Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night (2 page)

There was no scream, just silence, the fall, and the dull sound of a landing without echo: a gap in time, filled only with the incomprehensible disbelief of its witnesses.

‘My God,’ a proctor said quietly.

‘Was that Mr Lyall?’ Montague asked. ‘The rope’s loose. I can’t see Bartlett. I’m on my own. I don’t know how to get down.’

One of the porters called up, ‘Take it slowly, sir.’

‘DID MR LYALL FALL?’

‘Get back down to the roof, sir, and someone will come and get you. Do you know the interior staircase?’

‘Where’s that?’

‘There’s a trapdoor in the roof. Wait there and we’ll come and get you.’

‘I don’t know anything about a trapdoor. Where’s Kit? What’s happened to Mr Lyall?’

The porter did not answer. ‘We need to get you down.’

‘I don’t want to die,’ Montague shouted back.

‘Who is with you?’

‘I’ve told you. Kit Bartlett. But I don’t know where he is. DID MR LYALL FALL?’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Corpus.’

Montague clambered down and jumped the last few feet on to the roof. He searched the length of the chapel for the trapdoor that led down to the interior staircase. Had his friend Kit already found this or was he hiding somewhere else? How had he managed to disappear so quickly?

An ambulance made its way down King’s Parade.

Sir Giles Tremlett, the Master of Corpus, was deeply distressed by the death of one of his fellows and asked Sidney to come and see him the following evening. ‘I am assuming that you will be prepared to take the funeral?’

It would be Sidney’s third that year already. He saw so much natural death in winter and it saddened him that this was so needless. ‘I didn’t know Lyall well.’

‘Nevertheless, it would be appropriate for a fellow of the college to be buried at Grantchester.’

‘I take it he was not a churchgoer?’

‘These days, scientists seldom are.’ The Master poured out a stiff sherry and then stopped. ‘I am sorry. I always forget you don’t like this stuff. A little whisky?’

‘With water. It’s rather early.’

The Master was distracted. Normally he would have a servant present to pour out the drinks but it was clear that he wanted an uninterrupted conversation. A tall man with long clean hands and elegant fingers, Sir Giles had a precision about his manners and exactitude in his dress that diverted any suspicion of the fey. His speech was as crisply ironed as his shirt, and he wore a three-piece suit in dark navy from Savile Row, together with the regimental tie of the Grenadier Guards. He had fought in the Great War alongside Harold Macmillan, and he was a good friend of Selwyn Lloyd, the Foreign Secretary. His wife, Lady Celia, always dressed in Chanel, and their two daughters had married into minor aristocracy. Decorated with a KBE in his early fifties, Sir Giles was considered to be a key figure in the British establishment; so much so that Sidney wondered if he thought a Cambridge college was something of a backwater.

As a former diplomat Sir Giles was used to the ambiguities of political discourse and the technicalities of the law, but, since taking up his post only a few years previously, he had been surprised how personally academics took to their disputes and how difficult it was to find lasting and satisfactory resolutions to their problems. It was bad enough discussing matters at meetings of the governing body, but now that one of their own had died in mysterious circumstances, he was going to have to rely on all his tact and discretion to smooth things over. ‘I was hoping that this could all be kept within the confines of the university, but that wish has proved forlorn. I believe you know Inspector Keating of the Cambridge police force?’ he asked.

‘I saw him only last night, and I am sure that he will take an interest in the case.’

‘He already has. He plans to interview Rory Montague this afternoon.’

‘And Bartlett?’

‘It is a tricky situation. It was irresponsible of Lyall to take students out on such a night. I know that some of us have done a bit of night climbing in the past but that was when we were students. You would have thought he might have got it out of his system by now. Rory Montague has been unhelpfully evasive. I was hoping that you might talk to him, Sidney.’

‘A pastoral visit? Surely the college chaplain could see to that?’

‘No, I’d like you to go. You were there, after all. Of course it hardly helps that Kit Bartlett has disappeared.’

‘There is still no sign of him?’

‘None. His parents have already telephoned. They seem to know that something is amiss (God knows how) and will start making their own enquiries. They might even go to the press, which is, of course, the last thing we need . . .’

‘Indeed.’

‘Montague says Bartlett vanished before he started the descent. And there’s another curious thing: his rooms are empty.’

‘As if he had planned to disappear all along?’

‘Exactly so.’

‘And therefore Lyall’s death may not have been accidental?’

‘I don’t think it will take the police too long to reach that conclusion, do you? Keating’s not stupid and he’s bound to interfere. I can only suppose that Bartlett’s in hiding. We’ll have to talk to all his friends, of course.’

‘Did Montague see what happened?’

‘He can remember the rope being thrown down to him. After that, he claims his mind is blank.’

‘Anything else?’

‘He suffers from vertigo so he feels guilty. He says that they wouldn’t have used the rope if he hadn’t been with them.’

‘It makes you wonder why he went up in the first place.’

‘He was their photographer,’ the Master explained. ‘And I imagine he was keen to impress. Kit Bartlett is a charismatic figure and Lyall was his tutor.’

‘Pacifists used to do foolhardy things in the war to prove they weren’t cowards.’ Sidney remembered two cheerful friends who had worked as stretcher-bearers, refusing to kill enemy soldiers, acting with daring courage on a Normandy beach before they were blown up in front of him.

‘I don’t know if that will be Montague’s story or not. I am also not sure whether it is helpful if he confesses to any responsibility. It could lead to a manslaughter charge and we don’t want that.’

Sidney finished his whisky. ‘We do, however, want the truth.’

The Master was irritated. ‘The last thing this college needs is a scandal. We have already had a generous response to the appeal on our six-hundredth anniversary and I do not want to put that into jeopardy.’

‘We have to ascertain what happened.’

‘That, I recognise. We will behave with authority and fairness. It will be my official position.’

‘Then I must assume you have an unofficial position?’

‘It is a delicate matter, Sidney.’

‘Then perhaps you could explain?’

‘I am sure Inspector Keating will keep himself busy. Investigating. Asking questions.’

‘He certainly will. What of it?’

The Master gave Sidney what he hoped was a confidential look. ‘I’d like you to tell me what he thinks. I would like some warning if his enquiries become too detailed, particularly regarding the personal lives of those involved. I wouldn’t like him to delve too closely, either into their relationships or their political interests.’

‘I thought Lyall was married?’

‘He
was
married, yes. But I think that was very much for show. I am sure you don’t need me to spell things out.’

‘You want me to keep watch over the police investigation?’

‘I wouldn’t put it like that. But I want you to be our college liaison. Inspector Keating knows and trusts you.’

‘He won’t trust me if he finds out that I am telling you everything he’s up to; and he certainly won’t take kindly to the idea of me spying on police procedures.’

‘I don’t think we need to put it as strongly as that. One needs to be very careful in Cambridge, as you know perfectly well, about the use of the word “spy”. It leads to unsavoury speculation and we have quite enough of that already.’

Sidney was aware that the university had still not recovered from the ignominy of ‘the affair of the missing diplomats’, the former graduates Burgess and Maclean who, it was assumed, had defected to Moscow four years previously. Keating had been consulted about their disappearance and had protested that he hadn’t been given full-enough access to the investigation. Since then, things had certainly developed. There had also been rumours that another Cambridge Apostle, Kim Philby, was ‘a third man’ after his resignation from MI6 in 1951, and Keating had made it clear that he thought the newly formed KGB, led by Ivan ‘The Terrible’ Serov, regarded the university as a fertile recruiting ground.

‘I didn’t know that Lyall was working for the security services.’

‘I didn’t say that he was.’

Sidney waited for the Master to explain but he did not. ‘You can’t expect me to talk in any detail about all of this. Some things are best left in the dark. I am sure there is a discreet way in which we can conduct the matter.’

‘I am not sure there is, Master. After a death . . .’

Sidney knew there was a murky side to the relationship between the university and both MI5 and MI6 but he had always steered clear of asking too many questions about it. He recognised the appeal of recruiting intelligent agents but wished that it could be kept until after the students had graduated. It was too easy to exploit people who could not anticipate the consequences of their enthusiasm for intrigue; and, once they acquired a taste for secrecy and deceit, they could not always be relied upon to stay on the same side.

‘I thought you priests dealt in grey areas all the time. Very few moral dilemmas come in black and white. It’s a question of trust. Loyalty too.’

Sidney was not at all sure that he liked where the conversation was heading. ‘I am perfectly aware of my loyalties, Master.’

‘To God, and your country; your college and your friends.’

Sidney put his empty glass of whisky back on the drinks tray. ‘May they never come into conflict. Good evening, Master.’

The snow returned once more, covering the ice on the roads and pavements, so that any movement across its surface was hazardous. Few people dared look up and ahead for long, offering only muted greetings to those they knew, preferring to concentrate on securing each footstep against a fall, eager to escape mishap and get home. Such careful responsibility was a far cry from Sidney’s childhood enthusiasm for tobogganing with his brother and sister on Primrose Hill before the war. Then danger was a thrill, but now that he was older and into his thirties, he would have preferred to use the wintry conditions as an excuse to stay at home and concentrate on his next sermon.

The last thing he wanted was another tortuous inquiry. He had only just returned from a short holiday in Berlin with his friend Hildegard Staunton. She had been excellent company and it had been a relief to get away, both from his clerical duties and his criminal investigations. Indeed, he was still living in something of a post-holiday afterglow, and so he was as keen as the Master to ascertain that the events on the roof of King’s College Chapel had been unfortunate rather than sinister.

Rory Montague had his rooms in New Court, on a staircase close to the Porter’s Lodge. Sidney was not looking forward to the meeting because he found it difficult to provide consolation and extract information at the same time.

There was also the dilemma at the heart of the event. He could understand the idea of some amateur climbing for high jinks. He had done it himself. But for a fellow of the college to encourage his students to attempt such a risky ascent on a dark and snowy night in the middle of winter seemed the height of madness.

Why on earth did they want to do it? he wondered. Could it simply be the excitement: the idea that action is life and here was jeopardy at its most distilled? Was it, as he imagined mountaineering to be, the hypnotism of an immense terror drawing them on, the narrowness of the gap between life and death, the fact that one slip or a lapse in concentration could result in a fatality?

Montague was a nervous, barrel-chested boy with curly brown hair, tortoiseshell spectacles and a small mole on his left cheek. He wore a tweed jacket, a mustard-coloured sleeveless jumper and a dark green tie over a Viyella shirt. There could hardly have been someone who looked less like a climber, let alone a man who might wilfully plan the death of another.

Sidney introduced himself and began with an apology. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I know you must have had a difficult time.’

‘Why have you come?’ Montague answered. ‘Am I in trouble? Do people think it was my fault?’

‘I was asked if I could talk to you.’

‘Who by?’

‘The college. And I assure you that anything you tell me will be in confidence.’

‘I’ve already made one statement. I should have known it would not be enough. I can’t think why it happened.’

Sidney knew he would have to choose his words carefully. ‘If you do not want to add anything to what you have said already then, of course, I understand. I know it is a distressing time. I merely wanted to say that I am at your disposal, should you wish to discuss anything more.’