Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 151, Nos. 1 & 2. Whole Nos. 916 & 917, January/February 2018

Tapping the Glass by Jane Jakeman

Jane Jakeman is a freelance journalist with a doctorate in art history. Among her novels are four featuring the Byronic detective Lord Ambrose Malfine. Endeavour Press recently released digital editions of the books. PW has praised the series for its “realistic and admirable characters” and Library Journal for its “excellent prose.” The Oxford author also reviews fiction for the Independent.

At first there were just a few soft noises.

I couldn’t make out where I they were coming from and at that point I didn’t care. I’d got back on a late July evening, when Oxford was full of the smells of traffic and wine and the air was full of dust. I’d spent a long day in the Bodleian, shut away from the pleasures outside, as I buried my head in letters from people who were long dead. I wanted a busy street, I wanted an ice-cold lager, and I would go out for one as soon as I had washed off that peculiar dust of old libraries, the crumbled scurf of centuries that had accumulated in my clothing — even in my hair, in the very folds of my skin. Whatever the reason, I just knew I wanted to get out of the place.

I hadn’t thought I would feel like this when I had taken the rooms in Holywell House.

“The College can let you have these rooms for the summer, Mr... er...”

“Nicolaides,” I said helpfully.

The bursar, who dealt with all college business, gave a twitch that might have been a smile. She was pin-thin, dressed in an expensive black suit, and immaculately made up.

“Ah, yes. But you will have to fend for yourself with the cleaning and cooking and so on.”

“No problem,” I said. St. Grimbald’s College owned this house, an eighteenth-century building that seemed to have had little in the way of restoration over the centuries. My rooms were on the upper floor. I had an undistinguished small bedroom at the back of the house, and the bathroom was a late-Victorian plumbing triumph with the additions of a stained mirror and wooden towel rail and chair, but the first-floor sitting room was beautiful in an exhausted sort of way. It surely had the original panelling and quite possibly the original paint, a badly scuffed pale green, and was generously proportioned, large enough to function comfortably as study and sitting room. There was a decent small table, where I could eat or work, and two splendid long windows that overlooked the street. Beneath them ran a long boxed window seat with a faded velvet cushion. It would be pleasant to sit there on a summer’s evening and watch the passersby below. And, which most attracted me, it was a few minutes away from the Bodleian Library.

Most of my fellow postgraduates had gone away for the vacation, but I needed somewhere to spend the summer while I finished my thesis and the college would be hosting large parties of summer-school students, a most valuable annual crop which Oxford carefully cultivates. The bursar had promised to find me somewhere for August, a period known as “deep vacation” when the city is given over to tourists and other moneymaking enterprises. And fortunately the once rather grand first-floor salon in which we then stood was available. Indeed, the bursar informed me, the whole house was empty till the next university term, quaintly called Michaelmas but of course not pronounced like that — “Mickelmass” or something like that is the correct pronunciation. I have great difficulty with the illogicalities of Oxford.

“And that begins in October, so you will not be disturbed all summer,” said the bursar.

“When can I move in?”

The bursar cast her eyes upwards, presumably to indicate deep consideration, but she said very quickly, “Tomorrow? The college would charge you from the beginning of next month.”

“Wow!” said my friend Monty when we finally got to have an ice-cold lager later that evening.

Monty, whom I had met in the Bodleian, was really the Honourable Montague Justinian Penderfrith Chalmers-Pallanby, the latter pronounced Charmers-Polby, as I had discovered when a girl teased him about it, and he was apparently in the direct lineage of some ancient family. He rather liked talking to me, I fancy, because I knew nothing and cared less about the English aristocracy. My Scottish mother was a humble tourist guide from a “wee croftie” in the Highlands and my Greek father’s family has occasionally claimed descent from Zeus, which would obviously trump anything the English nobility had to offer.

Monty, for all his blue blood, was very keen on economics, the subject of his research, and indeed liked money in general, I had noticed when buying a “round,” a term with which he had made me familiar. I was not surprised when he commented that not only was the college charging me a very low rent, but that the bursar was actually letting me off a week.

“I thought that woman had a heart of stone,” he commented. “What have you done to her?”

I modestly batted my long black eyelashes. “I drive your British women wild!”

“All the same, it is odd,” he said, ignoring the provocation with aristocratic cool. “Who had the room last year? D’you know?”

“No idea.”

There had somehow been stale air, the feeling that the room had perhaps not been occupied for some long time. I opened the windows to let in fresh air when I first took over the place, and lifted the cushion off the window seat and raised the hinged lid. The dusty interior had been roughly carpentered, the boards not fitting quite together. It was empty. Useful for storing my books, especially if it could be cleaned up a bit. I take some pride in my small library, though of course I have to use the Internet — who doesn’t, these days? — but I love the smell of a book, the experience of opening one and turning the pages back and forth at my leisure. My books had been crated to Oxford, and I badly wanted to set them out, to look through them again. The crate stood even now in the centre of the room and I was anxious to begin.

The boards inside the window seat had to be cleaned up first. I examined the interior carefully. The thick dust had to be removed, obviously. I swept up the dust, clouds of which flew out into my face, and could then see that there was blackish dirt lodged between the boards of the lining. Irritated, I determined to finish the job properly — I would certainly not put my treasured calf-bound editions of Byron’s poems into the window seat till the work was done.

There was some cutlery provided by the college in a kitchen drawer. I picked out a small cooking knife and slid the blade experimentally between the boards, digging out a good deal of compacted dirt as I went along. I made good progress, cleaning up the mess as I went, but suddenly the blade caught on something and dragged it along. A scrap of something light-coloured appeared and I was able to get hold of it with my fingers and pull it out. It was a long strip of yellowed paper, curling and torn.

Holding it up to the light, I saw to my astonishment that it appeared to be written in nothing other than Latin. Not in modern script, probably that of a couple of centuries ago, and maybe the hand of someone who had learned Latin as a student, even here, perhaps, in Oxford. But although I had studied Latin — even needed it occasionally for my work on old texts — the words made no sense to me.

I laid aside my efforts at deciphering, placed the strip of paper on my table, and returned to my domestic task. The inside of the window seat still looked decidedly dirty and I fetched a bowl of water and washed it out. Then I left the lid open so that it could dry more quickly. As for the scrap of Latin script, I laid it between two sheets of clean paper and weighed it down to flatten it out. Beside it on the table I put a pile of books, intending to sort them out before putting them in the window seat.

The next day I looked at the slip of paper again. The handwriting was cramped and difficult to read, but I began to transcribe it on a separate sheet. Though I still couldn’t fathom the meanings, it looked like a list:

Libellula, Ephemera, Phryganea, Hemerobius, Panorpa, Raphidia, Oesyrus, Tipula, Musca, Tabanus, Culex, Empis, Conops, Asilus, Bombylius, Hippobosca

None of this meant anything to me — this was not a Latin vocabulary I had ever encountered. I put the list down on the table again. The inside of the window seat was still damp and would probably take a day or two longer to dry out. A few days later I put the lid down and the cushion back in place, intending to buy some lining paper before I put my books inside.

The thuds in the room were so dulled and occasional that they were not bothersome for a while, until the weather became exceptionally warm for England — that is to say, some degrees above freezing. At any rate, the summer seemed to have reached its full blossoming.

One humid late-summer evening the sounds became insistent and I was forced to put down my notes.

What part of the room were the noises coming from? I got up and stood in the centre and began to feel a most peculiar fear of, as it were, being exposed on all sides. I was overcome by a primitive sensation: I badly wanted to have “my back to the wall,” as the English expression goes. The air surrounding me seemed to be full of warm, swirling currents. I crossed the room, at each step feeling more and more vulnerable, and reached the open window, where I stopped in my tracks and listened.

The sound was coming — thud, thud, thud — from below the glass, and now had been joined by a deep buzzing which formed a continuous angry background. The noises had to be, and yet I did not want to admit this, coming from inside my room. This was no outside agency against which I could bolt my door and shut the window. It was within.

I was disturbed more than I can say, for the horrible thought occurred to me that the sounds were somehow in my head, throbbing against my skull, banging against the bone. Without thinking, I rushed down the stairs and out into the street, where an uncertain warm breeze was fluttering scraps of paper in the gutter: This movement, quivering at the edges of my vision, unnerved me totally. From the pub on the corner of the road came laugher and music and for once I was glad to hear the raucous sounds of student enjoyment. I turned sharply into the bar and pushed my way in through the crowd. When a hand fell on my shoulder just as I was ordering a whisky, I literally jumped.

“Mine’s a pint of Morrell’s.”

We sat down in the “quiet room” at the back — well, quieter, at least. I tried to explain.

“Noises? Wooo...?”

Was he making fun? But Monty was staring at me now. “Sorry. You look as if you’ve...?” Something in my face must have restrained any further jocularity.

Reluctantly, I told him about the thuds, and another small incident which otherwise I might not have thought of mentioning, but which now struck me as among the peculiarities of my rooms. I had woken up and breathed in some unpleasant smell that jogged my memory — what did it remind me of? Not anything here, not Oxford or England. Something in Greece.

Yes, it came to me — the smell of a Greek butcher’s shop, with the sides of meat hanging up outside, the odour of blood and offal, the kind of place one never encountered in this orderly country of Britain where all kinds of hygienic regulations ensured that the raw, the real and animal, was kept safely under wraps. But there again, the smell had gone when I was fully awake. I did not tell Monty my own conclusion, but underneath his light-minded exterior he is an intelligent man and no doubt worked it out for himself. What I had experienced must have been part of a dream, revisiting the country in which I had spent my childhood. Homesickness, perhaps.

When Monty said, after my second whisky, which he had uncharacteristically pressed upon me, “Come on, then!” I followed him out of the pub. Five minutes later we were at the foot of my stairs. I switched on the light though it was not yet dark. Monty shouldered his way past me in the narrow space and charged upstairs. I wanted to shout, “Wait, take care!” but what reason could there be to tread gently in this perfectly ordinary college house in the centre of a city? All I could say was that I had heard some strange sounds — not even menacing ones — and perhaps I had smelled or imagined an odd odour.

Monty was quickly through the door of my room, and I followed. We stood still for a moment at the threshold, hearing the muffled thudding sounds. At least I had not imagined them. Monty moved quietly to the centre of the room, looking all round, his deep-set eyes searching the walls, then the ceiling. Gradually, as if drawn by sound and not sight, he moved towards the window, then stood still. As I followed, moving as quietly as I could, he stared at me in astonishment and bent lower over the window seat, almost pressing his ear against the cushion. Then he lifted it and said softly, “Open the window.” Mystified but caught by the urgency in his tone, I reached over, untwisted the lock, and slid up the lower frame.

With a sudden jerk, Monty pulled up the top of the window seat and out flew a dark cloud, buzzing and fluttering desperately to escape, pouring through the open space as if it were an airborne flow of some blackish current and out into the street.

Peering down into the box below, I saw a writhing mass covering the bottom of the box, with here and there a veined wing fluttering in the struggle to pull an iridescent body up out of the morass. I jerked back as something hit my cheek and then streaked upwards to the light of the window.

“My God, you had a nest of bluebottles!” said Monty. “Ugh, revolting things. Fetch the vacuum cleaner.”

We hoovered up the dead flies and their still-unhatched companions, wriggling semilucent white grubs. It was an unpleasant task, made nastier by the transparency of the dust container, through which we saw a mass of churning corpses with smashed eyes whirling around until at last all settled into a composite, still wetness. Somehow we scraped this out into the dustbin and washed the container clean.

I sank into a chair. To tell the truth, my feelings were in rather a turmoil, disgust for the creatures and yet a kind of pity for their horrid end, like corpses flung high on a battlefield. The determination of nature to survive, yes, I had seen it in that sucked mass as dying creatures twitched against the leaking bodies of their fellows in a last attempt at life.

“How the hell did they come there? Had you seen any sign of them?” said Monty, but I shook my head. “I hadn’t even seen one,” I said. “God knows how they got into that window seat.”

“I suppose maybe one of them had got trapped in there,” said Monty, “and laid a mass of eggs. But what—?”

“I don’t know anything about these great big flies,” I said. “These bluebottles. But I suppose when they hatch... or whatever they do... there must be something they can—”

“They can feed off,” finished Monty. He walked over to the window seat and peered down into it. “Doesn’t seem to be anything there. Thought there might be a dead bird or something like that. But it’s empty.” He dropped the lid down and I instinctively jumped at the sound.

“Hey, you’re a nervous wreck! Don’t let it get to you. But I tell you what, the college should have had this room properly cleaned after the student before you left. The cleaners can’t have done their job — they must have left something nasty inside that window seat, even if we can’t see anything now. I’d complain to the bursar, if I were you. After all, it’s a pretty filthy state of affairs. Those creatures spread all kinds of diseases.”

The thought of complaining to that iron-jacketed mannequin made me shake my head and say firmly, “No. It’s over now — I’ll just forget about it.”

Monty looked at me with some concern. “Nasty thing to happen, all the same, in the room where you have to eat and work.”

This made me feel even worse, and I clattered down the stairs, followed by Monty, who volunteered another round in the King’s Arms. I had dinner there too — English pub food. Eating in that room, heating something on the little gas burner or in the microwave (St. Grimbald’s College’s one concession to modernity) that sat behind a curtain in a corner, revolted me. I imagined those creatures discovered in my food or seeing them on my plate, and my stomach churned.

I should perhaps have gone to the bursar straightaway, but I put it off as an unpleasantness and managed to forget the incident for a few days. It had been a freak occurrence, that was all.

My college did not offer meals to its own students in the depths of the long vacation, for the kitchens were too busy with summer schools staying for a short course of study. So the following evening, when I had worked late at the library, I went up the stairs to my rooms, telling myself I must put that unpleasant experience out of my mind. I did not even have to cook anything, having bought a pizza from an Italian takeaway, and I had a bottle of decent Barolo stashed away. I poured a glass, put the pizza on a plate, and sat down with a good appetite at the little table of the type which the English call a “gateleg.”

The plate, part of the minimum student equipment supplied with the room, was of a coarse plain white china. I had eaten several forkfuls when I sensed, rather than saw, something that seemed to flutter just out of sight, and as I turned my head to look for it a small object banged down hard against my plate. I rose up, the fork with food upon it still grasped in my hand, and then, a real horror, the filthy thing flew upwards against my lip and narrowly missed my mouth. I say “filthy thing,” for now I could see as it fell upon the table that it was one of those gross fat creatures that had tormented me a few evenings before. I almost vomited and held my napkin across my mouth. Where had it come from?

The bursar, I was told when I went to the college office next day, was away on holiday. No, there was no one who could deal with a complaint about college property in the meantime. If it recurred, of course I could submit a report in writing...

“We have to try and look at this rationally,” said Monty when we met after this fruitless effort to sort out the nastiness in my room. “Even scientifically. But we’re neither of us scientists, so we have to find one. Someone who knows about insects. There’s a girl I know a bit... well, I’d like to know her better, actually, I met her at a party. But the point is, she studies insects. She can sort out these bugs for us.”

I had no better ideas. I would have difficulty finding another place this late in the summer and besides, the rooms would suit me very well if this infestation could be dealt with and I could be sure of no recurrence.

Bernie (actually Bernadette, Monty explained) had a pale face and thin cheeks with long dark hair pulled up into a rather elegant plait. She seemed to be a more sophisticated person than the openly admiring Monty, who hung on her every word. She had that quality of paying close attention which probably makes a first-rate scientist, and sat at our table in the King’s Arms listening intently. When we had finished, she merely said, “Do you have any specimens?”

We looked at each other. Not only had we not thought to keep any of the disgusting creatures, but I felt rather sick at the idea of doing so.

“There might be one or two left,” offered Monty, clearly anxious that Bernie should not lose interest in our experience.

“Very well, let’s go and see.” I felt that I had to say this, and a strange feeling of hostly obligation overcame me, which I can only attribute to my Greek ancestry, where the courtesies owed by a host to a guest are absolute, even if they must consist in attempting to produce a dead bluebottle for the evening’s entertainment. So we trekked back to my room. I stood at a distance while Bernie, with total composure, raised the lid of the window seat and Monty stood close by, but not, I noticed, really, really close.

“Aha!” said Bernie, her head inside the window seat. “I think there’s one in this corner. Do you have a spoon you don’t want?”

I found a piece of bent college cutlery in a drawer. Bernie scooped into a corner and lifted the spoon up for our scrutiny.

In the bowl lay a large glistening blue fly with huge staring eyes.

“Calliphora vomitoria,” said Bernie triumphantly.

“Vomitoria? Sounds right to me,” I said feebly.

“The common bluebottle. But the interesting thing is, what were the maggots feeding on?”

“Maggots? Those little white things we saw?”

“Exactly, but they have tiny black jaws with hooks for tearing their food — you can see those under a microscope. I could...”

“No, thank you.” I was fearful of an offer. This woman’s enthusiasm for bugs was unstoppable.

“You see,” she continued enthusiastically, “the eggs are usually laid in some decomposing food or dead creature.”

“Exactly what I thought,” said Monty, triumphant at his entomological knowledge.

“When you find them indoors like this,” continued Bernie, “there’ll often be the remains of a rat or a bird that they’ve been feeding on. But I can’t see anything.”

“I’ve cleaned the window seat out,” I said. “I was going to put some books in it.”

Bernie peered in again. “Maybe there’s something left. Oh, I don’t know, it’s so old, this wood, perhaps something’s sunk into it. Have you got a clean envelope? And a knife.”

I was reluctant to offer up any more cutlery, but Monty produced a Swiss Army knife. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised — the English aristocracy probably carry these things from boyhood, very handy for cutting the string on braces of pheasants or getting stones out of polo ponies’ hooves, that sort of thing. Monty was plainly thrilled to be of service.

“Okay. You’ll have to sterilise it afterwards.”

She leaned in again and scraped at the bottom of the window seat. “There’s some dust still here in the corners, I think there’s something... Get me another envelope, would you? Good, I’ll take this lot back to the lab.”

At this point I remembered the scrap of paper I had found stuck between the cracks in the wood at the bottom of the window seat. “There was something at the bottom — look, here it is. Couldn’t make head or tail of it.”

Bernie stared at the crumpled strip, then looked up at me in astonishment. “Do you know what this is?” She began to read out some of the words, “Libellula, ephemera,” and then stopped, got up, and said, “Look, I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon?”

“In the pub?” said Monty, hopefully.

“In the university museum. I’ll show you something interesting.”

“Come on, where’s your fighting spirit?” said Monty after lunch next day.

“Just to see a bunch of old insects?”

“Courage! What about those ancient Greek heroes — aren’t you proud of them? Achilles... and, er, Hector?”

“He was a Trojan,” I said, but I put on my jacket.

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History is one of those great Victorian buildings that one finds in Britain, like the Victoria and Albert, for instance, proud creations and temples to earnest improvement. The Oxford Museum is surprisingly light and airy, with a great glass-house type roof covering the main arcade. There are galleries higher up running around the central hall, where the enormous bones of dinosaurs have been wired together to stand again, and the most famous attraction, part of the last surviving Dodo bird, attracts hordes of children. We left the sound of their chatter below and followed Bernie up a staircase to a long arched gallery with displays of glass cases.

I peered in cautiously. There was no going back. I could hardly turn and flee down the stone staircase and away from all those wings and feelers. I forced myself to march closer to the nearest case.

And jumped back in shock. I was gazing at the biggest cockroach I had ever seen, fully a metre long.

“Just a large-scale model,” said Bernie, and I breathed again. “There’s another interesting cockroach here — a real one. Dead, of course,” she added kindly, as I gazed at a creature with a long brown projection from its... well, it didn’t have a face, not really; a face of nightmares, perhaps. “Macropanesthia rhinoceros. The Rhinoceros Cockroach,” said the label.

“They aren’t...?” began Monty feebly.

“No, don’t worry, this comes from Australia. But turn round and look behind you.”

The Entomology Gallery seemed very narrow: There was no distance at all between me and the glass case opposite the cockroaches. A big label hung over it.

“Diptera,” said Bernie. “That means—”

“Two wings,” I pronounced. “There are some advantages in being half Greek.”

Bernie looked at me with approval.

“Exactly. What you found was a list of some insects, of Diptera, from the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist Linnaeus.”

Monty came in here. “I’ve heard of him, at any rate. He’s famous, surely. Animal, vegetable, mineral. He classsified everything.”

“Yes, and that list is part of his classification for flies. Astonishing creatures, they are — they can move in all directions, upside down, hover, fly backwards. Now have a good look here.”

There was another of those horrible enormous models in the front of the case, this time of a pair of giant eyes, but I tried to avoid their gaze and followed Bernie’s pointing finger to the small creatures in the background.

“Bluebottles,” I said triumphantly, “Calliphora vomitoria,” recognising those loathsome glistening bodies and forcing myself to look at the information displayed neatly alongside the damned things, but what I took in mainly from the text was that, as Bernie had said, the eggs were laid in some moist and rotting matter. There was a photograph of a recently dead nestling, with bare patches of discoloured skin covered with investigating bluebottles.

“The thing is,” said Bernie, “there was nothing inside your window seat for the maggots to feed off. So I was really puzzled about where they came from. And I used the scrapings I took from the wood to carry out some tests. There was some brownish matter. And some wet wood.”

“Yes,” I said, and a horrible idea was forming in my mind.

“It’s quite inexplicable,” said Bernie. “The brownish stuff is blood.”

She seemed to know what the next question would be.

“Yes. Human.”

The words seemed to echo down the Gothic archways.

How old? That was the obvious question forming in my mind, but Bernie said as we walked along the gallery, “Don’t worry, it’s not recent. Can’t tell exactly how old it is without some detailed tests. Come on, we’ve seen the life cycle of the bluebottle. That’s the thing.”

To our right, the cases progressed through various types of Diptera. I was beginning to feel rather bolder about looking at the creatures, even enjoying the sad beauty of some soft and velvety butterflies, long dead.

Then came a tall case with greenery growing up inside it and something furry with a body about the size of my palm lying under dark leaves. It had long legs of a strange pinkish colour.

“It’s a tarantula,” said Bernie encouragingly, and I was peering in, proud of my courage, when I saw the large printed admonition.

PLEASE DO NOT TAP ON THE GLASS

It dawned on me.

“My God, it’s alive!”

At that moment a small boy came up, peered in, saw the creature, and immediately, as if by some small boy’s unerring instinct, tapped on the glass.

The spider rushed forward and reared up its front legs. I saw a nest of small eyes peering out of the hair.

The small boy gave a little shriek and ran away.

“The Salmon-Pink Bird Eater, officially Lasiodora parahybana. This is the third-largest species in the world,” said Bernie with pride. “She’s got a ten-inch leg span. Now, what does that name mean?”

“Well,” I said, wanting to prove a good student but wary of making a fool of myself, “Modern Greek isn’t quite the same as the classical language. But Lasiodora — I think that would mean ‘shaggy skin.’ Parahybana — that I don’t know.”

“Shaggy, hairy, yes, that describes madam here well, don’t you think? Don’t worry about the Parahybana bit,” said Bernie. “That’s just the name of the place in Brazil where the species was found.”

“I’ll just call her Lassie, if you don’t mind,” said Monty.

“They breed well in captivity,” Bernie continued, “but we have to try and keep people from tapping on the glass. Children always want to watch her react — as you saw, she rears up if she’s alarmed.”

Lasiodora parahybana was not the only creature who was alarmed, I thought. But Monty was pondering something else. “What about all those eyes? And Bird Eater, does she really?” he asked.

His thirst for knowledge was proving too much, I thought, horrified at the thought of those thick hairy legs crawling over some poor nestling, but Bernie answered briskly, “She’s got eight eyes, like most spiders. And they don’t usually eat birds — more large insects, frogs, that sort of thing. They can bite, but they’re very unlikely to do much harm to a human being with their fangs.”

The tiny eyes, like black beads, glinted from the depths of the Salmon Pink’s hairy head. “Fangs? They could do it with a look,” I said, and was only partly joking.

I turned away and hurried on beyond the Salmon Pink, the others following me. At the corner of the gallery was a rope closing off a section to the public, but just beyond the rope I could see a painting hanging on the wall. The lighting there was dim, but there was a figure appearing within the frame, and the shape of it, perhaps combined with the nervous aftereffects of the creatures I had been observing, filled me with dread — that angry countenance, the shrunken limbs. I feared it, and my fear was all the greater for not knowing why I did so.

“Who is that?”

Bernie and Monty were obviously startled by the urgency of my question.

“Sir Lucas Carew. An insect collector, famous in his day,” answered Bernie. “He died in about — oh, seventeen fifty, I think. There were some oddities about him, I believe. He was a fellow of your college, as a matter of fact.”

“Oddities?”

She hesitated. “Oh, just stories. You know, passed down through generations of students. I was told about it in my second year.”

“What stories?”

“Well, he left his collection to the college.”

“And?” I felt there must be more.

“The gift was refused. No one ever knew the reason.”

That night I slept badly. At one time, a figure approached me and as it drew slowly closer, shuffling and leaning on a stick, I saw, with the mistiness of a dream, an old man in the dress of some earlier age, with back bent. His small shrivelled face had red and angry cheeks. I was sure that he intended me harm as he crept closer, but awoke with a jerk before he could reach out to me. So real did he seem to me that I forgot for some time that I had seen the portrait of such a being hanging in the university museum.

The next morning, I could think of nothing better than to leave the place. That single fly that had flown into my face as I started to eat my meal — it could be the first of hundreds more. God knew where they might be breeding still. Anywhere must be better than the possibility of facing another swarm of those “Diptera,” and now that I knew more about them, it added to my disgust, rather than, as I suspect Bernie had hoped, detracting from it. Looking back, I realised that I should have made more of a study of them. As Pope said, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” I had learned enough to hate the creatures, yet not enough to respect them. But there was that portrait also. Was it eighteenth-century dress the old man in my dream had been wearing?

“No, don’t think of packing up,” said Bernie, when they called round to see me the next day and Monty nodded his head in agreement. They seemed to be acting pretty much as a duo now. “I want to discover what happened here,” she added. “There may be more to come. They can lay up to six hundred eggs.”

The thought of that great swarm we had witnessed was horrible — surely it could have filled the room. Six hundred maggots, six hundred flies, searching for... But Bernie was talking again. “Perhaps there was some dead creature, after all.” She looked around the window seat and began to examine the panelling carefully.

Bernie was a real scientist, but my aversion was countering her desire for discovery. I would have asked her to put an end to her investigations, but Monty joined in. “Maybe there’s something we haven’t looked at — in the panelling behind the window seat, perhaps.”

I thought of the unpleasant smell that I had been unable to trace. Yes, that would provide a natural explanation for the bluebottles’ appearance.

“All right, where shall we start?” I said. “Can we take out the panelling? We’d never get permission from the college — these must be the genuine oak panels from when the house was built.”

Monty said, “I can do it, take the panelling off and replace it. I’ve done a lot of carpentry.”

“Carpentry? Eton?” I was disbelieving.

“The Dream,” he explained unhelpfully. “Sorry — A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By William Shakespeare, y’know. I joined the theatre society and we had to make all the stage sets ourselves. Trees, the magic wood, the lot.”

“Bottom’s ass’s head?” Bernie was amused.

“Yah, that too. I can borrow some tools from the college maintenance bloke. We’re on good terms.”

The ability of the English aristocracy to thrive in all social circumstances has ceased to astonish me now. At the time, I just gazed at him open-mouthed.

Bernie was more enthusiastic. “Great. Go get them. Would about eight o’clock this evening suit?’ ”

“Certainly.” I was afraid of the night, of another dream in which that vile old man came creeeping up to me. Best get it over with as soon as possible. Get what over with? My fearful thoughts went on whirling round.

It was still light: one of those long English summer evenings when the climate of that fog-bound island suddenly revealed its soft and beautiful self. Small roses were nodding over hedges and fences, and I turned into Holywell Street with reluctance.

Monty produced a green baize cloth in which were wrapped some lethal-looking tools, and began to prise out the panelling constituting the back and sides of the window seat. There seemed nothing but old dust, bits of splintered wood, and the occasional dead spider, which Bernie pounced on momentarily and then discarded. Then Monty turned his attention to the boards at the bottom, where I had already made some explorations and found the strip of paper with Latin script. There were only four or five boards, made of wide planks of oak, still damp with my cleaning efforts. As the first one came up, we could see — Bernie and I were peering over Monty’s shoulder — something grey below. Below lay the planks of the flooring.

“Take care you don’t damage that, whatever it is,” said Bernie. Surprisingly gently, Monty levered out another board, and then another.

Now we could see thick sheets of what looked like stained parchment, folded and fastened down with sealing wax to form an envelope.

Bernie reached over and drew it out with care. “It’s a bit damp,” she said.

“That’s probably from when I washed it out,” I answered.

“It doesn’t seem to be much damaged,” she said and passed it over to me. I laid it on my table and Monty produced his knife. “Don’t tear at it. Cut under the sealing wax,” he said.

Very carefully, I slid the blade under the seal and unfolded the parchment, which was badly stained.

“Good heavens!” said Bernie, and she bent close to study the strange contents that lay exposed on the yellow sheet of thin skin. “I don’t dare to touch them — they’re practically crumbling away as it is.”

“But can you tell what they are?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” she answered. “Here, take a look at this.”

If she was fascinated, I was repelled. There seemed to be a jumble of wings and thready legs which Bernie very gently prodded with the tip of a pencil till they were rearranged into the semblance of insects. These were creatures quite unlike the fat bluebottles that had flown out at me, yet they had a similarity to something I had recently seen. That long body, terminating in an upward curve, a sort of tail.

“We saw some of these in the museum,” I said.

“This is a nasty little cache,” said Bernie softly, as she very gently scooped one of the things up on a sheet of paper to take a better look. “You’re quite right — we did see some of these. Panorpa communis. Scorpionflies.”

“But how on earth did they get in? I understand the bluebottles, they’re everywhere if you give them a chance, but I’ve never seen these before.”

“No, they’re mostly found in warmer climates. Southern hemisphere, or the hotter countries of Europe. I think someone was collecting these and had them brought to Oxford. And maybe more — perhaps he was trying to breed them. Look, there seem to be some dead grubs as well.”

“Scorpionflies?” asked Monty. “Can they sting?”

“No, they were called that because people thought that upturned abdomen looked like a scorpion’s tail. All the same, they have some very nasty feeding habits.”

Very gently, she transferred the crumbling insect bodies to a clean sheet of paper and then, taking up the piece of parchment on which they had lain, she passed it to me. This was in Latin, but I found it quite easy to translate. It did not contain any scientific terms, but seemed to be jottings, made in different shades of ink but in the same hand, so written over the course of some time. I translated it for them.

Paid skipper of the Mary Haven a guinea for the Scorpions, as they call them. He is a robber!

How feed them? Keeping them warm, yes, but what feed them on? Talk to men who have been in those parts.

Fresh! They say it must be fresh!

He understands too much — I caught him reading the other day. Thank the Lord I make all my notes of my secret proceedings in Latin. Must be sure to do so always.

The boy says he is tired of going out for it. He will go to the college and say what I do. My work will be destroyed — there is no doubt the ignorant people here will not let me proceed. I see a solution — how beautifully simple, a true scientific answer to my several problems.

I came to the end of my impromptu translation. “That’s all — best I can do... What do we make of it?”

“If this was the work of old Sir Lucas, he was a member of your college,” said Bernie. “So it’s pretty clear what we have to do. Tomorrow morning?”

I swore to myself that was the last night I would pass in Holywell House. Bernie and Monty left at about eleven o’clock, as the shadows were beginning to gather in the corners of the room. I longed to ask them to stay, but was embarassed to do so. I lay in bed and read for a long time, fancying I heard noises — per-haps a child crying — could that be right? — and eventually drifted into an uncomfortable dream, where Bernie, Monty, and I were walking along a gallery in the university museum and we all stopped in front of a glass case. Then the front of the case cracked wide open and from the darkness within she burst forward in all her many-limbed power, the tarantula Lasiodora parahybana, but vast, monstrously high on her hairy legs, so that the multiple eyes were staring as she scuttled at me.

I woke and found I had entangled myself in the sheet, and was sweating even more than could be caused by the warmth of the heavy summer night. Crossing to the old bathroom, where brass and copper piping lay in dusty convolutions and a huge Gas Geyser darkened one whole corner, I washed my face and neck with cold water. Feeling a little better, I sat down on the rush-seated bathroom chair.

But as I leaned back I saw, reflected in the spotted bathroom mirror a small red and angry face, its mouth open, and below it a pale hand reaching out to grasp me. Around it swarmed a cloud of creatures and then the hovering mass seemed to turn in my direction.

I screamed, leapt up, and dashed the chair against the mirror.

The shattering of the glass brought me to my senses. I was standing in the bathroom, quite alone.

I went back to bed, kept the light on for the rest of the night, and swept up the glass in the morning.

The bursar had returned from her holiday, looking rather more relaxed when we walked into her office, but she seemed to stiffen up as soon as we produced the parchment and the insect remains.

“Holywell House? Yes, we have some documents on the archives, of course. But if I find you other accomodation straight away, Mr., er—”

“Nicolaides,” I said.

“Exactly. If we find you somewhere immediately, need there be any further investigation of this matter? We could simply dispose of the... remains...” She stared down at the mess.

“These are extremely rare scientific specimens,” said Bernie firmly. “If, as the document we found with them would suggest, they were collected by Sir Lucas Carew, that means they are among the earliest examples known of Panorpa communis. The species was first identified by Linnaeus in his seventeen fifty-eight classification.”

The bursar gave a sigh, but she clearly had a respect for Bernie’s scientific knowledge.

“Very well.” She went to the door and called to her assistant in the next room. “Philip, would you bring me the Holywell House documents, please?”

From the bundle of papers she extracted three documents. “These will perhaps give you the background to this business.”

The first was recorded in a careful copperplate, perhaps written by a clerk, and bore the date of the fourth day of August, 1746.

Written down the side of this, in a large and heavy hand, were the words, NIL ACTIO.

“No action! So nothing was done to help Eliza Camber find her Anthony,” said Bernie.

“I’m afraid not,” said the bursar, and her sharp features seemed to soften. “The university did not take much note of the townsfolk in those days. It was pretty much a law unto itself. Poor woman! But there is another document relevant to his disappearance.” This was a letter in a reasonably careful and neat hand, presumably from a literate correspondent, again to the Master of St. Grimbald’s College. The date had this time been inserted, again in a clerkly script so probably in the college office, at the top. “Rec.d ye last day of August, 1746.” The text was clear to read.

“So the house did not belong to the College at that time?” asked Monty, surprised.

For answer, the bursar pushed another document across the desk. This time, it was plainly an official deed, bearing the St. Grimbald’s seal at the bottom and a number of signatures. “A deed of sale,” she said.

“The sale of Holywell House to the college,” I said as I looked through it. “So the college simply bought the house, lock, stock, and barrel. They didn’t even try to do anything to solve the neighbours’ problems or take any action against Carew.”

“I see,” said Monty, with a sigh. “The college bought the property, the landlord went quiet, and the neighbours had to put up with it. But what happened to the boy?”

“We don’t know,” said the bursar. “There is no further record of Anthony Camber. No more mention of his buying meat in the market.”

“And Carew?”

“I can tell you that,” said Bernie. “He died in seventeen forty-seven, the year after this sale. He left his collections to the university. The gift was refused.”

“How did he die?” I wanted to know what had happened to that dreadful old creature of the portrait and surely also of my dreams.

The bursar spread her well-manicured hands in a rare gesture of ignorance. “The college took over the house and the rooms were sealed up. They remained so for a long time. There have been one or two occupants before you, Mr. Nicolaides, but I truly believed that all those stories about the house — well, that they were just stories. I do apologise. We’ll find you other accommodation straightaway.”

“Wow, that’s a first! I’ve never known that woman to apologise,” said Monty as we walked away from the bursar’s office.

“But I can’t understand the essential problem,” I said.

“Calliphora vomitoria? Yes, that is the question, isn’t it?” said Bernie.

“What are you two talking about?” asked Monty.

“My bluebottles. How did they breed in that window seat?” I said. “There was nothing in there for the maggots to feed on — no dead bird or anything. You said something about the scorpionflies. About their unpleasant habits.”

“Yes,” said Bernie. “He was trying to breed them, but there were difficulties. As a matter of fact, the Scorpions, Panorpa communis, are quite useful in forensic medicine. You see, they have quite different feeding habits to Calliphora vomitoria. Unlike the bluebottle maggots, scorpionflies will only feed on fresh meat. As soon as it begins to decay, they will disappear from a cadaver. So in the countries where they breed they can give an idea of how long ago a person died — if they are still on the body, death has been very recent.”

Light was dawning. “He sent the boy every day to the market for fresh meat. And then even the butchers refused to let him have any more. But he was trying to breed the scorpions so he needed fresh food for them. And there was indeed a very simple solution.”

I gazed at the window seat. “A twelve-year-old boy would have been quite small... and we have found some scorpions there.”

There was a pause as we tried, or rather perhaps tried not, to visualise the body of a child folded up into that cruel box under the windows.

“It’s surely not possible!” exclaimed Monty. “I mean, we seem to have solved an eighteenth-century murder, but there is another conundrum. It’s surely not possible that the bluebottles should still have been able to breed there after two and a half centuries! It would all have been dried up long ago.”

“There is a scientific possibility. I have a theory,” said Bernie. “When you washed the wood inside the window seat, the water soaked into the dried blood. The resulting compound may have attracted a single fly to lay eggs and then provided sufficient — well, nourishment, shall we say? — for the maggots to feed and eventually become bluebottles.”

That was the rational science-based thinking of Lady Bernadette Penderfrith Chalmers-Pallanby, as she now is, having been initially attracted to Monty’s stately home by its remarkable infestation of death-watch beetles.

I have a different notion, perhaps deriving from the Greek side of my nature. My idea is, I am sure, quite unscientific. I recall the tarantula in the museum, crouching motionless yet suddenly alert when a child tapped on the glass of its enclosure. From which I conclude that certain things are safely sealed within the past, as if in a museum case — and in those rooms in Holywell House, I had, like that child, somehow tapped on the glass and provoked some nasty piece of history into springing into life. One must be very, very careful with the past.