‘I wonder where they hid the body before they buried it in the hole?’ said Mr Ronsonby. ‘Those few days were the time of the greatest risk, one would think.’
‘If they killed him at Mrs Buxton’s, sir, I reckon that’s where they left him till they could dispose of him. Them’s basement houses. The back door leads to a passage which nobody would use except the Buxtons themselves.’
‘If you are right,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘then Mrs Buxton is implicated. Given the circumstances as we know them, I agree that it is most likely Mr Pythias was murdered in the house and that the story of his going to friends for Christmas was fiction. If that is so, I think it likely that he was killed either in his own room or in that of his murderer, and I have it from Mrs Gavin that there was little or no fraternising among the tenants, so that the body could have remained undetected in one of the rented rooms.’
‘And there was Buxton’s van to transport it to my quad when the time came,’ said Mr Ronsonby. ‘I see only one difficulty with regard to that. Once the building is empty, the gates are locked and no van could get into the school grounds.’
‘It could get round to the road what border the school field, though, sir,’ said Sparshott, ‘All they’d have to do then would be to take the body round the alleyway and get it over the fence. Then they could have took it through the school from the back entrance where there wasn’t no door and so through to the quad.’
‘I see an objection to that theory,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘You think that the interment was carried out when the hens were dispersed. Your relatives would have been out on the school field chasing them and must have been aware of any interlopers.’
‘Not if them interlopers had already dumped the body in a classroom or somewhere afore they let the hens out, ma’am.’
‘Ah, that would explain matters. What were the exact circumstances under which your cottage was tenanted that night?’
‘Being as my wife and me and my son Ron was away for Christmas, my older son Geoffrey and his wife took over my cottage for a couple of days, and they brought a couple of friends with ’em. Me and my wife and Ron, we come home latish on Boxing Day after Geoffrey’s two friends had gorn and was told as some mischievious persons had let the hens out and what a job it had been a-chasing of all them chickens and getting ’em back inside. Geoffrey said he’d as soon try to round up a couple of dozen young pigs as them dratted, pestiferous fowls!’
‘How long did it take to catch them all?’
‘The others helped, but it took the best part of three hours, I reckon, because they had to keep going round to people’s front doors and asking if they could go into their back gardens. Geoffrey and Geoffrey’s wife and another chap done the chasing and an older lady stood by the henhouse to open the door for them to bung the chickens in and shut it up again. Lucky most of the hens was white Wyandottes, because it was dark time they finished and if they’d of been Buff Orpingtons they never would have caught ’em because they wouldn’t have been able to see ’em.’
‘While this safari was going on, would there have been any access to the school or its grounds other than by climbing the fence?’
Sparshott, who had appeared animated, so far as this was possible in so phlegmatic a man, shook his head, but not in negation of the suggestion.
‘As to that,’ he said, ‘well, Geoffrey soon realised as him and the other chap couldn’t keep climbing over the fence into the alleyway behind people’s back gardens. Him and the other chap might have managed it, but not Geoffrey’s wife, so he unlocks one of the side gates at the front of the school so as to get in and out. You will have noticed, ma’am, as there’s big double gates to admit cars and on either side of these there’s pedestrian gates leading on to paved footpaths to keep boys out of the way of staff cars coming in. Not as it do, but that’s another matter. Well, Geoffrey unlocks the left-hand one of these little gates with special instructions to the others to pull it to again when any of ’em went in or out. You could never have told from the street that it was unlocked, but, all the same, anybody could have used it to come in, if they’d knowed.’
‘Hindsight informs me,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘that your older son’s movements had been carefully watched and monitored and the release of the chickens which so effectively engaged the attention of the whole household was part of a carefully fabricated plan.’
‘Please don’t tell my missus that, ma’am. She’d never get another wink of sleep if she thought the cottage had been spied on by a murderer. Can’t say I fancies the idea too much myself.’
‘No, a disturbing thought. But tell us more. So Geoffrey, with the best of intentions, had unlocked the small side gate.’
‘But he locked it up again when all the hens was accounted for.’
Dame Beatrice was sceptical about this, but she made no comment. She also wondered how the hen-chasers could be sure that all the birds had been accounted for. She said nothing of this either. She asked what had happened after Sparshott, his wife and his younger son had returned to their cottage.
Sparshott, it appeared, had made his late evening round as usual. He had gone in by the back way and crept cautiously around the ground floor of the building, but there had been no lights anywhere and no sounds of any intruders. He had been told about the chickens, but had been sure that releasing them had been the work of mischievous little boys.
‘Did you go and inspect the quad?’ Dame Beatrice enquired.
‘I didn’t see no need. There wasn’t never no lights nor no voices nor nothing at all.’
‘When did you go and look at the quad by daylight after the school Christmas holiday?’
‘By daylight? Well, there wasn’t no call for me to see it by daylight, ma’am. While school is on, the quad is no business of mine. I does a snoop round after school to make sure everybody is off the building before I locks up, but after that, unless any sort of alarm is give, I contents myself with pussyfooting round the building before I has my supper. Mondays is a kind of open evening, so I’m specially careful then, but there’s evening classes Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with school clubs mostly on Fridays. On Saturdays and Sundays I keeps my weather- eye lifting, same as on Mondays, but excepting for two boys who tried to have me on a piece of string because they’d dropped a biro in the quad there’s been no more upsets of any kind. That matter was an upset, not on account of the boys, but because all the school outside-doors being on and fastened firm be that time, I found as two jokers had broke a winder in the boys’ washplace and got into the quad; that winder was a pro job and not done by boys.’
