Faintley Speaking

have got drowned,’ he added helpfully. At this moment his acquaintance of the previous morning, her handsome frame draped in slacks and a Sloppy Joe, came to the foot of the stairs. She carried a waterproof bag. Thankfully Mark gathered up his own belongings and followed the girl to the swing-door. In less than ten minutes they were both in the water.

‘What’s the trouble?’ the girl asked, as both of them surfaced. ‘The manager looked a bit jaundiced, I thought… or is that my imagination?’

Mark explained, quite truthfully, exactly what had happened on the previous day.

‘Of course, if I’d known, I wouldn’t have left her,’ Mark concluded.

‘Why not? You couldn’t have known she would drop out like that. Where do you suppose she’s got to?’

‘I don’t know. I keep wondering. She’s an awful ass, but… well, I mean, it isn’t the asses who disappear usually, is it? It’s people who are making a getaway. I’m sure Miss Faintley isn’t one of those. She wouldn’t have pluck enough, for one thing. I say, what’s your name?’

‘Laura Menzies. I know yours. I saw it in the visitors’ book when we arrived. You’re Mark Street, aren’t you? I’ll call you Mark and you’d better call me Laura.’

‘All right,’ agreed Mark. ‘Race you to the diving-raft!’

He gave himself a generous lead by setting off as the words left his mouth, but Laura Menzies beat him easily and had hoisted herself on to the raft by the time he had threshed his way to it and was holding on to the side.

‘Not bad,’ she said casually. ‘I expect you do most of your swimming in a public bath, don’t you?’

Mark admitted that he did, and clambered out to sit beside her.

‘I say,’ he said, ‘old Faintley, you know. What do you honestly think? I mean, if she’d been run over she’d have been taken to hospital, and what was funniest… only I haven’t told anybody yet… you know that bookshop she went to when I left her to buy my film? Well, she wasn’t there any more. I mean, she wasn’t inside, either, because I could see in from the top of the bus. At the time I thought what a bit of luck, but now I’m beginning to wonder whether she might have thought it wasn’t a bad idea to push off by herself after all.’

‘There’s something in that.’

‘I think so, too. After all, why did she want to take me out in the first place? It wasn’t as though I’d got nothing else to do. You don’t suppose…’ he hitched himself round to look at her instead of continuing to watch his own feet gently scuffling in the sea… ‘you don’t suppose she was using me for some kind of cover? I’ve read of things like that. Do you think she could have got mixed up with some sort of gang, and took me with her to put them off the scent?’

‘You said she wasn’t the type,’ Laura pointed out. ‘Look here, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll push over to Torbury myself after lunch and have a snoop round.’

‘The police will have done that already, I expect.’

‘Not until they’ve had a talk with you. You’re the only direct source of information.’

‘Oh, heck!’ said Mark, dismayed. Like many boys of his age, he was afraid of policemen. He always imagined they might pounce on him for something done in school in which he had had no hand, and that the usual code would oblige him to take the rap and tell no tales. ‘I can’t tell them a single thing except what I’ve told you and my father and the manager, and none of it helps at all. I don’t see,’ he added, voicing his chief grievance, ‘why it had to be me this happened to. We’ve always lost the teachers on school outings, and nothing has ever happened to any of them before, or to any of us, either!’

‘I know,’ said Laura sympathetically. ‘But life’s like that. You do a thing three hundred and ninety-nine times, and get away with it, and then, the four-hundredth time, you’re in the mud up to the neck. It was always like that at school with me, and there never seemed any real reason. Come on. Let’s get back. I want my elevenses. Besides, I can see a fair-weather crowd getting in, and I do hate sharing a raft with dozens of belly-flopping divers.’

The police interview, which was conducted by a quiet man in plain clothes, was not in the least distressing. Mark explained how he had been invited out by Miss Faintley and that he and his father had agreed (after some resistance on Mark’s part) that the invitation must be accepted. Asked whether he had been surprised when he received the invitation, Mark replied that he had, and he had not, and clarified this by adding:

‘I shouldn’t have thought a lady teacher would want to take boys out in the hols., although some decent masters take you to France and Switzerland and Iceland and all that, but I wasn’t much good at Miss Faintley’s subject and fooled about a bit in form, so I should think she’d rather go out by herself when she had the chance. All the same, she was sort of educational – always improving our minds and being cultural and a lot of rot – so perhaps, as we were fairly near Torbury, and it’s got a cathedral and some old city walls and a museum, she might have thought it a good thing to take me, although really I should have thought she’d rather have done some kind of a ramble and picked things for botany. That’s supposed to be her subject.’

‘In other words, you don’t really know why you were invited out, and you didn’t want to go.’

‘Fair enough,’ muttered Mark, shuffling a little and giving his father a half-glance.

‘It’s all right, son. I’m as sick as you are that I made you go,’ said Mr Street. ‘Will that be all, Inspector?’

‘I’d just like a detailed description from Mark of how Miss Faintley was dressed, sir. He may have noticed some detail which I didn’t get from the hotel porter who saw them go out.’

‘Grey skirt, light-green blouse, dark-green cardigan, green-blue tweed jacket, no hat, dark-brown suede shoes, thick sort of stockings, gold wrist-watch on a thick gold bracelet thing… oh, and she’d put a ski-ing club badge in her lapel, two crossed skis and a circle of laurel leaves, but I don’t think she was really entitled to wear it.’

‘Why not?’ asked the inspector. ‘You’ve given me a first-rate description, and this bit about the badge and the wrist-watch may be extremely helpful. But why don’t you think she was entitled to this ski-ing badge?’

‘Well, Jenkins, who’s rather gifted at getting the teachers to talk about their holidays when we’re all getting browned-off in form, once asked Miss Faintley if she’d ever been in Switzerland, and Miss Faintley said she had never been nearer Switzerland than England.’