Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow (21 page)

“Exactly. And I don’t want to think about you getting in trouble. You’ve always needed me to protect you, because you’ve never understood what the world’s really like.”

The laughter burst out, startling both of us. “You know, you had me convinced of that for most of my life! Dumb old me, needing all that protection from somebody who’d long ago sold his soul for money and prestige.”

“Look, I’m not ashamed of my work! I’m damn proud of the career I’ve built
and
the money I’ve made. And I did it all without my wife giving me so much as an occasional pat on the back!”

“You’re right, you’re absolutely right. When you’d talk about how cleverly you got some rich client off it made me uncomfortable, but I wouldn’t let myself think about it. I never was that supportive little woman you wanted. And now that I’ve had a taste of life on my own terms, I’m even worse!”

That burden I’d been carrying for so long was quite gone now. I’d never felt such relief and delight except on the delivery table, forty pounds lighter and about to turn the page on an exciting new chapter in my story.

I could see in his eyes he realized something had changed.

“Kit, calm down!” came the familiar order. “This is a perfect example of what I just said, you’re jumping to another crazy conclusion. I know we’ve got problems, but we can work them out. I want you back in spite of all that.”

“No, you don’t want me, Quin,” I said. “You want what we had in the old days—before you grew up.”

“Damn it, I know what I want! Okay, you’re so hung up on the truth, let’s hear
you
tell it. This is about that Geoffrey guy, isn’t it? All that high-minded talk isn’t worth a damn, you just don’t want to admit you’re involved with another man!”

I couldn’t contain another burst of laughter.

“Oh, Quin, it’s not Geoffrey! I don’t
want
to do the whole thing over with a different man. I’ve lived that life, and now I want something else. I want my freedom.”

“It’s the first time you’ve ever talked like that,” he said scornfully.

“Because I’ve been learning since I came to the village, although I didn’t know it. I’ve been learning to be myself, with no apologies. And I like it.”

As I stood up and edged out from behind the table he said furiously, “All right, I’ll go to Aubrey’s with you, if that’s what started you on this tantrum! But this time I’m not going to let you do anything illegal—”

I had already started for the door.

“No, I don’t want you to come with me, Quin. I can do it alone. Let’s make this good-bye. Go tell Janet she doesn’t have to worry anymore.”

“Kit, come back here!” he bellowed.

I stopped at the door and shook my head. “No,” I said, “I’m not coming back,” and I left him sitting there.

There are a many ways that conduct to seeming honour, and some of them very dirty ones.

—John Webster,
Duchess of Malfi

I
hurried back to Keble Road to get my car, feeling the way an ex-con must feel when the prison gate slams shut behind him. I was unreasonably happy, unduly relieved, and irrationally confident. I could get into Aubrey’s and make away with that evidence without anybody’s help.

It had been a narrow escape, but if Quin hadn’t come and pushed me to the brink, I knew I’d have gone on in my new life always regretting the old one and wasting my energy on bitterness. I could really begin to live on my own terms now. If I hadn’t gone to the Bird and Baby today, if I’d hidden and let him leave without that confrontation, I would never have understood the lessons Far Wychwood had been teaching me.

Magdalen Bridge being closed to traffic this morning while revelers still packed the streets, I had to get out my
Oxford A to Z
map book and work out an alternate route to the Aubreys’ street. I could hardly concentrate, so many different ideas were pulsing in my brain, but finally had to admit there was no way except the long way, north on the Banbury Road and then a big loop around to the south again.

Driving past the unaesthetic modern university buildings concentrated north of the historic area, my thoughts traveled from what had just happened, to what was waiting for me. I was sure there was still enough time to grab the tape player before the Aubreys came home. I could have it in John Bennett’s hands before Cyril missed it. Without that evidence, there was no way anybody would believe he had murdered two people. I could hardly believe it myself.

Why would a man like Cyril Aubrey kill two of his oldest friends? A romantic triangle? Impossible to believe he’d betray Ann, he just wasn’t the kind. But of course, that’s what I’d believed about Quin, wasn’t it? I shook my head, making the right turn onto Marston Ferry Road. No, there was no doubt about the Aubreys’ devotion to each other, and no one had ever linked Cyril with Perdita. Maybe he’d just felt sorry for her and wanted to free her from Edgar’s mistreatment—but in that case, why would he kill her too?

All right, there were other common motives—how about blackmail? Edgar might have known something that could harm Cyril or his precious family. That would explain the conferral of the headship on the one man least suited to the position. Cyril had to have known what Edgar Stone was, if the rest of the faculty did. The more I thought about it, the more false his attempts to justify his choice had sounded. And Stone had loved exercising power over people—no doubt he would have resented a man who held power over him. I could even imagine how he might have burned with jealousy watching Aubrey’s two handsome, intelligent sons, roughly the same age as his Simon, grow up and make their mark in the world. To force Cyril to bow before him, to wrench from him control over the whole faculty, that would have been Edgar Stone’s idea of real merrymaking.

Maybe Perdita found out about all that, somehow put two and two together and realized Cyril had killed her husband? Then he’d have to eliminate her as well. I couldn’t see him as a cold-blooded executioner, but whatever desperate act Edgar might have driven him to, it was still hard to comprehend how he could murder Perdita or frame Peter.

The Aubreys’ little street was very quiet—everybody would be at the festivities, of course. There were no lights in the house by the river, although the beautiful morning had turned cloudy. A swan was floating past, making an upside-down image in the dark water as I drew up to the curb. The garage door was open and the car gone. Obviously there was nobody home, but I almost tiptoed, approaching the front door. I remembered what I’d heard Ann say at the dinner party, and sure enough, after a quick search, found the key hidden in a niche between the mailbox and the wall of the house.

I unlocked the front door and stepped into the foyer, further exhilarated by my newly discovered talent for housebreaking.

I hurried down the hallway to the study. There was the tape player, right where Archie had left it, askew on the topmost shelf. My heart pounded with excitement as I pushed the ladder over and started climbing, not even feeling my usual queasiness about high places—not today!

I had the tape player in my hand and was repositioning my feet to start backing down, when I saw something familiar on the next shelf below. It was the spine of an old book, split down the middle, its green coloring scraped away in places so the brown leather beneath showed through. A distinctive pattern of gold sunbursts ran down the middle.

That book belonged in another library. I knew I had seen it somewhere else, but I couldn’t remember where. I pried it loose with my free hand. The pages tried to fall out, but I held them down with my thumb. Awkwardly, I turned the cover back and saw the title page.

Marching across the sheet of brittle vellum on a slight downward slant, those roughly printed letters told me the whole reason for the murders, although it took me a few minutes to realize it:

Gradually, a memory seeped into my mind—the Senior Common Room, the murmur of literate conversation, Peter telling me about the
Ur-Hamlet
mentioned by theatergoers before Shakespeare’s earliest known play was performed, and believed never to have been published. What had he said—the
Hamlet
we know wasn’t written until 1600 or so? I was pretty sure of that, and I knew Peter’s first words on introducing me had been about Cyril Aubrey’s great coup, the finding of a letter that proved Thomas Kyd had written the
Ur-Hamlet
. The best seller in which he’d revealed his find had brought him acclaim in the academic world, and the headship with all its money and perks.

I turned back the title page. Beneath “Act I, scene I” was not the familiar opening I expected, the guards on the parapet discussing the ghost, but one set in the queen’s chamber, the prince arguing with his mother about her hasty marriage. This was a whole different
Hamlet,
I realized with a little chill down the backbone. I was holding in my hands proof that Cyril Aubrey’s whole career was a sham.

He must have forged the Kyd letter—as a scholar he would know all about Elizabethan documents, the composition of ink, the style of penmanship. Paper of the time wouldn’t be hard to find, for an expert in the field. Had he done it for the sake of reputation, I wondered, or money?

And now I remembered where I had seen the green book before. Perdita had grabbed it from her shelves, that day she told Geoffrey and me she was going to sell Edgar’s books. She’d been planning to call in rare-book dealers, and they would definitely have recognized the significance of this one. Cyril would have been exposed and discredited.

Edgar Stone must somehow have found the
Ur-Hamlet
and used it to blackmail his way into the head-ship. Any normal person would have revealed such a find right away for the fame and fortune it would bring, but Edgar was far from normal—judging by what I knew of him, he would prefer to enjoy his petty tyrannies first. There would be time enough to reveal his discovery to the world once he got bored with watching his colleagues suffer.

Cyril must have known that. So he had silenced Edgar permanently, then done away with Perdita to keep her from selling the precious volume that would reveal his lie to the world. Why couldn’t he just have stolen it from her, I wondered miserably, why did he have to kill her as well? And framing Peter, now that was absolutely—

“Fie on it, ah, fie!” said a voice behind me. “How all occasions do conspire against me! If only we hadn’t encountered Graham’s old schoolmaster, I should have been here an hour since and had that tape erased. Oh, dear—I see you’ve found the incriminating manuscript, as well! We are caught in a conundrum indeed, Mrs.—er, Catherine. Are we not?”

I twisted around to look over my shoulder at Cyril Aubrey. He stood there in the doorway shaking his shaggy head, his face furrowed with genuine distress. Then he stepped inside the room and closed the door behind him. As I turned back to the shelves before I lost my balance, my glance swept over the tape recorder hanging from one hand, and an idea came to me. I slipped my finger furtively across the top of it and rewound the tape just a little, not enough to erase his Edgar imitation, then pressed the Record button. Faintly, I heard the little wheels start turning inside.

“When Eric said you and the child had been in this room,” he went on, speaking quickly, in a sort of controlled panic, “I thought it unlikely that you had found anything. But then I saw the tape player had been moved on the shelf. I should, of course, have erased that tape long ago, but I’m afraid my vanity won out. I did some acting in my youth, you know, and was rather proud of my performance as Edgar, especially the 999 call, although my summons to Peter was fairly credible as well. A useful lesson in the sin of pride—”

“That’s not much of a sin compared to two murders!” I exclaimed.

“Please, let me explain all that!” he burst out in anguish. “You mustn’t think I killed Edgar and Perdita just for myself—But come down, won’t you? I don’t want to hurt you! If you’ll permit me to tell you
why
I killed them, perhaps we can agree to let it go no further.”

“I don’t think so!” I said indignantly. “Not when you tried to put my son-in-law in prison for your crime.”

“I quite hated doing that, but he
was
the obvious suspect. Everyone knew his dislike for Stone, and so that evening, with all the faculty watching, I had only to reveal Edgar’s behavior toward Emily and offer him an excuse to threaten Peter’s job, to suggest quite a superfluity of motives. But afterward—I did repent me when I saw the effect on you, on Emily, on all our friends. Quite a different thing, developing a foolproof plan in theory, from watching it play out in reality. Alas, I did not employ the principles of my philosophy when I chose a man with many friends. Do come down, won’t you? I can explain so much better face-to-face.”

The tape had run out. I was sure it contained enough of that explanation to convict him, along with the Edgar imitation and the
Ur-Hamlet
. I knew I had to get past him and out of there with all the pieces of the puzzle. So I began loosening a large leather-bound book, obscured by the lower part of my body, as I tried to divert his attention.

“How could you be sure Edgar’s manuscript was genuine? Did you get it tested?” I asked innocently.

“Oh, no—I couldn’t let anyone examine it, or the game would have been up! But I do have some expertise in these matters—my Kyd letter, after all, fooled everyone—and it appears genuine to me. At any rate, how could I take the chance that it was? He was a sadistic man, you know. He actually quoted from the
Ur-Hamlet
that night in front of everyone—‘Roscius, when once he spoke a speech in Rome’—a threat to expose me, because I protested his conduct toward Perdita. Yes, he deserved killing. Perhaps you are nervous about descending the ladder, Catherine. Come, give me your hand and I’ll help you to—”

As he came near, I pulled the big book out and, looking over my shoulder, threw it at him as hard as I could. Of course it missed by inches and fell splayed open on the carpet.

Cyril cried out and knelt beside it, smoothing the pages tenderly. He clutched it to his chest and looked up at me with bewildered indignation.

“This is a first-edition Marlowe!” He struggled to his feet and laid it carefully on the desk. “I must insist that you come away from my books, if you are inclined to fling them about like that!”

I gave up and climbed down the ladder, but when he reached for the
Ur-Hamlet
I quickly swung it, and the tape recorder, behind my back.