Murder At School Read online

  Over an hour later—shortly after noon, to be precise— Revell and the detective stepped out of a taxi in a narrow Soho street. Revell’s spirits were, if anything, a shade less doleful. To begin with, he had put on a new brown suit that his tailor had just finished for him, and he was distinctly aware that he looked well in it. London, too, was less gloomy than Islington, and even beyond his misery there were the beginnings of hunger.

  In the small ante-room to the restaurant the detective broke his rule and drank a cocktail. Revell stood a second one, and after that the two repaired to a table and composed what Revell had to admit was a really creditable lunch. Petite Marmite, Sole Mornay, Poulet en Casserole, Canapé Macmahon—each in turn tempted him and won. He ate; he enjoyed. And a large bottle of Liebfraumilch still further improved his attitude towards the world in general.

  During the meal he spoke little, but Guthrie kept up an entertaining flow of talk just faintly tinged with “shop”. Revell found him quite amusing to listen to; indeed, he was rather surprised to find him possessed of such conversational powers.

  At Guthrie’s suggestion they took coffee and liqueurs in a small room at the rear of the restaurant. They had lunched so early that they had the room to themselves; it was a sort of lounge, fitted up with tile-topped tables and deep armchairs. There, in relaxed attitudes, they made themselves thoroughly comfortable, while good black coffee, excellent old brandy, and a cigarette, made even Revell feel that life was partially worth living. “Good place, this,” he commented. “I must come here again.”

  Guthrie nodded. “Yes, they give you good food and don’t worry you with trimmings. Hang your own hat and coat up on the hooks—not an army of retainers to collect sixpences from you. And this lounge place here I’ve always liked—you’re not the first person I’ve brought, I can assure you. Some pretty queer secrets have been told here.”

  “Are you going to tell me any?”

  Guthrie smiled. “I’m not sure, yet. Are you busy this afternoon, by the way?”

  Revell shook his head. “I’ve nothing on that can’t be let go, anyhow.” He hadn’t, as a matter of fact, anything on at all, and he felt far too drunk to think of bothering about it, even if it had existed.

  “Good. I’M quite free too, as it happens. I thought, as we may not meet again for some time, you might care to hear a bit about the case. Don’t hesitate to say so, though, if you’d rather not.”

  “I’d like to hear about it—I think.”

  “Yes, and I’d rather you did, too. You’re a clever chap, Revell, and you’ve a clever brain, but I’m not at all sure that if you didn’t learn the truth you wouldn’t go rearing up some new gigantic theory of your own.” He laughed. “Joking apart, you had some ingenious ideas about this Oakington affair. TOO ingenious, some of them, unfortunately. Yet the real truth, when I managed to get at it, was just as extraordinary. You’ll have a pretty good retort when I’ve finished, Revell—you’ll be able to say that nothing you imagined was really any more unlikely than what DID happen.”

  Guthrie paused, puffed at his pipe for a few seconds, and then went on: “I could easily, if I wanted to, pose as a Heaven-sent Sherlock in this affair, but I’m not going to. I’d rather be frank—after all, I shall get quite enough credit in the newspapers. They’ll boom me no end, which will be very gratifying, of course, but the plain truth is—and I don’t mind admitting it to you—that except for spotting the culprit I haven’t been particularly right about things. Of course the main thing is to get your man—or woman, even—but I do feel, all the same, rather like a boy who’s got the answer right and parts of the sum wrong. By the way, if you’re going to listen to the full yarn, I must just put through a telephone call first, if you don’t mind—shan’t be a minute.”

  When he came back, after the interlude, he resumed: “Yes, I was fairly wrong as well as fairly right. I was wrong, for instance, about the death of the first boy. I was wrong about Lambourne’s death, too. Of course, when I say I was right in this and wrong in that, I only mean that my preconceived theories do or do not tally with the woman’s confession. You can say, if you like, that there’s no earthly reason why she should be believed now any more than before, and naturally I can’t deny it. She’s the most consummately clever liar I’ve ever come across, and quite capable of hoodwinking us to the end if she had anything to gain by it. The point is that she hasn’t. We’ve got her, anyhow, so I can’t see why she should stuff us up with a lot of unnecessary yarning.”

  “Did she volunteer a confession, then?” Revell’s voice trembled a little in the varying throes of brandy and memory.

  “More or less. I gave her the usual warning, of course, but she began to talk, all the same. She seemed rather to like telling us how clever she’d been. Not unusual, you know, with the superior sort of criminal.”

  “And how was she? I mean—how did she seem to take it all— the arrest and so on?”

  “Oh, not so badly. After the big scene she just caved in—they often do. We took down all she said in shorthand, worked it up into a statement, had it typed, and then got her to sign it. She was quite calm by then. You’d have been astonished—she read it over and put her name at the end as quietly as if it had been a cheque for a new hat.”

  He continued: “Let’s clear up a few side-issues first of all. There was Roseveare, to begin with. I admit I began by suspecting him—not tremendously, but on general principles. There was, and perhaps is, something just faintly fishy about him. Sort of man who COULD be crooked, if he wanted to—you know what I mean? He’s certainly as cunning as an old fox, but he has his charm.”

  “_I_ rather liked him, anyhow.”

  “So did I—so did everybody. He WAS likeable. Just the opposite with Ellington, of course. You remember how thrilled we were to discover that Ellington and Roseveare were old pals, as you might say? You, I recollect, hatched a wild theory about something sticky in Roseveare’s past that Ellington was blackmailing him about. There wasn’t the slightest evidence of any such thing, of course, but you thought it possible—just because you didn’t like Ellington. That was part of the whole trouble—nobody DID like Ellington, and most people were more than willing to believe the worst about him. As a matter of fact, his feeling for Roseveare was marvellously different from what you thought. Roseveare had befriended him in the past, and Ellington had followed him about in sheer gratitude ever since. As faithful as an old mastiff—and about as savage, too.”

  “Why on earth did his wife marry him, I wonder?”

  “Why did he marry her, for that matter? She wasn’t too much good, even in those days. There was a scandal over her at the hospital where she was a nurse—I soon found THAT out. She wasn’t even technically faithful to Ellington, and it was THAT, I think—some affair that she had with someone—that made him come back to England and ask Roseveare for a job.”

  “Decent of Roseveare to give him one.”

  “Oh yes. And it increased, of course, Ellington’s gratitude. Mrs. Ellington, too, was pleased, and the first thing she did at Oakington was what more than one woman had done before her—she fell in love with the Head.”

  “Seriously?”

  “The only serious affair she’s ever had in her life—so she says. She seems rather proud of it. And I daresay Roseveare, behind his coy and innocent manner, wasn’t wholly unsusceptible—in fact, I rather think he was just a little bit of a fool over her. Not much, mind you—and only for a time. He thought she was rather a tragic figure—the poor little colonial girl married to a man who didn’t understand her and had brought her back from the great open spaces—all that sort of thing. Ellington hadn’t told Roseveare anything against her—he was a man of honour to that extent. So the friendship prospered, and while everything was going on so nicely, Robert Marshall met his death by the accidental fall of a gas-fitting in the dormitory.”

  “ACCIDENTAL?”

  “Yes. SHE says it was, and I always rather thought so myself. There was never any definite
evidence to the contrary, and the murder theory was very far-fetched. Incidentally, I found after careful inquiry amongst some of the boys that there HAD been horseplay in the dormitory—swinging on the gas-brackets and so on, though of course after the boy’s death they were all very terrified about admitting it. Yes, I think we’ll agree that it was an accident, though a deuced queer one, in view of what it led up to.”

  He went on, leaning forward a little: “We come now to Lambourne. I needn’t say much about him except that he must have the credit or discredit of laying the spark to the train of gunpowder. Really, I’m getting quite eloquent —you must stop me if I fly too high. Anyhow, to return to sober fact, Lambourne, in the course of conversation with Mrs. Ellington shortly after the accident, remarked upon the cleverness of such a method of committing murder. He treated her, indeed, to a complete lecture on murder as a fine art —you can imagine him doing it, I daresay. And thus the great idea was born in her mind.

  “It certainly WAS great, from her standpoint. She wanted three things —first, to be rid of her husband—second, to have money— and third, to marry Roseveare. Doubtless she assumed that if she managed the first two, the third would follow pretty easily. And after a good deal of careful thought she hit on a plan of campaign which was so diabolically unusual that I excuse you all the theories you ever had in your life, since the real thing was as astounding as any of them. Lambourne, as I said, put murder into her mind, but the elaboration of the idea was wholly hers. And briefly, it was as follows. She would kill the second brother in such a way that guilt would inevitably fall on her husband. But first of all, before doing that, she had another little scheme in hand. About a week after the accident she went to Roseveare and pretended—she was a superb actress, remember—to be upset and hysterical. When Roseveare asked her what was the matter, she began to talk wildly and hysterically about the accident and her husband’s connexion with it—hinting that he had been up in the disused sick-rooms a good deal of late, that there was more in the accident than had happened, and so on. Roseveare naturally pooh-poohed the matter, which of course she had expected him to. She knew that as things stood then, the idea was absurd, but she also knew (and this was the diabolical cleverness of her) that if the second brother died by another apparent accident, those wild hints of hers about her husband’s connexion with the first affair would recur to Roseveare with terrible significance.

  “Here, however, we come to the first example of the lady’s weak spot —and that was a tendency to have moments of sheer panic. Roseveare, it seems, had after all been slightly impressed by her hysterical suspicions (she must have acted too well), and had sent for a young man named Colin Revell to look into the matter unofficially. The whole explanation he gave you, by the way, is probably the exact truth. But Mrs. Ellington for some reason had one of her panicky moments when Lambourne told her that someone was already on the track—so she immediately went to Roseveare and told him that she’d been a very naughty and hysterical woman to think such horrid things about her husband, that she hadn’t really meant any of them, and that she was very, very sorry! Roseveare believed her only too willingly and dismissed his young inquiry agent at the earliest possible moment. Extraordinary, really, that she should have worried about you at all, Revell. What HAD she to fear? Nothing—yet for all that, your arrival upset her nerve for the time being. I should think you ought to feel rather proud of that.”

  Revell made no comment, and Guthrie proceeded: “Well, now we pass to the actual murder, and I expect you’re thinking it’s about time we did. Mrs. Ellington, after you’d gone back, soon regained her lost courage and began to plan her ‘murder by accident’. She must have made her detailed plans very quickly and almost at the last minute. She knew that Wilbraham was a swimmer and very often went to the baths on the warm evenings. On the particular day decided upon she contrived, by an apparently casual suggestion to her husband, to have the bath suddenly emptied. (She frankly admitted her responsibility for this, which was a distinctly clever touch.) Then, soon after ten in the evening, when the boy came down to the baths all ready for a swim, she met him, seemingly by accident, and entered with him on some pretext or other. That wouldn’t be difficult—they were cousins, remember, and on fairly intimate terms. It wasn’t more than half-dark, and when they got into the main building a surprise awaited them—the bath was empty. And I’ll warrant you she acted that surprise jolly well.”

  Guthrie’s voice had become a little husky; he poured himself out the remains of the now cold coffee and drank it. Then he went on: “Most of this I’m glad to say I deduced. Afterwards, however, I wasn’t so lucky. My notion was that she’d suddenly shot the boy while the two of them were standing on the edge of the bath, and had then bashed his head about to disguise the bullet-wound. A pretty awful thing for a woman to do, when you come to think about it, and I’m not really surprised that Mrs. Ellington decided on something much more artistic. She wanted the boy’s head to be bashed in completely, and she came to the really brilliant conclusion that the best way to achieve this would be to make him actually fall from that top diving-platform. She did it (I’ve only her word for it, of course, but it sounds quite credible) by larking about with him for a time and then challenging him for a race up to the top. There are two ladders, you know, approaching the platform from either side, so conditions were quite good for a race. The two reached the top, and there, in the gathering twilight, she whipped out her revolver and shot him so that he fell head foremost on to the tiled floor sixty feet below. There was no need to bash his head in.”

  Revell shuddered involuntarily. “She had nerve,” he muttered.

  “Up to a point, yes, but beyond that—however, I shall come to that later on. She had nerve enough to go to the fuse-box and cut the fuses, and to unstrap the boy’s wrist-watch (it hadn’t been injured in the fall) and climb back with it to the top diving-platform. Oh, and you remember the note you wrote me about the dressing-gown? You thought it might have led to a clue, but I’m afraid I’d given it my fullest attention long before, and there was no clue in it at all. The dressing-gown and slippers found by the side of the bath next morning were simply the boy’s ordinary dressing-gown and slippers, and no amount of perseverance could deduce anything else from ‘em. The beauty of it was, you see, that before going up the ladder to the platform, the boy took off his dressing-gown—it’s an awkward garment to be wearing in a climbing-race. And, of course, that suited the lady admirably, though I wouldn’t say she absolutely foresaw it. Probably she had some alternative plan if circumstances had arisen differently. Anyhow, as it was, there were only the boy’s slippers to be removed after the murder, and they hadn’t any blood on them.

  “I’d better clear up one other small point while I’m about it. I daresay it may have struck you as rather remarkable that nobody heard the shot. One reason, of course, was the fact that the swimming-baths are a fair distance away from the other School buildings. But the chief reason, I think, was that everyone assumed that the affair had happened so much later than it did. You, for instance, went about asking people, if they had heard anything during the night—they hadn’t, of course. But when I asked them what they had heard during the evening I got quite a lot of interesting answers. Several people, for example, thought they had heard something between ten and eleven o’clock, but there’d been so many noises of all kinds during the day that they hadn’t taken much notice. Mrs. Ellington had chosen her time well. Even at Oakington most people are awake at ten-thirty on a midsummer evening, and, though it may seem a paradox, there is always less chance of a noise being noticed when most people are awake than when they are asleep. That night, also, as it happened, workmen had been busy until dusk knocking platforms and grandstands together in readiness for the Oakington Jubilee celebrations, so there was an additional reason for a noise passing unnoticed. I’m not denying that she took a risk, of course. But then, all murderers must do that.

  “Now,” he continued, after a short pause, “w
e can turn to what happened immediately after the murder. Mrs. Ellington, of course, went home and to bed. And here comes another factor in the situation. Ellington was a very jealous man, and suspected his wife with Lambourne. That night—the night of the murder, that is—he fancied she had been to visit him. He didn’t tax her with it—that wasn’t his way—but he brooded and went out to walk his feelings off a little. Meanwhile Lambourne, thinking to have a swim, had gone down to the baths and had found the body there. I don’t doubt that it was a fearful shock to him and that he really did do exactly what he said he did. His story, improbable enough in itself, has a certain ring of possibility in it when you think of the man who told it. He suspected murder instantly, but whereas other men would have raised an alarm and declared their suspicions, Lambourne’s less-straightforward brain accepted the challenge, as it were, and set about to trump the other fellow’s card. Believing that Ellington had bashed the boy’s head in and taken away the weapon, he fabricated, just as he confessed, the evidence of the cricket-bat. Then he took his stroll and met Ellington. It must have been a dashed queer meeting—Lambourne thinking Ellington had just committed murder, and Ellington thinking Lambourne had just been carrying on with his wife…”

  He smiled slightly and continued: “I think you know how _I_ came into it all. Somebody sent Colonel Graham, the boy’s guardian, an anonymous letter, which he brought to us along with newspaper cuttings of the two inquests. He had suspicions, rather naturally, and I went off to Oakington by the next train to see what I could find out at firsthand.

  “You mustn’t imagine that Graham’s misgivings were taken at their face value. Coincidences do happen, often enough—in fact, they’re far less unusual than the murder of two boys by a schoolmaster. Until I found independent evidence of some kind, there was really no case against anybody. To begin with, I spent a few days scouting round the place as a perfect stranger. The first thing to do, if possible, was to interview the writer of the anonymous letter, but it had been typewritten and had a London postmark, so THAT wasn’t a very promising line of investigation. I don’t know now who wrote it, but I strongly suspect Lambourne… You see, then, my difficulty when I arrived at Oakington. I had nothing at all to go on but the coincidence of the two apparent accidents and an anonymous letter that might or might not be some malicious hoax. All the usual clues that one looks for after a murder had been cleared away beyond hope of discovery. It was really enough to make any detective hold up his hands in despair. Then, just in the nick of time, came the finding of the cricket-bat.