Death at the Opera

chapter ix: evidence

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It was surprising that Mrs. Bradley noticed the small paragraph in the morning paper. She was less a reader than a skimmer of the daily news. She would glance at the headlines, then read the column below, if she were interested in the topic. Then she would glance at the leading article, and, on the same principle, read it or not, as the spirit moved her. The small paragraph, which was tucked away almost at the bottom of one of the inside pages of the newspaper, would not have attracted her attention but for the sight of her own name, which happened to occur towards the end of it.

Not imagining that she herself was being referred to, she read the paragraph nevertheless, and discovered in it a fact of peculiar interest. This was nothing less than a notice of the sudden death of Mrs. Frederick Hampstead at a private asylum. The cause of death was drowning, and it was stated that the unfortunate woman had fallen by accident into a small ornamental lake in the grounds of the institution.

At one time, the column asserted, the deceased had been under the care of Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, the eminent psycho-analyst and specialist in nervous and mental disorders.

“Curious,” said Mrs. Bradley, referring to the sudden decease of Mr. Hampstead’s unwanted wife, and made a note in her small book while she was waiting for the train which was to take her to the home of Calma Ferris’s aunt.

It was a long and tiresome journey from Hillmaston to Bognor Regis, and Mrs. Bradley employed her time during the actual time the train was in motion, and also during the long periods of waiting for a connection, by thinking out the facts bearing on the death of Calma Ferris, to see whether any new angle could be obtained from which to view the case.

She had made up her mind that it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain clear proof of the murderer’s identity, although, in her opinion, the psychological proof was already overwhelming. But, partly for amusement and partly to test her theories by thinking them out from the beginning, she took each person who had had both opportunity and motive for the murder, then those who had had motive, but seemingly no opportunity, then those who had had opportunity but no apparent motive, and she reserved to herself the right to think over any unexpected developments which might have arisen during the time she had spent at the school in working on the case.

First, there was the boy Hurstwood. Temperamentally, Mrs. Bradley decided, he was capable of murder. He had had sufficient opportunity and a reasonably strong motive —Mrs. Bradley decided that to a schoolboy of seventeen the consequences of his having been discovered passionately kissing a member of the staff might appear far more disastrous and overwhelming than they would to an adult, especially if that adult were a man of the world, as Mr. Cliffordson appeared to be. The boy had known that Miss Ferris had injured her eye. He had known that she had gone into the water-lobby to bathe it. He had even lent her his handkerchief, and the handkerchief had certainly reappeared in what had to be considered suspicious circumstances. Miss Cliffordson had had possession of the handkerchief. If Hurstwood were not to be regarded with suspicion that handkerchief ought to have been found on or near the body.

Other questions had to be interpolated here, Mrs. Bradley decided. The first one was: Were Miss Cliffordson and Hurstwood in collusion? Miss Ferris’s unfortunate discovery of the love affair affected them equally up to a certain point. The second question was: Had Miss Cliffordson found the handkerchief and recognized it, and then kept it in order to shield Hurstwood? If so, why had she weakened sufficiently to show it to Mrs. Bradley, and confess it was Hurstwood’s?

This question was doubly difficult to answer in that the handkerchief was unidentifiable since initial and marking cotton had both been picked out. The third point was this: Did Miss Cliffordson believe that Hurstwood had committed the murder? Did she accept the finding of the handkerchief (if it was found, and not handed to her for safety by Hurstwood himself) as proof of his guilt? And did she fear for her own safety? She had reason to know that Hurstwood could be uncontrolled and unmanageable, and that physically he was much stronger than she was. It was possible, thought Mrs. Bradley, that fear had caused her to produce the handkerchief.

Against all this were several points which told in the boy’s favour. He had admitted that he knew of Miss Ferris’s injured face and that she was going to bathe it. Would an obviously intelligent boy have made such a damaging admission if he had had anything to fear? He was nervous, imaginative and sensitive. If he had committed a horrible crime against an absolutely inoffensive person, would he have been able to brazen it out? Mrs. Bradley thought it very doubtful, unless he felt that by killing Miss Ferris he had saved Miss Cliffordson from the consequences of his own tempestuous behaviour on the night of the rehearsal. A boy of Hurstwood’s temperament might easily imagine that he owed it to Miss Cliffordson to get her out of the trouble into which his own madness and lack of self-control had placed her.

A different type of evidence was offered by the failing of the electric light in the water-lobby. There seemed no reasonable doubt that the light had been deliberately disconnected. If Hurstwood were responsible for tampering with the switch, it was for one of two reasons: either to cover up the murder he himself had committed, or the murder he believed one of his friends had committed. Putting it another way, said Mrs. Bradley to herself, if Hurstwood had any reason whatsoever for believing that Miss Cliffordson had killed Miss Ferris, he might have performed the two rash acts of giving his own handkerchief up for her to produce as evidence of his guilt instead of her own, and of disconnecting the electric light so as to put off the evil hour of the discovery of the body as long as possible. Taking into consideration his temperament, his reactions and his state of mind, the evidence was as much in his favour as against him, Mrs. Bradley decided.

She reconsidered his fainting fit in the Headmaster’s room. It was the direct result of learning that Mr. Cliffordson knew all about his love for Miss Cliffordson, and that the Headmaster, in a semi-facetious manner, sympathized with instead of condemning him. In such circumstances, the fainting, followed by the boy’s hysterical tears, had been natural enough, and need have had no connection at all with the murder.

She dismissed that train of thought, and returned to the question of the electric light. Could there be any connection between two lights that failed on the same evening? It was a coincidence, certainly, but a possible one. Suppose, for instance, that the caretaker was wrong about the switch in the water-lobby? Suppose nobody, either in jest or earnest, had tampered with it. Suppose, also, that Hurstwood had been telling the truth when he had told the Headmaster that after his first exit he had gone to the water-lobby to find Miss Ferris and ask for the return of his handkerchief—boys usually went provided with one only, Mrs. Bradley suspected, so that it was all quite plausible so far. Suppose the boy had discovered the place in darkness, discovered furthermore that he could not switch the light on, went back to the men’s dressing-room and talked with Mr. Smith before going on the stage again.

There were a lot of gaps in Hurstwood’s story, she was compelled to admit. On the other hand, it might easily be the truth. She wondered whether it might be necessary later to reinvestigate it. Not even Hurstwood’s youth was on his side in a case like this. So many unstable boys in their teens had murdered women. There were numerous newspaper accounts of such crimes, besides the psychologically classic instances. She shook her head, and began to consider the case of Gretta Cliffordson.

Vindictively or not, Miss Cliffordson had certainly tried to incriminate Hurstwood, and that, on the face of it, looked bad from one who had at least as strong a motive as the boy for wishing to shut Miss Ferris’s mouth. Some of Mrs. Bradley’s patients had been schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, and she knew that one of the most dangerous effects of the most unnatural life in the world was the importance which trivialities were apt to assume in the minds of those who spent their lives among undeveloped intelligences and small events. It might easily be that Miss Cliffordson, for all her seeming pertness and independence, dreaded her uncle’s anger and contempt above all things, and thought that by allowing matters between herself and Hurstwood to get to the point at which Miss Ferris had discovered them was to court disaster indeed if word ever came to Mr. Cliffordson’s ears of what had occurred. On the other hand, there was Miss Cliffordson’s entirely voluntary confession to Mrs. Bradley that Hurstwood was “being rather difficult.”

The point at issue here, Mrs. Bradley decided, was this: Did Miss Cliffordson believe that Hurstwood was the murderer? If she did, it was a heavy indictment of the boy, for Miss Cliffordson might reasonably be expected to know a great deal about him and about the impulses which might have prompted him to such a terrible deed.

Mrs. Bradley, loath to believe evil of the boy, to whom she had taken a liking, tapped her notebook with the end of her silver pencil, and looked unhappy. On considering the rest of Miss Cliffordson’s evidence, however, her face cleared, and her black eyes lit up with fresh interest. Miss Cliffordson’s realistic description of the murder returned to her memory as she re-read her notes.

“It was such an easy way to kill anybody,” Miss Cliffordson had said—she could hear the carefully modulated, over-refined tones all over again—“especially anybody who was sitting down. You offer to help—you lend a handkerchief —you stuff the waste-pipe up with clay…” (Ah, but there, thought Mrs. Bradley, is the rub.) At what point in the proceedings, precisely, do you stuff the waste-pipe up with clay? Have you, so to speak, a lump of clay in your left hand whilst you proffer a handkerchief with your right, or vice versa? Or have you prepared a bowl beforehand so that the water won’t run away, and do you then guide the predestined victim to that particular bowl when she wants to bathe the cut on her face?

Mrs. Bradley shelved the point for the moment and went on reading.

“… and press the tap,” Miss Cliffordson had said—school taps are never of the type that have to be turned on and off, for obvious reasons, Mrs. Bradley reflected—“and talk—any kind of nervous, silly talk, so that no suspicion is excited…”

Yes, but it was just that flow of talk, so essential for the quietening of the victim’s mind, so impossible to the male adolescent under such circumstances, that Mrs. Bradley found it impossible to associate with Hurstwood. Obviously, if the element of surprise which was so necessary in this particular kind of crime was to be maintained, conversation of an interesting, or, at any rate, a non-interruptable kind, had to be provided by the murderer. No boy, surely, could have watched that basin filling and filling—school taps are usually of small bore and do their work slowly and splashily—and riveted his victim’s attention upon something so interesting that at the crucial moment he could have thrust her head under water without her having experienced the slightest premonition of danger?

On the other hand, though, what if Miss Ferris had herself provided the conversation? By all accounts she was the kind of woman whose conscience might have troubled her sorely over the Hurstwood-Cliffordson—or even the Boyle-Hampstead—affair, and she might have regarded the advent of Hurstwood as a God-given opportunity for easing her conscience by speaking her mind. That this argument would apply equally if Alceste Boyle had committed the crime Mrs. Bradley pigeon-holed in her mind (and at the back of her notebook) for future reference.

“Then,” concluded the portion of Miss Cliffordson’s evidence in which Mrs. Bradley was most interested, “as the basin fills, you begin to press the woman’s head down.”

“But you don’t, of course,” Mrs. Bradley decided. “You don’t dare to risk touching the woman’s head until the basin is full. You daren’t risk a scuffle and a struggle and a half-drowned victim who will proceed immediately to the nearest police station.‘”

She shook her head. Miss Cliffordson, she decided, had visualized the murder, but had visualized it imperfectly. It was almost certain that she was not the criminal.

As the similarity, in one sense, of the motives which might have governed the conduct of Alceste Boyle and Frederick Hampstead struck Mrs. Bradley, she considered their case next. Frederick Hampstead she immediately dismissed from her mind. On religious, moral and temperamental grounds she considered him an unlikely person to commit any murder, let alone a murder whose motive, in his case, would have been sordid in the extreme. Besides, it seemed impossible that he could have had any opportunity for the crime. It had most certainly occurred during the First Act of the opera, and during the whole of that time he had been in position as conductor of the orchestra. Guarded inquiries among the players, who were all schoolboys and schoolgirls, had revealed the fact that not for a single instant after the first note of the overture had Frederick Hampstead left his place until the interval. And it was inconceivable, Mrs. Bradley decided, that he should have found Calma Ferris in the water-lobby during the interval, murdered her, disconnected the electric switch, gone away, and left Moira Malley immediately to discover the body. Besides, in that case, Calma Ferris would have been alive to take her cue in the First Act.

Mrs. Bradley felt that nothing was to be gained by thinking that Frederick Hampstead could have had any connection with the affair, but the recurring idea of the switch brought her again to the question of Miss Cliffordson’s guilt. But if Hurstwood had not thought Miss Cliffordson was guilty, would he not still have tampered with the switch? The desire to hide dreadful deeds from the light is characteristic of the young.

She sighed, and then turned over a couple of pages in order to consider the case of Alceste Boyle. Mrs. Bradley was not one of those psychologists who divide humanity into two groups—those capable of committing murder and those incapable of it. Her view was that, given time, place, opportunity and circumstances, it was impossible to say that any human being was incapable of such an act. Nevertheless, on temperament, she was forced to admit that Alceste Boyle was not the person she would have picked out as the murderer of an inoffensive person like Calma Ferris.

The only reason which could be found to explain why Alceste Boyle should murder anybody would be that great danger threatened someone whom she loved. Could this reason be found to operate in the particular case Mrs. Bradley was studying? Frederick Hampstead, it appeared, was the person Alceste loved. The only danger which could have threatened him was the danger of being dismissed from his post at the school. Surely a level-headed, sane, well-balanced, admirably sensible woman like Alceste Boyle would not have committed a horrid crime to prevent the dismissal of Hampstead?

Besides, thought Mrs. Bradley, it was most unlikely that Calma Ferris would have betrayed the lovers to Mr. Cliffordson, and it was almost impossible to believe that Mr. Cliffordson would have taken a very grave view of the matter if she had. Even supposing he had gone so far as to dismiss them, surely the dismissal of one or both from the staff of the school would have been private, not public; friendly, regretful, apologetic on the one side; ruefully but comprehendingly accepted on the other. The Senior English Mistress, familiar with the classic situations in Greek and Shakespearian tragedy, would never have been sufficiently misguided to confuse the greater with the less to the extent of preferring Calma Ferris murdered to Frederick Hampstead dismissed. It was unthinkable.

There was, of course, the question of opportunity. Alceste, free to rove about behind the scenes during the whole of the First Act, her comings and goings, appearances and disappearances unquestioned, had had as much opportunity as anyone of drowning poor Miss Ferris if she had made up her mind to drown her. On the other hand, her general behaviour, described by herself and corroborated wherever corroboration was possible by members of the company, was not that of a murderer coming fresh from the scene of the crime. She had searched, and had set others to search for Miss Ferris. She had appealed to Miss Camden to play the part, had been refused, and had gone on herself to play it. Would she have risked sending out a search party if she thought there was any chance of their discovering the body of the victim? It seemed unlikely. On the other hand, again, a very clear, far-seeing and courageous person might have risked it, and Alceste could certainly be described by those three adjectives, Mrs. Bradley reflected.

But the electric light! Could Alceste have tampered with the switch? If she had, it would go to prove that she had taken the minimum of risk when sending out the search party, for nobody would be likely to explore a place that was in pitch darkness. But very few women would have thought of disconnecting the switch. Most would have turned off the light and trusted to luck. Then, again, Alceste had immediately disposed of her own supposed motive for the murder by confessing to the Headmaster the love she had for Hampstead. True, she had refused to give the name of the man, but it was easy enough for Mr. Cliffordson to put two and two together. It had to be Hampstead or Smith, and with Smith there would have been no obstacle to the marriage, since he was a bachelor. Under the heading of Opportunity, Alceste remained on Mrs. Bradley’s list of suspected persons, but on every other count she was ruthlessly and finally crossed off.

The next suspect on Mrs. Bradley’s list was Mr. Smith. Her feelings about this man were mixed. That he was capable of murder she felt certain. That he had committed this particular murder she was slow to believe. Any motive which she could assign to him was weak. Admitted that he might have nursed a desire to retaliate on Miss Ferris for the loss of his Psyche, it was difficult to believe that he would have killed her as an act of revenge. The only other motive which he may have had, Mrs. Bradley decided, was that of saving Alceste Boyle, whom he loved in the way that some small boys love their mothers, from the consequences of Calma Ferris having discovered her relationship with Frederick Hampstead.

The point at issue here, Mrs. Bradley told herself, was whether Smith knew of Miss Ferris’s discovery of Alceste’s secret. Alceste, she felt certain, would not have discussed the point with Smith, and Hampstead would scarcely have deemed it delicate to do so. Apart from the question of motive, Smith would have to remain fairly high on the list of suspects, she thought, since he was one of the people who had had the whole of the First Act in which to commit the crime.

The other person with almost unlimited opportunity was the ex-actress, Mrs. Berotti. Here, although temperamentally she would make an ideal murderer, possessing the artistic instinct, courage, a sort of divine exasperation with fools, resourcefulness and an actress’s self-command, it was difficult to assign to her any motive for the crime. A murder without motive is the act of a maniac, and Mrs. Berotti, whatever her shortcomings of temper and impatience, was certainly not mad.

The bogus electrician, Helm—if Helm it had been: a theory that needed proving—must have had opportunity, but where, again, was his motive? Calma Ferris had left a will bequeathing her property—two or three hundred pounds—to the school. She would have inherited something from her aunt, it was true, but only if she had survived her. Helm had offered her marriage, by which ultimately he might have gained something, but, as matters stood at the time of Miss Ferris’s death, he could gain nothing whatever by that death.

Miss Camden was the most likely person to have committed murder, it seemed. She was extravagant enough, perhaps, to waste life as well as money; she was perverse, ill-dispositioned and thwarted; she had hated the dead woman and had intended to be revenged on her…

At this point Mrs. Bradley discovered that she had to change at the next station, so she stowed away notebook and pencil and sat staring out of the window on to the flying landscape. Greys and browns predominated in the colouring of vegetation and sky. It ought to have been a dispiriting reflection that winter was only just beginning, but Mrs. Bradley, who was insensible to changes in the weather, and was equally undisturbed by the climates of Greenland and Southern India—she had experienced both —did not find it so.

Instead, when the train drew up at the next station, she hopped blithely on to the platform and was greatly surprised to find a young friend of hers, the Reverend Noel Wells, seated upon the nearest bench, his long black-trousered legs uncanonically sprawling, his soft black hat tilted over his eyes, his mouth wide open and an expression of imbecile contentment on his vacuous, sleeping face. Mrs. Bradley set down her small suit-case and prodded him gently with the ferrule of her neat umbrella.

“Well, child,” she said. Wells sat up and stared.

“Well, I’m blowed,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I am chasing a murderer,” said Mrs. Bradley, concisely. “And you?”

“Doing a locum job at Bognor. At least, it’s a little village outside. I’ve got to go to Bognor and then walk or bus or something. Wouldn’t be bad if it were August, of course.”

“And Daphne?” inquired Mrs. Bradley.

“South of France. You knew we were married? I say, you know, this is a bit of luck! I suppose you’re not going to Bognor by any chance?”

“But I am, dear child,” said Mrs. Bradley. “This is splendid. Listen, child. If the circumstances warranted it would you be prepared to practise a little innocent deception?”

“Rather. What is it!” inquired the young curate.

“Pretend to be my son,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“Rather. I get you, although you might not think I could rise to it,” said Wells. “You want to persuade someone that you’re a bit of a goop, and you think that the party will take one good look at me, shake his or her head sadly, observe pensively, ‘Like mother, like son,’ and that’ll be that.”

“You know, child,” said Mrs. Bradley, in all sincerity, as she stepped back a pace to get a better look at him, “there are moments when your intelligence staggers me.”

“It’s being married to Daphne,” the young curate explained modestly. “Bucks up the intellect no end. I’m supposed to be having a pop at a bishopric, you know.”

He laughed, and they talked about matters of interest common to them both until the train came in.

“And now,” said Mrs. Bradley, when they were settled in opposite corners of the compartment, “for a little further investigation into the case of Mr. Donald Smith.” And, without taking any further notice of the Reverend Noel Wells, who proceeded to smoke his pipe and gaze peacefully out of the window, she took out her notebook and pencil, turned up the pages she had devoted to the evidence supplied by and on behalf of the Senior Art Master, and reconsidered it.

Smith worried her. He was almost as obvious a choice for the murderer as Miss Camden. Motive and opportunity here were strong, she decided, again. The whole of the First Act had been Mr. Smith’s opportunity, the damaged clay figure of the Psyche his chief motive. But there were snags. Mr. Smith was not the type to brood for two or three days over a wrong. If he had been going to kill Calma Ferris for damaging his work he would have snatched up the nearest heavy object and brought it down on the top of her head there and then, Mrs. Bradley decided. Besides, the motive in his case was not so strong at a second glance as it had seemed at first sight. He was not interested in that particular figure, it appeared, except as a money-making proposition. It had been commissioned, and he was in debt, and with the money he obtained from the sale of the commissioned work he was going to pay his debts. Well, the clay figure had been damaged past repair by Calma Ferris, but Alceste Boyle had come to the rescue, lent the money and comforted the artist.

True, Smith had been the person to cause Calma Ferris’s injury, but it was permissible to believe that the collision in the darkened corridor was accidental. It was not to be supposed that Smith imagined he could seriously injure the unfortunate woman by charging down the corridor, since he would not even have known she was there until they collided; for there was nothing to show that he had asked Calma Ferris to come that way or that he could have seized upon the exact moment of her coming. He might possibly have foreseen that she would be wearing eyeglasses with her make-up, but not that she would cut her face; nor that she would have gone to that particular water-lobby to bathe the cut, since it was not the only place on the ground-floor behind the scenes where running water was available.

Smith might have tampered with one or both of the electric lights that failed, since he had plenty of time on his hands, but it was fantastic to suppose he had done so before the murder, unless he had experimented on the corridor light that went wrong in order to make certain that he could cut out the one in the lobby when the time came.

His plea of a bad memory was suspicious, if he were the murderer, but, on the other hand, people of his peculiarly erratic, nervous type often did have bad memories.

The business of the modelling clay from the art-room which had been used to stop up the waste-pipe reacted for and against Smith, Mrs. Bradley decided. On the one hand, it was the kind of non-porous agent which would have occurred to a man who had been using it for modelling purposes a short time previously, but, on the other hand, would any murderer have been so foolish as to use something which so obviously suggested his guilt?

Mrs. Bradley, shaking her head over all the classic instances of murderers’ foolhardiness, reluctantly confessed to herself that Smith might easily have used the modelling clay to stop up the waste-pipe. One more thought presented itself in connection with the clay. Had someone else used the clay, foreseeing that its discovery in the waste-pipe might incriminate Smith?

It was an interesting question which, up to the moment, it was impossible to answer. The very proximity of the art-room to the water-lobby might in itself have suggested the clay, and the murderer might never have considered for an instant that the discovery of the clay might implicate Smith.

At this point a new idea came to her, and an unwelcome one. She looked across at Wells and said:

“Child, if you were going to make a statue called Psyche, how old do you think your model would have to be?”

Wells rubbed his Wellingtonian nose and, having given the question a good deal of earnest thought, replied vaguely:

“Oh, I dunno. Somewhere between fifteen and eighteen, I suppose.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Child, I’m alarmed.”

“Bottom fallen out of your conclusions?” inquired Wells, sympathetically. Mrs. Bradley shuddered.

“I hope not. But I am conscious of hideous doubts, child.”

She had wondered once or twice what Smith’s reason could have been for doing his modelling at school instead of in his studio at home. It struck her now that the reason must be that he was using someone at the school for a model—someone who could stay at school after hours, perhaps, but who could not have gone alone to Smith’s studio.

“At the next stop I must telephone,” she said. She put through the call to Alceste Boyle.

“Please find out for certain whom Mr. Smith was using as a model for his Psyche, will you?”- she said, when communication between herself and Mrs. Boyle had been established. The reply was a foregone conclusion.

“Moira Malley. He was using her figure, but not her head,” said Alceste.

“No wonder,” said Mrs. Bradley, when they had again made their connection and were en route for Bognor Regis, this time on a main line and in a much faster train, “that Mr. Smith was sufficiently in touch with Moira Malley to get her to promise not to tell anyone that he was responsible for the accident to Miss Ferris’s glasses.”

But the outcome of this new discovery was likely to be perturbing in the extreme. Mrs. Bradley had never seriously considered the Sixth Form Irish girl as a probable murderer, but it was possible to suppose that she had given the sittings secretly to Smith, and it was possible that Miss Ferris had discovered that she was sitting to him.

Mrs. Bradley decided that if the spectacle of Hurstwood kissing Miss Cliffordson had shocked Miss Ferris, the spectacle of a naked Sixth Form girl posing after school hours for the Art Master would have shocked her a good deal more. Another point at issue was that although Smith himself had probably regarded the girl’s action as natural, justifiable, convenient and right (and probably, too, in view of the girl’s chronically impecunious state, as a business proposition entirely), Mrs. Bradley thought it more than possible that to the girl herself, fanatically chaste and unreasoningly modest as only an Irish person can be, the sittings were a source of constant war between her conscience and her desire to please Smith, with whom, thought Mrs. Bradley, groaning with humorous despair, she was probably in love.

There was nothing humorous, however, about the conclusion towards which this latest discovery tended. If Moira Malley thought that Miss Ferris would report to the Headmaster that she had discovered her standing naked in the art-room, no matter for what purpose or reason, the motive for Moira Malley’s having killed Miss Ferris was overwhelmingly strong.

Mrs. Bradley felt old and tired. Her previous conclusions as to the identity of the murderer began to rock on their foundations. Fortunately, she decided, it would be impossible now to prove whether Miss Ferris had known of the sittings or not, and, without such proof, the case against Moira Malley fell to the ground. All the same, a little demon insisted upon repeating in Mrs. Bradley’s mental ear a snippet of the conversation she herself had had with Moira Malley on the subject of the time the girl was expected to be home from school.

“But what about your people?”

“Aunt doesn’t mind. Often she doesn’t know whether I’m in the house or not, until supper-time…”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Mrs. Bradley. “I do hope you didn’t do it, you poor child, because you’ll never get over it if you did.”

There had been the girl’s outburst, too, when Mrs. Bradley had suggested that she should conduct her to the water-lobby where the body had been found.

“I can’t go round there after dark! I won’t face it!”

Well, it was natural enough, considering that the girl had been the first person to discover the dead body. On the other hand, that “discovery” in itself was suspicious. So many murderers, overcome by their own nervous inability to escape from the scene of the crime, have “discovered” the body with intent to begin the very inquiries they most dread having set on foot.

It looked bad—Wells, looking across at Mrs. Bradley, noted the sunken lines round her mouth and the pucker between her brows—it looked very bad for Moira Malley. But still—Mrs. Bradley turned over another page of her notebook—there were several other people to be considered. There was still Miss Camden, for example, and there was still the electrician. If the electrician should prove to be the man Helm, he would have to explain away a good deal of very suspicious matter in connection with his obviously clandestine visit to the school, Mrs. Bradley decided. She resolved not to consider him further until she had visited Miss Ferris’s aunt at Bognor Regis and had learned all she could from her about Helm and the dead woman.

Miss Camden, however, was in a different category of suspects. In her case the motive seemed fairly obvious— she had had what might be called a double motive, in fact —and temperamentally she was capable of murder. She possessed a good many, if not all, of the qualities required in the carrying out of this particular crime. Her course as a Physical Training and Games Mistress had made her alert, physically powerful, able to grasp opportunity quickly, ruthless in the sense that in her had been developed the “will to win” at the expense, so far as Mrs. Bradley could determine from a very imperfect study of the girl, of gentler qualities.

The difficulty in her case, Mrs. Bradley repeated to herself, was the question of opportunity. But the more Mrs. Bradley thought it over, the more possible it seemed that Miss Camden might have had as much opportunity as any other person with a motive for committing the crime. It was easy enough to prove that she had been seated at the end of a row in the auditorium at the beginning of the performance, and it was apparent, from Alceste Boyle’s evidence, that she had been in the same seat towards the end of the act.

But the point at issue, so far as Mrs. Bradley was concerned, was whether she had remained there during the whole of the intervening time. If it could be shown that she had left her place at any point between, say, half-past seven and a quarter-past eight, for instance, there would be a certain amount of reason for keeping her high on the list of suspected persons.

She was a person with little or no power of thinking ahead; she was inclined to yield to sudden temptation (if the story of the cashed and altered cheque was true); she was a disillusioned creature, and she was obviously the victim of nervous strain brought on by overwork. On the other hand, she had admitted to having had what she called a “row” with Miss Ferris, and she had sufficiently confessed the incident of the Headmaster’s cheque for Mrs. Bradley to find out the complete story. It was difficult, too, to determine exactly how she had discovered that Miss Ferris had been using the water-lobby. Mrs. Bradley wrinkled her brows over this. Suddenly light came.

When she and Wells left the train at Bognor she ordered the taxi to stop at the first post office. From there she sent Alceste Boyle a telegram.

“Ask girls who attended Ferris night of opera.”

To shorten the message further was to make it unintelligible, she thought. The reply came next morning in the form of a letter.

“I could not explain satisfactorily on a telegraph-form” [Alceste had written]. “I asked in all the forms to-day, and when I had asked in the Fourth Form, my call-boy girl stood up and said that, imagining I was too busy with the opera to be bothered about such matters, she had gone into the auditorium to find Miss Camden when she knew Miss Ferris had injured herself. Miss Camden is always called in when first aid is required, so that it was natural and sensible of the girl to go and find her. Miss Camden went immediately to Miss Ferris’s assistance, the girl going too, and remaining to assist.”

“I wonder whether the girl remained to assist all the time they were in the water-lobby together?” thought Mrs. Bradley. “I wonder how and when that modelling-clay was put into the waste-pipe? I wonder whether Miss Camden went a second time to help Miss Ferris? I wonder how this man Helm comes into the affair? I wonder why, with four perfectly good suspects, all of them with motives, all of them with opportunities, all of them, within limits, capable of committing murder, I trouble myself to try to find a fifth? ”