Crucible by S. G. MacLean Page A

a little surprised to hear of Sim’s recent night-time wanderings, but he had been long enough in the world not to be shocked by them.
    ‘It was a lonely life he led. It may be that he had found some comfort or companionship at the end of it. You will be discreet in your enquiries? It cannot harm him now, buthe was a good man, and I would not see his name maligned.’ I assured him I would, although with regard to the change in Robert’s nocturnal habits, I did not see how I was to proceed further, discreetly or otherwise.
    ‘As to the matter of the books he was taking out of the library, only Robert himself would have been able to tell us what they were. I wonder at him having Dr Liddel’s Bible in German, though, for he did not have the language, you know.’
    ‘Perhaps he was learning it.’
    ‘Perhaps so. It is a pity he had not come to me. I lived so long in Germany that I still wake up some mornings thinking in that tongue.’ He sighed. ‘That is the register you have with you?’
    ‘That is my task for this afternoon – questioning those who were in the library yesterday.’
    ‘Good,’ he said, and looked as though he would move on, but he evidently sensed my hesitation. ‘There is something else, Alexander?’
    ‘The Trades’ Benefaction Book: I cannot find it.’
    He opened a drawer in his desk. ‘I judged it best to keep it safe, here. The trade guilds do not like their business to be known, and there is much of their business in these pages.’ He opened the ledger at the Coopers’ page and showed me. ‘Each of the larger guilds has its own account, detailing its payment for the support of scholars here or in the grammar school, who have a call through kinship on the charity of their craft.’
    I knew that already. It was the only way that many an orphaned son of a craftsman had any hope of an education.
    ‘But here,’ continued the principal, drawing my attention to the fine detail of the accounts, ‘you see the contributions of individual members – the amount and frequency of their payments, whether and for how long they have fallen into arrears, the extent of any procedures begun against them. There are names on this list that might surprise you, and not all of these people would be happy for their laxity in payment – their fall in standing within their craft – to be noised abroad.’
    ‘But it is hardly cause for murder,’ I said. ‘And anyway, surely there are other ways that a craftsman’s financial affairs can be brought to public scrutiny.’
    ‘Several,’ agreed Dun. ‘All the same, take care where you keep this book.’ He closed the volume and handed it to me. ‘But now,’ he said getting up heavily from behind his desk, ‘while you look into the business of the dead, there are matters of the living I must attend to: Matthew Jack beat the boys too hard this morning, far too hard.’
    It had not taken me long to track down the three students whose names were written in the library register for Saturday, and I had them brought to me at the library from their classes, one at a time, in the afternoon.
    The first two boys had very little of interest to tell me. They had been in the library from nine in the morninguntil eleven. The only other reader to come in during that time had been a regent from the King’s College. He had still been there when they left. They were not sure of his name. But I was; it was there in front of me in Robert’s hand in the register. That would be a more awkward matter, and one I had put off until the evening. Robert Sim, they told me, had been no different from any other time they had been in the library: courteous, but not given to personal exchanges or pleasantries. Each one looked mightily relieved as I thanked him for his help and dismissed him back to his class.
    The final name in the register, other than my own, was that of Adam Ingram, the sleepy scholar whom I had finally released from his labours over Aristotle to go and join the