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Subject: A Cantabrian Operetta Chapter 14 This story is a work of fiction and only contains characters who are entirely fictitious. You’re not in here, and neither is anybody else you know. I wrote it – I should know. The action of this story takes place early in the 21st century. I have not attended any of the august places of learning mentioned in the text, and the details of those places are accurate only geographically. The fact that a crime takes place in one of them is no reflection on the integrity of that institution. I repeat – work of fiction.It is just possible that activities of a sexual nature may take place, and some of that may be cross generational. There is NO pornography. Look elsewhere for that. If you wish to provide feedback I can be contacted at lfa4321jonah@outlook and please bear in mind that you don’t pay to read these stories, but it does cost Nifty money to provide them. Please consider donating to Nifty fty/donate.html A Cantabrian Operetta. by Jonah Chapter 14. Recit and duet. It was not a bad night. Dinner was excellent. Many of the Yeomen cast stopped by our table to congratulate Oliver on his musicianship. It seemed that he had become a familiar face about the college, and nobody questioned his being there. We had come to regard the Professor’s lodgings as home, and it was good to be back there. A last discussion on what we knew and what we needed to know took us to shower-time and finally, bedtime. Yes, it was good to be wrapped up on the sofa with Oliver, and we both found ourselves hugging each others legs. Since I got to the sofa first, that was probably a defence against falling off. Whatever – I didn’t mind. Again there was some play during the night. Neither of us minded, and neither of us was going to be irresponsible. The discovery that Oliver was cleverer than I thought he was, led me to believe that he was smart enough not to be taken advantage of – not that I would have done so, but it was one less thing to worry about. We both knew how far we could go. In spite of all this, I slept well and, again, he was up and showered and dressed before I awakened. Not only that but the Professor was up and about before I awakened. Once more he had been out to fetch his newspaper. “I have Mr. Blunt for tutorial this morning,” he told us. “He is also doing the end of the Plantagenents, but is as anti-riccardian as it is possible to be. I think a joint discussion might be advantageous, if he has no objection.” “I don’t think you’ll convert him,” I said. “I can give him reason,” he replied. “If he can give reason for reason, well and good. If he can only give dogma, that will be too bad.” “You mean to see if he can convert you?” I queried. “I’d be more interested in seeing if he can convert you,” he replied. There was a knock on the door. “He’s early,” said the Professor. “Must be keen.” But it was not Derek. It was Detectives Tremble and Grant. “Good morning all, ” said the inspector. “I shan’t take up much of your time, but now that we know about Mr. Duncan, I need to check that he’s OK. I shall need to interview him at some stage.” “That’s understood inspector,” said the Professor. “You’d probably best take care of that.” He handed the inspector Oliver’s list. “Is this what I think it is?” the inspector asked. “I asked him to write it yesterday. Of course, he can’t know that all those are the clients real names, and two of them are dead. You also can’t arrest everybody on that list, because they didn’t all have sex with him.” “I’d like to know which ones did,” he observed. “I’ll bet you would,” replied the Professor. “Are you happy with being here Oliver?” the inspector asked. The boy, with his mouth full of Corn Flakes, nodded vigorously, but said not a word. “It’s probably the safest place for you. Try not to go out too much. I’m sure we’ll be able to wrap this case up in a few days.” “Has there been some progress then Inspector,” the Professor wanted to know. “Everything that happens is progress. Oliver coming escort bayan to you is progress. You finally yielding this list is progress.” The Professor let that one go and showed the officers out. Breakfast was porridge and Derek turned up just as we cleared away and put the kettle on. He was happy for Oliver and I to stay so the Professor asked him to open the proceedings. “I don’t know why I even have to defend this. I’m only saying what eminent historians have been saying for centuries,” he began. “And are you an eminent historian Mr. Blunt?” the Professor said. “Not yet,” replied Derek. “Then what gives you the right to say what you say you are saying? Those historians had the right to state what were, after all, their own thoughts, but you can’t claim ownership of them.” “Are you saying that I can’t use their arguments?” “You haven’t even attempted to do so. You just stated that they made arguments. You tell me that you don’t know why you have to defend their arguments. Well, if you don’t even know that Mr. Blunt, what are you doing at university?” “Now you’re saying that I shouldn’t be here unless I believe as you do.” The Professor raised his eyebrows and in shocked tones said, “Do you not believe as I do Mr. Blunt? Well, well! Why didn’t you say so? Why don’t you tell me what you believe?” “Well, I believe Richard III murdered his way to the throne, and then murdered to keep it. Finally Henry Tudor freed his people from his oppression.” “And you have evidence to support that?” “A lot of very well-known historians…” “I’ve read them. Have you anything that isn’t hearsay ?” “It was in 1483, so you can’t produce evidence either.” “Good, finally a statement from Derek Blunt instead of some dead historian.” “Well it’s a fact that Richard had persuaded Edward IV to murder the Duke of Clarence.” “Who says so?” “Thomas More, a particularly eminent historian.” “Very eminent indeed. An infant prodigy in fact. He was two years old, but he probably remembered the events in the King’s bedchamber well in later life. He didn’t say anything of the sort however. He only hinted that there was speculation of that sort at the time. That’s understandable. You only have to recall the things the Duke of Edinburrgh used to mutter about the Palace concerning the late Princess of Wales.” Derek smiled. “I really couldn’t say. I was a bit young at the time and didn’t frequent Buckingham Palace.” “You were more than two years old, and the two-year-old More didn’t frequent the Tower of London either.” “You’re making fun of me Professor.” “No Mr. Blunt. I’m trying to persuade you to tell me what you think, rather than what you’ve read. I’m also trying hard not to tell you what I think. I know it disagrees with what you’ve read, but it probably disagrees with what I’ve read too. You haven’t produced a great deal of evidence that you’ve thought about it at all, except to try to form opinions. Those opinions are laudable, if they’re based on what you genuinely believe to be facts. If they are based on what you’ve chosen to believe are facts because it saves you the trouble of arguing with them, then that’s tough. You’ve come here to learn to use your brain, not how to avoid having to do so. That means arguing. You’ve got to learn to use your brain to do that, because that is what this university will award a degree for. You need to learn how to argue. If you won’t argue with the so called ’eminent historians’ whose writings you profess to know so well, you’re going to have to argue with me, but be aware that for argument I will accept only argument. protesations that you shouldn’t have to argue will cut no ice. The words “common knowledge” or “established fact” hold no weight at all. Do you understand me?” “I think so Professor. Then you’d rather I didn’t read the works of Tudor historians?” “Read what you like. I persuaded young Cummings there to read a work of fiction that I despise. You should read it too, but not at the moment, because you need to learn how argument kocaeli escort bayan works. For a start you can’t immunise yourself against logic. If it is perfect, it will always come up with the right answer. If you happen to think that’s the wrong answer, it won’t oblige by coming up with a different one. You’d have to use flawed logic to achieve that. Always test your logic to make sure it isn’t flawed. If in doubt, play the Devil’s advocate. Now, if you apply that to history, you’ll find that most of what you were taught at school is either impossible or, at the very least, highly improbable.” Oliver and I took very little part in the discourse. The Professor in full flow can’t be stopped and, what is more, you find that you don’t want to stop him. When his hour and a half was up, Derek joined Oliver and I in rehearsing for the show. Nobody mentioned that Oliver, the Professor and I, were hiding from a murderer (who could have been Derek, for aught we knew to the contrary). In fairness, only one of us was actively hiding. The Professor and I were actively chancing the wrath of the murderer, whilst insisting that Oliver didn’t. It wasn’t difficult to understand why the poor lad got frustrated. The departure of Derek brought me back to the topic I wanted to get around to. “So we’ve just discovered that Dovedale had made an appointment with his murderer. We know that he did that often enough to have devised a code to do it. We know that He owned a flat where he met gays, including Oliver and took photos, which could be subsequently used to blackmail them. We know that Terry Wright was one of those people, and that he was murdered by somebody who had access to Terry’s rooms. We know that whoever murdered Terry didn’t know which room was his. Those last two facts seem to be mutually exclusive, by the way.” The Professor held up his hand. “I hope you’re a better historian than detective,” he said. “You seem to ‘know’ a lot of things that you only assume. We only know that Dovedale made an appointment with somebody. If he had added the words, ‘and then you can murder me’, we’d have had cause to believe it was his murderer, but he didn’t so we can’t. We know that he devised a code for some purpose, but there’s no evidence that it was always used to arrange rendezvous. Your next ‘fact’ is only correct because you used the words ‘could be’. There’s no evidence that he ever blackmailed anybody. We know that the murderer had acccess to Terry’s possessions, or one of them. We don’t know that he had been in his room or that he still had access, and you said yourself that Terry’s body could have been deliberately dumped in your room.” “So what do we have?” I asked, somewhat deflated. “We have a lot of probabilities. You listed them as facts, but we haven’t established them as such. Surely the next thing to do is to establish some of them. Did Dovedale actually blackmail anybody. We know he didn’t blackmail you, or Oliver or Terry, at least not for money. He did use his influence to make Oliver, and Terry, do things. What about the other people on the list? Who had access to Terry’s rooms, and who else had visited him on an occasional, or one-off, basis? Who regularly visited Dovedale? That could be a hard one because they may have usually visited him at his flat.” “It’s all very well to say that we have to establish the facts,” I pointed out, “but actually doing it might not be so simple. We don’t automatically have the right to interrogate people that the police do.” “They don’t automatically have it,” he replied. “There are rules they have to follow. They also have uniforms that remind people that they have to be careful how they answer. In many cases they’d tell us more than they would the police. That’s why Oliver’s here, and not at the police station.” I thought about it, and realized that was true. Terry had been in police custody, but had not mentioned Auckland Road to them. In retrospect, neither had we. If the murderer was getting kocaeli escort information somehow via the police, he could not have learned about Oliver that way. It was possible that he had met Oliver at the flat, but unlikely. In that case, until I had brought Oliver back to the college, he had been in no danger. That was a sobering thought, and one that had not occurred to Oliver. “Not all policemen wear uniforms,” I said. “Most of them do.” he said. “The CID mostly don’t, but they’ve sent uniformed officers round here to gather evidence for them nearly as often as they’ve come themselves.” That was true, and another advantage for the police. I wished I’d had somebody else to send on my fool’s errand to the Evening News. A sudden thought struck me. “Oliver,” I said, “where did you meet Terry Wright?” “We met down King Street. Dovedale forced us to do things for him to photograph.” “And why was Professor Palmer on your list?” “Same thing.” “So you did actually have sex with everybody on that list?” “Not everybody. Some of the shots were just posed. Dovedale made us do things for the camera, but it stopped as soon as the shutter had clicked.” “Well that decides our next job,” said the Professor. “It’d be nice to see the rest of those photos – no, I didn’t mean it like that,” he added, seeing my grin. ” It seems strange that we’ve found Terry’s photos, but all these others must be around somewhere. It also seems that I’d better have a word with Professor Palmer, but you’d better stay with Oliver while I do it.” For some reason, spending the rest of the afternoon with Oliver didn’t seem as much fun as usual. All right, so my feelings of guilt at exposing him to danger had evaporated with the discovery that he most likely did meet the murderer down King Street. Oliver just seemed a different person, now that I knew that so many people had been forced to have simulated sex with him. I concealed my feelings as well as I could, but it didn’t work. “You don’t like me any more, now that you know what I’ve done,” he said pointedly. “No, it’s not that,” I lied. “It’s not even as if I wanted to. My dad would have chucked me out.” “He has anyway.” “What’s that got to do with it?” “You hadn’t done anything for him to chuck you out for, until Dovedale ‘made’ you do it.” “Huh! You don’t know Dovedale.” Suddenly I realised that I did. What he had just said was untrue. I certainly did know Dovedale. I had failed to ask myself the questions that I was asking him. I thought. What did I know about Dovedale. Yes, what Oliver said was true. He could manipulate somebody so that their best course of action would seem their worst and vice versa. What is more, he was a malicious enough person to want to do it. Probably his greatest regret, as he pulled out the knife, would be that he hadn’t lived long enough to see Oliver disowned by his parents. He would have wanted, at some stage, to see Professor Palmer sacked from his job, probably never to work again. Of course his ‘Christmas card’ was meant to get me kicked out of my family home. Dennis Dovedale only lived to deliberately screw up other people’s lives. He had screwed up the murderer’s too, but only if he could ensure that the man was caught. Dennis would have known that the man would be desperate enough to kill. I doubt if he really intended to be the first victim ( though he was enough of an attention-seeker to do that), but he would certainly want to see the man go down. I bet he wished we still had the death penalty. He would probably want to see the man wriggle a bit, as he struggled to avoid detection. If he needed to kill again to do that, so much the better. Now that was worrying. The Professor was in greater danger than any of us had realised. TO BE CONTINUED If you’ve enjoyed this story you’d probably enjoy other stories by the same author, also on Adult/Youth. “Immigrant”, “Marooned”, “Letter from America”, ” Stranger on a train” and “The Boston Tea Party” are all by this author, as is, “The Pen-Pals” (on Young Friends). You would also probably like “A Neglected Boy” by Jacob Lion. Pictures of some of the characters in this story can be found on Jacob’s bly/jonah-stories.html My thanks go to Jacob for his generosity and hard work in making this available.

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