“No, Pocock took his lot and mine for prep. that evening, but then, when they’d had prayers and their bedtime snack, I put my boys to bed. Prep. only lasts an hour, anyway. I couldn’t have gone and murdered Ferrars while it was on.”
“Thank you, Mr. Spalding. You have been most frank and helpful,” said Dame Beatrice. “I will be equally frank. I shall check this story of yours, so far as I can, of course. You would expect that. If, as I think likely, it is supported by your colleagues, I shall remit it to your father and stepmother and obtain from them an account of how Mr. Ferrars’ body came to be found unclothed in a locked room at the foot of the lighthouse tower. I think there can be no doubt that your father put it there, and I think he did so because he believed, and your stepmother believed, that you had caused Mr. Ferrars’ death. When they are persuaded that you did not, I think they will reconsider their present attitude.”
“You won’t be able to check that I was in my room from about two until half-past four though, will you?” said Colin miserably. “And that’s the time that counts.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Wheat from the Chaff
“…we saw ourselves at once in a difficult and dangerous position.”
“What do you think of all that?” Dame Beatrice asked, as they went to Mr. Eastleigh’s room to obtain permission to speak to Mr. Heathers.
“It took him a darned long time to write that letter,” said Laura. “All the rest of it was all right, but I find it difficult to believe he was stuck up there in his bedroom from just after two until half-past four. What’s your idea about that?”
“I may be able to tell you when we have heard what Mr. Heathers, and possibly others, have to say.”
“Heathers’ evidence won’t be any help. He was pretty busy that afternoon from two until half-past four, I expect, and that’s just the time we want covered. He’d have been taking the Sevens and Eights for games, for one thing.”
“Where are the games played?”
“Mr. Eastleigh rents a meadow about half a mile north of the school, in the opposite direction to the lighthouse, but the Sevens and Eights don’t use it. They kick around in the entrance courtyard to the hotel. If you’ve noticed, there’s quite a decent-sized patch of grass there. You don’t need to play on the gravel, although small boys, with their usual cussedness, seem to prefer it. That’s when they’re on their own, of course. I was always mopping up gravel rashes during my short time as matron.”
“Then, surely, if Mr. Heathers and these tiny boys were playing outside the front door of the hotel, Mr. Colin must have been seen if he left the school during the time he claimed to have been trying to compose his letter to Mrs. Spalding?”
“It isn’t as easy as that. The Man would never think of allowing boys to play games immediately on top of a stodgy lunch. They have to put in two lesson periods of half an hour each before they’re able to go to the field. This operates on every afternoon except Wednesday, when clubs and hobbies take up the whole of the time between lunch and high tea at six.”
“Then would not Mr. Colin have been teaching from two o’clock until three? He did not mention that he was, although it would have helped him to establish his alibi.”
“Let’s look at the big time-table. I can’t answer that one off-hand. I know I was teaching. I had two history lessons, one with the Eights and one with the Tens. As the Tens come to me straight from French they have to be calmed down a bit before I can start.”
“I thought that to tease the French master was now a thing of the past.”
“Oh, the Tens don’t rag! You wouldn’t dare rag Mr. Pocock, anyway. No, they come and tell me all about the lesson, and try out their French accents on me, and rehearse all their latest vocabulary, and so forth. Endearing of them, but rather trying when I’m wishing them to concentrate on the local history. It’s all right, once I’ve quenched the joie de vivre, of course.”
Mr. Eastleigh, who was busy, received them with his usual charm, and waved Laura towards the big time-table.
“There will be people marking and making out reports in the common-room,” he said, “so you will be better off in the housekeeper’s room, where you can be perfectly private. My wife won’t mind a bit. She’ll probably park herself in here.”
“The big time-table has established one thing,” said Laura to Dame Beatrice, as they went along the passage to the room which had once been Laura’s sanctum. “Colin wasn’t teaching that afternoon. You see what it means, though, don’t you? Everybody else was on, including Heathers, so Colin could have slipped away at the beginning of afternoon school and, so long as he got back directly games were over and the front of the hotel was clear of Heathers and his Sevens and Eights, there’s no reason why anybody should be the wiser. The games played on the field are packed up at a quarter-past four, you see, but the older boys never hurry back, so it’s always twenty to five before they come straggling in to get their showers before tea. Mind you, they may have been earlier that day, because of a heavy sea-mist which came rolling in.”
“You say that everyone except Mr. Colin was teaching that afternoon, but it seems as though Mr. Ferrars was also free.”
“I looked him up. He’s down to take biology first period in the afternoon, so I expect he leaves them writing up their notes and takes the time off. Second period he’s free, anyway.”
“But was Mr. Eastleigh satisfied with this arrangement that Mr. Ferrars should help himself, as it were, to a free period?”
“Oh, yes, I expect so. Any kind of science is a hell of a subject here, because, of course, we haven’t got a lab., so Ferrars was pretty considerably handicapped and naturally got more than a bit cheesed off. He was always beefing about it in the Staffroom and hinting that he should resign, so, if his boys were reasonably quiet and were kept reasonably busy, Mr. Eastleigh would wink at Ferrars taking a breather.”
“He seems a remarkably easy-going headmaster.”
“It pays off, you know. He’s able to keep a first-class Staff. Skelton, who’s in charge of games, has also had sculpture in the Academy, and the music man, Robson, who also takes some of the maths., is a Mus. Doc. and is guest conductor at the big music festivals. Mariana—Mr. Grange—turned down a producer’s job on B.B.C.2 in favour of teaching, and Heathers, for all that he seems such a nit, has already published a book on the geology of Norway and seems all set—so my spies inform me—for an F.R.S. later on.”
“I see.”
“And here,” Laura added, as they reached the housekeeper’s room, “is Mrs. Eastleigh. I say, I do hope we shan’t need to turn you out of your sanctum for very long,” she added, to the headmaster’s wife.
“Now, Mr. Heathers,” said Dame Beatrice, when Mrs. Eastleigh had left them, and Heathers had answered a summons to the housekeeper’s room, “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Consider yourself on oath, dear child, if you please.”
“Oh, yes—yes, certainly,” agreed Heathers, nervously taking off his spectacles, looking surprisedly at them, and putting them on again. “Just so. Of course. About what?” he asked, a note of apology in his voice. Dame Beatrice took out her notebook.
“Can you cast your mind back to the day on which Mr. Ferrars was first reported missing?” she asked.
“Yes, I can,” said Heathers, eagerly. “Yes, indeed, I remember it very well. I’m sorry to say that I was rather angry with poor Ferrars at the time. The arrangement was, you see, that if I took the games he would take prep. and then put the Sevens and Eights to bed, so, when he didn’t show up, I had to do everything he ought to have done. I felt he’d let me down. It was a great shock to me when I realised that he wasn’t to blame. Then, of course, there was the telephone call from some wretched girl to say he’d promised to meet her and had stood her up. That made me angry, too, because it meant that he’d never intended to come back in time to take prep. and see the chaps into bed.”
“Were you present when he left the school that
afternoon?”
“Not when he actually left. I expect I’d gone to class before then. I did hear him having a bit of a fuss with Spalding. It was about some socks, I think, and a tie. Nothing, really. Just the usual give and take. Not serious. That would have been at about five minutes to two. I didn’t hear the end of it because I knew my Sevens would be creating hell—making a good deal of noise—because they were looking forward to a double drama lesson on that afternoon, and the prospect of drama always seems to go to their heads.”
“I understand that Mr. Grange took the school for play-acting,” said Dame Beatrice.
“Oh, yes, so he does—drama proper, as one might put it. I call what I do ‘graphic geography,’ actually, but the boys call it drama, to make it more exciting. We all act as mountains and rivers and railways and so forth, you know. The mountains make pyramids of three boys to each mountain, and the rivers meander round them, and the railways play at trains and try to make tunnels through the mountains—rather good fun for them, actually. There is always great competition to be a railway.”
Dame Beatrice said that she could well believe it.
“Do you know where Mr. Spalding went when he and Mr. Ferrars parted?” she asked.
“No. I didn’t see Spalding again until we sat at tea. It’s his afternoon off, you know. I do know he didn’t leave the school while I was taking games on the front lawn and gravel.”
“Is there anyone on the Staff who might have seen him between two o’clock and half-past four?”
“I could not undertake to say. Rather unlikely, I think.”
“So Heathers is a dead loss,” said Laura, when Heathers had returned to his form-room.
“I should be sorry to have missed the description of a graphic geography lesson,” said Dame Beatrice.
“I know. I wonder half his kids haven’t broken their necks before now. Any good sending for anybody else?”
“These windows look out on to the drive. I wonder whether Mrs. Eastleigh was in this room for the major part of that afternoon. If so, perhaps she can help us.”
Mrs. Eastleigh returned to her domain.
“I met William Heathers in the passage,” she said, “so I knew you had finished with him. Was he of any help in your enquiries?”
“No, but I wonder whether you may be,” said Dame Beatrice. “Do you mind answering a few questions?”
“Of course not. What do you want to know?”
“To what extent, if at all, you can substantiate Mr. Colin Spalding’s account of how he spent the afternoon of the day on which Mr. Ferrars disappeared.”
“Oh? Is it important that I should?”
“I know that you will not repeat this, except, perhaps, to your husband, but Colin’s parents may have hidden Mr. Ferrars’ body. They could have had only one of two reasons for doing such a lawless thing. Either they themselves have guilty knowledge of how Mr. Ferrars died, or they believe that Mr. Colin killed him.”
“Good gracious me!”
“You have heard no rumours to this effect?”
“Certainly I have not. What a dreadful thought that Colin Spalding—But, no! He is quite incapable of such a thing. I’d as soon believe it of myself!”
“He claims to have remained in his bedroom from just after two o’clock until half-past four. Is there any way in which I can prove that statement to be true?”
“Two and a half hours? It sounds a long stretch, but perhaps he was putting in the time on his Russian. He is teaching Russian, you know. The boys are mad on it. My husband wants him to stay with us when we go back to Kent next term. I don’t know whether he will. I think he might have done, but for all this upset about Ferrars.”
“You cannot help us, then?”
“I’m sorry. I’d like to have helped him, but I don’t see how I can. I was in and out of here, and I made some telephone calls from the box in the entrance hall, and went to the kitchen, I remember, and on a tour of the dormitories to inspect pillowcases and pyjamas and things. I do that regularly on a Friday. The laundry is collected on Mondays, so that gives the sewing-woman time to do any repairs. Boys are very hard on pillowcases and pyjamas.”
“Yes. Well, thank you, Mrs. Eastleigh. You cannot think of anybody else who would know whether Mr. Colin stayed in that afternoon? He does not claim to have been studying Russian, but to have been composing a difficult letter of which, I gather, he made several drafts. In the end, it seems, he gave up the attempt, as he found he could not express himself as he wished.”
“Several drafts? That would mean a fair amount of waste paper. Just a moment! I’ll send for the maid who looks after that set of rooms.”
The maid was able to establish one thing. Colin had been doing a considerable amount of writing, either on the afternoon in question or that same evening.
“Are you sure it was the day we are referring to?” Dame Beatrice asked. The maid, a dependable forty-year-old who had come with the school from Kent, was certain.
“I couldn’t be mistaken, madam, not with all the fuss about the little boy that never came back to his dormitory that night. We heard about it next day, and it was the following morning as I done out Mr. Spalding’s room with all that mess of blacked and burnt-out papers on the hearth, the fire-grate being done away with in favour of the electric fire, as you know, madam. I wonder he hadn’t burnt the place down! Took me the best part of twenty minutes to make a job of it, with all them dead matches and all.”
“It doesn’t help very much,” said Dame Beatrice, when the maid had been dismissed. “It does not prove that it was during the afternoon that Mr. Colin did this writing and burnt the results. It could equally well have been after supper that same evening. It does not prove, either, how much time the writing and the destruction of the writing might have taken. My next step will be to get in touch with Mr. Howard Spalding, supposing that he is well enough to be questioned. No doubt the police have been to the hospital to find that out already.”
Howard, in the private ward to which he had been transferred, was despairing but dignified.
“It is good of you to put yourself to trouble on our behalf,” he said. “Kempson, too, my solicitor, has been more than kind. He tells me that if a case is brought against us, Fiona will be dropped from it. I can claim that everything which happened was my doing, and that she was entirely guided by me.”
“Suppose,” said Dame Beatrice, “you tell me exactly what did happen? I have no official standing, so far as this matter is concerned, and I shall, of course, respect your confidence. I make no promises, but if I could hear the whole story from you, without reservations, something might suggest itself. What do you say about that?”
“I’ve told Kempson most of it.”
“Then why not tell me the rest? If it is of any comfort to you, I am convinced that your son is blameless of any attack on the unfortunate Mr. Ferrars.”
“Thank you for saying so. I was utterly wrong to suspect the boy in the first place. I am now convinced that he had nothing whatever to do with Ronald’s death.”
“Oh, you called him Ronald, did you?”
“Well, a school-friend of my son…”
“He wasn’t really that, though, was he? I do beg of you, Mr. Spalding, to be quite frank with me.”
“Very well. I suppose I have nothing to lose by telling the truth. Where do you think I should begin?”
“When did you first suspect that your son was in love with your wife?”
This bald query caused the sick man to make a gesture as though he was warding off an enemy. Then he dropped his arm and, settling himself more comfortably in the narrow, high, hospital bed, he said:
“Very soon after we got to the lighthouse, I’m afraid. Colin had been ill, you know, and I suppose my wife had coddled him a bit, and this may have caused him to think she meant a great deal more than was seemly. He is an impressionable, sensitive boy, and, of course, my wife is fifteen years younger than myself, and, although perhaps I am prejudiced, she h
as always seemed to me a very attractive woman.
“Matters reached their first climax on the afternoon when Mrs. Gavin visited us. I was extremely sorry afterwards that I had made a scene in her presence, but I was very angry with Colin. He had taken advantage of our being up on the lighthouse gallery to remain with my wife instead of going for the walk he had proposed to take, and had behaved, I considered, in a thoroughly deceitful fashion.”
“Oh, yes, I have heard about all this.”
“From Mrs. Gavin, no doubt. I am afraid that, on that occasion, neither Colin nor I could have appeared in at all a favourable light.”
“You know, Mr. Spalding,” said Laura, “I had an impression—I don’t altogether know why—that Colin wasn’t feeling friendly (let’s call it) towards Mrs. Spalding that afternoon. I thought they’d had the father and mother of a row, but it was after that that Ferrars began coming here, I think, so the row couldn’t have been about him.” She knew, from Colin, that it had not been. It was Fiona who had made the fuss.
“Whether or not,” said Howard. “I’ve agreed to be frank with you, Dame Beatrice, so here is the truth. To my certain knowledge, Ronald had called here twice before Fiona and Colin went off to Bournemouth that day. Both times, as it happened, I was downstairs and helped to entertain him by taking him up to the lantern gallery and discoursing to him on the subject of birds, which, as you probably know, is my chief interest.”
Laura exchanged a brief glance with Dame Beatrice, a glance which, in a tenth of a second, spoke volumes.
“Yes, indeed,” said Dame Beatrice. “I have been told about your all-embracing hobby, and now we come to the day on which Mr. Ferrars died. Will you tell me exactly what you did on that day?” She spoke gently. Howard was, and looked, a sick man. He lay back on his pillows and closed his eyes. “Take your time,” she went on, “and remember that, until we obtain the whole truth, of which your narrative can give us, perhaps, the major part, we shall not be able to clear this matter up and remove suspicion from yourself and your son.”
Skeleton Island (Mrs. Bradley) Page 18
