FOUR
IN THE
CHAMPION OF THE THAMES
While Lord Peter was struggling to make a dent in Slavic inscrutability, Mr Mervyn Bunter was enjoying a glass of Greene King with Croft, the night porter, in the Champion of the Thames, a small but appealing public house located behind the College in King Street.
"A bad business this, with Dr Black," he observed, leaning his back comfortably against the bar.
"You can say that again," said Croft. "It's very hard on the new Master, just when he's tryin' to get settled in. There was people sayin' he should cancel the May Ball out of respect for the dead, but he said it was too late for that, and anyway the Junior Members would be disappointed."
"I expect it was what Dr Black would have wanted," said Bunter, reluctant to get drawn into a discussion of College politics.
"Not him," said Croft grimly. "He was dead against balls, said they was a waste of money. I wouldn't put it past him to have picked his moment out of sheer spite."
"Why do you think he did it? Had he been acting out of the ordinary at all?"
"Dr Black? You could never tell what was goin' on inside his head. One of those little buttoned-down fellows, he was, all prim and precise, like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. But if, say, any of his letters accidentally happened to get into the wrong pigeonhole, what might happen to anyone on duty, what with the load of post we get in the Porters' Lodge, he'd kick up a fuss like the end of the world was comin'. Now you come to mention it, though, he did seem rather distracted the last few days. He come in to drop off some post one day and left his briefcase in the Lodge, and the next evening he asked me to run back and get his gown from the SCR because he'd turned up for Hall without it."
"He didn't mention any troubles?"
"Blimey, no. Not to me. Dr Black wasn't the kind to talk to the lower orders about anything."
"You found the body, didn't you?" enquired Bunter, turning to what he hoped would prove a more promising line of investigation.
"I did," said Croft with satisfaction. "I heard the shot as I was a-coming to lock up the Fellows' Garden and I come running in and found him there, dead as you please, right under the mulberry tree. Shot with Milton's pistol under Milton's mulberry – the poor man must be turnin' in his grave."
"It must have been a shock for you. Were you all on your own?"
"Oh yes, I does the evening rounds by meself. Daley stays in the Lodge, you see, in case anyone wants to get in or out. Nice work if you can get it, eh? He got most of the crossword done while I was dealin' with the corpus." He laughed good-naturedly, his humour doubtless improved by the fact that the sedentary Daley had thereby missed out on all the glory.
"And the shot killed him straight out?"
"Oh yes, dead as a doornail, he was. He'd stuck the pistol in his mouth like this, see" - here Mr Croft obligingly demonstrated, with the aid of an ale bottle, exactly the angle the pistol had taken - "and blown the back of his head clean off."
"Good heavens!" said Mr Bunter, with gratifying horror. "And you're sure the injury was self-inflicted? You didn't see anyone else in the garden? It was getting dark, wasn't it?"
"Twilight," agreed Croft. "It was about quarter to nine, see, just after sunset. I starts locking up at half past and it takes me about a quarter of an hour to get to that there gate."
"And yet you're sure there was no-one else present?"
"Not that I noticed. Not but what I was looking for anyone else, mind, me head being so full of poor Dr Black. But I took it for granted that whoever had been in there earlier had gone, because I didn't hear any talking."
"You heard someone earlier?"
"Oh yes, when I was doin' me rounds a couple of hours before. One of the young gentlemen in Third Court had a guest what was makin' a bit of a spectacle of hisself, so I escorted him off the premises by the back gate just before Formal Hall, and on the way back I heard voices argufying down at the bottom of the Fellows' Garden."
"Was it Black?"
"I'd stake me life on it."
"And the other person?"
"I have no idea," said Croft regretfully. "I didn't have a look-see, because the Senior Members can be a bit touchy about people intruding on their private business."
"Did you inform the police?"
"Course I did, but they said since there was no proof it was Black what I heard, it wasn't much use."
"You definitely didn't recognise the
other voice?"
"I didn't hear it to reckernise. It could of been just Dr Black rantin'
away to hisself for all I know, except that he left in pauses, like someone was
talking back. I didn't think nothing of it at the time. It's not like he was
done in by anyone. I was a stretcher bearer in the Great War, I was, and I seen
any number of blokes what had shot theirselves. When it all got too much for 'em,
they'd stick their pistols in their mouths and boom! Brains hangin' out all over
the place, just like poor Black."
"Dear me, how frightful," said Mr Bunter, who was quite as well acquainted with the phenomenon as Croft, but had no wish to detract from the Porter's moment in the limelight. "It was one of Milton's pistols, wasn't it? A very romantic gesture, using a weapon of such historic import. Would you say Dr Black was a romantic in nature, or perhaps a particular admirer of John Milton?"
"Dr Black," said Croft with some force, "wouldn't of known what romance was if it jumped up and bit him. He didn't have no poetry in his soul. All about book-keeping he was, why I remember when he was Bursar…" and with that Croft launched into one of those institutional anecdotes that are tedious to all but the most involved participants. At least the ale was good, and Bunter consoled himself with the thought that, even if he did have to listen to the Porter's tales of collegiate back-stabbing, at least he was spared the horrors of High Table gossip. Not for the first time, he reflected that he would not willingly change places with Lord Peter for all his lordship's wealth and domestic happiness.
Thanks to Mr Croft's friendship with the landlord of the Champion, and his custodianship of an enormous bunch of College keys, he and Bunter were able to circumvent both closing time and the College curfew, walking in boldly via the front gate at a little after midnight. Here they parted ways, Croft to return to his bachelor abode a few streets away, and Bunter to his lordship's rooms in Third Court. It was a splendid night, clear and fresh, with a small, round moon like a silver button, as neat and ancient as the little college it illuminated, and Bunter was seized with a sudden desire for a stroll before bed. It occurred to him as he passed the gate to the Fellow's Garden that there might be some value in establishing whether Mr Kuryakin could reach the garden from his room, via some circuitous route behind the buildings that would protect him from prying eyes. Accordingly he doubled back through Second Court, but instead of passing through the archway that linked the Hall to the Senior Combination Room, he bent his steps behind the building and disappeared into a sort of shrubbery. What he found there was a great deal more exciting than he had anticipated.