“It’s all a bit odd to me, mother.” Ferdinand knit his black brows and stared away over the top of his mother’s dark head to where, beyond the orchard, the tall church rose to the sky. Mrs. Bradley cackled, and George observed:
“Madam didn’t exactly let Miss Bonnet go. It was more that the young lady managed to disappear in the general melee of the rescue.”
“Very fairly put, George,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And the fact does remain, of course, that I could not have handed her over to the police, for I could not prove much against her, although she confessed that she had attacked Sister Bridget. In any case, I do not think that the attack was meant to kill the victim, although the actual force of the blow was rather dangerously misjudged. But that’s Miss Bonnet all over.”
“But the murder of the child! You remember you described to me how you reconstructed the murder with that piece of gas-tubing in the guest-house dining-room?”
“Oh, that? But that was not a reconstruction of the murder! It was to assure myself that that was not a way in which the thing could very well have been done. If the murderer had held that tube of escaping gas so that the victim could breathe from it, she would have run considerable risk of being gassed herself. Have you turned the gas on in there? And the child, you remember, was not injured. Her nose might well have been broken, if the method that I demonstrated was right.” Ferdinand looked at his mother in some perplexity.
“But the cigarette holder shoved in the nozzle of the gas-tube to form a mouthpiece!” he exclaimed. “That seemed to me so ingenious!”
“Yes, so it was,” Mrs. Bradley regretfully conceded. “But it happened to be my ingenuity, not Miss Bonnet’s at all. You see, she never used a cigarette holder. On the other hand, Ulrica Doyle, quite suddenly, began helping her cousin Ursula with her Latin
“Ulrica?”
“Yes. Carbon monoxide is easy enough to make, and Ulrica used to take those mysterious walks, which the Community, believing them harmless, did not supervise.”
“You mean children ought to be under constant supervision? I thought you were such an apostle of liberty!”
“I am, dear child, I hope. And it is now part of an inevitable reaction, that Ulrica knows she betrayed the kindness of Mother Francis and the Reverend Mother Superior.”
“But I thought you had fixed on Miss Bonnet!”
“Miss Bonnet,” said Mrs. Bradley, “is almost a halfwit in some respects, but even she could hardly have missed the conclusion that, if a child was going to be murdered, the time to do it was while the nuns were all in church between two o’clock and half-past. Even if nothing else had indicated that Miss Bonnet was not the culprit, I should have given up thinking her guilty when I heard about that half-hour’s special coaching she gave to the private-school girls.”
“But she knocked out that orphan child deliberately during the netball practice, you thought.”
“Yes, I know she did. She needed an excuse to get into the Orphanage, I think. When she had stolen the chalice and paten she wanted a hiding place very near at hand, from which she could take them when the search had ceased to be local and had widened.”
“But why pick the Orphanage?”
“Because nobody would suspect the poor orphans of stealing the chalice and paten, and suspicion would hardly be attached to Mother Ambrose and Mother Jude.”
“She just snooped round for a hiding-place?”
“Whilst Mother Ambrose and Mother Jude were busy. Yes, I think so.”
“But where was the child killed, mother?”
“In the bathroom where she was found. The carbon monoxide could have been made in several ways by a girl with some knowledge of chemistry—by burning some charcoal, for instance. The problem of how the child got into the guest-house bothered me for a time, but I’m quite sure now that Ulrica told her Miss Bonnet was there and wanted to see her about that extra coaching in physical training. You remember that that was one of the reasons brought forward in favour of the suicide verdict?—that the child was in trouble at school? Well, she was in trouble— if you can call it that!— with Miss Bonnet, and had been told she must have some extra practice.”
“But the bathroom?”
“Oh, we can imagine, I think, what happened. First they looked in at the parlour. ‘She isn’t here. She said she might be upstairs, and we were to find her.’ You know what children are, and Ursula would have believed every word from her cousin, the cousin who was helping her with her work, helping her to gain merit badges from her teachers, helping to make her so happy. You remember that many of the nuns decided that so happy a child would not have killed herself? Then, when they got to the bathroom door, the whiff of the carbon monoxide—‘look what I’m going to show Mother Saint Simon to-morrow.’ The fatal sniff, the climb out of the window to release the rest of the gas where it might harm no one, the horrifying discovery that the child was not merely unconscious, but was dead, the panic-stricken tearing off of the clothes, the water rising higher and higher in the bath, the closed window—to conceal, if possible, even from herself, that she had been out on the roof to get rid of the dangerous evidence—and then, the flight to the church, quite the most characteristic touch. Mind you, I think this: that if all had gone exactly according to plan, and the child had been found, not gassed in the bath, but drowned, and a verdict of Accidental Death had been returned, even Ulrica herself would have forgotten, very soon, that the death was due to her agency. Unfortunately for her, suicide is a dreadful sin from the point of view of the Church. That point of view she accepted, and immediately it worried and confused her. To have her innocent cousin—for she never thought of her except as a cypher and a pawn— accused of mortal sin, and wrongly accused, worked on her mind, and roused in her a dormant suicide complex.”
“But what are you going to do about it now?”
“Nothing, dear child. Why should I? Reverend Mother Superior, Mother Saint Francis, and old Mother Gregory, the Sacristan, were all convinced of her guilt.”
“But she can’t get off scot free!”
“Scot free?” said Mrs. Bradley. She laughed—not her usual cackle, but a harsh sound, sardonic and pitiful. “Why
