chapter
8
Recalling the Runners
« ^ »
I wonder whether you’d mind if we talked on the field?” said Henry. “I promised a couple of shot-putters an extra go after tea.”
He and Dame Beatrice strolled out into the grounds, but found none of Henry’s athletes.
“Am I to gather that you did not want to talk to me in front of Mr. Medlar?” she asked, glancing round the empty field.
“Well,” said Henry, “Jones, as you know, was Gassie’s brother-in-law and that makes things awkward. One can hardly call Jones a sweep and a reptile in front of a relative, especially as they always seemed to be on excellent terms with one another.”
“Does your opinion of Mr. Jones coincide with that of the rest of the lecturers, then?”
“So far as I know, it does. I don’t think anybody liked him, and one or two detested him.”
“What about the students?”
“He was anything but popular.”
“And from the outset you have never thought that his death was an accident?”
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t, but, for the sake of the College, I hope the coroner’s jury will say that it was. Of course, if the murderer—I don’t flinch from using that word to you, although I shall avoid it most carefully when I’m talking to anyone else, Dame Beatrice—if the chap, as I say, had had the sense to leave Jones’s body lying just where it fell, with the javelin still in place or beside it, I might have other ideas. It’s this stupid business of burying him and the even more stupid business of choosing somewhere as obvious as the long-jump pit, which gives the game away. And then to plant the wrong javelin where it was bound to be discovered by anybody using the indoor baths seems to me to be folly not much short of insanity.”
“Let us look at it another way.”
“Is there another way of looking at it?”
“Suppose somebody else moved the body and buried it and put a javelin in the swimming-bath? Had not that occurred to you? It seems to me quite possible that a death which could have been attributed to a fatal accident, and clearly was meant to appear so, was deliberately and mischievously made to look like murder by somebody who knew what had happened, intended the body to be found very easily, and also intended to indicate that murder had been committed, whether this was really the case or not.”
“It would take a warped mind to conceive of a thing like that, but I’m afraid we’re not short of warped minds in this place. So you think Jones’s death really was an accident, do you?”
“I did not say that, but suppose the person who killed Mr. Jones had left the body where it fell and had not removed the javelin afterwards, would you then have been satisfied that the death was the result of accident?”
Henry thought this over for a moment. Then he replied, “No, I would not.”
“Your reason?”
“I have more than one reason. In the first place, had it been any other member of the College staff, I might have thought that the death was accidental, but Jones, as I’ve said, was very generally disliked by everybody except Gassie. Secondly, there’s the business of this special metal point which somebody must have substituted for the one the manufacturers provided when we bought the javelin in the first place. I don’t like that. Thirdly, I don’t see how any student could have been out on the field at practice all on his own. As I thought I’d made clear, he couldn’t have got hold of a javelin.”
“Of course, we must not lose sight of the fact that, so far, we have no proof of how Mr. Jones was killed, have we? Some other weapon..”
“Even so, my point about the javelin still holds good.”
‘It does not hold good if a member of the staff is implicated.”
“Oh, no, hang it all!” protested Henry. “You don’t really think it was one of us, do you?”
“Well, as you claim, you seem to have shown very clearly that no student could be in unlawful possession of a javelin. Did every member of the staff have a key to that steel-fronted cupboard?”
“I didn’t give James a key to it. There isn’t a spare, and there is no occasion for him to use the cupboard, you see.”
“Miss Celia?”
“Yes, she has a key. There are two or three wrapped-up bricks in there which she uses occasionally for life-saving practice. As Gassie conceives of them as objects of some menace, we keep them locked up.”
“Miss Lesley?”
“Her jumping-ropes, which have weighted ends, are kept in the cupboard. She once threatened to swing one at Jonah’s head, but that’s beside the point now.”
“Mr. Martin?”
“Helps me with the discus, hammer, javelin, and shot, so, of course, he needs a key to get access to the apparatus.”
“Mr. Jerry?”
“Starting guns. An ingenious student could turn them into lethal weapons. In fact, for Jerry’s Webley .38 you need a fire-arms certificate.”
“Miss Yale, of course, is in the same category as you and Mr. Martin, I believe. What about Mr. Barry?”
“The long-jump rakes are kept in the cupboard. Gassie takes simply no chances at all, and I think that is very sensible of him.”
“He himself has a key to the cupboard, I presume?”
“I suppose he’s got a full set of keys to every lock in the College. But I’m sure that, in going into details like this, you are barking up the wrong tree, Dame Beatrice. Whether Jonah’s death was an accident or not, it must have been caused by a student. After all, it was students, by their own confession, who carried him off and locked him away. They kidnapped Jones last Wednesday afternoon somewhere between the hours of two and four. By Thursday midnight Jones had been released or removed. The students say they had planned to set him at liberty, but when they went for him he was no longer there. Hamish and I both know that he was no longer there as early as Thursday night, as a matter of fact, because we went to look for him in the very place where the students say he was hidden away.”
“Has the doctor given his opinion of the approximate time of death?”
“Yes. He gave it to the police. The inspector, when he questioned Gassie and myself, told us that the medical opinion given by our own doctor and the police surgeon, was that Jones had been dead for round about thirty-six hours, give or take two to three hours each way.”
“Thirty-six hours?” said Dame Beatrice. “And at what time this morning did the doctor see the body?‘
“Let me think. Yes, James came to fetch me at just before eight. Breakfast is at eight and I was just about to leave my room and go down to it. The doctor came almost at once.”
“So thirty-six hours before that brings us to eight p.m. on Thursday. Could it possibly be rather later? After dark, perhaps?”
“That sounds very likely to me. It was after midnight on Thursday when James and I went along to the stoke-hole and got no reply from Jones. I see now why we did not. He was already dead.”
“Yes, he must have been. In your opinion—and bearing in mind that the doctors think he might have been dead either longer or less than thirty-six hours, when is the likeliest time…”
“For somebody to murder him? Well, it wasn’t done during Hall, because I always make a spot check at dinner. The best time to commit any unlawful act in this establishment would be at tea-time.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“Tea is a hit-or-miss kind of meal here, and is laid on from four in the afternoon until five-thirty. Any student could miss it and nobody would wonder where he was. Some would stay on the field until perhaps five o’clock, others would go into tea at four and be out again by a quarter past, and so on. Tea is served buffet style in the halls of residence. Chaps just help themselves. The staff and the girls often brew up in their own quarters. All the women students are given their own crockery, so they go down to the kitchen and collect a pot of tea and some cakes and jam and take their tea in their own rooms, with or without their friends. The point I’m making, I hope, is that you couldn’t guarantee where any student would be, or what he would be doing, once the gong goes for tea.”