Fault in the Structure

CHAPTER 8

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The lie in the twisted thought that travesties the truth

‘Hullo, what’s this?’ said Laura. She was sorting out the morning’s correspondence and the question was rhetorical. From a foolscap envelope she extracted a typed letter and, with it, a clipping from a newspaper. She was perusing the clipping when her employer came down to breakfast. She looked up from her reading.

‘The fun seems to be under way,’ she said. ‘I opened this envelope because it was typewritten, but it’s from the Chief Constable and I think the contents are for your personal information. The newspaper bit is all about that cloister garth at Abbesses College. They’ve found a body in it and the police are calling upon a man to assist them in their enquiries. I bet that means Lawrence!’

‘So you suppose him to have killed his redundant first wife, do you? I would not have associated him with physical violence, but perhaps you are right.’

‘But there’s an odd thing about it. The body has been identified as that of the second wife, the secretary to the Dean of Abbesses.’

‘Interesting. Are there any details?’

‘Only that she’d been dead for some days before the body was buried. The police are still looking for the place where she actually died. I don’t suppose they’ll make an arrest until they find it. They haven’t found the weapon either.’

‘What of Coralie St Malo? Has she been found?’

‘She’s been traced to Blackpool, where she’s with a pier-head concert-party. She’s been sharing a room with another chorus girl there.’

‘So the story of the public-house quarrel between Miss St Malo and Lawrence is entirely irrelevant, although their subsequent reconciliation (if both stories are true) may not be irrelevant at all.’

‘You mean Lawrence may have ditched the Dean’s secretary, in the most permanent manner known to man, in preparation for taking up again with Coralie?’

‘Nothing, on the face of it, seems less likely, unless there are wheels within wheels of which we know nothing.’

‘What kind of wheels would those be?’

‘Square ones, perhaps.’

‘Are you proposing to take a hand in the matter?’

‘Not unless I am called in officially when the police have made an arrest, so that I can report upon the state of mind of the accused.’

‘But you were the first person to see that there was something suspicious about that hole in the middle of the cloister garth.’

‘And you were the first person to hear about the prowler with the sack. Are you proposing to conduct an investigation?’

Laura looked down her nose, but had no need to reply to the facetious question, for at that moment the telephone rang and she went into the hall to answer it.

‘It was the High Mistress of Abbesses College,’ she said, coming back into the room. ‘She’s in no end of a taking. The police have given up questioning Lawrence, it seems, and have taken the two College porters into custody. Will you speak to her? I asked her to hold on.’

The High Mistress begged Dame Beatrice to come and see her.

The High Mistress may have been in a state of great disquiet, as Laura, in other words, had indicated, but if so she did not betray it when she received her visitors. She was a dumpling of a woman with intelligent eyes, a fighter’s nose and a good humoured mouth which, however, could betray rat-trap determination when occasion called for it.

She greeted Dame Beatrice and Laura with great cordiality and gave them tea. Her parlourmaid – a distinction must be made here: the dons and the students had scouts to attend on them, but the servants at the Lodging were always referred to as the maids – her parlourmaid cleared the table at the end of a meal during which the conversation had simply consisted of general chit-chat, and then the High Mistress got down to business.

‘Poor Oates and Wagstaffe,’ she said. ‘Two more law-abiding men have never lived. To accuse them of stealing is more than monstrous; it is utterly ridiculous! And then to charge them with murdering the person they are supposed to have robbed – well, words fail me!’

‘On what is the charge based, then?’ Dame Beatrice enquired.

‘The police searched Mrs Lawrence’s rooms and then the College. The actual murder was committed, it seems, in the gatehouse cellar. It appears that there was some kind of fuss going on between Mrs Lawrence and the porters over a missing parcel which was reported to have been left at the lodge but which did not materialise. I knew about it, because the porters had complained of Mrs Lawrence’s insinuations that one of them had stolen it. They spoke to the Dean first and she referred them to me. I heard their complaint and then I spoke to Mrs Lawrence. In point of fact, the College pays my own secretary, the Bursar’s and the Dean’s, and although we have a voice in the appointments we are not permitted to terminate them without the consent of the governing body. That, needless to say, would in practice never be refused, but that is by the way.’

‘So, the alleged motive having been suggested, we come to a matter of means and opportunity, together with the dates when these would have been available. The means, according to the newspaper report, were economical and hideous,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Yes, the poor woman’s throat was cut.’

‘And the opportunity for somebody to cut it?’

‘Oh,’ said the High Mistress grimly, ‘in a place like the cellar under the gatehouse there would be opportunity enough. It is hardly ever used except by Mrs Lawrence herself.’

‘Must be an awful lot of blood about in the cellar,’ said Laura. ‘I suppose there’s no question of suicide? People do cut their own throats. We’ve got books on forensic medicine at the Stone House. Some of the photographs in them are pretty horrible and most of them are of suicides.’

‘I really don’t care to discuss it,’ said Dr Durham-Basing. ‘What I do care about are those two unfortunate men. I am as convinced of their innocence as I am of my own. I refer, of course, to the disappearance of Mrs Lawrence’s parcel. The graver charge surely cannot really be sustained, but if we can disprove theft, a charge of murder falls to the ground automatically, for it disposes of the motive.’

‘The police must have some grounds for suspecting them, even vaguely, of murder,’ Dame Beatrice suggested.

‘Unsafe grounds, in my opinion. They claim that, apart from myself and the senior members of the College, nobody except the porters has a key to the gate. The gatehouse cellar can be reached only from inside our walls, you see.’

‘Have they considered the possibility of access to the College buildings by way of the river?’ asked Dame Beatrice. ‘Laura thought that a light skiff, for example, could be pulled ashore and transported round the barrier which shuts off your private stretch of the river from the rest of the stream. From what Miss Runmede has told us, it seems that the prowler she saw must have come from Bessie’s Quad, but that need not rule out the possibility that he came across from the opposite direction.’

‘I will see what I can find out about that. The barrier you speak of is supposed to be sufficient to ensure our privacy. The last thing I could countenance would be that we should be open to invasion from the town or from any of the men’s Colleges.’

‘Who identified the body?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

‘The porters were called upon first of all. The formal identification was carried out by Mrs Lawrence’s brother, a Mr Bill Caret.’

‘Not by Lawrence himself?’

‘Before the inquest was held, Lawrence was already being questioned by the police. By the time he had proved his alibi and been released, the body had been buried – formally, this time, of course.’

‘His alibi, I take it, was provided by the Warden of Wayneflete College.’

‘No. Mr Lawrence was no longer staying with his uncle. I do not know who was responsible for his alibi.’

‘Coralie St Malo, I expect,’ said Laura to Dame Beatrice, when they had left the High Mistress and were on their way to the Chief Constable’s house where, as the result of a telephone call from the High Mistress’s Lodging requesting an interview with him, they were to dine. ‘By the way, my question about suicide didn’t get answered.’

‘It hardly needed to be put.’

‘You mean that, even if she did kill herself, she could hardly have put herself in a sack and buried herself. Oh, well – damn silly question, etcetera,’ admitted Laura.

The Chief Constable himself raised the question of suicide as soon as dinner was over.

‘Of course, even if the body had not been put in a sack and even if it had not been buried, we should have ruled out suicide,’ he said. ‘According to the medical evidence, suicides who intend to cut their own throats – and it’s not an uncommon method of terminating a life which has become intolerable to its owner – they invariably make some tentative incisions before they nerve themselves to do the actual deed. Anything up to a dozen or more of these preliminary dividings of the skin are common, I’m told. There was nothing of the sort in this case. The doctors think she was gripped by the hair from behind, her head pulled back and one great slash made right across the thyro-hyoid ligament. They suggest that the slash was carried out by a right-handed person.’

‘What made the police, in the beginning, suspect Lawrence?’

‘Husbands are always the prime suspects in cases of murder when neither rape nor robbery is involved. More particularly in this case, we thought he might have been able at some time to take an impression of his wife’s key to the College entrance and also that, because of her, he could have known of the excavation in which she was buried.’

‘And who provided him with an alibi?’

‘His landlady in his own university town of Norcaster. Unless her evidence is cooked up and false, it doesn’t seem that Lawrence can be our man.’

‘You know when the murder was committed, then?’

‘Within limits, and those limits are confidently covered by his landlady’s statement.’

‘I see. And what about the accused men, Oates and Wagstaffe?’

‘Apart from Lawrence himself, they not only fulfil all the requirements, but are even more vulnerable than, after we had questioned him, we thought Lawrence was. They – or one of them – had a motive which, in Lawrence’s case, did not exist. Apparently Mrs Lawrence had been making herself very unpleasant to the porters over a missing parcel. She seems to have been a very plain-spoken young woman.’

‘If we might return to the subject of Oates and Wagstaffe, do you suppose them to have been in collusion over the murder?’

‘One could have been accessory to the other, but that will sort itself out sooner or later. We believe the murder was committed by one man only, but at the moment we cannot eliminate either Oates or Wagstaffe because, after the lapse of time between the murder and the discovery of the body, the medical evidence of time of death can only be approximate. As you probably know, the porters’ hours of duty alternate. They work a shift system in the porters’ lodge from eight in the morning until midnight, four hours on and four hours off duty. They sleep in their own homes, which are less than a stone’s throw from the College and are, in fact, two semi-detached cottages, both of them College property so that the porters live rent free. The College is well endowed, thanks to the generosity of a former student, and the porters’jobs are exceptionally well paid.’

‘So that the men who had charge of the lodge would stand to lose excellent wages and rent-free accommodation if a charge of theft was proved against them,’ said Laura.

‘Exactly. It makes a powerful motive for getting rid of their accuser.’

‘But I thought the High Mistress had refused to entertain the theory that the missing parcel had been stolen by the porters,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘What was in it, I wonder?’

‘According to Mrs Lawrence, when she called in the police, a gold repeater watch with a repoussé case very elegantly moulded with a scene of Greek nymphs. It had a champlevé dial and the hall-mark of 1724. A very valuable piece indeed.’

‘You appear to have memorised its perfections,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘I’m interested in clocks and watches and have a small collection of my own, so I was particularly interested.’

‘What is a repoussé case?’ asked Laura.

‘Like anything else repoussé.’

‘Oh, embossed. That accounts for the Greek nymphs, I suppose. And what is a champlevé dial? I’m sorry to be so ignorant.’

‘Not at all. Champlevé is a technical term. It means that the dial of the watch has been cut away so that the numerals and other marks remain raised up.’

‘Thank you. So what would such a watch be worth?’

‘I could not say. Much would depend upon its condition.’

‘Had Mrs Lawrence seen it before it disappeared?’

‘No. She told us she had the description of it in a letter from the friend who sent it to her. She simply referred to him as ‘Old Sir Anthony’. He wrote the letter to tell her that he was despatching the watch by registered post – or so she said.’

‘So it was signed for,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Apparently not. The old gentleman must have omitted or forgotten to register the parcel. The porters contended that it had never turned up at all and the post office could not trace it.’

‘And Mrs Lawrence affirmed that she had informed the porters that a parcel was to arrive for her?’

‘Yes, but she described it as a registered parcel which, of course, owing to an oversight on the part, we think, of Sir Anthony himself, it was not. The servant would have registered it if he had been instructed to do so.’

‘And there is no means of knowing which of the two porters was most likely to have taken it in if, indeed, it was ever delivered at the College?’

‘No means at all. The man, Oates, clocks in at eight in the morning and goes off at twelve, so that if the parcel came by letter post which, as presumably it was small in bulk and not particularly heavy, it may well have done, Oates would have taken it in; but if it came by parcel post, it would not have arrived at the porters’ lodge until between half-past two and half-past three in the afternoon, when Wagstaffe would have been on duty.’

‘The porters were questioned at the time, I suppose?’

‘Yes, but with a score or more parcels arriving every day for students and staff, they couldn’t possibly be expected to remember any particular one, especially as nobody could tell them exactly which day or by which post it would have come, or give an exact description of it.’

‘So nothing could be proved, yet the porters remained under suspicion.’

‘Lambasted good and proper by Mrs Lawrence, one gathers,’ said Laura.

‘Until one or both of them got sick of it and did for her. Yes, I suppose that’s about the size of it,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘It’s not a clear-cut case by any means, though.’

Dame Beatrice and Laura left the Chief Constable’s house at soon after nine and returned to the College and the High Mistress’s Lodging to recount the details of the interview.

‘How many people knew of the gatehouse cellar?’ Dame Beatrice asked her.

‘I suppose any number of people could have known of it, but only the porters and Mrs Lawrence had keys to it.’

‘It was usually kept locked, then?’

‘Yes. In these days one doesn’t provide hidey-holes in a women’s College.

‘So why did Mrs Lawrence have a key?’

‘She was a keen photographer and had permission to use part of the cellar as a darkroom.’

‘And the porters?’

‘The cellar used to be a prison for recalcitrant nuns, so it is divided into several small cells. Mrs Lawrence used the largest of these and the porters kept my garden-party deckchairs in the others.’

‘So, if Mrs Lawrence was in her darkroom, the door to the cellar would not be locked.’

‘As I’ve pointed out to the police, anybody bold enough to take the risk could have followed her down there, as the College grounds are open to daytime visitors. The fact that the porters had keys is therefore quite irrelevant, but the police can’t get that missing parcel out of their obstinate heads and, of course, Mrs Lawrence had made herself very unpleasant about it.’

‘The murderer, if you exonerate the porters, had to get into the College grounds by daylight, then. At what time of day did Mrs Lawrence use the darkroom?’

‘In the evenings, after her secretarial duties were over. Oh, and in the daytime during the vacations, I suppose. She had a key to the main gate, just as my own secretary has.’

‘Lawrence, of course, would have known of his wife’s hobby and also that she had a key to the gate.’

‘I suppose so, although I believe they were only together out of term-time. He was at his own university in term and she was here. It seemed an odd arrangement to me for a married couple, but no worse, I suppose, than being married to a sailor or both partners being on the stage.’

‘Did Mrs Lawrence live in College?’

‘No. She had rooms in the town, but very close at hand.’

‘Did nobody realise she was missing? It seems to have been some time between the murder and the discovery of the body.’

‘Nobody at all. Of course, when her body was found, her landlady was questioned, but she knew nothing. She had gone on holiday the week before College went down. She says that when she returned, a fortnight later, she assumed that Mrs Lawrence had gone on holiday, too, although she admitted she was a little surprised that Mrs Lawrence had not followed her usual practice of leaving a forwarding address for letters.’

‘At what time do you lock your gate at night?’

‘At ten. The dons, as you know, have keys. Students on late passes have to ring for the porter, who is on duty until midnight. The bell connects with the Dean’s quarters after that, so anybody coming back later than midnight has to be let in by the Dean and, unless there is a cast-iron reason for lateness, the offender is very likely to be rusticated.’ She smiled and added, ‘Even if only for getting the Dean out of bed. The students know the rules and, even in this undisciplined age, I do my best to see that those rules are kept. It’s for the students’ own good. They can’t do their work if they are going to make whoopee at all hours of the night.’

It was arranged that the visitors should spend the night at the College. On their way home after breakfast on the following morning, Laura asked:

‘Didn’t you want to examine that gatehouse cellar for yourself?’

‘With what object? The police will have searched it exhaustively and the floor and the walls will have been cleaned up long before this.’

‘I wonder what made them think of looking there?’

‘They would have been told about Mrs Lawrence’s darkroom, no doubt, when the body was identified and they could get no help at her lodging.’

‘Would anybody but the porters have moved the corpse, do you think? Surely any outsider would simply have left it to be found. It was taking an awful risk to drag it across to the cloister. Another thing: if Lawrence and his wife usually spent their holidays together, isn’t it rather surprising that he doesn’t seem to have reported that she was missing?’

‘If they usually spent their holidays together it would be more than surprising; it would be incredible. However, we have no proof that they were accustomed to spend their holidays in each other’s company.’

‘Doctor Durham-Basing seemed to think they did.’

‘Oh, no doubt the couple kept up appearances, but it need have been no more than that. According to what we know, Lawrence spent some part of his vacations with Sir Anthony and certainly did so this year.’

‘With fatal results. I say, it does all hang together,’ said Laura. ‘I mean, if Mrs Lawrence knew that there had been funny business in connection with Sir Anthony’s death and that Lawrence was coming in for a lot of money, money enough to get him out of the jam he was in…’

‘Yes, but we cannot argue ahead of our data. Be patient, and let time pass,’ said Dame Beatrice.