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

  “But what about the clothes all over the floor? What about the mirror?”

  “I don’t know. One of the EMTs suggested he might have had convulsions.”

  “I see. Do you think it was hypoglycemia?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  Mignon picked up a cell phone from the back of the desk and slipped it into a pocket of her shapeless shift, then extracted some papers from the open desk drawer.

  “Is that Bram’s cell phone?” I asked.

  “Right. It’ll have numbers for his nearest and dearest.” She heaved a big sigh. “I need to start making calls,” she said, her voice quavering. “This is going to be hard.”

  “What about family? Did he have any?”

  “His mother and a couple of brothers, I believe. Live somewhere up near Newcastle, I think. Bram didn’t talk much about family. His nearest and dearest are our friends in Glastonbury. We have a lot of friends there. A lovely circle of lovely people.” She paused and took a deep breath. When she spoke again, it was barely a whisper, “Lovely like Bram. Lovely like Bram.”

  “Were you and Bram . . . ?” I didn’t know how to phrase it.

  “Lovers?” Her eyes caught mine. “Sometimes. Sometimes not. I loved him though, and he loved me.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Oh, years? About five.” She rolled a few sheets of paper into a fist-size cylinder and glanced around the room. “Would you mind if I left now and went to my room alone?”

  “Will you be okay?”

  “Sure. Close the door when you leave,” she said, and then stepped out.

  It felt strange being alone in the room where a man had died such a short time ago, but I reminded myself this wasn’t a crime scene so there was no need to worry about fingerprints or whatever. But how sure was I of that? This room was needling me. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like a room in which someone had drifted off into death by hypoglycemia, but I couldn’t think why not.

  The tea tray was like the one in my room. Same electric pot, same bowl with sugar in little packets, cream in little tubs, tea bags, and a couple of long paper tubes filled with granulated coffee. Bram had placed his trashcan close to the mattress on the floor, just as I had placed mine near the head of my bed last night. I shivered at the similarity. Had he been nauseated, too? I peered into the trashcan and found three cellophane biscuit wrappers, but these said Chocolate Kreams. The ones the scout had been leaving me were Bourbon Kreams. Same logo and same brand. A couple of soggy tea bags and several empty sugar packs, a disposable razor, some used tissues, a couple of cash register receipts. I pushed the trash around with a pencil from the desk and then dropped the pencil in with the rest.

  A blood glucose meter similar to my own lay on the table near the tea tray, along with a couple of used test strips, cotton swabs, and used syringes. These last stood inside a plastic water bottle. I kept a travel-sized sharps container on the back of my sink. I had already noticed his insulin was, like mine, stored in the tiny fridge on the landing outside the loo.

  A Celtic cross hung from the gooseneck lamp on the desk. In a metal incense burner, a couple of spent sticks stuck up at odd angles. I spotted one of Bram’s huge rubber-soled sandals atop the bare wooden bed frame, the other one lay under the sink in the far corner.

  I scratched through my purse for my cell phone and snapped a few shots of the room from various angles. You never know what will come in handy.

  I paused at Mignon’s door on my way down, but decided not to knock. She said she wanted to be alone. I could check on her later. I completed my descent and headed for Smythson Hall, thinking I could slip into the back and hear the last of Claudia Moss’s paper, but I met Daphne coming out as I was going in.

  “I told Harold.”

  “How did he react?”

  “At first he said we shouldn’t tell anyone until after the day’s lectures, but I reminded him that the next lecturer is not going to be there because he’s dead. Oh, I’m sorry. That sounded crass, didn’t it?”

  “So what did he decide?”

  “Harold? He said he’d tell them what happened and say that he’d have more news at dinner tonight. Until then they were on their own, and he’d make a few suggestions for how they could spend their afternoon.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Aren’t you nice to offer?” Daphne took my arm and looked up at me. She was a good half-foot shorter than me. I’m five-five, so she was under five feet. “I’m going to see if poor Miss Beaulieu is all right, then I’ll sort out what to do next.”

  “Actually? I don’t think you should. She told me she wants to be alone in her room for a while.”

  “Oh!” Daphne seemed taken aback. We had walked through the archway and into the East Quad but weren’t, as far as I knew, headed anywhere in particular. “Okay, perhaps I’ll wait a bit. Meanwhile . . .” She didn’t seem to have an end for that sentence.

  She turned, stopped in front of the bench I had recently vacated, swiped at the seat with her bare hand, and sat. I sat down beside her. This was a pretty good vantage point, I thought, from which to watch comings or goings on Staircase Thirteen and, if a call came into the Porter’s Lodge, they could easily find us.

  My bench mate heaved a huge sigh.

  I asked, “Did you and Harold know Bram Fitzwaring before this conference?”

  Daphne’s neck muscles tensed. “No. I’ve never seen either of them before. They’re from Glastonbury.” She looked at me as if I should know what that meant. “I believe it was your mentor, wasn’t it—Dr. Roberts—who suggested Fitzwaring as a speaker?”

  Uh-oh. It might have been me who actually made the suggestion. I chose my next words carefully. “We, that is, Dr. Roberts and I, did receive email from him in the early spring. I was staying on campus at the University of Virginia while we collaborated on my dissertation topic, and I ended up handling much of his email for him. I remember corresponding with Bram Fitzwaring, but I rather thought he’d already been invited to speak by someone here.”

  “Did you know he was from Glastonbury?”

  “I don’t recall even being curious about exactly where he lived. I assumed he lived in England.”

  Daphne wrung her hands nervously, but said nothing for a minute.

  “How did your husband react when you told him Bram was dead?”

  “Harold takes things like this in stride. He said, ‘Heart attack?’ and I said, ‘They think it was low blood sugar.’” Daphne’s hands worked constantly with the folds in her dress. “Harold is an academic, Dr. Lamb. His head is always busy with things the rest of us will never understand. My sister calls him a genius.”

  “Can you call me Dotsy? I don’t have my PhD yet.”

  “All right.” But she didn’t say call me Daphne, so what was I to do? The British are more formal than we are, but I truly would have felt strange calling this woman who was about ten years younger and six inches shorter than I, Mrs. Wetmore.

  “How long have you and Dr. Wetmore been married?” I realized calling him Dr. Wetmore was laying the groundwork for further confusion.

  “Three years,” she said. “Harold and I were both what you might call late bloomers. Up until the time we met, Harold was totally immersed in his research. He’s written more than thirty papers, and published four books.” Daphne paused while I reacted appropriately to these impressive statistics. “He works closely with archaeologists in this part of the country, because his field is the early kings of Wessex, and so much of what we’re learning now comes from the archaeologists.”

  “Yes. I was a bit surprised at his choice of topic this morning. The Tudor period? But he handled it beautifully.”

  Daphne blushed. “Harold can speak on any period of British history. He’s amazing. My sister calls him Einstein. I’m continually in awe of that brain of his.”

  The porter on duty emerged from his office beside the front gate and trudged toward Staircase Thirteen. I stood
as he disappeared into its dark interior. “I bet he’s going up to Mignon’s room. I think I’ll follow him.”

  “Me too,” said Daphne, hurrying to catch up.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  The porter did go to Mignon’s room, but shook his head at Daphne and closed the door behind him. We kept climbing. When we arrived at the landing between rooms four and five, I saw the door to five, Lettie’s door, was open. Lettie sat on the side of her bed, kicking her sandals off with a flourish that sent one of them spinning across the room. Her shirt was partially unbuttoned. “You can come in, but you can’t stay,” she said. “I haven’t had a wink of sleep and I need to take a nap.”

  “Are you all right, Mrs. Osgood?” Daphne’s question was perfunctory. The sort of thing she always asked guests, expecting an affirmative answer. The good hostess. She turned toward Bram’s room, looked down the stairwell, then back at the door to room four, as if she didn’t know where to go or why. “Will you excuse me? I have a million things to do.”

  She disappeared down the stairs.

  “Who’s with the children?” I asked, knowing that Lettie’s daughter worked at the hospital most days while Lettie babysat. I stepped into Lettie’s room and closed the door behind me.

  Lettie Osgood is my oldest and dearest friend. We grew up together, but we now live a hundred miles apart so we see each other only a few times a year. One of those times, for the past several years, has been when we go on vacation together. Lettie’s husband, Ollie, is a building contractor in northern Virginia and he’s busiest in the summer so he can’t take those months off from work. Lettie and I, on the other hand, can. The courses I teach at a small college in Virginia don’t extend through summer session. Lettie is a librarian, and she also finds her summers the easiest time to leave town. We sometimes take a tour or a cruise, but this summer was different.

  I had known since March that I was to accompany Larry Roberts to Oxford for this conference. Lettie had no plans to come with me until her daughter, Lindsey, accepted an offer to work at Oxford’s highly respected Radcliffe Hospital in a doctor exchange program with her own hospital back home. Lindsey and her husband are separated, soon to be divorced, and the battle between them has been bitter the last few months. Lettie has called me nearly every night to unload her burden. She takes on her children’s troubles as if they were her own. Her main concern in this matter—and my own, too—is that the young ones be spared the ugliness. Claire, seven, and Caleb, five, obviously had to come to Oxford with Lindsey, but Taylor, the soon-to-be-ex, raised a stink, claiming she couldn’t take them out of the country. Their lawyers went toe-to-toe, and Lindsey won when her lawyer produced photos showing details of the lifestyle to which the children would be exposed if they stayed with their father.

  This presented another problem: What to do with the kids while Lindsey was working at the hospital? She knew nothing about sitters or day care here, and was reluctant to leave them with strangers. Lettie came to her rescue by offering to come over and babysit. As luck would have it, I had already booked a room at St. Ormond’s for this conference and knew that they rented vacant dorm rooms in the summer on a B&B basis as well.

  Lettie had been here for two weeks before Larry and I arrived so she was already an old hand at getting around in Oxford. She usually took a bus, sometimes a cab, between the college and Lindsey’s flat. I told her she’d be better off to lease a car, but she reminded me that, since her unfortunate entanglement with a yield sign in Scotland, she’d sworn off driving in any country that drove on the left side of the road.

  Lettie was breathing loudly as she undressed, the way she does when there’s something on her mind and she needs to talk about it. I had something I needed to talk about as well but I decided to let her unload first, as my news would probably take longer.

  Lettie answered my question about the children. “Lindsey’s taking the day off so she’s with the kids. She got home at five-thirty this morning.” My friend looked at me with her head lowered, the way she would do if she were looking over the tops of her glasses but she didn’t wear glasses.

  “Out with her new friend?”

  “Right. I spent most of the night planning what I was going to say to her, but when she finally came wandering in, sneaking in, like she didn’t think I’d hear her—I lost my nerve. I didn’t say anything.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because there’s something wrong.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, but I got the feeling that if I said anything it would be the wrong thing. You know what I mean?”

  “Are you hungry? Have you eaten today?”

  “I’ve done nothing but eat. Nervous snacking. I ate a whole box of yogurt-covered pretzels. What I need is sleep.”

  “I’ll let you sleep, but first I have to tell you what happened to the man in room four.”

  “The big man with the long braid?”

  “You saw him?”

  “He and this woman—girl—heavy,” Lettie said, puffing her cheeks out, “were carrying their bags in yesterday as I was leaving. We nodded to each other, but I didn’t really meet them.”

  “What was your first impression?”

  “They looked like escapees from Woodstock, nineteen sixty-nine.”

  I laughed, and then told her my story. Meanwhile Lettie donned her nightshirt, smeared green goo all over her face, crawled between the covers of her little bed, and propped her pillow behind her head. At first she was aiming to get rid of me, but became engrossed as I gabbed on, telling her about the state of Bram’s room and about my misgivings. As I wrapped up my story, Lettie was sitting, cross-legged and wide-eyed, with the pillow scrunched in her lap.

  “But why, Dotsy? Why do you think there’s something else to it?”

  “Why do you think there’s something wrong with Lindsey?”

  “Okay, okay. But hypoglycemia sounds reasonable, considering how you say he was acting last night.”

  “I agree. But the timing’s wrong and there’s something else. Something I saw. Maybe something someone—Daphne or Mi-gnon—said.”

  “Woman’s intuition?”

  “I don’t believe in woman’s intuition. You know that.”

  “Do you know about Daphne Wetmore’s sister?” Lettie said in an abrupt change of subject.

  “Her sister? I’ve heard her mention a sister, but no. What about her?”

  “She’s like royalty or something. She’s married to a lord, so that makes her a lady.”

  “That’s not royalty. That’s nobility. Royalty means you’re related to the queen.”

  “Whatever. Lindsey was talking about her. Daphne’s sister, Lady Whoever.” Lettie put her hand up alongside her mouth as if she were whispering a secret to me but she wasn’t whispering. “Lindsey told me she was always in the news. There was a huge horse-racing scandal. She owns horses. And her husband, the lord, bought an island in the Caribbean somewhere, but there’s a problem with his taxes and the government and all. And some girl who was staying with him on the island drowned. And there are those who say it wasn’t an accident.”

  “Hold on! What sort of horse-racing scandal?”

  “Lindsey didn’t say.”

  “What sort of tax problem?”

  She shrugged.

  “Who was this girl? Was she like a mistress or just a friend?”

  “I’m just telling you what Lindsey told me. She didn’t go into any details.”

  This sounded fascinating, but Lettie needed to sleep and I needed to see how my fellow conferees were reacting to the death of their afternoon speaker.

  People were milling around the West Quad lawn when I got there. Claudia’s speech was over and tea was being served. Heads turned as I stepped through the archway, and several hands caught my arms as I walked across the grass searching for Claudia. I wanted to tell her I was sorry I’d missed her talk. Apparently it was obvious I’d come from the area where, they’d just learne
d, Bram Fitzwaring had died.

  “What happened?”

  “Were you there?”

  “Who called the ambulance?”

  “Is the, er, the ambulance still here?”

  I answered all their questions because there seemed no reason to be obscure about it. Nothing was amiss, at least as far as I or anyone else actually knew. Bram, an overweight diabetic, had died in his sleep. Everyone’s assumption, including my own, was that there would be an autopsy and we might or might not learn what it revealed. How sad it was that a human being’s death so often elicited a few gasps of surprise, a few kind but perfunctory remarks like, I feel so bad for his family and he’s in a better place now, followed quickly by a return to business as usual. In this case business as usual was, “Milk please. No sugar.”

  I couldn’t find Claudia Moss but I did find Larry Roberts, who grabbed my elbow and pinched it between his thumb and middle finger. He pulled me away from the knot of people in front of the tea table. His hand on my arm felt shaky.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  I pulled his hand off my elbow with my free hand. “Mignon—his companion, you know—found him. She went to his room because it was noon and she thought he was still asleep, but he wasn’t. He was dead.” I repeated the whole story much as I had told it to Lettie.

  “Bummer. Are they sure it was low blood sugar? Did he take insulin?”

  “Yes. In fact, I saw his used syringes in an old plastic water bottle.”

  “Have you had . . . ? Of course, you haven’t had tea yet.” He glanced down at my empty hands. “Hey. I’d rather have tea at the Randolph. Come with me. We can talk.”

  Larry, rather than staying in one of the college rooms, was staying at the swanky Randolph Hotel, across the street from the Ashmolean Museum. I’d walked past the hotel several times and longed to see what it looked like inside but had been afraid to go in without a legitimate reason. I’d heard they had a Morse Bar, themed on the Inspector Morse TV shows starring the late, great, actor, John Thaw. I’d also been told the author, Colin Dexter, still lived in Oxford. The series had been filmed in Oxford. The Randolph was within easy walking distance, so I told Larry I’d go with him.