There’s a Christian Union meeting. They’re having a drive. It’s Find-a-Faith week. I believe Walt does a nice line in turning water into Nescafé. It should be over just now. You’re not going to arrest one of them, are you?’
Halfdane spoke lightly, friendlily, his attitude conciliatory. Even Ellie looked interested. Pascoe toyed with the idea of telling them what had happened. Why not? Everyone would know soon enough.
But why should he have to use tid-bits of professional information to attract friendship? No one else did.
The door burst open and a small knot of students entered.
‘You’d better hurry,’ said Halfdane. ‘That’s half the congregation.’
‘Thanks,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’ll see you again. Sorry about being late.’
The Misses Scotby and Disney proved difficult to prise apart. He made the mistake of approaching Disney first, who claimed to be irretrievably committed to an important discussion with two students who looked desperate for escape. Scotby then came into view, so Pascoe quickly switched the attack. The senior tutor said yes, she would be pleased to spare the superintendent a few minutes of her time, upon which Disney cut herself off in the middle of a reminiscence of her last tour of the Holy Land and joined the party before they had gone three paces.
So Pascoe, poker-faced, ushered them in together; Dalziel to his credit took it in his stride. He came from behind the desk to greet them like a headmaster welcoming important mothers.
All rubbery smiles like the Michelin-tyre man, thought Pascoe.
But once they were all seated, he put on his bad-news face.
‘Now, Miss Scotby, and you too, Miss Disney, I would like to ask you one or two questions whose relevance may not at first be apparent to you.’
He’s been rehearsing, thought Pascoe.
‘I would be grateful if you would just answer the questions, painful though this may be, without requiring from me any further information to start with.’
That’s a bit tortuous, thought Pascoe. Get on with it!
‘Please go ahead, Superintendent,’ said Miss Scotby in her precise tones. Miss Disney said nothing.
‘The questions concern Miss Girling, your late principal. Now, I believe she died in Austria, some five years ago.’
‘Five years last Christmas,’ said Miss Scotby.
‘In a ski-ing accident?’ asked Dalziel.
‘Not exactly,’ said Miss Scotby.
‘Asshaschlange.’ The strange outburst came from Miss Disney. The wisp of lace had appeared again and she was having difficulty with her articulation.
‘Sorry?’ said Dalziel.
‘An avalanche,’ she snapped quite clearly. She essayed another sob, Miss Scotby opened her mouth as though to speak, the sob was contained and she went on. ‘Don’t you recall that dreadful avalanche near Osterwald which swept the hotel coach off the road and over the mountainside? She, Alison … Miss Girling … was in it.’
‘How dreadful,’ breathed Dalziel with a light in his eyes which belied the statement. ‘And her body, if you’ll forgive the expression, where …?’
‘They never found it,’ said Miss Scotby. ‘There were half a dozen who were not recovered. It was a terrible business.’
‘There was a service, Superintendent. On the mountainside. It was most moving,’ interrupted Miss Disney. ‘And quite in order. That was later, of course, much later.’
‘You were present?’
‘Of course.’ The Disney bosom swelled. ‘Where else should I be? I was dear Al’s oldest friend, after all.’
Miss Scotby said nothing but shifted her feet in a minutely, eloquent gesture.
‘If they never found Miss Girling’s body,’ said Pascoe, ‘and all the passengers were killed, how were they certain she was on the coach?’
Miss Disney glanced at him coldly but did not deign to answer a subordinate. Miss Scotby had no such qualms.
‘Remember it wasn’t just a coach, any coach. It belonged to the Gasthof where Miss Girling stayed every year. They were expecting her that night. She was probably a little delayed by the fog …’
‘Fog? Which fog?’ asked Dalziel.
‘Well, it was very foggy that December, I remember. There were lots of delays. I remember watching on my television and hoping the principal had got off all right. I’ve often thought that if it hadn’t been for the fog, the coach would probably have picked her up earlier. And she would not have travelled along the road at just that fateful time.’
‘I see. And the coach …?’
‘It was split in half, I believe, before being swept over the edge into a ravine. It was one of those terrible curving roads with a precipice on one side and a cliff-face on the other. The part of the coach with the luggage boot in it was recovered almost intact. Miss Girling’s luggage was there.’
She became silent. Pascoe felt that the memory gave her real pain.
Dalziel having got what he wanted was now keen to get rid of the women.
‘Thank you, ladies,’ he said, now a jovial innkeeper at closing-time. ‘You’ve been most helpful. I’ll keep you no longer.’
The suddenness of the onslaught had them both nearly through the door before Disney dug her heels in.
‘Superintendent! My outcry this morning (was it only this morning!) when those awful … remains were found. You cannot be taking it seriously! I was distraught. You are wasting your time. You …’
Words failed her, but Miss Scotby took up the burden.
‘Do you really believe it might have been Miss Girling, beneath her statue, I mean?’
Dalziel nearly had them over the threshold now. He thrust his great face at them.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I really do.’
They took a step back and he closed the door.
‘Well,’ he said rubbing his hands. ‘That’s better. So far, so good. It’s all possible. Now we can sleep. Tomorrow we’ll set about finding out when. Did she get to Austria and come back to be killed? Or perhaps she never got to Austria at all! But she’s kept five years. She’ll keep another day. Not a bad night’s work, this. A bit of luck’s always handy, isn’t it, Sergeant? Wouldn’t you say this has been our lucky night?’
But Pascoe was not at all certain that he fully agreed.

It had certainly been Harold Lapping’s lucky night.
Harold was over seventy, but still in possession of all his faculties. He had served his country with common sense if not distinction in two world wars. He had loved and outlived two wives, and on certain great family festivals he could look with pride on more than twenty legitimate descendants.
Now in retirement he was a man respected near and far, a church-warden, a pillar of strength in the bowling club, the oldest playing member of the golf club though his handicap had slipped to 12, and an enthusiastic ornithologist.
He was also a voyeur.
It started by accident one spring night as he lay silently in the tough sea-grass above the beach vainly watching through his night-glasses (a memento of one of the wars, he forgot which) a weaving of grass which he had optimistically decided was a dunlin’s nest. If it was, the dunlin was obviously spending the night elsewhere. Bored, Harold moved his glasses slowly along an arc, some thirty or forty yards ahead. And found himself peering into a fascinating tangle of arms and legs. It seemed incredible that only two people could be involved. Harold had no desire to disturb the happy pair, so he waited until their demeanour seemed to indicate they were completely oblivious to anything outside themselves before departing. But while waiting he saw no harm at all in continuing to view with expert approval the techniques on display.
Thereafter whenever his evening’s ornithological research was finished, Harold always cast around with his glasses for a few moments before heading for home.
Tonight was different. It was far too late for any self-respecting birds to be on show. Harold was on his way home after a couple of pints of mild ale followed by two or three bottles of Guinness and the remnants of a cold pie at a friend’s house. It was close on midnight, but the sun’s light was not long out of the perfectly clear sky. He had turned off the road and cut across the golf course to the sea, more to prolong than shorten his journey home. The tide was half-way in, still a long way to go, and the surface of the sea was like cellophane, perfectly still. He could not recall a night so calm.
Then his sharp old eyes caught a flicker of movement among the dunes a furlong ahead.
Without thinking he halted and raised his glasses, without whose weight around his neck he would have felt only half-dressed.
What he saw sent him scrambling up a heathery bank to his right to gain a better vantage point. Then his glasses were up again, swinging wildly round in his incredulity.
In a hollow in the dunes ahead there were about twenty naked men and women dancing. At least that was the only name he could give to it. They were roughly in a circle, moving clockwise; generally in pairs, some facing each other, gripping each other’s arms, sinking to the ground together and leaping up again, their heads flung backwards, shaking in apparent frenzy. Others, arms linked behind, danced back to back, spinning round and round with increasing violence.
He could only see two-thirds of the circle because of the fold of the ground, and even with the clearness of the night and the help of his glasses, detail was not all that clear. But it was obvious that all the men were in a state of great sexual excitement.
A girl appeared alone in the centre of the circle. She seemed to be facing something he could not see because it was on the nearer side of the hollow. She knelt down, her arms flung wide, just in his view. Something advanced towards her from the side of the hollow, blocking her from Harold’s view. Something difficult to make out, dark and shadowy, a strange animal-like silhouette, like the head of a bull.
The dancing reached a new pitch of frenzy, the couples leaping high and shaking their bodies at each other with a wild abandon. Finally one pair collapsed in a tight embrace to the ground, another followed, then another, till in a few moments all lay there together, and a new dance began.
But this had no chance to reach any conclusions. Something happened, Harold couldn’t tell what. But a man leapt up suddenly and looked around. He obviously said something to the others, seemed to shout it in fact, but the distance was too great for Harold to hear.
Then they were all up on their feet and moving again. Not now in the convulsive provocative gyrations of sexual frenzy, but the uncertain changes of direction of fear and panic.
The man who was first to his feet disappeared at a run out of the hollow towards the sea. Instantly the rest scattered and in seconds, as far as Harold could see, the hollow was empty. He followed one or two of the naked figures with his glasses for a few moments, but soon they had all passed completely from view.
Still he swung his glasses to right and left hoping for a brief encore. A movement to the landward side caught his attention. He stopped and focused, but immediately snorted in disappointment. It was a figure all right, but obviously fully clothed. For a moment it stood silhouetted against the night sky, just a bulky shape topped absurdly by a pork pie hat. Then it moved forward down into a hollow among the dunes.
After that all was still.
Harold remained sitting on his vantage point for another fifteen minutes or so. Finally, ‘Now I’ve bloody well seen it all,’ he said to himself in gratulatory tones.
And, rising, he made his way back to the road and thence home.
Truly, so it seemed at the time, it had been Harold Lapping’s lucky night.

Chapter 7 (#ulink_eb892719-e910-5482-97ff-86972e1a073d)
It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest; and surely the fairer way is not much about?
SIR FRANCIS BACON
Op. Cit.
The next day dawned as bright as those preceding it, but by breakfast a stiff breeze had sprung up from somewhere and students and staff alike began searching for the cardigans and pullovers they had so recently discarded.
Dalziel set off early in the morning to confer with his superiors. Pascoe couldn’t imagine what such a conference would be like. Who could possibly be Dalziel’s superior without having dismissed him on sight? If you needed qualities of wisdom and tolerance like these to get to the very top, Pascoe despaired of his own prospects. On the other hand there was the example of Kent.
Detective-Inspector Kent, who had supervised the digging of the garden and the collection of the remains the previous day, now appeared in Landor’s office and gave himself a few airs for a while. But he was too nice a man to keep it up. Pascoe liked him, but, like everyone else, marvelled that he had reached his present eminence. He was married with three young children and his family were devoted to him. But the one real love of his life was golf. It was an obsession with him. A week in which he played less than four rounds was to him a wasted week, though other men found it difficult to fit in nine holes between the demands of the job and their domestic responsibilities.
But Pascoe could feel almost sorry for the man now as he stared out of the window in the direction of the golf course. Dalziel distrusted him and though he’d left a whole list of instructions for Pascoe, Kent had nothing but a few reports to work on and Pascoe could almost feel him working himself up to take a stroll towards the links.
Which would be foolish, but it wasn’t Pascoe’s business to say so. He had work enough to do.
The first thing was to get as clear a picture as possible of Miss Girling’s movements on the day of her departure for Austria.
It is remarkable how difficult it is to reconstruct one particular day after five years. Pascoe tried it for himself and found it impossible.
The actual disaster had taken place in the early hours of December 20th. A Tuesday. Pascoe had arranged for copies of relevant press reports to be discreetly obtained for him. There was no point in provoking interest before they had to. The discovery of the bones had created a small stir, but generally speaking the public preferred fresh, warm blood.
Examination of the relevant year book which had provided much help with his lists the day before revealed that term had ended on Friday December 16th.
This seemed late to him. He consulted Landor who came in from time to time in search of files to take to his new office.
‘We are not a university, Sergeant,’ he answered drily. ‘I am realistic enough to fear that many of our students will not deign to open a book once away from us for the vacation. So we keep them here as long as we can. And in Miss Girling’s day, the place was very much a ladies’ seminary.’
Pascoe was growing to like Landor. Before leaving, Dalziel had told him of the previous night’s discoveries. Landor was unamazed.
‘How clever of you, Superintendent,’ he had said. ‘May we expect an early solution? It has taken a mere five years to discover that poor Miss Girling was murdered.’
Landor now suggested that Miss Scotby might have preserved some record of the sequence of end-of-term events. He himself was quite unable to help. Nothing in the registrar’s office was of any assistance either.
But before he could even start another Scotbyhunt, there was an interruption.
A small aggressive man with a Scottish accent burst in.
‘Where’s the other, the fat one?’ he demanded.
‘You mean Superintendent Dalziel?’
‘Dalziel? He’s a Scot?’
‘Only by birth. He’s not here at the moment. Can I help?’ The man looked doubtful, then nodded.
‘Why not? I’m Dunbar. Chemistry.’
He said it as though he were the science’s personification.
‘Yes, Mr Dunbar?’
‘What’s all this about Girling? That fool Disney’s been twittering about her all morning evidently. She’s a dreadful creature, dreadful. But they all are. It’s an occupational hazard. But what about Girling? The daft creature was hinting at a connection between our late lamented principal and those bones out there?’
He pointed dramatically into the garden. His short arm didn’t seem to stretch as far as he would like.
‘We have reason to believe that the remains discovered yesterday are Miss Girling’s,’ said Pascoe officially.
‘There’s a thing,’ said Dunbar. ‘Well, now. I didn’t believe the others, but this is horse’s mouth stuff, eh?’
‘Others?’ said Pascoe.
‘Aye. Disney yesterday. I had to hold her up. “It’s Girling!” she cried. Man, I near ruptured myself. Then some students this morning. They were convinced. Said they had it from a weejy board or some such nonsense. You’re certain, it’s true?’
‘Yes,’ said Pascoe in some exasperation. Dunbar nodded as if reluctantly convinced. He pulled a disproportionately large pipe from his pocket and began to shred what looked like brown paper into the bowl.
‘She had it coming to her, y’know,’ he said. ‘I thought it was the hand of God, but this …’
He struck three unsuccessful matches.
‘You knew Miss Girling then?’ asked Pascoe. He knew full well that Dunbar’s name was on the list of staff surviving from six years before.
‘Aye. Well. Too bloody well. Me and Saltecombe – you’ve met him? Fat chap in charge of history – we were the first men ever appointed here, you know. 1965. Must have been mad. She didn’t want us, I’m pretty sure. But there were pressures. Others could see the way things were going, so we were a kind of concession. Reckoned we were pretty harmless. Mind, I think Disney would have had us operated on if she could. There was a girl got pregnant that year. She didn’t speak to us for days.’
He laughed loudly and his breath scattered charred shavings from his pipe.
‘I don’t know how I’ve stuck it all this time.’
‘But now …?’
‘Now? We exchanged one old woman for another.’
‘You speak very frankly, Mr Dunbar.’
‘It’s my nature, laddie. Look, how the hell did it happen? I mean, what’s she doing here when she should be feeding the edelweiss in Austria?’
‘That’s what we wish to find out. Tell me,’ said Pascoe, ‘when did you last see Miss Girling alive?’
‘Man, that’s a hard one! Let’s see. That morning. The last day of term.’
‘December 16th?’
‘If you say so.’
‘Friday.’
Dunbar looked at him puzzled.
‘Ah, no!’ he said. ‘That would be when the students went off. But not us. Oh no. We used to hang around over the weekend so we could have a cosy little postmortem at a staff meeting on the Monday morning. The 16th, you said? Then it would be Monday 19th.’
‘I see. So all the academic staff were there on Monday 19th. Have you any idea when Miss Girling would have set off on her holiday? She was flying to Austria, you’ll recall.’
‘No recollection at all. The day is dead to me. I’d be off myself as soon as I humanly could.’
‘A pity. Perhaps Miss Disney, or someone on more friendly terms …’
Dunbar stood up, letting loose his unpleasant laugh once more.
‘Disney! Friendly! Man, you’ve been propagandized!’
‘But I understood …’
‘It’s a myth. She’s got no friends among the living, that one, so she appropriates the dead. One of the few things in Al’s favour was that she couldn’t stomach Disney. Good day to you!’
‘Goodbye. I’m sure the superintendent would like to talk …’
But the door was already slamming shut.
‘Not a very nice kind of man,’ said Kent from the window-seat. Pascoe had forgotten he was there.
‘You handled him well, Sergeant. I think I’ll take a little stroll around the estate and soak up a bit of atmosphere. Back in half an hour if I’m wanted.’
Pascoe watched him stride purposefully out of the room. Perhaps I’ll be like him with a year to go to retirement, he thought wryly.
He turned back to his work. Dunbar had been interesting. But first things first. At what stage did Miss Girling cease to be Miss Girling on her way to a winter holiday and become a corpse ready for its grotesque interment beneath her own memorial? Any point you cared to choose on the road from the college to Osterwald seemed as impossible as any other. Only the reasons changed.
At least this wasn’t one where time was of the essence. There was no freshly killed corpse to be examined, no relatives to be informed (perhaps there were? but it wasn’t the same), no frantic rush to track down a killer, while the traces were still fresh. There was no need to browbeat witnesses, to cut corners.
This one could be taken leisurely, almost academically (not that Dalziel would approve of either of those words!).
But it was true. Pascoe felt almost happy as he went about his work. There was a feeling of cosiness in the old panelled room with the wind outside pushing vainly against the window-pane.
Perhaps he should have gone in for the life scholastic after all. These boys knew what they were at, arriving at their (qualified) conclusions after taking the long way round.
Welcome aboard! he told himself.

Down near the shore the wind was stronger than ever, gusting with violence off the land.
Captain Jessup was having difficulty in coping with it. It blew his drives into the rough, his approach shots into bunkers and even his putts he was willing to swear were being steered inches off course by the malevolent blasts.
The captain’s lips pressed together in a tighter and thinner line beneath his sadly ruffled white moustaches.
Douglas Pearl on the other hand had discovered the secret of the perfect golf swing.
Again.
It was a cyclical business this, like the old religions. An endless circle of discovery and loss, death and resurrection. And to be conscious of the gift was often the prelude to losing it. So he viewed the fourteenth fairway uneasily. It ran along the sea shore, separated from the beach by a range of steep-sided dunes, vicious with tangled heather and gorse. The fairway ran round inland in a wide arc; the wise man followed it. The brave and the stupid attempted to carry the broad peninsula of dunes which lay between the tee and the hole.
Pearl stood uncertain. The wind galed forth in new fury. The captain sniffed impatiently. He made his mind a blank, and swung.

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