Was It Murder?

by James Hilton

  “Don’t you think it’s rather excusable?” Mrs. Ellington queried, with an inflection in her voice that Revell thought was slightly acid.

  “No, I do not.”

  Revell interposed tactfully. “I certainly agree,” he said, addressing Ellington, “that there’s been far too much sightseeing in the swimming-bath. In my opinion the place ought to have been locked up immediately after the accident, and no one ought to have gone near it without special permission. What possibility is there of reconstructing how the accident happened when everybody’s been allowed to treat the place like a side-show on a fair-ground?”

  Ellington faced him truculently. “RECONSTRUCTING, eh? What d’you mean? Isn’t Murchiston’s opinion good enough? And the Head’s too? Don’t see what need there’ll be of any reconstructing, as you call it. Still, you’re right about the sightseeing—there HAS been too much of it. And there’s been too much of other things, too. Chattering and gossiping and idle tittle-tattle—the whole School’s full of it. I quite expect to have to discuss nothing else from morning till night to-morrow.”

  “I can quite understand that you must feel heartily sick of it all.”

  Ellington grunted. “I can’t even cycle into the village without a dozen people stopping me to ask questions. Stupid scandal-mongering, that’s all it is.”

  There was nothing much to be got out of him save repeated grumbles on similar lines, so Revell took an early leave, pitying Mrs. Ellington for having to face the rest of the wrathful outpouring alone. “You must come and see us again before you go,” she said, walking with him to the top of the outside steps. And there was (or perhaps he merely imagined it) something in the tone of her voice that added an unspoken—“PLEASE come again.”

  Dr. Roseveare was most charming at dinner. Though his face still bore traces of the strain he was undergoing, he yet managed, with the true courtesy of a host, to entertain his guest without apparent signs of preoccupation. Revell would have been willing enough to discuss the swimming-bath affair, but he found the other’s opinions concerning Oriental china almost equally revealing, at any rate as a proof of his extraordinary self-control. Yet this was the man, who, nine months before, had been suffering from nerves!

  Not till the close of the meal did the conversation approach the narrowed confines of Oakington, and then Revell, seizing the opportunity, asked if he might visit the swimming-bath on his own.

  Roseveare seemed more interested in the request than surprised by it. “Why, yes, of course, if you wish. But I should have thought you would have been there already.”

  “Oh, I have. But I’d rather like to have a few moments there by myself —and at night.”

  “Very well—I will lend you my key. I am afraid, though, that you will find very little of interest.”

  “Still, I’d like a look around. And there’s just one other thing, too —I’m sorry to have to bother you about it, but I’m relying on your offer to help me, you know—could I be permitted to see the—er —the body?”

  Roseveare smiled rather sadly. “You think it necessary for your— investigations, eh? Well, I won’t refuse you, or perhaps you WOULD think I was trying to hamper your efforts. But of course you quite understand that nothing must be disturbed in any way. Subject to that condition, I can certainly comply. In fact, I’ll take you now—it is almost dark and we shall attract less attention than in the daytime.”

  At about half-past ten, therefore, on the eve of Oakington Jubilee Speech Day, Revell and Dr. Roseveare made their rather gruesome pilgrimage to the School gymnasium that had been temporarily turned into a mortuary; the doctor unlocked the door and, in the dim illumination of a rather distant electric light, Revell pulled back the linen sheet and looked upon what was left of Wilbraham Marshall, sometime head prefect of Oakington School. A glance was sufficient—or rather, perhaps, many additional glances would have been no more helpful. The doctor did not look at all.

  “And now,” said Revell, as they left the gymnasium and relocked it, “I needn’t trouble you any further if you will just lend me the swimming-bath key.”

  Roseveare detached it from his bundle and pressed it into Revell’s hand with an almost fatherly gesture. “Yes, I think I’ll leave you to it—I have a number of urgent matters to attend to to-night. You’ll help yourself to my whisky if you’re back after I’ve gone to bed, won’t you?… That’s right. Good night.”

  Revell unlocked the door of the swimming-bath and walked up the entire length of the building as far as the diving-board and platforms. Then he walked back again. That was all. He had seen what he wanted to see, and was rather proud, indeed, of having expected to see it. And also, too, he had heard what he wanted to hear.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 4. — A SPEECH DAY AND AN INQUEST

  It was surely the most remarkable Speech Day Oakington could ever have experienced. Had the tragedy happened a little earlier, it might have been possible to postpone the Jubilee celebrations, but with less than forty-eight hours’ notice, the major proceedings had to remain as planned. Details, of course, were judiciously altered—and yet perhaps not too judiciously, for a little of even manufactured gaiety would have helped to mitigate the sombre melancholy of the affair.

  Revell, as a slightly quizzical spectator, watched the curious scene from hour to hour. He saw the reception at the main entrance in the morning —saw Dr. Roseveare, with a mechanical smile and a few mechanical words of welcome, shaking hands mechanically with each one of several hundred guests; he attended the chapel service and listened to an appallingly dull sermon by an Old Oakingtonian whom years and ambitious mediocrity had combined to make a colonial bishop; he sat in one of the rearmost rows in the Hall during the afternoon and heard the lugubrious chanting of the School Song. The guest of honour was Sir Giles Mandrake, a millionaire shipowner; his wife presented the prizes. Roseveare sat conveniently at Lady Mandrake’s elbow, ready to give her tactful assistance in any little difficulty that might arise. His massive head (“leonine” was the obvious word), with its crown of silver hair, seemed in a strange way to dominate everything and everybody. A truly remarkable man, as Revell had realised, though never so completely as now. For after the tedious, halting, nerve-racking speech by Sir Giles, Roseveare’s cool, exquisitely-chosen words were like healing ointment on a raw wound. He spoke gently of the School’s past, wisely of its present, and hopefully of its future. In a single guarded sentence he referred to “events during the past year which we must all deplore and which I, personally, regret more than I can ever say”—but that was all. He made a few half- wistful, half-jesting comments on the School’s sporting achievements. He complimented his staff and thanked them for their loyalty. He mentioned one or two scholastic successes. He made, in short, the perfect speech for the somewhat difficult occasion.

  In place of the swimming display there was a rapidly improvised concert of appalling badness. Then came a garden-party tea on the quadrangle, during which Revell chatted to several Old Oakingtonians whom he knew and who had brought their families with them. They were all, of course, agog with excitement about the Marshall affair, and the known fact that the body lay in the locked gymnasium awaiting the inquest on the morrow gave them a particular thrill. “Too bad—to have happened just now,” was a frequent comment, but Revell imagined that in many cases a more truthful one would have been—“Too good—to be able to get a genuine Edgar Wallace thrill out of a Speech Day.” For already the place was alive with the wildest and most sinister rumours.

  But by seven at night almost the last of the visitors had departed. Many of the boys whose homes were within moderate distance had gone back with their parents for the traditional week-end holiday; the school servants were busily clearing away the tea-party litter from the quadrangle; and the whole school, after the turmoil, seemed lonely and forlorn.

  Revell, from sympathy with the Head after the strain of such a day, would not have mentioned the Marshall affair on his own account. He could hardly avoid do
ing so, however, when Roseveare calmly asked him what train he intended catching the next day. The question was put so artlessly and with such apparent casualness that Revell was for the moment taken aback. Roseveare seemed to notice this, for he added: “Please don’t think I particularly want you to go—I only imagined you might have other affairs to attend to, now that Speech Day is over. There is the inquest to-morrow morning, which you might care to attend, but no doubt it will be over by lunch-time.”

  After a thoughtful pause Revell said: “If you don’t mind, I should rather like to stay on a few days longer.”

  “You would? Very well, I shall be delighted, of course. May I take it that your investigations are bearing fruit?”

  The question was neither sarcastic nor contemptuous, but perhaps it was just a shade too bland.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Revell answered. “Only I just feel I’d like to poke about a bit more, that’s all.”

  Roseveare nodded with complete geniality. “You’re a conscientious fellow, Revell, and deserve a far better fate than to be probing a mystery that isn’t, I’m afraid, much of a mystery at all. I know the place is full of rumours, but most of them contradict each other, and in any case, the theories of a generation reared on crook dramas and detective novels are hardly worth taking seriously. I do not, of course, expect that even the inquest to-morrow will stop these unpleasant fiction-mongers. They will just go on till they are tired, and we shall have to put up with it.”

  Revell was silent, and the other continued: “I hope you are not forgetting the boy’s wrist-watch which was found on the top diving-platform. That, more perhaps than anything else, seems convincing evidence of what happened.”

  “Possibly, though I don’t see why he shouldn’t have left it down below, with his dressing-gown and slippers.”

  “He may have forgotten it until the last minute. It was radium-pointed, so that in the dark its illumination may have attracted his attention just as he was on the point of diving. Would you like to see the watch, by the way? It will be one of the exhibits shown to the jury to-morrow.”

  “Oh no, don’t bother—I don’t think it would help me much.”

  As he exclaimed rather peevishly to Lambourne an hour or so later: “What the hell was the use of looking at the damned watch after it had been mauled about by Wilson and Roseveare himself and God knows who else? Besides, I’m not a finger-print expert, even if the murderer’s paw-marks were plastered all over it!”

  “Yet you have, I suppose, a theory of your own by this time?” Lambourne queried.

  Revell nodded rather gloomily. “Yes, I have, and it would be about as easy to prove to that jury to-morrow as the Einstein theory. Not that I care much about the inquest.”

  “Don’t you? Well, neither do I. Which is why I intend to suppress a little evidence which, even if I took pains to blurt it out, would only be considered highly irrelevant.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, it would. If I told them that about midnight on the night before last Ellington was seen walking about the grounds, they’d probably ask me what the devil it had to do with Marshall.”

  “Good heavens! Who saw him?”

  “I did.”

  “YOU?”

  “Myself alone. You see, I happen to be a very bad sleeper, and I often go for a stroll late at night. And that night was the hottest of the year —I knew I should find it hard to get a wink, so I thought I’d take a turn round the buildings.”

  “And you saw Ellington?”

  “More than that, I met him and spoke to him. He told me he was doing exactly the same thing—taking a stroll because of the heat. I don’t care for his company much, but it seemed churlish not to chat with him, so I did—for perhaps a quarter of an hour or so. In fact, we walked once round the Ring and then went back to our respective habitations. At least, he saw me go into School House, and I presume he let himself into his own immediately afterwards.”

  “But, my dear fellow, this seems frightfully important. Why on earth didn’t you tell me about it before?”

  “Because I didn’t want you to know too much against Ellington all at once. It might have biased you in deciding whether the accident was faked or not. Now that you’re pretty certain of that, I don’t mind you knowing the lot.”

  “How do you know I’m pretty certain the accident was faked?”

  “Because you had the excellent idea of visiting the swimming-bath in the dark. I was taking another stroll and I saw you—funny what a lot of things I see on my strolls. I saw you go in and I saw you come out again in about half a minute, which is roughly the time it would take any reasonably intelligent person to spot what really happened. Or at any rate, what really couldn’t have happened.”

  “Yes, quite,” said Revell eagerly. “I could see the water rippling distinctly. And I noticed, too, that footsteps sound differently when the bath is full.”

  “You might add that the whole place smells differently—there’s nothing quite so unmistakable as the smell of the water in a swimming-bath… Oh yes, the accident theory is hopelessly impossible. Unless, of course, you begin by bringing evidence that three of the boy’s senses were deficient.”

  A silence followed, which Revell broke by the question: “What did you and Ellington talk about when you met that night?”

  “Shop, of course. Have you ever heard Ellington talk anything else?”

  “It would be amusing if he gave evidence that he met YOU at that suspicious hour. And rather clever of him, too.”

  Lambourne laughed. “You bet he won’t. As a matter of fact, he visited me here an hour ago to discuss that very point. And we both agreed that we would not waste the Coroner’s valuable time by mentioning such a trivial matter.”

  “Good Lord! You’ve got a nerve!”

  “Well, it seemed a fairly reasonable arrangement, I must admit. He promised not to say he’d seen me if I promised not to say I’d seen him. After all, in the eyes of the law, I suppose we should both be equally suspect if there were suspicion at all. Anyhow, the inquest’s bound to be the biggest farce you ever saw, so what does it matter?”

  And Revell, though he completely agreed with the other’s sentiments, could not forbear a slight shudder at the tone of cynical indifference in which they had been expressed.

  The inquest was held in the School gymnasium the following morning amidst the gathering heat of a typical midsummer day. It began at ten o’clock and was over within the hour. Revell had never seen anything quite so slickly performed. Dr. Roseveare, calm and weightily sorrowful, brooded over the proceedings like some kindly deity whom it would have been ungenerous and even impious to frustrate. Both Coroner and jury seemed anxious to spare the feelings of such a well-known and valued citizen of Oakington. Indeed, it might almost have appeared that general sympathy was as much with the doctor as with the deceased.

  Medical evidence was given by Murchiston in a decorous and hardly audible undertone. The injuries (technically specified) were, he declared emphatically, such as might have arisen through a fall from a considerable height on to a hard surface. Wilson, dressed in his Sunday clothes, described his finding of the body and of his later discovery of the wrist-watch on the top diving-platform. The jury, having previously seen the body, were then conducted into the swimming-bath and shown the place where the body had been found. They also climbed (some of them) and examined the diving-platform. On the return of the entire party to the gymnasium, Roseveare was called upon to give evidence; he explained the boy’s habits more or less as he had previously explained them to Revell. No further evidence was called, but one of the jurors insisted on asking at what hour the wrist-watch had stopped. As it had stopped through want of winding and at eleven minutes past three on the afternoon following the boy’s death, it was not easy to see the point of the matter, but it served at any rate to prevent the asking of any further and perhaps less foolish questions.

  The jury retired and brought in an almost immediate verdict of “Acci
dental Death”. Then the Coroner expressed sympathy all round—with the relatives of the boy, with the Head, with the School, and even with the jury for being called upon to investigate such a distressing affair. “It is only too clear how it happened,” he remarked. “Boys will be boys, and we all of us know the temptation of a swim in weather like this.”

  “And then,” as Revell remarked to Lambourne afterwards, “the fatuous idiot wiped the sweat off his thick head. Man, it was awful to have to sit there and listen to it all. Roseveare had ‘em absolutely in the hollow of his hand. Of course, I know he’s the biggest pot in Oakington, and half the jury were tradesmen who depended on the School, but still—even THAT doesn’t altogether explain it. Englishmen aren’t really corrupt enough to connive at murder. The trouble is, they never SUSPECTED. They’ve heard all the queer rumours, but when it came to the point, Roseveare simply hypnotised the lot of ‘em!

  “ONLY TOO CLEAR HOW IT HAPPENED! God—I nearly laughed when the Coroner said that! Only too clear why a boy should dive into an empty bath in the middle of the night… And I suppose the first inquest was pretty much the same kind of farce?”

  “Quite,” replied Lambourne calmly. “Yet I wonder you’re even surprised at it—it’s all so much the sort of thing one has to expect. Most people in this world are incapable of any really critical observation—they won’t and can’t see anything unless they have a previous hint that it’s going to be there. If Scotland Yard men had examined the gas-fittings after the first accident, they might have discovered something rather interesting about them, but as it was, you see, the examiners were merely gas company officials bent on exonerating their own firm. What they may have wondered, among themselves, I’ve often speculated on—though it’s quite possible that they didn’t wonder anything at all. That Tunstall fellow, though, seemed to think somebody had been playing the fool with things—only the dear old Head shut him up—reputation of the School at stake and all that sort of thing, don’t you know. Mind you, we mustn’t blame anyone TOO much, for there IS a distinct initial improbability about a falling gas-fitting being in reality a diabolically-contrived murder.”