Murder Is Academic Read Online Free Page B

week.
    â€˜It doesn’t have to be … it could be just for company,’ he said.
    I twisted round and looked into his face. He slipped his arms around my waist.
    â€˜Sure?’ I asked.
    He nodded. I reached up and stroked the dark hair that was just beginning to show threads of silver. His arms tightened around me. I relaxed into his embrace. His lips touched mine and at that instant, as though the contact had triggered an alarm, the telephone rang.
    We stood there, frozen. Then I stepped back.
    â€˜Hell and damnation.’ Stephen said.
    As I moved towards the phone by the bed, he said, ‘Wait. I switched the machine on as I came up. Let’s see who it is first.’
    Abruptly the ringing stopped and was followed a moment later by my own voice, distorted by the tape and muffled by the floorboards. There was a second or two of silence when I thought the caller was going to hang up, then I heard a sharp intake of breath.
    â€˜Cassandra, if you’re there, would you please pick up the phone? It really is urgent. It’s the exam papers. Look, I’ll, um, well, I’ll ring back in an hour or so if I can’t get hold of Lawrence. There’s no answer from his phone either.’
    In his agitation he was about to hang up without giving his name. I reached the phone in time, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. There was no mistaking those precise Kelvinside tones. It was Malcolm.
    *   *   *
    Forty minutes later, Stephen and I were sitting with him at his kitchen table at his house in Cranmer Road.
    The missing scripts were spread out on the kitchen table. The cover sheet of one of them had been torn in half and sellotaped together. There was a piece of avocado skin stuck to one of the others, something that I guessed was red wine on another, and a strong smell of rotting vegetables.
    â€˜You are sure that they are all there?’ I asked anxiously. ‘Every single page? Nothing missing?’
    â€˜I think so. I did go through them.’
    â€˜I just can’t believe we’ve got them back.’ I was light-headed with relief.
    Malcolm leaned forward and put a finger on the sellotaped cover sheet.
    â€˜I had to stick this back together. And the actual script, that was torn too, but it’s all here.’
    I began to look through the exam papers.
    â€˜Are you really going to ask someone to mark these in this state?’ Stephen wrinkled his nose in distaste.
    I plucked a piece of wilted lettuce leaf off one of the pages. ‘No, we’ll have them transcribed. That’s what we’re going to do with the others, the ones that have been…’ I was suddenly aware of the swimming pool lying only yards away from me in the darkness of the garden.
    â€˜Anyway,’ I went on hurriedly, ‘these don’t seem too bad considering that they’ve been in the dustbin.’
    â€˜They had some newspaper wrapped round them,’ Malcolm said.
    â€˜When is the rubbish collected?’ Stephen asked.
    â€˜Tomorrow morning.’
    We contemplated this narrow escape.
    I stole a glance at Malcolm. He had changed out of his dark suit into jeans and a crumpled shirt. His hair was tousled and there was a dusting of pale stubble on the lower half of his face. The lines around his mouth and nose were deeper than I remembered, but had I ever really looked at him before? For me he had always worn a label: ‘Colleague’s husband: kind, reliable, not very interesting and out of bounds anyway’. Was there something I hadn’t noticed? Certainly that Scottish accent was very attractive and although I didn’t really like fair men myself … He looked up and his eyes met mine. I looked away in confusion. I thought, It’s the day of Margaret’s funeral and I’m sitting here at her kitchen table, wondering whether I fancy her husband.
    â€˜But where are my manners?’ Malcolm said. ‘I