Murder in the Basement

by Anthony Berkeley

  The door opened, and Phyllis Harrison came in. She glanced from red face to red face in amazement, and then at her husband, who, apparently petrified, sat clutching the edge of his desk.

  “What on earth is going on?” asked Mrs. Harrison with interest. “A glee competition, or something?”

  “Oh, nothing,” muttered Mr. Rice.

  “My dear,” bleated Mr. Harrison, looking like a goat in distress, “I think perhaps you had better . . .”

  “Are you having a row?” enquired Mrs. Harrison, with still more interest, and, disregarding her husband’s feeble attempt to get rid of her, perched her white-clad form on the arm of a chair and regarded the combatants with approval. “Go on. Don’t mind me. Who’s winning?”

  Mr. Rice thought he saw a chance. He threw off his fiery hue and addressed his late tennis-pupil in the formal tones of the junior master towards his headmaster’s wife.

  “It’s really a matter that concerns you, Mrs. Harrison, if you’ll allow me to put it.”

  “Me?” smiled Phyllis. “Good gracious. Were you quarrelling with Amy about me?”

  “Certainly not. I meant that the point of our—discussion is really your concern, you being responsible for the boys’ health here.”

  “Am I?” asked Phyllis doubtfully, with a glance at her fuming step-daughter. It was a point on which she had never been at all sure.

  “Well, of course,” replied Mr. Rice, with a faint air of surprise. “Miss Harrison saw fit just now to issue an order on your behalf, which I personally thought was a mistaken one. That was what we were talking about. I should like to put the point to you.” He did so.

  “Not very difficult, is it?” said Mrs. Harrison lightly, when he had finished. “Has the boy got a cold or has he not? One sneeze doesn’t make a cold, you know.”

  “No, he hasn’t,” said Mr. Rice.

  “Yes, he has,” snapped Amy, who had gone into a cold fury and yet found herself helpless before these tactics.

  The confidential smile which her father’s wife directed towards Mr. Rice did nothing to allay her anger.

  “And what do you think about it, dear?” cooed Mrs. Harrison, who was enjoying herself and did not mind Amy knowing it. Mrs. Harrison seldom got a chance of enjoying herself at Amy’s expense. The six years between their ages did not allow her to exercise any step-maternal authority over her husband’s masterful daughter, and yet was enough to prevent the school-girlish repartees which so frequently offered themselves to her lips. Amy also had the annoying habit of making her step-mother usually feel six years younger than herself instead of six years older.

  Mr. Harrison, thus unfairly thrust into his proper position, naturally hedged. He was secretly almost as much in awe of his junior master as he was of his daughter.

  “Is it really very important that Purefoy should take part in the match, Rice? ”

  “Just as important as that Jenkinson should,” replied Mr. Rice firmly. “Without them, the game will be just a farce.”

  “I fail to see that that is as important as risking the boy’s health,” retorted Amy icily. “There’s a good deal too much attention being paid to games here at present. One would think that the school existed for nothing else. Mr. Parker is perfectly right. It’s nothing but professionalism.”

  “Perhaps you’d like him to take the games over again,” sneered Mr. Rice, “so that the school can go on losing all their matches?”

  “I’d sooner see the school lose its matches than its scholarships. It’s ridiculous to subordinate games to work. If Jenkinson did such a bad paper, of course he must be kept in to do it again. Mr. Parker was absolutely right. You must agree with me, father.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Harrison, and pulled at his beard.

  “It’s a difficult point,” said Phyllis with great solemnity, and shook her head. Unfortunately there was a gleam in her eye which neither of the combatants missed.

  Mr. Rice went for it boldly. “In any case, I suggest that Miss Harrison is in no position to decide in either case. Purefoy’s belongs entirely to Mrs. Harrison, and Jenkinson’s to you, headmaster. Will you please give us a decision on Purefoy, Mrs. Harrison? ”

  “Certainly, Mr. Rice. If as you say, he hasn’t got a cold, there’s no earthly reason why he shouldn’t play.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Rice, with dignity. “And about Jenkinson, headmaster?” Mr. Rice always made a point of addressing Mr. Harrison as “headmaster,” as in a real school.

  “Well,” said Mr. Harrison, and again had recourse to his beard.

  “If,” said Amy through white lips, “I am really as little use here as Mr. Rice suggests, there is no point in my staying till the end of term. You remember that Marjorie Beasley asked me to go and stay with her as soon as term was over, father. I shall wire her that I am coming tomorrow”

  “Amy!” said Mr. Harrison, aghast.

  “Amy!” said Mrs. Harrison, no less so.

  “Well?” retorted Amy truculently. “You can get the boys off, Phyllis, can’t you? I understand it’s your job.”

  “Mr. Rice,” said Phyllis, “I’m so sorry. Purefoy can’t possibly play this afternoon, with that cold of his.”

  “Nor Jenkinson,” Amy thrust in. “Father!”

  “Well, we must certainly pay quite as much attention to our work as to our games,” hesitated Mr. Harrison.

  Amy delivered the final blow. “Mr. Rice, it isn’t my place, as you would be the first to point out, to suggest that you overstepped the bounds not only of your duty but of common courtesy in countermanding the orders of a master senior to you and of myself. I shall therefore leave it entirely to my father to tell you that discipline must be maintained among the staff just as much as among the boys.

  In the meantime——”

  “Headmaster,” said Mr. Rice, in a strangled voice, “will you kindly accept my resignation? I shall leave at the end of this term.”

  “A full term’s notice is necessary, I think,” replied Miss Harrison coldly. “In the meantime, will you kindly send both Jenkinson and Purefoy back from the field at once.”

  In the final of the league match that afternoon the Yellows defeated the Greens by an innings and eighty-seven runs.

  Mr. Rice was very angry indeed.

  His anger was not lessened by the unusual sight of Mr. Parker and Amy hobnobbing in deck-chairs outside the pavilion. Judging from the animation of their talk and the frequent laughter which punctuated it, Amy and Mr. Parker had found a most amusing subject of discussion.

  Mr. Rice was not accustomed to being considered amusing.

  The battle was up.

  III

  There was a man once who lent his country cottage to some friends. When they came back they thanked him very nicely, and sent him their dirty linen to wash. Mr. Rice was feeling as if Phyllis Harrison had done much the same kind of thing to him.

  “But, dearest, you must see I couldn’t do anything else,” Phyllis explained, with becoming penitence, as she trotted back from the stricken cricket field beside a silently striding Mr. Rice. “I could never have got the boys to their right homes. Really, I couldn’t. They’d all have landed up anyhow, with the wrong socks and everything. You must see that.”

  “You let me down,” said Mr. Rice sternly.

  “Dearest!” pleaded Mrs. Harrison.

  “You made me look a fool with the boys.”

  “Darling!”

  There was a pause.

  “Please forgive me,” said Phyllis. “Please!”

  “I shouldn’t have expected it of you, Phyllis.”

  “No, darling. Please forgive me.”

  “Well, anyhow,” said Mr. Rice, with grim satisfaction, “I’m going.”

  “Oh, you didn’t mean it!” Phyllis wailed. “You can’t go. Gerald, you can’t. Whatever should I do here
without you?”

  “You’ve got your husband, haven’t you?” retorted Mr. Rice smugly.

  Phyllis made a moue.

  “Well, my dear girl, why did you marry him?”

  “Heaven alone knows,” said Phyllis frankly. “Won’t you take me away with you, Gerald?”

  “No, I will not.”

  Phyllis sighed. “I thought you wouldn’t. You don’t really love me, do you?”

  “Do you really love me?”

  “Gerald, of course I do. How can you ask such a thing?” Phyllis’s eyes danced towards the large, grim figure at her side. The figure caught them, and Phyllis dropped them modestly. “Would I have . . . if I didn’t love you?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Rice uncompromisingly.

  Phyllis laughed delightedly. “Gerald, I really do love you when you go so strong and silent and honest. There— you smiled. Not angry with me any more, are you? ”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Rice.

  “Say you’re not, or I’ll kiss you here and now, in front of all the boys. I swear I will. Are you angry with me still?”

  “No,” Mr. Rice said hastily, by no means sure that she was not capable of carrying out her threat.

  “That’s all right, then,” Phyllis said comfortably. “Now, how are we going to get one back on Amy?”

  “Really, I haven’t the least wish to get one back on Amy.”

  “Nonsense, darling. Of course you have. Just as much as I have. That’s what I love about this place. We’re all just as childish as the boys. More, if anything, because we ought to know better. I simply love getting one back on people. I know: I’ll go and have a talk with Leila Jevons. Amy tried to get her sacked this morning. She’ll be feeling just like we are.”

  “My dear girl,” said Mr. Rice with great dignity, “I assure you I’m not feeling anything.”

  “Darling!” said Mrs. Harrison fondly.

  IV

  So all day long the noise of battle rolled.

  CHAPTER VII

  I

  Leila Jevons sat in front of her dressing-table, plucking her eyebrows.

  Miss Jevons paid a good deal of attention to her eyebrows. Nature had made one or two slips in the designing of them, and Miss Jevons was kept rather busy putting Nature right in the matter. Left to themselves, for instance, Miss Jevons’s eyebrows resembled nothing so much as one thick bar extending squarely across the lower edge of her forehead, for it was their habit to meet regrettably across the bridge of her nose. When she was younger Miss Jevons had been accustomed to keep this meeting-place clear by means of a safety-razor, but this had not been altogether a success; the bridge of Miss Jevons’s rather puggish nose had been wont at times to bristle like an Arab zareba. The eyebrow-tweezers, though more painful, were infinitely more efficient.

  Her eyebrows thinned into two becoming lines, Miss Jevons pulled her blue cotton kimono absently apart, and leaned forward to examine the wart which had its habitation on the side of her nose. This wart—well, it was not a wart really, if warts have horny crowns, but more of a pronounced mole—was an abiding source of sorrow to Miss Jevons. It had the distressing custom of nourishing three stalwart black hairs, which seemed only to thrive upon constant eradication. Every night Miss Jevons, however tired she might be, spent three or four sorrowful minutes pulling this super-mole this way and that, squeezing it, lamenting over it, and downright tormenting it. Should she have it burnt out or should she not? That was the nightly problem. Would the result be better, or would it be horribly worse? It was a terrible question to have to decide. Miss Jevons had been debating it every night for the last eleven years, ever since she was fifteen, and had not reached a decision yet.

  She would have liked, very much she would have liked, to canvass Mr. Duff’s opinion on the point. But could one? Would it not be terribly forward? Miss Jevons had a horror of being forward. And might it not frighten him off altogether? On the other hand, might it not offer him the opening which he never seemed able to make for himself? But then again, did he want an opening at all? It was all most difficult.

  Miss Jevons rose from her dressing-table stool and, throwing off her kimono, looked at herself in the long mirror. When her mind was harassed and her spirit troubled, as was not infrequently the case, Miss Jevons would always soothe herself by the contemplation of her beautiful legs and wonder whether she would not go on the stage after all.

  This evening however Miss Jevons’s admiration of her limbs was almost perfunctory. For once there was so much to think about that even the mole had come off more lightly than usual. Truly it had been a remarkable day. Within a short fifteen minutes that morning she had been dismissed, taken back again, been kissed and had kissed. Mr. Harrison, of all people. . . . !

  Miss Jevons was not prim. She herself was often at some pains to point out, chiefly to Elsa Crimp, that whatever she might be she was not prim. A kiss, one was allowed to gather, meant very little to Miss Jevons. But Mr. Harrison . . .

  True, it had only been on the forehead. Not an exciting kiss by any means. But the point was that it had been a kiss at all from Mr. Harrison. And he had done it so easily, with such practised nonchalance. Could it be that Mr. Harrison was not so stuffy after all? Elsa Crimp had always said that Mr. Harrison was a dark horse; but of course Elsa said that about everyone—even about Mr. Duff. But could it possibly be that Mr. Harrison . . . ? Miss Jevons caught her breath, and forgot her legs and the stage altogether. Could Mr. Harrison be going to get some of his own back and have selected herself as a partner in the process?

  This was such an exciting conception that Miss Jevons stretched herself on the narrow bed to stare up at the ceiling and think it out.

  Had Mr. Harrison tumbled at last to what had been going on between Phyllis and Gerald Rice?

  That was the question. Elsa Crimp had thought he had, some time ago, and was only waiting his chance. This had been an exciting, volcanoish idea at first, but Mr. Harrison had now been waiting so long that the excitement had worn thin. It certainly had seemed incredible that Mr. Harrison could have noticed nothing of what had been so plain to the eyes of everyone else, but husbands are notoriously blind, and Miss Jevons herself had come to the conclusion, when nothing happened and nothing happened, that Mr. Harrison had not tumbled. But now . . .

  Suppose Mr. Harrison wanted to begin an intrigue with her. . . .

  Regretfully Miss Jevons rose, put on her kimono again, and sat down once more at her dressing-table, to cream her face. She knew perfectly well that the kiss which had been bestowed upon her was not that kind of kiss at all; her imagination had been running away with her, as usual.

  Nevertheless she exulted in the fact that it had happened at all. A woman who has been kissed by a man, and only kissed, knows that she has established a claim. Miss Jevons and her old mother were safe now from Mr. Harrison’s ruthless daughter.

  So now, about Mr. Duff. . . .

  About the battle that had taken place that afternoon between Amy and Mr. Rice, Miss Jevons thought very little. She had been used to preparatory schools for nearly five years now, and she could remember no term which had ended without some kind of battle, major or minor. Resignations invariably hurtled through the air during the last few days like hailstones, and yet the resigned ones always turned up again next term smiling as if nothing had happened. Miss Jevons was glad of course that someone had stood up to Amy at last, and she was wholeheartedly on the side of Mr. Rice. And so, she had no doubt, would Mr. Duff be.

  Miss Jevons wiped the thick layer of cream off her face, and began to pat the underneath of her chin with a springy shoe-tree.

  Yes, and thinking of Mr. Duff. . . .

  II

  In the small room next to Miss Jevons’s small room, Mary Waterhouse had been going through much the same kind of routine, except that she had no mole to bully and her eyebrows were naturally fine and archi
ng, wherefore Miss Waterhouse had the very good sense to leave them alone. And yet Miss Waterhouse was accustomed to spend just as much time in front of her mirror as did Miss Jevons. Perhaps she considered it her duty towards humanity to look her best, which can only be achieved of course in the case of a young woman by spending a great deal of time every night before the mirror. There was, too, in Miss Waterhouse’s case her long hair to brush, which more than counterbalanced Miss Jevons’s mole and eyebrows.

  For Miss Waterhouse wore her fine, dark-brown hair long. Those who knew her well said that she did so because she was that sort of girl. Those who knew her better said that it was because she wished to be thought that kind of girl; but it is a fact that those who know us better do not know us nearly so well, and even if they did would never speak the truth about us. Arguing from facts therefore, all one can determine is that Miss Waterhouse had very beautiful hair which reached below her waist, and that she wore it parted in the middle, dragged uncompromisingly straight back with no hint of wave or curl, and coiled in what are technically known as “snails “over each ear, than which no method of dressing beautiful, fine, long, dark-brown hair could be more unbecoming. But as those who knew Miss Mary Waterhouse well said that she did this thing because she did not care whether she made herself becoming or not, whereas those who knew her better (and on whose knowledge and word it is impossible to rely) said that she did it because she wanted to give just that impression while remaining becoming in her very unbecoming-ness—well, there seems to be very little argument in it either way.

  Certainly one who did not know her at all would not have said that Miss Waterhouse laid herself out to be becoming. Unlike Miss Jevons, she used neither scent nor powder, and lipstick knew her not. She had a somewhat knobbly forehead, which by her style of hairdressing she ruthlessly exposed. Her ears were white and small, yet she hid them. It was obvious that Miss Waterhouse cared not how she looked; and yet she always looked attractive. Her wide mouth smiled slowly, but with charm. Her large, grey-blue eyes at least looked intelligent. She was an excellent listener. What she thought she had the admirable faculty of keeping to herself. Of all the feminine side of the staff she was at once the most unobtrusive, and the most interesting. She was reputed to be an orphan and entirely dependent on her own capabilities; and no one quite knew what those capabilities were.