“So,” Peter said, “what do you want to know? About all the things Marta said? I don’t know where to start.”
“At the moment,” Danny Kelly said, “I think we’d like to know the more basic things. Who the victim was, for instance.”
“Oh.” Peter Makepeace looked as if he were radically adjusting expectations he hadn’t realized he had. “Her name was Edith Braxner, Edith Delshort Braxner. She was married once, I think, when she was very young. She didn’t talk about it. She taught languages, French and German. She was head of the Language Department.”
“Had she been here long?” Danny asked.
“Longer than I have,” Peter said. “She’s one of our stalwarts, and one of the few to have lasted long after the school’s mission changed. This used to be a girls’ school, and a very traditional one in many ways. When the school decided to admit boys, they also decided to make some changes to the educational philosophy. Many of the teachers who had been here under the original ethos had a hard time adjusting. The headmistress at the time lasted less than a year.”
“And you replaced her?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Peter Makepeace said. “I’ve only been here eight years. This was back in the early 1980s. Edith must have been close to retirement age. I should know that, but for some reason I don’t.”
“But you know she’d adjusted to the new, ah, mission,” Danny said.
“Not exactly,” Peter said. “Edith was an odd woman out, in many ways, but she was an excellent teacher, and she made it possible for us to offer German in a very small school. Students didn’t call her Edith though. They called her Dr. Braxner.”
“Doctor?” Gregor said.
“Yes. Yes, she had a doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard. She got it in the days when women found it very difficult to get faculty places at colleges and universities, except at the women’s colleges. I don’t know why she didn’t try for one of those. Or perhaps she did and still met with prejudice. There was quite a bit. For whatever reason she came here. I can’t believe I’m talking about her in the past tense.”
Gregor thought that there came a time when you had to talk about everybody in the past tense, except when you could no longer talk at all, and other people referred to you that way. He asked, “Was there any family? I take it she lived alone.”
“She lived alone and on campus,” Peter said. “As for family, I think there’s a married sister somewhere. Edith used to visit her in the summers for a week before taking a group of students to Germany to study. A number of our teachers run these little summer sessions. It provides the students with enrichment they wouldn’t be able to get otherwise, and it provides the teachers with a means of traveling, which they otherwise couldn’t afford.”
“Do you know if she was having a dispute of any kind with anyone?” Danny Kelly asked. “Was she involved in litigation, or were there bad feelings between herself and any other faculty member?”
“Do you mean, did she have any enemies?” Peter smiled faintly. “That always sounds so unrealistic to me. Do people have enemies in that sense in this day and age?”
“Some of them do,” Danny said. “What we need to know is if Edith Braxner did.”
“Not that I know of,” Peter said. “I won’t say there were never any frictions between members of the faculty, or between members of the faculty and students, because therewere. It’s a matter of degree. I don’t think a teacher would kill another teacher over a dispute about which textbook to adopt in a freshman course or whether to offer Art History as a lecture course or a seminar.”
“And were there disputes like that?” Danny asked. “Was Edith Braxner involved in them?”
“I don’t know,” Peter Makepeace said.
Gregor tried another tack. “When I saw her for the first time,” he said, “she was standing in a little nook at the end of a catwalk that ran along one side above the main reading room of the library. There are apparently two catwalks and two nooks.”
“That’s right,” Peter said. “They’re not really completely safe. I knew that. They’re narrow, for one thing, and the railings are too low. We’ve been warned by the insurance company more than once, and we did intend to do something about them. I hope she didn’t die from that. I hope she didn’t die from the fall.”
Gregor was convinced she hadn’t died from the fall. “I was going up to that catwalk because Mark DeAvecca told me that he had been there, in the nook, on the night Michael Feyre died. He had looked out of the window in that nook and seen something that disturbed him near something called Maverick Pond. Could Edith Braxner have been looking for the same thing?”