“My niece,” said Mrs. Bradley complacently.
“Oh, is she? Then John’s your nephew— Oh, that’s silly and obvious, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Bradley, who had been out of England for some months previously, and so had not kept track of Lady Selina’s gyrations, was wondering what her massive sister-in-law would think when she received news that a murder had been committed at the co-educational school which had commended itself to her so heartily a few months before. Mrs. Bradley could visualize a satisfied sixteen-year-old John Lestrange returning to Rugby the following term, if the authorities there would take him back. She chuckled, and Moira Malley looked surprised.
“A mental picture,” Mrs. Bradley explained. “But we must be serious. I want some help. Have you any idea when it was that you last saw Miss Ferris alive?”
The girl did not answer, and when Mrs. Bradley looked at her she saw that she was biting her bottom lip and that her hands were clenched so that the knuckles showed white.
“You need not be afraid,” said Mrs. Bradley gently. “Tell me the truth, child, and don’t leave anything out.”
The girl remained silent.
“Very well,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Please yourself, my dear. Come and show me the water-lobby where the body was found.”
“No!” said the girl. “I can’t go round there after dark! I can’t face it!”
“Very well,” said Mrs. Bradley, as equably as before. There was a note of hysteria in the girl’s voice, so the little old woman laid a skinny claw on her knee and said:
“I understand that on the night of the performance Miss Ferris cut herself and had to go into the water-lobby to staunch the bleeding. Is that right?”
Moira began to cry.
“I promised I wouldn’t tell,” she said, “but as you seem to know, I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
She was crying so bitterly that Mrs. Bradley had some difficulty in making out the words.
“It was Mr. Smith. He came charging round a corner and knocked into Miss Ferris and broke her glasses. A bit of broken glass dug in her cheek just under the eye. It made the tiniest little mark, but it bled a good bit and she said she would go and wash it. That’s the last I saw of her. The next day Mr. Smith came round to aunt’s home and said he wanted to speak to me about using our hockey pitch for a boy’s match. It was Saturday”—she was regaining control over herself, and her words were becoming easier to follow—“and we hadn’t a match in the afternoon. Aunt sent for me to talk to him, after he’d told her what he wanted, and when we were in the drawing-room together he told me that Miss Ferris was dead, and asked me to promise not to tell about the accident to Miss. Ferris’s glasses. He said he had fearful wind up when he found out that somebody had seen it happen, because it made him partly responsible for her committing suicide by putting the idea of water, that is, drowning, into her head. It seemed silly to me, but, of course, if he thought she had been
She broke off suddenly. Mrs. Bradley pursed up her mouth into a little beak, and decided that the girl was not being entirely frank with her. But what Moira was hiding, Time, Mrs. Bradley’s experience informed her, would probably disclose.
“At what time did the accident take place?” she asked, determined at the moment not to press the girl.
“Oh, let me see. Very near the beginning of the opera, because I was just going to make my first entrance—you know—the ‘Three Little Maids from School’ bit—so I couldn’t stop and see to poor Miss Ferris. The other two, ‘Yum-Yum’ and ‘Pitti-Sing,’ were already in the wings, only they are both mistresses, so I didn’t like to tack on to them too closely, so neither of them saw it happen. It was only me.”
“Was there the slightest possibility that anyone else could have witnessed the collision?” Mrs. Bradley asked.
“Anybody in the men-principals’ dressing-room might have seen it, but I don’t know who was there.”
“And you were about to make your first entrance?” pursued Mrs. Bradley thoughtfully. “Thank you, Moira. That’s all, then. Cheer up, child.”
When the girl had gone, Mrs. Bradley switched off the lights in the form-room and made her way to the water- lobby where the death of Calma Ferris had occurred. The schoolkeeper was busy with a broom and a pail of damp sawdust, and politely stood aside to allow her to enter.
“You aren’t superstitious, ma’am, I see,” he observed, noticing that Mrs. Bradley was pressing the tap which flowed into what he had now become accustomed to refer to at the Hillmaston Arms as “the fatal bowl.”
“Oh, is this
“It is, ma’am. Took me an hour and ten minutes to get all that nasty messy clay out of the waste-pipe, too. What with that and seeing what was wrong with the electric light switch, I had a busy day Sunday, I can tell you.”
“I can imagine it,” returned Mrs. Bradley courteously. “And what
“Some of them boys had been up to their mischief, I reckon. The switch ’ad worked a bit loose, you see—I was meaning to replace it—and it was easy enough to take it off and put the wiring out of action, and put the whole thing back again. Barring that it hung a bit loose, as I said before, you wouldn’t notice anything wrong, but when you actually went to switch on the light nothing wouldn’t happen, ma’am. See? Them boys do it just for devilment. They done it to all the school switches one Guy Fawkes’s night, and the Headmaster made ’em put ’em all right again. Mr. Pritchard learns ’em all the tricks. He’s real clever at electricity—got the boys in his form to make the school a wireless set—ah, and it’s a beauty, too!—and any of the young devils could have put that switch out of order as easy as look at it.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Bradley. “The switch was not out of order on the Thursday evening, then, when you did your cleaning?”
“ ’Course it wasn’t,” replied the schoolkeeper. “I ’as to have the lights on every night at this time of the year, to do my work, you see. Ah, and I can go further, ma’am. It was all right on the
