An incompetent small-town Australian police chief (Royle) visits the lodgings of a headmaster suspected of murder (Doncaster):
“It was a gentleman-scholar’s room: photographs of cricket teams, school groups, and a smart army photograph with a rather artificially grim expression. On the wall a college shield, and a cricket bat signed by one of the school’s dimmest past students, who had gone on to play for the state and become a Country Party politician. The bookshelves were full of books, old, dirty, and looking very thumbed. Royle idly wondered whether the thumbs that had thumbed them had been Doncaster’s thumbs, or if they had been picked up cheap in a second-hand bookshop. He’d never actually seen Doncaster reading, and unless he actually saw people reading, Royle was inclined to suspect that they never did, since he had no time whatsoever for the occupation himself.”
(Robert Barnard, Death of an Old Goat, 1979, XI)
