A Question of Proof

by Nicholas Blake

  The superintendent was feeling slightly ruffled when he sat down in the morning-room and prepared to interview the staff. He was fortified, however, by the presence of Sergeant Pearson with a large notebook in the background, and a certain solid piece of metal in his own pocket. Tiverton was the victim. He had been in the common room the whole time between lunch and two-thirty, except for occasional visits to the day room, to see that the boys, who were sitting there till they should be told to change, were doing nothing outrageous.

  ‘Which of the staff were with you?’

  ‘Let me see. Mr. Sims was there most of the time. He went out, at about two o’clock – to change, I think: I didn’t notice him after that till just before the first race began.’

  ‘You did not go up to change, yourself, sir?’

  ‘No, I had put on my festive garments before lunch.’

  ‘What about the other masters?’

  ‘Well, really, I’m not my brother’s keeper, you know. They were in and out, most of them. Gadsby, I believe, went in to the village shortly after lunch. Wrench turned up soon after two o’clock and went out again. Evans came in to change the boys: that must have been just before two-fifteen. Who else is there? Oh, yes: Griffin had a cigarette here before he went out to look over the arrangements for the sports. I cannot answer for the headmaster,’ he added mischievously.

  ‘Did all the masters attend the sports, Mr. Tiverton?’

  ‘Yes, they were all there. I didn’t see Wrench till the end of the first race. Talking to parents or something, I believe.’

  ‘And you have no suggestions, sir, as to the perpetrator of the crime?’

  ‘No. No – except that I can’t conceive what motive any of us could have that makes you inquire so searchingly into our whereabouts.’

  ‘A matter of form. Thank you, sir; that will be all for the present,’ said the superintendent indifferently. ‘Could you ask Mr. Gadsby to step this way?’

  Gadsby came in and embarrassed the superintendent by a hearty handshake. ‘Well, putting me on the mat, eh? Fire away then.’

  ‘If you could just tell me where you were between lunch and the sports, Mr. Gadsby. We have to inquire into these things.’

  ‘That’s all right, old man. Fullah’s got to do his duty. ‘S’matter of fact, I popped into the village for a quick one. Have to get primed for these social riots, y’know. Not a society man.’

  ‘Quite so, sir. And how quick was the one?’

  Gadsby went into a paroxysm of laughter. ‘Ha! ha! ha! That’s a good one. Damned smart. Must tell it to the chaps. Ha! ha! ‘How quick was the one?’ Well, to tell you the truth, it was quick all right, but more than one. Two or three. Good beer at the Cock and Feathers, and I settled it down with a couple of whiskies. Old Tompkins, keeps the pub, y’know, superintendent; he’ll go into the witness box for me.’

  ‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary, sir,’ replied the superintendent playfully, a remark which also went down very well with the hilarious Gadsby. ‘You were there, how long, sir?’ he prompted.

  ‘Left about two-fifteen. No distance in a car.’

  ‘Oh, I see, you were in a car. I see. Then there is only one further question. Can you think of any reason for this boy’s being done to death? Ever heard anyone threaten to – it might have started as a practical joke on the part of some boys, for instance.’

  Gadsby leaned forward with what Tiverton called ‘his schoolgirl’s confidence’ expression. ‘I don’t mind telling you – though it seems a bit hard on the poor little fellow, talking like this just now – most of the school hated him like poison. I wouldn’t put it past a good many of them to screw his neck a touch too violently. Funny thing, that: only at breakfast today –’ he broke off suddenly.

  ‘At breakfast, sir, you were saying?’ the superintendent prompted.

  ‘Oh, we happened to be talking about murders, that’s all,’ Gadsby replied lamely. Then, as though feeling that something more was expected of him, ‘Curious what coincidences you run across every now and then, isn’t it, superintendent? I remember in ’17 –’

  But Armstrong was in no mood for reminiscences of that sort. He intercepted the garrulous Gadsby before he could get into his stride, and skilfully elicited from him the substance of that breakfast conversation which had already been recorded. The sergeant scribbled furiously.

  It was Sims’ turn next. He came hesitatingly into the room, an uncertain smile looking coyly out through his reedy moustache.

  ‘Good evening. Er – I believe you wished to see me.’

  ‘That’s right, sir. I have to ask you a few questions. Will you just tell me your movements after lunch today?’

  ‘Oh, dear, I’m afraid I’ve a hopeless memory for that sort of thing. Now, what did I do? I went into the common room for a bit. Tiverton was there, I remember. Then I changed; upstairs. Then I came down again. I’m afraid this is all rather inadequate.’

  ‘Have you any idea what time you came down, sir?’

  ‘Well, it struck two as I was going up the stairs. And one takes about a quarter of an hour to change. So I suppose –’

  ‘I see. You came down about quarter past two. Then you went into the common room, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes.’ Sims shot a quick glance at the superintendent. ‘No, I’m wrong. Whoever told you? I went outside and had a cigarette.’

  ‘Whereabouts did you go?’

  ‘Oh, out at the back. Along by the hayfield, you know. I walked up and down the path. Griffin must have seen me, you know. He was out on Big Field.’ Armstrong did not fail to note an apprehensive timbre in the tone of Sims’ last statements, but he gave no sign of it.

  ‘Quite. And I take it you saw nothing out of the way?’

  ‘No, of course not. I should have told you. There was no one out on that side of the house but Griffin. Evans came in just as I was at the door.’ ‘Thank you, sir. Then, if you have no suggestions to make, will you be so good as to send along Mr. Evans?’

  Unless he is lying – no, unless he and Mr. Griffin are in collaboration, and if Mrs. Vale’s evidence is correct, that would seem to fix the murder between one-thirty and two-fifteen, unless, of course, it was committed somewhere else. Far too many ‘ifs’ and ‘unlesses,’ thought Superintendent Armstrong, fingering a certain envelope in his pocket.

  ‘Ah, good evening; Mr. Evans, isn’t it? Have you any theories about this crime?’

  Michael was conscious of antagonism; a very faintly contemptuous accent on the word ‘you’ (had some one else been bothering the superintendent with theories?), and a general air of dangerous quiescence in the superintendent’s big body slumped back heavily in his chair.

  ‘Me? Oh, Lord, no.’

  ‘You have never heard anyone threatening to murder this boy?’

  ‘Of course not. Do murderers commonly proclaim their intentions in public?’

  The superintendent’s brow contracted. He said, ‘You do not recall a conversation at breakfast today?’

  ‘What on earth? Surely you are not suspecting Griffin? It’s too ludicrous. Why, anyone might talk about screwing a boy’s neck. I do myself about twice a week.’

  ‘Very well, sir, we’ll pass that over.’ Michael had an uneasy feeling that Armstrong was by no means passing it over. Was he just an ordinary police numskull? No, there was a formidable intelligence in those small eyes. Then why go off on this ridiculous tack about Griffin? Perhaps he is trying to put me off my guard. Be careful.

  ‘Now, just a few formal questions, sir. I am told you were not in school for lunch.’

  ‘No, I went out – into the wood beyond the playing fields.’

  ‘Did you see Mrs. Vale?’

  O God, now it’s begun. What has she told him? Chance it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you might have. She was having lunch in the hayfield.’ Thank God. It seems all right so far.

  ‘Did you have anything to eat, sir?’

  ‘Yes, I took some sandwiches with m
e.’ That should be safe enough.

  ‘I see… I expect they were busy in the kitchen today.’ The superintendent’s voice was just a shade too offhand. Michael sensed the trap.

  ‘I keep a loaf and butter in my room.’ Well, so I do. Damn and blast! I should never have said that. I should have waited till he asked. Out of one trap into another… Armstrong, however, made no comment.

  ‘I take it you saw no one in the wood, or on the hayfield?’

  ‘No. Griffin came out not long after the bell rang. He and Mould, the groundsman, were in Big Field all the time, I think, after that.’

  This was going fine. Nothing to be afraid of in this fat official in blue. Just my guilty conscience.

  ‘I understand, then, that you didn’t go into the hayfield at all, sir? You were in the wood from one-thirty to about two-fifteen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The superintendent creaked forward in his chair, rummaging in a pocket, and pulled forth an envelope; allowed something to roll out of it on to the table in front of him.

  ‘And how do you account for this pencil of yours being found in the haystack where the body was? These are your initials, aren’t they?’

  Hell and damnation! That’s torn it. Must have dropped out when I was kissing Hero. Didn’t miss it this afternoon. He tried to assume a look of injured innocence.

  ‘Well, I really don’t know. Unless it dropped out during the hay battle yesterday. I was ragging about with the boys a good deal.’

  ‘Oh, you missed it yesterday, did you?’

  Michael became vaguely aware of another pitfall. Always keep as near the truth as possible when you’re lying – he seemed to remember as a convincing maxim.

  ‘No. I’d no idea I’d lost it till you turned it up in that rather melodramatic way.’ Michael was amazed to feel a wave of apparently genuine righteous indignation surging up in him. He added, with some heat, ‘And I may say, if these are your usual methods of interrogation, I don’t wonder the papers make a fuss about the third degree.’

  ‘Perhaps we are both being a little melodramatic, sir,’ said the superintendent, retreating in as good order as possible from his false position. To tell the truth, he felt considerably nonplussed, as Michael might have noticed if he had not been too occupied wondering whether the superintendent could have failed to observe the gaping and guilty chasm between his first question about the pencil and its answer. However, Armstrong began to show signs of apology rather than suspicion. Michael found himself giving a lively account of the hay battle, and in the end left the presence with a feeling of doubt as to whether its Machiavellian manoeuvres had not been a product of his own guilty imagination.

  To him succeeded Griffin, evidently prepared to lose his temper on the least provocation. This was duly given to him by the superintendent’s question about his unwary breakfast table remark.

  ‘Oh, my holy heavens! If that’s what you’re getting at, you’d better arrest every schoolmaster in England on suspicion of murder.’

  The superintendent handled this highly combustible article with great delicacy. ‘Come, sir,’ he said, ‘you must realise that we policemen have to go into every detail, however trivial it may seem. You remember the case of Jones-Evans?’

  ‘Jones-Evans? The Llanttyprid forward? Do I not. I always said that fellow would come to no good. Bit my – ear once in the scrum. Yes, I see what you mean.’

  ‘I take it, then, that your remarks were not meant in earnest?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I might well have screwed the poor little blighter’s neck for him. But, as it happens, I didn’t, if that’s what you want to know.’

  ‘Exactly. You were out in the field, weren’t you, after lunch? See anything peculiar?’

  ‘No, except Mouldy – he’s the groundsman; descended from a long line of village idiots, I think. Found he’d put out one too many sets of hurdles this time.’

  ‘What did you do about it, sir?’

  ‘Oh, I spoke a few words to him on the subject. Then we put them back in his shed again.’

  ‘About what time was that?’

  ‘Ten or fifteen minutes before the sports began, I should say. Why?’

  ‘Well, sir, it is possible that the body was not placed in the haystack till some time after the murder. I am naturally wondering where it might have been hidden in the interval, if this theory should be correct.’

  ‘No, there were no bodies lying about in the shed when we went in. Couldn’t have been hidden, either, because Mouldy yammered something about his sacks having been moved, and shifted them all back; so we should have seen if there’d been anything behind them.’

  Armstrong creaked slightly in his chair. ‘Well, that is about all then, sir. You didn’t happen to see Mrs. Vale after lunch, did you?’

  ‘I think she came out by the garden gate once or twice, to see about the seating accommodation.’

  ‘Anyone else about?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Oh, yes, Sims walked up and down the path for a bit. Came out as we were bringing hurdles in. And, I was forgetting. Just before that Evans walked along, from the direction of the wood. That’s all.’

  ‘Then I won’t trouble you any further. Can you send me Mr. Wrench?’

  Armstrong beamed upon Wrench as he sat down. If he noticed the nervous tic in the master’s left eyelid, and the way his hands gripped the arms of his chair, he certainly did not betray the fact.

  ‘Now, sir, I expect you younger gentlemen know some things about the boys that the older ones don’t. Perhaps you may be able to give me some suggestion as to why anyone should want to kill this lad?’

  ‘Oh, really, I’ve no idea. Of course he wasn’t popular with the boys, though some of them played up to him because of his money; or with the staff, either, for that matter.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he ragged anyone if he thought he could get away with it; in a nasty, malicious way, too.’

  ‘I see. Though I don’t imagine, from what I’ve seen of your colleagues, that he would get much rope from any of them.’

  ‘Good Lord, he twisted Gadsby round his finger, and as for Sims –’ Wrench broke off in some confusion.

  ‘I quite understand your hesitation, sir. Very natural under the circumstances. But, of course, even we policemen are not so stupid as to suppose that anyone would commit murder from such a motive. All I’m trying to do is to get an idea of the psychology of the victim. It often gives one a line on the murderer, you know.’

  ‘Oh, well, if that’s all,’ said Wrench, still rather uneasily, ‘I suppose there’s no harm in telling you that Wemyss did his best to make Sims’ life a hell for him.’

  Armstrong elicited some circumstantial evidence for this; then, feeling Wrench to be ‘ripe,’ as he put it, moved to the attack.

  ‘All I want now, sir, is an account of your own movements between lunch and two-thirty.’

  Wrench visibly braced himself in his chair, and began to finger his pink tie. Armstrong noticed a slight coarsening in his accent as he began to speak.

  ‘Aow. I was in the school – mucking about, you know.’

  ‘You must try to be more explicit, sir.’

  ‘Well, after lunch I went up to my bedroom, and lay down for a bit; feeling rather seedy. Then I felt better and thought I’d read. I remembered I’d left my book in the common room and went down to fetch it. Tiverton was there, and –’

  ‘May I ask what was the book, sir?’

  Wrench looked up quickly, blushing. ‘I really don’t see what – it was a French book, if you want to know, Mademoiselle de Maupin,’ he spoke defiantly.

  ‘I see. A school textbook. They didn’t teach us French when I was at school. And then?’

  ‘Then I read for a bit, and changed, and came down.’

  ‘You were late for the first race, weren’t you, sir?’

  ‘Late? No. Who put that in your head?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir. Some mistake. I u
nderstood that you were not with the other masters at the beginning of the sports.’

  ‘No more I was. I was talking with a parent.’

  ‘Who was that, sir?’

  ‘Funny thing, I don’t know,’ said Wrench slowly. ‘Tall, blue-eyed chap, in a brown suit. He came up and asked me how ‘Tom’ was getting on. Hadn’t an earthly who he was, but I told him ‘Tom’ was doing all right. That often happens at these beanos. Parents come up to you and expect you to know who they are and all about their boys.’

  ‘Very difficult it must be, sir. Well, that is all I need ask you. Thank you. Good evening, sir.’

  V

  Obverse and Reverse

  EVENING OF THE next day. They have cleared supper away in the common room. Tiverton, Evans and Griffin have congregated in the former’s sitting-room; Wrench is on duty; Gadsby and Sims are in the village, and expected back presently. The superintendent, who has been poking and pottering about all day, is finally gone, and with his going the oppression in the air seems to have lifted a little. Other persons, too, have come and gone, leaving the atmosphere still acrid and poisonous, as though after a gas attack; reporters from local and London newspapers, smelling out scandal for their titled proprietors like jackals scenting down a corpse for rather seedy lions. Reporters with notebooks; reporters with telegraph forms; reporters with cameras, rather baffled to find no ‘sorrowing relatives’ whose contorted features they may serve up next morning as a breakfast relish for their great public; reporters courteous, insinuating, truculent, well-meaning, ignoble, acute or obtuse – the whole swarm has swept down and swept away. The night air seems to sigh with relief, and even the murder-stained hayfield may be feeling cleaner for the departure of the carrion birds who hovered over it. Millions of eyes have fastened avidly upon the news which, in its local evening paper variety, Tiverton is now declaiming to Evans and Griffin.

  SHOCKING FATALITY AT PRIVATE SCHOOL

  TITLED VICTIM

  HAYMAKERS’ SENSATIONAL 7:15 P.M. DISCOVERY

  CORD ROUND SCHOOLBOY’S NECK

  ‘Haymakers working in a field adjoining Sudeley Hall Preparatory School late yesterday evening were horrified to find the body of a boy underneath one of the stacks. The fatal discovery was immediately communicated to the headmaster, the Rev. P.R. Vale, M.A., who identified the body as that of his nephew, the Hon. Algernon Wyvern-Wemyss, a pupil at the school. The deceased, it transpires, had been brutally strangled, a thin cord tied round the neck being the cause of death. Superintendent Armstrong and Sergeant Pearson, of the Staverton force, were quickly on the scene and our correspondent learns that they have discovered clues which should lead to a speedy arrest. The headmaster, who is also president of the Staverton and District Archaeological Society, in an interview stated that he suspected the crime to be the work of some vagrant and attributed the wave of violence which has lately been sweeping the country to the disastrous policy of the late Labour government. In reply to a question, the Rev. Vale strongly deprecated the suggestion that a practical joke might have been at the back of this shocking fatality. The deceased, who was universally popular with his schoolmates, was the son of –’