‘About ten-thirty.’
‘And you stayed all night in your room?’
‘Yes.’
‘What time did you leave it in the morning?’
‘I don’t remember. After eight.’
‘You must have been tired out. A bit drunk?’
Carrier said nothing.
‘Well; that checks, doesn’t it?’ Salter said with a smile. ‘If you can think of anything that might help me, anything at all, anything Summers said or did, for example, you’ll let me know won’t you? I’ll check all this with the hotel staff, of course, but I don’t expect they will have noticed anything, will they?’
Why are you looking so frightened, Salter wondered. Probably because you went back for a last trip to the stripjoint. Or a whorehouse. Were they legal in Montreal? Salter stared hard at the professor, wishing he knew more about interrogation techniques.
Last came Pollock. The name sounded familiar to Salter, but the man was a stranger to him. He was the first one Salter had met who looked like a proper professor. Dark suit, large bow tie, and black, old-fashioned boots which he placed at right-angles to each other as he bowed (or seemed to) his visitor through the door. Smallish and dapper, he affected a curly pipe with a lid, held in his mouth with one hand. When Salter was inside, he turned, placed his boots at right-angles again and waited for Salter to speak.
He’s trying to twinkle, Salter thought, but he’s a bit young for it. About thirty-five.
Eventually, after a long puff at his pipe, Pollock went around his desk and sat down, crossing his legs sideways to the desk and propping the elbow supporting the pipe on the desk with his head facing Salter.
He’s going to say, ‘What can I do for you, Inspector?’ thought Salter.
Pollock removed the pipe, looked at it, put it back, puffed on it, removed it again, and said, ‘What can I do for you, Inspector?’
‘I need a motive, Mr Pollock, and I might find it in Summers’s background. I am told you were his oldest friend here. First, do you know of any women in his life, apart from his wife?’ Salter felt as if he was on stage, playing ‘the policeman’ to Pollock’s ‘professor’.
Pollock considered. ‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘There have been. But not for years.’
‘You are sure of that?’
‘Certain. David never had long affairs. Over the years he fell in love once or twice; I always knew, because he told me. And his wife. That’s why they didn’t last long.’
‘His wife put a stop to them?’
‘No. Just the fact that she knew.’
‘But he was not “in love” at the moment?’
‘No.’
‘You are certain?’
‘Yes.’
‘There could have been no brief fling in Montreal with one of his colleagues, perhaps?’ I don’t usually talk like this, thought Salter wonderingly.
‘No.’
‘You are certain?’
‘Yes.’
Now it was in danger of becoming one of those nightmares on stage where a bit of dialogue keeps returning to its departure point because of a wrong cue. Salter shook himself.
‘Do you mind telling me how you are so sure of yourself?’
Pollock puffed four times and delivered his line. ‘Because he only has one female colleague, Marika Tils, and he did not have a brief fling with her.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I asked her.’
‘I see. And she is to be believed, is she?’
‘Absolutely.’ Puff, pause, puff. ‘You see, Inspector,’ puff, ‘Marika and I are lovers.’ Puff, puff, puff.
Jesus Christ, thought Salter. What a world these people live in. He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. ‘These conversations are entirely confidential, Professor, and I think I can trust you. This message was found in his mailbox in the hotel.’ He read it: ‘See you later. Wait for me. Jane.’
Pollock looked confused.
Gotcha, thought Salter.
Then: ‘Ah yes,’ Pollock said. ‘I knew all about Jane, of course. But she didn’t seem to be covered by your question. Jane is Jane Homer, Dean of Women at Wollstonecraft Hall. They were just old friends.’
‘I see.’ Salter made a note. ‘Now, Professor, I wonder if you would mind telling me everything about Summers that might help me to understand him. If I can get an idea of what kind of man he was it might help a great deal.’
Pollock began a seminar on his dead friend. Salter pretended to take notes to give Pollock’s words their proper value.
‘He was, I think, a good teacher, a very fair critic, a poor scholar, and a very poor student. He worked hard at his job here—too hard, probably; he had something interesting to say about what he was teaching, but he didn’t keep up with his field and he didn’t produce anything. His friends thought he failed to apply his talents, and his enemies accused him of having a butterfly mind. I think myself he had reached the age when it is now fashionable to change careers. The symptoms were that he had become involved in a whole host of activities in the last year or two that one could only see as distractions.’
‘Like?’
‘Like squash, Inspector. He took up squash last year, and played it four or five times a week. It was the high point of his day.’
‘Was he good?’
‘No. I played him after he had been playing for a year. He was no good at all. But among the people he played down at that club of his, he was able to find keen competition.’
‘What else?’
‘Making money. Obviously, he had decided to try and make his fortune, lie was always a bit of a gambler—poker, the races—that sort of thing—he bought every lottery ticket going—and lately he was dabbling in commodities.
‘Did he break out in any other ways?’
‘You want to know if he was having a “mid-life crisis”? I think that’s the jargon. Perhaps. He didn’t start to dress like a gypsy, though, or wear a wig, or any of the other symptoms I’ve heard about. No, if I understand the mid-life crisis, it is an attempt to have a few more years of boyhood in middle age, at least that’s how it manifests itself around here. Well, perhaps that’s what he was doing, but in his case the symptoms were a sudden renewed interest in games and in taking risks.’
‘Who were his friends, Professor?’
‘Me, of course, and Marika. One or two others in the department enjoyed his company. Otherwise the people he and his wife socialized with. He didn’t have many friends, the way people use that term nowadays, but he tended to keep them.’
‘His enemies?’
‘A lot of people were wary of him. He had a bad habit of looking for the funny side of any situation, and sometimes he was witty at the expense of others. He teased people and they took offence. And teasing is a form of cruelty, isn’t it?’
‘I’m trying to understand the relationship between him and Dunkley,’ Salter said, coming to the point. ‘Can you help me there?’
‘Yes. I thought we’d come to that. You’ve heard Browne’s theory, no doubt, of a Conradian link?’