He turned in his seat to take the mug from her and grimaced at the stiffness of his joints.
“I’ve just made medical history. I’m the first person to get rigor mortis while still breathing,” he complained.
Chantek was not sympathetic.
“It serves you right for suspecting Professor Darslow. He looks such a timid little man.”
The Saint sipped the hot brown liquid and sighed at the rapid thaw it produced in his arteries.
“So did Crippen and Christie,” he pointed out.
“I still don’t believe it,” Chantek said firmly.
The Saint nodded towards the cottage as he saw its front door opening.
“Well, we shall see. It looks as though we’re going into business at last.”
Chantek followed his eyes and watched Darslow leave the cottage and get into his car.
The Saint put a hand on her shoulder and drew her down beside him below the level of the dashboard as the Austin chugged past them heading for the centre of town. The rakish lines of the Hirondel would have drawn curious attention in Piccadilly; in that staid and sleepy backwater the cream and red speedster was as much in harmony with its surroundings as a tuba in a string quartet. For once he wished he had been driving something more sedate, but as he had not used it to go to the college there was no reason why anyone seeing it should associate it with him: it could as well have belonged to some very well-heeled undergraduate. At any rate, it did not seem to affect Professor Darslow’s progress.
Cautiously Simon peeped over the rim of the steering wheel and noted that the professor had not bothered to scrape the overnight frost from the rear window. Until the sun or the car’s heater dissolved the grey crystal coating, it would not be easy for him to discover that he was being followed.
The Hirondel awoke with a roar that slipped into rhythmic purring as he flicked the stick into gear and swung out on the trail of the Austin, steering with one hand and munching a bacon sandwich held in the other.
Darslow drove at a steady forty miles an hour once they had cleared the limits of Cambridge, and the Saint remained a regular fifty yards astern. As they followed the main highway towards Saffron Walden he brought the conversation back to the fellows of St. Enoch’s.
“If you think Professor Edwin Darslow is far too meek and mild to be a murderer,” he remarked thoughtfully, “why does he have that shifty and evasive manner?”
“I think he’s terribly shy. But he’s rather sweet.”
It was not the objective observation he would have preferred, and Chantek, sensing that he was hoping for something more substantial, continued: “It doesn’t seem likely that someone who lectures in law would commit a crime.”
The Saint smiled to himself as he thought of all the pillars of propriety he had known, from Cabinet ministers and judges to a few police officers, who were always lecturing in law in one way or another but had not always been known to practise their teachings themselves. But he let the matter rest and went on to see if he could learn any more about Darslow’s colleagues.
“What do you know about Professor Rosco?” he asked.
“He’s sweet.”
“Are all professors sugar-coated as far as you’re concerned?” Simon enquired, half amused by her innocence and half exasperated by her vagueness.
“What I mean,” Chantek explained with slow deliberation, “is that Professor Darslow is sweet like an uncle, but Rosco is mmmmm sweet.”
The seductive purr made the Saint chuckle.
“I get the message. Is he one of your tutors?”
“No, bad luck. I’m reading English, and he lectures on zoology,” she said with a sigh.
Rosco was clearly a more stimulating topic of conversation, and she needed no prompting to continue.
“He’s really very clever and he has been all over the world on expeditions. Borneo, the Amazon, Africa, everywhere. When he came here last year there was a feature on him in the university magazine, full of pictures of him wading through swamps and hacking through jungles and things. Last summer he went to Kenya to study the animals in one of the national parks and almost got killed by a leopard.”
“Sounds like stirring stuff,” Simon agreed.
“He doesn’t approve of hunting, but he had to kill it with a single shot just as it sprang,” Chantek said.
The Saint, who had firsthand knowledge of the speed of a big cat going for the kill and the reflexes needed to stay alive, was duly impressed.
“He must be a good shot.”
“He’s won prizes for it. There’s a whole cabinet full of them in his study, and he helps to run the shooting club of the university too.”
“Is that so?” he murmured, and was silent as he considered what Chantek had told him.
He had thought Rosco out of place the night before because he appeared less fusty than the others, and his global wanderings certainly provided a reason why he should be more open-minded than they. The fact that he could also handle himself in a tight corner and knew his way around a firearm was of even greater interest.
“I don’t think that either Dr. Burridge or Mr. Nyall really approves of him,” Chantek was saying, and he filed his thoughts for the moment and returned to the present.
“Why not?”
She shrugged.
“Oh, I don’t know really. They’re so stuffy and always going on about the college and its traditions, and he’s not a bit like that.”
She paused, and he was about to press her for more information about the college administrators when the Austin indicated right and turned off the main highway onto a secondary road. The Saint followed, and before he could restart the conversation a signpost announced that they were coming to the village of Bucksberry.
As English villages go, it was neither historically nor visually interesting, but on that particular morning it did have a certain picturesque charm owing to the riders and their pack of yapping hounds who were gathered on the green outside the aptly named Fox Inn. With the last traces of snow still clinging to the rooftops, it could have been a scene straight from a Victorian painting.
Darslow stopped in the pub’s forecourt next to a group of locals who were watching the preparations for the morning’s hunt. Simon tucked the Hirondel behind the cover of a conveniently placed van outside the general store on the opposite side of the road and switched off the engine.
The professor clambered out of his car and began talking to two or three of the men standing on the pavement. The Saint wound down his window but was too far away to hear what was said, and to leave the Hirondel would have risked instant recognition if Darslow looked his way. The conversation appeared, however, to consist more of arm pointing and head nodding than verbal communication.
Darslow’s dress of Wellington boots, tough cord trousers, and chunky rollneck sweater beneath a heavy homespun jacket blended perfectly with the clothes of those he talked to and with the environment generally. If the rest of the day was to be spent roaming the countryside, the Saint began to fear that his Bond Street car coat and Savile Row jacket and slacks might place him at a conspicuous disadvantage.
“What’s he doing, Simon?” Chantek asked.
“I’m not sure, but by the look of it he’s being given directions. We’ll just have to wait and see where to.”
Although he could not hear Darslow’s conversation there was no difficulty in hearing the remarks of the nearer riders and hunt followers as they drained their stirrup cups and speculated on the sport ahead of them. Dominating the group and clearly in charge of it was a red-jacketed rider whose heavy roan gelding stamped impatiently on the turf. The man, like his horse, was large and powerfully built. His features were strong and florid and he controlled his mount with the sureness of an accomplished horseman.