‘Poor Oates and Wagstaffe,’ she said. ‘Two more law-abiding men have never lived. To accuse them of stealing is more than monstrous; it is utterly ridiculous! And then to charge them with murdering the person they are supposed to have robbed – well, words fail me!’
‘On what is the charge based, then?’ Dame Beatrice enquired.
‘The police searched Mrs Lawrence’s rooms and then the College. The actual murder was committed, it seems, in the gatehouse cellar. It appears that there was some kind of fuss going on between Mrs Lawrence and the porters over a missing parcel which was reported to have been left at the lodge but which did not materialise. I knew about it, because the porters had complained of Mrs Lawrence’s insinuations that one of them had stolen it. They spoke to the Dean first and she referred them to me. I heard their complaint and then I spoke to Mrs Lawrence. In point of fact, the College pays my own secretary, the Bursar’s and the Dean’s, and although we have a voice in the appointments we are not permitted to terminate them without the consent of the governing body. That, needless to say, would in practice never be refused, but that is by the way.’
‘So, the alleged motive having been suggested, we come to a matter of means and opportunity, together with the dates when these would have been available. The means, according to the newspaper report, were economical and hideous,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘Yes, the poor woman’s throat was cut.’
‘And the opportunity for somebody to cut it?’
‘Oh,’ said the High Mistress grimly, ‘in a place like the cellar under the gatehouse there would be opportunity enough. It is hardly ever used except by Mrs Lawrence herself.’
‘Must be an awful lot of blood about in the cellar,’ said Laura. ‘I suppose there’s no question of suicide? People do cut their own throats. We’ve got books on forensic medicine at the Stone House. Some of the photographs in them are pretty horrible and most of them are of suicides.’
‘I really don’t care to discuss it,’ said Dr Durham-Basing. ‘What I do care about are those two unfortunate men. I am as convinced of their innocence as I am of my own. I refer, of course, to the disappearance of Mrs Lawrence’s parcel. The graver charge surely cannot really be sustained, but if we can disprove theft, a charge of murder falls to the ground automatically, for it disposes of the motive.’
‘The police must have some grounds for suspecting them, even vaguely, of murder,’ Dame Beatrice suggested.
‘Unsafe grounds, in my opinion. They claim that, apart from myself and the senior members of the College, nobody except the porters has a key to the gate. The gatehouse cellar can be reached only from inside our walls, you see.’
‘Have they considered the possibility of access to the College buildings by way of the river?’ asked Dame Beatrice. ‘Laura thought that a light skiff, for example, could be pulled ashore and transported round the barrier which shuts off your private stretch of the river from the rest of the stream. From what Miss Runmede has told us, it seems that the prowler she saw must have come from Bessie’s Quad, but that need not rule out the possibility that he came across from the opposite direction.’
‘I will see what I can find out about that. The barrier you speak of is supposed to be sufficient to ensure our privacy. The last thing I could countenance would be that we should be open to invasion from the town or from any of the men’s Colleges.’
‘Who identified the body?’ asked Dame Beatrice.
‘The porters were called upon first of all. The formal identification was carried out by Mrs Lawrence’s brother, a Mr Bill Caret.’
‘Not by Lawrence himself?’
‘Before the inquest was held, Lawrence was already being questioned by the police. By the time he had proved his alibi and been released, the body had been buried – formally, this time, of course.’
‘His alibi, I take it, was provided by the Warden of Wayneflete College.’
‘No. Mr Lawrence was no longer staying with his uncle. I do not know who was responsible for his alibi.’
‘Coralie St Malo, I expect,’ said Laura to Dame Beatrice, when they had left the High Mistress and were on their way to the Chief Constable’s house where, as the result of a telephone call from the High Mistress’s Lodging requesting an interview with him, they were to dine. ‘By the way, my question about suicide didn’t get answered.’
‘It hardly needed to be put.’
‘You mean that, even if she did kill herself, she could hardly have put herself in a sack and buried herself. Oh, well – damn silly question, etcetera,’ admitted Laura.
The Chief Constable himself raised the question of suicide as soon as dinner was over.
‘Of course, even if the body had not been put in a sack and even if it had not been buried, we should have ruled out suicide,’ he said. ‘According to the medical evidence, suicides who intend to cut their own throats – and it’s not an uncommon method of terminating a life which has become intolerable to its owner – they invariably make some tentative incisions before they nerve themselves to do the actual deed. Anything up to a dozen or more of these preliminary dividings of the skin are common, I’m told. There was nothing of the sort in this case. The doctors think she was gripped by the hair from behind, her head pulled back and one great slash made right across the thyro- hyoid ligament. They suggest that the slash was carried out by a right-handed person.’
‘What made the police, in the beginning, suspect Lawrence?’
‘Husbands are always the prime suspects in cases of murder when neither rape nor robbery is involved. More particularly in this case, we thought he might have been able at some time to take an impression of his wife’s key to the College entrance and also that, because of her, he could have known of the excavation in which she was buried.’
‘And who provided him with an alibi?’
‘His landlady in his own university town of Norcaster. Unless her evidence is cooked up and false, it doesn’t seem that Lawrence can be our man.’
‘You know when the murder was committed, then?’
