Fault in the Structure

CHAPTER 7

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The hastily-rigged machinery of the law

Chief Superintendent Nicholl was a man of slow thought, but once an idea had lodged itself firmly in his mind he took immediate action. From the moment he had been told that a prowler had been spotted after midnight in the grounds of Abbesses College he had seen to it that two of his men were stationed on duty with reliefs every two hours. One was to remain in view of the gatehouse and Bessie’s Quad, the other to be on patrol duty around the grounds. They would remain until the arrival of the porter in the morning.

The news which he received from the Chief Constable following the luncheon at the High Mistress’s lodging urged him to take further measures, but he retained his bump of caution and proceeded with care.

The first thing he did was to ring up the firm of contractors who had undertaken to establish the lily-pond in the middle of the cloister garth. Their address he obtained from the senior porter. They were not a local firm, but were domiciled in Reading.

The job, he was told, would have been finished during the College vacation following the Lent term which had ended in the last week of March, except for the fact that the Lady Bursar (complained the manager with resigned but scathing emphasis) kept changing her mind. First she wanted a concrete pond, but then she demurred on the score of expense. Then she settled (or so the firm thought) for a pre-fabricated arrangement in glass fibre but, shown a specimen, was not certain that it would meet with her requirements as it was ‘not quite what she had thought of’.

Finally the workmen had excavated to the required depth for a green-painted, metal, kidney-shaped container of more or less the size she specified, but work was held up again when she discovered that to bring the vessel from the cloister into the garth would involve removing stone from two narrow arches, one giving admittance to the cloister itself and the other leading out of the cloister on to the square of grass it enclosed.

‘So there we are and there we’re stuck until she finally makes up her mind,’ said the manager, when he was interviewed by the Chief Superintendent, later.

‘So anybody could have known all about this job,’ said Nicholl.

‘I suppose so, if they’d visited the College. Some parts of it, I dare say, are open to the public during vacations.’

‘And this hole of yours…’

‘Begun in the third week of March and we should have had the whole job finished by the time the students came back at the beginning of April. The Lent vacation is a short one, but quite long enough for a little job like that, especially when we thought the lady had settled on a pre-fab pool. She planned to plant the lilies and things herself, you see. We had only to sink the pond.’

‘I’ve been along to the site. Your men don’t seem to have put up a workmen’s hut of any kind. I suppose it wasn’t necessary.’

‘Not really. We did suggest a hut, if only so that the men could have somewhere to leave their tools, but the lady pointed out that there was shelter in the cloister which of course we couldn’t gainsay. It was quite evident that she didn’t intend to let us put up a hut. She pointed out that it would spoil the amenities as far as visitors were concerned and that the excavation itself was eyesore enough. She is a very difficult, masterful lady and you can’t get the better of her.’

‘You never thought of suggesting that she should take her contract elsewhere, I suppose?’

‘Well, we’d already begun our excavation in preparation for the pool before all these difficulties cropped up. Also – well, we rather wanted to be able to put on our prospectus and our advertisements that we were contractors to the University.’

‘Were the same men employed all the time on this particular job?’

‘Oh, yes. Even without any mechanical aid – impossible, of course, in such an enclosed space – it was only a three-day job for three chaps and a wheelbarrow.’

‘I’d like to speak to those men and, more than that, I’d like to take them along to look at the excavation with me.’

‘Why? Anything wrong? Somebody been burying a body?’ asked the manager jovially. His face altered when Nicholl replied that his guess was as good as the next man’s and that stranger things had been known to happen.

‘Look here, now,’ the manager said anxiously, ‘I mean, my chaps are in the clear, I hope?’

‘No reason to suspect them and of course yours and mine may be nothing but wild guesses. I hope they are,’ said Nicholl. ‘Anyway don’t broadcast them.’

The workmen were named Bob, Ernie and Bert. Assured by Nicholl that nothing to their detriment was involved, they abandoned their first determination to ‘get our Union on to this,’ and (reluctantly on their part, even on the assurance of the head of the firm that their day’s pay was not in jeopardy) they were taken in police cars to Abbesses College.

Their comments were illuminating. Their first care was to inspect their tools. These had been stored in a dark corner of the cloister in readiness for a resumption of operations.

‘Them ent our tools,’ said Ernie. Bob was less precipitate.

‘I reckon them’s our tools,’ he said, ‘but not where we left ’em. Clean my shovel was, too and all. Look at her now!’ The excavation, when the men had ducked under the archway which was still partly choked by the trailing rose-stems, also came in for criticism. ‘That ent the way us left un. Somebody ben mucken around wi’ her, I reckon,’ Bob averred.

‘Ah,’ said Nicholl, ‘that’s so, is it? I suppose you’re sure?’

Bert, who had not, so far, committed himself to speech, grunted a mild oath and spat into the excavation. The others, with similar oral embellishment but without the added emphasis of expectoration, declared that they were certain.

‘Know the look of your own job when you sees her again,’ added Bob.

‘Right. That’s what we wanted to know. Well, I’m afraid we’re going to muck up your job still further, but we’ll make it all right with your firm.’

‘Struck oil, have us?’ asked Ernie, with heavy irony.

‘You never know,’ replied Nicholl. He sent them home in one of the police cars, and the remaining couple of his men, having returned to the cloister to impound two of the shovels, removed their tunics and rolled up their shirt-sleeves.

The already twice-worked soil was light and easy to shift, but even so they sweated for nearly three-quarters of an hour before they uncovered and retrieved the sack with its grisly contents.

‘The Lady Bursar didn’t bargain for the answer to all her shilly-shallying about what kind of pond she wanted,’ said the Chief Superintendent, reporting to the Chief Constable later. ‘If she’d made up her mind at the beginning to have the concrete basin instead of belly-aching about the cost and so on, we’d never have had a body, never in this life. That unfinished hole was an open invitation to a murderer.’

‘Yes, if the murderer knew the hole was there, and that throws the whole thing wide open. It isn’t possible to check on all the people who visited the College between the time the excavation was abandoned and the time that prowler with the sack was spotted in the grounds of the College.’

‘Let alone that we can’t be sure that that particular sack contained the body, sir.’

‘True. It’s proof presumptive, but not proof positive.’

‘It’s just over a week since the student and this lecturer spotted the prowler. Added to that, there’s no confirmation of the student’s story that the man was dragging a sack. The lecturer didn’t see it.’

‘But she only saw the chap once, so that isn’t important.’

‘The next thing is to get the body identified, assuming (without prejudice, of course) that it’s this woman, Coralie St Malo.’

‘Because she’s disappeared it doesn’t follow that she’s dead. She may have skipped her digs just because she couldn’t pay the rent. It’s a chancy kind of life for these chorus and bit-part people, I believe.’

‘Yes, there’s that. Well, we’d better get hold of Lawrence and see whether he recognises her. There was that row in the pub, sir. It could be a pointer.’

‘I suggest, as she was found on their premises, we try the College authorities first. If she’s who you think she might be, nobody here will recognise her, so then we can get on to Lawrence, although it’s chancing our arm a bit.’

‘Not a very nice job for these College ladies. She’s not the prettiest of sights, sir.’

‘We’ll try the College porters, then. They won’t be quite so squeamish and they may have spotted some suspicious character about the place. I wonder how the fellow got in after dark?’