A Javelin for Jonah mb-47

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Yes, I suppose that can happen,” said Laura, “because, naturally, the school governors wouldn’t want their second master tried for murder. It was bad enough that he was even brought before the Bench. Enough to blot any school’s copybook.”

  “Fortunately the governors and the headmaster were saved from further embarrassment,” said Dame Beatrice. “It appears that Mr. Medlar finished the school term, which had only a week to run, and then forfeited six months’ salary in lieu of giving the proper amount of notice and retired from his post at Isingtower.”

  “And took on Joynings, whereby we now find ourselves in this mess,” said Hamish.

  “Dame Beatrice was asking for you, sir, while you were engaged,” said the maid, when she took in Gascoigne’s night-cap of whisky and soda.

  “Was she? Oh, well, I expect it is too late now, but perhaps you will go along and find out. If she has not retired, and is at liberty to receive me, let me know and I will go along.”

  Laura and Hamish made themselves scarce when the maid brought the Warden’s message and, as soon as he received her invitation, Gascoigne went to talk with Dame Beatrice in what had been Jones’s sitting-room.

  “I am glad to have the chance of talking with you,” he said. “One of the women students has been to me in great distress of mind. She appears to think that you have accused her and others of being responsible for poor Davy’s death.”

  “She exaggerates, as no doubt you have decided,” said Dame Beatrice. “Please sit down, Mr. Medlar. To be plain with you, I think Kathleen and her friends do know more than they have told you, although I have accused them of nothing more than of withholding information.”

  “What more do you think they know?” There was anxiety in Gascoigne’s voice.

  “I think they know where Mr. Jones was killed and I think they buried the body. No, no,” she added, noticing that Gascoigne was about to speak. “I do not think for one single instant that they killed him. I think they buried the body merely out of panic, fearing that they would be blamed for the death if the body was discovered in the place where they found it.”

  “Then that must have been in that cellar when they went to release him! But the police made a careful search. There was nothing to suggest that Davy died there. The inspector told me so.”

  “It is rare for the police to make known all their findings in a case of this kind, is it not?”

  “But what makes you think that those six students buried the body? I simply cannot believe it.”

  “It is the only theory which seems to accord with the facts. Do you care for me to recapitulate them?”

  “In the light of what you suspect, I should think it just as well.”

  “Very well, then. I begin from what was my own point of departure. Having kidnapped Mr. Jones on the Wednesday afternoon, the six students, who were in a panic by the Friday morning, then went to Mr. Henry and confessed to what they had done.”

  “Yes, I know, but that was because they had discovered that Davy was no longer where they had left him.”

  “I hardly think that was the sole reason for their reaction. It is true that they had obtained possession of a key to the cellar, but it seems common knowledge that there was a second key and one which was readily available, not only to them, but to anybody who chose to filch it.”

  “You mean the one which hung just inside Miss Yale’s door? I cannot think why, if they had decided upon this ridiculous and, as it has turned out, this fatal escapade, they did not take Miss Yale’s key in the first place.”

  “One of two circumstances might account for that. Either the key was not there when they went to get it, or else they were afraid that Miss Yale would miss it and would institute enquiries. I incline to the first of these theories.”

  “Well—granted. Pray continue.”

  “Very late on the Thursday night, Mr. Henry and Hamish, concerned by some hints they had received from students who were not among the six chiefly involved, instituted a search for Mr. Jones.”

  “Yes, but they found that Davy had already been removed from the cellar.”

  “As I understood their account, that is uncertain. Having no key, and being unwilling, I imagine, to disturb either the janitor or Miss Yale at that time of night, they attempted to attract Mr. Jones’s attention by calling to him.”

  “And received no reply.”

  “For what I believe was a good and sufficient reason: Mr. Jones was already dead.”

  “What!”

  “And the students knew that. I think the girl Kathleen was probably the prime mover. I think she was anxious to let Mr. Jones go. Most girls (I do not say all) are notoriously more tender-hearted than boys, and I think she, having the janitor’s key still in her possession, made a journey to the door of the cellar and called out to know whether Mr. Jones was all right. Receiving no reply, she went in search of some, if not all, of the others, and reported that Mr. Jones might be in a state of collapse. As I imagine that he may not have given in to his kidnappers without a struggle, they may well have thought that they had gone too far, and that it would be well to release him forthwith. That is when they found his dead body and also the weapon with which he had been stabbed to death.”

  “No, no! It couldn’t have been like that!” said Gascoigne. “They couldn’t have found him murdered!”

  “I have not finished,” said Dame Beatrice. “Pull my story to pieces when you have heard the rest of it.”

  chapter

  11

  Medley Relay

  « ^ »

  But if you are right,” said Gascoigne, “what on earth can have been the effect on those poor children?” He sounded genuinely distressed. “I know who and what they are. Not one of them is what Jerry calls a hard case. Kathleen was an unconvicted shoplifter, sent here by worried parents. I would put her down as a kleptomaniac except that she has pilfered nothing since she has been here. Bill and Julian were expelled from their respective schools for smoking ‘pot’, and John had a nervous breakdown after he and a younger brother had what was reported as a sportive wrestling-match and the brother tumbled over a high balcony and was killed.”

  “And John was sent here to recuperate?” asked Dame Beatrice.

  “That may seem strange to you,” admitted Gascoigne, “but it made a change of environment for him and, of course, he is not allowed to go back to his home, which was the scene of the accident, until he leaves the College for good. That is my invariable rule and I hoped it had been the salvation of the unfortunate lad.”

  “And the other two?”

  “Are equally to be accorded sympathy. Benjy was unlucky enough to fall foul at school of a ring of young Jew-baiters. He ran away after having set fire to one of the school dormitories. Nothing got into the papers, but I knew his mother and she persuaded me to take the boy into my care. Shaun, of course, was mixed up in the Belfast troubles. He may have committed, or connived at, murder over there. He was hurt in a street battle, went to hospital and then an uncle in Eire took charge of him and shipped him over here to an elderly great-aunt. She had heard of us and wrote to ask whether we would be willing to take him.”

  “The fees here are heavy, of course,” suggested Dame Beatrice.

  “Yes,” agreed Gascoigne briefly. He paused and then added, “The great-aunt is the widow of an American millionaire, so there was no difficulty.”

  “Now that you have mentioned these students’ names, I remember their case-histories,” said Dame Beatrice. “Of course, you admit that there are three potential murderers among them.”

  “Shaun, perhaps. The other two?”

  “The wrestling-match between the brothers may not have been an innocent affair at all, but a deadly struggle. As for Benjy, arson is a crime not far removed from murder if there are people in a house where an incendiary gets to work.”

  “And you really think these students discovered Davy’s body?” asked Gascoigne, avoiding the inferences.

  “I am sure of i
t. They discovered it, removed it to the long-jump pit and buried it. They acted, as I have pointed out, in sheer panic. I do not think the stabbing could have produced very much blood, but, of course, I have not seen the body. However, my theory is that what blood there was the students cleaned up. In plain words, I believe they did all that they could to hide the fact that Mr. Jones was killed in the place to which they themselves had assigned him. Judging, you see, from their case-histories, three out of the six had good reason to panic when they found that they had a murdered man to account for.”

  “But if they did not do it, who did?”

  “I have several theories. In the course of time, one of them will fit the facts.”

  “What about the weapon?”

  “Ah,” said Dame Beatrice, “that is an interesting question. I think the students must have found the weapon when they found the body. They cleaned the point of it—that heavy metal point which had replaced the original head of the javelin—and replaced the weapon in the locked cupboard. Then one of them (John is the most likely) was so much troubled about the whole affair that he risked going into your trophies cupboard, using Miss Yale’s key, purloined your own javelin, daubed it with red paint and placed it where one of the swimmers or divers was bound to find it.”

  “But why? Why?”

  “In order to do what he could to assist the course of justice, I assume. These students knew that Mr. Jones had been stabbed with a javelin and, as for John, your notes tell me that he had already suffered a nervous breakdown after he had caused the death of his brother, and I think his conscience (if one can call it that) or, possibly, some theory he had formed as to the identity of the murderer, drove him to make a gesture which clearly indicated by whose hand the murder was committed.”

  “He did not think very clearly,” said Gascoigne sourly, “if he thought that I had killed poor Davy, but, oh, dear me! I have never attempted to find out exactly what goes on in their minds. That is Henry’s job. It is sufficient for me to make sure that they are kept busy and happy. But the javelin which did the mischief? How comes it that Henry, Martin and Miss Yale (all of whom have a hand in training that particular squad) did not notice the alteration in the implement?”

  “How many students were members of that particular group?” asked Dame Beatrice, as though she was avoiding answering the question.

  “I could not say. I should need to ask Henry.”

  “In any case, I do not think the javelin was altered very long before the murder was committed, otherwise the difference would have been noted and would have received comment. Tomorrow I will talk to Mr. Henry about it. I have learned, by the way, that in addition to his official position as Dean, he is also your partner.”

  “Yes, that is so. It is by his own wish that his name is not on the College prospectus as such.”

  “May I ask whether he receives a salary in addition to a share in the profits?”

  “Yes, his salary represents the bulk of his emoluments. He has very few shares in the enterprise.”

  “Would he like more?”

  “Dame Beatrice, I am at a loss to interpret the meaning of your questions.”

  “They may be impudent, but they are not impertinent, I assure you.”

  “I must give you credit for that, then, and I will answer you. I expect Henry would like a larger share, but he cannot afford to buy more, even on the salary I pay him and, even if he had sufficient money, I am not prepared to relinquish any part of my own holding, so the question really does not arise.”

  “Did he buy such shares as he has?”

  “No. They were a gift from me in order to induce him to join my staff.”

  “How would his salary compare with that of Mr. Jones?”

  “Unfavourably, but Davy was a special case.”

  “Because he was your brother-in-law?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Not because he was in a position to blackmail you?”

  “Well, really! You are referring, no doubt, to the unpleasant experience to which I was subjected following the death of my poor wife!”

  “Yes, I was.” She fixed her sharp black eyes on his angry countenance. Gascoigne capitulated.

  “I preferred to keep Davy friendly towards me,” he said. “I knew that he was desperately disappointed at having been left nothing under my wife’s will. I will admit that I felt sorry for him. However, to answer a question of which, of course, crudely though you have put it, I can see the relevance, Davy was not in a position to blackmail me. Not only had I done nothing wrong, but also Davy, I suppose, was miles away at the time of my wife’s unfortunate death and could have known nothing about it until he read the report in the newspapers. He had been with a travelling circus for some time, but they dismissed him for drunkenness. He had begun to insist upon having a safety-net for his act—he was a top-class gymnast, of course—and they knew the unfortunate reason.”

  “And did not wish to provide a net?”

  “It removed interest from the act. The circus-loving public are there to be thrilled. That is why they like to see a man or woman performing with lions and tigers, a morbid and decadent taste which I do not share. I look upon it as a throw-back to the Roman arena, a…”

  “Yes, quite,” said Dame Beatrice. “So did Mr. Henry receive his partnership as an expression of thanks for the way he gave evidence under cross-examination?”

  “Really!” exclaimed Gascoigne. “That is a most improper question, Dame Beatrice!”

  “I imagine that is the way it must have looked to Mr. Jones.”

  “Davy certainly made some unpleasant insinuations,” admitted Gascoigne. “He went so far as to demand a partnership for himself as the price of holding his tongue, but, of course, I could not possibly agree to that. He did quite enough mischief here without the added power of being in a position to interfere in the way the College was run.”

  “You must forgive me for pressing the point, Mr. Medlar, but you say that his employers had dismissed him from the circus. Does that mean that he actually was in your neighbourhood at the time of your wife’s death?”

  “He claimed to be,” said Gascoigne sullenly. “I don’t know whether he could have proved it and, as it happened, he was so drunk in the witness box that the magistrates refused to listen to what he had to say.”

  “But you distrusted him sufficiently to offer him a lucrative post in order to stop his tongue.”

  “I know it sounds suspicious, but he could have caused me a great deal of trouble with his lies. All the same, I do assure you that nothing would have induced me to kill him, and I did not do so.”

  “Rattled, you think, but more in anger than from a guilty conscience,” said Laura, on the following morning.

  “That was my impression, but anger and fear, of course, are very closely allied.”

  “Do you think Jones was blackmailing him?”

  “It is possible, but only mildly, I think.”

  Laura grunted and, in return to a look of enquiry from Dame Beatrice, she said, “I’m not so sure about this mildness you mention. A job with no work attached to it—Hamish says Jones was hardly ever in the gym—a fat salary, an assured position, carte blanche to behave as badly as he liked without fear of being dismissed—these things add up to the good life with no strings attached, I should have thought.”

  “I see your point, but there was one string attached to this ‘good life’. He has lost it.”

  “Well what’s the next step?”

  “I must have a word with Mr. Henry, and then we are bound for the blacksmith’s forge in the village.”

  “Oh, you are thinking about the steel point on that javelin. You don’t think it was done in the College workshops, then? Yet Hamish says they are very well-equipped, and are not supervised by the staff.”

  “I know; but there might be students who would be interested. The murderer could not risk having any questions asked as to what he was doing with the javelin. Incidentally, I was interested t
o note that a statement I made during my last conversation with Mr. Medlar went unchallenged.”

  “What was that?—and why should he have challenged it?”

  “I said that the students who buried the body also returned the lethal javelin to that steel-fronted cupboard, whereas, on Mr. Henry’s evidence, no student has access to it until a member of staff unlocks it.”

  “Yes, and what about the forge? Students don’t go into the village, do they? And, even if they did, they’ve no money to pay for a blacksmith’s work or for any other job.”

  “No. It narrows the field again, does it not?”

  “To the staff, you mean. You’ve thought that, all along. If so, it looks like Barry.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “There was the accident to his star long-jumper, and there was the choice of the long-jump pit to bury the body. Both seem to add up to his signature tune.”

  “Your first premise is sound; your second is unsound. The students, not the murderer, buried the body. The choice of the long-jump pit as a grave-yard was arbitrary. The task of burial had to be done as quickly as possible, and the long-jump pit offered the easiest digging.”

  “But the body was found so soon. It was bound to be.”

  “That did not matter to the students. Their only concern was that it should not be found in a place with which they had guilty associations; and that brings me to my previous point. I told Mr. Medlar that the students not only buried the body, but also cleaned the point of the javelin, and then I expected him to ask me how the javelin was replaced in the locked-up, steel-fronted sports cupboard, but he did not do so.”

  “Like me, I suppose the question didn’t occur to him at the time.”

  “It is interesting, nevertheless.”

  “Yes, indeed, if it’s really true that the students had no access to that cupboard. Strengthens your theory that the murderer is one of the staff.”