Death at the Opera

At this point a new idea came to her, and an unwelcome one. She looked across at Wells and said:

“Child, if you were going to make a statue called Psyche, how old do you think your model would have to be?”

Wells rubbed his Wellingtonian nose and, having given the question a good deal of earnest thought, replied vaguely:

“Oh, I dunno. Somewhere between fifteen and eighteen, I suppose.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Child, I’m alarmed.”

“Bottom fallen out of your conclusions?” inquired Wells, sympathetically. Mrs. Bradley shuddered.

“I hope not. But I am conscious of hideous doubts, child.”

She had wondered once or twice what Smith’s reason could have been for doing his modelling at school instead of in his studio at home. It struck her now that the reason must be that he was using someone at the school for a model—someone who could stay at school after hours, perhaps, but who could not have gone alone to Smith’s studio.

“At the next stop I must telephone,” she said. She put through the call to Alceste Boyle.

“Please find out for certain whom Mr. Smith was using as a model for his Psyche, will you?”- she said, when communication between herself and Mrs. Boyle had been established. The reply was a foregone conclusion.

“Moira Malley. He was using her figure, but not her head,” said Alceste.

“No wonder,” said Mrs. Bradley, when they had again made their connection and were en route for Bognor Regis, this time on a main line and in a much faster train, “that Mr. Smith was sufficiently in touch with Moira Malley to get her to promise not to tell anyone that he was responsible for the accident to Miss Ferris’s glasses.”

But the outcome of this new discovery was likely to be perturbing in the extreme. Mrs. Bradley had never seriously considered the Sixth Form Irish girl as a probable murderer, but it was possible to suppose that she had given the sittings secretly to Smith, and it was possible that Miss Ferris had discovered that she was sitting to him.

Mrs. Bradley decided that if the spectacle of Hurstwood kissing Miss Cliffordson had shocked Miss Ferris, the spectacle of a naked Sixth Form girl posing after school hours for the Art Master would have shocked her a good deal more. Another point at issue was that although Smith himself had probably regarded the girl’s action as natural, justifiable, convenient and right (and probably, too, in view of the girl’s chronically impecunious state, as a business proposition entirely), Mrs. Bradley thought it more than possible that to the girl herself, fanatically chaste and unreasoningly modest as only an Irish person can be, the sittings were a source of constant war between her conscience and her desire to please Smith, with whom, thought Mrs. Bradley, groaning with humorous despair, she was probably in love.

There was nothing humorous, however, about the conclusion towards which this latest discovery tended. If Moira Malley thought that Miss Ferris would report to the Headmaster that she had discovered her standing naked in the art-room, no matter for what purpose or reason, the motive for Moira Malley’s having killed Miss Ferris was overwhelmingly strong.

Mrs. Bradley felt old and tired. Her previous conclusions as to the identity of the murderer began to rock on their foundations. Fortunately, she decided, it would be impossible now to prove whether Miss Ferris had known of the sittings or not, and, without such proof, the case against Moira Malley fell to the ground. All the same, a little demon insisted upon repeating in Mrs. Bradley’s mental ear a snippet of the conversation she herself had had with Moira Malley on the subject of the time the girl was expected to be home from school.

“But what about your people?”

“Aunt doesn’t mind. Often she doesn’t know whether I’m in the house or not, until supper-time…”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Mrs. Bradley. “I do hope you didn’t do it, you poor child, because you’ll never get over it if you did.”

There had been the girl’s outburst, too, when Mrs. Bradley had suggested that she should conduct her to the water-lobby where the body had been found.

“I can’t go round there after dark! I won’t face it!”

Well, it was natural enough, considering that the girl had been the first person to discover the dead body. On the other hand, that “discovery” in itself was suspicious. So many murderers, overcome by their own nervous inability to escape from the scene of the crime, have “discovered” the body with intent to begin the very inquiries they most dread having set on foot.

It looked bad—Wells, looking across at Mrs. Bradley, noted the sunken lines round her mouth and the pucker between her brows—it looked very bad for Moira Malley. But still—Mrs. Bradley turned over another page of her notebook—there were several other people to be considered. There was still Miss Camden, for example, and there was still the electrician. If the electrician should prove to be the man Helm, he would have to explain away a good deal of very suspicious matter in connection with his obviously clandestine visit to the school, Mrs. Bradley decided. She resolved not to consider him further until she had visited Miss Ferris’s aunt at Bognor Regis and had learned all she could from her about Helm and the dead woman.

Miss Camden, however, was in a different category of suspects. In her case the motive seemed fairly obvious— she had had what might be called a double motive, in fact —and temperamentally she was capable of murder. She possessed a good many, if not all, of the qualities required in the carrying out of this particular crime. Her course as a Physical Training and Games Mistress had made her alert, physically powerful, able to grasp opportunity quickly, ruthless in the sense that in her had been developed the “will to win” at the expense, so far as Mrs. Bradley could determine from a very imperfect study of the girl, of gentler qualities.

The difficulty in her case, Mrs. Bradley repeated to herself, was the question of opportunity. But the more Mrs. Bradley thought it over, the more possible it seemed that Miss Camden might have had as much opportunity as any other person with a motive for committing the crime. It was easy enough to prove that she had been seated at the end of a row in the auditorium at the beginning of the performance, and it was apparent, from Alceste Boyle’s evidence, that she had been in the same seat towards the end of the act.

But the point at issue, so far as Mrs. Bradley was concerned, was whether she had remained there during the whole of the intervening time. If it could be shown that she had left her place at any point between, say, half-past