on.’
He looked up at me from under his eyebrows. ‘He had no business leaving them, and you were not the duty regent today. But that is not our concern at the moment. Does this register bear out what you know of yesterday, that there was no one else at work in the library when you were here in the afternoon?’
‘No – but wait, yes. Malcolm Urquhart, of the fourth class. He was leaving as I arrived.’
‘Hmm. Perhaps he had consulted nothing.’ He closed the book. ‘Well, I would like you to seek out each of the people named here, find out from them exactly when they were here, what and whom they saw. And heard.’
I nodded, glad that it was I and not one of the baillies who would be interviewing my friend John Innes, but troubled still, not by the fact that he had been in our library, but that in all of our conversation of the librarian and the new benefaction, he had not mentioned his visit once.
The principal ran his hand along the arm of the librarian’schair and closed his fingers over the curved end of it, the oak rubbed smooth over the years by the man who had so long sat in it. ‘Robert, Robert.’ It was the first time I had seen Patrick Dun appear dejected, as if the burden of his office had become too great. ‘How was he, when you saw him?’
I took myself back to earlier in the day. ‘I did not think he was … altogether himself, not quite. He seemed agitated, a little distracted. In fact, there was something he wished to discuss with me. Something he was going to tell me, but William came in and he changed his mind.’ And then I remembered. ‘He said he needed to talk to you first.’
Dr Dun raised an eyebrow in interest. ‘To me? Did he give you any idea of what it was about?’
I shook my head. ‘I took it to be something to do with the benefaction. There was something in it, I think, that troubled him. He did not come to see you?’
‘I had been out at Belhelvie, and was not back in the town until after eight. I am sorry to say I had very little thought of the college or the library, and went directly to Benholm’s Lodging.’ I knew the thought that was in his mind: the journey from Belhelvie to his town residence at the top of the Netherkirkgate would have taken him within a hundred yards of the college and the library close, where Robert might already have been lying dead. He rubbed his left hand across a weary face. ‘Tell me what you know about this benefaction.’
‘It was an acquisition, lately come to the college from the Low Countries – Groningen, in fact. A doctor—’
Dun interrupted me. ‘Duncan, Gerald Duncan. Of course. I had a letter from Franeker that it was on its way. Gerald was a good friend to me, many years ago, when I first went to study under Dr Liddel at Helmstedt. We corresponded for a good while after I left, but, sad to say, I never saw him again. He made for himself a very creditable career in Germany and then Friesland, but I do not know that he ever returned home.’
‘He did once, at least. William Cargill recalls being a boy and meeting him at his uncle’s house.’
The principal looked surprised, but this was not the time or place for reminiscence on old acquaintance, and he returned to the substance of the matter. ‘So, Sim was cataloguing Gerald Duncan’s benefaction.’
‘And the catalogue is gone,’ I said, ‘so we now have no way of knowing what was in it.’ Familiar as I was with this place, without the catalogue I could not have told which of the hundreds of books on open shelves or shut behind the high glass doors of presses might be from Duncan’s collection.
‘You despair too quickly, Alexander.’ To my astonishment, he moved a stool to the shelves behind Sim’s desk and, climbing on to it, reached up with his hand to what appeared to be an empty space on the second highest shelf. ‘We are fortunate that Robert Sim was a little shorter than I am myself,’ he said, as he drew from the back of the shelfa length of
Stefan Zweig, Anthea Bell