Cambridge Noir

Once you’ve dipped a body in concrete, Cambridge offers a suprising number of places to conceal it.

As heads bent in hurried conclave by the window, hands scrabbling through the papers on the desk, no one thought to search the stroller in the Senior Combination Room.

A key feature of humility being, naturally, the urge to profess it in carved stone.

With only the light of iniquity to guide me, little wonder so many of my inquiries finished in dead ends.

There’s no trusting academics. In a cloistered community where plagiarism is the gravest crime, murder is simply a misdemeanour.

(The gumshoe is on hiatus. This casenote was first taken on 7 September 2012.)

The eerie quiet of the college court was broken only by a clock striking the quarter hour.

(The gumshoe is on hiatus. This casenote was first taken on 31 August 2012.)

I’d finally found the hidden sanctum of the Potsherd Club, the archaeological elite of Cambridge. These were hard men and women. Hard men and women with tiny trowels and brushes.

(The gumshoe is on hiatus. This casenote was first taken on 27 June 2012.)

The sense of being held beneath the deadened, stony gaze of some Olympian elder is known by the library visitors, petty thieves and graduate students of Cambridge alike.

(The gumshoe is on hiatus. This casenote was first taken on 17 July 2012.)

The lane was long and the walls high. I reflected uncomfortably that if the women’s first boat started sniping, the bicycles would provide scant cover …

(The gumshoe is on hiatus. This casenote was first taken on 24 May 2012.)

“No, not much mail,” said the Dean, “but then, the Porters have gotten quite good at sifting out the death threats.”

(The gumshoe is on hiatus. This casenote was first taken on 15 May 2012.)

A delicate, intricate trap with one narrow window for escape. The college gates were something of a metaphor for graduate degrees …

(The gumshoe is on hiatus. This casenote was first taken on 9 May 2012.)

They knew they were walking towards their final exam, what they did not realise was how very final it might be …

(The gumshoe is on hiatus. This casenote was first taken on 30 April 2012.)

Everyone was being as cold, slippery and guarded as a College gate on a snowy evening …

The College’s gothic façade loomed into sight: sinister as Miss Haversham’s wedding cake, though in considerably better repair.

The New Year shuffled into Cambridge with the disaffected air of someone presented with an old bill and unfairly high expectations that it would be paid.