her up the stairs and along to the bathroom.
There she set her down, grinned at her reassuringly, shut the door and turned on both taps in a steady, fairly fast trickle, letting the water fall on to a towel to deaden any sound that there might be. She looked at her watch, then took a folding ruler from her pocket and measured the bath. At the end of five minutes she measured the depth of the water. Then she whispered to the child:
“That’s all. Go back. You’ll still be in time for school. Did you ever read a detective story, by the way?”
“Seen Charlie Chan on the pictures,” said the child.
“Well, you and I together have been engaged in the solution of a mystery.”
The child made no verbal reply; her face, however, expressed her thoughts, which could be summed up thus: “Garn, you old barmy skinny lizzie!”
Mrs. Bradley cackled, and gave the child a shilling. Then she walked along to the seventh bedroom and tapped on the door. Bessie and Kitty had almost finished their task, and when she went in they were making the bed again. Mrs. Bradley shut the door behind her, and then, with her ear to the inside keyhole, she listened. This time there came a sound of running water. She went back to the bathroom, watched, this time, by the girls, and tied the towel, a big bath-towel— over the tap. Slowly, surely, but now without a sound, the water was gradually rising. The quietness of it fascinated Bessie, who leaned, open-mouthed, on the bath. Mrs. Bradley measured the depth again. She compared the result with some scribbled calculations she had made in the margin of her notebook, and slightly adjusted her figures. She was about to tell the girls to go back to their ordinary duties, when Bessie suddenly said:
“ ’Ell of a row you made on them there stairs.”
Mrs. Bradley started, and then laughed.
“I expect that was Molly Kelly getting back to school in a hurry. I came up about five minutes before you saw me come into the bedroom.”
“Thought she was going to be murdered, going by the row,” said Bessie. “Just a few minutes ago.”
“You heard nothing else, though, did you?”
“Nothing else in the world, ma’am,” said Kitty.
“Right. Now, listen, you two. I want you to come up here again at precisely half-past two, and undo everything you’ve done.”
“Not ’arf!” said Bessie, austerely. “Who do you think we are? Carter Paterson or something? Or Alice in Wonderland?”
“I should certainly hate to confuse you with the heroine of a certain music-hall turn I saw some time ago,” Mrs. Bradley replied. Suspecting a subtle witticism at her expense, Bessie regarded her tormentor with a wary but belligerent eye.
“What was that?” she demanded abruptly.
“A famous conjuring trick. I watched Horace Goldin saw a girl in half. She was almost the image of you, Bessie. It was most realistic, most. An enormous circular saw.
“ ’Ere!” said Bessie, backing away in mock trepidation, but casting a sincerely anxious glance over her left shoulder as she did so. “Want to make me dream?”
“At two-thirty, then,” said Mrs. Bradley, addressing Kitty as well. “Don’t fail me, or you’ll spoil a very good show.”
“This way for the loony-bin,” said Bessie, loudly and rudely. “Or, as the old gal at school used to say, ‘Across the stream, girls! You’ll soon be across the stream! ’ The asylum being the other side of the brook.”
Mrs. Bradley heard Kitty’s giggles coming faintly up the stairs, as the girls made their way to the kitchen to warn Annie and Ethel to stand by. It was almost a sound-proof house, she began to think. She resolved to congratulate the builder.
She went back to the bathroom, opened the window, and looked out. Then she glanced again at the bath. The water was coming in nicely. The bath was nearly half full. She looked at her watch, again revised her calculations a little, then went across to the private school to ask Mother Mary-Joseph to spare her a minute or two.
“I want you to know,” she said, “what I am trying to do, and why I can’t try the experiment with the assistance of one of the children. I am going to reconstruct what may have happened on the afternoon that Ursula Doyle was murdered, and I have asked particularly for your help because you are the lightest of the grown-up people here. You are not easily frightened, I hope?”
“No. I don’t think I am,” the young nun answered, smiling.
“Good. Go over to the guest-house and enter the first room on the left. Sit down on a chair beside the portable gas-fire, will you? I’ll be over in a minute or two.”
The nun left her, and Mrs. Bradley walked into the Orphanage, stood there a minute, then went to the guest- house. She found Mother Mary-Joseph seated in a low fire-side chair.
“Don’t be alarmed, dear child,” she said, very quietly. “You can struggle as much as you like; in fact, the harder the better.” So saying, she knelt on the floor beside the low chair, picked up the rubber nozzle of the gas tube and suddenly put her free arm round the nun in the bundly habit, and gripped her nose with some firmness. The young girl gasped and struggled. Mrs. Bradley held her tight, and, the moment that her mouth came open, she inserted the rubber nozzle, and said quickly:
“Don’t bite on the rubber, dear child!”
In spite of every effort that the victim could make, she could not escape nor dislodge the nozzle from her mouth.
“Keep your head still. I don’t want to injure your nose. So much for that!” said Mrs. Bradley, letting her go at last. “Feel bad? No? That’s good. Well, what do you think of the demonstration? Is it convincing, I wonder? Would it convince the police?”
