Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) Read online

  “Friends? Make that ‘friend,’ Larry. Only one left.”

  Larry couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. He pulled at his ear with his left hand and I noticed his wedding ring was missing.

  “Speaking of Glastonbury,” I said, “I may go there myself for a day or so when the conference is over. It’s not far.”

  “Why the hell would you go there?” Larry’s face darkened. “There’s nothing in Glastonbury but fruitcakes and magic shops.”

  “I’d like to see the place, okay? I’ll have a free day before we go home.”

  Harold mumbled, as if to remind us to lower our voices, “Our library has a lot of old books, but remember, they weren’t subjected to peer review. In today’s market, none of them would pass.”

  “And some were complete fiction,” Larry added.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  I was happy to see fifteen people show up, filling almost all of the chairs in the little room they’d assigned me. Claudia and Robin’s presentation yesterday had not drawn so many. I had already started my spiel when Larry Roberts walked in. My stomach lurched.

  I emphasized the pageantry, citing examples of courtly love and gallantry in Shakespeare’s stories. These were uncontroversial topics, even for Larry, and I felt I was in safe territory as long as I stuck to them. I’d totally forgotten that, in Oxford, I might come face to face with a die-hard Oxfordian—one who believes that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the author of the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare.

  A prune-faced man interrupted me defiantly. “And you believe the son of a glove maker from Stratford donned the soul of a nobleman and wrote all this as easily as he could have donned one of his old man’s gloves?”

  While considering my response, I gave him one of the looks I used on my boys when they were growing up and acting like asses. “I’m continually amazed that anyone, from any social background, could write so many beautiful works, but someone obviously did.”

  I got smiles and a few winks from most of my other listeners. Having spent half my allotted time in safe territory, I had to venture out. After all, my topic was “Shakespeare’s Historical Sources and References to Arthurian Legend in his Plays.” So far, I hadn’t mentioned Arthur. I killed a few seconds by pouring myself a glass of lukewarm water from the pitcher someone had brought me.

  “Shakespeare relied heavily on the work of Holinshed, as most of you know,” I said, hoping no one would dispute that well-known fact. “But remember, Holinshed was also influenced by earlier writers. He didn’t write centuries of history from memory.” That got a laugh. I felt emboldened. “Holinshed read Malory, William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and even Gildas. Gildas was a near-contemporary of the events attributed to Arthur.” I paused for breath. “So the story of King Arthur, be it history or myth, was firmly fixed in the brain of Raphael Holinshed.”

  Larry Roberts stopped me there. “You’re suggesting the possibility Arthur is a myth and the possibility he’s history are equally likely?”

  “That isn’t what I said.”

  “‘Be it history or myth?’ isn’t that what you said? Or is there a strange echo in here?”

  “You’re twisting my meaning!”

  “I’m listening, but what I’m hearing sounds like it came straight from the grey-haired hippies of Glastonbury.”

  By this time, everyone in the room was glaring at Larry. He looked around quickly, then stood and headed for the door.

  Someone said, “Of all the nerve!” loudly enough so that Larry, now hurrying across the threshold, must have heard it too.

  He turned and looked at me, his face nearly purple, and said, “And you can forget about that PhD.”

  At least I thought that was what he said.

  I went straight back to my room and paced, talking to myself. I’m sure my blood pressure was sky-high. I checked my iPad and found an email from my son Brian, informing me that business (he has a John Deere farm equipment franchise) was booming, his wife and children were well, but his father, my ex-husband, Chet, was drinking himself into oblivion almost every night now. Too bad, I thought. All in all, his message cheered me up a bit. I decided I couldn’t stay in my room and brood. I needed to go for a walk.

  I plodded down the High Street, trying not to think about Larry. The shops along both sides were a hodgepodge of the ancient and the new. An open door, its wood frame painted so many times old nicks and dings were nearly obliterated, spilled hip-hop music onto the sidewalk. I love the mixture you can only find in a college town.

  My feet turned in at the Covered Market, a collection of some fifty stores spanning the middle of the block between Market Street and the High. This was the first time I’d been inside. The smell of a leather shop gave way to the sweet aroma of pastries, then fruits, cheeses, meats, and fish. The fish markets were wisely placed near the wide open north exit.

  I stopped in front of the fish market and studied the display of mussels, clams, and shrimp on a long bed of ice. That reminded me of the canapés I blamed for the stomachache I and others had suffered. Was it because of the seafood? I only remembered eating one bacon-wrapped mussel, but I may have had more. I still couldn’t get the picture of Bram’s trashcan out of my mind. Placed at one corner of the mattress he’d put on the floor, it was so eerily like the one I’d pulled over to the head of my bed.

  I thought about saxitoxin and the oysters in the pan at St. Giles’s lab. He’d told me the oysters were sucking up the poisonous soup, concentrating the toxin in their tissues. I’d read about how animals high on the food chain could get toxic doses of chemicals that don’t harm the animals they eat, because predators don’t eat just one, and over time the toxin builds up. Like the bald eagles and DDT. They got such a big dose, their eggshells wouldn’t harden and the chicks died before they hatched.

  In this case it would be people rather than eagles at the top of the food chain. The algae in the water would produce the toxin in tiny amounts. Shellfish, all filter-feeders, get their food by pumping huge amounts of water in one siphon and out the other, removing the algae in the process. The toxins, useless as food, remain behind and build up until the tissues of the oyster, mussel, or whatever has a much higher concentration than the algae had. Then a human comes along and eats a couple dozen of these. That can be a fatal overdose.

  Had the mussels they served at the party been contaminated with saxitoxin? Were the algae that produce saxitoxin found in the waters around the British Isles? Might someone have deliberately tainted the shellfish? Again, I found that hard to believe. No one at the party, except possibly Bram, got all that sick. If the object was to inconvenience us, they had succeeded on a small scale, but if it was murder, who was the target? If the target was Bram Fitzwaring, how would the killer know Bram alone would die?

  Bram was about six feet four, I guessed, and weighed about 250 pounds. It would have taken a lot of bad mussels to kill him.

  What if someone knew Bram was inordinately fond of mussels and prone to eat huge numbers of them when available? That someone would’ve had to have access to the canapé trays before they were brought out. Someone in the kitchen, a cook, a server, or—Daphne Wetmore, who had supervised every detail of the event. Motive? None that I knew of. The only person likely to have known Bram’s favorite foods was Mignon. She could possibly have intercepted the food trays somewhere along their route from the kitchen to the Master’s Lodge, but again, where’s the motive? Perhaps it was simply that the mussels were tainted, collected, and sold without anyone in the supply chain knowing they weren’t safe. I had no idea whether shellfish were subjected to any sort of inspection in the British Isles, or indeed, if saxitoxin could be detected in a batch headed for market. St. Giles Bell mentioned collecting from the cold waters of the North Sea. But was he collecting oysters, saxitoxin, or the algae that produced saxitoxin? I’d read about people dying from shellfish poisoning, but I thought it only happened in the Gulf of Mexico and US coastal wat
ers.

  Might that be because I live in the United States and I’m hearing mainly US news?

  I’d been staring at the mussels nestled in their bed of ice, so, naturally, the fishmonger asked if he could help me. “Mussels are beautiful, no? Only two quid per kilo!” He had an Indian or Pakistani accent.

  “Beautiful,” I agreed. “Where do these come from?”

  “From the distributor,” he said, then grinned when he realized that wasn’t what I meant. “One minute.” He stepped back from the display and called to a man who was filleting a flatfish. Turning back to me he said, “Sussex.”

  “Have you had any complaints about people getting sick from eating these?”

  “Sick? No!” He looked confused and a bit insulted.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest . . . I mean, the other night at St. Ormond’s we had mussels at our cocktail party and several people got sick.”

  “They did not come from us, did they?”

  “I don’t know where they were bought, or who bought them.”

  The blood-spattered man from the worktable, still wielding a filet knife, stepped forward. “You’d best find out where they came from before you start accusing us of selling bad mussels!”

  I made hasty apologies and dashed out into Market Street. This wasn’t my day. I felt as if I could do with a Kevlar vest. Turning left onto busy Cornmarket Street, the town’s retail hub, I kept walking until Cornmarket turned into St. Aldate’s and ahead I saw the great Tom Tower of Christ Church, the bell tower named for Thomas à Becket and stubbornly set to ring nine o’clock at five after nine, because Oxford is, in fact, five minutes west of Greenwich, which is officially zero degrees longitude. Only in Oxford.

  I kept walking south toward the river Thames—locals called it the Isis—trying to fill my mind with the sights around me and forget my horrible afternoon, but my mind stubbornly returned to Larry. What didn’t make sense was how angry he got! I’d never seen him so upset. I’d rarely seen anyone that upset over anything. Okay, so he didn’t go for the idea that King Arthur may have been a real man. Okay, so there isn’t any actual proof he ever existed. I understand that historians get upset when non-historians start making things up and proposing them as though they really happened.

  But Larry’s anger was out of proportion. Off the charts. Why? I remembered Claudia Moss telling me about the curious exchange she’d heard between Larry and Harold. Something like, “Got your loins girded?” and “Frankly, I’d rather be elsewhere.” This was just prior to Claudia’s presentation and an hour or two before Bram was scheduled to take the stage. It was also about the same time Mignon walked into Bram’s room and found his body. Bram was already dead and had been so for hours.

  I knew, from talking to John Fish the ghost tour guide, that Harold Wetmore was an active opponent of all things paranormal. He’d tried to force city council to do away with the ghost tours. The Arthur legend was mixed up with the paranormal—Celtic gods, crop circles, veils between worlds, all that sort of thing—and I could safely assume Harold would have taken a dim view of whatever Bram Fitzwaring had planned to tell us in his afternoon lecture. But active opposition does not call for murder. I’ve seen historians argue for hours as if they might come to blows, then slap each other on the back and order another drink.

  All in all, Larry’s reaction to my harmless statement at my breakout session, and to my reading up on the Arthur links in the Fellows Library, made no sense.

  And if Bram had indeed been murdered, I had to know by whom and I had to know why. But was he? No one but me seemed to have any doubt that his death was natural. No one including the medical examiner, who knew a lot more about such things than I. It was time for me to rethink the whole thing. I had not one scrap of evidence.

  Turning back, I walked uphill and passed Alice’s Shop, a store that found its way into Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass as the Old Sheep Shop. Now it specialized, not in Alice’s barley sugar, but in children’s clothing and Alice memorabilia. A little way past Alice’s Shop, I spotted John Fish stepping out of a bookstore and already dressed in top hat and black coat for his evening ghost tour. I called to him.

  John waited on the sidewalk for me to catch up. “How are things at St. Ormond’s? Grey Lady still afoot?” His yellow-toothed grin tightened at the corners and quickly faded, perhaps because he was self-conscious about the condition of his teeth.

  “I saw her again the other night, and I chased her, but she got clean away.”

  He shot me a look of alarm. “Again? But that’s not possible!”

  “Why not?”

  His head lowered, he didn’t answer me.

  “Oh, I get it. You did know about it. You were behind it!”

  He still didn’t answer but I caught a glimpse of his face beneath the brim of his black hat and saw a mixture of indecision and chagrin. I had almost given up waiting for a response, when he said, “It was supposed to be a joke. Daphne Wetmore and I thought it up. We thought it would be a good conversation-starter on the first night of your conference.”

  “You certainly succeeded. The talk at dinner was of nothing else.”

  “Aye, that’s what you told me. I haven’t seen Daphne though, to find out what she thought of it. The Grey Lady, as your group called her, was played by Bumps McAlister. She’s the wife of the bloke who owns The Green Man on the High.”

  “I know The Green Man. I was in there the other day.” I told him, as briefly as I could, the connections between Mignon and Bram and the proprietors of The Green Man. “My friend Mignon, in fact, had dinner with them last night.”

  “Aye. Oxford’s a small town when you come right down to it.”

  “But why did the Grey Lady come back again Saturday night?”

  “She didn’t.”

  “She did. I chased her across the quad and nearly broke my ankle.”

  “I can’t explain that.”

  “And she disappeared more or less into thin air. I thought I’d catch her at the back gate. It was the only place she could have possibly gone, but when I got there the place was empty and the door was locked.” I stole another glance at John’s face and realized I was providing him with fodder for a brand-new ghost story. “I gather that you and Harold Wetmore aren’t the best of friends, but apparently you and Daphne are. Am I right?”

  “She’s a good woman,” John said. “Does everything she can to help St. Ormond’s, too. Harold is nothin’ but an arrogant old ass. Gets by on his reputation.”

  “He certainly has a great reputation as a historian. My major professor, the man I came over here with, practically genuflects every time he sees him.”

  “Daphne, too. Don’t ever let her hear a bad word about her Harold. I made that mistake once and she nearly took my head off. Hero worship, if you ask me. Makes me sick.”

  We’d reached Carfax corner where I vaguely intended to turn right, but when John kept walking straight ahead, up Cornmarket Street, I followed him. “Did you hear about the man at St. Ormond’s who died? It was Bram Fitzwaring, the man I was just telling you about. He was staying on the same staircase as I am.”

  John said he hadn’t heard about it, then asked, “You say he knew Simon McAlister?”

  “Is that the shopowner’s name? Yes. Mignon and Bram were from Glastonbury but they’re all connected, apparently, by this New Age thing. Bram was scheduled to deliver a paper at our conference and they both had rooms on Staircase Thirteen. Mignon is still here.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “Hypoglycemia, they say. He had diabetes, like me.” I leaped out of the path of a bicycle that came my way from the right as I stepped off the curb. “But several of us got sick that night, and I’ve wondered if it might not have been caused by the food they served at the cocktail party that evening. Since Bram was diabetic, if he got sick and threw up, that could bring on the hypoglycemia.”

  John nodded, somewhat disinterested, I thought. As if his mind had wandered off on
another track.

  “I suspect the mussels,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Yesterday I went out to the Radcliffe Hospital to see the daughter of a friend of mine. She took me through their research wing and I met a man who was working with a poison found in shellfish. It just made me wonder.”

  “That’s what happens when you get one thing on your mind. You start wondering about everything.”

  Technically, that made no sense at all, but oddly enough, I knew what he meant. “He had a pan full of oysters sitting in a poisonous bath. He told me he’s using it for his work on nervous disorders.” I thought about him again. So charming. Too charming? I don’t trust men with too much charm. “Odd name, he had.” I searched my mind to remember it. “St. Giles was his first name. St. Giles Bell.”

  John Fish stopped. He lifted his stove-pipe hat and ran his hand through his greasy hair. “Well, now! That’s a name I do recognize. From the papers.”

  “Oh?”

  In his best funereal tones, he said, “His wife died last year. Fell down the stairs and broke her neck.” We had reached another intersection. John paused again and his body language told me his destination lay somewhere down Beaumont Street. If I intended to return to St. Ormond’s for dinner, I needed to walk in the opposite direction, so I stopped, too.

  “And you remember this from the papers? You mean the obituaries?”

  “No, it was on the front pages for a while, then the back pages. Nothin’ ever came of it.” He took my elbow in his hand and looked at me through knitted brows. “But there were those as said it weren’t no accident.”

  “You mean she was pushed?”

  “Nothin’ ever came of it so who knows?” He shrugged, turned, and headed down Beaumont Street leaving me with a bunch of questions still forming in my mind.

  CHAPTER TWELVE