St. Just and Sergeant Fear pulled up to the college, the sergeant, as if celebrating his liberation from enforced stillness, exuberantly spraying gravel as he spun the car to a full stop. Constable Brummond ran out to greet them. Expecting no more than an update on the river discovery, St. Just was puzzled by the look of alarm on the constable's face.
"Come quickly, Sir. The ambulance is on its way."
"Ambulance?" said St. Just and Sergeant Fear together.
Brummond didn't stop to explain, but led the way up the main staircase. With a sickening certainty, St. Just began to realize where he was leading them.
A bedder stood outside the oak door, a button-faced woman of perhaps fifty years, gray-haired, red-eyed, and weeping into her dustcloth. Automatically, St. Just pulled a pristine handkerchief from his suit jacket and pressed it into the woman's hand.
"She was a good girl!" she loudly informed St. Just. "There was no harm in her."
"Saffron. Yes, she was," said St. Just.
"Folk just had to look past all the makeup and earrings and such," she went on. "That was just her playing at being grown up. She was no more than a child!" St. Just noticed the woman was gripping an exercise book. Someone had decorated it in metallic swirls and flowers.
"What is that you have there?"
She looked down at her hands as if the object had leapt into them. Quickly, she handed it to St. Just.
"She always kept this under her pillow. It was her diary, I reckon. When I was… trying to help her just now… I don't know how I come to be holding it." She added quickly, "I never read it. I respect their privacy, I do that."
"What is your name, please?"
"Marigold. Marigold Arkwright."
"Marigold, this is important. Was she able to say anything to you?"
She shook her head. "Not really. She was delirious, calling for Sebastian, and for her father."
Brummond signaled him over and whispered. Turning to Sergeant Fear, St. Just said, "Call someone to stay with Ms. Arkwright. Don't leave her. She's in shock. Now, Brummond, what's all this about?" St. Just followed him into Saffron's room. -- St. Just and Sergeant Fear waited in their temporary office off the main library, giving the team space to work in Saffron's small room. St. Just read her latest entries in the exercise book. Closing it, he smacked the pages against the desk and said:
"The silly child. The bedder had that right. No more than a child. Of all the numbty-headed things to do…"
"Suicide, Sir?"
St. Just shook his head. "Murder. There were chocolates by her bed, and an opened bottle of cola, and I'd lay odds we'll find one or both have been tampered with. She's been snooping. 'Detecting.' It's all in here," he pointed to the garish little book. "It's partly a diary or journal, all right, but she's taken real events and tried to turn them into one of her favorite detective stories. She writes about what she saw the night of the murder, which was three different people in the vicinity of the boathouse. Three people who said they were somewhere else. We're narrowing it down, Sergeant. Narrowing it down."
"Where did the stuff come from, Sir? The poison, or the drugs?"
"Any drug taken in great quantity is a poison, Sergeant. We may know more when they're through going over Lexy's room. But let me clear up one mystery for you now. Sebastian admitted to Brummond he was on occasion using some of the empty college rooms for overflow storage for his illegal trade. They're comparing prints from his room with the unexplained prints they found in Lexy's room to be sure. I think we'll find some of the prints belong to Sebastian, some to the room's usual occupant. The prints he could easily explain away, of course. But now, according to Brummond, Sebastian hasn't been seen since he saw a team going over Lexy's room yet again. Apparently, he's gone missing… and just as we find the girl like that, surrounded by a regular pharmacopeia. It is not looking good for our Sebastian, although he swears he had nothing to do with Lexy's missing drugs."
"I don't get it, Sir. Why would Sebastian be mixed up in something like this anyway?"
"Why would the golden-haired boy lower himself to this kind of scheme? At a guess, it's Seb's way of being independent of the parents. That's normally done by taking a paying job, of course, but Seb is one who would hold himself above the dull nine-to-five routine. That's for losers like you and me, Sergeant."
Just then, Constable Brummond stuck his head through the open door.
"They're leaving now, Sir."
"Good. Dispatch someone to bring me the package they found in the river." To Fear he added, "At least now we know who did it."
We do?
"Give me"-St. Just looked at his watch and back at Brummond-"exactly three minutes. Go down right now and tell the members of the media to gather downstairs in the entrance hall-now. I'll meet them there."
"How much are you going to tell them?" asked Sergeant Fear.
"Whatever I can think up in three minutes."
Fear didn't have time to puzzle over this statement.
"Tell them," St. Just went on, "that I'll be briefing them on important developments-make sure they understand anyone who is late is not being allowed in. While I'm talking to the media, tell the alumni guests and the Master, the Bursar, and the Reverend Otis: five sharp for sherry in the SCR. No excuses, no exceptions."
As Brummond left, St. Just turned to Sergeant Fear.
"Now, Sergeant, I have a special assignment for you."
He told him. Fear looked at his chief as if he'd gone mad, but slowly nodded his assent, thinking he'd get Brummond to go do the dirty work. Wasn't that what delegation was for?
St. Just, as if he could read his mind (one of his most annoying talents, in his sergeant's reckoning), said, "Oh, no you don't, Sergeant. Brummond already has his hands full."