A murder too many, p.1
A Murder Too Many, page 1
All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.
A MURDER TOO MANY
A Felony & Mayhem mystery
PRINTING HISTORY
First UK edition (Collins): 1988
First US edition (Doubleday): 1989
Felony & Mayhem edition: 2022
Copyright © 1988 by M. D. Brown
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-63194-268-6
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging-in-Publication information for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
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Death and the Chaste Apprentice
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Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King’s Daughter
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Blotto, Twinks and the Rodents of the Riviera
Blotto, Twinks and the Bootlegger’s Moll
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The Killings at Badger’s Drift
Death of a Hollow Man
Death in Disguise
Written in Blood
Murder at Madingley Grange
ELIZABETH IRONSIDE
The Accomplice
The Art of Deception
Death in the Garden
A Very Private Enterprise
MAGGIE JOEL
The Second-Last Woman in England
The Past and Other Lies
SHEILA RADLEY
Death in the Morning
The Chief Inspector’s Daughter
A Talent for Destruction
Fate Worse than Death
LESLIE THOMAS
Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective
L.C. TYLER
The Herring Seller’s Apprentice
Ten Little Herrings
The Herring in the Library
Herring on the Nile
Crooked Herring
E.X. FERRARS
Something Wicked
Root of All Evil
The Crime and the Crystal
The Other Devil’s Name
Last Will and Testament
Frog in the Throat
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter One
The train came to a standstill beside the gasworks, about a quarter of a mile short of the station of Knotlington, as it always had, all those years ago when Professor Andrew Basnett, F.R.S., had been the youngest of Assistant Lecturers in the Department of Botany at Knotlington University. But some things do not change.
He knew that the train would stay where it was for about three minutes, then potter slowly on into the station. Sitting and waiting, he found it amusing to discover that he felt almost a kind of affection for the great grey cylinders. They seemed to symbolize the beginning of his career, a career that on the whole he had enjoyed. It had taken him from Assistant Lecturer to Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, then Reader, then on to a Chair in the college in London University where many years before he had taken his degree. He had remained in that Chair, living in a pleasant flat in St. John’s Wood, until his retirement five years ago.
He lived in the flat alone now, because Nell, his wife, who had accompanied him step by step as he moved up the academic ladder, had died of cancer ten years before. In those ten years he had grown used, after a fashion, to solitariness, but now, looking out at the gasworks, an ugly scar on a scene that had all too many ugly scars on it, he had a sudden very clear memory of how he and Nell had first arrived here together and how the train had stopped at this very spot. Nell, who had grown up in the soft green of Hampshire, had never before been in one of England’s big industrial cities, or known anything of their grimness, and there had been a trace of dismay in her voice as she exclaimed, “Well, here we are!”
Since leaving Knotlington, Andrew had returned to it a number of times. He had come to conferences and to give the occasional lecture and to act as External Examiner in the department of which he had once been the most junior member. But he found that department hardly recognisable now. It had been entirely rebuilt, with an amount of money spent on it that would have seemed the most improbable of daydreams to the people who had worked there in those long-ago days—people who, even if they had not drifted on, as he had done, to other universities, were by now either dead or, like himself, retired. He found no familiar faces in his old department when he returned to it.
He was acquainted with the present Professor of Botany, Walter Greenslade, but that was because Walter had been a student of Andrew’s in his London University days. He also had one or two other friends in the town, which had changed in general as much as the university had. Since the war much of its ancient grime had been removed, and buildings which had once been mere black, flat, faceless blocks had been revealed, after cleaning, as charming and well-proportioned Georgian houses. The trams that had once screeched along the streets had gone, and a good deal of the smoke that had once belched from the many chimneys in the town had been compulsorily reduced. But the gasworks were unaltered, and so was the little pause for breath that the train gave when it came abreast of them. It filled Andrew for a moment with a sad but quite pleasant nostalgia.
He had changed a good deal himself with the passing years. He was a tall man, but recently he had acquired a habit of stooping slightly which made him seem to have shrunk. He was lean and had bony features, short grey hair, and grey eyes under eyebrows that were still strikingly dark. His long sight was still good and he needed glasses only for reading. There had always been a look of good nature about him, but this was blended now with a trace of vagueness, as if he sometimes caught himself wondering where he was and why he was there. He was coming to Knotlington now to attend a conference of the Botanical Association, a society of which he had once been Secretary, before his elevation to a Chair.
He was not sure why he was coming. He was still a member of the Association, paying his yearly subscription faithfully, even if, when this went up, he sometimes forgot to change his banker’s order. But he had had very little to do with the society for many years. However, when he had received the usual notification of the conference to be held in Knotlington in July some impulse had moved him for once to attend it. There was a possibility, he had thought, that he would meet some old colleagues, which would probably be enjoyable, and he might even find something stimulating in contact with the younger members of his profession. And then there had been the letter that he had received from Giles Farmoor. An odd letter.
Not that the letter by itself would have brought Andrew to Knotlington. He knew that Giles was an odd person, not always to be taken seriously. His occasional letters had a way of seeming to say more than he actually put into words. Even in the chats on the telephone, to which he was addicted, or over a quiet lunch, he often gave the impression of keeping to himself matters which it would be a grave breach of confidence to discuss. But the last letter that Andrew had had from him had been relatively explicit, urging him to come to the conference of the Botanical Association because this would provide excellent cover for his visit, and incidentally, because Giles was in need of advice from someone he trusted.
The suggestion that Andrew might be in need of cover if he chose to visit Knotlington had of course been merely flippant, and it had entertained him as well as stimulating his curiosity, thus helping to promote a feeling that after all it was worth his while from time to time to encounter other scientists and not accept a view of himself, which had been developing in him lately, that he was firmly and irrevocably lodged on the shelf. Anyway, here he was, looking at the gasworks.
The time was four-fifteen and he was not to meet Giles Farmoor until dinner that evening. In the interval he went to the room that had been reserved for him in one of the student hostels, empty of students at present since the long vacation had begun. The one in which he found himself lodged had been built long after he had moved on from the town. It was a pleasant, square building, faced with grey stone and surrounded by lawns and flowering trees and rose beds, at present richly flushed with bloom. A high stone wall surrounded the grounds. The room allotted to Andrew had light-coloured furniture, a dark brown carpet, pale green curtains, and a quantity of paperbacks in a bookshelf. When Andrew looked at these he saw that they were mostly detective stories and science fiction, which ought to indicate, he thought, though perhaps it did not, that the student whose room it was was a serious character who had taken what scholarly work he possessed home with him to study in the vacation, leavin g his escapist literature behind. On a writing table under a window there was an envelope with Andrew’s name on it.
He opened it and found a note from Professor Greenslade, inviting him to join him for a drink in the staff club at six o’clock. In Andrew’s time in Knotlington there had been no such thing as a staff club, but at a later date one had come into existence—a slim, modern structure between two solid, smoke-stained Victorian buildings. He knew his way to it and as the summer evening was fine he decided to walk. It would probably take him no longer than going by bus, as the traffic in the homegoing rush hour was very congested, moving very slowly from one set of lights to the next. Besides the thick flow of private cars making for the suburbs, big lorries went lumbering past, their engines roaring, their brakes squealing. Andrew felt thankful that the room that he had been given in the hostel was at the back of it, so that if this kind of noise continued into the night it was unlikely to disturb him.
The staff club was in a side street which was lined on both sides with parked cars, but led nowhere and so at least was quiet. Inside there was a long lounge with a bar at the far end of it. Walter Greenslade was at the bar and at the moment appeared to be having an argument with someone, a not very amicable argument. He was irritably contradicting something that had just been said to him. He had a carrying voice and was saying, “I don’t agree with you. Not at all! It’s high time we got rid of the bloody things.”
There was a quiet hum of talk in the place. Along one side of it were three tall windows which gave a not very interesting view of a blank wall outside, which belonged to the neighbouring building. On the wall of the lounge between the windows hung a row of pictures which Andrew did not remember having seen there before. They were mostly portraits and caught his eye in a way that made him think that presently he would take a more thoughtful look at them. But for the moment his object was to join Walter Greenslade.
He was sitting on a stool by the bar, with one elbow resting on it and with what looked like a very strong whisky and soda in his hand. That surprised Andrew, for Walter had always been an abstemious man. But the whisky was not the only surprise that Andrew’s first glance at Walter gave him. In the four years since they had last happened to meet at a Royal Society conversazione Walter had changed very much. His rather long, bland, smooth face was not merely far more sallow than it had been then, but was positively haggard. His grey eyes behind metal-rimmed spectacles looked sunken and had a nervous gleam in them instead of the slightly smug calm that Andrew remembered. In a moment of intuition of the kind that sometimes occurs in the very first glimpse that one has of someone whom one has not seen for some time, and which will fade as soon as familiar expressions and gestures reappear, Andrew thought with some distress that he was looking at a very sick man, a man almost on the edge of a breakdown.
If Walter had not been in a group of people, some of whom, like Andrew, had presumably come to the conference of the Botanical Association, he would probably have asked Walter straight away what was wrong. But that could hardly be done when he was apparently playing host to the people round him. And seeing Andrew approach his face brightened. He got down from his stool, clapped Andrew on the shoulder, asked if he had had a good journey, was the room that they had given him comfortable, and what would he like to drink.
Then he gestured at the people round him and said, “I expect you all know each other.”
His voice was attractive, mellow and soft and intimate. As soon as Andrew had the sherry for which he had asked, and the other members of the group around the bar were occupied with one another, Walter took Andrew by the arm and drew him closer.
“Did you notice all those pictures along there as you came in?” he asked. “I was just having an argument about them with some of these people. I’m always being told they’re genius, but to me they’re hideous, almost obscene, as well as just damned incompetent. Genius my foot! They’ve only been hung there out of sentiment. The man was a member of the University and he happened to get himself murdered, and there they’ll hang in memory of him to all eternity as far as I can see. I’ve tried telling people that enough is enough and it’s time they were taken down and dumped somewhere well out of sight. But nobody listens to me. Best artist there’s been in Knotlington this century, I’m told. But I just find them plain offensive. I’m sure Knotlington’s got some other artists it wouldn’t do any harm for the club to patronize. Now tell me honestly, what do you think of them?”
Andrew would have gone to take a look at one or two of the pictures if Walter had not held him so firmly by the arm.
“Who was the artist?” Andrew asked.
“Fellow called Judd—Carl Judd,” Walter answered.
The name rang a bell faintly in Andrew’s memory.
“And you said he was murdered?” he asked. “Ah yes, he was on the staff here, wasn’t he? I remember reading about it now. I was abroad at the time in Australia, and there was some shemozzle going on in the Middle East too which probably was going to mean a war, so I didn’t pay much attention to what was happening here. In fact, I only noticed it because it had happened in Knotlington. What department was he in?”
“Fine Arts,” Walter said. “He was a lecturer. Useless in his job because he couldn’t be bothered with students. Other people’s wives were more his line.”
Walter himself was unmarried, so his apparent bias against the dead lecturer could not have been caused by his having taken an undue interest in a wife of Walter’s.
“It was about two years ago it happened, wasn’t it?” Andrew said.
“Just about.”
“He was beaten up and strangled, I seem to remember.”
“No, stabbed.”
“Ah yes. And they never got who did it, did they?”
“Oh yes, it was a chap called Stephen Sharland, in the Botany Department. You mean you really don’t remember it?” Walter Greenslade looked astonished. “He got life. And Judd’s place has been taken by a harmless little white mouse of a man. Well, I say harmless, but it’s he who got the club committee to hang all those pictures there. Got hold of them from Margaret Judd and when they were first hung it was supposed to be just for an exhibition in memory of the man. But we seem to be stuck with them for good. They’ve already been there for months. But why are we talking about the things? It’s just that I get irritated by them every time I come in here. You’ll join us for dinner, won’t you?”
Andrew replied that he had already arranged to have dinner with Giles Farmoor.
“A pity,” Walter said. “Well, how have things been going with you? How’s the book getting along?”
It always embarrassed Andrew to be asked about his book. Soon after his retirement he had started to write a life of Robert Hooke, the noted seventeenth-century microscopist, botanist, and architect. In those days people had not been drilled into specialization as they are in modern times, and it had been possible to be both a scientist and an artist at the same time. This quality in the man had always had a fascination for Andrew, and as he believed that there were some papers relating to Hooke in the library of the university here he was hoping to be able to spend some time studying them instead of attending all the lectures in the conference programme.
But he preferred not to discuss his work. The trouble with it was that over the years it never seemed to grow any longer. It absorbed him. He spent hours on it. But a good many of those hours were spent in destroying what he had written the day before, and he had an uneasy feeling that a number of the people who knew him well probably thought of his endeavours as a joke. Of course they were polite about it. They asked him how it was coming along and appeared to take it seriously, but as he sometimes was himself in discouraged moods, they were probably quite sure that it would never be finished. When he was directly questioned about it, however, he always said that it was progressing well, then did his best to change the subject.
This happened to be made easy now because a small man suddenly appeared at Andrew’s elbow and said, “You must be Professor Basnett.”
Andrew had no memory of ever having seen the man before, but Walter introduced him as the university registrar, Kenneth Marriott, and the little man assured Andrew that he had attended lectures of his many years ago. He looked about fifty, was rather portly, and had a round, long face with plump cheeks, slightly protuberant brown eyes like a spaniel’s, and a high, smooth forehead. He told Andrew that although he had taken a degree in biology, he had long ago found out that he had no aptitude for science and had drifted into administration. He had been in Knotlington for five years.
