St. Peter's Finger

chapter 12

guests

“What a blessed change I find

Since I entertained this Guest!

Now methinks, another mind

Mores, and rules, within my breast.”

christopher harvey: The Enlarging of the Heart.

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Sister magdalene, smiling, as usual, opened the gate for her, and stood beside it, waiting to shut it again.

Mrs. Bradley stopped in the entrance and said:

“Who else has a key to the gate?”

“A key hangs in the Common Room, Reverend Mother Superior has another, and a third is in the possession of Sister Saint Ambrose for letting the orphan children in and out to the guest-house after sunset.”

So that was that, Mrs. Bradley thought. She thanked the lay-sister, passed through the gate and walked into the guest-house just as the gong was being sounded for the midday meal.

The dining-room was twice as long as its width, and a table ran almost the whole length of it with a place set at the head and another at the foot. These places, she found, were allotted to herself and to the Dominican, a merry-looking man of forty or so, with a jowl which no amount of shaving could make any colour but blue, black eyes as sharp and bold as sloes, and a very beautiful voice. He was, Mrs. Bradley learned, convalescent after long illness, and was hoping to return to his monastery in the near future. He had read all her works, and discussed them with her during most of the meal. He was a learned, entertaining companion, and the fact that the length of the table lay between them did nothing to abate his enthusiasm. Mrs. Bradley attempted, now and again, to talk to her neighbours, but the Spanish lady, another refugee, Señorita Mercedes Rio, and one of the two young French girls, who were going to Rome later on for their novitiate in the mother house of the Order, had scarcely a word to say.

“My father, my brothers, my lover, all are killed,” the Spaniard said, and lapsed into a silence which Mrs. Bradley hesitated to disturb. When the meal was over and Dom Pius had, for the second time, said grace, Mrs. Bradley met him, of set purpose, in the doorway, and laid a claw on his sleeve.

“You have something you wish to ask me?” enquired the monk, inoffensively but definitely drawing away from her touch.

“I want to talk to you about something of considerable importance. Will you walk with me in the garden?”

They passed through the convent gate again, the Dominican, who was in orders, automatically blessing Sister Magdalene as he passed, and began to stroll together towards the orchard.

“Last Monday week, father,” said Mrs. Bradley slowly, “the day on which the guests took the little orphan children to the pictures…”

“I remember. I did not go. Oh—we are allowed to go—that is to say, there is nothing forbidden about it—the theatre, yes, the cinema, no, not at present —but actually I did not accompany the others.”

“That is exceedingly interesting. Did anyone else not go?”

“You have good reason, doubtless, for asking me this, and I know, of course, why you are here. I cannot remember that anyone else did not go. But, then, I should hardly have troubled myself, I think, to find out who went and who did not.”

“Father Thomas?”

“Yes, he went in. It is not forbidden, you see, and the little children loved him. They would not have been so happy, had he not gone, therefore he went to please them. It is good to be loved by children.”

“What did you do, then, whilst the others were at the cinema?”

“I went into the local museum and studied the exhibits in the cases. I have seen better, but these were quite interesting. Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age —some Roman things, of course—Saxon, a mediaeval pot or two—it was not rubbish—nearly so, not quite. I was there for three hours, and then we all had tea.”

“Where?”

“In the guest-house, here, and the little children had theirs here, too, and then we played with them at bears, and then the good sisters came and took them to put them to bed. We did not know then of the dreadful thing that had happened, of course, in the guest-house.”

“I suppose you did not talk to the doctor, father, after he had examined the child?”

“I did not see him, no. I knew that the child was not dead by half-past twelve, but that you also know. I went up to that bathroom at the last, before we left, to bring down a watch which one of the ladies had left. This death is strange and terrible. Such things happen; I have known of them; but not where it is peace, as it is here.” He hesitated, and then said charmingly, “But I am keeping you, and you will wish to be away pursuing your enquiries. It is quite dreadful, and a great family, yes.”

“Not, I believe, a great family. Certainly a wealthy one,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “And the little girl was the heiress.”

“Where there is much wealth there is sometimes much wickedness. It is like that, money.” They were back at the great gates. He bowed, and Mrs. Bradley smiled, and let him go. There was a service at two o’clock each day, she remembered. Probably he wanted to attend it. She wondered whether all the other guests would go, too. Since the monk could not provide an alibi for anybody else, and since his own was (only technically) suspect—she could not imagine the Dominican killing a child—it would be just as well to establish that the rest of the party had actually spent their time at the cinema, and that none of them had sneaked back to the guest-house to meet Ursula Doyle.

She was fortunate, for, even as she stood thinking, a girl she had noticed at table, a frail, black-eyed creature who looked extremely ill, came past the gates and smiled at her as she passed. Mrs. Bradley arrested her progress.

“It is a little warmer,” she said. “Are you going to Vespers, possibly?”

“No, I am sorry. I am to take the air for an hour every afternoon that it is fine. Did you wish for a companion to go with you?” Her foreign accent was almost undetectable.

“No. Please walk about the garden with me for a little while. I, too, have to take the air,” Mrs. Bradley, partly mendaciously, explained.

“Ah, yes, that will be pleasant. I am not good alone. There is much to think about. Do you think much?”

“I think a good deal,” Mrs. Bradley admitted. “I think I should like to have been with you when you took the little children to the cinema.”

“Yes, I, too, would like to have gone, but, alas!—”

“Oh, you did not go with the children?”

“No, I did not go. I have trouble of the chest. I went out walking when they had all gone inside.”

“Did you go part of the way with Father Pius?”

“No, no. I went to the door of the cinema with the others. He left us at the turning to go to a little museum, so he said.”

“So he said? You think that perhaps he did not go to the museum after all?”

“I did not mean that. I mean that I heard him say that was where he would go. Why, please, should he not go, if he said he was going?”

“I have no idea. We must assume that that is where he went.”

“Perfectly.”

“Have you stayed here before?”

“Never. It is beautiful. I love the wildness. How do you call it—this wild country?”

“The moors.”

“Ah, yes. The moors. On them I walked whilst the others were inside the cinema, and above the sea, on the top of the cliffs.”

“How far did you go?”

“Not so far. It is not allowed to become too tired yet. I walked out, and I walked back, just enough to be interesting, and then I sat in a small little house—”

“A shelter?”

“A shelter—on the top of the cliff that is of the town. There was an old lady there, and a nursemaid who had a baby in a baby-carriage, and we talked. I liked it very much.”

“Did you not become cold?”

“No. I was well in clothes, and I wore the little stockings over the long stockings, and large gloves, and the sun shone, not so warm as we have it, but it was very pleasant.”

“Then you came back when the others came out from the cinema?”

“But very much sooner. The man, who had driven us over, took me back, and then returned for the others.”

“At what time, then, did you get back here to the guest-house?”

“To the guest-house, no, I do not come there. I was in the church ten minutes, perhaps, and then I was in the cloister in a long chair, and Sister Lucia— she is of my country and very kind—I am only English of my husband—Trust, his name is—she brought me some hot soup and put over me blankets and left me to rest as it is ordered. I fell asleep, it was so warm and comfortable.”

“And at what time, then, did you go into the church?”

“It would have been—let me see—I am to answer you as well as ever I can, because you are asking all these questions for a purpose—so much I can tell— well, now, Vespers are over, and the church is silent when I go in. How much over—that is what you wish to know. My friend, I cannot tell you. It is not long, I think—perhaps it was about a quarter to three. Sister Lucia will know. She came to me in the cloister— she will know at what time she came. Oh, and I think perhaps I was not alone in the church. Someone was praying, too. That person, perhaps, would know.”

It was all perfectly convincing, Mrs. Bradley thought, and nobody with lungs in the condition of this poor girl’s could have risked either a struggle or the carbon monoxide gas. Not that there was the slightest reason for suspecting her. The interesting thing was that, once again, the facts she had been given were proving not to be facts. All the guests had not gone to the cinema with the children. Counting poor old Sister Bridget, three, at least, of the convent’s visitors had been elsewhere at the time of the death.

She walked with the consumptive girl to the sunny side of the cloister, saw her tucked up by Sister Lucia, and then obtained the approximate time at which this had all been done on the afternoon on which the child had died. Not that it helped. Mrs. Bradley felt in her bones that it could not make any difference. How interesting it would have been, though, if somebody had gone to the bathroom before the arrival of Miss Bonnet at half-past three or just after.

She went back to the guest-house parlour in search of another victim, and found one in the person of the English girl, Philippa Carey, who was residing at the convent for a week or two before she went across to France to take up her novitiate. She was quiet, intelligent and, to Mrs. Bradley’s mind, irrationally enthusiastic at the thought of becoming a nun. This girl remembered that Dom Pius had left the party to go to the museum, and she remembered that the poor young married woman with the troublesome cough had left them at the door of the cinema. She agreed that she herself had gone in with the children, and stated that all the other guests had also gone in to see the show.

“It was Mickey Mouse,” she said, “and some cowboys. A very good programme for children.”

“Then the aunt of the poor little girl who was drowned was at the cinema that afternoon with the rest of you?” Mrs. Bradley exclaimed.

“Yes, certainly she was. She went in just in front of me, and, although, of course, it was dark whilst the films were being shown, I do not think that anybody went out.”

“Did she sit in front of you?”

“Why no. I do not know where she sat. We sat with children on either side of us, and attended to them and not to one another.”

“Did she come home with the rest of the party?”

“I do not remember noticing. But what a dreadful thing for her to come home to!”

“Do you remember how she was dressed?”

“I think so.” The girl looked at her curiously, but Mrs. Bradley offered no explanation of the abrupt and pointed question. “She had on a greenish tweed costume, and over it a big musquash coat, and had a little plume of deer’s hair—you know the ones they sell in Scotland to visitors?—at the side of her hat.”

“I hear she is coming back here after a bit?”

“I have not heard that. Poor woman, she was terribly distressed.”

“Naturally. I wonder whether she tried to get the coroner to bring it in as accidental death?”

The girl shook her head.

“I do not know. I did not attend the inquest. But here in the guest-house she said to me that she could not conceive that a child like little Ursula would dream of doing such a terrible thing.”

“The child was in trouble in school, though, wasn’t she? I heard a rumour that she was exceedingly unhappy.”

A curtain seemed to be drawn over the girl’s eyes. She replied very stiffly.

“I have no knowledge that she was unhappy or in trouble, but no happy child would commit mortal sin, I am certain.”

“I was sent for to prove that the child’s death was accidental,” Mrs. Bradley meekly explained.

“And can you prove it? How wonderful that would be!” Her face lit up as she said it. Mrs. Bradley slowly shook her head.

“Whether I can prove it remains to be seen,” she said. “I think the chances are exceedingly remote. There seems so little to go on.”

“But the evidence of character?”

“Yes, the evidence of character. The last kind of child to be involved in a fatal accident due to disobedience, wouldn’t you say? Quite the last child to break into the guest-house against the very strictest rule of the school. No, no.” She shook her head.