Dean of Women at Wollstonecraft Hall. They were just old friends.’
‘I see.’ Salter made a note. ‘Now, Professor, I wonder if you would mind telling me everything about Summers that might help me to understand him. If I can get an idea of what kind of man he was it might help a great deal.’
Pollock began a seminar on his dead friend. Salter pretended to take notes to give Pollock’s words their proper value.
‘He was, I think, a good teacher, a very fair critic, a poor scholar, and a very poor student. He worked hard at his job here—too hard, probably; he had something interesting to say about what he was teaching, but he didn’t keep up with his field and he didn’t produce anything. His friends thought he failed to apply his talents, and his enemies accused him of having a butterfly mind. I think myself he had reached the age when it is now fashionable to change careers. The symptoms were that he had become involved in a whole host of activities in the last year or two that one could only see as distractions.’
‘Like?’
‘Like squash, Inspector. He took up squash last year, and played it four or five times a week. It was the high point of his day.’
‘Was he good?’
‘No. I played him after he had been playing for a year. He was no good at all. But among the people he played down at that club of his, he was able to find keen competition.’
‘What else?’
‘Making money. Obviously, he had decided to try and make his fortune, lie was always a bit of a gambler—poker, the races—that sort of thing—he bought every lottery ticket going—and lately he was dabbling in commodities.
‘Did he break out in any other ways?’
‘You want to know if he was having a “mid-life crisis”? I think that’s the jargon. Perhaps. He didn’t start to dress like a gypsy, though, or wear a wig, or any of the other symptoms I’ve heard about. No, if I understand the mid-life crisis, it is an attempt to have a few more years of boyhood in middle age, at least that’s how it manifests itself around here. Well, perhaps that’s what he was doing, but in his case the symptoms were a sudden renewed interest in games and in taking risks.’
‘Who were his friends, Professor?’
‘Me, of course, and Marika. One or two others in the department enjoyed his company. Otherwise the people he and his wife socialized with. He didn’t have many friends, the way people use that term nowadays, but he tended to keep them.’
‘His enemies?’
‘A lot of people were wary of him. He had a bad habit of looking for the funny side of any situation, and sometimes he was witty at the expense of others. He teased people and they took offence. And teasing is a form of cruelty, isn’t it?’
‘I’m trying to understand the relationship between him and Dunkley,’ Salter said, coming to the point. ‘Can you help me there?’
‘Yes. I thought we’d come to that. You’ve heard Browne’s theory, no doubt, of a Conradian link?’
‘Yes. You think it makes sense?’
‘Oh, it makes sense, Inspector, but it would be more impressive if someone else had put it forward. Coming from Browne, it doesn’t carry much weight. Browne did his thesis on Conrad. That is the only author he knows.’
‘You don’t think much of it, then.’
‘Not really. I think they just struck sparks off each other.’
‘Summers never confided in you—about his feelings for Dunkley, and the reasons?’
‘No, he didn’t. That’s why I don’t think there’s any mystery. He would certainly have said something to me. We were very close.’ And then, quite unexpectedly, Pollock stopped acting, and his eyes filled with tears. He put his pipe down, and blew his nose.
Salter gave him a few moments by pretending to scribble. Then he said, gently enough, ‘It does seem strange, though, that he never discussed such a well-known feud with you, sir, his closest friend?’
But Pollock was now too upset to speculate with him. He shrugged and fiddled with the relighting of his pipe.
Salter put his notebook away and stood up. ‘If anything occurs to you that you think I might find helpful, you can find me at the Headquarters building. Thank you very much, sir.’ He left the professor still blinking at his pipe.
As he walked down the corridor he heard someone behind him, and he slowed down enough at the corner to see Marika Tils go into Pollock’s office.
CHAPTER 3
‘What would make two guys not speak to each other for ten years?’ Salter asked. They were sitting at the back of their house on a concrete slab, looking at the grass. Their neighbours would have called it having coffee on the patio in the garden, but from motives of inverted snobbery, though different in each case, Salter and Annie referred to the area as ‘the yard’. Salter had been raised in Cabbagetown, and ‘the yard’ was the proper term for the place where Canadians cooled off in the summer; ‘garden’ was an affected, English term. In Annie’s case, the half-acre of lawn surrounding her family home on Prince Edward Island was still called ‘the yard’, and she found the term ‘garden’ Upper Canadian, and effete.
‘Don’t their friends know?’ she asked.
‘No. Bloody mystery. Probably nothing to it, but the guy who didn’t speak to Salter is my chief suspect at the moment.’
‘Why?’
‘No reason. I just don’t like the bugger.’
‘Maybe there was a woman?’
‘Nobody has said anything about it if there was.’
‘Politics, then. What about you and Albert Prine?’
‘What about it? I caught him listening to my phone calls.’ Salter was immediately irritated. What did this have to do with anything?’
‘But you couldn’t prove it.’
‘No, but the bugger knows I caught him. If I had accused him they would have called me paranoid.’
‘He was listening, though. And you’ve never told anyone.’
‘If I did, he’d soon hear about it and I would have to prove it, or get clobbered.’
‘So you haven’t talked to him for a year. You don’t even mention his name around here any more.’
‘No, because sometimes I think you think I imagined it.’
‘Oh, I believe you, Charlie. You see what I mean, though.’
‘All right.’ Salter swallowed his irritation. ‘So you’re saying these two sort of had something on each other. I don’t think it could be politics, though.’
‘Money?’
