There was a stunned silence. Then Mr. Browning said blankly:
“But—you don’t mean—not the Mrs. Bradley, Headmaster?”
“Why not?” said Mr. Cliffordson coldly. The staff, taking its cue, rose and filed out, but the Headmaster motioned Browning to remain. When the others had gone and the door was shut, Mr. Cliffordson said:
“Mrs. Bradley is coming here to make a study of the school. She is writing a psychological treatise on adolescence, and wishes to make first-hand observations in boys’, girls’, and mixed schools. You understand?”
“I understand,” said young Mr. Browning, meeting the Headmaster’s eye, “that you think Miss Ferris was murdered, and, in view of the fact that the verdict of the coroner’s jury was one of suicide, I don’t consider you are being fair to us, Headmaster, in getting Mrs. Bradley here like this. I wish to tender my resignation.”
“And I refuse to accept it,” said Mr. Cliffordson firmly. He changed his tone.
“My dear boy,” he said, “pause and consider. I do believe Miss Ferris was murdered, but I don’t want the school turned upside down. Mrs. Bradley will decide, quietly, whether I am justified in my conclusions, and then, if I am, some action must be taken. That is all. Last night I was convinced that poor Miss Ferris had drowned herself. Later, I discovered that the waste-pipe was completely stopped up with clay. That struck me as curious. I must beg of you not to communicate these tidings to your colleagues. I hope that I am wrong. Things are quite bad enough. But there are facts which cannot be ignored, and I must face them.”
“Well, Headmaster, I won’t say a word, of course,” said Browning, mollified by the Headmaster’s attitude. “But if you imagine I’m the only one to smell a rat, I think you’ll find you’re wrong. Everyone has heard of Mrs. Bradley. She’s news, as they say in journalistic circles, and…”
“Enough, my boy,” said Mr. Cliffordson. “I have your assurance, then?”
“Oh, I won’t say anything about it,” said the young man. But to himself he said, as he walked back to his room: “I wonder who the devil he suspects? Smith, I expect. That clay in the waste-pipe came out of the Art Room, for a certainty, and she ruined his Psyche. But how on earth did he persuade her to go into the lobby in the first place? And the electric light! Someone had tampered with it so that she would not be found very quickly. Dirty work at the cross-roads, undoubtedly!”
He was so interested that he forbore to remark on a pitched battle that was being waged by the male members of Form Lower Four when he got back to the room they were in, and merely invited them, in magisterial tones, to get to their places and find page twenty-three. But his mind was not on his work, and at least nine boys and quite seventeen girls did their homework openly during what was left of the English period, while their teacher sat and brooded, and the rest of the form passed notes, flicked ink-soaked blotting-paper pellets or played noughts and crosses. At eleven o’clock Mr. Browning dismissed them, and at two minutes past eleven he was being asked in the men’s common-room to bet on which of his colleagues were suspected of the murder. The Headmaster’s ruse of passing Mrs. Bradley off as a member of the staff appeared to have failed completely.
The women’s common-room did not bet on the identity of the murderer, but among some members of the staff, consternation held sway. Miss Freely voiced the general view by observing with a shudder, after Mrs. Bradley’s advent had been discussed by seven people, all talking at once:
“Well, there’s one thing I’m quite sure of! I’m not going to stay a minute after school hours, to please anybody. I’m not going to run any risks! Have any of you heard of hoodoo? Thank goodness it’s only a few weeks until the end of the term!”
At the end of a twelve-minutes’ break the staff had to return to their classes, so that several interrupted conversations had to be resumed at lunch. It was the custom for at least three-quarters of the school to stay for lunch, so that every day four members of the staff, two men and two women, were on duty during the dinner-hour. Those who were not on duty lunched together in the big staff-room. Miss Cliffordson was the first person to tread on dangerous ground.
“You know, she wasn’t a bit the kind of person to commit suicide,” she said, choosing this oblique method of approaching the subject chiefly because it seemed indelicate to talk of murder.
“I don’t agree.” The Physical Training Mistress flushed deeply and spoke with considerable emphasis. “She was just the sort of woman you read about in the ‘Great Trials’ series—you know—morbid and quiet, with all sorts of repressions and complexes. I think it’s the most likely thing in the world that she knew she was going to make a fool of herself in the opera, and she couldn’t face up to it.”
“I can’t think she would have drowned herself,” said the deep voice of the Physics Master. “Not so easy, you know. Demands a tremendous amount of will-power to shove your head into a bowl of water and keep it there until you’re dead.”
“There’s something in that,” agreed the Botany Mistress. “And with a laboratory full of poisons quite handy, it seems a silly thing to attempt—drowning. No; what I think happened was that she felt faint, went for some water, found the light wouldn’t switch on, and collapsed over the basin, which happened to be full of water.”
“H’m!” said Mr. Poole. “Very queer she should collapse over the one basin in twenty which was not only full of water but which had had its waste-pipe carefully plugged with clay so that the water could not possibly run away, wasn’t it? And how do you account for the fact that she was sitting on a chair? ”
“I can account for the chair being in the water-lobby, anyway,” said young Mr. Browning, who had, in fact, done so at the inquest. “Don’t you remember, I had a boy suffer from nose-bleeding in form, and I sent him out there to lean over a basin. I sent another boy with a chair for the fellow to sit down. I can’t find that the chair was ever taken back to the hall, so that accounts for the chair.”
“Well, it’s a funny business, and I for one shan’t be a bit surprised to hear that children are to be withdrawn from the school at the end of term because of it. I heard of one large semi-public school—it was residential, certainly, but I can’t see that that makes any difference— where the Science Master cut his throat, and they lost seventy per cent. of their pupils almost immediately,” said the Senior Geography Master, a mild, bald-headed man in the early forties.
“Look here, do let’s drop the subject,” urged young Browning, fearful lest the Headmaster should suppose he had not kept his promise to refrain from suggesting that murder had been committed at the shcool. “Who’s reffing senior football? Because it is now just turned one-ten.”
“I’m taking netball,” said Miss Camden crossly. Since the loss of the semi-final for the Schools Trophy, netball was a sore point with her. “And you’ll have to ref. junior,” she added, turning to Miss Freely. That amiable young lady went at once to get her whistle, and Miss Camden and Mr. Hampstead followed her down the stairs.