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afterwards – me, Monica, Judith and a few others – and pooled our information.’
You do surprise me
, thought Dougal with elephantine sarcasm, for once a truly sensational carcass for the scandal vultures. ‘Judith had heard he’d been garotted – you know, when they put a thin cord round your neck like one of those cheese slicers they use in shops.’
    â€˜Where did she get that from?’ Dougal injected a touch of incredulity into his voice: a certain spur to Primrose’s inclination to confide.
    â€˜From one of the cleaners. She’s married to Bert – that porter who doesn’t believe in consonants – he was the one who actually found the body last night, when he was locking up.’
    They talked for a few minutes more, but Dougal could get nothing else out of him besides a predictable spate of speculation and the forthcoming motion the Students’ Union were planning for the next meeting, deploring violence within the college.
    But as Dougal went back up the stairs to the Paleography Room, he had to admit to himself that he was worried. The business had seemed manageable while knowledge of it was confined to himself and Hanbury – and possibly Gumper, of course. But now it was no longer private, he felt suddenly that anything could happen.

4
    B y the time he had sat down with the photograph in front of him he had argued himself into a more optimistic frame of mind. Really, things couldn’t be better. Primrose would have heard any rumours, true or false: he had a genius for gossip. Everything pointed to the fact that the police were making no progress, just going through the routines of homicide.
    While he was thinking, his eyes were resting idly on the words scribbled on the top left-hand corner of the page –
liber
. . . His mind, occupied with the police, executed a swift change of direction, one of those sideways strides which make puzzle solving a pleasurable activity. The words were in a later hand than the rest of the manuscript, a crabbed cursive. Suddenly they made sense; the letters and the contractions which confused them unscrambled themselves and became, with miraculous clarity,
liber monacborum sancti tumwulfi
– a book of the monks of St Tumwulf.
    Dougal had never heard of St Tumwulf, which was a good sign. Even in the Middle Ages, few churches would have been dedicated to an obscure Anglo-Saxon saint. He got the relevant reference book – Knowles and Hadcock’s
Medieval Religious Houses in England and Wales
– down from the shelf and checked the index. Only two monasteries had been dedicated to Tumwulf – a small pre-Conquest convent in Northumberland, the saint’s birthplace, and the great abbey of Rosington in Huntingdonshire, where Tumwulf had his ministry and found his martyrdom.
    The inscription must refer to Rosington, Dougal thought. It had been one of the great foundations of the Middle Ages, ranking in prestige with Glastonbury, Bury St Edmunds and Ely. Just the sort of place where you would expect a library with up-market manuscripts like this. And wasn’t it a Benedictine monastery, too? – and the Benedictines had surely been important in the process of importing Caroline Minuscule as a book-hand from France and establishing it in England.
    On impulse, Dougal tried the catalogue – the small one on the way out of the Paleography Room – for Rosington. His luck held – POOTERKIN , B . W ., had privately published the Ph.D. thesis which he had presented to the Eric Ehrlinger Memorial University, Alabama, three years ago and had given a copy to the University of London Library:
The Abbey Library of St Tumwulf’s, Rosington: a Critical Handlist of its Actual & Putative Contents in the Middle Ages, Together with a Summary of the Arguments for & against the Existence of a Scriptorium
.
    He jotted down the class number on his wrist and wandered round the shelves until he found the right