‘Is this a genuine assignment?’
‘There are more ways than one of spelling Aryan.’
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Laura, enlightened. ‘Now I get it! So what I do is to look up – Yes, I see! Of course I see! When do you want me to go?’
‘When you like. Of course, even when we have the confirmation which you will acquire, we shall be very little further forward in proving guilt. What I would wish, though, is that we could acquire the power to prevent the murderer from striking again.’
‘You think he will?’
‘Well, except for (I think) the first one, these murders seem to me motiveless except for the most dreadful motive of all, the lust to kill.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Sigh No More, Ladies
‘I says to her “Polly, and how d’ye do?”
To me way-ay, blow the man down.
Says she, “None the better for seeing of you!”
Oh, gimme some time to blow the man down.’
(1)
‘We’re no further forward,’ said Phillips. He looked and sounded exhausted. ‘I thought, over the Spanish girl, the C.I.D. had jumped us, and got the man we ought to have got, but it’s all gone blue on us again. This third death has got us all haywire. There was a possible connection between the first two murders, in a way …’
‘What was the connection?’ asked Dame Beatrice.
‘Oh, only that the Schumann family formed a link. James was engaged to the German girl, and Otto Schumann got the Spanish girl into trouble and admits that they had a row. Oh, I agree it’s a slender thread,’ he added, catching Dame Beatrice’s eye, ‘but it made me think perhaps something was going to make sense somewhere. This pointless business of the third murder leaves us guessing. There isn’t a tie-up anywhere.’
‘Except, as a long shot, with the first death.’
‘How do you make that out, ma’am?’
‘The only suggestion I can make is that there is a tenuous link with the school.’
‘You mean that Miss Schumann and James were on the staff – he still is, of course – and this Italian maid was employed by the school secretary? You’re right to call it a long shot, I would say.’
‘I entirely agree,’ Dame Beatrice meekly admitted.
‘What we’re on to at present,’ Phillips went on, ‘is checking up on all the foreigners – which includes all the people with foreign names – over a radius of forty miles from Wandles Parva.’
‘That means that some of your foreigners live in the sea,’ said Laura.
‘I’m past making or taking jokes, Mrs Gavin.’
Laura apologised, and Dame Beatrice said,
‘I don’t envy you your task, Superintendent.’
‘It’s a routine matter, ma’am, and as dull as most of the sifting-out jobs we do, but it’s the only thing we can think of. So far, I reckon we’ve done about half the area we’ve marked out, but, of course, this joker may not be a local man at all.’
‘Then he’s done his homework pretty well,’ said Laura. ‘I mean, look at the facts. Karen Schumann’s body was found almost at the centre of your circle, and Maria Machrado’s had been put ten miles or more inside your boundaries. In both cases the murderer must have known that other vehicles, lorries in the one case and tanks in the other, were almost certain to confuse, if not actually obliterate, any tell-tale tracks his car may have left. This Italian woman wasn’t taken away by car, but left in the bungalow where she was killed, and that’s not so far away, either.’
‘I know, Mrs Gavin, and that ought to tell us more than it seems to. Granted it’s the same fellow all the time, it looks as though he had to move the first two bodies. Why was it safe for him to leave the third one?’
‘If we knew that, we should know who he is, I suppose,’ said Laura. ‘In other words, there was some obvious connection between him and the place or places where the first two murders were committed, but nothing to connect him with the Clancy bungalow.’
‘There you are, then! Then there’s another fact which ought to be a help to us, but isn’t.’
‘You mean that each of these deaths has been brought about while some sort of school holiday was in progress, don’t you?’
‘That’s it, Mrs Gavin, but there, again, although two of the murders seem to tie up, they are not the same two. Very few people outside the school would have been able to plan that Karen Schumann was to be killed on an odd day’s holiday – one, I mean, that the general public wouldn’t know anything about – and Maria Machrado was murdered at a time when most people would be back at work after their Christmas break. All right, that ought to narrow it. The snag is that anybody – just anybody at all – could have planned the murder of Lucia What-Name for Easter Saturday. Even if the doctors hadn’t given us the dope about time of death, we could have deduced it easily enough. She went to church on Good Friday – we know that for a fact. Then she must have cooked herself supper because she left a fishy frying-pan in the sink. She hadn’t finished putting back the furniture in the bedroom she’d been spring-cleaning when her murderer knocked at the door. We’re sure he didn’t come on Easter Sunday, (apart from the medical evidence, I mean), because she’d promised the priest she’d go to Mass again on that day and didn’t turn up, and also she’d left herself half a bottle of the wine which the Clancys (they said) had given her and, in addition, there was a choice little joint of uncooked chicken they’d left for her in the fridge. There was no sense whatever in that poor creature’s death. It just seems as though we’re looking for somebody who hates foreigners, and that’s why we’re checking over this forty-mile radius I mentioned.’
‘And warning people?’ asked Dame Beatrice.
‘Well, it’s not our policy to spread alarm,
