Caroline Minuscule
Read Caroline Minuscule Online
Authors: Andrew Taylor
Table of Contents
The William Dougal Series
Our Fathers' Lies
An Old School Tie
Freelance Death
Blood Relation
The Sleeping Policeman
Odd Man Out
The Lydmouth Series
An Air That Kills
The Mortal Sickness
The Lover of the Grave
The Suffocating Night
Where Roses Fade
Death's Own Door
Call the Dying
Naked to the Hangman
The Roth Trilogy
The Four Last Things
The Judgement of Strangers
The Office of the Dead
The Blaines Novels
The Second Midnight
Blacklist
Toyshop
A Stain on the Silence
The Barred Window
The Raven on the Water
The American Boy
Bleeding Heart Square
The Anatomy of Ghosts
A bestselling crime writer, Andrew Taylor has also worked as a boatbuilder, wages clerk, librarian, labourer and publisher's reader. He has written many prize-winning crime novels and thrillers, including the William Dougal crime series, the Lydmouth crime series and the ground-breaking Roth Trilogy. Andrew Taylor lives with his wife in the Forest of Dean, on the borders of England and Wales.
To find out more, visit Andrew's website,
www.andrew-taylor.co.uk
Andrew Taylor
First published in Great Britain in 1982 by Victor Gollancz Ltd
First published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2007
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Andrew Taylor 1982
The right of Andrew Taylor to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 76500 7
Paperback ISBN 978 0 340 93291 9
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
To Caroline
T
ypical
, William Dougal thought.
How bloody inconvenient
.
He was standing just inside the door of his supervisor's room in the History Department. Three yards away, a corpulent, tweed-covered shape sprawled on the oatmeal carpet, to the right of the desk. The eyes and the tongue protruded from its bloated face towards Dougal in the doorway.
No doubt about it: the life had been sucked out of Doctor Gumper. Its absence left a chilly vacuum in the overheated atmosphere.
Dougal felt lightheaded and detached.
Don't panic
. It must have been a heart attack, he told himself; Gumper had always been pink with comfortable living and irritation.
The angle-poise lamp on the desk was switched on, spilling a puddle of light over the body. Did that mean that Gumper had died recently? Probably not â the lamp would have been on for hours, for the room was badly lit and the dull February day outside had been drab and overcast.
Suddenly Dougal caught sight of a detail he had missed before. The light was glinting on a filament of nylon which dangled from Gumper's neck, to the left of his Adam's apple, down to the floor. Dougal's mind clouded with the monstrous necessity of believing what he was seeing.
Not a heart attack: murder. He grappled with the idea, but it refused to succumb. Why should Gumper be killed â a dogmatic lecturer in paleography, whose only distinction was a belief that the proper study of mankind was a medieval script called Caroline Minuscule? And why did he, Dougal, have to be the one to find the body?
The nylon dug deep into the flesh of the neck. Dougal could trace the line of its passage. A garotte made the whole business so much stranger, he thought, as shivers shot through him. It suggested a degree of professionalism or premeditation on the part of the killer, which didn't tie in with a domestic crime of passion committed by a jealous wife, a disgruntled student or a competitive colleague.
A killer was the natural corollary to Gumper's corpse; he had forgotten that until now. Fear took over, and his mouth went dry, as if the moisture there had been scooped up by a powerful vacuum cleaner. The symptom was almost reassuring in the familiarity of what it portended. He kicked the door open â it was still ajar, as it had been when he came in â and stumbled across the linoleum of the passage to the lavatory opposite. He knelt like a supplicant before the bowl â he noticed gratefully that it was clean â closed his eyes and lost his lunch.
He pulled the chain and washed his hands, scalding them with the hot water in his nervousness. He dried them on the roller towel, feeling faintly surprised that routine should assert itself at such a time: toilet training must go deep.
The future stretched uninvitingly before him. What the hell was he going to do? Decision making was not his forte and he had a horror of situations which forced him to make them rapidly. He looked at the pale face in the mirror and it stared back at him, blank with uncertainty.
The police? He imagined how it would go â walking down to the Departmental secretary's office; trying to explain what had happened, which would take time because at first she would be more interested in doing her nails and then she would think he was trying to make a fool of her; the typist would gawp; they would ring the police and wait uncomfortably together before and after they came; there would be pots of tea, awkward silences, questions and statements, all of which would probably drag on into tomorrow.
Dougal swerved away from this unpleasant scenario. With his hand on the doorknob of the lavatory, he considered the alternative â a discreet withdrawal, which would inconvenience no one (certainly not Gumper) and save him a ruined evening. It could hardly affect the police's investigations. Nobody had seen him slipping away. And Doctor Gumper's desk diary would support the innocent deception, for it contained no record of an appointment with Dougal today â the arrangement had been vague: that he should drop in at some point before Friday with the transcription he should have done last week, prepared to discuss the general progress of his work. To go now would be like seeing someone shoplifting and doing nothing about it. It wasn't important.
The thought of Amanda hardened his resolve. She was doing the cooking tonight â beef Stroganoff at Dougal's request and under protest. Missing dinner could prove worse than tactless, whatever the reason.
His briefcase, though â that was still in Gumper's room. The thought of having to go back tempted him to change his mind and face the lesser evils of the secretary and the police. And what about fingerprints? . . . But no, he'd only touched the door on the outside. Anyway, he had been there perfectly legitimately last week.
(Well, Mr Dougal, your contribution to . . . um . . . scholarship this term hardly constitutes an auspicious beginning to the New Year's . . . um . . . labour.)
But perhaps the police could estimate the age of fingerprints by the degree of clarity they had, or the presence of others overlying them.
Some part of his mind, which had nothing to do with the semirational assessment of pros and cons, made its judgment: go, while it was still possible. He hadn't touched the doorknob . . . thank God the door had been left ajar . . . by the murderer.
Another factor supported his decision to retreat: he hadn't liked Doctor Gumper, a balloon-shaped man with colourless eyes behind sandy eyelashes, inflated to bursting point with the unstable gas of his own pomposity. Gumper's book-lined study reflected the man he had been â it was a cocoon of stale air where it was impossible to imagine anyone laughing or crying. It was on the first floor of the History Department, but Dougal had always thought of it as the concrete bunker beneath the ivory tower. Doctor Gumper, revelling in his status as an expert, had not been content to patronize kindly those with inferior intellectual attainments. His sarcasm had been gratuitously unpleasant; he had used his complacency as a weapon of offense. His muted spite hinted at failed ambition â a professorship, perhaps, or even a CBE for services to scholarship.
Dougal realized with a slight jolt, as old assumptions cracked like ice in the sudden thaw of new certainties, that he was really rather grateful to the person who had killed Doctor Gumper, despite the problems he had caused. It would be a relief to have to find a less abrasive supervisor.
One thought nagged him, though â what if someone
had
seen him in the building this evening? It was unlikely, he knew, but he decided to forestall the possibility of suspicion by going up to the Graduate Common-Room on the second floor before leaving the college.
He slid back the bolt on the lavatory door and braced himself for the regrettable necessity of going back to Gumper's room. In the corridor, he stood listening for a second, holding his breath. A typewriter was clattering somewhere below â from the secretary's office? â like hail-stones in slow motion on a tin roof. He heard a laugh which he recognized upstairs â it grated on his ears: Philip Primrose must be making the Common-Room unfit for human habitation again. Too bad.
Dougal shouldered open Gumper's door and stepped quietly into the room.
His briefcase lay on the chair between the desk and the door. He looked at it for an instant as if he had never seen it before, noticing its brown shabbiness, the stitching in an advanced stage of dissolution and the leather torn and scuffed.
He looked involuntarily past it and realized for the first time that Gumper's body was surrounded by a sea of scattered papers. He bent closer â most of them were photographs or photostats of manuscripts, mainly written in Caroline Minuscule. Prospective plates for Gumper's forthcoming book? All periods of the script seemed to be represented, from its blotchy origins in Merovingian cursive to the intimations of angularity in Protogothica. Better not touch anything.
Dougal shrugged. It was none of his business and it was stupid to stay here. He picked up the briefcase and edged back towards the door. He was glad to discover that, while the sight of Gumper was hardly attractive, it no longer made him retch. Progress of a sort.
He pulled the door to behind him, but didn't close it; everything must be as he had found it. Moving softly and swiftly, he headed for the stairs. The clock on the half-landing said a quarter past five â shit, the whole thing could only have taken two or three minutes.
The passage on the second floor was identical to the one below â a bare expanse of linoleum with half a dozen dirty cream doors opening off it; like the one below, it was also empty. Dougal slipped into the Graduate Common-Room â the door at the end. It was large and shabbily furnished; scuffed armchairs stood in clusters, flanked by severely rectangular coffee tables on the resiliently grey carpet. A hot drinks machine loomed uninvitingly in the corner by the window. It produced hot water for its clients, offering a generous choice of six shades of brown. On good days it provided plastic cups as well. The walls, painted with the regulation pastel green of the college, had been partially covered with glowing travel posters depicting the sort of places which were generally better in two dimensions than in three or four.