Death at the Opera

behind the scenes. They only want to gossip and get in the way. I’m sure that was everybody, except the boys and girls in the chorus—and the principals, of course.”

“Thank you.” He turned to Mrs. Bradley. “Mrs. Boyle is my head assistant. I think she should be taken into our confidence.”

“If you mean that you believe Miss Ferris was murdered—why, so do I,” said Mrs. Boyle, surprisingly. “She was delighted—thrilled—to be taking part in the opera. It’s true she made a hash of the dress-rehearsal, but so did several others, and we all knew it would be different on the night. Besides, at the last rehearsal, which was not a dress-rehearsal, she did ever so well. The pity is that nobody was there to see the difference. But, goodness knows, there are plenty of people who would have been pleased to see her dead! Anyway, I am certain in my mind that she was the last person to commit suicide.”

“Plenty of people would have been pleased to see her dead?” repeated the Headmaster incredulously. “But surely—she was such an extraordinarily inoffensive woman…”

He halted, uncertain of what to say. That Mrs. Boyle believed what she was saying, and had foundation for her belief, he had no doubt whatever.

“I think you will have to tell us everything you know,” he said at last. Alceste folded her large, well-shaped hands in her lap, and nodded.

“Mrs. Bradley is here to investigate the circumstances of the death, of course,” she said, “and advise us how to proceed if it proves that Calma Ferris was murdered?”

The Headmaster nodded. He opened a drawer in his desk and produced a box of cigarettes.

“Excuse me one moment,” said Mrs. Boyle. “My form. I’d better set them some work.”

“Oh, let ’em rip,” said Mr. Cliffordson easily. “Who goes in to them next? Poole? Oh, that’s all right. He’ll blow the flames out. They won’t hurt for half an hour. Do ’em good to be on the loose for a bit!”

“They’ll have the roof off,” said Alceste, uneasily. She had never entirely accommodated herself to the free- and-easy methods at the school.

“My dear girl, don’t worry yourself. I don’t care, so why should you? Take a cigarette, and do let us hear a little more about this frightful business,” said the Headmaster, who firmly believed that a noisy child is a good child and that silence breeds sin.

“Well, Mr. Cliffordson,” Alceste said, studying the burning tip of her cigarette, “to explain myself I shall have to tell you a story, and then throw myself on your mercy. I shall also have to refuse to answer a question which you are certain to ask me.”

“Carry on,” said the Headmaster.

“When the school was first opened I applied for the post of English Mistress, and got it,” Mrs. Boyle began. “I was a childless widow, and was content. My married life, without being in the least sensational, was not an unqualified success, and when my husband, an Irish doctor, died in Limerick during an influenza epidemic there, I had no desire, I discovered, to return to the stage, so I came to England, and for some time was very happy in this school. Then I fell in love with a man who was not free to marry me. We have spent every holiday— Christmas, Easter and Summer—together, and when I say ‘together’ I mean that we have lived in every sense— physical, mental, spiritual—as man and wife. This has been going on for the past eleven years. I was young, hopeful, headstrong, passionately in love when all this began. Now, at the end of eleven years of it—eleven years of treasuring it up, keeping it secret, looking forward, even in the dreariest term, to the coming holiday-time when I could be myself and fulfil myself—I discover that it has not been a secret at all. For several years Miss Ferris knew of it. When I heard that she was dead I went to her lodgings and asked to rent her rooms, because I wanted to find her diary and destroy it. I communicated with the —the man, and he tried also to rent the rooms when they were refused to me…”

Mrs. Bradley had a mental audition of the landlady’s voice, a trifle high-pitched and peevish, saying: “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…”

“… but the landlady wouldn’t have him either. So I never got hold of the diary.”

“Had you seen the diary previously, do you mean?” asked Mr. Cliffordson. “Had you seen it before Miss Ferris’s death?”

Alceste shook her head.

“She let out by accident that she knew. It was after she had ruined Mr. Smith’s clay figure on the night of the dress-rehearsal.”

“What?” exclaimed the Headmaster. “She ruined Smith’s model? Not his Psyche, surely?”

Alceste Boyle nodded.

“Wasn’t it dreadful?” she said. “It was absolutely an accident, of course, and I know she was terribly distressed. But the point is that she brought me in to comfort Smith —as though one could!—and it was then that I learned she knew the truth about me and about my affairs. Smith isn’t the man, by the way, although I believe he loves me.” Her dark-blue eyes challenged the world. “Oh, and I lent him two hundred and fifty pounds to compensate for the loss of the little Psyche.”

“Did Miss Ferris attempt to make capital out of her knowledge of your affairs?” inquired Mrs. Bradley, interestedly.

“Not in the least. She made the most off-hand remark about them, as though she had known for ages and took it for granted that I should have a lover. She was a bit like that, you know. She was so meek and docile and colourless herself that she took it for granted that other people were different. I never had the slightest idea that she would make capital out of her knowledge, but as soon as she was dead I could not help wondering whether she had left some record of her discovery. I didn’t want my secret to be broadcast, and she was just the type to keep an elaborately written and thoroughly indiscreet diary— indiscreet in the gossiping sense, I mean. And people are not scrupulous when they are going through dead people’s belongings, are they? I was afraid of what might be said.”

Mrs. Bradley had taken out her notebook and pencil and was rapidly filling a page with her own personal shorthand signs. The Headmaster was leaning back in his chair, his pipe between his teeth, and his eyes fixed on the top row of volumes in his book-case.