Free Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) by Maria Hudgins Page A

regular intervals. They get a battery of tests and a fresh supply of medicine, all administered by my assistants. Normally I don’t see them. Each has a coded number and my assistants have access to the database containing the names and codes. The test subjects get the real medication and the members of the control group get a placebo.”
    So far Bunsen hadn’t said anything I didn’t understand, but I hoped it wouldn’t get any deeper than this. “So you don’t know if Fitzwaring was in your study or not?”
    “Correct. It’s a double-blind study. They don’t know if they’re getting the real medicine or not and I don’t know either. My assistants match the patient’s number with a number on a bottle of pills.
    “I have actually examined and interviewed each of the subjects at the beginning of the study, but since then, I haven’t seen most of them. We’re talking about a hundred people, nearly a year ago, and I can’t recall what they all looked like. I’m not especially good with faces anyway. As for their names, we have them in our files out at the hospital, but I don’t personally have them.”
    “Oh, look at the time!” I said. It was seven o’clock exactly. I wasn’t sure what would happen to late arrivals at dinner. I imagined walking up and down, looking for my name on a place card while everyone else was seated and muttering disapprovingly under their breaths.
    As we raced across the lawn to the dining hall, I asked Keith, “Did you, by any chance, have an upset tummy last night after dinner? Several people, including me, did.”
    “Upset tummy?” Keith grinned at the expression. “No, I didn’t, but I have a cast-iron tummy.”
    We had no place cards this night so we could sit wherever we wanted. Keith and I, being among the last to arrive, took seats near the entrance on the far end of the room from the High Table. Mignon Beaulieu walked in as Harold Wetmore was calling for the invocation. Fortunately I had an empty seat beside me and I waved her over, saving her the embarrassment of searching for one.
    She wore the same midnight blue, crushed-velvet dress she’d worn the night before. Her auburn hair was piled up in a twist and held by a Celtic knot clasp like one I’d seen in the jewelry case at The Green Man. She took her seat quietly, but every head in the room turned toward her anyway. Whispers. I couldn’t hear what anyone said but obviously they were saying, “That’s the woman. The one who was with Mr. Fitzwaring.”
    I clasped her pudgy hand under the table.
    This was awkward. The handclasp was automatic. Nothing more than I would do to console anyone. But that laugh I’d heard earlier still rang in my head. Was she sad or glad Bram was dead?
    The starter was a cold sweet potato soup. Wine, which had been free at last night’s dinner, was not free tonight. I ordered a bottle of Chablis and shared with Mignon and Keith. The conversation was stilted and going nowhere so I introduced the topic of Keith’s research, partly to loosen things up and partly to see Mignon’s reactions.
    “Keith has been telling me about his study of a new—what should I call it—a new medication for diabetics. It sounds so promising, I wish I could get in on it, but I can’t because it’s already started and plus, I live in America.”
    “Is it the one Bram was in?” Mignon’s Welsh accent made questions and statements sound, to my ear, the same. But this answered the question on my mind.
    “Mrs. Lamb asked me the same question,” Keith said, “and I had to tell her I don’t really know.” He explained how the study was organized.
    “It sounds like the same one,” Mignon said. “Bram took a bus to Oxford once every six weeks. They asked him some questions about how he was feeling, checked him out, and gave him a bottle of pills.”
    “Small world,” I said, and turned to Keith. “How many people do you have in your study?” I already knew, but I asked for Mignon’s