Free Parting Breath by Catherine Aird Page B

subject of a theft from Ellison’s room last night. They look very like it.’
    â€˜Someone having fun?’ asked Leeyes suspiciously. ‘They’ve got some pretty queer ideas of humour round there.’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ said Sloan, equally puzzled. ‘They were all spread out along the parapet of the fountain. Not hidden or anything. Waiting to be found, you might say.’
    â€˜Anything to do with this Moleyns business?’
    â€˜Impossible to say, sir,’ said Sloan, ‘yet.’
    â€˜â€œTwenty-six minutes,” Inspector,’ declared Bridget Hellewell positively. ‘That’s what he said to me just before he died.’
    Tea and sympathy in equal proportions, administered by the Matron, a sensible woman, had had their usual calming effect and the student was very nearly coherent by the time Detective Inspector Sloan got to Matron’s room. The Bursar had sensibly ensconced her in the sanatorium, bidding her to speak to no one but the police.
    â€˜And “twenty-six minutes” was all that he said?’ Sloan asked her now.
    â€˜All he had time to say,’ she said seriously, tears beginning to well up in her eyes again. ‘Then he … just died. Just like that,’ she whispered.
    Sloan nodded. Death could be just like that but it was still a shock.
    â€˜I didn’t realise how bad he was at first,’ said Miss Hellewell, still gulping a little. ‘Or even who he was.’
    â€˜You knew him, then?’
    â€˜Oh, yes, but’ – she paused in confusion – ‘but I didn’t realise that I knew him, if you know what I mean.’
    â€˜You didn’t recognise him?’ said Sloan, who had passed no university entrance examination in comprehension and wasn’t expected to be particularly articulate.
    â€˜Exactly.’ She latched on to the phrase eagerly. ‘I just didn’t recognise him, he looked so dreadful – not like himself at all – and the light isn’t very good round the quad, is it?’
    â€˜No, miss, it isn’t.’ In fact, one of the very first things the police were doing was to improve it but Sloan did not say so. Instead he went on, ’Tell me what you were doing there.’
    â€˜Me? I was going back to my room for some more blankets and pillows.’
    â€˜Going back from where?’
    â€˜Almstone, of course. The sit-in.’ She peered at him, her other troubles temporarily forgotten. ‘Don’t you know about that?’
    â€˜Oh, yes, miss. All about it.’
    â€˜Well, we were beginning to get ready for the night.’ She waved a hand. ‘I’d got my own stuff there, of course. I hadn’t forgotten it or anything.’
    Sloan nodded and got the message that she wouldn’t like to be thought inefficient.’
    â€˜This was extra,’ said Bridget Hellewell. ‘We, er, hadn’t remembered that Malcolm Humbert wouldn’t have anything like that with him for the night on account of his having come from … from … frommm …’
    â€˜From a distance,’ supplied Sloan kindly. He probably knew a good deal more about where Malcolm Humbert had come from than Bridget Hellewell did. What the police would like to know was where he proposed going when he left Berebury. Special Branch had expressed a passing interest, too.
    â€˜That’s right,’ said the girl, ‘so I said I’d get some blankets and another pillow for him from my room.’
    â€˜Quite,’ said Sloan, noting that – female emancipation notwithstanding – a woman’s lot continued to be a domestic one even at a demonstration.
    â€˜It was colder in Almstone than we’d thought it would be, you see, because they’d taken the windows out and turned off the heating.’ This was said without rancour: sitters-in can’t be choosers. ‘Last time, if you remember, it was