The silent world of Nicholas Quinn (25 page)

EARLY ON SATURDAY evening Mr. Nigel Denniston decided to begin. He found that the

majority of his O-level English Language scripts had been delivered, and he began

his usual prelimina1ry task of putting the large buff-coloured envelopes into

alphabetical order, and of checking them against his allocated schedule. The

examiners' meeting was to be held in two days' time, and before then he had to look at

about twenty or so scripts, mark them provisionally in pencil, and present them for

scrutiny to the senior examiner, who would be interviewing each of his panel after the

main meeting. Al-jamara was the first school on his list, and he slit open the carefully-

sealed envelope and took out the contents. The attendance sheet was placed on top

of the scripts, and Denniston's eyes travelled automatically and hopefully down to the

'Absentee' column. It was always a cause of enormous joy to him if one or two of his

candidates had been smitten with some oriental malady; but Al-jamara was a

disappointment. According to the attendance sheet there were five candidates

entered, and all five were duly registered as 'present' by the distant invigilator. Never mind. There was always the chance of finding one or two of those delightful children

who knew nothing and who wrote nothing; children for whom the wells of inspiration

ran dry after only a couple of laboured sentences. But no. No luck there, either. None

of the five candidates had prematurely given up the ghost. Instead, it was the usual

business: page after page of ill-written, unidiomatic, irrelevant twaddle, which it was

his assignment to plough through (and almost certainly to plough), marking in red ink

the myriad errors of grammar, syntax, construction, spelling and punctuation. It was a

tedious chore, and he didn't really know why year after year he took it on. Yet he did

know. It was a bit of extra cash; and if he didn't mark, he would only be sitting in front of the TV, forever arguing with the family about which of the channels they should

watch . . . He flicked through the first few sheets. Oh dear! These foreigners might be

all right at Mathematics or Economics or that sort of thing. But they couldn't write

English
—that was a fact. Still, it wasn't really surprising. English was their second language, poor kids; and he felt a little less jaundiced as he took out his pencil and

started.

An hour later he had finished the first four scripts. The candidates had tried—of course

they had. But he felt quite unjustified in awarding the sort of marks that could bring

them anywhere near the pass range. Tentatively he had written his own provisional

percentages at the top right-hand corner of each script: 27%, 34%, 35%, 19%. He

decided to finish off the last one before supper.

This was a better script. My goodness, it was! And as he read on he realized that it

was very good indeed. He put aside his pencil and read through the essay with

genuine interest, bordering on delight. Whoever the boy was, he'd written beautifully.

There were a few awkward sentences, and a sprinkling of minor errors; but Denniston

doubted whether he himself could have written a better essay under examination

conditions. He had known the same sort of thing before, though. Sometimes a

candidate would memorize a whole essay and trot it out: beautiful stuff, lifted lock,

stock and paragraph from one of the great English prose stylists; but almost invariably

in such cases, the subject matter was so wildly divorced from the strict terms of the

question set as to be completely irrelevant. But not here. Either the lad was quite

exceptionally able, or else he had been extraordinarily fortunate. That wasn't for

Denniston to decide, though; his job was to reward what was on the script. He

pencilled in 90%; and then wondered why he hadn't given it 95%, or even 99%. But

like almost all examiners, he was always frightened of using the full range of marks.

The lad would fly through, anyway. Wonderful lad! Perfunctorily Denniston looked at

the name: Dubal. It meant nothing to him at all.

In Al-jamara itself, the last of the Autumn exa1minations, crowded into just the one

week, had finished the previous afternoon, and George Bland relaxed with an iced gin

and tonic in his air-conditioned flat. It had taken him only a few weeks to regret his

move. Better paid, certainly; but only away from Oxford had he begun fully to

appreciate the advantages of his strike-ridden, bankrupt, beautiful homeland. He

missed, above all, the feeling of belonging somewhere which, however loosely, he

could think of as his home: the pub at night; the Cotswold villages with their greens

and ancient churches; the concerts, the plays, the lectures, and the general air of

learning; the oddities forever padding their faddish, feckless paths around the groves

of the Muses. He'd never imagined how much it all meant to him . . . The climate of Al-

jamara was overwhelming, intolerable, endlessly enervating; the people alien—

ostensibly hospitable, but secretly watchful and suspicious . . . How he regretted the

move now!

The news had worried him; would have worried anyone. It was for information only,

really—no more; and it had been thoughtful of the Syndicate to keep him informed.

The International Telegram had arrived on Wednesday morning: TRAGIC NEWS

STOP QUINN DEAD STOP MURDER SUSPECTED STOP WILL WRITE STOP

BARTLETT. But there had been another telegram, received only that morning; and

this time it was unsigned. He had burned it immediately, although he realized that no

one could have suspected the true import of the brief, bleak lines. Yet it had always

been a possibility, and he was prepared. He walked over to his desk and took out his

passport once more. All was in order; and tucked safely inside was his ticket on the

scheduled flight to Cairo, due to leave at noon the following day.

THERE WAS A CAR outside No 1 Pinewood Close as Frank Greenaway pulled into the

crescent; but he didn't recognize it and gave it no second thought. He could fully

understand Joyce's point of view, of course. He wasn't too keen to go back there

himself, and it wasn't right to expect her to be there on her own while he was out at

work. She'd have the baby to keep her company, but—No. He agreed with her. They

would find somewhere else, and in the meantime his parents were being very kind.

Not that he wanted to stay with them too long. Like somebody said, fish and visitors

began to smell after three days . . . They could leave most of their possessions at

Pinewood Close for a week or two, but he had to pick up a few things for Joyce (who

would be leaving the John Radcliffe the next morning), and the police had said it

would be all right.

As he got out of his car, he noticed that the streetlamp had been repaired, and the

house where he and Joyce had lived, and wherein Quinn had been found murdered,

seemed almost ordinary again. The front gate stood open, and he walked up to the

front door, selecting the correct key from his ring. The garage doors stood open,

propped back by a couple of house bricks. Frank opened the front door very quietly.

He was not a nervous man, but he felt a slight involuntary shudder as he stepped into

the darkened hallway, the two doors on his right, the stairs almost directly in front of

him. He would hurry it up a bit; he didn't much fancy staying there too long on his own.

As he put his hand on the banister he noticed the slim line of light under the kitchen

door: the police must have forgotten . . . But then he heard it, quite distinctly. Someone was in the kitchen. Someone was quietly moving around in there . . . The demon fear

laid its electrifyin1g hand upon his shoulder, and without conscious volition he found

himself a few seconds later scurrying hurriedly along the concrete drive towards his

car.

Morse heard the click of the front door, and looked out into the passageway. But no

one. He was imagining things again. He returned to the kitchen, and bent down once

more beside the back door. Yes, he
had
been right. There was no mud on the carpets in the other downstairs rooms, and they had been hoovered only an hour or so before

Quinn was due to return. But beside the back door there
were
signs of mud, and

Morse knew that someone had taken off his shoes, or her shoes, and left them beside

the doormat. And even as he had stood there his own shoes crunched upon the gritty,

dried mud with the noise of someone trampling on corn flakes.

He left the house and got into the Lancia. But then he got out again, walked back,

closed the garage doors, and finally the garden gate behind him.

Ten minutes later he drew up outside the darkened house in Walton Street, where a

City constable stood guard before the door.

'No one's tried to get in, Constable?'

'No, sir. Few sightseers always hanging around, but no one's been in.'

'Good. I'll only be ten minutes.'

Ogleby's bedroom seemed lonely and bleak. No pictures on the walls, no books on

the bedside table, no ornaments on the dressing table, no visible signs of heating. The

large double-bed monopolized the confined space, and Morse turned back the

coverlet. Two head pillows lay there, side by side, and a pair of pale-yellow pyjamas

were tucked just beneath the top sheet Morse picked up the nearer pillow, and there

he found a neatly-folded négligé—black, flimsy, almost transparent, with a label

proclaiming 'St. Michael'.

No one had yet bothered to clean up the other room, and the fire which had blazed

merrily the night before was nothing now but cold, fine ash into which some of the

detectives had thrown the dropped butts of their cigarettes. It looked almost obscene.

Morse turned his attention to the books which lined the high shelves on each side of

the fireplace. The vast majority of them were technical treatises on Ogleby's

specialisms, and Morse was interested in only one:
Medical Jurisprudence and

Toxicology
, by Glaister and Rentoul. It was an old friend. A folded sheet of paper protruded from the top, and Morse opened the book at that point: page 566. In heavy

type, a quarter of the way down the page, stood the heading 'Hydrocyanic Acid'.

At the Summertown Health Clinic, Morse was shown immediately into Dr Parker's

consulting room.

' 'Yes, Inspector, I'd looked after Mr. Ogleby for—oh, seven or eight years now. Very

sad really. Something may have turned up, but I very much doubt it. Extremely rare

blood disease—nobody knows much about it.'

'You gave him about a year, you say?'

'Eighteen months, perhaps. No longer.'

'He knew this?'

'Oh yes. He insisted on knowing everything. Anyway, it would have been useless

trying to keep it from him. Medically speaking, he was a very well-informed man. Knew

more about his illness than I did. Or the specialists at the Radcliffe, come to that.'

'Do you think he told anybody?'

'I doubt it. Might have told one or two clos1e friends, I suppose. But I knew nothing

about his private life. For all I know, he didn't have any close friends.'

'Why do you say that?'

'I don't know. He was a—a bit of a loner, I think. Bit uncommunicative.'

'Did he have much pain?'

'I don't think so. He never said so, anyway.'

'He wasn't the suicidal sort, was he?'

'I don't think so. Seemed a pretty balanced sort of chap. If he
were
going to kill himself, he would have done it simply and quickly, I should have thought. He would certainly