‘It’s decent of you,’ said Connie. She hesitated, flushed, and then added, ‘I only wish I could tell you everything, but you wouldn’t want to know it, and, anyway, it wouldn’t be fair. I’ve got to sweat it out by myself.’
‘No, you haven’t, child. And why wouldn’t it be fair?’
‘It’s too much responsibility,’ said Connie, looking completely miserable. ‘But don’t worry! I’ll get by all right. I mean to.’
‘You haven’t told me the truth about your behaviour, have you?’ said Mrs Bradley. Connie looked at her and then answered:
‘No, not quite. But you can always pump Uncle Edris.’
Mrs Bradley laughed, but Connie did not join in this response. After another silence, she said abruptly:
‘I suppose you’ve never thought of killing a person?’
‘Oh, yes, I have,’ Mrs Bradley equably replied. ‘A harmless person?’
‘No – not exactly harmless. Can anyone we have the urge to kill be considered harmless, do you think?’
‘Oh, you couldn’t understand how I feel!’
‘Oh, yes, I think I can,’ said Mrs Bradley gently. ‘But before I made any definite confessions, I’d think them over if I were you. You might be sorry you’d trusted me, you know. Did you think about finger-prints, I wonder?’
‘Oh, I haven’t done anything terrible! Well, not so very terrible,’ said Connie hastily. She gave a half-glance at Mrs Bradley’s face and then broke down. ‘I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean to! Truly I didn’t mean to! I must have been mad! It was all Uncle Edris! I hate him! You say “Don’t confess,” but you want me to confess, and I will! I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him! I’m going to get rid of him somehow! I won’t let him live to kill Arthur!’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ said Mrs Bradley, looking at her sternly but with compassion. ‘Therefore you’ll do as I say.’
‘And suppose I wont’?’
‘“Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down!”’
‘Yes, I believe you would,’ said Connie, with a look half-beseeching, half-terrified. ‘All right, then, I’ll go.’
‘And now for our walk,’ said Alice. It was barely six o’clock and the morning was pale, fair and misty, with the promise of heat to come. The water-meadows, faintly shrouded, were as beautiful as the fields of the cloths of heaven, and the sound of waters was everywhere. The waters themselves, blue-grey, full-flood, deep-pooled, clear, swirling and haunted with deep weed, furtive fish and the legendary freshness of cresses, divided yet held the landscape.
Mrs Bradley and Alice walked for some time without speaking. Alice, young, slightly inhibited, impressionable, a pace ahead of the older woman, was far more in tune with the beauty and coldness of the morning than with the object of the walk itself, and showed this by her silence and the distance she remained ahead.
By the time they reached the wooden bridge, however, her grey eyes were searching the immediate landscape, and the morning, now rapidly widening to red and gold, showed her eager, alert and intense, still leading Mrs Bradley along the narrowing path towards St Cross, but now the person of action more than of contemplation.
There were no clues to Mr Tidson’s activities of the previous afternoon. Whatever he had done, or wherever he had gone, he seemed to have left no traces of his actions and no sort of signposts to indicate which direction he had taken.
‘It’s no good,’ said Alice. ‘There’s nothing to give him away.’
‘Then we had better stop using our eyes and try using our brains, I suppose,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘How far along here do you know he came? I mean, which is approximately the point at which you last saw him?’
‘Oh, much further back: before you get to the bridge from the College playing-fields.’
‘Right. Let’s get back, then, and start from there.’
‘Good heavens!’ cried Alice. ‘Do you really think so? That is, if I see what you mean!’
‘What has occurred to you, child?’
‘Why, that he could have crossed into the school playing-fields! I didn’t think of looking for him there. Don’t you see? If he’d done that, all he had to do then was to go along the river, still at the edge of the playing-fields, until he got to that little track by which you can leave the playing-fields and get on to the road! That’s what he did, I feel certain! Then he hurried along to St Cross – he could have outdistanced me easily while I searched the river banks to find him – left his fishing rod with those boys to make me think he’d gone into the St Cross grounds, hidden in the entrance to one of the private houses opposite St Cross gatehouse, and gone off to commit a murder or push the boy’s body down the bank, or anything else he pleased, without my knowing a thing! It would have given him plenty of time, and time, I imagine, was the thing of most importance.’
‘There’s something in that,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Good for you! I think there isn’t much doubt that you’ve worked out how he dodged you. There is just one more thing, though, that we ought to look out for, and—’
Alice stood still.
‘Good heavens! Do you see what I see?’ she exclaimed. ‘Do look! The water-nymph!’
Mrs Bradley glanced, stared, looked at the surrounding reeds and willow trees, and then again at the water. A splendid, naked figure, firm, buxom and rosy, had just dived over a great clump of flowering rushes and, entering the water like a spear-thrust, had left nothing but the widening ripples and the half-echo of a splash to convince the watchers that they had not been mistaken.
Alice had clasped her strong and biting fingers on Mrs Bradley’s wrist. She now disengaged them, and, bending low, began to stalk the water-nymph, losing sight of the river in her anxiety to remain unseen.
Left alone, with fifty feet of long, wet grass between herself and the nymph, Mrs Bradley suddenly cackled, and, leaving Alice to her Boy Scout devices, she picked up her skirts and ran, with surprising speed and agility, in the direction of the path which led from the College bridge to the plank and handrail structure which carried the College path across the Itchen. Here she leaned on the rail and had the felicity to find, in the six-foot pool below the bridge, her handsome and graceless secretary.
‘Rather an outsize in grayling or trout,’ said Mrs Bradley.
‘Hullo,’ said Laura. ‘Lucky it was you, and not the bishop or someone!’
‘The bishop might not object,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘but I would not care to answer for the dean. Why do you introduce your handsome, heathen form into the waters sacred to Saint Swithun?’
Laura paddled to the bank and climbed out. She had a piece of green waterweed dripping from the top of her head and a long streak of mud from the bank on one rosy and muscular thigh. It occurred to Mrs Bradley that Mr Tidson might have looked further for his naiad and fared worse.
‘Ah, well,’ she said, observing Laura’s lovely lines with detachment and admiration, ‘“a rainbow and a cuckoo’s song may never come together again; may never come, this side the tomb.” Get into the water again, child. You’ll turn cold.’
Laura squelched in soft mud to the shallows, walked deeper, leaned confidently forward, and gently re-entered the pool. Then she climbed to the rail of the bridge, balanced, first precariously and then with confidence there, drew breath and filled her deep lungs, flattened an already flat belly, soared like the sail of a yacht and took off with the flight of a swallow.
Meanwhile the over-sensitive Alice had abandoned her writhings through mint, forget-me-not, moon-daisies, purple loostrife and fools’ parsley, and now came on to the path and up to the bridge.