Faintley Speaking

‘Very definitely. We still correspond. I met her the year before last in Paris, if you recollect, where she was in charge of some gawping lassies from the top class of her school. She was always an earnest old cuckoo.’

‘Am I right in believing that she was in the Advanced Biology group?’

‘You certainly are. What young Alice doesn’t know about cutting sections and sticking them under the microscope is not knowledge. Why, if I may be permitted to ask, does her name crop up in the present nostalgic and moving conversation?’

‘If it had not, the conversation would be neither nostalgic nor moving. Do not revert to the style of your mis- spent youth. Give me Miss Boorman’s address.’

‘Littledene, Bosworth Road, Graftonbury-under-the-Edge. Why?… and, equally, why a bloke with her talents wants to bury herself alive in a place like that is more than I can fathom. But, there! I never did understand the dear old scout, and that’s a fact.’

‘Mutual lack of understanding is not necessarily detrimental to mutual abiding friendship. Thank you. I shall send Miss Boorman a telegram to find out how much she knows about British ferns.’

‘Oh!’ said Laura, who had been squinting down her nose in disapproval of all Mrs Bradley’s remarks except the last one. ‘Oh, I see! Now why didn’t I think of that?’

‘Because you had not thought of laying a false trail for our friends. I will go ashore again and send my telegram, and by the time I get back it will be all right, I should think, for you to go to the harbour-master again. Of course, if the police have been non-co-operative, please do not attempt to watch the house from any other vantage-point. I do not desire to waste my time attending an inquest. In the harbour-master’s house you will be perfectly safe, but if these people are what I suspect them to be —’

‘What do you suspect,them to be? I’ve been rummaging in my head for three weeks now, and I can’t make a selection from my ideas. I’ve thought of every kind of illegality from various smuggled articles to Communist infiltration, gun-running, forged banknotes and piracy. They all seem equally possible. It must be something pretty steep if Trench was prepared to murder Faintley to keep their secrets.’

‘Or to keep secret the fact that he had failed to keep his appointment with her. Remember, we still do not know why he failed.’

‘Everything about that telephone business is dashed peculiar, you know.’

‘Indeed, yes. What prompted her to arrange that he should go to Hagford and collect that particular parcel we shall never know except by a stroke of good fortune, but it was probably some perfectly simple reason such as that she had already booked her holiday accommodation at Cromlech and did not see why she should postpone her vacation in order to get a parcel which could equally well be picked up and taken to Tomson’s shop by somebody else.’

‘Yes, I see. And she couldn’t ask anybody else because they would have wondered what the devil she was up to, having dealings with a scruff like Tomson. So it had to be Trench, who was partly in the swim, or else nobody.’

‘Exactly. Then what I think happened was this: Miss Faintley was very well paid for what she did, and it troubled her conscience (it is amazing to the amoral minds of our generation… or it would be if they ever used their brains for anything but their own personal advantage… to find how extremely, almost morbidly, conscientious are teachers and Civil Servants) that she had relegated a task for which she had agreed to take responsibility to someone who might or might not have carried out her instructions.’

‘So she sent Trench a telegram to ask whether all was well, and he sent back to say he’d left the phone-box before her message came through. So, feeling thoroughly windy, she sent for him and arranged to meet him in Torbury, taking young Mark with her as camouflage and bent on losing him immediately. Yes, I can see all that. What I can’t see is why she didn’t instruct Trench by word of mouth. Why all this risky and uncertain business of the public call-box method?’

‘Just that she found no opportunity of speaking to him privately at school. She could have sent him a note by one of the children to ask him whether he would agree to be in the call-box at a particular time as she had a message for him, and he could write back to agree. She would not commit herself further on paper, no doubt, as secrecy had been urged upon her from the beginning. You probably know better than I do how very difficult it can be… particularly on a mixed staff in a school… to obtain an opportunity for a really private conversation.’

‘By Jove, yes, you’re right there. So the sweet Alice is to collect and transmit ferns, is she? No doubt she has sources from which she can obtain plants and things for her school work. Even I was told where to send to for my nature stuff, and told to be very economical!’

‘At any rate, we can see. The time-lag between the sending of my telegram and the receipt of her parcels may make a difficulty, but we must hope for the best. Thanks to the talking parrot, we know that we are on the right track, and now that the rusty-looking cruiser is in harbour with us, I feel that we may soon expect developments. I only hope we have selected the right house!’

‘There’s one more point: why did she need Mark for camouflage? She could have gone trotting off by herself, arriving with guide book and plan of city showing position of cathedral, etc., couldn’t she?’

‘My theory there is that she recognized one of the gang in Cromlech. It was surely not quite coincidental that she chose for her holiday the resort where the gang had one of their headquarters… the house on the cliff… but she may have had a shock at recognizing in the village someone whom she had not expected to see there. She probably thought that he had been following and spying on her because of her failure to collect the parcel, and she summoned Trench, in a fit of panic, to meet her and report that the parcel had indeed been delivered to Tomson… an assurance which Trench was quite unable to give. It was because he was unable to give it that he murdered her, I think… another example of panic. She took Mark to avoid being followed by the person she had recognized—’

‘This is where we want some dates, you know.’

‘We have them. I copied them from the visitors’ book at the hotel. Miss Faintley had been in Cromlech six days before she was murdered, counting the day she came down.’

‘So the man she recognized —!’

‘Exactly. The man she recognized could have been the left-luggage clerk at Hagford… the missing Price. Had it been anyone else I don’t think she would have worried. No doubt she had been summoned to Cromlech for some instructions which could not be confided in writing or over the telephone, and which the fern-code could not sufficiently clearly express. But when she saw Price, her conscience made a coward of her, and Trench’s fears made a murderer out of him.’