The others accompanied her, and Alice, offering money which was not accepted, obtained the use of two more towels from the publican, and whilst Laura, now shaking with cold and with hands too numb to dry herself, fumbled with the towel she had brought out from College, Alice and Kitty got to work on her like ostlers working on a horse, and, deaf to her protests that they were taking all the skin off, had her, except for her hands and feet, quite warm again by the time they had crammed on her vest and heavy sweater. Then, taking her by the arms, they trotted her up and down the stone-flagged path which bordered the bowling-green until she pronounced her circulation fully restored. By this time the watchers had dispersed, and the three went back to College.
‘And didn’t you scold her?’ asked Deborah. She and Mrs Bradley were having tea in Mrs Bradley’s sitting- room.
‘No. Why should I? I gave them all some parkin, and Miss Menzies a cup of Bovril,’ said the head of the house composedly.
‘But she might have got pneumonia!’
‘My scolding her would not prevent that, dear child. And look at the prize they brought in! Although I must say I can’t imagine how the police came to overlook it. Something to do with the action of the current, I suppose.’
‘But what did they bring in?’ asked Deborah.
‘Haven’t you heard? I feared it was all over Hall. Perhaps they’ve kept their mouths shut after all. They found Cook’s corsets in the river!’
Chapter 10
THE FLYING FLACORIS
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‘We’ve traced her movements over the week-end, madam,’ said the inspector, ‘and although we can’t find anybody who actually saw her enter the College grounds, she was seen, acting in a furtive manner, between the two stiles leading to the backs of your five houses of young ladies. That was at half-past nine on Monday evening. She was seen by Mr Titt, of the Watch Committee.’
‘I bet she was!’ said Miss Topas, when she heard this. ‘That man ought to be in prison!’
The two stiles referred to by the inspector were on College property. Behind the five Halls ran a drive, and behind the drive, and parallel with it, was a fairly high wall. Midway in this wall, and behind Beowulf Hall, there was a gap closed by a stile. A short footpath ran from this stile to another stile across a waste piece of ground used by the lecturers in botany as a kind of research-station for wild plants. The second stile was also set in a high wall, and beyond it stretched open fields which, in their turn, gave place to the moor. One of these fields was used by the College for hockey, but all the others belonged to farmers, and there was a right of way across to the College stile from the moorland highway, now an almost unused track since the stone-quarries there had been abandoned.
‘She went to Bradford,’ the inspector went on, ‘to her relations there. Respectable people; a man and his wife and three children. Nothing against them in any way. She stayed with them over Sunday, and then on Monday morning she told them she’d got a letter about a situation in York. They didn’t see any letter, but as she’d gone to the door herself to collect the post, they couldn’t question it.
‘And now, madam, comes a funny item. On Friday morning she went to the Post Office in Wantley — not here in the village, you’ll notice, nor anywhere near the College — and put fifty pounds into her Savings Bank account. Further to that, she put another fifty in on the Saturday before she visited her relatives, and not in Wantley this time, but in Bradford itself; and, even then, not at the branch office where her relations, living in the part they do, would be most likely to go. What do you make of that?’
‘At any rate, I know what you make of it, inspector,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘She received half the payment before she performed some task, and the other half when the task was satisfactorily completed.’
‘Question is, what was she bribed to do?’ inquired the inspector. Mrs Bradley would have enlightened him if it had been in her power to do so.
‘A woman like Cook,’ argued Laura, ‘would have put her stays on, chance what.’
As there was no dissenting voice, she glared militantly round her small circle of listeners and then lit a cigarette and smoked it half through before she continued her argument.
‘So what do we get?’ she went on. ‘I’ll tell you.’’
‘Bad teaching, Dog,’ observed Kitty. ‘If you ask a question, you shouldn’t answer it yourself.’
‘I’ll tell you,‘ repeated Laura firmly. “”We get this: somebody drowns poor old Cook in the bath; the other servants, used to the goings-on of that idiot Cartwright, don’t take any notice; the body is then dried and clothed, but the murderer, like a chump, doesn’t put on the corsets.’
‘Why not?’ Kitty inquired.
‘Ass! Can you imagine Cook without them? I bet the murderer gave one goggle-eyed look at the mass of adipose tissue, then took a despairing flip at the corsets, decided two into one won’t go, and slung the corsets into the river after the body, never dreaming that they’d fetch up where they did. You see, allowing for drift, current, prevailing winds, seasonal variations, present height of river, mean annual rainfall and the character of the local vegetation, that garment ought to have floated down ever so much farther than the body; instead of which, it got caught in weed, and hardly drifted at all. So when the police found the body at Spot A, they didn’t bother too much to search the bank at Spots A minus x, x being the unrecorded distance between the bridge and the body. Do I make myself clear to the lower division of the class?’
‘You’re an ass, Dog,’ said Kitty.
‘I see what you mean. I wish I could work things out,’ said Alice.
‘Old Dog made up most of that,’ said Kitty. ‘What a hellish day Sunday can be. Let’s go out and sweat at something, shall we?’
‘Let’s go into the gym,’ suggested Laura, who was still childish enough to delight in forbidden pleasures.
‘May we?’ inquired Alice. Her friends regarded her anxiously, and Kitty felt her pulse.
