A Javelin for Jonah

“Let me think. Yes, James came to fetch me at just before eight. Breakfast is at eight and I was just about to leave my room and go down to it. The doctor came almost at once.”

“So thirty-six hours before that brings us to eight p.m. on Thursday. Could it possibly be rather later? After dark, perhaps?”

“That sounds very likely to me. It was after midnight on Thursday when James and I went along to the stoke- hole and got no reply from Jones. I see now why we did not. He was already dead.”

“Yes, he must have been. In your opinion—and bearing in mind that the doctors think he might have been dead either longer or less than thirty-six hours, when is the likeliest time…”

“For somebody to murder him? Well, it wasn’t done during Hall, because I always make a spot check at dinner. The best time to commit any unlawful act in this establishment would be at tea-time.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“Tea is a hit-or-miss kind of meal here, and is laid on from four in the afternoon until five-thirty. Any student could miss it and nobody would wonder where he was. Some would stay on the field until perhaps five o’clock, others would go into tea at four and be out again by a quarter past, and so on. Tea is served buffet style in the halls of residence. Chaps just help themselves. The staff and the girls often brew up in their own quarters. All the women students are given their own crockery, so they go down to the kitchen and collect a pot of tea and some cakes and jam and take their tea in their own rooms, with or without their friends. The point I’m making, I hope, is that you couldn’t guarantee where any student would be, or what he would be doing, once the gong goes for tea.”

“And this applies until five-thirty, and to the staff as well?”

“Yes, it applies until the beginning of the last coaching-session, and even then lots of the students don’t attend a last coaching, but disport themselves in the pool or carry on in the workshops or follow other hobbies instead of taking a session or attending a blackboard or film-strip lecture on their particular event.”

“Do the swimming baths remain open during the tea interval?”

“You’re thinking of the covered bath where the javelin was found, are you not? The baths are not closed at all until the dressing-gongs are sounded at seven-thirty. We expect students to change for dinner in Hall, although there is no compulsion, of course. At this time of year it is the open-air pool which is popular. In fact, from tea-time onwards, except for the keen types who go for after-tea coaching or practice, the pool is the centre of the social life of the College, although the women’s gym is sometimes the scene of impromptu dancing.”

“But after dinner both baths are closed? I see. What about the staff at tea-time? Where do they have their tea?”

“The same applies to us as to the women students. We take tea in our own rooms and often invite a youngster or two, or some of the other lecturers.”

“And Mr. Medlar?”

“He’s not much of a mixer, but quite often he will invite Miss Yale or myself to take tea with him. It’s usually to discuss some College matter. He never invites students to tea, and I don’t think he has ever asked any other lecturer to join him, except, of course, Jones.”

“I wonder whether you will have time tomorrow to show me over the buildings?”

“Certainly I shall. The most important one, though, the covered bath in which the javelin was found, has been sealed off by the police.”

“The most important building is not that in which a javelin was found, but that in which one was used, surely?”

“You don’t think it was used out of doors, then?”

“As I am looking upon Mr. Jones’s death as a case of murder, I think an indoor setting is more likely as offering less chance of the deed being witnessed by some passer-by.”

“You are thinking of one of the gyms, perhaps. We have two, both spacious. One needs space in which to throw a javelin.”

“If it was thrown, and if the weapon was a javelin—of which, now I have seen the one to which Miss Yale drew our attention, I feel reasonably sure—one would certainly need space. My own view (and I have a feeling that you share it) is that, with the new steel head on it, the javelin would make a very efficient stabbing-spear.”

“You say ‘if it was thrown’, but whether it was thrown or whether it was used as a bayonet, it seems to me that the covered bath itself could be the place. There are mops about, used to swab down the tiles, and there is certainly plenty of water for washing out bloodstains.”

“And a javelin was smeared with red paint and left in one of the cubicles to tell the tale.”

“Sounds as though the killer is more than usually wrong in the head,” said Henry. He turned his own head and added, “Oh, bother! Here’s somebody wanting me, I think. A student named Kirk. Bit of a creep, I’m afraid.”

“He curries favour with the lecturers?”

“No. Sneaks to Gassie about us, we think. If he peached on other students he’d have been beaten up long ago. Unfortunately Gassie is always open to complaints about the staff. Helps him to keep the tabs on us, I suppose. Wonder what Kirk is after with me? Acting merely as Gassie’s messenger, I expect. I’m probably keeping you out here too long. Shall we say eleven tomorrow morning for our tour of the buildings?”

Kirk came up to them. Hamish would have recognized him as the student he had kicked across the lecture- room on the day after his arrival at Joynings. He had had nothing to do with the youth since then. Kirk was a gymnast, one of the late Jones’s neglected squad. He had never attended another French lecture.

“Hullo, Kirk,” said Henry, as the spotty, ill-favoured stripling came up to him. “What can I do for you?”

“It’s more like what I can do for you,” said the lad, smirking.

“In what way?”