A Little Learning Read Online Free PDF Page A

yourself in here, lad! Stinking fish, too! Can’t see either of you coming out of it smelling too sweet!’
    The man who had so rudely shattered Paul’s bedroom visions was stocky and powerful, with a shining bald head fringed with jet-black hair and a matching black moustache beneath very dark eyes. He had delivered his series of opening observations with mounting vehemence and increasing satisfaction.
    Peach sat behind the Bursar’s huge, leather-topped desk as if he had occupied the chair for years, not minutes, and gave Paul the impression that he devoured students for breakfast each day. His black eyebrows lowered themselves over the charcoal eyes, whose pupils seemed to bore like gimlets into Paul’s inner thoughts. Peach managed the difficult feat of frowning with his forehead and smiling with the bottom half of his face.
    Paul did not find it a pleasant smile. He said, ‘We found him for you. Without Gary and me, he might have been lying there yet.’
    Peach’s smile broadened. ‘True, that is, isn’t it? We should be grateful to you, shouldn’t we, at that rate? And yet when I look at you, my lad, gratitude isn’t the first emotion that leaps into my mind.’
    Paul steadied himself, trying hard to feel wronged. He hadn’t expected this aggression, especially when his first contact with the fuzz had been that delectable female presence now sitting quietly on the Inspector’s right. He tried to summon a sense of dignity. It wasn’t a thing you needed often as a student, but it might be useful now. And he was a drama student, after all: these simulations were supposed to come easily to him.
    He repeated loftily, ‘If it wasn’t for us, Claptr — Dr Carter might still be lying undiscovered in his house.’
    Peach held his smile for a moment longer, like a headlamp on full beam. Then he rapped, ‘What time did you report the discovery of a body, lad?’
    Paul licked his lips. ‘I couldn’t be certain of the time. Time was the last thing on our minds when —’
    ‘I’ll tell you, then. Twenty to three in the morning. 02:41 hours, as we say in the police service, to be precise. Unless you’re now saying that you want to dispute that, of course. That’s the time our station sergeant recorded for the phone call from your campus night porter.’
    ‘No! I mean no, I don’t wish to dispute that. If that’s when you say our night porter rang you with the news, then that will be correct.’
    ‘So that’s when you found the corpse of your Director. Or five minutes before that, shall we say, to be strictly accurate?’
    Paul Barnes didn’t like the way this was going. He had expected to be interviewed with Gary Pilkington, so that he could act as spokesman for the two. But the first thing this man had done was to separate the two of them, treating them almost as though they had something to hide rather than as citizens doing their duty and being of assistance to the fuzz in exposing a crime for them. God knows what Gary would end up saying, if this man got at him.
    Paul said, ‘Well, yes, it must have been some time just before Percy rang you. We might have taken a few minutes to collect ourselves, before we went across to the porter’s office and got him to ring through. It was the first time either of us had seen a dead body, you know. It might have thrown us a little off balance.’
    ‘Oh, I’m sure it did! Often does, doesn’t it, DS Blake? Makes people go quite weak at the knees, sometimes.’ Peach whirled his attention back from the smiling features of Lucy Blake to the man on the other side of the big desk. ‘But the usual reaction is to scream for help. To run to the nearest phone as quickly as your little feet will carry you and yell for the police!’
    And that’s exactly what Panicky Pilkington had wanted to do, thought Paul. Rush off and spill the beans about their plan for the Perfect Crime. Land them in hot water right up to their necks — the scalding kettle of fish this man Peach