Read Online Parting Breath by Catherine Aird - Free Book Online

just as all those years ago he had kept a close surveillance on Mallamby Ridge before the battle.
    Even Mr Basil Willacy’s much-heralded and nicely calculated arrival to encourage the students with a few well-chosen words had provoked the Head Porter no further than to a quick rolling of the eyeballs and a muttered reference to overgrown schoolboys. There had been a subaltern, he remembered, in the East Calleshires just like young Mr. Willacy – about as green as they came. At least, the subaltern had been green until the storming of Mallamby Ridge. Not after. Unfortunately Mr Willacy hadn’t met a battle yet, but in Alfred Palfreyman’s opinion it was exactly what he needed.
    Michael Challoner, noted the Head Porter, had come and gone several times in the course of the morning, but even Alfred Palfreyman had not guessed where the students’ deplorable old van had been until he saw Dr Wheatley being bundled out at the entrance and practically frog-marched into Almstone.
    Mrs Wheatley had taken the news calmly enough. ‘He may even be better there, Palfreyman, than fretting here.’
    â€˜Yes, madam, but his lunch –’
    â€˜I don’t think,’ said the Dean’s wife, ‘that missing his luncheon will do him too much harm. Or,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘his dinner.’
    â€˜No, madam.’
    â€˜But, Palfreyman …’
    â€˜Madam?’
    â€˜You’ll see that they don’t actually hurt him, won’t you?’
    â€˜I don’t think they’ll do that …’
    And as far as the Head Porter could make out they hadn’t. From time to time he had circled the building and heard nothing but speeches, and one thing that being in the Army had taught him was that speeches hurt nobody. All that he had been able to see through the empty window frames was a sea of hands and a placard which read JOIN US .
    He had seen to it, though, that no one at all had gone in or out of the Almstone administration block without his knowing. And as soon as he heard about Henry Moleyns he saw to it that not only did no one enter Almstone without his knowing but physically no one left the building at all.
    â€˜Those locks, Bert,’ he said to his assistant, ‘that we took off last night …’
    Bert opened a locker. ‘They’re over here.’
    â€˜Get ’em back on double quick, and take the keys with you.’
    â€˜Lock them in, do you mean?’
    â€˜I do,’ said the old soldier. ‘Then at least we’ll know where some of them are. That boy Moleyns had blood on his chest and it didn’t get there on its own.’
    Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan (known as Christopher Dennis to his wife and parents, and ‘Seedy’ to his friends and colleagues in the force) hadn’t got as far as examining Henry Moleyn’s chest yet. Up until now he and Detective Constable Crosby had only reached the Porter’s Lodge of Tarsus College.
    The harassed Bursar, John Hardiman, met the two policemen there, anxious that he had done all the right things.
    â€˜We haven’t let anyone near him,’ he said, ‘and Higgins here’ – he indicated the Tarsus College porter – ‘has a note of everyone who has been in and out this evening.’
    â€˜Good.’
    â€˜He closed the main gate at once.’
    â€˜Excellent,’ said Sloan. There would, he knew, be other exits and entrances – there always were – but finding them could wait awhile.
    John Hardiman cleared his throat. ‘The Chaplain is with, er, Moleyns now seeing that, er, everything is, er, all right.’
    Sloan took this euphemism at its face value and nodded.
    â€˜We haven’t touched anything, of course.’ John Hardiman might have had a file in his hand marked ‘Action to Be Taken by College Bursars on the Discovery of a Dead Body.’ Sloan knew that the Civil Service issued one on ‘Bombs and