M. Trow - Dark Entry

‘Machiavel?’ Dr Goad strained to catch the word. ‘Did she say “Machiavel”?’

‘She did, Provost.’ Benjamin Steane nodded, alarmed. ‘I’ve been fearing this for a while.’

‘Have you?’

Steane looked with contempt at the old man. He’d been waiting for his shoes now for more years than he cared to remember and the old duffer was getting dottier and deafer by the day. The exasperating truth was that old provosts didn’t die and they didn’t fade away, either.

‘You can walk into any study in this university,’ Steane told him, ‘and ten to one you’ll find a copy of the most pernicious book ever written – The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli. The man was the Devil himself, Provost, and yet today’s scholars think nothing of reading him.’ He shook his head. ‘There’s sore decline.’

‘There always was, Benjamin.’ The Provost’s memory went further back than Steane’s. Under his predecessor, scholars had failed to doff their caps to their betters, or to make way for them in the street. Goad intended, as a young new broom, to do something about that. One of his first acts as Provost was to ban attendance at bear-baiting, bull-baiting and playing football in the street.

‘And bathing,’ he suddenly blurted out, as though he’d been talking all along. ‘You remember the incident?’

Steane didn’t, but he’d heard it so often from the Provost he felt he had witnessed the thing personally.

‘Young Dick Hadden.’ Goad was shaking his white-haired head. ‘Drowned in the Cam in the prime of his youth. Oh, he could have gone a long, long way. Why do you suppose the scholars call that place Paradise, Benjamin?’

‘Boys will be boys, Provost,’ Steane observed, ‘the careless cruelty of youth.’ For years in Cambridge the sick joke had run that Dick Hadden had found Paradise earlier than he’d expected. Steane cleared his throat and nodded to the bedder standing, head bowed, before them in the lodge hall. ‘Now, perhaps, to the matter in hand?’

‘Hmm? Oh, yes, of course. This stranger -’ his old eyes focused on the woman – ‘the one who called himself Machiavel, where did he come from?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ Eliza Laurence mumbled. She was walking through a nightmare from which she couldn’t wake up. She, who had never spoken to the Provost or any of the Fellows before, was now facing the most powerful man in her life. It was the day of judgement for her and Dr Goad might have been St Peter himself. ‘One moment I was alone in the room . . . well, alone save for the Master . . . then he clamped a hand over my mouth so I shouldn’t scream.’

Steane nodded. ‘Clear guilt, Provost.’

‘The door was locked, Benjamin,’ Goad said. ‘This woman used her key – and Whitingside was dead in his bed. Are we sure that foul play was involved? A sudden seizure, surely? Apoplexy. Perhaps the sleeping sickness?’

The Provost looked hopeful. His college had come in for its share of knocks under his hand, scurrilous notices about him pinned to the Lodge door and the main gate. Getting on as he was, he was too old for all that now and wanted a quiet life. That said, there had not been a reported case of the sleeping sickness in the college for a quarter of a century.

‘Perhaps.’ Steane nodded. ‘Provost, may I have a quiet word?’

‘Hmm?’ Goad looked up at him. ‘Ah, of course. Er . . . leave us, Mistress . . . ah . . . But prepare yourself.’

‘Sir?’ Eliza Laurence’s eyes widened.

‘There will have to be an inquest, my good woman. Late tomorrow, I shouldn’t wonder – such is the way of things. I’ll try to arrange it here, in the Great Hall. You are First Finder. You will have to be there.’

‘Yessir.’ She bobbed and made her exit as quickly as she could.

Benjamin Steane relaxed, the minion having gone, and he sat next to Arthur Goad. ‘Provost, you don’t seriously believe this is God’s will, do you? Natural causes?’

Goad stared at him, gnawing his lip. They were different generations, these men, but they had the common bond of fellowship between them. ‘Either way, Benjamin, we must play this down. Scholars do not die every day at King’s without there is plague in the town and if we are talking about murder, I want this Machiavel caught, now. You know the coroner?’

‘Sir Edmund Winterton? Yes, I do.’

‘Go and see him. Get him . . . er . . . on our side.’

Steane sat upright. ‘Provost,’ he said, levelly. ‘I hope you’re not suggesting I interfere with the majesty of the law.’

‘Tsk, tsk,’ Goad said waspishly. ‘In Cambridge, dear boy, we are the law. I’m not asking you to do anything underhand. Just . . . finesse. A little delicacy. The right, non-committal verdict, quiet burial. What do we know about Whitingside? Pushy parents?’

‘No parents at all as far as I can gather,’ Steane said. ‘He was a ward of court until his eighteenth birthday. He’s Lord of some scabrous little manor somewhere in Kent.’

‘Good, good. With a bit of luck, nobody’ll make too much of a fuss, then. Get along to Winterton. Have a crate or two of college beer sent round to him – the good stuff. And, Benjamin?’

Steane turned in the doorway. ‘Yes, Provost?’ he said on a sigh.

‘Softly, softly, for God’s sake!’

If the lads had been gloomy at the Swan the night before, tonight at the Brazen George was positively sepulchral. They had all drunk too many toasts to good old Ralph in their host’s finest Dutch brandy and they sat staring into their cups or the middle distance.

‘Suicide,’ Henry Bromerick was mumbling. ‘Who’d have thought it? Ralph Whitingside, suicide. I can’t get over it.’ He looked up at the others as if to find some explanation in their faces.

‘You can’t get over it because it isn’t true, Henry,’ Marlowe said. ‘If Ralph killed himself, how did he do it?’

‘Poison,’ said Tom, always the sharpest of the bunch. ‘You said yourself, Kit, stains on his clothing, his bedding. He’d have been sick.’

‘Where was the cup?’ Marlowe asked him.

‘The what?’ Matthew Parker frowned.

‘If Ralph took poison, what did he do? Swig something from a bottle? I saw no bottle in his rooms. Did he drink from a goblet, carefully wash and dry it and put it back on the sideboard? Does a man so miserable he wants to end his own life do that?’

‘There are more things in Heaven and earth . . .’ Bromerick ventured, with his vast experience of life in the King’s School, Canterbury and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

‘And one of them is murder,’ Marlowe said, nodding.

‘Wait. Wait a minute.’ Colwell held up a hand, wrestling with all that Marlowe had told them in the brief snatches of free time during the day, before Dr Lyler hit them with everything the Civil Law course had to offer. ‘You said Ralph’s door was locked. The bedder unlocked it.’

‘That’s right,’ Marlowe said.

‘So . . .’

‘So if someone killed him, they had to have a key,’ Parker chimed in. ‘So it has to be someone at King’s.’

‘It has to be someone who killed Ralph, took his key and locked the door, that’s all,’ Marlowe pointed out.

Silence.

‘Still,’ Colwell said. ‘To get access to Ralph’s rooms at all, you’d need to have the right connections. Christ, Kit, you had to get in by the roof.’

‘Point taken,’ Marlowe said. ‘But it was Will Latimer who told me how, in his cups at the Devil. How many more people has he told? I wouldn’t trust that man further than I could throw him. How many other college servants blab indiscreetly over their ale or on street corners? And who -’ he leaned forward so that their heads were together – ‘wanted to see Ralph Whitingside dead?’