St. Peter's Finger

chapter 25

conclusion

“He was a shepparde and no mercenarie;

And though he holy were, and vertuous,

He was to sinful manful piteous.”

chaucer: The Canterbury Tales.

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We should never have managed it without her,” said Mrs. Bradley. It was some weeks later, and the time was Easter Saturday. Ferdinand, true to his promise, had come down to see his mother. The school children had all gone home for the holiday, and the religious and the orphans were in church for Compline, Matins and Lauds.

From where she stood, with her son and George on either side of her, Mrs. Bradley could hear the beginning of the Alleluias.

“Don’t apologise to me for having let her go,” said Ferdinand. “I suppose, as long as those two children and the precious vessels are safe, you don’t care whether the murderer is laid by the heels or not? Queer the old chap altering his will like that, and leaving all his money to the convent. Saved the Maslins a journey to New York! How angry that rather spiteful little woman was, wasn’t she? What’s happening to our young friend Ulrica—the girl I saw on to the boat?”

“She is going to stay over there in the care of a Catholic community.”

“What, as an orphan, do you mean?”

“No. The grandfather has set aside a sum of money for her education, and enough to give her a small dowry if she decides, later on, to take the veil. If she does not become a nun, the sum will secure to her a small income, but she will have to earn a little money as well.”

“It’s all a bit odd to me, mother.” Ferdinand knit his black brows and stared away over the top of his mother’s dark head to where, beyond the orchard, the tall church rose to the sky. Mrs. Bradley cackled, and George observed:

“Madam didn’t exactly let Miss Bonnet go. It was more that the young lady managed to disappear in the general mêlée of the rescue.”

“Very fairly put, George,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And the fact does remain, of course, that I could not have handed her over to the police, for I could not prove much against her, although she confessed that she had attacked Sister Bridget. In any case, I do not think that the attack was meant to kill the victim, although the actual force of the blow was rather dangerously misjudged. But that’s Miss Bonnet all over.”

“But the murder of the child! You remember you described to me how you reconstructed the murder with that piece of gas-tubing in the guest-house dining-room?”

“Oh, that? But that was not a reconstruction of the murder! It was to assure myself that that was not a way in which the thing could very well have been done. If the murderer had held that tube of escaping gas so that the victim could breathe from it, she would have run considerable risk of being gassed herself. Have you turned the gas on in there? And the child, you remember, was not injured. Her nose might well have been broken, if the method that I demonstrated was right.” Ferdinand looked at his mother in some perplexity.

“But the cigarette holder shoved in the nozzle of the gas-tube to form a mouthpiece!” he exclaimed. “That seemed to me so ingenious!”

“Yes, so it was,” Mrs. Bradley regretfully conceded. “But it happened to be my ingenuity, not Miss Bonnet’s at all. You see, she never used a cigarette holder. On the other hand, Ulrica Doyle, quite suddenly, began helping her cousin Ursula with her Latin and her Science. That seemed to me significant.”

“Ulrica?”

“Yes. Carbon monoxide is easy enough to make, and Ulrica used to take those mysterious walks, which the Community, believing them harmless, did not supervise.”

“You mean children ought to be under constant supervision? I thought you were such an apostle of liberty!”

“I am, dear child, I hope. And it is now part of an inevitable reaction, that Ulrica knows she betrayed the kindness of Mother Francis and the Reverend Mother Superior.”

“But I thought you had fixed on Miss Bonnet!”

“Miss Bonnet,” said Mrs. Bradley, “is almost a halfwit in some respects, but even she could hardly have missed the conclusion that, if a child was going to be murdered, the time to do it was while the nuns were all in church between two o’clock and half-past. Even if nothing else had indicated that Miss Bonnet was not the culprit, I should have given up thinking her guilty when I heard about that half-hour’s special coaching she gave to the private-school girls.”

“But she knocked out that orphan child deliberately during the netball practice, you thought.”

“Yes, I know she did. She needed an excuse to get into the Orphanage, I think. When she had stolen the chalice and paten she wanted a hiding place very near at hand, from which she could take them when the search had ceased to be local and had widened.”

“But why pick the Orphanage?”

“Because nobody would suspect the poor orphans of stealing the chalice and paten, and suspicion would hardly be attached to Mother Ambrose and Mother Jude.”

“She just snooped round for a hiding-place?”

“Whilst Mother Ambrose and Mother Jude were busy. Yes, I think so.”

“But where was the child killed, mother?”

“In the bathroom where she was found. The carbon monoxide could have been made in several ways by a girl with some knowledge of chemistry—by burning some charcoal, for instance. The problem of how the child got into the guest-house bothered me for a time, but I’m quite sure now that Ulrica told her Miss Bonnet was there and wanted to see her about that extra coaching in physical training. You remember that that was one of the reasons brought forward in favour of the suicide verdict?—that the child was in trouble at school? Well, she was in trouble—if you can call it that!— with Miss Bonnet, and had been told she must have some extra practice.”

“But the bathroom?”

“Oh, we can imagine, I think, what happened. First they looked in at the parlour. ‘She isn’t here. She said she might be upstairs, and we were to find her.’ You know what children are, and Ursula would have believed every word from her cousin, the cousin who was helping her with her work, helping her to gain merit badges from her teachers, helping to make her so happy. You remember that many of the nuns decided that so happy a child would not have killed herself? Then, when they got to the bathroom door, the whiff of the carbon monoxide—‘look what I’m going to show Mother Saint Simon to-morrow.’ The fatal sniff, the climb out of the window to release the rest of the gas where it might harm no one, the horrifying discovery that the child was not merely unconscious, but was dead, the panic-stricken tearing off of the clothes, the water rising higher and higher in the bath, the closed window—to conceal, if possible, even from herself, that she had been out on the roof to get rid of the dangerous evidence—and then, the flight to the church, quite the most characteristic touch. Mind you, I think this: that if all had gone exactly according to plan, and the child had been found, not gassed in the bath, but drowned, and a verdict of Accidental Death had been returned, even Ulrica herself would have forgotten, very soon, that the death was due to her agency. Unfortunately for her, suicide is a dreadful sin from the point of view of the Church. That point of view she accepted, and immediately it worried and confused her. To have her innocent cousin—for she never thought of her except as a cypher and a pawn— accused of mortal sin, and wrongly accused, worked on her mind, and roused in her a dormant suicide complex.”

“But what are you going to do about it now?”

“Nothing, dear child. Why should I? Reverend Mother Superior, Mother Saint Francis, and old Mother Gregory, the Sacristan, were all convinced of her guilt.”

“But she can’t get off scot free!”

“Scot free?” said Mrs. Bradley. She laughed—not her usual cackle, but a harsh sound, sardonic and pitiful. “Why do you think I have had her so carefully watched? The nuns knew, if you do not. That abortive attempt at suicide in the car was her first, although the nuns tell me that after the death she frequently walked in her sleep and always towards an open window or towards the head of the stairs. The tendency to suicide was innate, and it was that which made the murder possible. To a Christian, Catholic or Protestant, murder and suicide should be, alike, impossible. Logically, a belief in the resurrection of the dead must always neutralise any belief in death as a solution of human problems. Murder, including self-murder, is evidence of an innate non-Christian belief that death ends all, and this child’s father, remember, an atheist, was a renegade Catholic churchman. The child, brought up without positive religious beliefs, was always in a state of mental conflict, for she could never reconcile her early training with her later religious ecstasies. All adolescents are at war within themselves, but in this child the fight was terrible enough to overwhelm her. Somehow, she had to rehabilitate herself in the eyes of God. Somehow, the family fortune had got to go to the Church. That was how she saw it. She had to expiate, somehow, the terrible sin of her father’s atheism. It had become a burden too terrible to be borne, and true reason broke beneath the strain of it.”

“But, mother, she must have been mad.”

“On the contrary, perfectly sane. Her tragedy was that she had a single-track mind, as the vulgar have it. If that mind held two very powerful basic ideas, it followed that those ideas must be in conflict.”

“But you can’t just leave it like this!”

“She will never commit another crime.”

“But, mother, you’ll have to expose her! The murder was such a wanton, wicked thing. It was something planned for weeks, carefully, painstakingly, devilishly; every circumstance taken into account and used to the best advantage. It was only through the merest accident that it failed to hoodwink everybody! After all, you needn’t worry! They wouldn’t hang the girl!”

“No, they wouldn’t, would they?” said Mrs. Bradley. Walking without her customary briskness, she led the way to the guest-house.

“You had a good deal of evidence against Miss Bonnet, though, hadn’t you?” her son observed tentatively, as they passed the wicket gate. “The towel, the absence of the bath-sheet, the fact that she lied about her visit to Kelsorrow School—or, rather, about the time she went there—the fact that she made two or three attempts to ‘out’ you when she found you were getting rather warm—that jar of bath salts, for instance! Nobody here but Miss Bonnet could have shinned over that high brick wall, and so got back undetected to the school.”

“The evidence was nearly all circumstantial, dear child. And Miss Bonnet would never have murdered the girl in the guest-house. For her it would have been risky in the extreme. She would have wrung the child’s neck and thrown the body into one of the fissures of the cliff or into a pool on the moor. Miss Bonnet’s reactions are lively, violent, and bear all the colourful stigmata of a shallow and rather weak nature. Besides, I don’t think at first it occurred to Miss Bonnet that the children could be a menace. Even if they had gone to New York and recognised the chalice and paten in Timothy Doyle’s collection, she thought he would tell them that the convent had sold him the copies. Nobody but an expert could tell them from the originals, you see.”

“Then you—Oh! So Mrs. Maslin knew that Ulrica was the criminal, and wanted to go to New York to drop the old man a hint!”

“She must have known, yes. She saw her on the roof getting rid of the rest of the evidence. You remember that she came out early from the pictures? She thought of giving Ulrica away, and then saw that to do so might involve considerable risk to herself, since no one could give her an alibi for the probable time of the murder, and she knew that she had lied to me about the time. She said she walked back that day, but she came by taxi.”

“Exasperating sort of position to be in, with all that money at stake.”

“Yes.” They had reached the guest-house, and Ferdinand went inside. George remained at the entrance with his employer.

“Odd the young lady should have found the right towel and that, and not used the bath-sheet, madam,” he observed.

“Clever brain, George. The towel came out of her aunt’s room. She knew the guest-house pretty well, you see. Had been to tea there before the murder, and knew her way about. I found that out from the cousin, Mary Maslin. All three of those children knew the guest-house. Her school tunic, dirty after climbing on the roof, she discarded, I expect, and wore Ursula’s tunic instead. All the school garments are named, but the two of them had the same initial, and if the cousin’s tunic seemed a little shorter than her own, Miss Bonnet, she knew, would not notice, and for other lessons she wore that long black overall.”

“You don’t think the young lady would do herself in in New York, madam? Has she got over that by now?”

“I don’t know, George. She may have gone past the stage at which the tendency to suicide is still active. There is very little doubt, I’m afraid, that unless she joins a religious community and establishes an unbreakable inhibition, she will end by killing herself in some fit of despair.”

“Well, there’s one thing come right in it, madam. The poor old girl who set the place on fire getting her mind back through you.”

“Yes. Her recovery is well advanced, George. I think the fire actually helped. It was a shock, and this time the shock was followed by the right reaction.”

“And the young person in the Orphanage you were interested in?”

“Bessie? Doing very well. I’m very pleased about Bessie. Annie, too, has a good place to go to when she leaves.”

“So all’s well that ends well, madam.”

“A Jesuitical statement, George, that I did not look for from you.”

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[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

[A 3S Release— v1, html]

[October 08, 2006]