The Book of Air and Shadows

Classes he was meant to meet in one room were mysteriously scheduled for another room on the other side of the campus, and he had to rush to meet them in the heat of the summer. Those terrible New York summers, and he suffered so from the heat. Not used to it, you see, being from here. And his air-conditioning was always breaking down…”
    “Did he blame Mickey for that too?” I asked unkindly.
    “Yes, I see where you’re going and I confess I thought that as well. Is he running mad? But it was the weight of evidence, you see, I mean the accumulation of horrible details-could he possibly have made them up? Unlikely, in my opinion: poor Andrew wasn’t a fantasist, not in the least. We used to joke that he had no imagination at all, and then there’s what I saw when he returned last August.”
    He paused here and drank some of his beer. His eyes looked wet to me, and I fervently wished for him not to break down about poor Andrew. I took on some of my own pint, my third.
    “It’s difficult to describe. Manic and frightened at the same time. He had a young woman with him and insisted she had to stay in our house, although there are some perfectly adequate hotels nearby.”
    “Carolyn Rolly,” said Crosetti.
    “Yes, I believe that was her name. She was helping him in some research…”
    “Did he say what the research was?” Paul asked.
    “Not really, no. But he said it was the most important find in the whole history of Shakespeare scholarship, and dreadfully hush-hush. As if I would blab. In any case they were out and about. He seemed to have plenty of ready money, renting a car, staying away for days, returning in a mood of exhilaration. One thing he did say, that he was authenticating the antiquity of a manuscript and couldn’t be seen to be doing so. That was the main reason for Miss Rolly tagging along. From what I could gather, they did authenticate it by technical means and then they were off to Warwickshire.”
    “Where in Warwickshire, do you know?” I asked.
    “Yes, I happened upon some papers Miss Rolly left behind that suggested they had visited Darden Hall. Andrew returned alone, and he seemed much deflated and more frightened. I asked him about Miss Rolly, but he put me off. She was ‘away’ doing research. I didn’t believe him for a moment-I thought perhaps they’d had some sort of falling-out. In any case, as I say, he was a changed man. He insisted on having all the curtains drawn and he would stalk the house at night, holding a poker and shining a torch in dark corners. I begged him to tell me what the problem was, but he said I was better off not knowing.”
    Crosetti pressed March on what had become of Rolly. Did he think she had gone back to the States when Bulstrode had? He didn’t know, and that was more or less the end of our interview. After assuring the don that we would have all of Bulstrode’s personal items delivered to him and that Ms. Ping would handle the decedent’s will (and of course avoiding the issue of the lost manuscript), we took our leave.
    Back in the car, we had a small disagreement about what to do next. Paul thought that we should continue with our original plan of following Bulstrode’s tracks, which meant going to Warwickshire and visiting Darden Hall. Crosetti objected that Bulstrode did not seem to have found anything there and why did we think we’d do any better than an expert? He was for staying and investigating at March and Bulstrode’s home and looking at these “papers” March had mentioned. I observed that he seemed far more interested in finding Ms. Rolly than in locating the Item. He replied that Rolly was the source, key, and engine of the entire affair. Find Rolly and you had all currently available information about the Item, including in all probability the purloined grille. We tossed this bone back and forth for some minutes, with increasing irritation on my part (for, naturally, I knew it was
Miranda
who had stolen the grille!) until Brown reminded us that other agents would be cruising these roads and asking the locals whether anyone had seen a Mercedes SEL, of which there were probably not many on the lanes of rural Oxfordshire, and by such means arriving back on our heels.
    Paul suggested that Crosetti return to the inn and ask if March would consent to an inspection of these papers; he could stay at one of the perfectly adequate hotels. March was not averse to this plan, and we left Crosetti there with him. I was