In love and murder, p.1
In Love And Murder, page 1
In Love and Murder
An Oxford Murder Mystery
Bridget Hart Book 4
M S Morris
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
M S Morris have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
msmorrisbooks.com
Published by Landmark Media, a division of Landmark Internet Ltd.
Copyright © 2020 Margarita Morris and Steve Morris
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
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Thank you for reading
1
‘By making his bargain with the devil, is Faust responsible for his own downfall?’
Dr Nathan Frost gazed out of his small, narrow window onto the college quadrangle below while his two second-year students diligently noted down the title of the essay question they would have to answer for the following week’s tutorial.
It was the standard essay he always set on Goethe’s Faust, and if considered thoroughly, went straight to the heart of the text. The question gave the academically inquisitive student a chance to explore all the major themes: the ethical responsibilities of love; the arrogance of human learning; conscience, passion, wisdom, fate. Evil.
And yet.
In thirty-odd years of teaching German literature at the University of Oxford, setting the same essay questions on the same classic texts, in an endless cycle of academic terms that had long ago started to blur into each other, Frost could count on the fingers of one hand the number of essays that had actually impressed him, and still have digits to spare.
Reluctantly, he had come to accept that most undergraduate essays were superficial and derivative. He could usually spot within the opening few paragraphs which books – if any – had been consulted for research. Students just didn’t seem to have any original ideas these days. Was the internet to blame? He let out a long sigh.
This wasn’t how he’d imagined the life of an Oxford academic, all those years ago when – so young and naïve – he’d been appointed to the post. He’d anticipated stimulating tutorials with the brightest and best young minds, hungry for knowledge and bursting with fresh ideas. He’d envisaged time to pursue his own researches into German Romanticism and The Age of Enlightenment, resulting in a bookshelf of critically acclaimed titles to his name, speaking engagements at universities around the world, and, in due course, a professorship.
Little of that had materialised. And what, precisely, had he learned in a lifetime immersed in academia? To paraphrase Faust himself in one of the opening scenes of the play, it seemed that the more one pursued knowledge, the more one came to the realisation that ignorance was ever man’s fate. No wonder Faust had been tempted by the darker arts, and by Mephistopheles’ false promises.
One of the students – was it Lizzie or Lucy? He was always getting these two muddled – cleared her throat and Frost was jolted back to the present moment, back to his room in college with its dated furniture, faded carpet and bookshelves groaning under the weight of dusty tomes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Mann, Günter Grass and other German writers and philosophers. Outside the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, most people had barely heard the names of these great thinkers, let alone read their words. Did that mean that his life’s study was irrelevant in the modern world? Had it all been for nothing?
The students were looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to say something more. Something profound and enlightening, perhaps. How young they looked, with their sincere expressions of belief in the value of education. Experience had not yet taught them that it would lead them to an endless cycle of bitter nothingness.
‘So, if you could bring your essays with you to next week’s tutorial…’
His voice trailed off as they began to gather their things together, obviously keen to be elsewhere. And why not? He wanted to say to them, ‘Be gone from here! Pack your bags and find something better to do with your lives!’
‘Thank you, Dr Frost,’ they chorused. Then they were gone, their feet echoing down the wooden stairs, their voices chattering excitedly.
From his window, he watched them crossing Front Quad on their way to the Junior Common Room. It was five o’clock on Friday afternoon, the end of the first week of Michaelmas term.
Oxford terms were notoriously short – only eight weeks long, giving them an intense, feverish quality. A febrile atmosphere was always tangible in college at the start of a new academic year. Fresh-faced young undergraduates arrived from all corners of the United Kingdom, not to mention all around the world, so keen was the university to get its hands on the lucrative fees paid by foreign students. For them, this first week was an exciting time – a whirlwind of socialising and late-night drinking, not to mention reading the first texts of the academic year and writing the first weekly essay.
From his vantage point by the upstairs window, shielded from view by dusty, velvet curtains that had once been red but had long since faded in the sun to a dusky pink, he watched some of the current undergraduates crossing the quadrangle: scientists on their way back from the labs; arts and humanities students emerging from the library carrying armfuls of books. Some of them waved to their friends or stopped to chat, perhaps making social arrangements for the evening.
He’d seen so many students come and go over the years. Most of them had morphed in his mind into an indistinguishable mass. Like all the colleges that made up the university, Wadham College had students in every faculty, which meant there were only a few studying any given subject in each year. He only had direct contact with the three or four in each year who were studying German. Those doing other subjects were strangers to him.
But there were always one or two students who, even if he couldn’t put a name to their faces, became familiar: those who drew attention to themselves by their extrovert behaviour, those who were always campaigning on behalf of some cause or other, and those who simply had a natural charisma so that, once seen, you never forgot them.
One such student stopped in the quadrangle now to speak to a couple of her friends. A final-year Psychology student, she had immediately stood out when she’d arrived at the college just over two years ago. Gina Hartman. He only knew her name because her tutor, Dr Ashley, sometimes mentioned her over a glass of port in the Senior Common Room. Not only was she reputed to be gifted academically, but she exuded a magnetic attraction with her confident personality, her long, red corkscrew curls that tumbled over her shoulders, and her full-throated laugh that echoed around the quadrangle, seeming to bring the old stones to life.
Of course, Frost had never spoken to her. Why would he? He didn’t have anything to do with Psychology students, or students in any faculty other than Medieval and Modern Languages for that matter. But she absorbed his full attention whenever she walked beneath his window.
He couldn’t hear the conversation between Gina and the other two girls, but from their body language, Frost got the impression they were expecting her to go with them somewhere. Gina looked at her watch and shook her head. She held up a finger as if to say she’d join them in an hour, then headed off to the neighbouring quad. Her friends exchanged a look, shrugged their shoulders then moved off in the direction of the porters’ lodge. Frost was left standing behind his closed window, one of life’s observers.
It was growing dark now. He checked the clock on the wall and saw that it was already nearly six o’clock. The sand was trickling through the hourglass of his life just as it had for the last fifty-odd years.
This was the time of day when his colleagues would start to gather in the Senior Common Room for pre-dinner drinks, at least those who didn’t have partners and families to go home to and instead preferred to dine in college rather than admit their sad, lonely existences to themselves. He was, regrettably, one of them, never having found a woman with whom to share his passion for the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Ordinarily he would make polite conversation with the college warden over the beef bourguignon which the chef cooked every Friday, and then afterwards retire once more to the SCR to spend the rest of his evening listening to the Classics tutor droning on about Cicero as the hourglass slowly emptied, laying waste to his life.
But tonight, for once, he actually had an engagement to go to.
He withdrew from the window and went into the small adjoining room which contained a single bed, a sink and a chest of drawers. He slept in this room if there was a late-night event in college, or whenever he couldn’t summon the energy to cycle up the hill to his small, terraced house in Headington.
His dinner jacket, dress shirt and bow tie were spread on the bed where he had placed them that morning in anticipation. A pair of smart, black shoes stood on the floor by the bedside locker.
He opened a drawer in the bedside locker and removed an object, wrapped in a black velvet bag, that he had purchased at some cost from a specialist online retailer a few days previously. He unwrapped it and held it up to examine closely, his hands betraying a faint tremor at his mounting excitement.
The full-face Venetian mask he held before him was an item of unique craftsmanship and strange beauty, exquisitely decorated around the eyes and nose with a black, cream and gold diamond pattern. As was his nature, he had investigated the subject of Venetian masks at some length before making his purchase. He had decided at last on a Bauta-style mask which would cover his whole face, thereby concealing his identity while still allowing him to talk, eat and drink, thanks to the way in which the lower section of the mask protruded to a point. He tried it on and looked at himself again in the mirror.
Now he was a different man altogether.
The mask hid not only his age, but also his weariness and disappointment with life. Under the mask he might be a much younger man, a good-looking man, a man still imbued with energy and purpose. Someone who looked forward to what the future might bring.
He removed the mask and replaced it in the velvet bag. He couldn’t walk around the college wearing it. He would be laughed at. He checked the clock once more. It was almost time for formal hall to begin. He crossed the quadrangle and joined the line of tutors processing from the Senior Common Room to the hall, where he found himself seated on high table next to the Classics tutor.
‘Well, well,’ said Dr Slater, peering at Frost’s dinner jacket and black bow tie over the silver reading glasses which were permanently perched on the end of the tutor’s bulbous nose, whether or not he had a book in front of him. ‘It looks as if you’re dressed for a night at the opera, man.’
‘Not the opera,’ Frost replied, ‘but a… a gathering.’
Dr Slater’s bushy eyebrows arched in a way that suggested he thought the idea of Frost being invited to any kind of “gathering” rather unlikely. ‘A gathering?’ he pried.
‘Just so.’
‘Well, enjoy yourself,’ said Slater begrudgingly, when it became apparent that Frost had nothing more to divulge on the matter, ‘and spare a thought for the rest of us poor souls spending our evening here.’ After dinner, the elderly tutor hobbled off in the direction of the SCR, his pace unusually quick, no doubt with the intention of spreading this latest titbit of gossip.
Damn, thought Frost. Now his evening would be the speculation of the common room. Oxford colleges were such incestuous places, you couldn’t drop a pencil without the whole college knowing about it. He wished now that he’d gone home to eat, but it was too late for that. He collected his mask from his room, then hurried through the porters’ lodge and stepped out onto the street. To his relief he saw the taxi he’d arranged pulling up outside, right on time.
He climbed into the back of the mini-cab and gave the driver the address. Then he sat back and tried to recover some of the equilibrium that had been upset by his encounter with old Slater. Now there was a man who would never escape the ivory tower of academia. He would probably die in the Bodleian Library, surrounded by the works of Virgil and Homer. Frost shuddered at the thought. To live one’s life in the world of books and never to experience anything at first-hand. Well, he was about to put that right.
‘Fancy affair you’re going to, is it?’ asked the driver, a young Indian chap. He signalled right after passing the redbrick façade of Keble College and pulled onto the Banbury Road, heading north.
‘I’m sorry, pardon?’
‘You must be going somewhere nice, all dressed up like that,’ said the driver, his eyes twinkling at Frost in the rear-view mirror.
Frost glanced nervously at the velvet bag he was clutching in his lap. ‘Just a little gathering,’ he said in a tone of voice which, he hoped, would put an end to further enquiries and speculation. He looked purposefully out of the passenger window to deflect any more questioning, and the driver seemed to take the hint, tuning the radio into Heart Oxfordshire, which was playing some pop music Frost didn’t know.
The truth was, he had very little idea about what sort of evening he was letting himself in for. The invitation had been entirely unexpected.
He’d been taking his Sunday lunch at the Bear Inn, as he’d done every week for years, and was returning from the bar with his regulation pint of bitter, when a burly fellow knocked into him in the cramped interior of the old pub, causing him to spill some of his drink.
Frost wasn’t the sort of person to cause a fuss, and would have just mopped his hand with a handkerchief and taken his glass back to his table, but the chap insisted on buying him a new pint and engaging him in conversation. Despite his usual reticence and shyness, Frost found himself drawn in by the man’s ebullient manner. He introduced himself as Nick Damon and said he was in the building industry. He asked what Frost did for a living and showed polite interest when Frost admitted, in his self-deprecating manner, that he taught German literature at the university and named his college. Mention of Frost’s specialism was usually a showstopper where conversations with members of the public were concerned, but Mr Damon – ‘Call me Nick,’ he’d said shortly into their acquaintance – turned out to be surprisingly enthusiastic. ‘I can tell you’re a man of great culture and learning,’ he’d told Frost with a friendly slap on his back. ‘You’ll have to tell me all about it.’
‘And you’re in the building trade?’ Frost enquired, wondering if he’d understood the man correctly. His experience of tradesmen was extremely limited, but he doubted that many of them had any desire to hear about German literature.
Nick smiled. ‘I run my own construction company.’
The conversation had ended with Nick inviting him to a party at his house in the country on Friday evening. So here he was, dressed up to the nines, with a mask in a velvet bag on his lap, on his way to God knows where, for he knew not what.
As the taxi headed out of Oxford, Frost couldn’t help indulging in the fantasy that he had become Faust, and was about to experience the sensual pleasures of life for the first time, and that Nick Damon was Mephistopheles, tempting him into a life of vice and seduction for his own evil ends. He smiled to himself at the prospect of meeting a beautiful young woman as Faust had done, falling in love with her and having a passionate affair. But then one didn’t want to stretch the analogy too far. Faust’s girl had come to a sticky end, poor thing, not to mention Faust himself.
Nevertheless, he was excited at the prospect of leaving behind the dry, dusty world of books and, as Nietzsche would put it, crafting his own identity through self-realisation. God was dead. Nietzsche had been all in favour of embracing the material world, and Frost intended to take the philosopher’s advice.
The taxi wound its way through the heart of the Oxfordshire countryside, through villages built from the local yellow Cotswold stone, past isolated farmsteads and endless expanses of night-blackened fields. Mr Damon’s place was certainly out of the way. Frost wondered how much longer the journey was going to take.
His mobile phone buzzed with an incoming message and he remembered that Nick had promised to send him a password for the party. Frost thought the idea faintly ridiculous, but Nick had explained that he couldn’t be too careful with security. He didn’t want to risk gate-crashers. Checking his phone now, Frost saw that the password for entry to the house was Fidelio, the name of Beethoven’s only opera.
He leaned forward, trying to tell from the car’s SatNav display how much further they still had to go. They seemed to be miles from anywhere, and the countryside had closed in around them, dark for as far as he could see. Then the car turned off the main road and down a winding single-lane track. He felt a sudden flutter of anxiety. Was Nick Damon luring him to a remote spot for, what? To kidnap him? That would be absurd. He wasn’t a wealthy man. No one would pay a ransom for his release.
