Death at the Opera

seven and a quarter-past eight, for instance, there would be a certain amount of reason for keeping her high on the list of suspected persons.

She was a person with little or no power of thinking ahead; she was inclined to yield to sudden temptation (if the story of the cashed and altered cheque was true); she was a disillusioned creature, and she was obviously the victim of nervous strain brought on by overwork. On the other hand, she had admitted to having had what she called a “row” with Miss Ferris, and she had sufficiently confessed the incident of the Headmaster’s cheque for Mrs. Bradley to find out the complete story. It was difficult, too, to determine exactly how she had discovered that Miss Ferris had been using the water-lobby. Mrs. Bradley wrinkled her brows over this. Suddenly light came.

When she and Wells left the train at Bognor she ordered the taxi to stop at the first post office. From there she sent Alceste Boyle a telegram.

“Ask girls who attended Ferris night of opera.”

To shorten the message further was to make it unintelligible, she thought. The reply came next morning in the form of a letter.

“I could not explain satisfactorily on a telegraph-form” [Alceste had written]. “I asked in all the forms to-day, and when I had asked in the Fourth Form, my call-boy girl stood up and said that, imagining I was too busy with the opera to be bothered about such matters, she had gone into the auditorium to find Miss Camden when she knew Miss Ferris had injured herself. Miss Camden is always called in when first aid is required, so that it was natural and sensible of the girl to go and find her. Miss Camden went immediately to Miss Ferris’s assistance, the girl going too, and remaining to assist.”

“I wonder whether the girl remained to assist all the time they were in the water-lobby together?” thought Mrs. Bradley. “I wonder how and when that modelling-clay was put into the waste-pipe? I wonder whether Miss Camden went a second time to help Miss Ferris? I wonder how this man Helm comes into the affair? I wonder why, with four perfectly good suspects, all of them with motives, all of them with opportunities, all of them, within limits, capable of committing murder, I trouble myself to try to find a fifth? ”

chapter x: aunt

« ^ »

Mrs. Bradley had wondered how best to attack the question of Calma Ferris’s death with Calma Ferris’s aunt, but found her path smoothed by the unforeseen fact that the aunt, whose name was Miss Lincallow, had heard of her fame and was prepared not only to welcome her as a distinguished guest, but to open, of her own accord and without any prompting from the black-eyed visitor, the whole subject of what she still regarded as her niece’s suicide.

“But why should she have committed suicide?” Mrs. Bradley asked. Miss Lincallow shook her head.

“Before the inquest I should have said she had fallen and couldn’t face the future,” she observed, “but since the inquest—well, what can you think? It seems she was as virtuous as you or me.”

Mrs. Bradley, who had never regarded herself as particularly virtuous in either a moral or a physical sense, nodded solemnly and assumed the sombre expression of countenance which she imagined might pass for the outward, visible sign of deep intelligence.

“Of course, one never knows,” she said. To Miss Lincallow this apparently meaningless phrase must have conveyed something at once serious and profound, for she nodded in her turn, sighed loudly—almost groaned, in fact—while her greenish eyes turned slowly ceilingwards.

“Poor Calma,” she said. “She had her suspicions of that man at once. She sat opposite him at table the first day of her holiday here, Mrs. Bradley, and at the end of the meal—lunch, I believe it was, but I’m not quite sure— she came to me and said: ‘Auntie, you must please move me away from that sinister middle-aged man.’

“ ‘What sinister middle-aged man, dear?’ I said, all middle-aged men looking alike to me as far as sinister is concerned—you know what I mean: all of them with wives they’ve got tired of—especially when they come and stay in a nice town like Bognor all alone, or any other high-class watering-place, for that matter—‘what sinister middle- aged man, dear? ’ I said.

“When she pointed him out I quite understood. A commercial, Mrs. Bradley, if ever I saw one, and you know what they’re like when they’re away from home! Worse than sailors, I always say, because, after all, sailors are subject to some sort of discipline on board ship if not actually while they are ashore, and also, of course, they do have a chaplain to read the prayers at sea and teach them to be God-fearing on the water, if nowhere else; but commercials! Why, their whole living depends on them telling more lies than anyone else can think of, doesn’t it, now?”

Mrs. Bradley, to whom this aspect of a commercial traveller’s means of livelihood had not previously presented itself, assented meekly, but, without waiting for her hearer’s comment, Miss Lincallow continued:

“And then, that night! Oh, dear! That night! Never shall I forget it! Mind you, I could hardly believe it at the time, and looking back now it all seems a dream. But, burglars or not—although, if I were on my dying oath, nothing whatever was missing from the house or in any of the visitors’ rooms or anywhere—but, burglars or not, as I say, they were in Calma’s room, both poor Calma and that man together. Nefarious, I call it, don’t you?”

Mrs. Bradley, who had never used the word in her life, again assented.

“I didn’t say a word to Calma, mind you,” Calma’s aunt continued. “It wouldn’t have done. There she was, paying almost as much for her room as anyone, and quite old enough to take care of herself, and with her father’s independent character, for all that she seemed somehow so mild. She had a strong nature, Calma had, and if she was set on doing a thing, do it she certainly would. Not headstrong, just determined in a quiet way. Behaved as though you weren’t there, if you know what I mean. You couldn’t domineer over her at all. So I said nothing, and he stayed a good while, longer than a commercial ought to, I should have thought, and I couldn’t find out what he travelled in. And then we heard why. And when we heard why, I asked my lord to leave, quick, sharp!” She sank her voice to a blood-curdling whisper. “Murder, Mrs. Bradley. But acquitted. You remember the George Bryan Cutler case last year?”

Mrs. Bradley recollected a murder trial, at the termination of which a man known as George Bryan Cutler had