Murder In School Read Online Free PDF Page A

Brownies.’
    ‘Ah – excellent, lad.  Glad to
hear that.  Whereabouts?’
    ‘Just below Little Crossthwaite, where
the Derwent flows into Bass Lake.’
    ‘I know it.  Beautiful spot.’
    ‘Come with me some time.’
    ‘That would be an honour – though
the hours you keep send a shiver down my spine.’
    Skelgill grins.  ‘A policeman’s
lot.’
    ‘On which note – there must be
something I can do: for you to have run me to ground in my lair here.’
    ‘I did want to pick your brains. 
It’s about Oakthwaite School.’
    ‘Be my guest.’
    The Professor indicates a chair opposite,
but as he does so the shadow of the librarian darkens the doorway beyond, her posture
communicating a hint of disapproval.
    ‘We’re making too much racket,
Daniel.  Shall we retreat for a cappuccino?  Let me just tidy this
lot up.  I’m giving a talk to the Borrowdale History Society next month: The
Flight of Mary, Queen of Scots .  She came this way, you know, when she
was driven from Scotland?’
    ‘She got around a bit, I know that.’
    ‘She was an extraordinary girl –
she would have been a media sensation if she’d lived four hundred years later. 
Not least because she was six foot two in her party shoes.’
    Skelgill watches as he neatly stacks and
files his meticulous notes and coloured pens: no sign of any new technology. 
Jim Hartley, now retired, was for many years Professor of Medieval History over
at Durham University, some eighty miles due east across the Pennines.  A
native of Keswick, and an ardent angler, he’d kept on a house in the small
Lakeland town, and had come to know the spotty teenage Daniel Skelgill when the
latter had attended one of his ‘summer schools’ on fly-casting.  He’d
identified Skelgill’s natural talent at once, and ‘young Daniel’ became
something of a protégé in the absence of children of his own.
    They make their way through to the little
cafeteria attached to the library.  As the Professor takes his seat he
says, ‘Oakthwaite – now there’s a curious coincidence, Daniel.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘Yes.  I came across a reference to
the place only this morning.  Not the school, you understand?  There
has been a stronghold on the site since the Dark Ages – probably
earlier.’
    ‘What – like a castle?’
    ‘Yes.  Perhaps some kind of broch
originally, but certainly a substantial fortress in late medieval times.’
    ‘What became of it?’
    ‘It may be that Mary proved its undoing. 
In 1568, aged just twenty-five, she’d escaped from confinement in Loch Leven
Castle, and rallied an army that was on its way to take up position at
Dumbarton Castle.  Their defences would have been impregnable.  But they
were intercepted and routed at the Battle of Langside, south of Glasgow, by
forces under the Earl of Moray – her half-brother, no less.’
    ‘Sounds like my family.’
    The Professor grins.  ‘Then she fled
south, misguidedly hoping Elizabeth would help her.  From Dundrennan Abbey
she was smuggled across the Solway disguised as a fisherwoman, and rumour has
it she was given refuge at Oakthwaite.  She was a staunch Roman Catholic, naturally,
and this part of Cumberland was a clandestine stronghold.  It may be that
in time the local lords suffered for providing assistance to the pretender.’
    ‘So the castle at Oakthwaite was
destroyed?’
    ‘If it wasn’t one catastrophic event,
certainly the barony was strangled into decline over the course of a couple of
generations, the estate with it.  I expect half the farms in the vicinity
have pieces of the castle stone in their walls.  The foundations will
still be intact, though, somewhere beneath the school.  There would have
been extensive vaults, wells, dungeons, and a crypt under the chapel. 
I’ve read of a tunnel that led away to safety in case the priest ever needed to
evade capture.  But of course it’s never been excavated: the school was
built before they thought of Time Team