Death at the Opera

keeps a small private hotel at Bognor Regis, warning her against a man named Helm whom she had met there during the summer holiday. I was not able to elicit any particular reason from Miss Ferris for her aunt’s seeing fit to warn her against this man, and so all I could do was to reassure her, and to advise her to keep a look-out for the man in the neighbourhood and inform me directly he importuned her. I don’t see what else I could have done. Oh, I got a description of the man, of course. Here it is.”

“Had she any other relatives, do you know,” asked Mrs. Bradley, “besides this particular aunt?”

“I am sure she had none whatsoever. It seems a queer thing to say, perhaps, but I think she liked the school and the life here chiefly because she had nothing outside her work to interest her or engage her attention. I know she was an orphan, and I never heard of any other relatives apart from this aunt. I know, too, that she was to be the principal beneficiary under her aunt’s will, although how much the older lady had to leave I could not give you the slightest idea.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Bradley. “By the way,” she added, “I feel certain that most, if not all, of your staff know why I am here, and therefore, as the cat is out of the bag, I should prefer to give up my class-teaching and devote myself to this investigation.”

“I was afraid your reputation might have preceded you,” the Headmaster admitted. “I can easily arrange for someone to take over the form until we get a teacher appointed. You mean that you have an idea to work on?”

“Several,” said Mrs. Bradley concisely. “The first is that the aunt, having warned her niece hurriedly by telegram last Friday week, would probably have followed up the telegram by an explanatory letter.”

“None was produced at the inquest,” said the Headmaster. “And yet it is impossible to suppose that an elderly lady would have deemed a cryptically worded telegram a sufficient deterrent to prevent her niece from entangling herself with an undesirable widower.”

“How was the telegram worded?” inquired Mrs. Bradley. The Headmaster wrinkled his brow, but his excellent memory soon produced the required sequence of words.

“Beware helm widower suspicious circumstances asked school.”

“This afternoon, when school is over, I shall go to Miss Ferris’s lodgings and see what I can discover,” said Mrs. Bradley. “There certainly ought to be a letter to explain that telegram.”

“Go now,” suggested Mr. Cliffordson. “I’ll go and take the class.”

So at five minutes past three Mrs. Bradley, an eyesore to all and sundry in her queer but expensive garments, went briskly through the quiet streets that bordered the school and made her way to the house where Miss Ferris had lodged.

The landlady herself opened the door.

“I understand that you have rooms to let,” said Mrs. Bradley, without preamble.

“Come in,” said the woman. Mrs. Bradley entered the house, a small villa, and was shown into the drawing- room.

“Several people have been after the rooms, but they were all these nosey-parkers who only wanted a thrill out of staying a week or so where a suicide had lived, that’s all. They wouldn’t have been permanent, any of them, and I didn’t see having to tell them all about her, poor woman, which anybody could see with half an eye was all they wanted. But I could do with the money, unfortunately, so if you’ll take the rooms I shall have to ask you not to talk about her to me, that’s all.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“It’s all this talk about suicide that does me down,” the woman continued. “Whatever anybody says, I knew her, and she wasn’t one to commit suicide, no matter what happened, and that I’ll swear. A real Christian woman was Miss Ferris, and well brought up, and it’s a sin and a shame for them to go and pretend she’d drowned herself just because they’re afraid of finding out who did it!”

“Afraid of finding out who did it?” repeated Mrs. Bradley, affecting to misunderstand the implication.

“Well, what else can you think?”

Mrs. Bradley considered the woman. She was flushed and earnest, a smallish, care-worn person, still on the right side of middle-age, but prematurely grey and with a face which had known anxiety and trouble. Mrs. Bradley learned later that she was a widow with one child.

“I think you might be right,” Mrs. Bradley observed. “The Headmaster of the school thinks as you do. He is having the case investigated independently of the police.”

“I don’t take much account of other people’s business as a rule,” the woman continued, “because I haven’t the time nor the curiosity. But I feel ever so sorry about poor Miss Ferris and the things they are saying about her. Why, even that aunt of hers, that came here the day before the inquest, told me some things that I could have turned round and told her weren’t true, only she did genuinely seem upset about it all and I didn’t like to be hard. Miss Ferris was her only niece, you see, and she was dreadfully cut up about her death.”

“What did the aunt think was the cause of Miss Ferris’s suicide?” asked Mrs. Bradley. “You say she believed it was suicide?”

“Oh, she believed it, and ought to be ashamed of herself for harbouring such a wicked thought,” said the woman vehemently. “And a fine tale she told me! According to her—although, take it from me that knew poor Miss Ferris far better than she did, her having lived here just on eight years, and I do miss her, too, for all she was so quiet and nice—it was a lie from beginning to end—according to her, Miss Ferris had had this man Helm in her room one night at the boarding-house, and, thinking they had been discovered, they set up an alarm of burglars. And Miss Ferris’s aunt, if you please, thinks something happened that night between them, and that Miss Ferris couldn’t face the future unmarried. Anyway, rather than have her marry this Helm, she sent her a telegram, which worried poor Miss Ferris dreadfully, and me, too, for neither of us could really make head or tail of it. So Miss Ferris said she should show the Headmaster and ask his advice, which hardly looks like the seventh commandment, does it?”

Mrs. Bradley concurred in this delicately expressed opinion, and then asked whether the telegram had been followed by a letter.

“There was a letter,” the woman admitted. “It came Friday evening, by the nine o’clock post, only nobody was here to take it in, because my little girl and Miss Ferris and me were all at the