“Several,” said Mrs. Bradley concisely. “The first is that the aunt, having warned her niece hurriedly by telegram last Friday week, would probably have followed up the telegram by an explanatory letter.”
“None was produced at the inquest,” said the Headmaster. “And yet it is impossible to suppose that an elderly lady would have deemed a cryptically worded telegram a sufficient deterrent to prevent her niece from entangling herself with an undesirable widower.”
“How was the telegram worded?” inquired Mrs. Bradley. The Headmaster wrinkled his brow, but his excellent memory soon produced the required sequence of words.
“Beware helm widower suspicious circumstances asked school.”
“This afternoon, when school is over, I shall go to Miss Ferris’s lodgings and see what I can discover,” said Mrs. Bradley. “There certainly ought to be a letter to explain that telegram.”
“Go now,” suggested Mr. Cliffordson. “I’ll go and take the class.”
So at five minutes past three Mrs. Bradley, an eyesore to all and sundry in her queer but expensive garments, went briskly through the quiet streets that bordered the school and made her way to the house where Miss Ferris had lodged.
The landlady herself opened the door.
“I understand that you have rooms to let,” said Mrs. Bradley, without preamble.
“Come in,” said the woman. Mrs. Bradley entered the house, a small villa, and was shown into the drawing-room.
“Several people have been after the rooms, but they were all these nosey-parkers who only wanted a thrill out of staying a week or so where a suicide had lived, that’s all. They wouldn’t have been permanent, any of them, and I didn’t see having to tell them all about her, poor woman, which anybody could see with half an eye was all they wanted. But I could do with the money, unfortunately, so if you’ll take the rooms I shall have to ask you not to talk about her to me, that’s all.”
“I see,” said Mrs. Bradley.
“It’s all this talk about suicide that does me down,” the woman continued. “Whatever anybody says, I knew her, and she wasn’t one to commit suicide, no matter what happened, and that I’ll swear. A real Christian woman was Miss Ferris, and well brought up, and it’s a sin and a shame for them to go and pretend she’d drowned herself just because they’re afraid of finding out who did it!”
“Afraid of finding out who did it?” repeated Mrs. Bradley, affecting to misunderstand the implication.
“Well, what else can you think?”
Mrs. Bradley considered the woman. She was flushed and earnest, a smallish, care-worn person, still on the right side of middle-age, but prematurely grey and with a face which had known anxiety and trouble. Mrs. Bradley learned later that she was a widow with one child.
“I think you might be right,” Mrs. Bradley observed. “The Headmaster of the school thinks as you do. He is having the case investigated independently of the police.”
“I don’t take much account of other people’s business as a rule,” the woman continued, “because I haven’t the time nor the curiosity. But I feel ever so sorry about poor Miss Ferris and the things they are saying about her. Why, even that aunt of hers, that came here the day before the inquest, told me some things that I could have turned round and told her weren’t true, only she did genuinely seem upset about it all and I didn’t like to be hard. Miss Ferris was her only niece, you see, and she was dreadfully cut up about her death.”
“What did the aunt think was the cause of Miss Ferris’s suicide?” asked Mrs. Bradley. “You say she believed it was suicide?”
“Oh, she believed it, and ought to be ashamed of herself for harbouring such a wicked thought,” said the woman vehemently. “And a fine tale she told me! According to her—although, take it from me that knew poor Miss Ferris far better than she did, her having lived here just on eight years, and I do miss her, too, for all she was so quiet and nice—it was a lie from beginning to end—according to her, Miss Ferris had had this man Helm in her room one night at the boarding-house, and, thinking they had been discovered, they set up an alarm of burglars. And Miss Ferris’s aunt, if you please, thinks something happened that night between them, and that Miss Ferris couldn’t face the future unmarried. Anyway, rather than have her marry this Helm, she sent her a telegram, which worried poor Miss Ferris dreadfully, and me, too, for neither of us could really make head or tail of it. So Miss Ferris said she should show the Headmaster and ask his advice, which hardly looks like the seventh commandment, does it?”
Mrs. Bradley concurred in this delicately expressed opinion, and then asked whether the telegram had been followed by a letter.
“There was a letter,” the woman admitted. “It came Friday evening, by the nine o’clock post, only nobody was here to take it in, because my little girl and Miss Ferris and me were all at the concert. Of course, I got a shock when Miss Ferris didn’t come on the stage, and more of a shock when she never came home that night, and the police told me she was dead. But there was the letter on the mat, and I put it in her room as usual, and there it is now, I suppose. I’ll go and see.”
She returned in a few moments.
“It had fallen into the hearth and slipped under the front of the fender,” she said. “That’s why nobody found it, I suppose. Here it is, anyway. I don’t suppose it matters much who reads it now everything legal is over.”
The letter was long and rambling, and beyond conveying an impression that the man Helm was a thoroughly undesirable person, gave no more help than the telegram had done. The letter did not give any clue to the whereabouts of Helm, nor any definite reason why Miss Ferris should avoid his society. The aunt had stated vaguely: “Things have come out about him which nobody suspected, but he seemed to me a bold, undesirable fellow,” but she had not committed herself further, except to confess that her partner at the boarding-house had given him Miss Ferris’s school address.
Mrs. Bradley read the letter twice, made a note of the aunt’s address, paid a week’s rent for the rooms and returned in a very thoughtful mood. It was a quarter-past four by the time she reached the school gate, and the junior forms had been dismissed and came past her in groups. One child of about twelve accosted her.
“Please, Mrs. Bradley, was Miss Ferris really murdered?”
Mrs. Bradley smiled in the manner of a well-disposed and kindly boa-constrictor, and poked her small interlocutor in the ribs.
“Go and ask your Headmaster,” she said. But when Moira Malley, the sixth-form girl who had taken part in the opera, stopped her outside the Headmaster’s room and put the same question, Mrs. Bradley was a good deal more interested.
“What is your name?” she asked. And when the girl had told her, she said: “Why, you are one of the people I want to talk to. Can you keep a secret?”
The Irish girl smiled.
“Yes, I think I can,” she answered. She looked pale, Mrs. Bradley thought, but was an attractive creature, with a wide mouth, grey eyes and dark-brown hair.
“Wait downstairs in my form-room—you know which one?—for a quarter of an hour. If I am not with you by that time, come back here and knock for me.”
Moira descended the stairs, and Mrs. Bradley tapped at the Headmaster’s door.
“Nothing to report,” she announced, “but that your opinion is shared by Miss Ferris’s landlady. The landlady knew Miss Ferris for eight years, and is certain that she would never have committed suicide. One other question arises which may be important. Was Miss Ferris pregnant, do you know? Was it suggested that that might have been a reason for her suicide?”