Death at the Opera

it couldn’t have been! Only an utterly depraved boy would have thought of such a thing. And Harry isn’t depraved.”

“No,” said the Headmaster. “He is merely highly-strung, temperamental, morbidly imaginative and sensitive. Where’s Mrs Bradley now?”

“I don’t know, Uncle.”

“I’ll go and have a talk with her. If it was Hurstwood, the ‘suicide’ verdict will have to stand. One of the staff would have been bad enough, but a boy at the school, trained by us— And it would be impossible to keep you out of it, Gretta, you know.”

He walked off, looking extremely perturbed, and found Mrs. Bradley occupying a chair at the small table in his room and writing busily and indecipherably in her notebook. Beyond cackling in a terrifying manner, she would commit herself to nothing. Hurstwood had not been in the room when she returned to it after her talk with Miss Cliffordson, she said, in response to a question from the Headmaster, and in response to a second question she agreed that the said talk had been enlightening.

“But not sufficiently enlightening to please me entirely,” she added. “I must have a talk with Mr. Hampstead. May I see him privately in here?”

“You mean you do not wish me to be present?” asked Mr. Cliffordson.

“I want to talk to him about his private affairs,” replied Mrs. Bradley. The Headmaster pressed the buzzer, sent for the Senior Music Master, and then went out of the room. ii

Frederick Hampstead spoke first.

“I’ve just seen Mrs. Boyle,” he said.

“Ah!” Mrs. Bradley nodded pleasantly. “Sit down, Mr. Hampstead. Why are you wasting your time teaching in a school?”

“I beg your pardon?” said Hampstead, blankly.

“Come, child, don’t hedge,” said Mrs. Bradley, grinning. “In the words of the last of the prophets, ‘He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.’ What about that Second Symphony?”

Hampstead laughed.

“Are you a witch?” he asked. “I haven’t even told Alceste about the Second Symphony? How did you know?”

“I didn’t,” confessed Mrs. Bradley. “I deduced. Do you know Maxwell Maxwell?”

“Only by his photographs in musical journals,” said Hampstead, ruefully.

“Send him your work. I’ll give you a letter of introduction. Now, what about this wretched murder?”

“Do you think that, too?” Hampstead looked genuinely amazed. “Do you know, such a thing would never have occurred to me unless I had heard other people talking about it.”

“Why not?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

“Well, what had the woman to live for? No home, no intimates, no lover, no brains—nothing to work for; nothing to look forward to; no special interests… I should have thought she was the very type to commit suicide, you know.”

“This is very illuminating,” said Mrs. Bradley, dryly, writing it all down. “Nevertheless, I may tell you that Miss Ferris was murdered, and that she was murdered before the interval. So I can cross you off my list of suspected persons, can’t I?”

“But what about the police? Oughtn’t they to be told?” said Hampstead doubtfully.

“It’s a nice point,” Mrs. Bradley admitted. “At the moment, you see, we can offer them nothing but the evidence on which the coroner’s jury brought in a unanimous verdict of suicide.”

“Yes, I see,” said Hampstead. “Well, why not leave it at that? I mean, the poor woman is dead. It can’t matter now whether it was suicide or murder, can it?”

“There speaks the unregenerate musician,” said Mrs. Bradley, laughing. “The Church would tell you that it made a great deal of difference—to the woman herself, if to nobody else.”

“Yes, I suppose so. I’m a Catholic, you know,” he added; “but by tradition rather than conviction, I’m afraid.”

“Forgive an old woman’s impertinent curiosity,” said Mrs. Bradley briskly, “but I suppose Mrs. Boyle is not free to marry you?”

“Other way about,” said Hampstead brusquely. “She’s a widow, but I’ve a wife living.”

“I’ve attended your wife, then,” said Mrs. Bradley surprisingly. “I thought the name was familiar. In Derbyshire, isn’t she?”

Hampstead nodded.

“Fieldenfare Manor,” he said.

“Yes.” Mrs. Bradley nodded in her turn.

“It happened a year after our marriage,” said Hampstead, staring into space. “Luckily the child died.” Suddenly his grim expression softened. “I couldn’t stay in a place where everybody knew me, and be stared at and pitied,” he went on, “so I came here, and met Alceste.”

“And that relationship was threatened by Miss Ferris’8 knowledge of it?” said Mrs. Bradley softly.

Hampstead shook his head.