Death on the Cherwell (British Library Crime Classics)

by Mavis Doriel Hay

“Floating down just like the Lady of Shalott! Some new romantic stunt of hers!” Nina was scornful.

  “There’s something wrong!” Sally stated in a flat, practical voice, which masked the horribly real fear flickering in her mind. “A boat-hook—no, a punt pole—quick!”

  She plunged from the boathouse roof on to the steps that led to the water at one side of it and, bending under the roof, stepped into a punt moored there and from that into another punt farther out, setting them all splashing and knocking against one another. She had been so quick that the others were still moving thunderously on the roof above her. What a din! But it did not disturb the occupant of the floating canoe.

  “Hurry! Hurry!” Sally yelled. “A pole!” But she found one for herself, slung in the straps at the side of a punt, and got it out with a great deal of splashing and banging. Daphne arrived on the steps with another pole; Nina and Gwyneth, stumbling down behind her with paddles, almost pushed her into the lapping water. The canoe drifted down on the sluggish stream; now it was nearly level with the steps.

  Sally poised her pole. “She’s drifting farther out; are any of those punts unlocked?”

  Nina, in a rocking punt, clinging to the roof, tried the padlocks. “Of course not—when we want them.”

  No one felt inclined to leave the scene of action and run to the house for a key.

  “Hold me—” Sally leaned dangerously across the water reaching out the heavy pole. “I’m slipping—hold hard—I’ve got her! She’s turning broadside on—hook the stern, Daphne!”

  “It’s the Faralone right enough,” Gwyneth was murmuring.

  “And it’s her,” Nina corroborated.

  They dragged the canoe in alongside a punt. In it lay a woman stretched at full length beneath the thwarts and partly covered by a long tweed coat. Her green jersey and tweed skirt were sodden and her wet, fair hair was looped rakishly over one eye and streaked across her pallid face that was smeared with dark mud. Her partly open mouth and the one free eye horribly upturned, gaped vacantly.

  “She’s drowned!” gasped Gwyneth in a frightened whisper.

  “How can anyone drown in a canoe?” demanded Sally severely. “P’rhaps she’s only ill. We must haul her out. No, tie up the canoe first.”

  Myra Denning, the bursar of Persephone College, was not a big woman but it was with difficulty that the four girls, crowding each other on the narrow steps, heaved the inert body and its weight of wet clothing from under the thwarts of the canoe and up the steps on to the gravel path.

  The suddenness of what had happened and the horror of it had sent all thoughts of the Lode League from their minds for the time being. It was only when the cold body lay on the path that the grim connection between it and their reason for being there struck Gwyneth.

  “We can’t do any more; hadn’t we better clear out?” she suggested in a shaky voice.

  “Artificial respiration,” said Daphne doubtfully.

  “But it can’t be any good!” wailed Gwyneth. “And we—” she shuddered.

  “Don’t be an ass!” Sally commanded. “Don’t breathe a word, of course, about the League. It has nothing to do with—what has happened.” She was already at work with Nina on the unresponsive corpse. “Run like mad to Miss Cordell and tell her to phone to a doctor.”

  Gwyneth sped away across the wet lawn and round the end of the house towards the garden door.

  CHAPTER II

  MISS CORDELL FACES PUBLICITY

  MISS CORDELL, Principal of Persephone College, Oxford, looked up from her tea-tray at the pale, breathless figure of Gwyneth Pane, who had hurled herself into the principal’s study and now stood grasping the door handle, with her mouth open. Miss Cordell’s first feeling was annoyance; she cherished some old-fashioned ideas about the desirability of being “lady-like,” and hated to see any of her students looking gauche.

  “Miss Cordell! There’s been an accident—Miss Denning—in her canoe—” Gwyneth gasped out.

  “Not serious, I hope—” (Surely not serious, Miss Cordell was telling herself, to contradict Gwyneth’s startling appearance. Miss Denning—such a strong swimmer and so used to the river.)

  “Yes, we’re afraid so—we’re afraid—she’s—drowned! I think you’d better ring up the doctor—Oh!—your tea!”

  Gwyneth had interrupted Miss Cordell just as she was about to enjoy the first delicious sip from a teacup which she still held in her hand; the tea now slopped messily over a plate of bread and butter and even down Miss Cordell’s neat brown dress. She set down the cup with a little cluck of annoyance.

  “But where is she, Gwyneth? How——”

  “She was in her canoe—we got her out—down there, on the garden path by the small boathouse—the others are trying artificial respiration.”

  For a moment Miss Cordell hesitated. Her vision of undergraduate life was always slightly distorted by the suspicion that “this may be a rag.” She could never get away from the fear that she might be “had” and made to look publicly silly. But no; Gwyneth’s agitation was surely genuine.

  Miss Cordell asked her telephone anxiously: “Is that Doctor Shuter? Miss Cordell, Persephone, speaking. There’s been an accident—Miss Denning—in her canoe on the river—in the river—very serious— Yes, we’re doing that. Thank you—good-bye.” She hung up the receiver with an uneasy feeling that “good-bye” was not quite the appropriate expression at the moment.

  When Doctor Shuter arrived some ten minutes later, Sally and Nina were working unavailingly at the saturated corpse in the dark garden.

  “You did the right thing but I’m afraid it’s too late,” he told them, after a short examination of the body. Miss Cordell had brought him out through the french windows of the drawing-room, from which a shaft of light now struck across the garden, showing them each other’s faces, pale and strained, as they stood in an awkward group on the path.

  “How long have you been at this?” he asked the girls.

  “Since— Oh! soon after a quarter past four was when we first saw her,” Sally told him.

  “You saw her body in the river?”

  “Yes—no; in her canoe.”

  “In her canoe? Then you saw the accident happen?”

  “No; we saw the canoe floating down the river and then we found that she was in it.”

  “My dear girl, I’m not blaming you; I only want to know what happened,” exclaimed the doctor in annoyance. He looked round at the others. “Will one of you tell me plainly what occurred?”

  “We don’t know what happened,” burst out Gwyneth in a voice which, through distress and anxiety, sounded petulant. “But we found her, as if she had been drowned, in her canoe. I know it doesn’t sound sensible.”

  The doctor looked round at them rather grimly. They realized that they were damp and cold and that what had happened now seemed incredible. Sally was so offended by Doctor Shuter’s remarks that she maintained a dignified silence.

  Nina broke the awkward silence by stating: “We saw the canoe floating down the river, just drifting. We saw something was wrong, so we pulled it in to the steps with a punt pole. Then we saw Miss Denning and we got her out——”

  “Out of the river?”

  “No. Out of the canoe. She was lying flat in the canoe, simply soaking wet, as if she had been drowned.” The doctor frowned and shook his head meditatively. After all, it wasn’t his job to investigate this affair.

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing for it but to ring up the police, Miss Cordell. May I use your telephone? And perhaps—would you mind waiting here? I shan’t be more than a few minutes.”

  He strode off to the house. Miss Cordell turned doubtfully back to the girls. She had a sedate academic affection for Myra Denning, who had been her colleague for fifteen years, but she was still too violently shocked to be sensible of grief or loss. In a crisis she instinctively became official. The doctor’s last remarks were like squibs and crackers exploding suddenly in the quiet garden of Persephone College. P
olice—publicity! Publicity was Miss Cordell’s bugbear. Respectable publicity was bad enough because newspaper reporters, however carefully instructed, were liable to break out into some idiocy about “undergraduettes” or “academic caps coquettishly set on golden curls.” But shameful publicity! A death mystery! This was terrible! But these four students had apparently been at the scene of the accident. Surely they could explain it. The doctor had frightened them by his brusque manner. She must extract the truth from them tactfully. They would realize that undue publicity must be avoided and that “mystery” was always a keen scent to the hounds of the Press.

  The doctor was soon back and turned his attention to the girls, ordering them to go and change their damp clothes quickly and get something hot to drink.

  “When you have changed, will you all go to my room and wait for me there,” Miss Cordell directed. “I will send for some fresh tea for you. And I must ask you to say nothing whatever of this to anyone.”

  As the girls walked solemnly away across the lawn, Doctor Shuter tried to reassure Miss Cordell.

  “Fortunately the superintendent, Inspector Wythe, was in and is coming at once. You will find him very discreet. Can you understand what exactly happened, Miss Cordell?”

  Miss Cordell’s tactful questions had failed to make matters much clearer, but she felt that some criticism of her students was implied and rallied in their defence.

  “They are all in their first year and they have had a most unnerving experience, but I am sure they will be able to make it clear when they have had time to collect themselves. Sally Watson, in particular, is a most sensible girl. Of course this is all quite unprecedented and very shocking.”

  “Hm! Hm! Well, I mustn’t keep you standing here, Miss Cordell. There’s nothing further we can do, but I’ll wait here till the superintendent comes.”

  The principal returned to the house and the members of the half-formed Lode League were assembled in her room, gulping hot tea thankfully, by the time the superintendent arrived. Two constables with a stretcher accompanied him, and after a survey of the scene by the river steps he had the body carried into the drawing-room.

  “She was drowned, within the last four or five hours, so far as I can tell,” Doctor Shuter told him. “But there’s this mark on the back of her head—a pretty hard blow, it looks like, which may have stunned her though it could hardly have killed her.”

  “Striking her head—no; it was a canoe, you say; not a punt,” the superintendent mused. “A canoe isn’t heavy enough to give a hard blow. And then all the mud—face, hair, clothes! That looks like something more than straightforward drowning. And you may have observed that although her clothes are saturated, the overcoat is only damp. And found in the canoe, you say? Are you sure?”

  “No, I’m not,” said Doctor Shuter with some asperity, annoyed at having this fantastic story foisted upon him as it were. “You’d better see those girls. They had her lying on the path when I came, just as you found her. Of course one can’t name the cause of death for a certainty, or give any idea of when the blow occurred, without a post mortem.”

  The four girls were not sorry when their tea party was broken up by the arrival of Inspector Wythe, who asked them to accompany him to the boathouse. Already a whisper of mysterious events had spread through college, and an unusual number of maids and students found it necessary to pass through the hall or linger on the staircase which mounted from it, just opposite the door of Miss Cordell’s room. The flashing of the superintendent’s torch over the path, the river steps and the boathouse was watched by dozens of eyes from the college windows.

  The torchlight swept the boathouse roof and showed the abandoned rug.

  “Whose coat?” queried the inspector sharply.

  “It’s my rug,” muttered Daphne. “We were sitting there.”

  Miss Cordell’s eyebrows rose.

  After a hasty inspection of the place and a few questions, the inspector left his two men to examine the canoe and the surroundings and walked with the rest of the party towards the house.

  “I must ask all you young ladies to wait somewhere, so that each of you can answer some questions for me in turn,” he said slowly, as if he were still thinking things over. “No one else was with you when you found her?”

  “No. We didn’t see anyone else in the garden at all,” Sally told him.

  “Do you know if any other student saw Miss Denning start out in the canoe, or saw her during the afternoon?”

  “Didn’t Draga say she saw her start?” burst out Gwyneth.

  Miss Cordell’s frown was invisible in the darkness. Draga Czernak! How—how—unsuitable! Just the one student she would not choose as a witness. So unrestrained! So unlikely to do credit to Persephone College!

  They were crossing the narrow terrace to the drawing-room door—they must pass through that room, where Miss Denning lay on a sofa. Miss Cordell wondered why she had not led them round to the garden door at the end of the building; but then such a procession tramping all through the college would certainly have aroused the wildest curiosity of any students whom they might have met. Instinctively they trod very quietly through the drawing-room. Miss Cordell took them all to the small common-room, where Sally had coached with Mr. Mort from three to four that afternoon.

  “If you will conduct your interviews here, Inspector, the others can wait in my own room, next door,” Miss Cordell announced. She felt that the chief witnesses would be “safe” in her sacred apartment. They were still rather pale and quiet, but shudderingly she imagined them, as soon as they were set free, the centre of interest, relating all the horrid circumstances of their discovery to gaping groups round their firesides. Of course it was bound to happen before long, but at least she would have time to talk things over with Miss Steevens, her vice-principal, and decide with her upon some line of action. An announcement to the students at dinner; a warning against gossip. ...

  The inspector elected to interview Sally first and the other three retired to the principal’s room. Here, in the warmth and light of the college, they were self-possessed and placid again; what had happened out in the dark garden was definitely shelved in the past. They felt as if they had clambered out of a pit of horror back into the normal world and would have liked to discuss their adventure. But it seemed almost improper to discuss what had happened to Burse while sitting in—perhaps—the very chair in which she had often sat while recounting their crimes to Miss Cordell—that, according to undergraduate opinion at Persephone, being her chief form of conversation. Except for a moan from Gwyneth—“I suppose we can’t even smoke”—they said little.

  The inspector had purposely curbed his curiosity whilst they inspected the boathouse because he wanted to get the whole story first from the individuals separately, rather than as a hotch-potch of comment and counter-comment and contradictory chorus. Now he surveyed Sally Watson with approval as she settled herself in the small arm-chair opposite to him. Trim and self-controlled she looked now, although her usual buoyant self-confidence had not quite returned. She had sleeked her brown hair and had donned—hastily, yet with a vague sense of fitting herself for a sombre occasion—a tailored, navy-blue frock. A nice, sensible girl, thought the inspector, as he looked directly into her brown eyes.

  Rather a stupid-looking man, thought Sally after a brief inspection of his square, stolid face and reddish, toothbrush moustache.

  “Now, Miss Watson, will you tell me all that you saw and everything you know about this—er—accident?”

  Sally frowned slightly in her effort to remember everything. She realized that the boathouse roof was going to be a little difficult to explain as a natural resort, and characteristically she plunged at once into this difficulty. “The four of us were sitting on the boathouse roof—I was there from four o’clock; I know the time because I’d just come from a coaching——”

  “The others came later?”

  “No; they were there first; I joined them——”

 
; “Were you going on the river?”

  “Oh, no! We arranged to meet there; it’s a favourite place of ours to sit; there’s something awfully attractive about that river, even when it’s cold and half-dark,” Sally rushed on, hoping that this was convincing.

  “Were you meeting someone there?” The superintendent thought he was on the track of a clue to one phase of the mystery.

  “Oh, no; only ourselves. We just met to talk something over and we talked from four to a quarter past; we heard Sim’s chimes.”

  “You were expecting Miss Denning?”

  “Oh, no!”

  “But you knew she was on the river in her canoe?”

  “No—oh, I think Daphne knew, but we didn’t know when we arranged to go there.”

  “Did Miss Denning keep her canoe in that boathouse?”

  “Yes—but we didn’t notice it wasn’t there. We didn’t go down the steps, only on to the roof.”

  “So the fact that you were sitting on the boathouse roof had no connection with Miss Denning?”

  This took Sally by surprise. She felt it was not quite fair. Obviously this policeman must not be told about the Lode League; he might think it was silly or, worse, he might take it as an implication that they had something to do with whatever had happened to Burse. So she answered firmly, though not quite promptly: “Oh, no!” She wondered if she were blushing under the superintendent’s steady stare. An inquisitive man!

  “Would it strike you as unusual that Miss Denning should be out in a canoe at four o’clock on a January afternoon?” was his next question.

  “No, not really; not for her. She often goes out in the Faralone—that’s her canoe—and at least once I’ve seen her come back about tea-time.” Sally was relieved to be embarked on the safer subject of Burse’s habits.

  “So it was not unusual. Now, Miss Watson, will you continue and tell me just what happened after you joined your friends on the boathouse roof at four o’clock.”

  Sally told her story, from the moment when they saw the canoe; she described calmly, though her lip trembled, how Myra Denning’s body was lying, slightly on one side, stretched out under the thwarts, with the grey overcoat covering it.