The Medieval Murderers - The First Murder

‘What’s brought this on all of a sudden?’ demanded Loftus Maltravers, Senior Lecturer in the History Department. ‘Harry’s not angling for a professorship again, is he?’

‘Only God knows how his mind works!’ growled Partridge. ‘But you might be right. No doubt some of the members of Council will turn up for it. Anyway, he’s called a meeting for three o’clock to discuss it. Every one has to be there, it’s a three-line whip.’

Peter was a big man in his late twenties, with red hair parted in the centre and Brylcreemed down flat on either side. A lecturer with a special interest in the plays of Molière, he had heavy features and an aggressive manner, which made him unpopular with his colleagues, who tried hard to make allowances for his club foot and the consequent three-inch-thick sole on his left boot. Like most of the college staff, either on health grounds or from being overage, he was exempt from military service.

Loftus, who suffered from bouts of severe asthma, was a thin, morose fellow nearing fifty, with black hair and a Clark Gable moustache. He was an expert in the history of stage scenery and pantomime throughout the ages. The two men always seemed ready to snipe at each other, contradicting and arguing over trivialities.

‘So what play do we have to do?’ he demanded. ‘Not another bit of the Townley Cycle, surely? We were stuck with that two years ago. I’m not building another bloody Noah’s Ark for it.’

Partridge sighed and shook his head. ‘No need to get yourself in a lather, Loftus! Harry said he’d found something very interesting in an old journal. He seemed quite excited about it, said we ought to follow it up and maybe get up a paper for one of the Yank publications.’

‘Nice to see that plagiarism is still alive and well,’ observed Loftus, with his habitual cynicism.

They broke off their conversation as the distant ululations of air-raid sirens began broadcasting their warning to a wide area of northern Surrey and South London. The college was a few miles south of Croydon, having been evacuated in 1940 from the main university campus in Lambeth to this shabby Victorian mansion in the supposedly safer Green Belt.

‘Bit early for them, isn’t it?’ asked Loftus, uneasily. With part of the northern coast of France already liberated following D-Day the previous month, the Luftwaffe air raids had almost ceased, but the unmanned V-1 missiles were still coming from launching ramps in the Pas de Calais.

The wailing sound faded and nothing further disturbed the peace of the morning, though until the steady tone of the All Clear sounded forty minutes later, both men had half an ear listening for the throbbing drone of the pulse-jet engine that signalled the approach of a ‘doodlebug’, to use the derisory but fearful term for Hitler’s no-longer secret weapon.

Loftus carried on reading some essays he had set during term time to the few undergraduates that had either escaped the call-up or had been invalided from the Forces. In the armchair, Peter Partridge scanned the four thin pages of the morning newspaper. As a drama historian, he found the news that Stalin had once more attacked Finland and invaded the Baltic States of less immediate interest than reports of the London premiere of Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V .

The door opened again and a very thin elderly woman came in, hugging a briefcase under her arm. She had a severe face devoid of make-up and wore old-fashioned pince-nez on a cord pinned to her mannish grey costume. Dr Agatha Wood-Turner, Senior Lecturer in Religious Art, was inevitably known by the nickname of ‘Lathe’, from both her surname and her body shape.

Scorning the motley collection of crockery on the table, she sat on an upright chair and delved into her case to retrieve a tartan Thermos flask. Unscrewing the Bakelite cover, she poured some murky brown fluid into it and then produced a small bottle of milk, two sugar cubes and a paper bag containing three digestive biscuits. Only when she had organised her ‘elevenses’ did she acknowledge the presence of the two men.

‘I hear that Doctor Drabble is intending to put on a play for Open Day,’ she said, as if she was reading the one o’clock news on the BBC Home Service.

Maltravers nodded. ‘We’re on parade at three o’clock. A hundred lines for any absentees,’ he added sarcastically, but the prim and proper woman ignored his attempt at levity.

The door opened again and a very different sort of female entered. Christina Ullswater was the archetypal fluffy blonde – petite, blue-eyed and shapely. She wore a fussy pink floral dress with ruffles at the neck, a white cardigan thrown artfully over her shoulders and unsuitably high-heeled shoes. At twenty-six, she was a postgraduate working on her doctoral thesis, and in spite of looking like an escapee from a Chelsea tennis club, was in fact a very clever young woman, already making her mark in the rarified world of early medieval poetry.

It was a matter of covert speculation in the college as to why she was not a Waaf or Wren, and opinions varied from having a daddy who was ‘something in the War Office’, to having being the mistress of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The most popular theory at the moment was that her first war job had been filling shells at a munitions factory, but that she had been asked to leave after a fortnight, due to fears for the safety of the establishment!

Christina gave a big smile to the others and dropped into another mismatched armchair. Though technically not on the teaching staff, the exigencies of war allowed her to use the SCR, as out of term time the students’ meagre facilities were closed down.

‘Hear the sirens earlier on?’ she asked brightly. ‘Less often now than last month, thank heaven. Why they bother with sirens, I can’t imagine. When the motor stops, we’ve got only half a minute left, so what’s the point?’

Listening to doodlebug engines was now a serious pastime. If the noise continued when directly overhead, you were safe, but if it cut out before it reached you, you could well expect half a ton of high explosive to be dropped at your feet.

Agatha Wood-Turner preferred not to dwell on instruments of violent death, unless they were medieval tortures portrayed in stained-glass windows.

‘I suppose you’ll be cast as the Virgin, and I’ll get Noah’s wife, as usual,’ she said bitterly.

The blonde batted her long eyelashes at the speaker in a parody of puzzlement.

‘What on earth do you mean, Agatha?’

‘Haven’t you heard yet on the college grapevine? Our lord and master wants to put on a Miracle Play for the Open Day.’

Christina shrugged philosophically. ‘Oh well, it beats having to listen to Harry making more speeches about how studying art history furthers the war effort!’

She groped in her own document case and pulled out a shapely bottle of orange Tizer and a glass. Filling it and raising it to the others, she proposed a toast.

‘Here’s to Adam and Eve, then. On with the motley, the paint and the powder!’

‘I thought we needed something essentially British in these dangerous times,’ said Hieronymus Drabble, doing his best to sound Churchillian. ‘Something from our glorious past, like a medieval play from the Old Testament.’

‘That would be essentially Hebrew, not British,’ muttered Partridge, but Drabble ignored him. He was a fat man with a bald head and a double chin, having a passing resemblance to the Prime Minister, which he cultivated. Approaching sixty, he saw his coveted professorship slipping beyond his grasp, and this soured his whole nature.

‘Are you talking about another bit of the York or Chester Cycle?’ demanded Agatha, referring to a couple of the well-known collections of religious plays from the Middle Ages. ‘We’ve done a few of those over the years, even going back before the war,’ she pointed out, to emphasise her seniority in years of service.