The Bad Quarto

Book 0: Imogen Quy Mysteries

by Jill Paton Walsh

Genres: Mystery; Suspense

Synopsis

Imogen Quy returns to solve another intriguing Cambridge mystery, in the latest in an exciting series to rival Inspector Morse.

Another foolhardy Cambridge college-climber has died attempting Harding's Folly. This time it's John Talentire, one of the brightest young dons at St Agatha's, and the verdict is accident, compounded by idiocy.

But Imogen Quy — her name rhymes with 'why' — can't help wondering how such a clever young man died so stupidly.

And when a wildly eccentric production of Hamlet is interrupted by a murder accusation, Imogen has to look into it, uncovering more crime than she expected.

Release date: March 1, 2012

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 288

Sample

Thus twice before, and jump at this dead howerWith Marshall stalke he passed through our watch …

It was much later than usual when Imogen Quy, the college nurse of St Agatha’s College, Cambridge, locked up her office in the college and went to fetch her bike for the ride home. There was a lot of writing up notes to catch up on, it was examination time and the final-year students were all stressed and excitable. She had seen many of them in the last week. Later she was mortified to be unable to say at exactly what time she had left. She didn’t mind cycling home after dark: her cycle lights were in order, and there was a provisional and unemphatic quality about the darkness on summer nights.

She took her bike from the college bicycle shed, and wheeled it out onto Castle Hill and her way home. She passed the end of Patten Alley as she went. The usually deserted little alley was packed with people, for some reason. Glancing down it she saw a crowd, backs turned to her, and heard a commotion of some kind – a muted commotion. Then someone turned and saw her – she must have been passing the pool of light cast by a lamppost at the corner – and called out to her: ‘Miss Quy! Come quick!’ The note of anguish in the cry was unmistakable.

Imogen propped her bike against the wall and ran forward. She had to elbow her way through the press of people. And there, lying face upward on the stones of the little street, was a fellow of the college. John Talentire, glamorous, outspoken, provocative John Talentire, the best research fellow for years. Imogen knelt down on the stones beside him, taking his wrist to feel his pulse. It was very faint. His eyelids fluttered and closed.

‘Has someone called 999?’ Imogen asked.

‘Yes, ages ago!’ wailed a young woman close by. But Imogen knew very well that minutes seem like centuries in such a scene as this.

She pushed something off his chest to put her ear to his ribs and listen for his heart. She couldn’t hear it. She smelled beer on his breath. The sporadic lights in the alley were not bright, and the onlookers cast nearly solid shadow over the scene. Then someone shone a torch at her. She saw that a pool of blood was gathering around Talentire’s skull; he had fallen very hard, not, surely, just fallen over, or else he had been viciously struck on the head. At that moment the faint pulse in the wrist she was holding faltered and stopped.

A wailing siren a little way off indicated the arrival of ambulance or police. Too late, Imogen thought. He had died this minute, while she knelt beside him. How odd and distressing that a man that she didn’t like, and who didn’t like her, should die with her holding his hand. She sat back on her knees. She looked curiously at what she had pushed off his chest to listen for his heartbeat: it was a coil of rope. It was still attached to his belt by a shackle. Then she looked up.

Overhead on one side of the alley the lovely Jacobean buildings of the college rose in an elaborate tower, marking the corner of the court. The topmost casement of this tower was wide open, maybe fifty feet above them. And on the other side of the alley the pediment of the New Library jutted out against the stars, coming to within ten feet or so of the window.

‘Of course,’ Imogen murmured. ‘Harding’s Folly.’

Is it a custom here?

It was not unusual for Imogen to find herself applied to for non-medical consultations by members of her college. Lady Caroline Buckmote, the Master’s wife, asked often for Imogen’s counsel on college matters, the two of them having developed a friendship based on instinctive sympathy, and a shared concern for the welfare of Sir William Buckmote, a great man who had from time to time found the stresses of his position deeply trying. On a fine March morning, Lady Buckmote recruited Imogen for advice about what to do about the tower room in Fountain Court. This room, one of the best in the college, had been empty, unused and locked since the terrible accident two terms ago, in which John Talentire had lost his life. But accidents and deaths, however tragic, are only moments in the life of colleges, which encompass years in hundreds and brilliant fellows in dozens of dozens.

Imogen followed Caroline Buckmote, up the ancient spiral stone staircase that led to the disastrous room, and waited while she unlocked first the ‘oak’ – the heavy outer door with which ancient college rooms were provided to preserve privacy when required – and then the handsome panelled door into the room itself.

It was an extraordinarily pleasant room. It was nearly square, with a window in each wall, and a window-seat below each window. It would, when occupied, have been lined with books, but now was lined with vacant bookcases. It was a bed-sitting room, with a bed against one wall, and a little lobby containing bath and basin and lavatory concealed behind a panelled door. It was perfectly comfortable in spite of the oddities of the space. The ceiling was high, and supported from corner to corner by a massive diagonal beam, carved with running vines and fruits in low relief. At each end of the beam, supporting it, was a vertical prop, in effect an upright beam, standing a little clear of the wall as though the builders had not quite trusted the ceiling beam with the considerable span, and the weight of the stone roof overhead. Light poured into the room from all directions. The two women instinctively walked round looking through each window in turn. One opened onto Fountain Court, the famous and beautiful main court of St Agatha’s. Seen from this height – four storeys above the pavements – it looked like the diagrammatic engravings of college buildings beloved of the eighteenth century – charming compromises between pictures and plans – which one bought at huge expense on King’s Parade.

They moved on to the second window. This looked sideways along the roof ridge of one side of the court, across a slope of Barnack stone tiles running down to a parapet decorated with saints and gargoyles; a sensible, solid, water-shedding roof hiding behind the architect’s fancies about what ought to show from the ground. The third window looked into the Fellows’ Garden, and was dominated by the huge mulberry tree planted by the college’s first botanist, who was, of course, not a scholar, but a gardener; and so they came round to the fourth window. This last window was the cause of all the grief.

It was startlingly near the New Library, which had been squeezed onto an old burying plot the college had acquired in the nineteenth century. As they looked out now the New Library reared up alongside them and the angle of the pediment pointed directly at the tower, reaching its closest point about three feet below the window where they stood, and perhaps eight feet distant; it was hard to estimate. Far below them at ground level ran a narrow street, a little medieval lane, Patten Alley, which had once led to the burying ground, and was a public street, although St Agatha’s now stood on both sides of it. From the street, as Imogen had often had the chance to observe, the gap between the corner of one building and the window of the other looked very small indeed – close enough to jump, and that was the trouble. The gap was known as Harding’s Folly after the first student to have jumped it. His survival, alas, had set an example to all who came after him, so that the college had been faced with a savagely dangerous tradition, a tempting dare to all its hot-heads, which in the eighty-odd years since the New Library was built had claimed four promising young lives.

Thirty years back St Agatha’s had refused admission to a perfectly well-qualified young aristocrat whose father and grandfather had both attended the college, and both jumped Harding’s Folly. He had promised not to try it, and he had not been believed. Rightly; he had been admitted to King’s, made friends at St Agatha’s, tried the jump and broken his neck.

‘You see?’ said Lady Buckmote.

‘It has to be said,’ said Imogen thoughtfully, ‘that it looks much worse from up here than it does from down below. One might have to be a touch tipsy, don’t you think?’

They were joined at this point by Malcolm Gracie, St Agatha’s new bursar. ‘Ah, a conference, I see,’ he said. ‘Our natural reaction to all this, ladies, was to propose putting bars on the window; but it seems one needs listed building consent, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings is appalled at the idea, and English Heritage is muttering about not giving grants in future to institutions which cannot be trusted with the curatorship of what they have got. All very tiresome, as I’m sure you can see.’

Imogen thought about it. ‘Do we need consent if the bars are not visible from outside?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ said the bursar. ‘How would that be done?’

‘Well, after all,’ said Lady Buckmote, ‘there isn’t anyone out there on top of the New Library who can look right in; suppose we fixed the bars on the inside of the thickness of the wall, just here.’

‘Making the window-seat inaccessible,’ said Gracie.

‘Leaving three window-seats in use, after all,’ said Lady Buckmote.

‘It would nevertheless look a bit odd,’ said the bursar, ‘and leave a space that the housekeeper couldn’t reach to dust.’

‘Then what about putting a sealed double-glazing unit right across the window aperture, leaving the present casement just as it is?’ offered Imogen. ‘That wouldn’t show from outside, would it?’

‘It would look a lot nicer than bars, too,’ said Lady Buckmote. ‘Whose room is it going to be?’

‘Don’t know,’ said the bursar gloomily. ‘We knew, of course, that we couldn’t put an undergraduate or graduate student in here, in view of their potential as suicide candidates, but we did think it would be safe to put a fellow in here, however young and brilliant. But as you know we were sadly mistaken. I wondered if we have anyone old and doddery enough to be absolutely certain not to go jumping out of windows, but the trouble with our extensive selection of brilliant old dodderers is that they are perfectly capable of going off to the south of France for a week leaving their room unlocked. And then anyone could get in. I suppose you wouldn’t consider it, Imogen?’

‘Golly, what a temptation!’ Imogen said. ‘In some ways this is the best room in Cambridge. But I don’t think so; it’s such a long way up for people to climb to come and see me, and naturally they are often feeling a bit dicey when they want to come. It’s just not accessible enough to be practical, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m afraid you’re right,’ said Lady Buckmote. ‘What a shame.’

‘Ah, well, we’ll think of something. But I think we should attempt to get permission to close off that window impenetrably somehow, whatever we are going to do with the room.’

‘Oh, yes, Malcolm. Better safe than sorry. Pity we didn’t think of it earlier.’

‘I have been lying awake at night with that thought, Caroline,’ said the bursar ruefully.

And with that they left him to lock up securely behind them.

Back in the Master’s Lodge having a quiet coffee and chat together, Imogen and Lady Buckmote were joined by the Master himself. Ultra-sensitive to Sir William Buckmote’s state of mind, for she had known him a long time, and nursed him informally through several crises, Imogen perceived at once that sunshine and cheer were not the prevailing mood-music.

‘Trouble, my dear?’ asked Lady Buckmote.

‘Not exactly,’ the great man replied. ‘But I see trouble coming. We have to appoint a new fellow in English. We will have feuding and squabbles over it all term, I’m afraid.’

‘Why, William?’

‘Well, it’s no good asking me!’ he exclaimed. ‘Nature of the subject, I suppose. It’s corrupting, I think. But then I’m only a poor bloody scientist. What could I know about it?’

‘If English is corrupting, William,’ said Lady Buckmote, ‘then the college has been debauching young people by the dozens for many years. Do you want some coffee?’

‘No time, thanks. Yes, I rather think the college has been perpetrating damage. Not just English, either, though it’s English on my mind at the moment. Any course called Something Studies, for example.’

‘Rather an extreme view, dear?’

‘Well, it is, I suppose, extreme. It wouldn’t make me any friends on the college governing body if I uttered it in public. But I’m not exactly joking, either. I seriously think that subjects in which there is no such thing as a wrong answer are debilitating when one is young. I must be off.’

His two companions watched him go, ambling across the vast space of the living room, under its elaborate ceilings, past its portrait-laden walls.

‘Do you think my better half is becoming rather odd, Imogen?’ asked Lady Buckmote.

‘Not really. Not as heads of house go.’

‘They go potty in large numbers, you mean?’

‘It’s a stressful job. And it hits people when they are entering the home straight, so to speak. How long has William to go before he retires?’

‘Three more years, officially. I hope he isn’t going to upset the English faculty. There’s tension enough between arts and sciences here.’

‘I know, though I don’t understand exactly why.’

‘Well, roughly, the arts people think that science is about facts; and facts involve only mechanical rote learning. And the scientists think that subjects as subjective as English, almost devoid of discernible fact, are too wishy-washy to train the mind, and just self-indulgence.’

‘Therefore bad for the young who are too self-indulgent already?’

‘Exactly.’

‘I must go,’ said Imogen. ‘I have a surgery in a minute. I mustn’t be late.’

There is a curious aspect of life in Cambridge, which can seem exhilarating, and can induce a mood of autumnal sadness. Those who stay put in Cambridge all their lives get older with the passing years; but the crowds around them are the young, endlessly replenished. There are two large universities in the place, and every year another throng of golden lads and girls arrive, and begin to walk and shop, and cycle and row, and sprawl talking on the grass of the open spaces in summer weather, and get drunk in the pubs. Imogen’s clients were mostly undergraduates, with a range of slight problems, or sports injuries – those were sometimes serious – or feeble excuses to request sympathy and attention from a kindly person, for sometimes all that ailed them was that they were missing their mothers. They would of course have been horrified and mortally insulted had Imogen offered that diagnosis. Increasingly they seemed to Imogen too young to be there, far too young to be taking their lives in their own hands, studying and thinking for themselves, taking lovers, making choices that would follow them for years. But she realised that she herself had been fully adult and mature at eighteen, in her own opinion. The greenness of her clients didn’t really measure change in them, but, awful thought, in her.

That morning brought a random set of problems into Imogen’s room. The only serious one was James Shelford, a chemistry student, who was feeling wheezy. He hadn’t had asthma before, and Imogen reached the conclusion that he had been inhaling something in the laboratory that had done him a bit of no good. When she asked him what the fumes would have been he reeled off a molecular structure which left her none the wiser. Even if she had known, she wouldn’t have had an antidote in her simple medicine cupboard. But when she said, ‘Off with you to Addenbrooke’s. I’ll write you a note for the casualty officer,’ young James demurred.

‘I can’t tell them what it was,’ he said. ‘It’s new research – it’s got to be secret.’

‘But you’ve just told me,’ said Imogen.

‘Well, I knew you wouldn’t understand it.’

‘You shouldn’t take risks with your health, James. Go and get seen to in A & E.’

He shook his head. ‘My supervisor wouldn’t like it. We’re supposed to keep it strictly confidential till we’re ready to publish.’

‘Who is your supervisor?’ asked Imogen, lifting the phone.

Dr Appleby, of course, could see what was what. He didn’t need a health-and-safety inspection of the lab; he didn’t need a sick undergraduate with a grievance; he needed to know at once if anything going on under his supervision was potentially dangerous; he didn’t need a horror-story in the tabloid press putting off next year’s applicants to read chemistry: in short he could see beyond the end of his nose, and when Imogen handed the phone to James he gave strict instructions to go to Addenbrooke’s at once, and come to see him afterwards. By now James’s breathing was audibly rough, so lmogen called the lodge to have the college porter order a taxi.

‘I can’t afford a taxi,’ said James, resistant to the last.

‘It’ll be on the college account, James,’ said Imogen. ‘Look, various other people have some responsibility to make sure you don’t come to any harm; but you have a duty to be sensible too.’

Behind James came an assortment of relatively minor complaints. Imogen dispensed paracetamol, and advice, wrote a couple more notes, showed a girl how to use a pregnancy testing kit, and suggested measures of self-defence, and was just closing up shop when Samantha Barton appeared. Samantha couldn’t sleep for worry. At first Imogen felt rather severe about this problem: all that was worrying Samantha was her approaching exam, part one of the English tripos, and Imogen thought that others might have rather more serious worries to think about. But she let Samantha run on, as she always did; it was the chief means by which she got into a position to help people. And Samantha’s complaint was not unreasonable. She didn’t know whether the examiners would be structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists, new historicists, etc. etc. There was even a possibility that the examiners would be looking for close reading, fine judgement, and enjoyment of the set text. Samantha, Imogen gathered, had worked hard, and would be able to provide whatever form of commentary would get her good marks. But not knowing what sort of thing would count as clever and correct was making the exam seem terrifying. What if she gave historicist answers to an anti-historicist examiner? It . . .