Evanly Bodies - By Rhys Bowen Page 0,31

Rogers ever had an affair? Evan wondered. And what about the meek and mild Dr. Skinner over whom Rogers habitually walked? Didn't such people eventually snap?

He made his way back down the hallway, deep in thought. Wingate was in the small staff room, nursing a cup of instant coffee with Paul Jenkins and Olive Sloan.

"How did it go?" he asked.

"Interesting," Evan said.

Paul Jenkins looked up from his coffee. "Has Gwyneth been spilling the beans about the rest of us? About David's sordid affair with Martin and Badger filching the department funds to bet on the horses?" He looked at their faces and laughed. "Just kidding," he said.

"Not particularly funny," Wingate said, "given that a man is lying in the morgue with a hole through his head because he represented such a major threat that somebody had to kill him."

"Sorry." Jenkins made a face. "Actually, I think it's pretty beastly, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree if you're trying to find some deep, dark secret here. We're just a typical university department, and our biggest squabbles are about whether a certain document dated from 1257 or 1258."

He stopped talking as Rhys Jones and David Skinner came in to join them. Skinner reacted to the presence of two policemen again. "Christ, not more interrogations," he said. "Are we to be browbeaten until one of us confesses? I thought I'd told you everything yesterday."

"One thing we forgot to ask you, sir," Jeremy Wingate said easily. "It's about your movements yesterday morning."

"My movements?" Skinner looked bewildered.

"Yes. Where were you between about seven thirty and eight thirty?"

"That's easy enough. Snoring my head off. I don't have a class on Thursdays until eleven, so I don't surface before nine. Sinful, I'm sure, but true."

"And you have no one to vouch for that?" Wingate asked.

"He wishes," Jenkins quipped.

"No, no one." Skinner shot him a look.

Suddenly the door burst open, and a young man barged in. He made a dramatic picture with his leather jacket and shoulder-length black hair that had been blown every which way in the wind. "Have you heard the news, chaps!" he shouted. "Somebody's finally done it! They've put old Martin Rogers out of his misery!"

Chapter 12

"I'm not sure whether that was an exercise in futility or not," Sergeant Wingate said to Evan as they came out of the History Department building. The wind had subsided and the weather was brightening from the west, revealing the odd patch of blue between the strands of cloud. "Did you find out anything interesting?"

"Gwyneth Humphries made it clear that every one of them had clashed with Martin Rogers at one time or another. Maybe that was to throw us off the scent and not have us focus on one of them."

"Could be. Rhys Thomas said pretty much the same thing to me."

"And Brock seemed to think it wasn't even surprising that Professor Rogers had been murdered," Evan went on. "But then he was the one who had a perfect alibi for yesterday. He was out at his dig with a bunch of students."

"I'll tell you one thing," Evan added, watching the steady stream of students making their way down the hill like a column of ants. "Gwyneth Humphries was sweet on Professor Rogers."

"No kidding? Do you think something was going on there? A liaison on the side?"

"I don't think so. She took pains to tell me how morally correct Rogers was."

"So it was unrequited love on her part-pining from afar. Maybe her theory was, if I can't have him then nobody else can. Hell has no fury, and all that."

"I can't see her shooting somebody," Evan said. "She's a dramatic woman, I grant you, but shooting is too cold and calculated for her. I can picture her stabbing him with a Celtic dagger, perhaps."

"So what do we tell Bragg?" Wingate asked.

"Let's wait and hear what he's come up with this morning. And we haven't spoken to any students yet."

"I'd imagine there are several hundred students who attend history lectures. Rather a tall order to interview them all. Where do you suggest we start?"

"I think we're like Mohammed," Evan said, looking down the hill. "I think the mountain is coming to us." And indeed students were suddenly streaming out of buildings all over the campus, some of them now heading in the direction of the History Department building. At the same moment there were noises in the hallway behind them, and another group of students was coming down the stairs.

Jeremy Wingate stepped out to meet