NINE
INSIDE THE FELLOWS' BUILDING
"So we now have a connection between Black and Turing to add to the connection between Turing and Kuryakin," Lord Peter reported to Bunter on his return from Trinity, a trip which had been made in rather a hurry beneath an ominous sky. "If we can just establish a connection between Kuryakin and Black, we can complete the triangle and thereby satisfy my soul's geometrical urges. There must have been something going on between them, or else Kuryakin wouldn't have made such a show of avoiding Black the week before his death, but I'm damned if I can figure out what. Let's go and rootle around in the paperwork and see what we can turn up."
Accordingly the Master, innocently making his way to the SCR for afternoon tea, found himself well and truly nobbled.
"Look here, old man, I wish you'd get me a key to Black's room so I can have a sniff around inside."
Sir John could not have paled more at this impropriety if Wimsey had asked if he could sniff around inside Black's coffin.
"Good God, man, whatever for?" he expostulated, "I mean, the poor chap's barely cold in his grave. Pawing through his personal possessions seems positively indecent."
"I was rather hoping to find a reason why he might have killed himself," said Lord Peter. Sir John's features made a graceless transition from touched-by-death-white to pushed-too-far-red.
"Look here, Wimsey," he said. "This is overstepping the bounds. Whatever reasons the poor chap had for doing away with himself are no concern of ours. Let him rest in peace."
"But it's very much my concern," objected Lord Peter. "You asked me to find out if the allegations against Kuryakin are correct; and they can hardly be correct if Black took his own life after being, say, diagnosed with terminal cancer, can they?"
"I asked you to investigate the allegations; I didn't ask you to poke your nose into poor Black's private life," said Sir John firmly. "Run whatever kind of check it is you Foreign Office chaps do on Kuryakin, and either give him a clean bill of health or send him back behind the Iron Curtain. But I don't want you rummaging about in people's dirty laundry baskets. A fellow could have any number of reasons for wishing to end it all, and frankly, since Black left no note explaining his actions, I think we should respect his wish for privacy."
"And suppose Kuryakin drove him to suicide?"
"Drove him to suicide?" echoed Sir John.
"Yes. There are more ways of killing a cat than buttering it with parsnips, you know. And it wouldn't be the first time the KGB have used this tactic. But that raises two questions: what were they blackmailing him with, and what were they blackmailing him for?"
"I'm afraid I don't quite follow you."
"I'm sorry, I was thinking out loud again. Terrible habit. What I mean is, why would the KGB have wanted Black dead? And how did they persuade him to do it? It's got to have been blackmail of some kind."
"Blackmail," repeated Sir John in strangled tones, newspaper headlines dancing so visibly before his eyes that Wimsey could practically read them himself.
"He was a close friend of Alan Turing's, wasn't he?" he said casually.
Judging by Sir John's reaction, the Master had missed his true calling as a star of Christmas pantos. Many a Dame would have envied his magnificently goggle-eyed expression, not to mention the flapping jaw, as he absorbed the import of Peter's question.
"I say, Wimsey," he finally managed, "you can't be serious about this? I absolutely cannot have you making accusations like that. You'll throw the whole college into disrepute. I insist that you drop this line of enquiry. In fact, I rather think you'd better drop the whole thing. I wish I'd never asked you up here."
"Oh, I entirely see your point, Duffield," Wimsey assured him drily. "Better a live KGB officer on the premises than a dead Friend of Dorothy's. Only in this particular instance the two seem to be linked."
"But even if that's true, I still don't see why you have to go about this as if it were a detective case," protested Sir John. "Can't you just put out feelers in the F.O. and see if there's anything about Kuryakin you can pick up on the grapevine?"
"I could," agreed Peter, "and, as a matter of fact, I have. But I'm afraid that if you didn't want this gone about as if it were a detective case, then you shouldn't have roped in Yours Truly. I'm quite incorrigible in that respect. And there is always the possibility, is there not, that the fellow might be a KGB officer and yet innocent of this particular crime?"
"Frankly," said Sir John, tight-voiced, "I am past the point of caring about such niceties. If he's working for the KGB I want him out of my College, whether he did Black in or not. The fellow's a ticking bomb, and whether he went off this time, or goes off in six months, is beside the point."
"And if he's not KGB?"
"I thought you'd established he was?"
"Not exactly."
"And what does that mean?"
"There's a question mark in his file, but it appears to go back to an anonymous source, albeit an anonymous source with rather better connections to the F.O. than our friendly letter writer. He could still be the victim of a smear campaign. Possibly even one initiated by the Soviets. He hasn't made any noises about defecting, has he? I'm told he's a gifted scientist."
"Damn you, Wimsey, I should never have dragged you into this. All right, you can have a look around Black's room. But for God's sake, if you do find anything, I'm relying on your discretion. I will not have rumours of untoward doings in the college cloisters voiced outside this, er, corridor. In fact, we'd better go and do it now, while everyone else is at tea."
Compared with Sir Edward Fawsley's luxurious Trinity pad, Black's set was tiny, and whatever his secret habits might have been, his tastes in furnishings ran to the Spartan rather than the decadent.
"So," said Wimsey, casting a Holmesian eye around the premises, "this is the fox's earth, eh? Hardly the style to which I would wish to become accustomed. Are all the Fellows' sets this cramped, Duffers?"
"It's not cramped, it's bijou," objected Sir John. "Small but perfectly formed. No ostentatious monstrosities for Christ's, thank you very much. We leave that sort of thing to St John's."
"Absolutely," said Wimsey, hastening to smooth the Master's ruffled pride. "And I daresay it would all look very much cosier if the furnishings were a little less petit bourgeois. That sofa should be spending its declining years in the Home for Retired Soft Furnishings, for a start. And yet it fits, somehow. Dr Black, we note, was a man who placed little value on worldly things. Observe the positioning of the desk, placed so as to dominate the room, yet away from the distractions offered by the window. No watching the undergrads lounge on the grass of Second Court for Black! His mind is focused upon higher things. No cheap novels wink at him from the shelves, no potted plants tempt him with thoughts of the world outside his window. And yet the material plane inflicts itself upon his attention. He likes to have things just so. Behold the ink pot and blotter, arranged with an eye to symmetry. Behold the absence of clutter. When he has finished working, his papers are not left spread about his desk but neatly filed away in this cabinet here. Even on the night he kills himself, he ensures that all is orderly. I see from the twin coasters on the coffee table that he does occasionally entertain at least one friend. And there is an armchair, albeit sans cushion. Gosh, that's hard. The guest must sit on the sofa. What do they drink, Dr Black and his chum? Something from this cabinet, I take it, poured into the appropriate specimen from this collection of glasses. Certainly a man who ensures his ink pot is positioned so precisely could never be at ease drinking white wine from a red wine glass. And what do his tastes run to? Oh dear, cheap plonk, sweet sherry and blended whisky. I am beginning to develop a decided distaste for Dr Black. Hullo, what's this? Vodka? Now that's rather curious. I thought our man was a Red-baiter? What's he doing supporting the Soviet economy?"
"Man," said the Master philosophically, "is an irrational and inconsistent creature. I myself am very fond of pinot noir, although I cannot abide the French. No, don't start on me, Flim. A man of my age must be allowed his eccentricities."
"You're quite right," agreed Wimsey. "Of course there's no a priori reason why a dyed-in-the-wool Tory shouldn't develop a taste for vodka, though one rather wonders how it came to pass. I deduce from the fact that it has yet to be opened that it wasn't his favourite tipple. That honour clearly goes," - here he gave a delicate shudder - "to the Australian cabernet sauvignon. Bunter mine, take this politically suspect bottle and dust it for pawprints, would you? Oy, Duffers, don't go touching anything! You'll mess up the results! Don't you see how Bunter's using his handkerchief to pick up the evidence?"
"Sorry, sorry," said Sir John hastily, snatching back his hands as if he had been burned. "Dear me, are you going to take prints off everything in this room? I can't see what good it will do you. I can't possibly allow you to fingerprint the entire College as if we were a collection of criminals. And what on earth does your man want with ashes from the fireplace?"
"You let me worry about that," said Wimsey. "Now then, before we turn our attention to the contents of this very tempting-looking filing cabinet, what's through here? The bedroom? Bless me, it's even smaller than the sitting room. And almost as sparsely furnished. Itym, one bed, single. Foam pillow and scratchy brown blankets. Itym, one cupboard, no doubt full of hair shirts. Well, horrible tweed suits, anyway, which is much the same thing. Anything in the pockets? Hmm, a box of matches, three copper coins and a penknife. No letters from Addenbrooke's hospital, unfortunately. And here we have a pair of exceedingly elderly Italian shoes, size 43, presumably a hangover from Black's wild days at King's. And that's it. Not even a bedside table, or a lamp to read in bed by. A man of principle, of dedication to the life of the mind, who denies himself even the smallest of luxuries. He sounds as if he was the most frightful bore."
"You should have been a psychologist," said Duffield admiringly. "That's Black to a T. Nasty little man, to my mind. Always thought he was better than everyone else, because all he ever did was work. Did you know he went to a grammar school? I always thought that accounted for the smell of small-mindedness and boiled cabbage about him. Though he was a fine scholar, of course. Now, what about that filing cabinet, if you've quite finished in here?"
"Ah yes, the filing cabinet. Hmm, not locked. That's hardly a feature of a repository of lethal secrets, is it? Still, no stone unturned and all that. Goodness me, what a pile of papers. These academics, always scribble scribble scribble. Still, at least they're efficiently filed. Lecture notes, Governing Body meetings, conferences… ah, private correspondence, that's a likely candidate. Plonk yourself down on the sofa, Bunter, this is going to take a while. But you needn't read the whole file, just do a quick pass through for anything that looks like a suicide note."
"I'll do the private correspondence," said Sir John firmly, settling himself in the armchair. "If anyone's going to sniff around his private papers, it should be a colleague. Good Lord, this is uncomfortable. I think you might be right about those hair shirts. Don't look at me like that, Wimsey, I promise I shall let you have a shuftie at anything that might be relevant to your inquiry - oh, I say, the file's completely empty! Hang on a minute, is that why you want to examine the ashes, to see if he burned anything? By Jove, that's rather cunning of you."
"Cunningness is my watchword," said Peter. "If Private Correspondence is empty, you can have Gov. Bod. At least you'll know if he's saved every minute, or just stuff relating to specific issues."
Other than this initial revelation, the pass through the papers turned up nothing untoward, the contents of the files proving to be exactly as stated on the labels. Sir John gave forceful expression to his opinion of the inconsiderateness of people who, upon committing suicide, were sufficiently well-organised to burn their correspondence but unwilling to leave suicide notes, thereby causing other people to leap to all manner of unwarranted conclusions, not to mention forcing them to spend hours sifting through piles of tedious papers. He also gave tangential vent to his disappointment at the lack of correspondence relating to terminal cancer, an idea which had seized his imagination as a most happy way of extricating his College from its current predicament. Lord Peter, by contrast, was exceedingly satisfied with the results of his reading session, and was looking forward to a meeting of minds with Bunter on the subject, as soon as they could get rid of Sir John.