Death at the Opera

or near the body.

Other questions had to be interpolated here, Mrs. Bradley decided. The first one was: Were Miss Cliffordson and Hurstwood in collusion? Miss Ferris’s unfortunate discovery of the love affair affected them equally up to a certain point. The second question was: Had Miss Cliffordson found the handkerchief and recognized it, and then kept it in order to shield Hurstwood? If so, why had she weakened sufficiently to show it to Mrs. Bradley, and confess it was Hurstwood’s?

This question was doubly difficult to answer in that the handkerchief was unidentifiable since initial and marking cotton had both been picked out. The third point was this: Did Miss Cliffordson believe that Hurstwood had committed the murder? Did she accept the finding of the handkerchief (if it was found, and not handed to her for safety by Hurstwood himself) as proof of his guilt? And did she fear for her own safety? She had reason to know that Hurstwood could be uncontrolled and unmanageable, and that physically he was much stronger than she was. It was possible, thought Mrs. Bradley, that fear had caused her to produce the handkerchief.

Against all this were several points which told in the boy’s favour. He had admitted that he knew of Miss Ferris’s injured face and that she was going to bathe it. Would an obviously intelligent boy have made such a damaging admission if he had had anything to fear? He was nervous, imaginative and sensitive. If he had committed a horrible crime against an absolutely inoffensive person, would he have been able to brazen it out? Mrs. Bradley thought it very doubtful, unless he felt that by killing Miss Ferris he had saved Miss Cliffordson from the consequences of his own tempestuous behaviour on the night of the rehearsal. A boy of Hurstwood’s temperament might easily imagine that he owed it to Miss Cliffordson to get her out of the trouble into which his own madness and lack of self-control had placed her.

A different type of evidence was offered by the failing of the electric light in the water-lobby. There seemed no reasonable doubt that the light had been deliberately disconnected. If Hurstwood were responsible for tampering with the switch, it was for one of two reasons: either to cover up the murder he himself had committed, or the murder he believed one of his friends had committed. Putting it another way, said Mrs. Bradley to herself, if Hurstwood had any reason whatsoever for believing that Miss Cliffordson had killed Miss Ferris, he might have performed the two rash acts of giving his own handkerchief up for her to produce as evidence of his guilt instead of her own, and of disconnecting the electric light so as to put off the evil hour of the discovery of the body as long as possible. Taking into consideration his temperament, his reactions and his state of mind, the evidence was as much in his favour as against him, Mrs. Bradley decided.

She reconsidered his fainting fit in the Headmaster’s room. It was the direct result of learning that Mr. Cliffordson knew all about his love for Miss Cliffordson, and that the Headmaster, in a semi-facetious manner, sympathized with instead of condemning him. In such circumstances, the fainting, followed by the boy’s hysterical tears, had been natural enough, and need have had no connection at all with the murder.

She dismissed that train of thought, and returned to the question of the electric light. Could there be any connection between two lights that failed on the same evening? It was a coincidence, certainly, but a possible one. Suppose, for instance, that the caretaker was wrong about the switch in the water-lobby? Suppose nobody, either in jest or earnest, had tampered with it. Suppose, also, that Hurstwood had been telling the truth when he had told the Headmaster that after his first exit he had gone to the water-lobby to find Miss Ferris and ask for the return of his handkerchief—boys usually went provided with one only, Mrs. Bradley suspected, so that it was all quite plausible so far. Suppose the boy had discovered the place in darkness, discovered furthermore that he could not switch the light on, went back to the men’s dressing-room and talked with Mr. Smith before going on the stage again.

There were a lot of gaps in Hurstwood’s story, she was compelled to admit. On the other hand, it might easily be the truth. She wondered whether it might be necessary later to reinvestigate it. Not even Hurstwood’s youth was on his side in a case like this. So many unstable boys in their teens had murdered women. There were numerous newspaper accounts of such crimes, besides the psychologically classic instances. She shook her head, and began to consider the case of Gretta Cliffordson.

Vindictively or not, Miss Cliffordson had certainly tried to incriminate Hurstwood, and that, on the face of it, looked bad from one who had at least as strong a motive as the boy for wishing to shut Miss Ferris’s mouth. Some of Mrs. Bradley’s patients had been schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, and she knew that one of the most dangerous effects of the most unnatural life in the world was the importance which trivialities were apt to assume in the minds of those who spent their lives among undeveloped intelligences and small events. It might easily be that Miss Cliffordson, for all her seeming pertness and independence, dreaded her uncle’s anger and contempt above all things, and thought that by allowing matters between herself and Hurstwood to get to the point at which Miss Ferris had discovered them was to court disaster indeed if word ever came to Mr. Cliffordson’s ears of what had occurred. On the other hand, there was Miss Cliffordson’s entirely voluntary confession to Mrs. Bradley that Hurstwood was “being rather difficult.”

The point at issue here, Mrs. Bradley decided, was this: Did Miss Cliffordson believe that Hurstwood was the murderer? If she did, it was a heavy indictment of the boy, for Miss Cliffordson might reasonably be expected to know a great deal about him and about the impulses which might have prompted him to such a terrible deed.

Mrs. Bradley, loath to believe evil of the boy, to whom she had taken a liking, tapped her notebook with the end of her silver pencil, and looked unhappy. On considering the rest of Miss Cliffordson’s evidence, however, her face cleared, and her black eyes lit up with fresh interest. Miss Cliffordson’s realistic description of the murder returned to her memory as she re-read her notes.

“It was such an easy way to kill anybody,” Miss Cliffordson had said—she could hear the carefully modulated, over-refined tones all over again—“especially anybody who was sitting down. You offer to help—you lend a handkerchief —you stuff the waste-pipe up with clay…” (Ah, but there, thought Mrs. Bradley, is the rub.) At what point in the proceedings, precisely, do you stuff the waste-pipe up with clay? Have you, so to speak, a lump of clay in your left hand whilst you proffer a handkerchief with your right, or vice versa? Or have you prepared a bowl beforehand so that the water won’t run away, and do you then guide the predestined victim to that particular bowl when she wants to bathe the cut on her face?

Mrs. Bradley shelved the point for the moment and went on reading.

“… and press the tap,” Miss Cliffordson had said—school taps are never of the type that have to be turned on and off, for obvious reasons, Mrs. Bradley reflected—“and talk—any kind of nervous, silly talk, so that no suspicion is excited…”

Yes, but it was just that flow of talk, so essential for the quietening of the victim’s mind, so impossible to the male adolescent under such circumstances, that Mrs. Bradley found it impossible to associate with Hurstwood. Obviously, if the element of surprise which was so necessary in this particular kind of crime was to be maintained, conversation of an interesting, or, at any rate, a non-interruptable kind, had to be provided by the murderer. No boy, surely, could have watched that basin filling and filling—school taps are usually of small bore and do their work slowly and splashily—and riveted his victim’s attention upon something so interesting that at the crucial moment he could have thrust her head under water without her having experienced the slightest premonition of danger?

On the other hand, though, what if Miss Ferris had herself provided the conversation? By all accounts she was