Death on the Cherwell (British Library Crime Classics)

by Mavis Doriel Hay

  “Of course, of course,” Miss Cordell replied abstractedly. “I will send for her at once. But, of course, she may have gone to a lecture.” After ringing the bell she looked uncertainly at Braydon, wondering if it would be improper to ask for information. He saved her the effort of deciding.

  “I’m afraid I cannot tell you much, Miss Cordell. I believe that I may be on the point of solving the problem, but nothing is yet certain. After I have seen Miss Czernak I propose to go up the river in Miss Denning’s canoe, which has been brought back here for that purpose. I want to make some tests of time and distance.”

  Miss Cordell nodded. A maid answered the bell and received instructions to find Miss Czernak.

  “I shall welcome an end to this dreadful uncertainty,” the principal said, “and yet I almost fear what the solution may be.”

  Braydon was taken aback. “There is nothing further you can tell us, Miss Cordell? Nothing that would help us?”

  “Oh, no, no! I have not the faintest idea what can have happened. I only mean that, try as one can to imagine that the death of my colleague was the result of an accident, one is forced to the conclusion that there is something—something sinister and terrible to be discovered, something that may be even worse than uncertainty.”

  “I am afraid the explanation of an occurrence of this kind is bound to be terrible,” Braydon agreed gravely, feeling profoundly sorry for Miss Cordell.

  There was a knock at the door and Draga appeared.

  “Inspector Braydon wants to speak to you, Draga. Probably you would like to go to the small common-room?” Miss Cordell suggested to Braydon. “Draga, will you show Inspector Braydon the way?”

  He took his leave of Miss Cordell and followed Draga, noting her composed appearance and remembering Sally’s warning that this might suddenly break into storm.

  “I suppose that you have come to ask me to tell you the whole truth, as Mr. Coniston has told me I am to do,” Draga remarked when she was seated opposite to him.

  “We do prefer the truth,” Braydon agreed amiably. “It gives us less trouble. I came to ask you if you can remember at what time you returned to college on Friday afternoon, after visiting Mr. Coniston at Sim’s.”

  “The time!” exclaimed Draga in annoyance. “In England you do everything by the clock! To me that is finally tiresome.”

  “It is rather a bore,” Braydon agreed. “But if you could think of something that would make it certain, it might help us a great deal. What time do you have tea in college?”

  “At a quarter to four the bell rings,” Draga said.

  “Well, do you remember whether you heard the bell ring after you came in on Friday? Did you go to tea?”

  “Yes, I went to tea. I acquire the habit,” Draga admitted with some pride. “Now, I will think. Ah! They were already eating tea when I arrived.”

  “So it was certainly after a quarter to four. Now can you remember how much later it was. Did you hear a clock strike four by any chance? You can hear Sim’s chimes from here, can’t you?”

  “I know!” said Draga suddenly, after a period of meditation. “I came home because it was the time for tea! When I was talking to Mr. Coniston I looked at my little clock and saw that it was a quarter to four. I did not come away at that moment; we talked for a little more; but I came soon after.”

  “Then it would be five minutes past four, or even later, when you got here? Did you walk across Ferry House garden?”

  “Yes; the lane is so long. But I still do not know the time when I arrived here!”

  “Do you walk fast?” Braydon asked.

  Draga looked vague. “How can I tell?”

  “You don’t know how long you take to walk from Sim’s?”

  Draga shook her head hopelessly. “I try to tell you the truth,” she declared, “but that I do not know.”

  “Well, never mind; perhaps you know this. Did you meet anyone on the bridge, or in the lane after the bridge, or on the footpath or between that and your front door?”

  “No, no. I know that, because it was—not dark, but so dim. I was rather frightened of the footpath, because Gwyneth had told me of that terrible old man. I am sure there was no one there.”

  “Now you could help me a great deal if you would walk up to Sim’s this morning and then walk back, just as you did on Friday, and look at your little clock before you start and when you get here and see how long it takes. And I hope you’re not worrying any more about your curse, because really I feel sure it had nothing to do with Miss Denning’s death and I don’t think anyone need know of it.”

  “Thank you,” said Draga gravely. “I will do as you say, and will you come again so that I can tell you?”

  “Yes, I’ll come again,” Braydon promised as he took his leave.

  Braydon next proceeded to the boathouse and found Miss Denning’s canoe, the Faralone, with its two paddles, waiting for him there in the charge of a constable.

  “Will you go up to Norham Road and wait around there for me, near the entrance to the Back End—you know the house? I think you had better bring a car,” Braydon directed the man.

  Braydon got into the canoe, noted the time by his watch, and paddled vigorously upstream. He skirted the west side of the island, passed the fork of the New Lode where the spiky-headed willows overhung the water, continued along the Parks bank and soon sighted the footbridge. As he passed under this he noted the time again. Only ten minutes from the start. He was probably going a little too fast, and certainly his muscular right arm was aching.

  He slowed down slightly and in rather less than a quarter of an hour from the bridge he passed the backwater up which lay Sim’s college boathouse. Braydon carried on, paddling steadily, past Sim’s gardens which border the Cherwell behind tall iron railings, until he came to another backwater on the same side. It was narrow, with reedy shores, but there was a fairly clear passage wide enough for a punt. He swept the canoe round to the left and began to paddle gently through the stagnant, muddy water, looking ahead with a slight frown to where the backwater apparently ended in a hedge. As he came nearer he saw that the channel curved sharply to the left, and when he rounded the corner the channel was clearer.

  He stopped paddling and looked at his watch. It was eighteen minutes since he passed under the bridge and twenty-eight minutes since he started. He plunged the paddle straight down into the water. It struck mud when the blade was little more than fully immersed, and when he drew it up the lower edge was clogged with thick, blackish lumps.

  Braydon surveyed the scene. Directly ahead of him was a substantial boathouse with a sloping landing-stage in front of it, which blocked the end of the backwater. The right bank of the channel had been straightened, cleared of reeds and shored up with stakes. A thick hedge on the bank obscured any view in that direction. The left bank was even more carefully edged with boarding, and beyond it stretched the garden of the Back End. It was a garden thick with shrubs and trees, and roses trained on posts, but above this growth Braydon could see the irregular slopes of the roof and one tall chimney of the house. He stepped out on to the bank, and when the canoe, freed from his weight, rose in the water its gunwale was level with the ground.

  Tying the canoe to a post, he surveyed the bank carefully and then strolled up to the landing-stage and paced across its lower edge, measuring the width of the backwater. About six feet, he reckoned. At the side of the boathouse he found a door, fastened with a padlock which opened easily to one of his skeleton keys.

  Inside it was dark and he drew out a torch and flashed it around. A punt, bottom upwards, filled most of the space. There were cushions, poles, paddles; all the paraphernalia one would expect. He looked for a rug, but found none.

  Some garments hung on a peg on the wall. Braydon took them down and examined them. An old tweed sports coat, out at elbows; a pair of grey flannel trousers, faded and stained and rather muddy at the hems. He looked at them closely and scratched at the mud with his finger-nail. It was quite dry a
nd was of brownish colour. He hung up the trousers on their peg and continued to peer around the boathouse, sweeping the space systematically with the ray of his torch. In a corner he found a pair of thick shoes, scratched and dirty, and evidently long unpolished. There was a good deal of mud on them, but again it was dry and brownish. He carried the shoes out to the side of the backwater, where the Faralone was moored and, kneeling down, he examined the boarding which shored up the bank. There were clots of dry mud there too, but that was blackish, like the stuff that had clogged the blade of his paddle when he had thrust it into the river bed, only paler because it was dry.

  Braydon carried the shoes back to the boathouse and set them down where he had found them. They, and the coat and trousers were just the things a man might keep for messing about with his punt, or in the garden. Apart from the coat, they were just the things that Sally had described as worn by Mr. Mort at the coaching on Friday afternoon.

  There was a cupboard on the opposite side of the boathouse and, opening this, Braydon found the big punt cushions, doubled up. He hauled at their unwieldy bulk and they sprawled out on to the floor. There was something left behind, which seemed to have been stuffed in untidily beneath them. Braydon pulled out another pair of grey flannel trousers, which he spread on the punt and examined carefully by the light of the torch. From the upper part, which was unsoiled, one would judge that they were fairly new and had been well pressed, but from some inches above the knees, downwards, they were smeared with mud of a blackish colour, or grey where it was partly dried. Much of it was still soft and the trousers were damp. He investigated them inch by inch and presently he found what he half expected, a long, fair hair.

  Braydon returned to the cupboard and his ray of light disclosed a pair of shoes. These were clotted, not only outside but inside, with wet, black mud, and the leather was dulled and discoloured and damp with water. Yet apart from the havoc wrought by mud and water, they seemed to have been a better pair of shoes than the first pair he had come across.

  He rolled up the trousers carefully and pondered for a minute. Then he lifted the edge of the punt and pushed shoes and trousers beneath it. He replaced the punt cushions and left the boathouse, shutting the door but not snapping the padlock. After another look at the Faralone where it lay moored in the backwater, and a glance round the deserted garden, Braydon followed the path up to the house and found the front door. A brisk, middle-aged woman answered his ring.

  “Mr. Mort is out,” she told him. “Lectures and so forth. He’ll be home to lunch. Will you leave a message?”

  Braydon looked at her closely. “Do you happen to know if Mr. Mort has lost a rug? Rather an old rug, with a sort of plaid pattern in various shades of brown?” he asked.

  The woman frowned. “There was an old brown rug that Mr. Mort sometimes uses in the punt, but he hasn’t been out on the river lately, not this term, I should think. I haven’t heard that it was lost. Are you from the police, sir?”

  “Yes. Detective-Inspector Braydon. You don’t know if the rug is in the house?”

  “Mr. Mort generally kept it in the boathouse, so’s it would be handy when wanted. Has he reported it lost?” She was evidently puzzled. “If you was to show it to me—” she began, slowly. “But I don’t know; rugs are much alike.”

  “I haven’t got it with me now. Never mind. Please tell Mr. Mort when he comes in that Inspector Braydon called, and that I came by the river.”

  The path from the front door to the gate into Norham Road led near the boathouse, and Braydon secured the shoes and trousers and strolled out into the road. There was the police car, with a constable at the wheel. Braydon deposited his bundle carefully on the floor and got in.

  “Straight back to the station,” he directed.

  CHAPTER XIX

  A MAN GETS FREE

  THE hall of Persephone College, although not forty years old, achieves by means of good proportions, panelled walls, plain, round-arched windows and general simplicity, a certain Augustan dignity. Here, on Monday afternoon, the University coroner conducted the inquest on Myra Denning.

  Miss Cordell found some relief in the fact that, since the university retains the right to conduct its own inquests, this function was a very academic affair, and the police court element, represented by Superintendent Wythe and Detective-Inspector Braydon, was distinctly subdued. The jury, composed of fellows and tutors of the college, the dead woman’s colleagues, under the foremanship of Miss Cordell herself, was sombrely formal in caps and flowing gowns.

  The members of the Lode League sat in a row, in their abbreviated undergraduate gowns and medieval, square black caps. Nina was struck by the fact that although Miss Cordell, as foreman of a jury, ought really to be more official than usual, nevertheless, if you considered her face and movements rather than her academic dress, she appeared in the guise of a human being who could claim sympathy, instead of playing a role which gave one the right to do one’s best to baffle and mislead her.

  “Poor old Cordial!” Nina murmured to Sally. “I really am sorry for her; this has knocked all the stuffing out of her. I believe she must have been fond of Burse!”

  “I’m sure she relied on her a lot,” Sally replied. “And I suppose they are all human, after all.”

  Even the deep distress which Miss Cordell felt did not free her from a rather fussy anxiety as to how her students would conduct themselves on this semi-public occasion. It was some relief to her that a university inquest was dignified and ballasted by a long train of precedent; there were rules of procedure to guide herself and her colleagues. But undergraduates were capable of going to ridiculous extremes either to uphold a tradition or to smash it; you never could tell how it would affect them, but in either case their behaviour was liable to be exaggerated. She had long ago decided that they were more highly developed in the brain than in the heart and had little hope that grief would exercise any repressive influence.

  Sally and Nina and Daphne could be relied upon, she thought; she hoped that Gwyneth would not get excited and squeak in that ridiculous manner of hers. But Draga, whose presence the coroner had insisted upon, was as dangerous as a lighted squib. She was sitting placidly enough beside Nina, but the presence, on her other side, of a dark, ugly man in an undergraduate gown was disturbing. Fortunately a table prevented Miss Cordell from seeing that Matthew Coniston was holding Draga’s hand.

  By one o’clock, an hour before the inquest was due to open, Braydon’s case had still been incomplete in minor details and this gave him an excuse for deciding to let these academic people carry on according to plan and conduct their inquest as a rather unimportant formality, from the police point of view. At the back of Braydon’s mind, too, there was a sense of relief that he was able to spare them from having to give a verdict of murder against one of their own colleagues.

  The inquest opened with evidence of identification given by Pamela in a low voice. Draga was then called and asked to tell how she had seen Miss Denning go down to the boathouse to start on her last journey. Miss Cordell held her breath and gripped the table.

  “From where I sat in the library,” said Draga distinctly, “I observed Miss Denning go across the lawn towards the boathouse with her two paddles, as I have seen her go before. It would appear to be, in England, an ordinary procedure.”

  The coroner, who had been given a lurid account of Draga’s idiosyncrasies, asked no questions. Miss Cordell audibly let out her breath and Miss Steevens, looking anxiously at her principal, observed that she was unwontedly red in the face. The evidence proceeded dully. By means of simple questions the fact that he saw a woman paddling up the river and, later, down again, was extracted from Bayes without any confusing details. The members of the Lode League described with fitting gravity the finding of the body; the superintendent told of his arrival on the scene. Medical evidence was then given.

  “Would you give it as your opinion,” the coroner asked, “that the evidence precludes the possibility of death having been
accidental?”

  “As to that,” Dr. Odell replied, “the death itself might have been caused accidentally. There is nothing to show whether Miss Denning received a deliberate blow, which rendered her unconscious, and was then pushed, or fell, into the water, or whether she fell, by pure accident, into the water and in doing so hit her head. The subsequent removal of the body from the water and packing of it into the canoe indicates, obviously, the presence of some other person. That is all I can say.”

  “Thank you,” said the coroner, and Dr. Odell stepped down.

  “In this grievous and, unfortunately, mysterious affair,” the coroner summed up, “all that we here can decide is the cause of death. We must hope that the police will earnestly pursue their investigations into matters which are now beyond our scope and will lay clear what is now dark. Ladies of the jury, on the medical evidence you should decide that the cause of death was drowning, you may add, if you so decide, that the deceased had first been rendered unconscious by a blow on the head. You must also decide, if you can, whether the blow and the drowning were accidental or were caused by some person or persons unknown. If you are unable to come to any conclusion upon this question, you must return an open verdict.”

  The jury retired to consider their verdict because Miss Cordell felt that it would be undignified for them to remain in their places and whisper together.

  Their discussion was short.

  “We can’t really decide anything,” declared Jean Steevens, the vice-principal, “unless we agree, as the coroner suggested, that Miss Denning must have been drowned whilst unconscious from a blow on the head. That seems reasonable, since we know she was a strong swimmer and unlikely to drown if in full possession of her faculties.”

  They agreed to this, Miss Cordell silently deploring Miss Steevens’s breezy manner.

  “As to the rest,” Miss Steevens continued, “there was obviously someone present who did all he could to conceal what had happened and where it had happened, but I feel that we ought to consider the possibility that the actual happening was accidental. That means an open verdict.”