Death on the Cherwell (British Library Crime Classics)

by Mavis Doriel Hay

  “Gwyneth, you’re a ghoul!” Sally was disapproving. “And Daphne ought never to eat suet pudding, with her figure.”

  “My figure stands comparison with any in Oxford,” declared Daphne. “All those straight up-and-down, can’t tell whether you’re going or coming affairs, have definitely gone out. The crumpets are in my bureau, Nina, if you are being so kind as to fetch them.”

  When they were at last settled round the fire, with a crumpet on Sally’s toasting fork, Gwyneth asked:

  “What about the Lode League? Does it just lapse?”

  “I think not,” said Sally very earnestly. “There’ll be an awful tamasha about this, and we’ve got to try to help clear up the mystery. You’ll find the four rings in my bag, Nina. The Lode got his all right, apparently, and we’d better have ours.” Nina produced them and Sally solemnly handed them round and put one on her own finger. “Now what the Lode League has to do is to try to find out the truth of this mystery, and to find it out so that Persephone doesn’t look silly. We had a rotten bursar and now she’ll have brought us into the limelight by getting herself drowned in her canoe. I’m awfully sorry for her relatives, and all that. I’m even sorry for Burse—something horrible must have happened and one wouldn’t want it to happen to anyone. But I can’t help feeling that it had something to do with—well, with all her rotten bursing. There may be things that we don’t want to come out.”

  “We’d better be careful,” declared Daphne warningly. “Already that inspector thinks we’re hiding something and if we do anything to make him more suspicious, he’ll think the worst.”

  “You must have messed up your interview,” said Sally. “You or Gwyneth.”

  “Of course I’d rather have Burse alive and bursing her worst,” declared Nina hastily. “I’d rather lose all my washing and live on gruel for the rest of my three years, than have Burse drowned. But I don’t see what we can do. Amateur detectives only do any good in thrillers.”

  “You don’t know anything about it,” Sally told her. “My sister Betty had a lot to do with clearing up the Pongleton case.”1

  The others looked awed. “How did she do it?” inquired Gwyneth. “Do you mean she really——”

  “I’ll tell you some other time. But you’d better not ask her when she comes to-morrow, because Basil, that’s her husband, doesn’t like to talk about it. You see, his Aunt Phemia was murdered on the underground stairs and—well, it isn’t a thing you talk about.”

  “Sally, do tell us,” pleaded Gwyneth.

  “Not now. We’ve got to consider the great canoe mystery.”

  There was a loud knock on the door, which was opened before the knocking finished, and Draga Czernak whisked in.

  “And is this another English meal?” she inquired calmly, looking with interest at the group round the fire, the crumpets, plates and butter.

  “This is called a snack,” Daphne informed her. “Taken in the best society to fill up the yawning gap between dinner and supper.”

  “And that is called a ‘have,’,” suggested Draga serenely. “I am not so green! Yes, I get your slang very well. Sally, may I have your notes from Professor Windle’s lecture this morning? You said you would lend me——”

  “All right.” Sally handed the toasting fork to Daphne and went to rummage in her bureau. “But they’re awfully scrappy and you’d really understand the thing much better if you went to a lecture now and then yourself.”

  “Per-haps. But I had other occupation.”

  “Have a crumpet?” suggested Gwyneth.

  “A snack? No, thank you. I think my Slav stomach would not appreciate the English snack. Thank you, Sally.”

  “What did the inspector ask you, Draga?” inquired Gwyneth bluntly.

  “The inspector?” Draga, half out of the door with Sally’s notes, hesitated. “Ah, the police! My God! That I should be the one to see that woman last of all!” She returned to the room and shut the door abruptly. She clenched her hands, frowning. Her placidity was broken as though by an electric current.

  “You shouldn’t say ‘My God,’,” Sally reproved her. “It’s quite a swear in English.”

  “A woman so bad and so cunning deserved to die,” Draga declared.

  “That’s a beastly thing to say,” Nina reproved her. “You have no right to say anyone deserves to die. And besides, being drowned, it’s horrible.”

  “But I say it. She insulted me—per-haps she then drown herself in remorse.” The correctness of Draga’s English was always impaired by excitement.

  “But she didn’t drown herself! How could she?” demanded Gwyneth.

  “How do you know?” asked Draga excitedly.

  “How do we know?” Sally echoed. “She was in her canoe. It’s a mystery. She may have been murdered.”

  “I thought she drown herself in the river by mistake,” Draga told them. “But in either case she insulted me. She say I am a pig—I, a Czernak of Stara Gora.”

  “It’s nothing to call anyone a pig in English,” Nina explained soothingly.

  “What happened?” asked Gwyneth, with her usual thirst for information.

  “She comes to my room—I have branches on the floor——”

  “Branches?”

  “Yes, of the fir trees. I am—lonely; yesterday was the day of a festival in my country, when we lay branches of the fir trees on the floor of the big hall in our castle. I think I will have my own small festival here in my room, and the servant girl tells Miss Denning this morning that my room is untidy. Miss Denning comes and tells me, ‘I do not care for what a state you live in at home in Yugo-Slavia; you may live in the pig—’ what is the word—’the pig-house——’”

  “Pigsty!”

  “Yes, pigsty! ‘But,’ she say, ‘while you are here in Persephone College you must try to attain the English standards of cleanness!’” Draga repeated all this with ominous calmness. Then she burst out in fury: “That she say to me! In my country a blood feud has been started for less than that!”

  “You simply mustn’t take it so seriously, Draga,” Sally declared. “Of course, Burse could be pretty rude, but in English it really isn’t so bad as you think.”

  “A pig is a pig, an English pig or a Slav pig. It is all one,” said Draga earnestly. “It was an insult. While she lived it could not be washed away.”

  “Well, it’s been washed away now all right, and you really might forget it,” advised Nina.

  “And don’t go about saying she deserved to die,” added Sally. “In England we don’t say that sort of thing and it might get you into trouble.”

  “You mean—they might think I have drowned her? Then I would go home and there be secure. I care not a bit.” Draga whisked abruptly out of the room.

  The four gazed at one another.

  “Could she have done it?” whispered Gwyneth in an awe-struck whisper.

  “No. I don’t think so. I’m not sure that she wouldn’t have done it if she had the chance, but how could she?”

  “She said, ‘How do you know?’ when we said Burse didn’t drown herself,” Daphne pointed out.

  “I don’t think that meant anything. After all, she hadn’t heard how we found her. She doesn’t know any more than the rest of the college knows—what the Cordial told us at dinner, that Miss Denning had been drowned in a boating accident.”

  “Then why should she think it was suicide?” inquired Gwyneth.

  “That’s just her Slav mind, dwelling on the macabre and trying to find a connection between the accident and the pigsty incident,” Daphne explained.

  “And anyway, Draga’s a rabbit on the river. She couldn’t have anything to do with what happened there,” Nina pointed out.

  “Not herself—but—good Lord!—she was telephoning to Matthew Coniston this evening!” shrieked Gwyneth.

  “What of it?” demanded Sally coldly. “Draga’s always telephoning to Matthew. And don’t squeak so; they’ll think I’m keeping guinea-pigs in my room.”

&nb
sp; “Guinea-pigs be hanged! I tell you, Draga was telephoning to Matthew in Yugo-Slavian—or whatever she calls her foul language—and she was all het up and it was about Burse!”

  “So you were perfecting your knowledge of Yugo-Slavian—only I think it’s usually called Serbian—this afternoon?” inquired Daphne sarcastically.

  “This is really an important clue,” urged Gwyneth. “I wish you wouldn’t be such idiots. Draga was telephoning in Serbian, and so it must have been to Matthew, because you know he talks it and she does telephone to him in it, so that no one can understand, sometimes. I was passing and I noticed that Draga was all in a doo-dah and seemed to keep saying something over and over, as if he couldn’t understand it, and at last she said in English, ‘bursar,’ two or three times, and then she went on and told him a lot more, but as if she was in an awful state about it.”

  “Gwyneth passes—pretty slowly, I gather,” remarked Daphne.

  “I don’t see that there’s anything criminal in it,” said Nina. “Draga was naturally a bit agitated when she heard what had happened, and it doesn’t seem extraordinary that she should ring up Matthew and tell him—not when you consider Draga. He probably didn’t know the Serbian for bursar and so she had to explain it in English.”

  “Well, I think it’s queer,” Gwyneth insisted. “Draga seemed awfully agitated, but at the end she seemed relieved, as if he had told her that it would be all right in some way.”

  “You’re simply letting your imagination run away with you,” said Sally. “When did this happen, as the detectives always ask?”

  “After our interviews. After I had gone upstairs I went down again to see if there was a letter for me. I couldn’t help noticing, because Draga was yaddelling away into the telephone as if it were a matter of life or death.”

  “You know how excitable Draga is, and probably she was asking Matthew if she would be arrested because she had said Burse had insulted her, and she was relieved when he said she wouldn’t. They might do that sort of thing in Yugo-Slavia,” Nina explained.

  “We can make a note of it,” suggested Sally, “in case it does turn out to be at all vital when we find out more about the mystery. But we’ve got to be frightfully careful. Remember what the Cordial said about ‘harmful gossip or sensational press publicity?’ She’s quite right. We don’t want the papers to get hold of anything they can make headlines of. If we find out anything that seems to bring Draga into it, we may have to cover her tracks.”

  “But ought we?” Gwyneth inquired. “After all, if it was murder——”

  “No English jury would understand a Yugo-Slav blood feud,” Sally declared. “Would you like Draga to be hanged? I don’t believe Draga had anything to do with it, but we’ve got to watch our step, not only with outsiders but with everyone in college. Everyone will soon know that we found her and will be asking us all about it, and we’d better say as little as possible. In fact——”

  Sally put a half-eaten crumpet on her plate and went to her bureau, where she wrote a large “ENGAGED” notice, which she pinned to the outside of her door.

  “Now, we’ve got to be systematic,” she announced, with her mouth full of crumpet, having returned to her seat on the hearthrug. “Each of us must take one line of investigation. It’s a good thing to-day’s Friday; we shall have lots of time in the week-end, and my sister will help. In fact, I think you’d all better come and have lunch with her and Basil and me at the Mitre to-morrow; one o’clock.”

  “Won’t your brother-in-law mind all of us barging in directly they arrive?” inquired Daphne.

  “He’ll be charmed. And anyway, this is serious; we can’t waste time. Now, let’s allocate the jobs. The first thing is to find out all about Burse yesterday afternoon. When did she start and who saw her on the river. Gwyneth—no; it means talking to everyone and you’d be sure to say too much.”

  “Bilge!” declared Gwyneth. “I’ll be as discreet as the grave.”

  “Well, all right. You get a line on that. And I think someone had better find out—fr-r-rightfully tactfully—about Draga—what she was doing all afternoon. Nina, can you get that taped? And someone ought to scour the river for clues——”

  “We can’t take any punts or canoes out,” Nina reminded the director of operations. “I don’t see how else you can do any scouring.”

  “You ought to search the banks, as far as you can. You can go through the Parks, and through the fields on the opposite side. You might find something—Burse’s paddles, for instance.”

  “A pretty thin job,” Daphne remarked. “Squishing about in those muddy fields! The police are sure to have found the paddles. Do you want us to measure the footprints and collect all the cigarette-ends and scraps of paper?”

  “You search with an open mind, for anything that might be a clue. It’s a job that needs brains. Daphne, will you cope? And I,” Sally concluded firmly, “am going to investigate Ferry House!”

  “Ferry House!” the others echoed. “But why?”

  “Old Lond might have something to do with it; he had a special feud against Burse—almost like Draga’s blood feud—over the footpath and over something to do with buying that land to build on.”

  “That’s a brilliant idea!” Gwyneth declared. “He’s mad, too. But, Sally, do be careful. He swore at me terribly yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? So he was there then—and may have been there to-day.”

  “I was awfully late for a lekker and my tyre was punctured,” Gwyneth explained. “I don’t really like meeting him and I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. He jumped out from behind a tree and said something about an island in an awful voice; it sounded like a rhyme.”

  “But even if he was there to-day, how could he murder Burse? He’s awfully doddering,” Nina objected.

  “Hired assassins, perhaps,” Daphne suggested.

  “The trouble about this case,” declared Sally, in her best Scotland Yard manner, “is that the people who would certainly have liked to murder Burse, such as Draga and old Lond, don’t seem really capable of doing it.”

  “Don’t you think it might have been an accident after all,” suggested Gwyneth. “Couldn’t she have lain down to read in the canoe—I know it sounds silly, but it’s the sort of thing she might do—and the canoe turned over and drowned her and somehow got right side up again?”

  “You’ve got to bring reason to bear on this problem,” said Daphne. “She’d have kicked herself free and swum.”

  “Besides, didn’t you hear the bobby say that her hat was in the canoe?” Nina pointed out. “Someone must have put it there.”

  Sally announced that it was time for coffee, and went to fill her kettle. Conversation became desultory, ranging over the possibilities of murder, accident and even suicide, but it never touched the inspector’s theory of an undergraduate rag which had turned to tragedy, because undergraduates, in their own eyes, are responsible individuals.

  1 See “Murder Underground,” M. Doriel Hay (Skeffington).

  CHAPTER V

  TRESPASS BY NIGHT

  SALLY’S party broke up early—that is to say at about eleven—since both Gwyneth and Daphne declared that they must do a spot of work before going to bed, if they were to devote the rest of the week-end to detection. Nina lingered and helped to clear away the crockery. Sally’s room was at the south end of the college building and looked across the narrowest part of the garden, towards the boathouse. The shed itself was hidden by trees, but the iron gate leading to the steps could be seen.

  The discussion of the mystery had become rather wearisome, because both the girls had completely exhausted, for the time being, their stock of bright ideas, and it was impossible to discuss anything else. As if to seek inspiration from a survey of the scene of the gruesome discovery, Sally parted the window curtains and put her head through, holding the curtains closed behind her so that the light in her room would not make the darkness impenetrable.

  “Why, it’s cleared up; there’s quite a
bright moon!” she informed Nina. After a pause there was an urgent whisper from behind the curtain. “Nina! Turn out the light and come here!”

  Nina obeyed. “Don’t start seeing ghosts!” she remarked soberly.

  “Sh! Look at the gate; I’ll swear I saw someone climb over it.”

  “Going or coming?” inquired Nina, joining Sally behind the curtain.

  “Coming in. I think it was a man. Look! Can’t you see someone moving in the shadows there, by the lilacs?”

  “One of those bobbies, probably. Daphne said they had brought the canoe up and left it just inside the gate.”

  “Then why should they come back? Besides, they don’t go climbing over gates. Somebody’s come in, I’m sure, to get something or do something to the canoe. Look!”

  “Y-e-e-s; I thought I saw someone then,” Nina admitted.

  “Nina, you must go and put on rubber shoes and hitch up your frock, or take it off; and you’ve got a torch, haven’t you? Be as quick as lightning, and don’t let anyone see you, and meet me near the garden door.”

  “But—” began Nina, faintly protesting.

  “Quick!” urged Sally. “If you’re not there, I’ll go alone.”

  A very few minutes later, Nina arrived on tip-toe at the appointed spot, to find Sally cautiously pushing up the lower sash of a window in the corridor, beside the door leading into the garden. “I wonder they’ve never put bars on this! Rather high, of course, but we’ll get in again all right.”

  “Suppose someone comes along and latches it?”

  “They won’t. That’s it!” Sally was on the window-sill, and quickly disappeared into the night with a heavy thud. Nina followed.

  They crept towards the group of lilacs which hid the boathouse and the shed nearby where paddles and poles were kept. Suddenly Nina gripped Sally’s arm, startling her so that she let out a squeak. They stopped dead.

  “Ass!” hissed Sally under her breath.

  “A light!” whispered Nina. “Didn’t you see? Someone’s there, with a flashlight.”

  They stood silent, trembling with excitement, afraid of the mysterious trespasser and uncertain what to do. They heard a little indefinite sound and then a slight crunch of gravel. It was dark, but seemed to be growing less dark.