Bad Quarto (Imogen Quy Mystery 4) by Jill Paton Walsh

Author:Jill Paton Walsh [Walsh, Jill Paton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781444718140
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2012-03-01T06:00:00+00:00

11

I, Horatio, I’le take the Ghost’s word

For more than all the coyne in Denmarke

It would have taken a lot to banish all this from Imogen’s mind, but that is what happened. When she passed the porters’ lodge that evening, the head porter intercepted her.

‘Can you spare a minute, Miss Quy?’ Mr Hughes led her through into his inner sanctum, a little room behind the porters’ counter, with a board of keys, a few battered phone directories, and a run of volumes in, and about Cornish, for he was himself a scholar of sorts.

‘One of the undergraduates has reported her room-mate going absent,’ he told Imogen. ‘Three nights now. I’ve left a note in the delinquent’s room, and made a few enquiries, without result so far.’

‘Who is it?’ Imogen asked.

‘Susan Inchman.’

‘Ah.’

‘I supposed you might perhaps know something.’

Imogen sighed. It wasn’t, actually, unheard of at all for an undergraduate to simply disappear from the university during term. They had many motives for this irrational behaviour. Surely it was irrational to spend the latter years of their golden youth swotting desperately to get into Cambridge, and once there to abscond. But each term one or two people did it. Just now and then they were the true elite, so golden that they were actually disappointed at the company they found themselves in, or at the level of teaching they were getting. They took themselves off to Harvard, as Martin Mottle had threatened to do. Or they simply short-circuited their education, and launched themselves on the world without a degree. Most, but not all of them, informed the college what they were doing, and perhaps why. But frankly Susan might belong to another group, those who found the pressure too much, the competition too much, the contrast too much from being the cleverest in the class, heaped with praise by delighted and ambitious teachers, to being a dumb-dumb, floundering about in the supervision, outshone by their companions. Not everybody, in short, prospered at Cambridge, and this wasn’t Imogen’s field of responsibility.

‘Well, lots of things could take someone off for three days. Of course she ought to have told someone, but she isn’t much of a rule-keeper, I think.’

‘Apparently not,’ said Hughes. ‘In my opinion, Miss Quy, a young person in her situation should be particularly careful to observe college regulations, not conspicuously lax about them.’

‘In her situation, Mr Hughes?’

‘One of these scholarship youngsters. Not up to the mark, and admitted for other reasons. Isn’t she one of those?’

‘I thought that was supposed to be strictly confidential, Mr Hughes.’

‘Not much happens here that I don’t get to know about, Miss Quy,’ he said with tight-lipped satisfaction. ‘Unless you happened to know what was what, I’m duty bound to tell her supervisor, and commence enquiries.’

‘Yes, I think you should, Mr Hughes. She’s a grown-up, for good or ill.’

Imogen left him, and sat in her office for the usual session, before going across to the Lodge for sherry with Lady Buckmote and the Master. She had a lot to tell them, to juice up the dry Amontillado.

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