Grantchester Grind Read Free Page A

see him getting on with Lady Mary like a house on

    fire.
    But tell me, why do you always refer to him by his Christian name?’
    Vera smiled. ‘Because he’s my cousin,’ she said.
    It was not something Goodenough mentioned to Mr Lapline. In fact he amended the list of

    Dr Osbert’s publications. Mr Lapline was in a bad way without having to cope with the

    innocence of Dr Crippen and what happened when they hanged Mrs Thompson. He was having

    trouble with his own bowels. ‘I can’t honestly say I begin to like the sound of any of

    them,’ he said, ‘and as for this one in Grimsby…’
    ‘You don’t think he’s right for Porterhouse?’
    Mr Lapline expressed the opinion that he wasn’t right for anywhere except hell.

    Goodenough went away to make his next move. Having studied the notes Lady Mary had made on

    the Senior Fellows–there wasn’t a faintly benevolent comment among them–he decided it

    would be best not to discuss the possibility of the new Fellowship with the Bursar. The

    Dean (what she had to say about the Dean was vitriolic) and the Senior Tutor, ‘a wholly

    unintelligent person whose interest in rowing suggests obsessive adolescent

    interests’ in her words, clearly distrusted the Bursar who ’sided with Godber on

    financial grounds’. There was independent evidence of this dislike in the reports of

    the two private detectives she had employed to investigate her husband’s death. One

    report, written by an unfortunate operative who had spent two hellish months working as

    a human dishwasher in the College kitchens and who had developed a most unpleasant skin

    condition thanks to the scouring powder and detergents he had been forced to use,

    described the Dean as the real power in Porterhouse with the Senior Tutor as his

    deputy.
    ‘I have decided to make the offer through the Senior Tutor,’ Goodenough told Vera.

    ‘If I took the idea to the Bursar, the Dean would turn it down flat. He’d smell trouble. Got

    a nose for it. In any case, from what I hear the Bursar is so desperate for money we’re

    bound to have his support. It will look better coming from the Tutor.’
    In fact the stratagem was unnecessary. The Dean was already making plans to spend some

    time away from Porterhouse. He was going to find a rich successor to Skullion, preferably

    from among the Old Porterthusians. He had always been fond of Skullion, but in view of the

    financial situation in Porterhouse the need to find a new Master, one with financial

    pull and a very large private income, seemed imperative. At least to the Dean. That was how

    they had dealt with the financial mess Lord Fitzherbert had got the College into.

    Fitzherbert had been a rich enough man himself, and they had made him Master. That had

    always been the preferred Porterhouse method, and the Dean meant to use it again. The real

    difficulty lay in finding a way to remove Skullion. It had never been supposed he would

    live so long after his stroke and now the Dean could only hope he would pass quietly away

    after an excellent dinner. The Dean had in mind the special Duck Dinner. Skullion had

    always loved _Canards pressés à la Porterhouse._ All the same the Dean had been to see the

    College doctor in the hope of an unfavourable prognosis for the Master, but Dr

    MacKendly was more concerned with the Dean himself. ‘Now what is it this time?’ he asked.

    ‘The old prostate giving you trouble again?’
    ‘Hardly,’ said the Dean, ’since it has never given me the slightest trouble

    before.’
    ‘Well, it was bound to happen at your age,’ said the doctor, putting on a surgical glove

    and indicating the examination couch. ‘Now this may be a touch uncomfortable but

    hardly painful.’
    ‘It certainly won’t,’ said the Dean, remaining rooted to his chair. ‘I have not come

    about my own condition. I am concerned about Skull…the Master, that is.’
    Dr MacKendly sat down regretfully at his desk but