Spotted Hemlock

‘Really? For what reason?’

‘If I wished to be melodramatic, sensational and realistic, I should say that she came over to college that night to murder her sister, but — ”

Miss McKay remained calm. She nodded.

‘But that is not the right answer. Please tell me all that you know,’ she said.

‘It is not a question of knowledge—yet. It is a question of applied logic, I think. Are there any rooms in the students’ quarters here, which contain two beds?’

‘None.’

‘Good. May I speak to the men in charge of the boiler-room before I speak to the students?’

The men in charge of the boiler-room proved to be two in number. They wore dark-brown overalls and were brothers. Their ages might have been forty-five and fifty. What they had to report, in answer to Dame Beatrice’s questions, was interesting, to the point and, to her, confidently expected. In other words, so far as they knew, nothing except for the fuel that they themselves had shovelled on, had been put to burn in the boiler furnaces since the summer holiday.

‘That had to be cleared up,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Well, let us hope that the rats in the inner cellar won’t have eaten every scrap of the overcoat by the time the police get here.’

As Miss McKay was not completely in her confidence, she made no reply to this but agreed that Dame Beatrice should address the in-college students immediately before supper that evening.

She made her appeal to them in the full confidence that if they had anything to tell her she would hear it. Her experience of young people informed her that, reserved and slightly suspicious as they were in the face of authoritative pronouncements, they were ready and willing to co-operate for the general good.

‘It is essential,’ she concluded, ‘that the murderer be found if another life is to be spared. I cannot promise indemnity to the student or students who are prepared to help me, but I can promise that the case or cases will be considered sympathetically. Anyone to whom my words may apply should report to me as soon as possible after the evening study period. I shall be in the secretary’s office and I shall be alone there.’

‘They’ll talk their heads off, you know, during supper and even during Study,’ protested Miss McKay, when she and Dame Beatrice had left the hall. Dame Beatrice nodded.

‘Exactly what I want,’ she declared. ‘These difficult decisions are not always best left to the individual conscience.’

She parted from the Principal and went over to Miss Considine’s house to interview the pulchritudinous Miss Good.

Miss Good was in high feather. Miss Considine’s house had finished supper by the time Dame Beatrice arrived, and Miss Good had received by post that morning an intimation from Mr Cleeves that his father was prepared to ‘come across with a decent little farm’ so that the marriage could be arranged and would take place immediately their college careers were over.

‘I want to know rather more about your ghostly horseman, Miss Good,’ said Dame Beatrice, introduced into the hostel common-room at an hour when the rest of Miss Considine’s students were busy, or not, at their books. ‘Please do not embroider your answers. If you cannot remember, pray say so in plain terms. This is important.’

‘I’m not likely to forget that awful night,’ said Miss Good, seated upon an upholstered stool opposite her interlocutor, who was occupying an armchair. ‘What with leaving my ring at the hotel and then being abandoned at the gates and having to trail back in shoes which hurt me, and then meeting the ghost—well, I’ve never felt quite the same since. What did you want me to tell you?’

‘A little more about the ghostly horseman, as I said. What shape was he?’

‘Tall and broad and, somehow, bulgy. Like the bear, you know.’

Dame Beatrice did know. She added that she was strongly tempted to ask a leading question.

‘You can,’ said Miss Good. ‘You might not think it, but I’m not easily influenced.’

Dame Beatrice hesitated no longer.

‘I know you were taken by surprise when you saw the apparition,’ she said, ‘but could it have been possible that this rather shapeless horseman was carrying something?’

‘Gracious!’ exclaimed Miss Good. ‘Now you are putting ideas into my head! No, honestly, I couldn’t say. You see, I was so petrified.’ She hesitated, and then gave her lustrous hair a childish toss. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t say. It’s no good. It is a leading question and I could so easily agree. You mean a body, don’t you? I’d better leave it unsaid. I just don’t know.’

Dame Beatrice commended her for her good sense and left her. Miss Good had not retarded the enquiry, and Dame Beatrice was grateful to her. Her next step was to telephone the police to tell them that the college cellars might bear some investigation and then she went into the secretary’s office, left vacant at her request, to await any developments which might follow her address to the in-college students.

She had been seated at the secretary’s desk for ten minutes or so when there came a gentle tap at the door, and a dark, pale-faced, rather good-looking girl came in. Dame Beatrice invited her to close the door and sit down.

‘I suppose I know what you want,’ said the girl. ‘You want to know that I swapped rooms with Miss Palliser the night before she actually disappeared.’

‘That is what I want to know. Why did she ask you to make the exchange?’

‘She said she’d got some photographs to develop and she wanted to use the college cellar as a dark- room.’

‘Was that an unusual reason to give?’

‘No, not at all. Heaps of people did it. You see, we’ve got a photography club in college. The staff encourage it. The animals and plants, you know, and students doing the jobs—it makes a nice exhibition when we have Open