Invitation to Die Read online

  “I understand.” Redfyre spoke uncertainly. He did not really understand, his mind racing to fill in gaps and tie up ends. The whole story of this appointment smacked of manipulation from a higher source. The Admiralty? SigInt? Room 40? This self-styled “piece of grit,” this disarming pudding-fancier, might well be a formidable character. Rosa’s father was beginning to look very like one of the stout supports of the English establishment. Could he be persuaded, tricked or charmed into telling a policeman what had gone so wrong in one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious colleges that a tricky, fire-eating commando force of one had to be smuggled aboard to sort out the problem?

  “Of course, I was an undergraduate here myself once upon a time and I took a degree in the classics, so I had a slim but essential qualification for the post,” Wells was explaining. “The surprising thing, Redfyre, is that I’ve grown to quite enjoy what I’m doing. Hard at first to armour oneself against all that ‘But, sir, you may not! Tradition allows . . . The previous master would never . . .’ nonsense, but I’m making headway. My regret is that my daughter is sacrificing a year—it may, despite my best efforts, amount to more than a year—of her young life here at my side. I know she misses her London life.”

  Redfyre was touched to see Miss Wells nip around the table and kiss the top of her father’s head.

  “Who else would employ me, Pa?” she asked him. “At least I’m finding a practical use for my qualifications.”

  Her father answered Redfyre’s enquiring look. “Clever girl, Rosa—”

  “Oh no!” she interrupted, “Pa! Please don’t give John a false impression! I’m no Philippa Fawcett to outshine the male top-wrangler in finals! Never think it!”

  “Perhaps not,” her father resumed, “but too sharp and active to spend her days darning socks and doing good works. She has successfully completed a course at the Lilian Carstairs college here in Cambridge. She’s a shorthand typist and a secretary. They’re not the same thing, she tells me, and she is both. She can do shorthand, as you saw for yourself, type at a rate of knots, organise an office—organise me. I couldn’t manage without her. And, Redfyre, it’s a portable skill. Rosa could walk into any office and take it over. As long as we men are too lazy to learn the skills for ourselves, she could have access to the highest and most powerful departments in the land,” he concluded with paternal pride and—Redfyre thought—a dollop of ulterior motive. The man seemed to think like a spy. “Trouble is, here, surrounded as she is by pasty-faced scholars, day in, day out, life’s a bit dull for a girl.”

  “I had understood that you were planning to go to the Trinity May Ball, Miss Wells, to relieve the tedium?”

  “Oh yes. But not with some dashing Trinity sportsman! One of our own men has acquired tickets and has invited me to accompany him. One of the young readers. Digby Gisbourne is rather sweet, but I don’t think he’s capable of doing a very energetic quickstep, let alone a tango.”

  “What a coincidence! I shall be there, too. With a friend of yours—Earwig Stretton. I’m sure Earwig will insist that we swap partners when they strike up a tango, and I will happily step my way through it with you.”

  “There you go, Rosa, my love! That’s a very decent offer! But just be sure not to annoy young Gisbourne. He won’t think much of seeing a chap with the inspector’s dashing good looks cutting in on his partner for the evening.” The master turned to Redfyre and confided, “Gisbourne is the son of one of our most generous benefactors, you understand.”

  Redfyre shook his head in unaffected puzzlement. “Gisbourne? Should I know the name?”

  “He’s not a Cambridge man, though when he sets up shop—and you may take me literally!—in town next year, he will be! He’s the son and heir of Gisbourne the Family Grocer. Young Digby is going to be a very wealthy man. In these straightened times the college has been lucky indeed to have him.”

  “Oh, it’s no penance, really, spending an evening with Digby,” Rosa hurried to say. “He may not be much of a dancer, but he’s very lively and entertaining. He’s easy and a good talker.”

  “He’ll need those virtues in the career he’s chosen for himself,” her father commented. “He’s one of those chaps who know from an early age what they want to do with their lives. Gisbourne has his eye set on the highest office in the land. He fully intends to be prime minister one day. Makes no secret of his ambition! Now, I ask myself—is that honesty, disarming in its naïveté? Or honesty, alarming in its directness? He’s starting off by oiling up to the local dignitaries and party leaders here in the county with a view to being appointed Tory candidate for Cambridgeshire in the next elections in two years’ time. A much-sought-after position, apparently. A man to keep an eye on.”

  Did Redfyre imagine the amused look that slid between father and daughter at the comment?

  “But that’s enough of college gossip! Now, tell me about the murder that occurred on my back lawn last Friday night, and how we may help you shake out a few clues. My gardener is due to give the grass a short back and sides tomorrow morning, but I can hold him back if you wish.”

  Realising that the interest was genuine, Redfyre decided to break his rule of never involving a nonprofessional in his enquiries wherever possible and invited father and daughter to accompany him on a reconstruction of the crime as it might have occurred. A sweep of the lawn and a thorough inspection of the flower beds producing nothing of interest, they unlocked the gate and went through into the churchyard, taking in the bier that had held the body and spending a minute of silent contemplation by its side.

  Rosamund appeared moved, and in an effort to better understand the circumstances, asked a few simple questions of Redfyre. “At which end was his head? . . . You say his boots were . . . here? At the foot? Why? If he took them off himself, he must have been attacked while he was lying stretched out trying to get to sleep? The boots tell you that he was not killed on our back lawn. I’m rather glad of that! Or else that he was throttled to death and then his murderer went to the trouble of removing his victim’s footwear and placing it tidily by his side?”

  “But such a natural gesture!” Dr. Wells commented. “Exactly what an old soldier—or an old sailor—would do. Done just the same myself for years . . . Had you thought, Redfyre, that if he didn’t just stroll in on his own two feet and place himself on the stone, ready for death, it would have been quite a task for anyone to heave and drag his body all the way across my back lawn, through the locked gate—showing intimate knowledge of the college grounds—then undertake an ad hoc valeting service on the corpse and its clothing?”

  “I certainly had,” Redfyre managed to say before the master in his enthusiasm rushed on.

  “And the clothing . . . you say he was wearing an army greatcoat? Well, anyone can acquire one secondhand these days. Anything useful in the pockets? Like a receipt for a meal at the Savoy or a ticket stub for the Palladium?”

  Was the shove in the right direction fortuitous or calculated? Redfyre wondered.

  “As a matter of fact, we were lucky enough to find one item. Overlooked by whoever cleaned out the coat. In an inside ticket pocket . . .”

  Redfyre took out his notecase and produced the Invitation to Dine card from the Amici Apicii, watching the master’s face carefully.

  Cornelius Wells took it with a wondering look, read the script on the front and then turned it over to check, as Redfyre had done, for pencilled messages or reminders on the back.

  The inspector had expected a stone-faced, professional response, but was rewarded with a series of changing expressions that flitted in apparent spontaneity across the unguarded features. Astonishment, disbelief, anger, satisfaction and resolve—Redfyre identified all these emotions.

  Finally, “Let’s go and sit down in my drawing room again and consider this,” Wells said. “I have something to tell you in return, Inspector. High time to show you my pitiful hand of cards,
I think. Rosa, come. You must hear this, too. I’m afraid, in my overconfidence, I may have exposed you to something very dark and distasteful.”

  Chapter 18

  Cambridge, Wednesday, the 21st of May, 1924

  “Dining clubs are a fairly normal feature of college life, surely, sir?” Redfyre’s tone was one of mild inquiry. “I was a member myself of such a one when I was up. Two, in fact! The ‘Convivium’ and the ‘Goblin Men.’ The first was expensive and pretentious, the second I hardly remember. For good reason—it had rather more to do with quaffin’ than gobblin’.”

  Cornelius Wells nodded in agreement. “We’ve all done it. So you can imagine, I was astonished and—if I’m honest—a wee bit insulted when I was approached in the matter of the Jude’s mastership. ‘As temporary and as brief a tenure as you wish,’ I was assured at a very private meeting in London.”

  Redfyre interrupted him. “Private, sir? How high did this go?”

  “High enough to make my head spin! There were the college people you would expect . . .”

  “The chancellor?”

  “And the all-important vice-chancellor. Also the sitting member of Parliament for Cambridge and a shady-looking chap with a Ronald Colman moustache. Hear-all-say-nothing type, if you know what I mean. Intelligence outfit written all over him. A few men were hovering about with fountain pens and notebooks at the ready.”

  “To investigate a dining club?” Redfyre was baffled. “This speaks of a concern deeper than that springing from a collegiate matter. What sort of shenanigans could have so disturbed them? Political? Criminal? Why didn’t they just come to us in the CID?”

  Wells pulled a comically pitying face. “This country’s dirty secrets are kept within ivy-covered walls by choice. ‘No need for police boots tramping through peaceful courtyards,’ I was told. Though your name had come up at an earlier stage.” He smiled. “As a safe pair of hands. A receptive ear. Your skills are highly valued in the . . . um, inner circles, or perhaps I should say rather, ‘opinion-forming cabals’ of Cambridge society.” He looked questioningly at Redfyre, but encountering an expression of puzzlement, he moved on. “In any case, the appointments panel concluded with a reassurance: ‘We’re reasonably certain that no crime has been committed, after all.’”

  The two men shared a knowing glance. Reasonably certain? They both knew how to interpret that. These people were damned sure it had happened and were determined to hush it up.

  “This heavyweight committee added lightly: ‘It will take you no time at all to flush out this menace.’ When I questioned the use of a strong term like ‘menace’ in relation to the student habit of harmless overindulgence in food and wine after the privations experienced at their boarding schools, heads were shaken and a tutting chorus tap-danced around the table.”

  “They made it clear that you ‘didn’t know the half of it’?”

  “Exactly! I was made aware that this bastion of propriety, this pinnacle of academic excellence—my own alma mater, for God’s sake!—was decaying from the inside, of a condition that was set out to me as a cross between dry rot and the Black Death!”

  Redfyre sympathised. He would have reacted in exactly the same way to the committee’s suggestion—with amusement and disbelief. He would have told them in clear terms what to do with their proposal. But, like the master, he was alarmed by the subsequent events and discoveries and in no mood for false bravado. Hindsight had shone its light into a very dark corner.

  “So the upshot was that, though grumbling a protest, I agreed to take on the mastership for a term with the brief of digging about in the sewers of college life, uncovering any unpleasantness hidden away there, and after the requisite exorcism, presumably reburying the thing.” With a rueful shrug of his shoulders, he confessed: “In fact, I quite looked forward to playing the new broom. Making some changes in staff, checking out the financial health, quelling the internecine fighting that had been damaging the college for decades.” He sighed and admitted that a single term was a ludicrous suggestion. He was now approaching the end of his first year and nowhere near achieving his aims.

  “The dining club, surprisingly, proved to be the least intractable of my problems. This trumpeted oh-so-secret society that was rumoured to be gnawing away at the very foundations of the college’s morality was no Hellfire Club. And was anything but secret! Indeed, the members themselves were the only people in college or town who were under the illusion that their doings were a secret. I was given no help with establishing the identities of the membership initially. Everyone discreetly denied any knowledge. So I attacked on another, less well-armoured front. The kitchens! These diners provided dinners, somewhere here in the college. And they damn well didn’t cook the food themselves!”

  Redfyre smiled and nodded in approval.

  “Interestingly, our college kitchen knew all about ‘the goings-on,’ yet denied any involvement. They huffed and puffed their disapproval. ‘That bunch o’ loonies!’ were a law unto themselves. They operated in secrecy, and no more than once a term at irregular times somewhere up in the Cromwell wing. At the other end of the college premises. The chefs they used, men imported from the town’s best restaurants and occasionally up from London by train, operated within the confines of the top residential floor. A grand set of rooms up there—one of the best in college—is occupied by a long-established member of Jude’s. The mad diners were only a bother when they ran out of implements or ingredients and sent a runner down to the main kitchen for a slab of butter or a cream whisk. Was the master, my head of the pantry wanted to know, aware of the risk of fire in Cromwell? Since the college had been electrified, newfangled stoves of some description had been put to use on the club dinner nights. That couldn’t be legal, could it?

  “The man’s objections were valid, and I told him so. Enquiries, I said, would be made at once. And they were.”

  “But no immediate action to close them down?” Redfyre said carefully.

  “Oh no! I wanted to catch them at it! Breaking a few regulations, even boring ones like the fire rules, would be the very best method of putting a stop to activities. No one argues with the fire regs! If I were to pull out their plugs on the grounds of—what? The running of a drinking club in the style of the ancient Athenian ‘andron’? By the world’s authority on ancient Greeks? The suborning of the young men of Jude’s, perhaps? The unlicensed entertainment of assorted people of the town? I’d have been laughed out of college, Redfyre.

  “I held off and pursued my enquiries. I have to admit I was disturbed by what I initially found. And, with my daughter’s help, I was to discover much worse. Have you any idea what these men are up to? No? I think I have an inkling, though I may just have glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. I don’t know whether to give a world-weary laugh or howl with despair for mankind. You shall judge! And, I hope, advise.

  “Look—this club, the Amici Apicii? Huh! The worthy Apicius should sue! It’s surely defamatory to be claimed as a friend by these rogues. There’s a shifting and changing membership of between six and ten, as far as I can work out. Who knows? Perhaps they’re aiming for the classical nine guests for the ninth hour, but the best they can do is six for six? However, they have a central core: this classical scholar Fanshawe. He’s a world authority on Alexander of Macedon: his hero, whom he in no way, thank God, resembles! He’s also one of the two frontrunners for the position of master of the college when I hand over the reins. He can’t wait! Wherever I turn, he’s there! Ingratiating himself, trying to impress. I shall be very careful not to accept any dinner invitations from him. Fanshawe has many well-respected books and papers to his name. He’s well established in academic circles. But I sense that he’s . . . flawed. There’s a hairline crack in his bell, if you know what I mean.”

  “Is he influential, sir? Is he listened to?”

  “Oh yes! He’s an attraction for younger men of all ranks and years in the college,
it seems, on account of his character and tastes. He exudes sophistication. He’s well travelled, a connoisseur of wine and food. More sinisterly, in my patriotic book, he does himself no credit when he sets himself up as a challenger to the views of the older generation, who chose to send the young men to war in their millions.”

  “‘Pacifism’—the word that seems to have dropped out of your vocabulary, sir,” Redfyre said with mock reproof, “is an easy doctrine to tout at the moment. And selective pacifism, even more alluring.”

  Wells grunted his agreement, looked with sharp assessment at the inspector from behind his eyebrows and ventured further: “I have caught him out using in front of students that fallacious phrase: ‘Lions led by donkeys.’ Wormed his way out of it, of course, by quoting Plutarch at me. Claims that he in turn was quoting a Macedonian general and the animals in question were lions and deer. Correct, of course, but not so catchy as the one currently in vogue. And Fanshawe is very much a man seduced by a turn of phrase. He’s a neat hand at phrase-turning himself. And they stick in student’s heads. The thicker heads. No—Fanshawe’s a dangerous scoundrel in my book.”

  After a moment’s silence he added grimly, “Redfyre, I have built a picture of what goes on at these bacchanalian routs, and—”

  He caught Redfyre’s anxious look in Rosa’s direction and hurried to say, “Oh, it’s all right! Stand at ease, Inspector! It doesn’t disturb Rosa to hear this. She’s a London girl, you know. Bloomsbury,” he confided as indisputable proof of her worldliness. “No, it’s not sexual licence they indulge in. I should more properly have compared his social occasions to an ancient Greek gentlemen’s drinking party—a symposium as described by Socrates or Xenophon. But without the acrobatic and obliging young lady flute-players. And certainly without the suggestions of orgiastic goings-on that have recently scandalised us in certain publications seeking to reinterpret the classical texts. No, it’s torture that excites them. Mental torment of a selected victim in the pursuit of some gratification my own mind thankfully cannot grasp.”