Death Lives Next Door

“Not a very good one.” Rachel sighed. “Trouble with me is,” she said wryly, “that I like the people I go to live and work among. And I want them to like me. Won’t do. To be a good anthropologist you’ve got to be quite detached. I minded that those last people, the Berboa, didn’t like me.”

“Seems a reasonably human sort of thing to mind,” said Ezra.

“It does, doesn’t it? But that’s it. Anthropologists are not human. Or only remotely, men-in-a-machine human.”

“You must have picked up that style of dress from he Berboa,” said Ezra, observing her affectionately.

Rachel ignored this. “Anyway who cares? To hell with intellectuals.” This was the Hansom strain coming out—hotted up by the Boxer.

“Do you think I’m an intellectual?”

“Oh, so so,” said Rachel absently from the security of her own intellectual eminence.

“You’re honest, anyway,” exclaimed Ezra, more than a little hurt.

“Let’s look at it this way,” said Rachel, coming back to earth with a start. “You’re more of an intellectual than me, for I sometimes think that I simply inherit my way of life and that left on my own …”

“I think so, too,” interrupted Ezra with satisfaction. So Rachel did sometimes see herself.

“But you’re less of an intellectual than my Uncle Bertie,” went on Rachel. Uncle Bertie was a professional philosopher, and although many philosophers are very practical men and keep a remarkably sharp eye on the world and its benefits, Uncle Bertie Boxer did not. He was so constantly engaged in his battle with words that to the lay observer he sometimes seemed not quite in his right mind. It is alarming to come across a middle-aged gentleman running through the University Parks muttering: Are questions constitutionally nosey?

“Thank God for that,” said Ezra.

He wondered what Rachel got from him. Nothing more, probably, than an irresistible impulse to tidy him up. She wasn’t at this stage in the least in love with him. He felt a desire to show off.

“In six years I shall be a Doctor of Philosophy, the acknowledged master of my little corner of research, cock of my own dunghill.”

“In six years you will be forty-odd. You may be dead.”

“You may be right,” he admitted dolefully. But he had to go on.

“I have an idea about the figure behind a small group of Early English epic fragments. I think you can pick out some individual points about the writer. A sort of little Homer, well perhaps I exaggerate there, but still he was a real person. Anyway I want to reconstruct this lost man.”

“A sort of Anglo-Saxon quest for Corvo?”

“Oh, that wonderful book!” Ezra was just the sort of person to be caught in the spell of Corvo: he liked lost souls. “But I can never make up my mind whether it is fact or fiction.”

“Never much interested in Corvo, I must say. He must have been a dreary little chap.”

“I told you you were a prig. But, of course, what makes it so fascinating is what it reveals of the author.”

While they were talking they had both been watching the man who stood there, oblivious to everything except the one house. His very concentration made Ezra feel uneasy.

“Could he be a detective?”

“Why should a detective watch Marion?”

“That’s something we shall have to ask Marion,” said Ezra, a trifle grimly.

“He’s not a detective,” said Rachel. “I’ll swear to that. I’ve spoken to him and you haven’t. He’s not sharp enough.” She had convinced herself anyway. “Besides, Marion’s good. There can’t be anything in her life that needs detecting.”

Ezra was thinking.

He was remembering what he knew about Marion, what he had heard and what she had told him. With the interest in anthropology had gone a wide interest in people, everything had been grist to her mill. She had no more been able to avoid gathering up the curious, the strange and the lost people than now she could help gathering up the lame dogs she had known.

“Has it struck you that Marion must have known some pretty wicked sort of people in her time? Crowley and Beasley and Rosa Farmer and so on. Not a little bunch of honeys really.”

Rachel frowned. “Silly rather than wicked,” she said loftily.

Ezra sighed. “That’s exactly you all over. Silliness doesn’t rule out wickedness. Rather the reverse. Someone silly and wicked could be very dangerous.”

“Do you think this man is dangerous?” Rachel was surprised.

Ezra nodded. He was convinced there was danger for Marion, and what was more he felt sure Marion knew it, too, in her heart.

They threaded their way through the crowds of undergraduates on bicycles and approached the School of Anthropology, which was housed in a large sunny building.

“I have to leave a note,” explained Rachel, although she had no need to offer any explanations to her companion, who would have trotted along happily beside her to the moon if she had happened to suggest it. “And I’ve a book to pick up in the library. Do wait for me.”

Ezra tucked his feet under a chair and sat down to wait. He was thoroughly happy in this atmosphere of leisurely learning. He realised anew how unsuited he was to leave it.

A few students drifted in and out, exchanging a word with the porter in his little cubby-hole as they did so. He was a round fat agreeable man and an old friend of Ezra’s, who had waited here many times for Rachel. He came out now to talk to Ezra.

The porter and his wife knew both Marion and Ezra well.

(“I suppose she feels sort of maternal to him,” the wife had suggested.

“Oh no,” said the porter.

“Not … anything else?” queried his wife doubtfully. She didn’t want to think badly of Marion.

“Oh no, mother, you’ve got it all wrong. People like them have interests in common. That’s how they put it. Things in common. Age doesn’t count. It’s their minds.”

“Well I can’t help thinking it’s all a bit—” She hesitated: “Comic”)

“I’d be glad to have a word with you, sir.”

“Do,” said Ezra, looking up in surprise.

“I live in Little Clarendon Street, sir, as you know, just around the way from Chancellor Hyde Street, I’m often up and down the road, I usually go that way to the Parks to exercise my little dog. You’ve seen us perhaps, sir?”

Briefly Ezra let his mind rest on the dog; the ‘little dog’ was a great loutish retriever with teeth like a tiger’s fangs and a temper notorious among even the ill-tempered dogs of North Oxford.

“Yes, I know him.”

“And you being a particular friend of Dr. Manning’s, sir, I thought I’d mention it.”

“Mention what?” There was something coming.