Seaton 03 - Crucible of Secrets Read online

  I watched her go back out to her yard and then turned the key in the lock. Sim’s room, with the shutters pulled open on a window looking out on to the thoroughfare, had better light than had the kitchen, and I did not need the tallow candle the widow had given me. I stood in the doorway a moment, looking round at the small chamber. It could have been any man’s room; any unmarried man. There was a bed with a small chest under it, a small fir table and stool, and a simple sideboard below the window. Robert’s winter cloak and the gown he kept for the Sabbath and for college ceremonies, hung from a hook on the back of the door. A pair of riding boots lay under the bed.

  I checked the chest first. It contained only two winter blankets and some clean linen.

  Above the table, fixed to the wall, was one flimsy shelf. On it were a Bible, a book of psalms, an old childhood catechism, and something I would not have expected to find there: the first of what I knew to be three parts of Luther’s translation into German of the Bible. I opened the volume: it had been printed in Frankfurt in 1595 and gifted to the college by Dr Liddel, Dr Dun’s old teacher from Helmstedt and a generous benefactor of education in our town. The work should have been locked safely behind the glass door of a press in the library along with the rest of Dr Liddel’s benefaction, not sitting openly on a shelf in a poor room rented from one of the town’s brewsters. I turned the volume over in my hand, prior to setting it down on the bed, that I might not forget to take it with me when I left. I had not known Robert even understood the German tongue.

  I went next to the sideboard. Placed on top were a pitcher and bowl, rough local work, nothing to the pieces of Delftware in my own chamber, so treasured by Sarah, gifted to us on our marriage by that same old, loving landlady of mine. Beside them a cloth and a hairbrush. The drawer beneath contained nothing I would not have expected to find there: two clean shirts, a winter jerkin, spare hose and stockings, good winter gloves of sheepskin and a hat, evidently of the same manufacture. In the cupboard below were two plates, a knife and a cup that must have been Sim’s own, an empty leather flask of the sort a man might use when travelling, and a walnut box, bound with leather straps. It was not locked, and the straps were not properly tied: the baillie’s men, I supposed, for Robert would never have been so careless. Inside was a small amount of money, Scots and English, with a few Dutch and French coins of little value. Robert’s contract with the town as the college librarian was there too, along with testimonials from his university teachers and the minister of the parish a few miles away where he had grown up. I took a few minutes to read them, but they were of the sort I had seen many times before, and told me nothing new.

  I was about to leave the room when I noticed I had knocked Robert’s boots askew when moving the chest from under the bed. It could not matter to him now, but the sight of the boots looked wrong in the well-ordered room. I lifted the left one to straighten it, and was surprised by the weight of it. I balanced it against the right and found that it was indeed heavier. I slid my hand down inside the leg of the boot and my hand closed around something hard and smooth which turned out, when I extracted it, to be a small replica of the walnut box whose contents I had already examined. This one, evidently missed by the baillie’s men, was locked. Nowhere in the room, or about the pockets of Robert Sim’s clothing, could I find a key. And then I remembered: I searched in the pocket of my breeches and drew out the library keys found near to Robert Sim’s body. Nestling amongst the larger college instruments was one very small key of finely worked brass. I slipped it in to the lock and it turned without complaint. I had not stopped to think what I might find in that box, but when I opened the lid, I felt only a surge of disappointment, for all that was there was a scrap of paper, folded. When I opened it I saw that there were only two words on it, written in Robert Sim’s own, precise hand. The words were known to me from somewhere, the knowledge of them tantalisingly close and yet I could not place them: Jachin and Boaz. I folded the slip of paper and put it in my own pocket. Then locking the box, I slipped it back into the boot and under the bed once more, not forgetting, as Robert’s landlady had instructed me, to lock the door of the dead man’s chamber as I left it.

  ‘All will be as it should be, Mr Seaton?’ was all she said to me as I passed back out into her yard.

  ‘Yes, Mistress,’ I said. ‘All is at it should be.’ I held up the bible to show her. ‘I am returning this book to the library – it is college property.’

  I was about to turn up the close leading from her small courtyard to the street when the silhouette of a man appeared at the end of it. I squinted against the sunlight to make him out. As he emerged in to the light I saw that it was Richard Middleton, a physician not many years older than myself who had settled in the burgh while I had still been in Banff. He stopped short a moment when he saw me.

  ‘Mr Seaton, I … it is … I had not thought to find you here.’ His accent still held traces of his Lanarkshire childhood, and had not been hardened by our harsher northern tongue.

  Nor I you, were the words that came to my mind, but I managed to stop myself from uttering them. Richard Middleton, tall, fair, graceful and elegantly dressed, was known to be a favourite amongst the rising families of Aberdeen; I doubted that he had many patients down here amongst the widows and lower craftsmen. ‘I am here on college business. You will have heard what happened to Robert Sim?’

  He nodded. ‘At the sermon, yesterday – the people could talk of little else. What a horror to happen, within the college walls.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it was.’

  We appeared to have reached the limit of our conversation, and Middleton did not look anxious to prolong it.

  ‘Well,’ I said, putting on my hat, ‘I will leave you to your business. Good day, Mistress. Doctor.’

  ‘Good day, Mr Seaton,’ said the widow, never for a moment taking her eyes from the physician.

  SEVEN

  The Register

  I was shown in to the principal’s private chamber a little before mid-day. He looked weary, and I guessed he had not slept well.

  ‘The sight of Robert Sim as we found him is before my eyes every time I close them. It would have been a thing bad enough, had it happened in a back street of the town, some silent and dark alleyway where men forbear to wander after dark, but somebody came deliberately within our college walls to murder him. It is an evil I do not understand.’ He looked at me and his eyes were red-rimmed. ‘But we must seek to understand it, Alexander. What have you found?’

  And so I told him of my visit to Robert’s lodgings, and what I had learned from his landlady. He looked a little surprised to hear of Sim’s recent night-time wanderings, but he had been long enough in the world not to be shocked by them.

  ‘It was a lonely life he led. It may be that he had found some comfort or companionship at the end of it. You will be discreet in your enquiries? It cannot harm him now, but he was a good man, and I would not see his name maligned.’ I assured him I would, although with regard to the change in Robert’s nocturnal habits, I did not see how I was to proceed further, discreetly or otherwise.

  ‘As to the matter of the books he was taking out of the library, only Robert himself would have been able to tell us what they were. I wonder at him having Dr Liddel’s Bible in German, though, for he did not have the language, you know.’

  ‘Perhaps he was learning it.’

  ‘Perhaps so. It is a pity he had not come to me. I lived so long in Germany that I still wake up some mornings thinking in that tongue.’ He sighed. ‘That is the register you have with you?’

  ‘That is my task for this afternoon – questioning those who were in the library yesterday.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, and looked as though he would move on, but he evidently sensed my hesitation. ‘There is something else, Alexander?’

  ‘The Trades’ Benefaction Book: I cannot find it.’

  He opened a drawer in his desk. ‘I judged it best to keep it safe, here. The trade guilds do not lik
e their business to be known, and there is much of their business in these pages.’ He opened the ledger at the Coopers’ page and showed me. ‘Each of the larger guilds has its own account, detailing its payment for the support of scholars here or in the grammar school, who have a call through kinship on the charity of their craft.’

  I knew that already. It was the only way that many an orphaned son of a craftsman had any hope of an education.

  ‘But here,’ continued the principal, drawing my attention to the fine detail of the accounts, ‘you see the contributions of individual members – the amount and frequency of their payments, whether and for how long they have fallen into arrears, the extent of any procedures begun against them. There are names on this list that might surprise you, and not all of these people would be happy for their laxity in payment – their fall in standing within their craft – to be noised abroad.’

  ‘But it is hardly cause for murder,’ I said. ‘And anyway, surely there are other ways that a craftsman’s financial affairs can be brought to public scrutiny.’

  ‘Several,’ agreed Dun. ‘All the same, take care where you keep this book.’ He closed the volume and handed it to me. ‘But now,’ he said getting up heavily from behind his desk, ‘while you look into the business of the dead, there are matters of the living I must attend to: Matthew Jack beat the boys too hard this morning, far too hard.’

  It had not taken me long to track down the three students whose names were written in the library register for Saturday, and I had them brought to me at the library from their classes, one at a time, in the afternoon.

  The first two boys had very little of interest to tell me. They had been in the library from nine in the morning until eleven. The only other reader to come in during that time had been a regent from the King’s College. He had still been there when they left. They were not sure of his name. But I was; it was there in front of me in Robert’s hand in the register. That would be a more awkward matter, and one I had put off until the evening. Robert Sim, they told me, had been no different from any other time they had been in the library: courteous, but not given to personal exchanges or pleasantries. Each one looked mightily relieved as I thanked him for his help and dismissed him back to his class.

  The final name in the register, other than my own, was that of Adam Ingram, the sleepy scholar whom I had finally released from his labours over Aristotle to go and join the others on the Links. I had expected him to enter the library immediately after the latter of the others had left it, but it was almost five minutes later that I finally heard a step on the bottom of the stairs. I did not think it was him at first, so slow was the trudge that brought him to the library door. I turned to face it as it opened and could not stop the sound of shock that escaped my throat: he was hunched slightly, holding himself awkwardly to one side, and taking slow and painful steps. He was not looking at me, but down and away to the floor like a frightened dog, and the hand that held his cloak across him had two long and angry gashes across the top and knuckles. I recovered myself quickly and hurried over to take him to the nearest seat.

  ‘Adam, for the love of God …!’ And then I realised:

  Matthew Jack. My voice fell flat. ‘Mr Jack did this to you.’

  He swallowed with difficulty and nodded.

  ‘I cannot believe Dr Dun allowed it.’

  ‘He … he did not,’ said Adam, his voice hoarse, as if he did not trust himself. ‘He was not there for the start.’ I could believe it: the principal did not like to see the boys punished, and often found a reason to absent himself from their public whippings. He swallowed again. ‘I was the fourth. By that time Mr Williamson had gone to fetch Dr Dun; he put a stop to it as soon as he saw. Too late for me and the other three, but the rest were spared it, thank God.’

  I put my hand over his but removed it instantly as he flinched under the pain of the open wounds. ‘Adam, I promise you this: if my word bears any weight with the principal, Matthew Jack will never again lift his hand to a boy in this college.’

  He nodded again, looking at me at last, with bloodshot eyes rimmed with red. He took in the room, as if adjusting to where he was, and why we were here. ‘It seems different now,’ he said at last. ‘Everything looks the same, but it is different.’

  He was right. There was the same curved wooden ceiling, the same fir beams supporting it above the rows of shelves and high glass-fronted presses that lined the walls. Windows, tall, narrow and arched as in a church, let in just what light they had always done at this time of the day, at this point in the year, but the absence of the constant presence of the librarian, the knowledge of what had happened to him, rendered the place crypt-like.

  I poured him a beaker of water and waited as, with trembling hand, he took some. ‘Now tell me about Saturday,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the time between your arrival and my own. Who else came to the library during that time? Did anything occur that struck you as strange? Did any change in manner overtake Mr Sim whilst you were here?’

  He thought back. ‘I came in shortly after midday. I had taken my dinner in the hall with the others but wanted an hour or two of quiet study before going down to the Links. I met the porter and two of the college servants coming down the stairs; they had just delivered some books that had been waiting a few days down at the docks, while the town and the college wrangled over who should pay for their transport up to the library. The servants were grumbling greatly about the weight of one of the boxes. When I got up to the library Mr Sim was bent over a large wooden chest and was lifting a letter from it. And he was smiling, at the books themselves almost. He put the letter – or list, I think it was by the look of it – down on top of an open ledger on his desk, and fetched my book for me. I thanked him, and he bent again to the box, and started to lift the books from it, one at a time. I think he had soon forgotten I was there.’

  I had seen Robert in this state many times myself, when he was at his most content. ‘And that was it? No one else came into the library between then and when I came up myself, at around one?’

  He was, like me, looking at the names on the register. ‘No,’ he began, and then, ‘but wait, yes. Malcolm Urquhart. You would have passed him on the stairs.’

  ‘I did. And a foul enough mood he seemed to be in. But Mr Sim did not write his name in the register.’

  ‘He did not stay. He had not come in to consult a book – he did not even sit down. He only wanted to speak with Mr Sim.’

  ‘And did he?’

  Adam nodded. ‘He kept his voice low – I don’t think he wanted me to hear, but I had a good idea what it was about, anyway.’ He looked a little uncomfortable.

  ‘Adam, sometime between when I last saw him alive and when I found him dead, Mr Sim was murdered down in that courtyard, a few yards away from where we now sit; he was left to crawl on the ground in his own blood. His killer then came up the steps and walked up and down this room, opened these presses, scanned these shelves. If anything you saw or heard in here might lead us to the identity of that person, you must tell me.’

  The boy looked frightened, for which I was a little sorry, but I had the feeling that soft words might not unlock his tongue. ‘It was not Malcolm Urquhart, Mr Seaton, I am sure of that. He can have a fiery temper, but he would never have done such a thing. ‘

  ‘What did he want with Mr Sim?’

  ‘He wanted him to allow him off with the final library payment. He has not the money to pay it, nor any of the other expenses of his graduation. Malcolm has only what his brother can afford to give him, which is very little – he is schoolmaster at Banchory – and some help from the laird of Crathes, who is his brother’s patron. It would have been enough to see him through his studies had Malcolm lived as other poor scholars must.’

  ‘But he has not, has he?’ I knew Malcolm Urquhart, with all his wit and dangerous charm, had run with the highborn. I had assumed that, just as I had been myself, he had been supported by the family of one of them.

  ‘He
is heavily in debt. He will not graduate if he cannot pay his fees, or persuade the college to wait for them.’

  ‘Has he gone to the principal yet? Or his regent, even? Dr Dun and Mr Williamson are good men. Malcolm Urquhart would not be the first scholar to find himself unable to pay his fees.’

  Adam shook his head. ‘He could not. He was cautioned twice last year, threatened with removal, after being found in a tavern in the Old Town, both times with a woman. He was not … wise … with what money he had, and now he will pay the price. He thought that Mr Sim might have been more lenient with him over the library dues than those who better know his past transgressions and the cause of his misfortunes.’

  I remembered the ill-humour in the boy’s mumbled response to my greeting as he had gone past me. ‘I take it Mr Sim did not turn a kindly ear to his plea?’

  ‘I do not think so, for Malcolm seemed very angry; he – he knocked something from Mr Sim’s hand before making off down the stairs.’

  ‘Then I hope he has cooled his heels by now, for I intend to talk to him next. Do you know where I might find him at the minute?’

  The apprehension in Adam’s eyes turned to genuine surprise.

  ‘Do you not know, Mr Seaton?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Malcolm Urquhart is missing; nobody has seen him since Saturday afternoon.’

  EIGHT

  The Round Tower

  I was glad to get out of the college, away from its damp corners and crumbling walls into the bright sunshine of the June afternoon. The cawing of the gulls, white pennants gliding and curling against the endless blue of the sky, mocked the men moving silently beneath them along the gloomy passageways of our citadel of learning.

  ‘Will you be back today, Mr Seaton?’ called the porter, as I went past his lodge and out onto the Broadgate.

  ‘No, Stephen, I do not think so. Why?’

  ‘Because Dr Dun has told me I am to lock the gates when the bell at the Grayfriar’s Kirk tolls six tonight, and not to open them again before six tomorrow, should even the bishop himself come banging on the doors.’ Such hours were common in the winter, but in the summer months the gates were not usually locked until ten at night. The principal was clearly in fear that the murderer of Robert Sim had not yet finished his business with the Marischal College.