Murder Is Academic (14 page)

I found a place in the central Reading Room, close to the reference books I needed, and spread out my papers. After a short time, I pushed my chair back and looked around the long narrow room with its high ceiling and long rows of tables lit by desk lamps. As usual during term-time, it was almost full, but the big space soaked up sound. All I could hear was a faint murmur of conversation at the enquiry desk, and the occasional rustle of someone at the next table turning a page. It struck me that the atmosphere was oddly similar to that of the Intensive Care ward.

It had moved me deeply, that room of silent sleepers. I thought again that it was like a legend or a fairy-story. There was something timeless and peaceful about it; there seemed no reason why Rebecca should not lie there for years, as insulated from the world as a child in the womb. There was a tiny snapping noise. I looked down. I had broken the point of my pencil.

I leaned forward and put my head in my hands. It was natural that I should be concerned and disturbed about Rebecca, but was it natural that I should be so very upset? Did I somehow feel that the attack on Rebecca had something to do with the college, and the department for which I was now responsible? Could it really be coincidence that Margaret and Lucy were both dead and Rebecca was lying unconscious in hospital? It could be, I told myself, of course it could. Perhaps it was just an amazing run of bad luck, but what if it wasn't?

I fixed my attention on the page in front of me. Thirty seconds later I realized that I had got to the bottom of it without taking in a single word. My book on Victorian poetry, which I'd laboured on so lovingly for so long, seemed dull and irrelevant. I thought, but what if I was writing a book about
this,
about what's been happening over the last eight months or so? That startling idea seemed to bring things into focus. Well, what would I do? Exactly what I did when I was researching my academic books. I wouldn't take anything for granted, I wouldn't rely on anything anyone told me unless there was evidence to back it up; I'd go right back to the beginning – further probably than anyone else had thought necessary – and work my way forward, casting my net as wide as I could. And all along I'd be weighing the evidence, looking for the connections and patterns, piecing together a picture …

I went to the periodicals desk and ordered up back copies of
The Times
for April. I soon found what I was looking for. On page four of the edition for 12 April was a small item headed ‘Cambridge student dies in fall':

Lucy Hambleton, 28, a postgraduate student from St Etheldreda's College, Cambridge, has died in hospital after an accident in the Derbyshire Dales. Miss Hambleton was found at the bottom of a cliff near Thor's Cave, a site of archaeological interest, by a man out with his dog. She suffered a fractured skull and hypothermia. It is thought that she slipped and fell as she was climbing up to the cave, and that she had lain unconscious in the open all night. Dr Lawrence Osbourne, Warden of St Etheldreda's College, said, ‘We are devastated by Lucy's death. She was a very able and popular student, and all our sympathy goes out to her family at this unhappy time. The college hopes to set up a memorial fund in her name.'

I went back into the Reading Room. Just by the enquiry desk there's a bank of telephone directories covering the whole country. I pulled out the one for Derby and District, took it back to my desk, and rifled through the pages until I found the telephone number of The Compleat Angler.

Chapter Eleven

‘Why are aquariums so strangely fascinating?' Stephen said.

‘They really are, aren't they? Perhaps we've got a kind of distant race memory, from before our ancestors left the sea.'

‘And of course we start life floating in the womb.'

‘Yes: there's a kind of aquarium in here,' I said, placing my hand on the bump under my sweater.

We stopped at a tank where a single fish hung in the water, motionless except for the gentle fluttering movement of its fan-like pectoral fins. The long dorsal fin was streaked with electric blue, and the scales on the upper part of the body were outlined with indigo. Dotted here and there were scales marked like the eye on a peacock's feather.

‘What's this?' Stephen said.

I looked at the label below the tank. ‘It's a snakehead.'

The broad flat head did look a little snake-like, but the golden eyes seemed to peer out at us in benign enquiry. Stephen put his finger gently on the plate glass of the tank. The fish pressed its mouth against the other side.

‘Do you know that Chinese saying?' he asked. ‘The fish is the last to know that he lives in water. I wonder what the world looks like from the other side of the glass.'

We strolled on down the dimly lit corridor. We had gone into the aquarium at Matlock Bath to get out of the rain. In here, the only sound was that of the gentle bubbling of air, like the throb of a heartbeat, being fed into the tanks to aerate the water. It was indeed a bit like being back in the womb, I thought.

We passed a tank of red-eared terrapins clambering over one another under a sun-lamp. In the next tank a sad-looking soft-shelled turtle was half-buried in the gravel at the bottom. Outside, the thermal pool, which had once soothed the rheumatic pains of visitors to this little spa town, was full of large carp; black, ivory, gold, coral-coloured; some dappled, some elegantly all of a piece.

The carp moved expectantly towards us. We bought handfuls of pellets from a machine and leaned over the rail, watching the churning water and the flurry of fish as they lunged for the food.

‘“Nature red in tooth and claw”,' I said, aiming a pellet at one of the less successful fish. He caught it and dashed away, pursued by a bigger fish.

‘Yep. The survival of the fittest,' Stephen said. ‘Food and sex. That's all they're interested in.'

‘And shelter, perhaps,' I said, thinking of the soft-shelled turtle in his gravel. I tossed in the last few pellets.

We went out into the main street. Through the sound of the traffic, I caught the faint roar of the River Derwent as it went tumbling down the valley, turgid with flood water. The rain was now little more than a mist that clung to the sides of the steep valley. The granite cliffs, crowded with trees, and little cable-cars spanning the ravine gave Matlock Bath an alpine air. With its fish and chip shops, ice-cream kiosks and amusement arcades, it was like a faded seaside town picked up and set down in the middle of the Derbyshire Dales. On this cold November day it had a melancholy, raffish out-of-season charm that I'd always enjoyed. I'd been here often with Simon. I hadn't told Stephen that. It was only forty minutes drive from Sheffield and had been one of our favourite places when we'd first met.

‘Are you all right?' Stephen asked.

‘Just cold.'

He took one of my hands in both of his and rubbed it. ‘You need a cup of coffee,' he decided.

We went into a café and settled ourselves down by the window.

When the waitress had served us, Stephen said, ‘Were there any doubts at the time about Lucy's death being accidental?'

I shook my head. ‘I'm sure there weren't.'

Stephen began drawing on the steamed-up window with the end of his coffee spoon.

‘What was she like?' he asked.

I shrugged. ‘I hardly knew her. The impression I got was that she was lively, sociable, confident. Sporty. She played in the college netball team. So did Rebecca. I looked up her file in the registry yesterday. That must have been how they knew each other.'

‘You said she was older than the usual postgraduate.'

‘Twenty-eight. She hadn't come straight from her first degree. That's not uncommon these days. It's so difficult to get funding. She'd managed to get a British Academy grant. No mean achievement. She was very bright, very able, no doubt about that.'

‘Then one false step and it's all over.' He added a line to the drawing on the window and sat back to consider the effect.

‘As it was for Margaret,' I reminded him. I looked at the window. All I could make out was an abstract pattern of straight lines and curves.

‘Accidents do happen. So do coincidences.'

‘I'd like nothing better than to believe that. I'm hoping that I can find out enough about Lucy's death to put my mind at rest.'

Stephen narrowed his eyes and added a couple of lines to his creation. Was it actually lettering? I couldn't quite make it out.

‘I've been thinking, Cass. If the police don't collar someone for this attack soon – the one on Rebecca, I mean – and you'd rather not approach the police formally, you could do worse than have a quiet word with Jim Ferguson. He'd be able to put out some feelers, drop a word in the right ear.'

‘Jim—?'

Stephen added a couple of dots with the very end of the coffee spoon handle.

‘I met him at that conference on crime and the internet – you remember, it was about six months ago – total waste of time. We ended up in the bar and we had a drink together.'

I raised a quizzical eyebrow.

Stephen grinned. ‘Well, maybe three or four. Anyway, he's a good bloke. And more to the point, he's a Detective Inspector based at Cambridge nick. I run into him now and then and we keep saying we'll have a drink together.'

‘Certainly something to bear in mind,' I said. I tilted my head to see if the writing made better sense from an angle. It didn't.

Stephen stood up and dug in his pocket for some money.

‘So what's the plan for this afternoon?'

I got up and put my coat on. ‘A visit to Thor's Cave, I think.'

Stephen counted his change out on the table. Then, as if as an afterthought, he leaned over and with his finger drew a heart above the hieroglyphs on the window.

‘What
is
that?' I said at last.

He shook his head and smiled mysteriously. With a few sharp strokes he put an arrow through the heart.

As we walked away from the café, I looked back at the window. Now that I was on the other side I could see what Stephen had written in careful yet exuberant Gothic script.

I love Cassandra.

*   *   *

Heading west from Matlock Bath we soon entered a mysterious landscape of narrow lanes and little hidden dales and rivers. We parked at the point where Weag's Bridge crosses the River Manifold, and set off along a metalled path, which had once been the track of the Leek and Manifold Light Railway.

The rain had cleared to leave an intense blue sky. But there was a stiff breeze and, although it was only two o'clock, the sun was low, throwing raking shadows down the hills. The path took us up the valley between the river, which ran gurgling over its stony bed, and a shallow cliff where little trees clung to fissures in the rock. Ivy and moss didn't quite conceal the stratification of the limestone that cut through the cliff in great diagonal lines.

Suddenly a bend in the path brought a huge grey crag into view, disconcertingly close, rising up several hundred feet. Its lower slopes were wooded, but for the last hundred feet or so it was bare limestone, rough-hewn, precipitous. As we rounded the bend a cavernous hole came into view. As far as I knew, I'd never seen it before, but it looked oddly familiar.

We stopped in our tracks.

‘My God! Is that Thor's Cave?' Stephen exclaimed. ‘Are we really going to climb up to it?'

‘That's the idea. I've looked on the Ordnance Survey map. There's a path that goes all the way up.'

Stephen looked doubtful. He let his focus drop to where my bump would have been visible had I not been wearing two jumpers and a fleece. ‘It looks awfully steep.'

I said firmly, ‘I'll be fine as long as I go slowly. And I'll stop the moment I'm at all tired. Promise.'

Stephen sighed. ‘Well, you go first and then if you do slip…'

‘I'll have a soft landing. I'll be very careful. Really. And it's not actually that steep. The path winds about a lot. You can tell that from the map.'

We crossed an old iron bridge over the river and began the ascent. Wet leaves squeaked and squelched underfoot. The feet of earlier walkers had churned the path into thick mud that sucked at our walking boots. We climbed through a grove of hazel trees, graceful and attenuated without their foliage. Close to the path, gnarled and spiky old hawthorn caught at our coats as we passed. My calves began to ache. On and on we toiled. The path got steeper. I planted my hands on my knees as I climbed. Stephen put the palms of his hands in the small of my back to push me up. Several times we stopped so that I could rest.

Near the top, large slabs of rock were set unevenly up the hill to form a rough staircase. As we neared the mouth of the cave, the valley opened out beneath us.

We stood looking down into it, the wind slapping our faces and snatching at our clothes. The river and the path wound round another smaller crag on the other side before disappearing into a fold of the dale. Beyond that I could see the tiny white square of a farmhouse, and beyond that the scattered buildings of a village. The vast airy space seemed to have something tangible about it, as though it had a density greater than normal air. I imagined leaning out and gliding as effortlessly as a bird, high above the valley, borne up by the wind. I felt the first nauseous stirrings of vertigo and pulled my eyes away from the panorama.

We turned to look up at the cave. Once again, I had the feeling that I had seen it – or something very like it – before. Thor's Cave. No doubt the name was a nineteenth century invention, but this did seem a fitting home for the god of thunder and rain. Its mouth was guarded by a sloping outcrop of rock that offered few footholds. Ribbed walls rose up to form the shape of a Gothic arch about twenty feet high. A long fissure in the limestone let in a shaft of slanting light that made the cave look like a primitive cathedral hewn out of rock. After a few yards the passage curved and disappeared into darkness.