Death at the Opera mb-5

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Is there any reason why you should refuse to write a testimonial for Miss Camden if she wanted to apply for another post?” she asked. Mr. Cliffordson sat down at his desk, moved his pen-tray and blotting-pad, and fidgeted with a jotter and a small metal ruler, and then inquired:

  “Did she tell you I wouldn’t?”

  “Yes, dear child.”

  “Oh? I would, of course, if she asked for one. I couldn’t very well refuse. But I know what she means.” He put down the ruler and drummed on the desk with his fingers.

  “There was a funny business about some money,” he said, obviously unwilling to embark on the explanation. “Mind, I accuse nobody—except myself, for leaving my cheque-book about. I had made out a cheque for nine pounds to Self, and left the leaf in the book—signed, of course—while I went down to take a class. The cheque disappeared, and was later cashed for ninety pounds, and well, it rather appeared that nobody could have had access to it except Miss Camden, who was helping me that day with my correspondence in place of my secretary, who was down with influenza. I did not accuse her then, nor do I accuse her now, and, of course, the thing went no further than the four walls of this room. I should never have mentioned the subject again had not your question prompted me to do so. I do know that the poor girl is very extravagant. I heard from one of the men that she had told the staff she even had to wire home for the money for a return journey from Monte Carlo this last summer. But I don’t believe she is dishonest. Please forget all this. The subject is very distasteful to me. I shall never be sufficiently sorry that my own carelessness tempted someone into dishonesty. But I certainly could not refuse to give Miss Camden a testimonial.”

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And now I want to leave the school for a few days. I am going to visit Miss Ferris’s aunt at Bognor Regis. There is a missing diary which ought to be found and read. I am hoping that the aunt collected it up with the other personal belongings of Miss Ferris when she came here to attend the inquest.”

  “And you think the diary may throw some light on the identity of the murderer?”

  “I doubt it,” replied Mrs. Bradley. “But in any case I think I know the identity of the murderer. No. I want the diary for purposes—nefarious ones”—she screeched joyously—“of my own!”

  “Extraordinary woman,” thought the Headmaster. He was not at all certain whether he was pleased or sorry that he had called her in to investigate the murder of Calma Ferris. As though she guessed his thoughts, Mrs. Bradley turned round when she reached the door.

  “Who sups with the devil must have a long spoon,” she said. “Cheer up, child. Do you know, I have a shrewd suspicion that if anyone is hanged for the murder of Calma Ferris, it will be that elusive electrician of yours—or possibly your Mr. Pritchard,” she added, chuckling.

  “Pritchard!” said Mr. Cliffordson, startled. Mrs. Bradley nodded.

  “Pritchard. He pretended to me just now that he didn’t know a fused wire from a worn-out lamp. What do you think of that?”

  The Headmaster did not have the chance of telling her what he thought of it, for by the time he was ready she had gone.

  chapter ix: evidence

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  It was surprising that Mrs. Bradley noticed the small paragraph in the morning paper. She was less a reader than a skimmer of the daily news. She would glance at the headlines, then read the column below, if she were interested in the topic. Then she would glance at the leading article, and, on the same principle, read it or not, as the spirit moved her. The small paragraph, which was tucked away almost at the bottom of one of the inside pages of the newspaper, would not have attracted her attention but for the sight of her own name, which happened to occur towards the end of it.

  Not imagining that she herself was being referred to, she read the paragraph nevertheless, and discovered in it a fact of peculiar interest. This was nothing less than a notice of the sudden death of Mrs. Frederick Hampstead at a private asylum. The cause of death was drowning, and it was stated that the unfortunate woman had fallen by accident into a small ornamental lake in the grounds of the institution.

  At one time, the column asserted, the deceased had been under the care of Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, the eminent psycho-analyst and specialist in nervous and mental disorders.

  “Curious,” said Mrs. Bradley, referring to the sudden decease of Mr. Hampstead’s unwanted wife, and made a note in her small book while she was waiting for the train which was to take her to the home of Calma Ferris’s aunt.

  It was a long and tiresome journey from Hillmaston to Bognor Regis, and Mrs. Bradley employed her time during the actual time the train was in motion, and also during the long periods of waiting for a connection, by thinking out the facts bearing on the death of Calma Ferris, to see whether any new angle could be obtained from which to view the case.

  She had made up her mind that it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain clear proof of the murderer’s identity, although, in her opinion, the psychological proof was already overwhelming. But, partly for amusement and partly to test her theories by thinking them out from the beginning, she took each person who had had both opportunity and motive for the murder, then those who had had motive, but seemingly no opportunity, then those who had had opportunity but no apparent motive, and she reserved to herself the right to think over any unexpected developments which might have arisen during the time she had spent at the school in working on the case.

  First, there was the boy Hurstwood. Temperamentally, Mrs. Bradley decided, he was capable of murder. He had had sufficient opportunity and a reasonably strong motive —Mrs. Bradley decided that to a schoolboy of seventeen the consequences of his having been discovered passionately kissing a member of the staff might appear far more disastrous and overwhelming than they would to an adult, especially if that adult were a man of the world, as Mr. Cliffordson appeared to be. The boy had known that Miss Ferris had injured her eye. He had known that she had gone into the water-lobby to bathe it. He had even lent her his handkerchief, and the handkerchief had certainly reappeared in what had to be considered suspicious circumstances. Miss Cliffordson had had possession of the handkerchief. If Hurstwood were not to be regarded with suspicion that handkerchief ought to have been found on or near the body.

  Other questions had to be interpolated here, Mrs. Bradley decided. The first one was: Were Miss Cliffordson and Hurstwood in collusion? Miss Ferris’s unfortunate discovery of the love affair affected them equally up to a certain point. The second question was: Had Miss Cliffordson found the handkerchief and recognized it, and then kept it in order to shield Hurstwood? If so, why had she weakened sufficiently to show it to Mrs. Bradley, and confess it was Hurstwood’s?

  This question was doubly difficult to answer in that the handkerchief was unidentifiable since initial and marking cotton had both been picked out. The third point was this: Did Miss Cliffordson believe that Hurstwood had committed the murder? Did she accept the finding of the handkerchief (if it was found, and not handed to her for safety by Hurstwood himself) as proof of his guilt? And did she fear for her own safety? She had reason to know that Hurstwood could be uncontrolled and unmanageable, and that physically he was much stronger than she was. It was possible, thought Mrs. Bradley, that fear had caused her to produce the handkerchief.

  Against all this were several points which told in the boy’s favour. He had admitted that he knew of Miss Ferris’s injured face and that she was going to bathe it. Would an obviously intelligent boy have made such a damaging admission if he had had anything to fear? He was nervous, imaginative and sensitive. If he had committed a horrible crime against an absolutely inoffensive person, would he have been able to brazen it out? Mrs. Bradley thought it very doubtful, unless he felt that by killing Miss Ferris he had saved Miss Cliffordson from the consequences of his own tempestuous behaviour on the night of the rehearsal. A boy of Hurstwood’s temperament might easily imagine that he owed it to Miss Cliffordson to
get her out of the trouble into which his own madness and lack of self-control had placed her.

  A different type of evidence was offered by the failing of the electric light in the water-lobby. There seemed no reasonable doubt that the light had been deliberately disconnected. If Hurstwood were responsible for tampering with the switch, it was for one of two reasons: either to cover up the murder he himself had committed, or the murder he believed one of his friends had committed. Putting it another way, said Mrs. Bradley to herself, if Hurstwood had any reason whatsoever for believing that Miss Cliffordson had killed Miss Ferris, he might have performed the two rash acts of giving his own handkerchief up for her to produce as evidence of his guilt instead of her own, and of disconnecting the electric light so as to put off the evil hour of the discovery of the body as long as possible. Taking into consideration his temperament, his reactions and his state of mind, the evidence was as much in his favour as against him, Mrs. Bradley decided.

  She reconsidered his fainting fit in the Headmaster’s room. It was the direct result of learning that Mr. Cliffordson knew all about his love for Miss Cliffordson, and that the Headmaster, in a semi-facetious manner, sympathized with instead of condemning him. In such circumstances, the fainting, followed by the boy’s hysterical tears, had been natural enough, and need have had no connection at all with the murder.

  She dismissed that train of thought, and returned to the question of the electric light. Could there be any connection between two lights that failed on the same evening? It was a coincidence, certainly, but a possible one. Suppose, for instance, that the caretaker was wrong about the switch in the water-lobby? Suppose nobody, either in jest or earnest, had tampered with it. Suppose, also, that Hurstwood had been telling the truth when he had told the Headmaster that after his first exit he had gone to the water-lobby to find Miss Ferris and ask for the return of his handkerchief—boys usually went provided with one only, Mrs. Bradley suspected, so that it was all quite plausible so far. Suppose the boy had discovered the place in darkness, discovered furthermore that he could not switch the light on, went back to the men’s dressing-room and talked with Mr. Smith before going on the stage again.

  There were a lot of gaps in Hurstwood’s story, she was compelled to admit. On the other hand, it might easily be the truth. She wondered whether it might be necessary later to reinvestigate it. Not even Hurstwood’s youth was on his side in a case like this. So many unstable boys in their teens had murdered women. There were numerous newspaper accounts of such crimes, besides the psychologically classic instances. She shook her head, and began to consider the case of Gretta Cliffordson.

  Vindictively or not, Miss Cliffordson had certainly tried to incriminate Hurstwood, and that, on the face of it, looked bad from one who had at least as strong a motive as the boy for wishing to shut Miss Ferris’s mouth. Some of Mrs. Bradley’s patients had been schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, and she knew that one of the most dangerous effects of the most unnatural life in the world was the importance which trivialities were apt to assume in the minds of those who spent their lives among undeveloped intelligences and small events. It might easily be that Miss Cliffordson, for all her seeming pertness and independence, dreaded her uncle’s anger and contempt above all things, and thought that by allowing matters between herself and Hurstwood to get to the point at which Miss Ferris had discovered them was to court disaster indeed if word ever came to Mr. Cliffordson’s ears of what had occurred. On the other hand, there was Miss Cliffordson’s entirely voluntary confession to Mrs. Bradley that Hurstwood was “being rather difficult.”

  The point at issue here, Mrs. Bradley decided, was this: Did Miss Cliffordson believe that Hurstwood was the murderer? If she did, it was a heavy indictment of the boy, for Miss Cliffordson might reasonably be expected to know a great deal about him and about the impulses which might have prompted him to such a terrible deed.

  Mrs. Bradley, loath to believe evil of the boy, to whom she had taken a liking, tapped her notebook with the end of her silver pencil, and looked unhappy. On considering the rest of Miss Cliffordson’s evidence, however, her face cleared, and her black eyes lit up with fresh interest. Miss Cliffordson’s realistic description of the murder returned to her memory as she re-read her notes.

  “It was such an easy way to kill anybody,” Miss Cliffordson had said—she could hear the carefully modulated, over-refined tones all over again—“especially anybody who was sitting down. You offer to help—you lend a handkerchief —you stuff the waste-pipe up with clay…” (Ah, but there, thought Mrs. Bradley, is the rub.) At what point in the proceedings, precisely, do you stuff the waste-pipe up with clay? Have you, so to speak, a lump of clay in your left hand whilst you proffer a handkerchief with your right, or vice versa? Or have you prepared a bowl beforehand so that the water won’t run away, and do you then guide the predestined victim to that particular bowl when she wants to bathe the cut on her face?

  Mrs. Bradley shelved the point for the moment and went on reading.

  “… and press the tap,” Miss Cliffordson had said—school taps are never of the type that have to be turned on and off, for obvious reasons, Mrs. Bradley reflected—“and talk—any kind of nervous, silly talk, so that no suspicion is excited…”

  Yes, but it was just that flow of talk, so essential for the quietening of the victim’s mind, so impossible to the male adolescent under such circumstances, that Mrs. Bradley found it impossible to associate with Hurstwood. Obviously, if the element of surprise which was so necessary in this particular kind of crime was to be maintained, conversation of an interesting, or, at any rate, a non-interruptable kind, had to be provided by the murderer. No boy, surely, could have watched that basin filling and filling—school taps are usually of small bore and do their work slowly and splashily—and riveted his victim’s attention upon something so interesting that at the crucial moment he could have thrust her head under water without her having experienced the slightest premonition of danger?

  On the other hand, though, what if Miss Ferris had herself provided the conversation? By all accounts she was the kind of woman whose conscience might have troubled her sorely over the Hurstwood-Cliffordson—or even the Boyle-Hampstead—affair, and she might have regarded the advent of Hurstwood as a God-given opportunity for easing her conscience by speaking her mind. That this argument would apply equally if Alceste Boyle had committed the crime Mrs. Bradley pigeon-holed in her mind (and at the back of her notebook) for future reference.

  “Then,” concluded the portion of Miss Cliffordson’s evidence in which Mrs. Bradley was most interested, “as the basin fills, you begin to press the woman’s head down.”

  “But you don’t, of course,” Mrs. Bradley decided. “You don’t dare to risk touching the woman’s head until the basin is full. You daren’t risk a scuffle and a struggle and a half-drowned victim who will proceed immediately to the nearest police station.‘”

  She shook her head. Miss Cliffordson, she decided, had visualized the murder, but had visualized it imperfectly. It was almost certain that she was not the criminal.

  As the similarity, in one sense, of the motives which might have governed the conduct of Alceste Boyle and Frederick Hampstead struck Mrs. Bradley, she considered their case next. Frederick Hampstead she immediately dismissed from her mind. On religious, moral and temperamental grounds she considered him an unlikely person to commit any murder, let alone a murder whose motive, in his case, would have been sordid in the extreme. Besides, it seemed impossible that he could have had any opportunity for the crime. It had most certainly occurred during the First Act of the opera, and during the whole of that time he had been in position as conductor of the orchestra. Guarded inquiries among the players, who were all schoolboys and schoolgirls, had revealed the fact that not for a single instant after the first note of the overture had Frederick Hampstead left his place until the interval. And it was inconceivable, Mrs. Bradley decided, that he should have found Calma Ferris in the water
-lobby during the interval, murdered her, disconnected the electric switch, gone away, and left Moira Malley immediately to discover the body. Besides, in that case, Calma Ferris would have been alive to take her cue in the First Act.

  Mrs. Bradley felt that nothing was to be gained by thinking that Frederick Hampstead could have had any connection with the affair, but the recurring idea of the switch brought her again to the question of Miss Cliffordson’s guilt. But if Hurstwood had not thought Miss Cliffordson was guilty, would he not still have tampered with the switch? The desire to hide dreadful deeds from the light is characteristic of the young.

  She sighed, and then turned over a couple of pages in order to consider the case of Alceste Boyle. Mrs. Bradley was not one of those psychologists who divide humanity into two groups—those capable of committing murder and those incapable of it. Her view was that, given time, place, opportunity and circumstances, it was impossible to say that any human being was incapable of such an act. Nevertheless, on temperament, she was forced to admit that Alceste Boyle was not the person she would have picked out as the murderer of an inoffensive person like Calma Ferris.

  The only reason which could be found to explain why Alceste Boyle should murder anybody would be that great danger threatened someone whom she loved. Could this reason be found to operate in the particular case Mrs. Bradley was studying? Frederick Hampstead, it appeared, was the person Alceste loved. The only danger which could have threatened him was the danger of being dismissed from his post at the school. Surely a level-headed, sane, well-balanced, admirably sensible woman like Alceste Boyle would not have committed a horrid crime to prevent the dismissal of Hampstead?

  Besides, thought Mrs. Bradley, it was most unlikely that Calma Ferris would have betrayed the lovers to Mr. Cliffordson, and it was almost impossible to believe that Mr. Cliffordson would have taken a very grave view of the matter if she had. Even supposing he had gone so far as to dismiss them, surely the dismissal of one or both from the staff of the school would have been private, not public; friendly, regretful, apologetic on the one side; ruefully but comprehendingly accepted on the other. The Senior English Mistress, familiar with the classic situations in Greek and Shakespearian tragedy, would never have been sufficiently misguided to confuse the greater with the less to the extent of preferring Calma Ferris murdered to Frederick Hampstead dismissed. It was unthinkable.