St. Peter's Finger

chapter 19

culprit

“I leave the plain, I climb the height;

No branchy thicket shelter yields;

But blessed forms in whistling storms

Fly o’er waste fens and windy fields.”

alfred, lord tennyson: Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.

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The infirmary, a large, cheerful room with a view seawards which was partly blocked by the church, was, when Mrs. Bradley arrived, in the charge of Mother Mary-Joseph, who sat in a corner and, as it was Sunday, sedulously read from a book of religious character; what it was Mrs. Bradley did not know. She was seated out of earshot of any conversation which might be held between Mrs. Bradley and the child, and she kept this distance away all the time that Mrs. Bradley was there.

Mary looked pale, more from fear of getting into trouble than from the consequences of the fall, Mrs. Bradley thought. She greeted her cheerfully, whereupon the child burst into tears. This reaction, in one so obviously phlegmatic, provoked Mrs. Bradley’s interest.

“Come, now,” she said, with brisk kindness. “That’s enough of that. You and I must not waste each other’s time. What were you up to yesterday?”

“I thought I had a clue.”

“What about?”

“About Ursula.”

“Tell me.”

“Ulrica always thought that Ursula was murdered. It frightened me at first, but then I saw that Ulrica was also horribly frightened, and I asked her why, and she said that she supposed she would be the next one, and she didn’t want to die with her sins upon her. She isn’t a Catholic yet, you know. She was sure she was going to be murdered.”

“Rubbish. Accidents will happen,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“Yes, I know. But this was no accident. I found that out last night. Any more than poor Sister Bridget was an accident.”

“Sister Bridget,” said Mrs. Bradley, who knew that the children had heard nothing definite beyond what the first spate of gossip had washed down to the schoolgirls at the very beginning of the affair, “had a nasty experience, and is lucky to be on the way to recovering from it. She is not quite responsible for her actions, as I think we all know, and things may happen to her which would not happen to others who are better able to take care of themselves.”

“But they said she was hit on the head,” said Mary, rightly disregarding this conventional and insincere explanation.

“Of course she was,” Mrs. Bradley vigorously answered. “If people rush about the place at night as though they are burglars, naturally they get hit on the head if the people in charge have anything to hit them with.”

“No one confessed to hitting her, though,” said Mary, with irritating logic.

“Naturally not, since she nearly died of the blow,” said Mrs. Bradley tartly.

“But—”

Mrs. Bradley, who had had considerable experience of adolescents who said: “But,” decided to change the subject.

“You haven’t told me your clue yet,” she remarked.

“Oh, that! Well, I soon realised that things were more dangerous for Ulrica than for me, and, when I thought that, I cheered up quite a lot, because, you see, if it was the money, I can’t get any until Ulrica is dead— I don’t mean that to sound horrid; it’s just common sense. So I decided to do a bit of snooping.”

“Do a—” said Mrs. Bradley, the accusing spectacle of Mother Mary-Joseph, teacher of English, there in the corner of the infirmary and immediately before her eyes.

“Oh, you know—snooping. Like detectives do. I thought perhaps the others had missed something that I might discover, and I thought how lovely that would be.”

“Yes?”

“Oh, yes. Well, we’re never allowed in the guesthouse unless one of the guests invites us, so I made up my mind—I say, you won’t have to tell Mother Francis this?—to get into the guest-house somehow and have a look at that bathroom—only—I didn’t know, you see, which bathroom it was. That had to be found out first.”

“And what were your plans for getting into the guest-house?”

“Well, Ursula managed it, didn’t she? And she never broke any rules, as far as anyone knew. I thought there must be an easy way in, and it only needed finding.”

“Now this,” said Mrs. Bradley, “is what I’ve felt all along was the very nub of the matter. She never broke any rules, yet she broke one of the strictest rules of all. I understand from the nuns that it is only the most hardened offenders who ever dream of breaking into the guest-house.”

“The last girl who did it was expelled.”

“Were you willing to risk expulsion?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t have minded in a way, as soon as the row was over. Of course, I wouldn’t in the ordinary way want to leave the convent, but mother has been such a beast about taking me away in any case, that it didn’t seem to matter in quite the same way. And whether I am expelled or not, I am going to be taken straight out to my grandfather in New York.”

“Why is that?”

“Mother thinks he would like me better than Ursula or Ulrica, if he saw me, because Ursula was a bit mousy, and Ulrica really is rather fascinating, and, of course, most awfully clever, but I’m decidedly stupid, and as grandfather seems a bit stupid, too, mother—she isn’t my mother really, of course, she’s only my step, and I’m not, as a matter of fact, too terribly keen—”

“And as grandfather also seems a bit stupid,” said Mrs. Bradley, gently.

“Oh, yes. Mother thought he might like me a good deal better than either of them, and give me the money after all. It seems beastly to talk like this, but you do want to know it all, don’t you?”

“One moment,” said Mrs. Bradley. She wrote in her little notebook, the pencil that described her hieroglyphic shorthand flicking over the pages like a whip of silver fire.

“When did you know that your parents proposed to take you to New York to visit your grandfather!“she enquired.

“Oh, days! It was one of the first things mother mentioned when she got here.”

“And how many people have you told?”

“Oh, dozens. Simply everybody, by now.”

“And what made you sick on Friday?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Did you eat anything out of the ordinary?”

“No, but I don’t like fat, and I had an awful lot on my plate at dinner, and, of course, we have to eat everything on the plate. I rather expect it was that.”

“Why can’t you see your grandfather during the summer vacation?”

“He goes away himself. Anyway, he wouldn’t want us then. He says it’s too hot in the summer to be pestered with friends and relations.”

Mrs. Bradley could not regard this as a personal idiosyncrasy.

“I daresay he does. A good many people think the same. What does your father think about the trip to New York?”

“Daddy says while he pays school fees I’m to take advantage of them. It’s mother who’s always croaking about New York. All the same, I believe he’s just as keen as she is. He’d love me to have the money, naturally.”

“And it is your stepmother who is so much concerned about Ursula’s death?”

“Yes, of course she is. She doesn’t want anything to go wrong about the will. I don’t understand what she means by that. You could ask her about it if you liked.”

“I intend to do so. Well, did you manage to get yourself into the guest-house?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I funked it. Oh, I did! I know it sounds awful, but you don’t know what Mother Saint Francis and Mother Saint Patrick can be like. Mother Saint Patrick is my form-mistress, and I really believe she’s worse than Mother Saint Francis, and Mother Saint Francis once made a girl cry two whole days on end. I couldn’t explain how she does it, but she does.”

Mrs. Bradley could believe this, and came back to the previous evening’s exploit.

“Well, what about the guest-house?”

“I got an anonymous letter.”

“What?”

“You know—those letters people write and don’t put their name at the bottom. We had a poem like it, and Mother Mary-Joseph asked us why there wasn’t a name at the bottom, and Rosalie Waters—always very cheeky—she’s had three Major Penances from different people already this term—said, straight away, ‘I suppose he must be ashamed of it.’ Well, that might be true about some anonymous letters, I should think.”

“What did the letter say? Have you kept it, by any chance?”

“No. It said to destroy it, so I did. I pulled the chain on it.”

“A pity. It might, in itself, have been a clue.”

“Oh, dear. I didn’t think. It said: ‘To-night keep your eye on Bessie at the Orphanage’ and ‘Orphanage’ was spelt wrongly, I think, but I’m not too sure, because my own spelling’s rather shaky.”

“And is that what you were doing—keeping your eye on Bessie?”

“Oh, no! Do you read detective stories? We are not allowed them here, but at home I read a great many. I thought the letter was probably a blind. So I pretended to be keeping an eye on Bessie, but all the time I was trying to make out whether anybody had an eye on me.”

“But was not that a frightening idea?”

“No. I thought of Ulrica. She’d got to have an accident first, you see.”

“I admire your ghoulish intelligence, but listen to me: I want you not to take it upon yourself to do any more of this snooping. It isn’t really very safe.”

“No, it isn’t really. I got on to the roof of the guesthouse, and I could have got into the bathroom, but didn’t dare. And then I couldn’t get down.”

“Lost your nerve, I suppose, in the dark?”

“Yes, I did. I believe anybody would have. And I thought I saw somebody lurking.”

“Bessie’s young man, I daresay.”

“The orphans don’t have young men! It isn’t allowed.”

“Sometimes they have them,” said Mrs. Bradley, with a pleasant recollection of the carton of cream and the rose. “Promise me, please, that you won’t do any more snooping by yourself.”

“Very well, then. I’m glad you’ve made me, because now I can’t break the promise, and really I didn’t want to do any more hunting for clues. If I hadn’t fallen off the roof of the first private house, though, and been helped by a gentleman who lives there, I think I should have found out quite a lot. But I came over sick again, and lost my hold, and crashed.”

“Oh, yes. The private houses,” said Mrs. Bradley. She did not want to bring them any further into the affairs of the convent if she could help it, but she reflected that they might have information on various points which the convent did not possess. There were only two of them, and in time, she supposed, the convent would absorb them into its guest-house just as it had absorbed the other three which the friendly speculative builder had put up.

“So the gentleman helped you up?”

“Well, really, you know, I’d hurt myself. He picked me up, and then I got a sort of a clue, after all.”

“No!”

“Oh, yes. He said: ‘And how many more of you wretched kids am I going to spot on the roof?’

“I said: ‘I’m terribly sorry. I slipped, and then I rolled. But I didn’t know that anybody else had ever been on the roof. ’ I didn’t like to ask him when it was, but it sounds like Ursula, doesn’t it? You can get into that bathroom from the roof, because that’s the way the girl who was expelled from school got in, only she was caught by Mother Saint Jude, and Mother Saint Jude was terribly upset at having to take her over to Mother Saint Francis, but she felt she had to, because the rule is so strict.”

“You said that you received an anonymous letter. Have you no idea at all who might have sent it?”

“You know how the nuns write? Well, it was just like that. But all the girls can do it. It’s very easy.”

“What about your clothes?”

“A fearful mess. I daren’t think what Sister Geneviève’s going to say. Do you think that she’ll report me?”

“I really have no idea. Did your stockings get torn?”

“Oh, yes. I took the skin off all down the side of my leg, and, of course, the stocking tore away too. And the roof is so terribly dirty. I got simply smothered in soot. Luckily I had my black overall on, and not my grey school tunic!”

“By the way, how did you manage to get on to the roof?”

“Oh, the man in the end house had a ladder already up. He was doing some painting of the guttering. It was just light enough for me to carry, so, as soon as it was dark, I dragged it along and got up it. But I hadn’t got to the guest-house after all, but only to the second of the private houses. Oh, dear! I have got bruises!”

“But, look here,” said Mrs. Bradley, speaking sternly, “there’s more in this than you’ve told me. Let’s go over it again.”

“No, please, I’d rather not. I shall only get into trouble as it is! I’ve told you all I can. I can’t get other people into a mess.”

“Do you mean Nancy Ryan?”

“Well, not only Nancy.”

“Mary,” said Mrs. Bradley, “don’t be silly. What did you do on Friday between a quarter past three and bed-time?”

“I felt ill, and went up to bed.”

“You were not in bed when Cynthia Parks went to look.”

“I expect I was being sick again just then.”

“Did you go into Preparation on Friday evening?”

“No. I went back to bed. I was sick twice in the night, you know.”

“Why?”

“Well—”

“Why?”

“I ate soap.”

“We’re coming to it at last,” said Mrs. Bradley. “All right, Mary. Don’t begin to cry. You thought you were poisoned, didn’t you? And now, what made you think that?”

“Ulrica gave me some sweets.”

“Ulrica? Where did she get them?”

“She said that Mother Saint Gregory had given them to her. They were a kind of dark, awful yellow—very sinister. They tasted perfectly horrid, and I was nervous—because of Ursula, you know.”

“Have you any of them left?”

“Yes, one.”

“Good girl. Where is it?”

“In my needlework bag. It’s collected up in Mother Saint Cyprian’s cupboard. I’ll get it for you next needlework lesson if you want it.”

“How many did you eat?”

“Well, I ate three. I thought at first that the taste was simply peculiar, and that I might like it better if I persevered.”

“Had Ulrica given you any directions about eating the sweets, I wonder?”

“Yes. She said not to guzzle them all at once. I thought she was just being nasty. I know I’m greedy. I always confess to the sin of greed, but I don’t seem to get any better. I’m always hungry, that’s all. I don’t really mean to be greedy.”

“Neither does a cormorant,” said Mrs. Bradley, laughing. “Well, what happened next?”

“Well, my inside went funny,” said Mary, delicately, “so I told the girls I was sick, which doesn’t sound quite so awful. And then I suddenly thought—”

“What?”

“How easy it would be for Ulrica if I was out of the way. There’d be nobody then to go to New York and get grandfather’s money instead of her having it all.”

“So you suspect that your cousin tried to murder you?”

“Well, I didn’t exactly suspect it, but it all seemed rather queer, so I thought the best thing I could do was to make myself sick with the soap and get rid of the poison, if any.”

“Very sensible and commendable,” said Mrs. Bradley, nodding. Mary looked very uncomfortable. “I don’t want to get Ulrica into trouble,” she said.

“You won’t,” Mrs. Bradley promised her. “I will be the soul of discretion. I think we shall find that the sweets were merely brimstone and treacle tablets. Mother Saint Gregory provided them, you say?”

She was more immediately concerned with clothing than with sweets, and, upon leaving Mary, went to find Sister Geneviève. The lay-sister matron brought out the garments which had been found in the bathroom and brought the tape-measure which Mrs. Bradley also demanded. The clothes were as Mother Jude had described—torn and damaged. The rather long grey drill-tunic was black with soot from the roof. All the garments were marked with the owner’s name-tab, U. DOYLE, sewn on with tiny stitches.