Death at the Opera

was seen on or about the school premises on the night of the murder except a man—the electrician, you know— who cannot be proved to have been Helm. He may have been Helm—an unreasonable belief assails me that he was Helm—but it can’t be proved.”

“How do you mean?” Alceste inquired.

“Well, I showed a recognizable newspaper photograph of Helm to the schoolkeeper and to Mr. Kemball, both of whom saw and spoke to the bogus electrician, and neither can identify the man in the photograph. As a matter of fact, I never really felt that Helm had murdered Miss Ferris. His speciality is murder in a bath-tub. He would have gone to Miss Ferris’s lodging to murder her, or else he would have met her here and persuaded her to return with him.”

“Does Mr. Cliffordson believe that Helm killed Miss Ferris?” Alceste inquired.

“I don’t know, child. He pretends to accept my suggestion that Helm was the murderer because he wants the inquiry dropped. I don’t think he believes that Helm is guilty.”

Alceste looked uncomfortable.

“I suppose, then, that you know who did it, and that it was—one of us,” she said. Mrs. Bradley took out her notebook and showed Alceste the four names she had written down. The Senior English Mistress looked distressed.

“But surely—Moira Malley! She couldn’t have done such a thing. You don’t know the child as I do. It is quite, quite impossible to suspect her of an awful crime like murder!” she said. Mrs. Bradley nodded.

“I agree! I agree! But consider the facts: The girl had opportunity. She had motive—”

“Miss Ferris may have known about the sittings, you mean? She may have warned the girl she was going to report her. Oh, but that’s nonsense. Moira knows Mr. Cliffordson well enough to realize that Donald would be blamed, not she.”

“Don’t you see,” said Mrs. Bradley, “that that may have been the motive?”

Alceste went white.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “These poor, idiotie children! There’s that ridiculous boy Hurstwood making a fool of himself over Gretta Cliffordson, who isn’t worth a second thought by anybody. I see you’ve got him down.”

“Motive and opportunity,” said Mrs. Bradley solemnly. “The same words, in all their sinister significance”—she cackled harshly—“apply equally in the case of the other suspects, Miss Camden and Mr. Smith.”

“Of course, Camden—I can imagine that,” said Alceste slowly. “Overworked, strung-up, extravagant with money and energy and bad temper—an explosive sort of person altogether. And Miss Ferris had certainly got the wrong side of her.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley, smoothing a crease out of the sleeve of her raspberry-coloured jumper. “And Mr. Smith is an artist, and therefore—according to the ideas of the ordinary citizen, who regards art as expensive, and not even as a luxury at that!—a person who does not hold human life sacred. I know, too, that Miss Ferris damaged the Psyche and generally behaved in a Philistian manner. But what of it?”

She turned upon Alceste Boyle and said firmly:

“When I went away from here last term I was convinced—absolutely convinced—that Miss Camden was the murderer of Miss Ferris. Then I found out about Moira Malley and the sittings, and I became uncertain. So I also reconsidered the case of the boy Hurstwood, and it seemed to me that there was more than a possibility that he was guilty. Mr. Smith—I will be frank with you—I don’t suspect at all of the murder of Calma Ferris.”

She ran a pencil through his name in confirmation of what she was saying.

“But there’s something wrong,” she said vigorously. “There’s something behind all this which I don’t yet understand. If it was one of these three, and I can prove it to my own satisfaction, the matter will rest there. I shall take it no further. But—” She pursed her thin lips into a little beak and shook her head.

“But I can’t believe it was one of those three,” said Alceste. “At least—” she hesitated, and then added:

“I believe any one of them could have committed the murder, but not for any of the given reasons.”

“My difficulty entirely,” confessed Mrs. Bradley. “And yet,” she said, as though she were thinking aloud rather than addressing Mrs. Boyle, “I don’t know. What might appear to me, or to you, as a God-given and sufficient reason to eliminate a fellow-creature might seem airy, casual and of no importance to anyone else. On the other hand, you see, although it would not occur to me to murder anybody for the sake of gain, to a man like Helm it appears to be the obvious, natural thing to do. This motive business is very difficult. Nobody can say without fear of contradiction that any motive for murder is too trivial. My difficulty is that, if I read these three people aright, their spirits may have been willing, but I’m certain their wills would have been too weak, when it came to the point, to hold Calma Ferris’s head down in that basin of water until she died. There is only one person who was behind the scenes that night who is capable of visualizing and performing such an action, and on that person I cannot pin the faintest shadow of a motive. Opportunity in plenty, but motive—none whatever!”

“And who is that?” inquired Alceste, interested but unbelieving.

“Suppose I said that it was the Headmaster?” replied “Mrs. Bradley, with one of her unnerving hoots of laughter. Alceste laughed too.

“Simply and briefly, I shouldn’t believe you,” she said. “If he committed the murder, why should he call you in to investigate the matter, when the coroner and his people had already most obligingly called it suicide? Besides, I thought he had no opportunity.”

“True, child, true,” said Mrs. Bradley, sighing. “The one thing above all others which is clear in my mind is that somebody very closely connected with the opera committed the murder. The time so carefully chosen, for instance, and—”

“The clay in the waste-pipe,” said Mrs. Boyle. “I have been puzzled over that. Who, besides Donald Smith, would have been thinking about clay from the art-room? Yes, you’d like to say Moira Malley—”