Laurels Are Poison

Chapter l6

BONE

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George and the Chief Engineer went down to the sports pavilion to collect the skeleton left there by the six students. They went during the students’ dinner time, and no one except Mrs Bradley and the two men themselves knew when the box was transported to the College. Except that the Science Room was closed to all students for a couple of hours next day (greatly to the annoyance of Second-Years of the Advanced Group), there was no intimation that anything extraordinary was going on, except for the presence in the drive of three large saloon cars. One belonged to the police, one to a famous surgeon and the third to Miss Murchan’s dentist.

The police had come ‘in case there was anything for them’ as the elliptical phrase goes, the surgeon and Mrs Bradley, in consultation, were going to determine, if they could, the age of the bones in question, and the dentist had been invited because upon his evidence would depend the important question of whether the bones were all that remained of Miss Murchan.

The dentist was given the first innings. Twister Marshmallow (or his deputy) was taken carefully out of his box. Mrs Bradley had sealed up the box in the presence of the Principal, the Assistant Principal, Miss Rosewell and Miss Crossley, and, those four ladies having sworn to the fact that the seals had not been tampered with, they were politely but firmly shown out, the door was locked behind them, and the fun began.

The dentist did not take very long.

‘This isn’t Miss Murchan’s skull,’ he pronounced. ‘At least, they’re not her teeth.’

He produced chapter and verse in support of this last statement, and Mrs Bradley cackled.

‘Murderers have limited minds,’ she said. ‘There’s always something they don’t know, or forget or can’t be bothered with.’

When the dentist had gone, she and the surgeon got down enjoyably to their own part of the job. Shorn of technicalities and rendered, therefore, into English, the sum total of their conclusions came to the facts that the skeleton was female, therefore it was not Twister Marshmallow, that the body of which the skeleton had formed part had been alive not more than a year previously, that the bones had been boiled to get rid of the flesh upon them, that the right arm had sustained a fairly serious fracture at one time, that death had probably followed concussion, that the fracture had been suffered previous to the damage suffered by the skull, and, finally, that the way in which the skeleton had been put together and articulated was clumsy and amateurish.

‘And very nice, too,’ said Mrs Bradley, taking the surgeon off to have a wash. ‘If the police can’t find out where that skeleton came from, I shall be greatly surprised.’

‘But where do we begin, madam?’ the stolid inspector inquired.

‘Locally. The body can’t possibly have come in from far away.’

‘But nobody’s been reported missing, madam.’

‘No. The graves give up their dead, but they don’t advertise the fact by radio,’ said Mrs Bradley, with unusual tartness. The inspector’s face, however, cleared.

‘Robbed a grave, did they?’ he said.

‘She,’ corrected Mrs Bradley. ‘And what you want is news of a woman of about sixty, who had broken her right arm, and who died from concussion following a very nasty fall. Looks as though she fell off the top of a house, as a matter of fact’

‘Fell off the top of a house?’ said the inspector. ‘Well, Maggie Dalton might fit the bill. I don’t know about breaking her arm, but it’s true she fell off a window-sill four storeys up. Would sit on the sill to clean the outside. They begged her to have a window cleaner, but not she. Preferred to do it herself, she always said, and one day she overbalanced and down she came. Accidental death, of course.’

‘And when did this happen?’ Mrs Bradley inquired.

‘Last June twelve-month.’

‘Providential,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘And who was Maggie Dalton?’

‘Nobody knew. She was brought up in the Orphanage at Betchdale, so I heard.’

‘No relatives?’

‘Not as far as anybody knew. That all came out at the inquest.’

‘And where was poor Maggie Dalton buried?’

‘The local cemetery here. The one you see over on the right when you get to Collard Swing Bridge.’

‘You’ll have to get permission to exhume her,’ said Mrs Bradley.

‘You don’t mean — she couldn’t have been murdered, madam,’ said the inspector confusedly.

‘No, I know she wasn’t. She died accidentally, just as you have described. I meant that you will have to get permission to open the grave.’

‘Ah, now you’re talking,’ said the inspector. ‘That’s no Home Office job. Ted Parker, at the Cemetery, is my wife’s second cousin. If I can’t do a bit of digging in the cemetery with no questions asked, one night when we get a decent moon, call me a South Sea Islander.’

‘I should like to be present,’ Mrs Bradley observed.

‘And welcome,’ said the inspector heartily. ‘I’ll just have a word with Ted, and let you know.’

The moon was in its third quarter. Digging a grave, Mrs Bradley reflected, was a grisly kind of business, but un-digging it, as her grandson Derek might have said, was weird and ghostly indeed.

The inspector and his wife’s second cousin were the only gardeners. Mrs Bradley, half-hidden in the shade of a yew tree, brooded upon their employment whilst damp clay transferred its clammy coldness to the soles of her shoes, and its chill communicated itself to her bones.

At last the diggers struck upon the coffin and lifted it out. It lay, strange husk, upon the heap of upturned soil.

‘Nought in it. Too light,’ said the wife’s second cousin. He prised off the lid with a crowbar he had brought with him. The coffin stank, but was empty.

Reverently, to Mrs Bradley’s sardonic amusement, the men re-buried it. Mrs Bradley left them to their task — the reward to the wife’s second cousin for his kindly cooperation had been agreed upon beforehand — and went back to Athelstan.

She walked quickly through the College grounds, especially the part near the main gate, and, by a shrubbery, ran as fast as she could, and zigzagged from side to side of the drive. The ambush came just by the rockery, as she was about to ascend the steps which led from the grounds to the gravel.

Mrs Bradley dropped to earth, sheltered in the shadow of the rockery, and, very cautiously, began to stalk her antagonist. The quarry, however, either knew the grounds much better than Mrs Bradley did, or could see in the dark, for Mrs Bradley did not find him or her, and the moonlight was of no assistance whatever. She crawled back to the point at which she had been attacked, picked up the missiles which had been thrown — they were easy enough to see, for they lay far out in the moonlight on the soaking grass of the lawn — and took them into Athelstan with her, two half-bricks, which had been hurled with considerable force.

As she entered the house, stepping quietly and having used her latch-key to get in, she was aware of faint stirrings down in the basement.

She tested the door at the top of the basement stairs, found it locked, as usual, smiled contentedly and then stopped short as a thought struck her, not a pleasant thought, either.

‘Goodness me,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s Lulu’s job to see that that door is locked. I suppose the maids forgot it in the half-term week-end, and that’s how she managed to get up here and cut that poor girl’s hair!’