is that I don’t screw everyone in sight, and she takes that to mean that they are all ready to lie down whenever I say the word. They are all divorced and it makes her nervous.’ In fact, Salter had been unfaithful (with the same woman friend) only once, and he was such a poor liar that Annie had suspected immediately. After that he found fidelity the comfortable way to live. He loved his wife, and wished she would relax. When he tried to tell her this, she said only, ‘If I relax, you might,’ And that, as his woman friend pointed out, was probably true.
Now Annie asked, ‘They weren’t lovers, then?’
‘She says not,’ Salter replied.
‘You asked her?’
‘I’m a copper,’ he shouted. ‘I’m trying to find out who killed someone. You start by trying to find out who might have wanted to.’
‘Is she attractive?’
Oh, fuck it. ‘The interesting thing,’ he said, ‘Is that I like everyone who liked him, man, woman and child. But I didn’t much take to the ones who didn’t. That doesn’t mean that this woman gave me a hard-on, or that Summers was banging her after hours in the library. It just means that I might have liked Summers, too.’
‘All right, Charlie, make your phone calls.’
The first phone call was embarrassing. The number turned out to be that of Summers’s squash-playing friend, Bailey, whom Salter had seen at the funeral. ‘Sorry, Mr Bailey. I just wanted to check our appointment. Four o’clock tomorrow, at the club? Thanks. See you then.’ There was no reply to the second number. Salter consulted his notebook and dialled again. ‘Miss Homer? Miss Jane Homer? Inspector Salter here. Metro Police. I’d like to talk to you about Professor Summers. I believe you were in contact with him in Montreal.’
The voice was thick and strained. ‘Yes. I never saw him, though. What do you want?’
‘To talk to you, please. Mainly about Summers’s background. May I come to your office in the morning?’
‘All right. I get there about ten o’clock. I am the Dean of Women at Wollstonecraft Hall. On Harbord Street.’
‘I’ll find it. At ten o’clock, then. Fine.’
Salter consulted another piece of paper, Summers’s hotel bill with the record of two calls Summers had made on Friday afternoon. Again, there was no reply to the first. The second one produced a recorded message to the effect that the offices were now closed and he should call again tomorrow. That was that, then. Salter put his notebook away, and went upstairs to his wife’s sewing-room, where she kept all her old college books. He found what he was looking for, Volume II of Representative Poetry, and thumbed through it looking for Wordsworth and Keats. The first Wordsworth poem he found was about fifty pages long, and he kept looking until he found one that had fewer than a hundred words. Slowly, stumblingly, he learned the first two lines, a total of fourteen words. When he was sure of them, he turned to Keats. Again he had trouble finding one to his purpose, so he chose, arbitrarily, the last poem and picked out two lines in the final verse that sounded ‘poetic’. Once more he set himself to learn them. More difficult, these, because he was not sure what the lines meant. He sat there, mumbling, as his wife appeared. ‘What’s going on, Charlie?’ she asked, staring at the book.
‘It’s Summers,’ he said in some confusion. ‘He specialized in Romantic poetry. I was just trying to see what that was all about. Not very lively, is it?’ He smiled falsely.
‘Who have you been talking to today?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, he shouted. ‘I’m just getting into the man’s mind. That’s all.’
She looked surprised at his reaction, but did not press him further, merely picked up a piece of material she had come for and went back downstairs.
Salter waited until she was well out of hearing and went back to his homework. He had Wordsworth cold, but had to mumble away at the Keats for another five minutes before he felt sure of it.
CHAPTER 4
At the office the next morning, Gatenby greeted him with a message from the Superintendent. ‘He wants to hear from you about how this Montreal case is going,’ he said.
‘I’ve got an appointment at ten. Is he free now?’
‘He said he would be in all morning. He was very keen to hear from you.’
‘All right. I’ll do it now. I’m going to be out the rest of the day.’
‘Quick cup of coffee first? Won’t take a minute.’
‘All right.’
‘Little bit of sugar, just to take the edge off?’
Salter had recently been making a stab at dieting. Gatenby showed his interest by tempting him continually, like an old granny with a pocketful of sweets that the children are forbidden to eat.
‘No, Frank,’ Salter said, hardly irritated at all. ‘Annie said I mustn’t.’
Superintendent Orliff was not a friend of Salter’s, but neither was he an enemy. The Superintendent had no enemies, a state he had achieved by keeping his distance from anyone who made a lot of waves. He was a small, neat man whose desk was stacked with a dozen tidy piles of paper, each one representing some aspect of his work. He kept records of everything, including all verbal transactions, and the piles grew until the particular project was, or seemed to be (for Orliff was a careful man), finished, when it was put with other piles on the shelves lining his office. Eventually the piles were put into cabinets, but not until they had been dead for a long time. Orliff saw himself as a civil servant surrounded by politicians, and while his opinion was regularly sought, he rarely gave it, offering instead only information. He did not bury himself in his work (one of the piles on his desk contained material about his retirement plans; another charted the progress of a cottage he was building), but he recorded it thoroughly. While the various factions in the organization grouped and regrouped themselves, he sat back, available and promotable. His superiors could trust him to be loyal: his subordinates knew he had no favourites. When the former Superintendent had been promoted, he had taken over the job without opposition. He sat in his office now, waiting for Salter to deliver his report.
Salter said, ‘As of now it looks like a mugging. I still have a couple of people to question, but those I’ve seen so far don’t look very likely.’
Orliff put his finger on the transcript from Montreal. ‘No robbery,’ he said.
‘No robbery,’ Salter agreed. ‘But they probably panicked. Hookers who try this trick are not killers. Maybe she had a new boy-friend who was showing off.’
‘They agree in Montreal?’
‘I speak to Sergeant O’Brien every day. He’d rather have me find a killer with a nice motive here, but, yes, he’s looking for a likely pair.’
‘So. A middle-aged English Professor goes to a convention, has a little fling and he’s unlucky.’
‘Yes, sir. That’s funny, because he told everyone that it was his lucky day.’
‘What did he mean?’
‘I
