The Last Straw. Paul Gitsham

a problem, guv. I’ll call as soon as we have anything, Sutton out.”

      Jones smiled slightly. Using mobile phones instead of radios was still a bit strange to older members of the force and so they had a tendency to resort to radio-speak when using them at work. Jones was no different. Susan had teased him for weeks after he had phoned her from the fish and chip shop one evening and ended the conversation with ‘over’.

      That reminded him, he’d better call Susan when he had a few minutes. She was fairly understanding about his work commitments, but insisted that she should at least be given a rough idea of when he would be home. Quite how understanding she would be today was another question. One of the reasons for her parents’ visit was to celebrate Bernice’s birthday. The plan was for Susan and Warren to take Bernice and Dennis into Cambridge for an early dinner, followed by a play at the Corn Exchange. Warren prayed that he didn’t have to skip that, for then he would really be in the doghouse. As understanding as Susan was, an evening of frosty silence from her mother would not leave her in a good mood. Warren just hoped that the previous night’s red wine had been good enough to temper Bernice’s displeasure at his sudden departure.

      With at least a couple of his questions answered, Jones suggested Crawley take them down to see the head of department. They were led back down the corridor in a thoughtful silence. Jones stared at the back of Crawley’s head, his mind whirring. He’d started the day with only one potential suspect. Now it would seem that there may be dozens of people with motives. He glanced over at Hardwick. Her brow was furrowed and she was clearly thinking hard. Jones looked forward to her thoughts. One question in particular troubled Jones.

      Why was the professor in his office at ten p.m. on a Friday? And how had his killer known?

       Chapter 4

      The head of department’s office was on the ground floor, close to the main reception area where the three officers had entered earlier. The entrance to the head’s office was actually inside a larger office complex signed as ‘Department of Biology — Administration’. A long, narrow room, it occupied almost an entire side of the building and was filled with a half-dozen workstations. Each desk had a comfortable-looking office chair, a desktop PC, a telephone and in and out trays, some empty, others stuffed with paper. A bank of cryptically labelled filing cabinets lined the wall underneath a row of windows overlooking the car park. A large photocopier and an industrial-sized paper shredder filled the remaining gaps along the wall. Two laser printers sat on top of the filing cabinets, along with a box of white A4 photocopy paper. The empty room smelt of stale coffee and ozone from the photocopier. The office seemed representative of the building as a whole, decided Jones. Nineteen-sixties architecture, a couple of decades past its prime, struggling to do its job in a world that bore little resemblance to what the planners had envisioned.

      The door to Professor Tompkinson’s office was right at the back of the office. An effort had been made to create a sort of waiting area, with a couple of comfy chairs lined up beneath the window. On the opposing side of the room a workstation sat facing the visitors; a name plate on the table read ‘Mrs C Gardner — PA to the HoD’.

      Despite the shabbiness of the set-up, it reminded Jones a lot of the chief constable’s office. The logic of the layout there was to keep the boss away from the day-to-day grind, shielding him from unwanted visitors and time-wasters. The HoD’s PA was no doubt the guardian of the appointments calendar and probably a formidable obstacle. Jones himself tended to operate an open-door policy: if the door was open come straight in, no appointment necessary. If the door was closed ask Cathy, the secretary nearest to the office and Jones’ unofficial PA, if it was worth knocking or if it would be better to leave a message. He found himself wondering if Professor Tompkinson was an open-door or closed-door kind of boss.

      At the moment, the door was closed. As the two officers waited by the comfy chairs Crawley knocked once and entered the office. A few seconds later he emerged. “Professor Tompkinson is on the phone. He’ll speak to you in a moment. I’d better get back to the lab and give those details to the constable.”

      He left quickly.

      With the door still closed, Jones turned quietly to his colleague.

      “Impressions?”

      Karen chewed her lip. She was clearly a little intimidated about being asked her opinion by someone as senior as Jones; nevertheless, she thought the question over carefully.

      “Holding something back. He was definitely uncomfortable answering that last lot of questions. I reckon he knows more than he was letting on.”

      Jones nodded in concurrence.

      “Karen, you asked some interesting questions there — what was on your mind?” He was careful to phrase it as an invitation. Jones valued the instincts of his junior colleagues and encouraged their input more than some. The first DCI he had worked for had routinely told junior officers to remember that they had two ears and one gob, and to use them in that proportion. His aggressive attitude had made young constables nervous about voicing their opinions. Jones was convinced that more than one case could have been closed far faster if the crusty old detective had listened to his colleagues more. Fortunately, he had finally retired six months after Jones had joined CID and his replacement, Bob Windermere, had been the complete opposite. To this day, Jones still regarded him as something of a mentor and regularly sought his advice.

      Karen Hardwick took the invitation.

      “When I was back in uni, some of my friends were doing PhDs. More than one of them had a supervisor that they argued with. It could get pretty nasty. If this Professor Tunbridge is half as unpleasant and mean as Dr Crawley was saying, he could have given Tom Spencer a pretty good motive for his murder.”

      Jones nodded encouragingly. He’d had the same thoughts himself.

      “What about the questions on funding you were asking about?”

      “Well, typically a student funded by a body like the Medical Research Council is given three years’ worth of funding for their project. That may be awarded directly to the student, but more typically it is part of a larger project grant that their PhD supervisor has successfully applied for. We’ll probably find that Tunbridge’s laboratory had a couple of large project grants running for several years and that his PhD students had studentships funded as part of the grant.”

      Jones made a note to follow that up, thankful to the gut instinct that had caused him to choose Karen Hardwick to accompany him and Sutton. Her insider knowledge of the mysterious workings of university departments was proving invaluable.

      “Anyhow, full-time students normally have funding for three years and are expected to submit their completed PhD thesis — an eighty-thousand-word dissertation — within four years.”

      “What happens if they miss the deadline?” asked Sutton.

      “In the worst-case scenario, I suppose they’d fail their degree.”

      “You seemed to think it important that Spencer was reaching the end of his four years. Could Tunbridge have been stopping him submitting? Crawley did mention that Tunbridge had been harsh to students in the past over their dissertations.”

      Hardwick shrugged. “I don’t know. We should definitely ask though, sir. We should also ask about Tom Spencer’s finances.”

      “Oh? Why?”

      “If he was towards the end of his four years, he was probably pretty skint. The three-year project funding also extends to the student’s living stipend. Students are usually told to save a bit of money during the three years so they can keep on paying the bills during their write-up period. Sometimes they can get some part-time teaching, but I knew PhD students who had to have bar jobs on top of their research just to make ends meet.”

      “Well, that’s certainly a good enough motive,” Jones mused. “If Tunbridge was stopping Spencer from graduating, he could have been in trouble financially. I think we’ve got a few more questions to ask