‘Miss Trevelyan,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘you had better sit down.’
‘Yes, Warden.’
‘Now, Miss Trevelyan, what have you to say for yourself?’
‘I — I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Don’t you try those schoolgirl gambits on me! ’ said Mrs Bradley, more bolt-upright than before. ‘Search your conscience, Miss Trevelyan, search your conscience! When you have done so, excuse yourself if you can.’
‘Oh — breaking and entering,’ said Kitty, giving way at once in this battle of nerves. ‘Yes, I — I did do that. It seemed sort of necessary at the time.’
‘And now?’
‘Well, I can see why I did it’
‘So can I,’ said Mrs Bradley deliberately. ‘You were actuated by what, for want of more original wording, I can only call sheer, vulgar, spiteful curiosity.’
‘Oh, no, Warden!’ wailed Kitty, stung to the quick by this uncompromising view of her detective faculties.
‘How
‘Oo, Warden!’
‘I say nothing about prying,and probing into her private affairs…’
‘Oh, I say!’
‘Abstracting her property…’
‘Oo, but…’
‘As to the hiding-place you chose in order to get rid of the evidence of your crime…’
‘Oh, I object to crime, Warden! No, honestly, I do call that a bit thick, I mean! No, really, dash it, Warden, I say!’
‘What exactly did you think you were doing?’ concluded Mrs Bradley mildly. Kitty looked at her, gulped, and then grinned.
‘I knew you were kidding,’ she said. At this ingenuous statement Deborah broke into a sudden squeal of laughter. Mrs Bradley stared at her disapprovingly, with a look which Deborah, with an absurd little shiver of anticipation, translated as ‘I will deal with you later.’ All that Mrs Bradley said was: ‘Come on, Miss Trevelyan. If you can give me any sort of reasonable explanation, I am prepared to overlook your really outrageous conduct.’
‘O.K., Warden. Well, you see, it began with that string. I knew, and Dog knew — I don’t know about Alice — that when you came in and busted us that first night, you knew we jolly well didn’t know anything about it. Well, Dog put two and two together, as you know she’s fairly well given to do…’
‘Yes. I do not underrate Miss Menzies’ intelligence,’ Mrs Bradley admitted.
‘Good old Dog. Well, she said if we hadn’t done it, who had? Because you’d hardly put that kind of thing down to the servants, and as for suspecting the senior student — well, that’s all rot, whatever you may say.’
‘I have never suspected the senior student, Miss Trevelyan, of tying pieces of string across doorways.’
‘No, of course not. Well, then, who are we left with? The lecturers, etc.,’ concluded Kitty dramatically. ‘So Dog said: “How about some silly — some lecturer who’d hoped to be made Warden of Athelstan, and hadn’t clicked?” Some women are very funny, you know.’
‘Yes, I had noticed it,’ Mrs Bradley drily agreed. ‘Go on, Miss Trevelyan, please.’
‘Well, then, the — er — the What-Names, all piled up during the Second-Year rag… Remember?’
‘Perfectly, Miss Trevelyan.’
‘Well, that was another case of Oo-dun-it. Or was it?’
‘It most certainly was, if I understand your idiom correctly.’
‘So said all of us. Well, there’s one thing I can tell you, Warden. It’s this: those What-Names were abstracted before dinner. I know, because we’d investigated ours, and — er — ’
‘Yes. I seem to remember an impromptu game of Rugby football,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘in which one of the promiscuous vessels figured as the ball. Am I right or wrong in supposing that Miss Menzies scored a try with her vessel at the top of the students’ staircase?’
‘Perfectly right, but — well, anyhow, I can swear to it they were there at five-fifty-five, pip emma. And nobody came into any of our three study-bedrooms while the Second-Year rag was in progress. That means those things were sneaked out of the rooms just before dinner. Was anybody absent from dinner?’
‘No, child. I am prepared to swear to that, and so is Miss Cloud.’
‘Me, too. Miss Mathers came round with a Hall list, and ticked off all the names. Well, what are we back to, again? The Staff. Q.E.D.’
‘Or some outside person or a servant. It’s not a very good point, Miss Trevelyan. All the same I can’t see why you suspected poor Miss Giggs.’
‘Oh, well, that was kind of by the way,’ said Kitty. ‘But, Warden, you remember the snakes? You do, anyway, Miss Cloud. You know, the snakes in Miss Harbottle’s Dem.’
‘What about them?’ said Deborah, shortly. The snakes were still an uncomfortable subject for her.
‘Don’t you see? The Dem-room being next door to the Staff Common Room…?’
