‘Ah, you, too,’ he said, standing up as Hera came into the room with the drinks. He took the tray from her, set it down and added, ‘Poor old Bull is being needled, too. Too bad, after the beaks dismissed him without a stain on his character.’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ I said. ‘He was guilty of dereliction of duty. He ought to have replaced that bulb as soon as he knew it had gone. When did he know it had gone, I wonder?’
‘I’ve been talking to him. The policeman has rather dwelt on the point, of course, and Bull told me what he told him and he swears it’s the truth. He did not discover it had gone until about two in the afternoon, when he needed to visit the what-have-you. He pressed the switch and no light came on, so he uttered a bold word, cursing whatever student had pinched the bulb for one of the study-bedrooms, and went up the stairs to a loo on the second floor. After that, he says, he was kept on the trot by the people who were giving the party and, although he fully intended to replace the bulb, it meant fetching a ladder (as he is too short to manage without one) and for a time he was kept so busy running back and forth for the party preparations that — well, one can see how it would have been.’
‘But when I went along that corridor to have a fag, the blighter was doing damn-all except reading a newspaper and eating fish and chips. Resting after his labours, I suppose. Anyway, what has Bingley got on you that you wanted to talk to us about?’
‘That silly little clot Patsy Carlow has given the coppers reason to believe that Carbridge and I were rivals in love — love for
‘Well, those Turkish pantaloons were really rather eye-catching. Had either of you seen her in them before?’ asked Hera, ‘I thought they were very fetching.’
‘Ripeness is all,’ said Todd, ‘if you’re going to flaunt yourself in that sort of garb, and pathetic young Patsy is hardly Mata Hari. However, to your question, so far as I am concerned the answer is no. Unfortunately, of course, the middle-aged Bingley saw her in those Turkish reach-me-downs when he came in and broke up the party that Saturday, and apparently was struck all of a heap. The result is that he believes her story that Carbridge and I were wildly infatuated with her and that we fell out because of this. I told him that at the party my reaction to the bizarre garments was to give her a fatherly smack on the seat of them, and what do you suppose he said when I told him that?’
‘I can’t wait to know,’ said Hera.
‘He said, “Sexy, Mr Todd, very sexy.” ’
‘Well, apparently there are the three of us on his roster,’ I said. ‘What do you expect me to do about it? I can’t extricate myself, let alone anybody else.’
‘I know. Safety in numbers, though. As long as he’s got three of us under suspicion — well, it’s better than only one. What I wanted to say was that I’ve told him nothing about that little affray at Crianlarich and I shan’t, either, unless I have to. You know what I mean.’
‘Perfectly. Neither will I mention Jane Minch’s sore feet,’ I said, risking a shot in the dark. It went home, though.
He looked at me in a speculative way and said, ‘So you worked that one out, did you?’ He finished his drink and got up to go. ‘So it’s checkmate, is it?’
‘Let us say, with Mr Peachum, “you know we have it in our power to hang each other”. Anyway, thank goodness the law doesn’t go quite so far as that nowadays.’
‘Amen,’ he said, ‘but I think it’s only a matter of time, you know.’
‘So what on earth were you getting at?’ asked Hera, when she had shown him out. ‘How did you get him sewn up like that?’
‘Easily. It stands to reason that, once Jane’s feet began to trouble her, the rather insensitive and egotistic Carbridge would have insisted upon pushing ahead and leaving the brother and sister behind.’
‘They were all at Fort William.’
‘So were Perth and the students. My guess is that everybody except Carbridge and Todd got a lift or took the bus for the end part of the trip. That means those two blokes were alone together for the last part of The Way. From friend Todd’s reactions, I should say that my faculty of imagination, plus a logical and analytical mind, has paid dividends.’
‘You are cleverer than I thought. It must come from reading so many books,’ she said mockingly. ‘What else have you deduced?’
‘That Todd is a snake in the grass.’ She turned colour, so I added, ‘I quite like him, though, and I have nothing against snakes. Their venom has curative properties when it’s put to therapeutic use.’
It was after this that I began to have bad dreams. I suppose most people have them at times, but to me they came as an unwelcome novelty. Mostly my dreams, when I could remember them in the morning, were of the most trivial content — I had dressed wrongly for some function or had found myself on a lonely road with no idea of how I had come to be there or in which direction I ought to be going. The worst dream I had had up to the night which followed the hearing at the police court and the talk with Todd, was that my and Sandy’s authors had turned into a pack of wolves and invaded the office thirsting for my blood.
The new dreams were very much worse than that. For one thing, they persisted night after night and they were horrifying. I dreamt that Todd — strangely enough not Carbridge — had turned into the Ancient Mariner’s albatross and was hanging from my neck. I could not rid myself of him and he was stifling me with his weight.
After the fourth night of this, Hera asked me what was wrong. She thought I must be sickening for something and advised me to see a doctor. Sandy was more sympathetic and to him I told my troubles.
‘It isn’t a doctor I need,’ I said. ‘It’s something in the nature of an exorcist.’
‘Well, you’re on the books of one,’ he said. ‘Go and see her. Of course it’s not Todd you’re dreaming about.’
‘You mean I’ve substituted him for Carbridge, but I don’t think that is the case. After all, I’m not really concerned in the murder, you know — not personally, I mean. I’m sorry for any man who dies before his time, but I’m not involved beyond that.’
