“Oh, is this It?” asked Mrs. Bradley, with a show of great interest.
“It is, ma’am. Took me an hour and ten minutes to get all that nasty messy clay out of the waste-pipe, too. What with that and seeing what was wrong with the electric light switch, I had a busy day Sunday, I can tell you.”
“I can imagine it,” returned Mrs. Bradley courteously. “And what was wrong with the electric light switch?”
“Some of them boys had been up to their mischief, I reckon. The switch ’ad worked a bit loose, you see—I was meaning to replace it—and it was easy enough to take it off and put the wiring out of action, and put the whole thing back again. Barring that it hung a bit loose, as I said before, you wouldn’t notice anything wrong, but when you actually went to switch on the light nothing wouldn’t happen, ma’am. See? Them boys do it just for devilment. They done it to all the school switches one Guy Fawkes’s night, and the Headmaster made ’em put ’em all right again. Mr. Pritchard learns ’em all the tricks. He’s real clever at electricity—got the boys in his form to make the school a wireless set—ah, and it’s a beauty, too!—and any of the young devils could have put that switch out of order as easy as look at it.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Bradley. “The switch was not out of order on the Thursday evening, then, when you did your cleaning?”
“ ’Course it wasn’t,” replied the schoolkeeper. “I ’as to have the lights on every night at this time of the year, to do my work, you see. Ah, and I can go further, ma’am. It was all right on the Friday evening, when I cleared up. I didn’t do more than I could help, that Friday evening, as I had to get the hall ready for the concert, but I did happen to come in here, because I remember for why. I does the inks in this lobby and I remembered Mr. Cliffordson asking me about a gallon jar of blue-black that had somehow got mislaid from stock, so I thought I’d just have a deck in here to see if it had got itself mixed up with the ink already in use. I knew it hadn’t, but I’d got to satisfy him with what you might call an official observation and report, and it just happened to occur to me. So I know the switch was all right then, because I used it.”
“I suppose Miss Ferris herself had not tampered with it?” suggested Mrs. Bradley.
“Considering the poor lady didn’t know no more about electricity than to ask me to come and look at her electric iron she used in the sitting-room at her lodgings and tell heir why it wouldn’t heat up, when all the time one of the wires at the plug end had come right out and she’d never noticed it—” said the schoolkeeper.
“Odd,” Mrs. Bradley reflected, as she made her way to her new lodgings without having washed her hands, “that Calma Ferris should have gone into a pitch-dark lobby to wash a cut on her face. I should imagine that she did nothing of the sort. However, we shall see.”
When she arrived at her lodgings she scrutinized the books on Miss Ferris’s little book-shelf, took down the script of The Mikado, was immersed in it when the landlady brought in her tea, and was still immersed in it when the landlady brought in her supper. By the time the woman came in again to clear away, however, Mrs. Bradley had returned the book to the shelf and was playing Patience. She grinned in her saurian fashion at the landlady and asked after her little girl.
The woman was consumed with curiosity, for she had recognized the book which Mrs. Bradley had been studying. Dozens of times had she good-naturedly held it in her hands and prompted Miss Ferris when the latter had been learning the part of “Katisha.” The amount of time Mrs. Bradley had spent in studying the book, and the sight of Mrs. Bradley’s notebook and pencil, and the undecipherable hieroglyphics with which the only page she could see, as she set the table, had been covered, made her very anxious to talk about her late lodger, in spite of the fact that she had told Mrs. Bradley she did not want to discuss Miss Ferris. She took as long as she could over clearing the supper things away, while Mrs. Bradley, black eyes intent on the small cards, appeared to be absorbed in her game and unconscious that such a person as Calma Ferris had ever existed. At last the woman could bear it no longer. Coming back with an unnecessary brush and crumb-tray, she said:
“Have you heard anything more, Mrs. Bradley?”
Mrs. Bradley looked up.
“Yes, a little,” she said. “Tell me. Did Miss Ferris always wear glasses?”
“Blind as a bat without ’em, I think,” the woman answered. “At least, she always had two pairs, and I remember once when one pair was at the optician’s, she mislaid the other pair one day, and quite hurt herself walking into the edge of the chest of drawers in her room, she was that short-sighted.”
“So that even after she had been made up for her part she would still have worn her glasses up to the moment of going on the stage?” said Mrs. Bradley.
“I doubt whether she could see to get on to the stage up the steps at the side without them,” said the woman. “She’d have handed them to someone in the wings, I shouldn’t wonder, ready to put on again as she came off.”
“I see,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Yes. Thank you. I think I’ll go to bed. Breakfast at nine o’clock, please.”
“Why, but that’ll make you late for school, won’t it?” asked the woman.
“I am not teaching at the school to-morrow,” replied Mrs. Bradley. She sighed. There was a boy in the Lower Third Commercial with, she felt certain, all the psychological peculiarities of the Emperor Caligula. She would have liked to study him.
chapter v: interrogation
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For nearly the whole of the next morning Mrs. Bradley was closeted with the Headmaster, and the “engaged” notice was hung on the outside of his study door from nine-fifteen until just after twelve.
“It seems to me,” Mrs. Bradley remarked, “that the evidence in support of the theory that Miss Ferris was murdered in the lobby is sufficiently strong to warrant further investigation, but not sufficiently tangible to offer to the authorities. I have reason to believe”—she took out her notebook—“that, as the result of a collision in the corridor, Miss Ferris had her glasses broken and sustained a small deep cut just beneath one eye. She went into the water-lobby to bathe the cut, and I have not found out yet that anyone went with her.”
“Who collided with her?” the Headmaster demanded. “The way boys rush down these narrow corridors is most dangerous.”
“It does not seem to have been a boy,” replied Mrs. Bradley. “It was Mr. Smith.”
“Smith?” The Headmaster looked astounded. “Surely not! Why, this is serious!”
Mrs. Bradley did not ask why. She fixed her twinkling black eyes on those of the Headmaster and waited for enlightenment. After a moment or two, it came.
“You remember, perhaps,” said Mr. Cliffordson, “the clay which was effectually stopping up the waste-pipe so that Miss Ferris’s head was still immersed in water when she was discovered dead?”
Mrs. Bradley looked intelligent, and nodded.
“That clay, it was established at the inquest, came from the art-room. Smith is the Senior Art Master. Furthermore, modelling clay was used, I believe, as part of his facial make-up.”
“Where is the art-room?” asked Mrs. Bradley, who had not been in the school long enough to have learned all the ramifications of its ground-floor plan.
“Almost opposite the prompt side of the stage.”
He drew a rough sketch on his blotting-pad, and Mrs. Bradley nodded.
“So that anybody who knew there was a lump of modelling clay in the art-room could have slipped in and taken enough to stop up that waste-pipe,” she said. “Cheer up, child! Mr. Smith isn’t hanged yet.” She cackled. “This brings me to a particularly important point,” she went on. “How many people were in a position to go into the art-room and/or into the water-lobby that night? Who was allowed behind the scenes—that is to say, apart from those people who were taking part in the opera?”