‘Well, I can’t see it can hurt to give it to you, like,’ said the proprietor of the garage.
He tore a piece of paper from the bottom of an invoice slip, looked up in a small, shiny note-book the reference he required, and wrote out the address in a neat and business-like hand.
‘Shouldn’t like the young fellow to miss what’s coming to him,’ he observed as he handed George the paper, ‘although he served me not so good. Told me he’d got a job near Bradford, and hopped it, all in a morning.’
‘ ’T’ain’t a lot, between you and me,’ said George. ‘Matter of sixty-five quid. Still, it means a lot to a young fellow starting out in life, I reckon, and he’d ought to have it. It’s his. There’s five of ’em, and they all share alike — three girls and the two young chaps. Well, thanks for the help. So long, mate.’
‘You’re welcome,’ replied the garage proprietor, opening the ledger again. George walked round the corner and into the street where he had left the car and Mrs Bradley in it.
‘I fancy the address may interest you, madam,’ he said. ‘I haven’t looked at the paper since he gave it to me, but I couldn’t help seeing what he was writing down.’
The address was that of the local post office of the College.
‘Webbed like a fish, and his fins like arms,’ said Mrs Bradley, with a grimace and a satisfied chuckle. ‘This grows interesting, George. What was one of Cartaret’s young ladies doing as a garage hand, I wonder?’
‘The old chap certainly hadn’t rumbled he was employing a young woman, madam, anyhow.’
‘No. That’s interesting, too. Probably confused the unusual with the impossible, a practice against which we are continually being warned by classic writers. Well, George, there is nothing more now, once I have been to the school. We shall have to ask the way again, I’m afraid.’
Saint Faith’s Senior Girls’ School lay in a little clearing amid some riverside slums. It was not on the telephone, and Mrs Bradley took it by surprise.
The headmistress was taking a class, and had to be brought out of it to answer Mrs Bradley’s questions. Fortunately Mrs Bradley did not need to keep her very long.
‘A Miss Cornflake?’ she said, looking puzzled. ‘No, we have never had an assistant of that name, I’m sure.’
‘This girl I am trying to trace went to Cartaret Training College last September,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘She may have called herself Flack, or even Paynter-Tree or Tree.’
But this suggestion met with no response from the headmistress.
‘I have only three assistants,’ she said. ‘Their names are Smith, Wakefield and Cotts. They have been with me a number of years now. They are all certificated teachers.’
Mrs Bradley thanked her, apologized for taking up her time, and departed, well satisfied. The darker the horse, she concluded, thinking of Miss Cornflake and her apparently mysterious antecedents, the better. The problem now seemed to be to choose the best time at which to show her hand, confront Miss Cornflake with the evidence, such as it was, and ask her to explain herself.
The holiday, at any rate, was not the right time. She drove back to Athelstan. The motives for the death of the child and of Miss Murchan’s disappearance seemed to be coming to light. The means used to accomplish the child’s death had never been in question. The means used to kill Miss Murchan, if she had been killed, were still obscure, and were likely to remain so until, for one thing, the time, place and fact of the death had been established. Opportunity in both cases was also difficult to show. The child had been killed at the (in the circumstances) extraordinary hour of seven in the evening, or later. Miss Murchan had disappeared during or after the College dance. Had both been decoyed? And by what agency?
Mrs Bradley sat at her desk and unlocked the top long drawer. She drew out her notebook and shook her head at it. There was much to do, much to discover, before this curiously baffling task she had undertaken could come to an end.
She opened the notebook. There was also Cook’s death to be investigated. The police had been persuaded that it was murder. She glanced out over the Cartaret grounds, now becoming misty in the dusk. The College was a pleasant place, on the whole. She wished she could have come there on some more savoury errand. She sighed, affected to make another entry in the notebook and closed the drawer. A curious sixth sense, which she trusted, was informing her that all was not as it should be.
‘Reach for it,’ said a voice.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Mrs Bradley, blessing the sixth sense, not for the first time in her life.
‘You heard! Stick ’em up,’ said the voice. Mrs Bradley turned her head as she put up her hands. There was still that bulge behind one of the long dark curtains.
‘Now pick up that notebook with your right hand and chuck it this way,’ the voice went on. ‘I know you can aim accurately if you want to. Hip it across, and no funny business. You’re covered, and I shan’t miss, mind.’
‘I’m sure you won’t,’ said Mrs Bradley courteously. She was not unaccustomed to homicidal maniacs. ‘But may I suggest, first, that you are mixing up two entirely different American accents, to wit, that of the Bronx with that of Chicago; secondly, that you are superimposing upon the mixture a kind of stage Cockney which — forgive me — you don’t do terribly well, and, thirdly, that even if…’
‘Stow the gab and shoot the loot!’ said the voice. The curtains quivered slightly.
‘Even if, I was about to remark,’ Mrs Bradley continued, in her deep, agreeable voice, ‘I do toss you my notebook, I can’t see that it will benefit you at all, since I am prepared to declare that you will not be able to read a word of my writing.’
‘That’s my funeral,’ said the voice, ‘and I’m getting impatient. Don’t you know who it is that you’re keeping waiting?’
‘Can you really see me through that curtain?’ asked Mrs Bradley. ‘I should scarcely have thought…’
‘Near enough to plug you if you don’t stow the gab and up with the…’
Mrs Bradley suddenly moved faster than could possibly have been expected of an elderly lady. She seized, not her notebook, but a beautiful little bronze which she used as a paper-weight. It represented the shepherd boy
