The Case of the Missing Bronte (7 page)

‘If the lady had come along to you, would you have recommended her to go to him?'

They all sat around the table in thought. Finally it was Moustache who spoke.

‘Well, it would have depended what she wanted, wouldn't it? If she wanted to sell — and she'd have to be crazy not to — I'd have said call in the experts, but deposit the thing in your bank while you're waiting, because it will take time.'

‘More or less what I said,' I put in.

‘On the other hand, if she was the philanthropic type who wanted to make it generally available and so on, then either she should give it to the Brontë Parsonage Museum or to some library. The British Library would be an obvious choice, or maybe the Brotherton in Leeds.'

‘I wonder if that's what Mr Scott-Windlesham recommended,' I said.

‘Timothy? Timothy's first thought would be: what's in it for me? That you can be quite sure of. I can't quite see what there could be in it for him, though.'

‘Unless,' said Beard, ‘he did her in, and kept the manuscript for himself. Supposing he had the nerve.'

‘Why all the questions, anyway?' asked Languid, languidly.

‘I'm Police. The lady was savagely beaten around the head and the manuscript taken. Dear me. Twenty minutes is up. Thanks for the instant. I'd better get along to see Mr Scott-Windlesham.'

I trusted my last words had left them goggling in there. Or perhaps Beard had meant the suggestion perfectly seriously anyway. It is not only in academic circles that people will habitually believe the worst of a colleague. Policemen are always being accused of brutality, and I remember only once totally and entirely refusing to entertain an allegation against one of my mates. And he turned out to have beaten a left-wing demonstrator to pulp with a lead-weighted truncheon.

Anyway, I needn't have worried that I had missed my appointment with Timothy Scott-Windlesham. When I came out into the corridor his door was just opening. As I walked towards his office the door was shut firmly again, for the conversation to be concluded. I loitered around, pretending to an inexhaustible interest in the names of the staff-members on the various doors. I had heard of
none of them. Milltown, it seemed, did not produce telly luminaries, quiz-show panellists, part-time novelists or Parliamentary candidates. Vegetation was sparse in Milltown as a whole, but it looked as if that was what was going on in its English Department.

Eventually the conversation was concluded, and two large fair men emerged from Scott-Windlesham's office and, without words of farewell, marched away down the corridor. Remembering the wounding conjecture of Moustache, I wondered if they were adult students, the only breed of student that seemed to flourish in Milltown. Training themselves for a more cultured form of unemployment, probably. I let a moment or two elapse, and then went and knocked on the door.

‘Oh — come
in,'
said an irritable thin voice.

Timothy Scott-Windlesham was sitting at his desk, but he swung his chair round to face the door as I entered, presumably so as to look like a writer interrupted in mid-œuvre. He was middling in height, but thin and hollow-chested. He was pasty in complexion, or at any rate he was pasty now, as if he had just been sick: the general effect was of an uncooked dumpling. His hair was long and straight and lank, and had been finger-combed across his head, no doubt in a moment of stress. His tie was askew, his shirt unironed, and he grabbed a packet from his desk and stuck a filter-tip in his mouth.

‘Oh, you. You were here before, weren't you? What is it?'

Gracious little twit. Them idea that manners maketh man clearly went out of the educational system before he went into it. I suited my behaviour to his, and took the one easy chair in his office, without being asked.

‘Mr Scott-Windlesham? I'm sorry to trouble you, since it's clear you're busy. I came because I believe you're an expert on Victorian literature.'

‘Ye-e-es.'

‘Isn't Meredith your speciality?'

‘Ye-e-e-es' (still more doubtfully).

Experimentally I said: ‘I've only read
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.'

With push-button precision, Scott-Windlesham replied: ‘Oh, that's the
popular
Meredith. I can't say I find that very interesting myself.'

Well, Moustache certainly knew her Timothy Scott-Windlesham. I guessed he was the sort of teacher who is marvellous at communicating his own lack of enthusiasm.

‘It wasn't Meredith, actually, I wanted to talk about,' I said. ‘Perhaps I'd better introduce myself. I'm a police officer — Superintendent Trethowan.'

Policemen are always imagining that people go white when they introduce themselves. Often they do, but for no reason relevant to the matter in hand. Anyway, I was pretty sure that Scott-Windlesham went a further shade of pastiness at this point. He said nothing, though, and merely goggled at me in an inarticulate and unacademic sort of way. His hands, on the arms of his desk chair, seemed to be almost gripping them. I was forced to go on without any encouragement from him.

‘I've come to you because we have a little problem you might be able to help us clear up.' Timothy Scott-Windlesham nodded, looking helpful, and seemed to have managed to swallow his first reactions. ‘I believe you had a visit some time last week from a lady with a question about the Brontës.'

Timothy's face fell again, indefinably.

‘Ye-e-es.'

‘A Miss Edith Wing.'

‘Was that the name? It was Marjory — our secretary — who made the appointment. With Professor Gumbold being . . . far from well . . . an awful lot of extra stuff descends on me that ought by rights to be his pigeon. Not that I'm complaining. And of course, though this
Miss Wing wasn't a student, still, I do think one of the things one has to do, perhaps particularly in a place like Milltown, with no old university tradition, is to keep oneself as
open
as possible, to the community at large, I mean, because if we are going to serve any real function
in
the community as a whole — '

He went on in this vein for some time. Perfectly unexceptionable sentiments, but they struck me as blather. We get used to blather, in the police. And I served for a time in the Houses of Parliament. Politicians' blather is to impress, suspects' blather is to gain time. I thought Timothy Scott-Windlesham wanted to gain time. I waited until the flow had dried up.

‘And what exactly was it that Miss Wing wanted to see you about?'

‘Well, as you said, the Brontës . . .' I sat silent, to force him to go on. I thought it possible he was considering whether to tell an outright lie. If so, he decided against it.

‘She had this little book, you know: tiny pages, minute script, practically unreadable. As far as I remember, she said she'd inherited it. And it was obviously very old — faded, dog-eared, and so on. Though of course that's very easily faked.'

‘You thought she might be a forger of some kind?'

Timothy Scott-Windlesham shrugged his hunchy shoulders.

‘Just one of the possibilities.'

‘And when you had inspected the manuscript, you suggested — ?'

‘Well, that it might be — no, wait: I think she brought that up, now I come to think about it. She suggested that it might be a manuscript of one of the Brontës.'

‘I see. Did you agree with that?'

‘Only in so far as that was certainly one of the possibilities. I wasn't in a position to do any more than
that. One would have to be an expert. Of course the Brontës are a fascinating topic, fabulous writers and all that — I meditate a little piece on Emily's French essays in the near future — but I'm not myself a specialist in them. All I could say was that the Brontës were the first names to spring to mind — naturally.'

It would all have been more convincing if I had not just heard his previously expressed opinions on the Brontës. In any case, the cloak of learning seemed to sit uneasily on his meagre frame.

‘You don't know of any other writers, then, using that sort of tiny script?'

‘No, but as I say, I'm not an expert on holographs, not at all. And of course, there is no guarantee that this was by a
writer,
in the sense you probably intend. Anybody around at that time could have developed a script like that — particularly someone who could not afford to buy a lot of paper.'

Fair point, that. It had occurred to Jan and me too, but I made a mental note not to underestimate Timothy Scott-Windlesham. I entered a caveat, though.

‘True enough. But it would be likely to have been a compulsive writer, wouldn't it?'

‘Not necessarily. Quite ordinary people, writing letters, wrote two pages on one by writing cross-wise — they turned the paper forty-five degrees and just wrote over what they had just written. Florence Nightingale did, I know.'

‘I see. So did you rather pour cold water on the idea?'

‘No, no,
no,
Superintendent.' He leaned forward in an agony of goodwill and sincerity. ‘Not at all, dear me no. But what I did do was try not to raise false hopes. Surely you can see that that was only kind? Because it would have been an awful let-down if it had turned out to be written by Amelia Smith, a dressmaker's apprentice from Halifax, or something.'

‘True. So what did you say?'

‘Well, the obvious thing: that what she needed was an expert, someone with special qualifications in manuscripts. I thought if I told her to take it to Haworth that would rather prejudge the affair. So I suggested she take it along to a librarian, who would know the sort of person to contact. Then there would be no question of anyone trying to confirm a preconceived idea.'

‘I see. You suggested the university library here?'

‘Good God, no. The librarian here's nothing but a sexy dwarf. He's only interested in grabbing his girls behind the desk. He wouldn't know a Brontë manuscript from a ship's log.'

‘Where did you recommend she go, then?'

‘I don't think I recommended anywhere, but I think I mentioned Leeds and Halifax. The Brotherton Library at Leeds is a very respectable collection — oodles of Brontë stuff, I believe, so they'd certainly be interested.'

‘I see. And she accepted this advice?'

Timothy spread out his hands. Women, he seemed to say. Who can be sure with them? ‘So far as I know. She thanked me, and said it seemed a good idea.'

‘And did you talk about this to anyone? Your wife? Any of your colleagues?'

‘I haven't got a wife. We're separated. No, I certainly didn't mention it to any of my colleagues, as you call them.'

‘Why?'

‘For a start, the likelihood was that there was nothing in it: lost manuscripts don't turn up in trunks every day of the week, and certainly not Brontë juvenilia. I know there's mountains of it, but still it did seem more likely that this was some schoolgirl's gushy attempt at fiction from back in the nineteenth century somewhere. Then my dear colleagues would have sniggered like crazy and put it about that I'd thought a Victorian school-miss's
trash was the work of a Brontë — there's no loyalty here, I'm awfully afraid. So you can be
quite
sure I didn't say a word to any of them.'

‘Nor anybody else? You didn't, for example, talk about it over a pint with anyone?'

‘You have the oddest idea, Superintendent, of what one talks about over a pint in Milltown.' He smirked. ‘It may be all sorts of things, but I assure you it is never literary manuscripts.'

‘I take your point. Did Miss Wing say what she would do with the manuscript if it did turn out to be of interest? Sell it? Give it to a library or museum?'

‘Really, we had hardly come to that stage — that
would
have been crossing one's bridges. In any case she was consulting me as — God help me — ' (here he put on a self-deprecating grin, which twisted his sunken cheeks) — ‘a literary man, not as a lawyer, or a financial adviser.'

‘One last point, and then I'll need to trouble you no longer. Tell me, how much of the manuscript did you get to read?'

‘Well, I didn't get to
read
any of it. I mean, it was frightfully difficult to decipher. I just cast my eye over it — you know how it is: I just caught the odd name, because of the capital letters standing out. Mendith Crag, I remember. Ling-something Manor. Somebody called Blackmore, I think. But it was all terribly closely written — the speech not separated off from the rest. It would have taken me
days
to go through the whole thing. I'm a busy man, Superintendent.'

I could take a hint.

‘Then I'll take my leave, sir. Thank you very much for all your help.' At the door, I paused. ‘You may have been wondering why I've been asking these questions . . .'

Timothy gulped a little.

‘Yes. Yes, indeed. I didn't quite like to enquire.'

‘Miss Wing was brutally attacked two nights ago.'

‘Really? How shocking!'

‘And the manuscript was stolen.'

‘I see. That explains it. It sounds quite barbaric. Really, one rather hopes it does turn out to be the outpourings of Miss Amelia Smith of Halifax, doesn't one?'

‘Not this one, sir. I hope it's a Brontë manuscript. Because I'm going to get it back.'

‘Then I wish you good luck. And good morning, Superintendent.'

So that was that. I trudged along the dreary corridors of the English Department. At the big square with the notice-boards, I paused. Professor Gumbold was on the phone again.

‘As a member of Faculty and a former Dean, I insist the matter be discussed. My position here is being
undermined
by elements in the Department I can only describe as
seditious — '