No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [94]
Matthew grinned suddenly. “Believe me, Joe, neither are you!”
Joseph picked up the wine bottle and for a few moments did not speak. “If Father was bringing the document to you in London, and whoever killed him took it from the car, what were they searching the house for?”
Matthew thought for a while. “If it really is a plot of some sort to kill the king, Irish or otherwise, perhaps there are at least two copies of it,” he replied. “They took the one Father was bringing, but they need the other as well. It’s far too dangerous to leave it where someone else might find it—especially if they actually put it into effect.”
It made perfect sense. At last there was something about it that fell into place. Intellectually it was a comfort, finally something reason could grasp. Emotionally it was a darkening of the shadows and a waking of a more urgent fear.
CHAPTER
NINE
Joseph returned to Cambridge the following morning, the twenty-second of July. The train pulled away from the streets and rooftops of the city and into the open country northward.
He felt an urgency to be back in college again, and to look with fresh and far more perceptive eyes at the people he knew. He was aware that he would see things he would prefer not to: weaknesses that were impinging on his consciousness, Morel’s anger and perhaps jealousy because Abigail had been in love with Sebastian. Had he taken his revenge for that, storing it up until it became unbearable? Or was it the insult to Abigail he avenged? Or was it nothing to do with either of them, but one of the other cruelties? Had someone cheated and been caught? Would a man kill to save his career? To be sent down for cheating was certainly the ruin of all future hope in a profession or society.
Matthew’s question about the gun came back again. Where had it come from? Perth had said it was a handgun. Joseph did not know a lot about guns; he disliked them. Even in the open countryside where he lived, close to woods and water, he knew of no one who kept handguns.
As soon as he reached the college, he went to his rooms. After he washed and changed, he started to review the situation. It was like taking the concealing bandages off a wound to find where the infection was, the unhealed part, and how deep it went. If he was to tell himself the truth, he knew it was to the bone.
And it was time he addressed the next issue he was aware of. Had someone cribbed from Sebastian or he from them? The suggestion had been that it was Foubister, and he knew why. Foubister came from a working-class family in the suburbs of Manchester. He had studied at Manchester Grammar School, one of the best in the country, and come to Cambridge on scholarship. His parents must have saved every penny simply to afford his necessities such as clothes and fare. The shock of coming from the narrow, back-to-back houses of the northern industrial city, to the broad countryside of Cambridge, the ancient city steeped in learning, the sheer wealth of centuries of endowment, was something he could not hide.
His mind was outstanding, quick, erratic, highly individual, but his cultural background was of poverty not only in material surroundings, but in art, literature, the history of Western thought and ideas. The leisure to create what was beautiful but essentially of no immediate practical use was as alien an idea to everyone he had known before coming here. It strained the imagination that he should have found the same felicitous phrase to translate a passage from the Greek or Hebrew as Sebastian Allard, whose background was so utterly different, nurtured in the classics from the day he started school.
Joseph stood up with a weariness inside and went to look for Foubister. He found him coming down the stairs from his own rooms. They met at the bottom, just inside the wide oak door open onto the quad.
“Morning, sir,” Foubister said unhappily. “That wretched policeman doesn’t know anything yet,