“You have good reason, doubtless, for asking me this, and I know, of course, why you are here. I cannot remember that anyone else did not go. But, then, I should hardly have troubled myself, I think, to find out who went and who did not.”
“Father Thomas?”
“Yes, he went in. It is not forbidden, you see, and the little children loved him. They would not have been so happy, had he not gone, therefore he went to please them. It is good to be loved by children.”
“What did you do, then, whilst the others were at the cinema?”
“I went into the local museum and studied the exhibits in the cases. I have seen better, but these were quite interesting. Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age —some Roman things, of course—Saxon, a mediaeval pot or two—it was not rubbish—nearly so, not quite. I was there for three hours, and then we all had tea.”
“Where?”
“In the guest-house, here, and the little children had theirs here, too, and then we played with them at bears, and then the good sisters came and took them to put them to bed. We did not know then of the dreadful thing that had happened, of course, in the guest-house.”
“I suppose you did not talk to the doctor, father, after he had examined the child?”
“I did not see him, no. I knew that the child was not dead by half-past twelve, but that you also know. I went up to that bathroom at the last, before we left, to bring down a watch which one of the ladies had left. This death is strange and terrible. Such things happen; I have known of them; but not where it is peace, as it is here.” He hesitated, and then said charmingly, “But I am keeping you, and you will wish to be away pursuing your enquiries. It is quite dreadful, and a great family, yes.”
“Not, I believe, a great family. Certainly a wealthy one,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “And the little girl was the heiress.”
“Where there is much wealth there is sometimes much wickedness. It is like that, money.” They were back at the great gates. He bowed, and Mrs. Bradley smiled, and let him go. There was a service at two o’clock each day, she remembered. Probably he wanted to attend it. She wondered whether all the other guests would go, too. Since the monk could not provide an alibi for anybody else, and since his own was (only technically) suspect—she could not imagine the Dominican killing a child—it would be just as well to establish that the rest of the party had actually spent their time at the cinema, and that none of them had sneaked back to the guest-house to meet Ursula Doyle.
She was fortunate, for, even as she stood thinking, a girl she had noticed at table, a frail, black-eyed creature who looked extremely ill, came past the gates and smiled at her as she passed. Mrs. Bradley arrested her progress.
“It is a little warmer,” she said. “Are you going to Vespers, possibly?”
“No, I am sorry. I am to take the air for an hour every afternoon that it is fine. Did you wish for a companion to go with you?” Her foreign accent was almost undetectable.
“No. Please walk about the garden with me for a little while. I, too, have to take the air,” Mrs. Bradley, partly mendaciously, explained.
“Ah, yes, that will be pleasant. I am not good alone. There is much to think about. Do you think much?”
“I think a good deal,” Mrs. Bradley admitted. “I think I should like to have been with you when you took the little children to the cinema.”
“Yes, I, too, would like to have gone, but, alas!—”
“Oh, you did not go with the children?”
“No, I did not go. I have trouble of the chest. I went out walking when they had all gone inside.”
“Did you go part of the way with Father Pius?”
“No, no. I went to the door of the cinema with the others. He left us at the turning to go to a little museum, so he said.”
“So he said? You think that perhaps he did not go to the museum after all?”
“I did not mean that. I mean that I heard him say that was where he would go. Why, please, should he not go, if he said he was going?”
“I have no idea. We must assume that that is where he went.”
“Perfectly.”
“Have you stayed here before?”
“Never. It is beautiful. I love the wildness. How do you call it—this wild country?”
“The moors.”
“Ah, yes. The moors. On them I walked whilst the others were inside the cinema, and above the sea, on the top of the cliffs.”
“How far did you go?”
“Not so far. It is not allowed to become too tired yet. I walked out, and I walked back, just enough to be interesting, and then I sat in a small little house—”
“A shelter?”
“A shelter—on the top of the cliff that is of the town. There was an old lady there, and a nursemaid who had a baby in a baby-carriage, and we talked. I liked it very much.”
“Did you not become cold?”
“No. I was well in clothes, and I wore the little stockings over the long stockings, and large gloves, and the sun
