'Tell you what?'
'About the scholarships.'
'There's so much I don't tell you,' he joked, 'But the scholarships are dad's baby, really. You should ask him about it.'
Claire was glad that the family wealth was being put to such a good use, especially now it became harder and harder for bright students to get university places, and she said so.
Later that evening, while Simon was doing his share of the housework, Claire called her friend Gina. She just had to tell someone about it all.
'The whole family in one house?' Gina exclaimed, 'Christ, I'd hate that.'
'They're not like your family, Geen. And the house is enormous.'
'But how do they manage? The shopping alone…'
'There's a cook. And aunt Rhoda functions as a kind of, well, matron, I suppose. There's cleaning duty rosters and everything - but you only get put on them when you stay longer than a week. And dinner's in two sittings - in the morning you put yourself down for six or eight o' clock, so the cook knows for how many she should, um, cook.'
'Sounds dreadful.'
'It isn't. It runs like clockwork, actually. And apart from dinner and housework the families have their own apartments. It isn't as if I can just clump into Simon's grandmother's sitting room without knocking.'
'Hm. But don't the kids want to move out? I couldn't wait to be on my own, when I was eighteen or so. Neither could you, Claire.'
'Sure the kids move out when they go to university. And they don't all move back to live here. They don't have to. But I suppose a house like this is hard to leave. You and I never had a home like this. I wouldn't have wanted to leave here.'
'Yes, I noticed that.'
'Look Geen, why are you being so sceptical? I'm trying to tell you I like it here.'
'I'm your friend, it's my duty to be sceptical. Remember when Julia was dating that creep Rory?'
Claire snorted. 'I'm a lot older and wiser than Julia was then. No wacky Christian sect here, I promise you. Just plain, non-attending C of E.'
'Glad to hear it. You take care.'
'You too, Geen. Catch you later.'
8
He had almost decided it was too hot to work. It was still quite early, but the flat hadn't cooled down much in the night. He should go out, get some colour on that white English skin of his. But he suspected that that would really be just another excuse for not admitting he was stuck with his research, so he persisted. Thank heaven for the internet, Dominic thought. A Victorian clergyman-writer, an Oxford don from the fifties, a Ph.D. student in 1986 - how else did you go about finding them?
The thought had come to him quite suddenly, in the middle of a sleepless night. Why had no history of the chapter ever been completed? What had discouraged his possible predecessors? James's student hadn't been the first to abandon a projected thesis on the order, there had been Barry Skinner, in the eighties. And earlier still, Alice Wright, who had written a monograph on Judith of Paris, never published her intended book on the order to which Judith belonged. So what happened? Conscious that he was indulging in the most flagrant procrastination, Dominic set about finding out.
About Alfred Poole he knew more than he liked already, thanks to the Victorian's enterprising publisher. Finding Alice Wright was easy. She had a Wikipedia page of her own, which praised her revolutionary - in the field - work on feminine mysticism and mentioned her long friendship with Shakespeare scholar Charlotte Harmondsworth. It also informed him that the poor woman had been poisoned not long after the publication of her book on Judith of Paris. The wording did not quite eliminate suicide, but he had the impression she had been killed. Arsenic in her tea - how very Christie. The knowledge disturbed him more than he liked. Who would kill a completely inoffensive historian? And why did he have to go and look this up? It only upset him, and it didn't actually teach him anything he wanted to learn. The Chapter of St Cloud was not even mentioned. He abandoned Wright and went on to try and find out about Barry Skinner. The problem here was that there were too many of him. 102 of them in the UK alone, if you believed Google. But how to find the one whose Ph.D. proposal was filed under the title The Rise of the Abbey of St Cloud? That thesis never appeared, he had looked for it, and none of the Barry Skinners published on medieval or religious history. Of course, Barry Skinner might be dead by now as well. That thesis proposal dated from 25 years ago. Anything could have happened. He tried a few more searches, with various combinations of words, and finally just added 'murder' to the mix. What he found, among a lot of trash, was a sensationalist magazine article about unsolved murders. On 21 April 1986, at his home in a student flat, one Barry Skinner's head was bashed in with a paperweight by an unknown, but most likely male, assailant.
It might not be the same Skinner, Dominic told himself, there's loads, you saw. But the article said he was a history student, and he never did finish that thesis, did he? He printed out the article, which didn't really have much to add. It looked like the author had just used the case as padding for two much more spectacular murders. Dominic noticed his hands shaking as he stuck the print-out in a file.
With Alfred Poole, this made three historians of the Chapter of St Cloud and three violent deaths. And as his ex was wont to say 'two is coincidence, three is a pattern'. This was too much. These murders couldn't have anything to do with each other, could they? He told himself he was just having another attack of imagination. And yet. There had been no apparent motive for any of the deaths, certainly no murderers convicted, as far as he could tell. But that did not necessarily mean they had anything to do with the chapter. His thoughts went around in this circle for a while, until he decided he needed to talk about this, and not just have a chat with a colleague. There was only one thing he could do, and, hands still trembling, he called the police. He worked through the 'if you want to report a crime dial 1' routine until he got to talk to a real person.
'I think I may have information about an unsolved murder,' he said, trying not to sound like the kind of person who made calls like this for entertainment, 'I would like to talk to someone about it.'
'If you have information about the death of Sean Whiteside, you should talk to Sergeant Walter in CID-'
'No, no. This isn't about that. It was much longer ago. Look, could I just make an appointment?'
His urgency must have come through, because now he was offered a meeting with a DI. He made a note in his diary - 4 pm: police, as if he was likely to forget - and thanked the officer politely.
Four o'clock. If he hurried, he could nip over to check the newspapers in the Oxford city archives and see what he could find about the murder of Alice Wright.
9
Detective Inspector Collins stared at the whiteboard in his office. He hated the thing. It had photos of the murder victim stuck to it with little magnets, and his name in a big red circle in the centre. There were arrows to various other names. There were a lot of questions marks, in blue. The whiteboard was there to help him 'visualise connections and think things through spatially, as it were'. Or some such crap. Apparently they needed that, now practically all information came in electronically and nobody used old-fashioned notebooks anymore. The things were all over CID. But there was nothing on the whiteboard that he couldn't just as easily remember. Other people had pictures of their family in the
