We worked steadily through the lists and then Dame Beatrice, handing them back, remarked, ‘You appear to get a number of foreign students here.’
‘Most places of higher education do. Here we get West Indians, Pakistanis, students from other parts of India, occasionally one or two from European countries —’
‘And, if his name is anything to go by, one from Spain.’
‘Spain?’ said the warden. Dame Beatrice handed him one of the documents. ‘Oh, yes, a man named Grantoro. Why did you single out that name? Simply because it is Spanish?’
‘I have never met it before.’ Both the warden and I saw this as an evasive answer and Dame Beatrice realised this and cackled. ‘ “The proper study of mankind is man”,’ she said, ‘and the study of man includes the language he uses to disguise (we are told) his thoughts.’
I glanced at her and light dawned on me. ‘Toro,’ I said, ‘means bull. Grantoro, big bull.’
‘Exactly,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I wonder, Mr Terrance, whether we might send for your caretaker?’
Puzzled but acquiescent, the warden touched the bell and sent a servant to find Bull. As soon as the old man saw Dame Beatrice, he stiffened and a look of obstinacy came into his face, but it was to me he spoke. ‘I’ve give it up,’ he said. ‘The young lady don’t want to do me life story. She ain’t been nowhere near me all this week.’
‘No. She is away from home,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Bull, why did you tell her (and Mr Melrose here) all those lies about your former profession?’
‘They wasn’t lies. I was assistant to the public executioner.’
‘Yes, in a Spanish province, not in England. You were not a hangman, but a garrotter. Your son was so bitterly ashamed of your public image that he did not register at the polytechnic in your name, but translated it to Grantoro.’
‘That wasn’t nothing to do with my job. I’d give it up. It was because he didn’t care to be known as the caretaker’s son.’
‘Why didn’t you admit you knew Carbridge?’ asked the warden. ‘You recognised the body as soon as you saw it, didn’t you? Carbridge and your son were fellow students here, although Grantoro was a third-year and Carbridge a first-year. This morning, I received a letter from my predecessor, who has only just heard about the murder. He says that, several years ago, Carbridge also changed his name. He is down in the lists simply as “Bridge” — that’s why no one noticed before.’
‘And at some time during their student days,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘Bridge found out that Todd, then calling himself Grantoro, was your son and he also found out what your former profession had been. My granddaughter found that out, too, and decided that she wanted no more to do with your autobiography. Mere squeamishness, of course, but most girls are squeamish when it comes to putting an iron collar round a criminal’s neck and tightening it until it throttles him. A drop at the end of a rope seems infinitely preferable to women if a criminal has to be executed.’
Bull said sullenly that the men he had dealt with were murderers, and that they deserved what they got. He added that he had always wanted to have his son educated in England.
‘I wanted as he should better himself,’ he said. ‘I wanted as he should have chances I did not have. I was twenty-four years of age when the Spanish Civil War started. I was married to an English girl and we had the one kid. She, the wife, didn’t like my job, either, so, what with the war and everything, I quit and we all come back here to live. I never let on what my job had been, thinking it would go against me, but I got work and built meself up a character for being reliable, which, as Mr Terrance will testify, I am, and when the job here was going they give it to me and I been here ever since, which I hope, if there’s going to be trouble, as Mr Terrance, sir, you will bear witness as I have always give satisfaction.’
The warden may or may not have intended to answer this appeal, but just then the telephone rang. Bingley was on the line.
‘I’ll take it in my study,’ said the warden. He left us and we were aware of a seriously alarmed Bull.
‘What’s he want with the warden?’ he asked in anxious tones.
‘Perhaps we shall know when the warden comes back,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Was it your idea or did my granddaughter herself decide not to attempt your autobiography?’
‘Reckon you knows the answer to that as well as I does, or better.’
‘I think your life was threatened if you published. As for Sally, I thought she might be in some danger, too, so I took steps to remove her from your orbit.’
‘I wouldn’t have harmed a hair of her head. We didn’t reckon we had enough of me memoirs to make into a book, that’s all.’
The warden was gone for what seemed a very long time. Bull became restless and, it was obvious, more and more uneasy.
‘I better be going,’ he said.
‘Not until the warden comes back,’ said Dame Beatrice. Such was the force of her personality that Bull re-seated himself in the chair from which he had risen and, muttering something about ‘suit yourself’, he leaned back, closed his eyes and opened them again only when the warden, Bingley and Bingley’s sergeant came in.
‘Well, Bull,’ said the detective-inspector, ‘Dame Beatrice has told me an interesting little story. I should like to know what you think of it. Of course I could tell it to you down at the station, but I daresay the warden and Mr Melrose would like to hear it, so I’ll tell it here and now. It concerns an honest man and a devoted father.’
‘You got nothing on me or on my boy.’
‘In other words, you don’t want to hear my story. Well, I don’t blame you. But why on earth, man, when you found the body in the loo passage, did you substitute another knife for the one you found in the wound? And I can tell you, before you answer me, that you may think yourself lucky that, owing to Dame Beatrice’s good offices on your behalf, I am not going to hold you as an accessory after the fact of murder. I ought to, but, as she points out, there are extenuating circumstances attaching to this case.’
‘I suppose,’ said Dame Beatrice, addressing Bull, ‘you thought you were helping your son by trying to throw suspicion on those two young people who were preparing the food for the party.’
‘I swear I never thought of nothink of that sort. All I wanted was to — was to — I don’t know how to put it.’
‘Create a diversion? Provide a red herring?’
‘Sommat o’ that sort, I’s’pose, but, honest, I never knowed as the knife belonged to the young lady student. I thought as how it were one of our own cook’s knives and I knowed she couldn’t be blamed, being on ’er ’olidays at the time and the rest o’ the kitchen staff likewise. There was plenty of other students millin’ around. I didn’t think the police would be able to pin the knife on anyone special, honest I never!’
‘I suppose it was you who buried the dagger we found in the garden in the square,’ said Bingley. ‘I really ought to run you in. You had a key to that garden—’
‘Who says I has?’
‘— and, of course, you found the body long before Mr Melrose stumbled upon it. That is when you removed the electric lightbulb by standing on a kitchen chair. You recognised the antique knife as the one your son had shown you, the present he was given by a woman member of the tour party.’
‘I still don’t know what you’re b— well talking about. Look, I got to make a phone call, so you’ll ’ave to excuse me.’