Death at the Alma Mater by G. M. Malliet

sooner been served than his mobile phone vibrated, the surprise jolt sending his fork flying through the air. Blast the thing. He unhooked the device from his belt and looked with apoplectic disbelief at the number. It couldn’t be, but it was. The Chief herself, reaching out. Sod it. He was supposed to be off duty. He took the call outside.
    “St. Mike’s. Yes’m, I certainly know it. A woman. Strangulation, you think. Good God. The University Constabulary…Yes, of course. Quite outside their brief. I’ll give Sergeant Fear a ring and we’ll be right over.”
    Ringing off, he punched in the number to Fear’s house, cursing the late hour. His right-hand man had taken a short furlough, but needs must. Why did murder always seem to happen after dark? But he knew the answer. “Under cloak of darkness” was a cliché for good reason. Nighttime, when the good and the just were tucked safely before the telly in their homes, no doubt watching a crime show—that was the time the predator went on the move.
    –––
    Someone picked up the receiver on the first ring, but there was dead silence at the other end.
    “Emma?” St. Just guessed. “Is that you, Emma?” Silence. Emma was Fear’s four-year-old. Four going on thirty-five. What on earth could she be doing up so late?
    “Emma, may I speak to your …” What would she call him? “Your daddy, please?” Silence. Thinking he just wasn’t using the right vocabulary, he tried again. “Your dadda?” No. “Your Pops? Poppy?” He was running out of options, and he had a murder to investigate. “Your father, please, Emma?”
    “Who is that, Emma?” St. Just heard Sergeant Fear call as if from a great height, where no doubt he was, from Emma’s perspective.
    “It’s Inspector St. Just.” Her slight lisp rendered this as, “Ith Inthpector Thaint Justh.” He felt his heart melt.
    “Bye-bye, Emma,” said St. Just softly.
    “Bye!” yelled Emma, loud enough to pierce an eardrum.
    There were sounds of a minor scuffle, and Sergeant Fear came on the line.
    “Sorry, Sir. Emma hasn’t quite found her volume control yet.”
    “Just the on-and-off switch, I take it.”
    He filled his sergeant in on as much of the situation as he knew, concluding, “Someone called the CU Constabulary, who naturally called us in.” The Cambridge University Constabulary was a small, non-Home Office force that was most often called upon to deal with crowd control and internal university matters. Murder in a college setting was rare to the point of being unheard of. Quite naturally, the University had called in the Cambridgeshire Constabulary.
    St. Just quickly settled his tab with the landlord, who was getting used to these abrupt departures. He offered to package up the meal but, reluctantly, St. Just declined. As these things went, time for the next good meal was hours or days away, and he’d have to exist on the Chief’s dainty offerings for a while.
    Travelling at a rapid but measured pace along the A14, he arrived at St. Michael’s College within minutes of Sergeant Fear, who stood waiting for him at the entrance. Already parked beside Fear’s car in a small lot at the front of the college were the SOCO van and Malenfant’s red Daimler.
    The two men—St. Just tall, broad, and middle-aged; his sergeant tall, with a youthful gangliness—strode towards the college, their footsteps ringing out against the cobblestones, to the massive wooden double gates, built to withstand the sieges of earlier centuries. They stepped through the inner door cut into the gate for pedestrians. After showing their warrant cards to a shaken Head Porter, who presided from within an intricately carved neo-Gothic cage at the college entrance, they were shown by his assistant the way to the Master’s study.
    “Frightful business, this,” said the Master. He had seen their approach and walked briskly across the first court to greet them, hand out in practiced greeting. They might have been