Spotted Hemlock

chapter sixteen

A Confusion of Students

‘These were our recreations; other labours abridged the hours, which sometimes seemed very long.’

Ibid.

« ^ »

Dame Beatrice gave considerable thought to the problem of balancing the gain to the enquiry against the possible harm to the college of her next step, and decided that the step must be taken.

She paid another visit to the college to put her proposals before Miss McKay. The Principal, deeply shocked and horrified by Dame Beatrice’s revelations and inferences, nevertheless agreed without reluctance to all the suggestions made to her and promised to make the necessary arrangements.

These involved a visit to the college cellars, an interview with the men in charge of the boiler-room and a visit to the hostel in which Mrs Coles had been resident. The chief caretaker, a man of melancholy aspect, accompanied her to the cellars. These were deep and vast and were reached by a door next to what had once been the butler’s pantry when the house had been privately owned. The cellars followed the plan of the ground-floor rooms, but only one, that at the foot of the steps they descended, was in use and was electrically lighted. The floor had been concreted and the room was shut off from the rest of the subterranean chambers by a steel door.

‘It’s the rats,’ said the caretaker, who had no inkling of the purpose of the visit. ‘Miss McKay puts her trunk down here, as you can see, and so do some of the lecturers what lives in the college itself. ’Ostels makes their own arrangements for the dishposal of students’ ’eavy baggage.’

‘I see. Is that steel door kept locked?’

‘Why, no. Rats can’t push open a door what’s closed.’

‘Don’t the rats become ravenously hungry? There’s nothing to eat, is there, in the cellars beyond this one?’

The caretaker wagged his head.

‘My perdecer,’ he said, ‘ ’e ’ad the idea to keep all the artificial fancy manures down ’ere. My oath! Them rats must of ’ad a good time! Hop manure, now! If they eat one sack, they must of eat ’undreds! It got ’em in, you see, and now we can’t get ’em out. So we ’as this steel door put in, what they can’t gnaw their way through, and we puts down concrete and reinforces the walls, and leaves ’em in outer darkness. Bless you, they uses the cellars now as an ’ome and gets their provender from the veg. the young ladies grows ’ere. Rats! Don’t talk to me about rats! If you wants my opinion, the Pied Piper of ’Am’lin didn’t ’ave nothink on us when it comes to rats.’

‘I take it you do not come from these parts, Mr Potts?’

‘I comes from ’Appy ’Ampstead on the ’Eath, and that’s where I’m goin’ to be buried.’

‘Do we risk the rats and see what is on the other side of that door?’

‘Preferably not. I don’t want rats in ’ere. Although, that’s a funny thing. I comes down one time and finds rat-dirts all over the place. Couldn’t account for it nowhow. Carn’t see ’ow they could get through the steel door.’

‘It must have been opened.’

‘But who’d open it? I thought of that meself. But who’d bother to come down ’ere? Not the young ladies, I promise you.’

‘All the same, you say that the door is not locked. We shall now return to the ground floor. It would tax your memory too heavily, I imagine, if I asked you to tell me when you saw the rat-dirts in here?’

‘That it wouldn’t. It was midway through third week of this term.’

Dame Beatrice knew better than to question the memories of the semi-literate. She accepted their evidence at its face value. She and the caretaker returned to the ground floor and when they were half-way back to Miss McKay’s sitting-room she asked where the boiler-room was. The caretaker looked somewhat disgusted, and told her that they would need to go into the new wing to find that. She replied immediately that she was not interested if that was the case, and returned to Miss McKay, who had promised to accompany her to Miss Paterson’s hostel.

The head of the hostel, as it happened, was neither lecturing nor demonstrating, and they were shown into her sitting-room where she sat correcting a pile of written work and, at the same time, nursing a large pet rabbit.

‘Dame Beatrice wants to talk to you, Miss Paterson,’ said Miss McKay, ‘about the Palliser girl. Some extremely disturbing circumstances have come to light. After you have heard what she has to disclose, she may need to question some of your students.’

Miss Paterson rang the bell, handed the rabbit to the maid, drew up two armchairs for her guests, and put more coal on the fire.

‘I’m not staying,’ said Miss McKay. ‘Ring me if you need to.’ Upon this, she departed.

‘The murderer has been located, then?’ asked Miss Paterson, taking the armchair she had drawn up for the Principal. ‘Jolly good thing, too.’

‘He or she has not been located, so far as my information goes. What we seem to have located is the cellar in which the body was hidden before it was conveyed to the old coach at the inn near Highpepper Hall,’ replied Dame Beatrice.

‘Really? Not—Oh, good gracious me! Not the college cellar?’

‘It seems more than likely. At any rate, as soon as I have finished here, I am going to telephone the police to that effect. They can brave the rats in the inner cellar to find clues. Now, you had a better opportunity of studying Mrs Coles than any other lecturer or tutor here. In your opinion, what kind of person was she?’

‘Extremely reserved and not very sociable. She appeared to have no very close friends, but then, of course, if she had secretly married and wanted to keep it dark, she was wiser not to make close friendships here.’

‘She had confided in one of the students, though—a girl with whom she’d been at school, I believe.’

‘Oh, yes, Miss Bellman. They came up together and asked to be housed in the same hostel.’

‘I shall have to talk to Miss Bellman again. Then there is Miss Good.’

‘She’s not one of mine.’

‘No. I must seek her in Miss Considine’s house. What is the rule about visitors here?’

‘Students’ visitors?’

‘Yes. Is it ever possible, for example, for the college to put them up?’

‘Oh, yes, if there is any special reason.’

‘What sort of circumstances would furnish a special reason?’

‘At half-term, when most of the students take a long weekend, it is possible for a girl staying up to have a sister or friend to spend the weekend here to keep her company or to use the college as a base from which to go sightseeing.’

‘I was not thinking of holiday times.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, during term we can accommodate very few visitors. In fact, we don’t encourage them at all, except for tea on Saturdays and Sundays, and then they are expected not to arrive before three and to leave before eight.’

‘How many visitors could you accommodate here at any one time, apart from during half-term?’

‘Two only, unless any students have taken a weekend pass. I have two rooms with twin beds. College rules allow each student a room to herself because she has to use it for study as well as for sleep, so, you see, it would be possible for those two extra beds to go to visitors.’

‘Have you so allotted them at any time during this term?’

‘No, I have not been asked to do so.’

‘Suppose that a student in another hostel, or living in the students’ wing of the main college building, wanted to have a visitor for the weekend who could not be accommodated there, would it be possible for an exchange of rooms to be made?’

‘I should strongly oppose such an arrangement. In fact, unless Miss McKay made a personal approach to me over such an exchange, I certainly shouldn’t sanction it. The students get quite enough distraction here without dodging about from hostel to hostel, swapping beds.’ She grinned disarmingly.

‘I certainly sympathise with your point of view,’ said Dame Beatrice, returning the grin with an alligator leer which appeared to startle her companion.

‘Of course,’ Miss Paterson added, ‘what the students can contrive by means of private arrangements among themselves is another matter entirely.’

‘Ah!’ said Dame Beatrice, with a wealth of satisfaction in her tone. ‘May I have a word with Miss Bellman?’

‘Certainly, so far as I’m concerned. The trouble may be to find out where she is and what she’s doing, and it may be something that she can’t stop doing until she’s through with it. You know what this place is like! I’ll ring through to the secretary’s office and find out which group she’s in, and then the big time-table outside the Principal’s room will show where she’s most likely to be, or, at least, who’s supposed to be in charge of her.’

It turned out that Miss Bellman was in Private Study, which was (or should have been), by interpretation, in the library. She was not to be found there. This did not appear to cause Miss Paterson the least degree of surprise.

‘The little cormorants spend all their private study periods at the buffet counter,’ she explained. ‘I should have been surprised if we had found her in here. Still, one was bound to try. Come along. I could do with a coffee and doughnut myself. It’s astonishing how hungry one gets. It’s the very good air about these parts, I suppose. And the students do a great deal of really tough physical work, of course.’

The buffet counter was at one end of the college dining-room and was thronged with students, some of whom looked guilty, some smug (those who had a Free, Miss Paterson explained), some slightly defiant. They made way for the lecturer and her visitor, and Miss Paterson ordered coffee and doughnuts and then arrested the flight of Miss Bellman with a peremptory announcement that Dame Beatrice would like to speak to her and that she was to bring ‘that revolting repast’ to one of the dining tables so that they could obtain a little privacy away from the other students.

Miss Bellman, bearing two Cornish pasties and two cakes lavishly decorated with synthetic cream, followed her hostel head to a table and returned for a jug of cocoa and a large china mug.

‘For heaven’s sake, don’t stop eating,’ said Miss Paterson, herself dunking a doughnut, ‘and do try to answer Dame Beatrice intelligently. Now, Dame Beatrice.’

‘I think,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘that Miss Bellman might prefer that my questions be put and replied to in private. Let us all refresh ourselves, and then, perhaps…’

‘Oh, I see. Yes. All right, Bellman. Rejoin the herd and then, by the time you get back here, I shall be gone.’

Miss Bellman, with a grateful glance at Dame Beatrice, made her two journeys back to the buffet counter with her provender, and Dame Beatrice, refusing sustenance in the form of the doughnuts, sipped coffee and listened to Miss Paterson’s comments on the mentality of students past and present whilst the lecturer disposed of two doughnuts and left the others ‘for Bellman, who’ll be sure to be able to gobble them up, however much food she’s had already.’

She had scarcely vanished through the swing doors when Miss Bellman, who, Dame Beatrice decided, must have been watching for this exit, came up to the table. Dame Beatrice presented her with the doughnuts.

‘You know P. G. Wodehouse,’ said Miss Bellman, seating herself and seizing one of the gifts. ‘Well, when he talks about starving pythons, it’s really nothing to what we get like in this place. Myself, I think we’re overworked and it’s nature’s way of ensuring that we don’t drop down dead. I never eat like this at home. Did you want to talk about Norah?’

‘Yes, of course. Miss Bellman, what sort of person was she? I know you’ve been asked this before, but is there anything you can add, I wonder?’

‘I’d call her the lone wolf type.’

‘Both lone and wolf?’

‘Eh? Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, I think she was a bit predatory. This boy Coles, you know. I bet, if you could find out the truth, that she married him, if you see what I mean. Otherwise, why an art student with no money? He can’t be much of a catch.’

‘How well did you know her?’

‘Well, we were at school together, and when we both planned to come here she suggested we tried to get into the same hostel. I wanted to be in the main building, but she wouldn’t hear of that. She said we’d be so much more independent in a hostel, and that she’d heard there was more chance of getting weekend passes and late leaves if you weren’t directly under the Prin.’s eye. So I gave way. You could have blown me over when she told me she was married. She never, in the ordinary way, told anybody anything. Of course, she swore me to secrecy and, as I couldn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t promise, I did. If I’d blabbed, it would have been all over the college grape-vine in no time, and the lecturers would have been bound to get wind of it. I don’t suppose the Prin. would have minded, in a way, but, of course, she’d have been bound to keep an eye on Coles to make sure her work wasn’t suffering, and that sort of thing’s such a bind! So I kept it to myself until, well, it sort of had to come out after we knew about the murder.’

‘Did her sister ever visit her in college?’

Miss Bellman, who had a mouthful of doughnut, choked.

‘No. I had heard at school that she’d got an older sister, but it seemed there’d been trouble at home and she never mentioned her after we got here,’ she said, as soon as she could utter.

‘Come, Miss Bellman! You know better than that! Please be frank.’

‘I can guess what you’re going to ask me, and there’s nothing I can tell you,’ said the student, very red in the face.

‘I see. Very well, Miss Bellman. I respect your loyalty, although I deplore your reticence—at least, on this occasion. Thank you for the help you have so far given me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Miss Bellman, following Dame Beatrice’s lead and rising from table. ‘I’d tell you if I felt it would be right, but I don’t feel it would.’

‘I quite understand. You must have had a terribly worrying time.’

They parted at the door, Miss Bellman to attend a lecture which she stigmatised as ‘poppycock about tap-roots’ and Dame Beatrice to return to Miss McKay. She found the Principal engaged on the telephone. Miss McKay waved her to a seat and soon put down the receiver.

‘So sorry,’ she said. ‘How did you get on?’

‘So well,’ Dame Beatrice replied, ‘that I want an interview with those students who live in college.’

‘We have twenty of them. Do you wish to speak to them all?’

‘Yes, please. As you know, there is evidence that, after hostel supper, the missing girl was not seen again. I have reason to suppose that she came over here, to college.’

‘Really? For what reason?’

‘If I wished to be melodramatic, sensational and realistic, I should say that she came over to college that night to murder her sister, but — ”

Miss McKay remained calm. She nodded.

‘But that is not the right answer. Please tell me all that you know,’ she said.

‘It is not a question of knowledge—yet. It is a question of applied logic, I think. Are there any rooms in the students’ quarters here, which contain two beds?’

‘None.’

‘Good. May I speak to the men in charge of the boiler-room before I speak to the students?’

The men in charge of the boiler-room proved to be two in number. They wore dark-brown overalls and were brothers. Their ages might have been forty-five and fifty. What they had to report, in answer to Dame Beatrice’s questions, was interesting, to the point and, to her, confidently expected. In other words, so far as they knew, nothing except for the fuel that they themselves had shovelled on, had been put to burn in the boiler furnaces since the summer holiday.

‘That had to be cleared up,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Well, let us hope that the rats in the inner cellar won’t have eaten every scrap of the overcoat by the time the police get here.’

As Miss McKay was not completely in her confidence, she made no reply to this but agreed that Dame Beatrice should address the in-college students immediately before supper that evening.

She made her appeal to them in the full confidence that if they had anything to tell her she would hear it. Her experience of young people informed her that, reserved and slightly suspicious as they were in the face of authoritative pronouncements, they were ready and willing to co-operate for the general good.

‘It is essential,’ she concluded, ‘that the murderer be found if another life is to be spared. I cannot promise indemnity to the student or students who are prepared to help me, but I can promise that the case or cases will be considered sympathetically. Anyone to whom my words may apply should report to me as soon as possible after the evening study period. I shall be in the secretary’s office and I shall be alone there.’

‘They’ll talk their heads off, you know, during supper and even during Study,’ protested Miss McKay, when she and Dame Beatrice had left the hall. Dame Beatrice nodded.

‘Exactly what I want,’ she declared. ‘These difficult decisions are not always best left to the individual conscience.’

She parted from the Principal and went over to Miss Considine’s house to interview the pulchritudinous Miss Good.

Miss Good was in high feather. Miss Considine’s house had finished supper by the time Dame Beatrice arrived, and Miss Good had received by post that morning an intimation from Mr Cleeves that his father was prepared to ‘come across with a decent little farm’ so that the marriage could be arranged and would take place immediately their college careers were over.

‘I want to know rather more about your ghostly horseman, Miss Good,’ said Dame Beatrice, introduced into the hostel common-room at an hour when the rest of Miss Considine’s students were busy, or not, at their books. ‘Please do not embroider your answers. If you cannot remember, pray say so in plain terms. This is important.’

‘I’m not likely to forget that awful night,’ said Miss Good, seated upon an upholstered stool opposite her interlocutor, who was occupying an armchair. ‘What with leaving my ring at the hotel and then being abandoned at the gates and having to trail back in shoes which hurt me, and then meeting the ghost—well, I’ve never felt quite the same since. What did you want me to tell you?’

‘A little more about the ghostly horseman, as I said. What shape was he?’

‘Tall and broad and, somehow, bulgy. Like the bear, you know.’

Dame Beatrice did know. She added that she was strongly tempted to ask a leading question.

‘You can,’ said Miss Good. ‘You might not think it, but I’m not easily influenced.’

Dame Beatrice hesitated no longer.

‘I know you were taken by surprise when you saw the apparition,’ she said, ‘but could it have been possible that this rather shapeless horseman was carrying something?’

‘Gracious!’ exclaimed Miss Good. ‘Now you are putting ideas into my head! No, honestly, I couldn’t say. You see, I was so petrified.’ She hesitated, and then gave her lustrous hair a childish toss. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t say. It’s no good. It is a leading question and I could so easily agree. You mean a body, don’t you? I’d better leave it unsaid. I just don’t know.’

Dame Beatrice commended her for her good sense and left her. Miss Good had not retarded the enquiry, and Dame Beatrice was grateful to her. Her next step was to telephone the police to tell them that the college cellars might bear some investigation and then she went into the secretary’s office, left vacant at her request, to await any developments which might follow her address to the in-college students.

She had been seated at the secretary’s desk for ten minutes or so when there came a gentle tap at the door, and a dark, pale-faced, rather good-looking girl came in. Dame Beatrice invited her to close the door and sit down.

‘I suppose I know what you want,’ said the girl. ‘You want to know that I swapped rooms with Miss Palliser the night before she actually disappeared.’

‘That is what I want to know. Why did she ask you to make the exchange?’

‘She said she’d got some photographs to develop and she wanted to use the college cellar as a dark-room.’

‘Was that an unusual reason to give?’

‘No, not at all. Heaps of people did it. You see, we’ve got a photography club in college. The staff encourage it. The animals and plants, you know, and students doing the jobs—it makes a nice exhibition when we have Open Day. Only you’re supposed to get permission to use the cellar, because staff baggage and stuff is kept down there, and Palliser (she was in my group, so I knew her, in a way, the way you do know people in your group) hadn’t got permission and wasn’t going to ask for it.’

‘Did she say why?’

‘Yes, of course she did. She’d got some negatives of herself and her boy, taken on holiday. Nothing to do with college at all. She was rather a cagey, secretive sort of person, so I wasn’t surprised she wanted to develop them in secret. I mean, with the best will in the world, no doubt, the lecturers do take such a kindly interest in us and our men. Even those ghastly boys at Highpepper seem to give them a heart-throb if they think we’re interested. So I swopped with Palliser for the night, she to occupy my S.B. and me to occupy hers. It’s easy enough, as long as you sport your oak and nobody sees you. It’s often been done for one reason and another. Why, last year a girl named Désirée Something or other smuggled a boy in, and they occupied one of the double-bedded rooms in Paterson’s on a swap basis, and Paterson hadn’t a clue.’

Dame Beatrice, who had visualised something of this situation and who, privately, congratulated the young on their enterprise, thanked the student warmly. The case was taking shape at last. She returned to Miss McKay to take her leave and indicated that the police would require to have access to the cellars, probably on the following day.