‘And my silver pencil?’
‘The diary doesn’t mention it. It was probably just your bad luck, not his stage-property. I asked several of them about it, by the way. Tiverton thought he had seen you using it after the hay battle – his mistake. Sims was noncommittal; I supposed that was his cunning; it would have been a little too obvious if he had sworn to seeing you using it just before the murder. But apparently it was just ignorance. Oh, and I was forgetting. I also announced my discovery of the workings of the Black Spot to several of your fellow-beaks. Sims almost immediately drew the connection between it and the method used to get Wemyss into the haystack. Wrench, who is more intelligent, was definitely slower off the mark. That was one up to Sims; it diverted some of my suspicion temporarily to Wrench. A good double bluff.’
Nigel paused, and gazed pathetically into the empty teapot. Hero, affecting not to notice this, said:
‘By the way, did you find anything out about that note to James Urquhart.’
‘Oh yes. That’s all in the diary. It was just a second line of defence supposing you two somehow wriggled out of suspicion. Sims had been to dinner with him several times, noticed the disparity between his apparent expenditure and his presumed income, and drew the same inference as Armstrong did. He typed the note on Michael’s typewriter, so that suspicion was neatly contrived to fall either on Michael or Urquhart. If Urquhart kept the note, Michael would be in the soup; if he destroyed it, he automatically became a suspect himself; the police would be bound to question whether it had ever existed. Of course, the whole plan had to be thought out at lightning speed. He found Hero’s note on the night of the nineteenth, read it immediately after she had put it behind the loose brick, and at once sent off the note to Urquhart, so that it reached him by the morning post. He must have stayed awake into the small hours, working out the other details.’
‘So you had Sims marked down quite early on?’
‘Yes. I hadn’t really much doubt. Not after I’d heard of his outbreak about sex, and seen the kind of reading he favoured – evangelical divines, hellfire, and so on – to back it up. But I hadn’t any proof either, not a stitch of it, to clothe my shameless skeleton of theorising. In fact, he’d probably be alive now but for his vanity –’
‘What on earth –?’
‘Don’t you see? A repressed character, all shut in on himself, no confidantes. What does a person like that do? Keep a diary, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Same character commits a brilliant, daring exhibitionist murder; asserts himself at last, but he can’t ask anyone to give him credit for it. What does he do again? Puts it down in the diary. The unrecognised genius. At any rate, it will be published after his death. Posterity will recognise him. Oh yes, I’d banked on that diary, but I couldn’t think where the devil he kept it. You see, the police searched all the masters’ rooms after the first murder, and they don’t miss things. Of course, it was the old protective colouring trick again. Had me beat. You remember that story of Poe’s – the important letter hidden in the letter-rack, staring every one in the face while they tore carpets up and panelling down –’
‘Will you stop this meandering,’ Michael interrupted. ‘We don’t want an informative talk on American literature. We shall expire if you don’t tell us this instant where it was.’
‘Keep calm! News is coming. It was an ordinary school exercise book – his Black Book. He kept a tally of his impositions in it, too.’
‘But do you mean to say he carried this keg of dynamite about with him, brought it into class, and into the common room? Why, it’s crazy.’
‘Well, he was crazy. More things than perfect love can cast out all fear. And it was all of a piece with the two murders. Wildly risky, on the face of it; but actually safeguarded from every point, so to speak, except the frontal attack, the red-handed discovery. And of course the fact that it was in shorthand made it pretty safe in your ill-educated community. I got on to it first when I went into his classroom to ask about the pencil. He made an involuntary movement towards his pile of books, as though he wanted to cover one of them up. It gave me an impression of guiltiness. Then I remembered the tiff between Gadsby and Tiverton, about the sacrosanctity of masters’ lockers in the common room, and it occurred to me that would be a good place for him to keep the diary. A damned sight too good in fact. I couldn’t poke about in them during the day for there always seemed to be someone in the common room, and he had the sense to bring it up to bed with him at night and, anyhow, it was still only a vague notion in the back of my mind. I didn’t feel certain I was right about this till just after Vale was killed. Armstrong said they’d just searched the common room; that was a nasty jolt for Sims, he looked sick as death. Every one thought it was reaction from the murder, but it was chiefly reaction to the horrid thought that they might have found his silent friend. He needn’t have got so bothered about it, if he’d thought twice, of course. They were looking for a weapon, not a full signed confession.’
‘How did you get hold of it?’ asked Hero.
‘That will transpire in due course, ma’am,’ said Nigel, and went on to the murder of the headmaster and the final discovery of the weapon. ‘I must confess I ought to have been able to stop that. But I was looking for his next move in the wrong direction. I thought it would be against one of you, if he made it at all. Yet the motive had been right under my nose. I had heard Vale giving him the most devastating ticking off. Remember thinking to myself, “I’d crack his head for him if he spoke to me like that.” That’s the sort of thing all of us say, but only a Sims puts into practice. Vale had been browbeating and patronising him for years, but this was the point at which Sims boiled over. He probably was also afraid that Vale might sack him for incompetence. But he might never have gone to the lengths of murdering him, if it hadn’t suggested to him a magnificent way of incriminating you. Yes, he really struck the top of his form there,’ Nigel added enthusiastically.
‘So glad you enjoyed it,’ murmured Michael in society-hostess tones.
‘It was more brilliant even than the first murder, and absolutely safe except for the moment of impact. At the crisis of the match he bent down, as if to do up his shoelace, snatched out the tent-peg dagger with his left hand, struck through the back of the deck chair, you get no spurt of blood with a very thin weapon like that, wiped the dagger on the grass, and thrust it back through the loop of the guy-rope. The whole thing would take three seconds. If there had been no really exciting point in the match to distract every one’s attention, he simply would not have acted; just substituted a real tent-peg that night and no one any the wiser. As he says in the diary, he could afford to wait. He knew, of course, where Hero and her husband would be sitting. He could rely on Michael being somewhere near. He didn’t know, on the other hand, that Hero would faint; that was his greatest triumph of tactics. The original plan was for him in some unobtrusive way to call the attention of the police to the tent-peg, a few hours after the murder. Its proximity to Hero’s chair, plus the motive she had for getting rid of her husband, would have clinched the case for the police. When she fainted, he altered this plan in a twinkling, called out “Fetch some water,” a perfectly innocent remark on the face of it, knowing that knight-errant Evans would hurry off for some, and at once be suspected of carrying the weapon with him. If the police had stopped him, searched him and found no weapon, then Sims could fall back on the first plan. Oh yes, the whole performance was alpha plus. His mania had sharpened his intelligence to a very fine point indeed.’
Nigel paused. Hero shivered a little, moved closer to Michael. Even in retrospect these things kept the edge of horror. She looked at Nigel. His dispassionate, scientific admiration for the methods of a killer frightened her. His face seemed inhuman to her at this moment, like a clever machine in repose after a day’s work. She shook herself. This was a nice way to feel towards someone who had saved her life and Michael’s.
‘You haven’t answered my question yet,’ she said.
&n
bsp; ‘What? Oh, the diary? Yes, it was very difficult. I still hadn’t a vestige of material proof that Sims was the murderer. And Armstrong was beginning to tug pretty hard at the leash. I couldn’t give him any reasons that would be satisfactory to him for holding Sims. So I asked him to arrest you, just to keep him quiet, and to keep Sims quiet too, of course. The diary was an hypothesis; I determined to try and prove it. The trouble was, Sims might very well have realised that it was a luxury he couldn’t afford now, and burnt it. If he hadn’t, he’d be pretty sure to keep strict guard over it. Anyway, Griffin, young Stevens and I staged a fire-alarm. That got Sims and every one else out of the common room without arousing suspicion. The diary was there, in his locker. Half a minute at it, and I knew we had won.’ Nigel’s voice changed. ‘Poor devil. None of us can have the remotest idea of the agony it is to be despised and rejected of men; a cancer in the soul. And then madness; the feeling of there being a curtain, more invisible than gauze, stronger than iron, between oneself and one’s fellow men. To cry out of the abyss, and to know that there will be no answer, that one is buried alive.’
Hero whispered involuntarily. ‘So you are human, after all.’
Nigel started, and looked puzzled, ‘What on earth –’ he said slowly.
‘I think I understand,’ said Michael. Then, with seeming irrelevance, ‘Do you always leave your revolver under your pillow? Careless habit. You should break yourself of it.’
‘I see there is no getting past you,’ answered Nigel. ‘And for goodness’ sake don’t let this go past you. I should be ruined if Armstrong got to hear of it. He can’t understand how a detective of my calibre should make such an almighty gaffe as to announce in front of a murderer exactly where he keeps a revolver –’
‘What’s this?’ asked Hero. ‘Was it your revolver he shot himself with?’
‘Yes. I can tell you, Armstrong is pretty sore about that. He’d be a damn sight sorer if he knew–oh well, I’d better explain. Armstrong imagines that Sims noticed his diary was missing, knew everything was up, and took advantage of my alleged carelessness with firearms to stage a grand finale. Actually it wasn’t as simple as that. I’m not so tired of life yet as to leave my revolver about in reach of murderers. And Sims did not miss his diary till I told him I’d read it; I placed a notebook of the same pattern in his locker, when I took the diary, and he hadn’t had time to discover the substitution. I had no intention of letting him get away with suicide then, not till I read the diary; then – well – my views changed. I knew he would not be hung with that evidence before a judge; he’d be sent to Broadmoor. And I simply have no use for keeping lunatics alive, criminal or otherwise. So I had a chat with Sims; told him it was all up, and where I kept my revolver – not under my pillow, I may say – and left him to it. He – no, I think I will not describe the interview in detail. Anyway, I took everyone off to reconstruct the first crime. That was really for my own satisfaction. I wanted to prove that he could have moved to the haystack and back during the race without being noticed, and – er – I like a little exhibition now and then. I intended, of course, to play the part of the murderer myself. You can imagine it shook me up all right when I saw, just before we kicked off, that Sims himself had turned up. I’d only left one shot in the revolver. But it looked as if he might propose to fire it into the wrong person. I was just on the point of jumping on him when it occurred to me that what he had come for was not my life but a triumphal exit. It was rather rash of me, I suppose, but I staked on my knowledge of his mental processes, and luckily I was right. We went ahead; Sims reenacted his own part, and had his crowded hour of glorious life, and here we all are.’
‘Well, you’ve certainly got a nerve,’ said Michael.
‘I don’t know how we begin to thank you,’ Hero said gently.
‘A fresh pot of tea would be quite a good start.’
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