Free Oxford Blood by Antonia Fraser

or Proffy, as your beguiling friend Miss Tiggie calls him, found the body in the middle of the night, having been aroused by the noise of what he called the infernal washing machine. Apparently he's always carrying on about the noise it made if used late at night. A few minutes later - he was very clear about it - Saffer accompanied by Tiggie came down the staircase. Of course she shouldn't have been in the college so late, but under the circumstances the professor wasn't going to complain. In any case, everybody at Oxford seems to turn a blind eye to that kind of thing these days, officially that is. Their story was that Tiggie wanted to go to the loo on the ground floor and Saffer was escorting her.'
    'A likely story?' queried Cass.
    'Not altogether unlikely, given the lack of bathrooms and loos in the former all-male colleges at Oxford. I've never seen such squalor. That's one advantage we had in all-women's colleges, bathrooms; but I digress. Not an altogether unlikely story. Look at it like this. If Saffron had really had a fight with the unfortunate Bim, thrown him or caused him to fall down the staircase, I can't believe he would have waited till he heard Proffy emerge, and then come down the stairs plus Miss T . He would either have tried to help straightaway, the decent reaction, or kept well clear of the proceedings altogether.'
    'Then there's the whole question of Miss Tiggie and the fight, isn't there?' pursued Cass, pouring Sancerre purposefully into his own glass, and after a gentle reminder into Jemima's too. (As Cass normally had excellent manners, Jemima privately put this aberration down to distracting thoughts of Tiggie Jones.) 'I may be prejudiced in her favour by her eyelashes,' went on Cass, unaware of these cross reflections, 'but supposing Bim did fall or was pushed down the staircase in Saffer's presence, would Tiggie really have let him calmly return to his own room, leaving Bim in a crumpled heap at the bottom, right at the bottom, in the launderette?'
    'I'm not so prejudiced that I can't agree to that,' Jemima was sipping away happily at her refilled glass. 'She'd have swooped down on him like some dreadful little bat and given him some terrifyingly predatory form of First Aid. However that's not the real mystery. The real mystery to me is why Bim Marcus set the washing machine in motion. The police think he was badly concussed. Crawled there, set it in motion and then died. It's still odd. But concussion - and alcohol - does odd things to you.'
    'Interested in this investigation, darling?' Cass was only half teasing. When Jemima's unofficial criminal investigations took over from her official sociological ones for Megalith, she was apt to have even less time for Cass for a month or two: Cass Brinsley, finding himself for some reason put in mind of the big black eyes and long black eyelashes of Tiggie Jones, thought he would like to have notice of an extended period of absence on Jemima's part. To give such notice was not exactly in their (unspoken) contract of a liberated relationship; any more than Cass had given Jemima notice of finding Flora Hereford, the new pupil in his Chambers, astonishingly attractive.
    Jemima however had somehow suspected it and reacted by having a devil-may-care affair with a handsome cameraman at Megalith. Well, she was not called Jemima Shore Investigator for nothing. Sometimes Cass even wondered whether some more permanent arrangement might give him yet more joy, much less heartache. In what should such an arrangement consist? There was one obvious kind of arrangement . . . Cass, wryly certain that such a thought had never crossed Jemima's own mind, put it resolutely from his own.
    'I'm interested in the investigation, yes,' Jemima, blithely unaware, cut across his thoughts. 'The nurse's story grabbed me from the start, as you know. I'm not talking about exposure here, of course: Saffron's secret is safe with me, if it is his secret. But I can't rid myself of a feeling