Pax Britannia: Human Nature (41 page)

Ulysses knelt down beside the body. Summerson had died in agony, his body curled into an agonised question mark, as if in death every part of him had wanted to know why he had to die in this manner. As far as Ulysses could tell, he had bled to death, having been stabbed so many times that the blood-sodden fabric of his clothes now lay in tatters over the mangled meat of his chest.

There was blood on his face, on his chest, his arms, blood had pooled on the floor around him, soaking fallen papers, the threadbare Persian rug on which he lay, contorted in his death-agonies, it covered his hands... Only it didn't. Ulysses paused and looked more closely.

The dead man only had blood on the rigoured claw of his right hand, and no signs of any wounds there. The hand was stretched out from the professor's body, his fingers partially obscured by a bloodied document that must have fallen across him as he lay dying on the floor of his study.

Suddenly aware of the rapid beating of his heart, caged within his chest, carefully Ulysses moved the papers aside. His breath caught in his throat. There, formed of bloody finger-strokes, was one semi-congealed word: Damocles.

Monty Summerson had sent Ulysses a final message, written in his own blood.

"I-I'd better call the-the police," the porter stammered, backing out of the room, leaving the door open behind him.

"Just give us half an hour," Ulysses said, without looking at the man, but flashing him the contents of his leather card-holder again just in case he needed reminding who's authority they were working under.

For a moment neither Ulysses nor Nimrod moved. Neither of them said anything, the only sound that broke the stillness of the study the insistent ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece on the other side of the room.

As Ulysses continued to take in every detail of the murder scene, a shadow fell across him from the doorway to the study behind him.

He heard a startled gasp and turned.

In a moment the young woman had composed herself again. "Perhaps you would like to make a comment now, Mr Quicksilver," Lucy Gudrun suggested, recording device pointing towards him.

"Anything that has the name Damocles on it. Anything that might give us any kind of a clue. Anything at all." Ulysses said, frustrated at his own failure to so far discover what it was that his former tutor had been trying to tell him through his last, dying act.

Heedless to what Chief Inspector Thaw might have to say about them disturbing a crime scene, Nimrod set about bringing some semblance of order back to the professor's study - although he made sure that he left the body just as it was - so that Ulysses' search for clues might be made all the easier, while the reporter began going through the papers on the dead man's desk.

Ulysses had taken the attitude that her arrival at Boriel College, having obviously followed them from the Bodleian, had been opportune. She obviously already had a handle on what was going on, and she had seen too much of the scene of Summerson's murder already to be fobbed off, and so he had decided to treat her presence as an asset rather than a hindrance. He had put her to work, promising her the scoop of her career as he set about solving the Christmas Killings. She was tough too, not seeming to mind that the professor's body was still there in the room.

And yet, here they were, with the half hour's grace granted them by the porter almost up, half-expecting the police to turn up at any moment, and still without any answers.

"Here, take a look at this!" Lucy suddenly piped up. Ulysses joined her at the professor's desk. She was poring over a pile of newspapers, among them copies of the
Oxford Echo
. Ulysses peered over her shoulder to see what it was that had caused her outburst.

She had a copy of
The Times
in front of her, folded so as to expose the obituaries page. Circled in red pen was the obituary of Dr Lockwood Lacey, doctor of psychiatry. Ulysses scanned the piece.

"Fifty-seven years old... worked at the Saint Ophelia Sanatorium for the Mentally Infirm," he read. "Very interesting, but what does this have to do with Damocles, or the other killings, for that matter?"

"Well, your professor friend circled it for a reason and then there's this." She moved the paper to reveal another, with another article circled, this time reporting the murder of one Aloysius Higgins, a banker. "This one just made yesterday's
Echo
."

"When's the obituary from?"

"The eighth of December. It says Lacey died on the first of December."

"And when did Higgins die?"

"The night of the twenty-second."

"So how does this one fit in?" Ulysses asked, lifting another folded newspaper from a pile of books on a chair beside him and placing it on the desk. In this case, Summerson appeared to have circled a few lines at the bottom of an inside page of the local paper, that reported the killing of a tramp well-known in the Jericho area, who went by the name of Noah.

"That's news to me," Lucy admitted. "When did that happen?"

"On..." Ulysses paused, searching for a date at the top of the page. "On the twenty-first. Sunday night."

"And then the Chief Librarian was killed last night, which was the twenty-third," Lucy pondered, gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance.

"Along with Summerson. So, what could possibly connect the Professor of Social Anthropology, the Chief Librarian of the Bodleian, a successful banker, and a homeless tramp?"

"You think something does connect them then?"

"Well, apart from the manner of their deaths? It seems likely, doesn't it to you?"

"Well yes, but a couple of academics, a banker and a tramp?"

"And let's not forget the suicidal doctor of psychiatry." Ulysses' face twisted into a knot of concentration. "Physician, heal thyself," he said quietly to himself.

"Excuse me, sir," Nimrod said interrupting his master's musings, "but I think this might be of interest." He was holding up a framed photograph. The glass was cracked right across the middle, no doubt having been damaged at the same time that Summerson was attacked.

Ulysses crossed the room in a series of excited, leaping strides. "Good show, old chap!"

The photograph showed seven young men, undoubtedly undergraduates, by their dress and apparent age. The picture had been taken within the Boriel College quad. Although the pose was formal, their attitude was anything but. All of them were wearing expressions of smug arrogance or feigned aloof indifference.

"Obnoxious arrogant bastards, convinced of their own superiority over the rest of the human race the lot of them," Ulysses muttered under his breath.

"I couldn't possibly comment, sir," was Nimrod's tactful reply, his gaze lingering on Ulysses.

The sepia-tint photograph was mounted within a card frame, at the bottom of which had been written, in an exaggerated Gothic hand:

The Damocles Club, Michaelmas Term, 1960.

Underneath that were recorded the names of the individuals in the picture.

"Well, there are a few familiar names here," he stated with glee. Her reporter's sense of curiosity piqued, Lucy rose from her place behind the desk and joined the two men in their inspection of the image. "There's Higgins, the banker, second from the left, and L. Lacey next to him, the suicidal doctor. Two along from him again is poor old Monty, of all people, and next to him, second from the right, is Willoughby."

"You think this is the connection then?" Lucy asked.

"Well, considering that we have the word 'Damocles' written over there on the floor in Monty's blood, and three of the men from this photograph have been murdered within as many days, I can hardly see how it can be anything other," Ulysses declared.

"It's four, actually," Lucy said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Four men from that list have been found dead since Monday morning."

"Really?"

"If you include old Noah. N. Hackett?"

"Of course!" Ulysses exclaimed, flashing the girl a delighted smile. "The tramp! Oh how the mighty have fallen."

He turned back to the photograph.

"So, one dead by his own hand. Four dead by the hand of another in the last three nights. That just leaves two names on this list, neither of which mean anything to me. But we have to find them, that is most imperative."

"You think they are in danger, sir?" Nimrod asked.

"Indeed I do. One of them could even be our killer. Either way, we have to find them as quickly as possible. Which is where you come in, Miss Gudrun."

"It is?" the young woman met Ulysses intense gaze.

"Indeed it is! I want you to use the immense resources of that local rag you work for to find out who S. Fitzmaurice and V. Ashton-Griffiths are and where they might be found. I have a feeling that it will be somewhere not a million miles from here."

"Very well, but what's in it for me?"

Ulysses' look of childish excitement darkened to become one of bitter disdain. Reporters the world over; they were all the same.

"Do this, for me," he said, "and I'll give you the exclusive of your career. I'll hand you Oxford's Christmas Killer on a platter."

V - SLAY BELLS

"Mr Fitzmaurice?" Ulysses tried, as he entered the fusty darkness of the glasshouse. "Saintjohn Fitzmaurice?" he called a little louder. Eyes straining to see anything through the failing twilight, his manservant cautiously followed him into the building.

The place seemed to be entirely deserted - there wasn't a light on anywhere - but that didn't put pay to the uncomfortable feeling Ulysses' had, like a persistent itch on the inside of his skull, that something wasn't right. There was danger here.

It had been several hours since they had made their hasty exit from the Professor's study, leaving as Chief Inspector Thaw and his attendant officers were making their way into Boriel College by the Longwall Street entrance.

As the reporter returned to the
Oxford Echo's
newsroom and its difference engine database, Ulysses and Nimrod retired to the backroom of the Turf Tavern, Ulysses muttering something about the hair of the dog that had bitten him the night before.

In time, Lucy's scouring of her Babbage engine's reader screen had come up trumps and she had contacted Ulysses, furnishing him with the current whereabouts of Saintjohn Fitzmaurice, formerly of the Damocles Club, now Director of Oxford's Botanic Gardens.

"Mr Fitzmaurice!" Ulysses called again into the gathering gloom between the potted plants, louder this time.

Still no reply.

They had tried the man's home already, only to be told by his housekeeper that he had left earlier that evening in a state of high dudgeon, having taken a handwritten missive at the door, saying something about having to go back to the Gardens.

Ulysses edged forwards slowly. The insistent subconscious scratching on the inside of his skull grew in intensity. Was Fitzmaurice waiting for them, just around the corner, garden fork in hand, ready to do them in? Or had the killer struck already, and the Director was, right now, lying dead, half buried in a compost heap somewhere?

And then Ulysses heard the incongruous sound for the first time, the jingling of bells.

"Come on, Nimrod!" he hissed. "This way!"

And then the two of them were running through the glasshouse. Ahead of them the insistent jingle-jingle of the bells continued, leading them on.

Ulysses reached a glazed divide and pushed through the unlatched door swinging on its hinges, almost tripping over the body lying in the darkness between the trestles of the potting shed.

Ulysses guessed that the figure curled in an expanding pool of his own blood, that glistened black in the darkness, was Saintjohn Fitzmaurice, but there wasn't time to stop and check.

The body groaned weakly.

"Nimrod, stay with him," Ulysses instructed his manservant, hopping over the fatally wounded man and charging on his way in pursuit of the bells.

There was a cacophonous crash of breaking glass and splintering glazing struts from the far end of the glasshouse. Ulysses ran on.

He emerged from the end of the glasshouse through the wreck of another glazed door that it looked like his quarry had run straight through without bothering to open, into the oily darkness of the formal gardens.

He ran on, between carefully-manicured black lawns, along gravel paths, always chasing the steady jingle of the Christmas bells. Sleigh bells.

Shrubs and the dark skeletal shapes of trees loomed ahead of him. There was a change in the rhythm of the jingling, as if, Ulysses imagined, the killer had taken a running jump at the walled boundary of the Gardens. A moment later he heard the thud of someone landing heavily in the street on the other side.

He reached the wall himself only a matter of moments later. Using his unnaturally muscled left arm in particular to help with his ascent, Ulysses pulled himself to the top of the wall that marked the western boundary of the Botanic Gardens.

He peered down into the poorly-lit lane beyond. He couldn't see anybody, either running up or down the road, and, he now realised after his own desperate scramble up the wall, he couldn't hear anything in the way of pounding footfalls or jingling sleigh bells either.