“Ask girls who attended Ferris night of opera.”
To shorten the message further was to make it unintelligible, she thought. The reply came next morning in the form of a letter.
“I could not explain satisfactorily on a telegraph-form” [Alceste had written]. “I asked in all the forms to-day, and when I had asked in the Fourth Form, my call-boy girl stood up and said that, imagining I was too busy with the opera to be bothered about such matters, she had gone into the auditorium to find Miss Camden when she knew Miss Ferris had injured herself. Miss Camden is always called in when first aid is required, so that it was natural and sensible of the girl to go and find her. Miss Camden went immediately to Miss Ferris’s assistance, the girl going too, and remaining to assist.”
“I wonder whether the girl remained to assist all the time they were in the water-lobby together?” thought Mrs. Bradley. “I wonder how and when that modelling-clay was put into the waste-pipe? I wonder whether Miss Camden went a second time to help Miss Ferris? I wonder how this man Helm comes into the affair? I wonder why, with four perfectly good suspects, all of them with motives, all of them with opportunities, all of them, within limits, capable of committing murder, I trouble myself to try to find a fifth? ”
chapter x: aunt
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Mrs. Bradley had wondered how best to attack the question of Calma Ferris’s death with Calma Ferris’s aunt, but found her path smoothed by the unforeseen fact that the aunt, whose name was Miss Lincallow, had heard of her fame and was prepared not only to welcome her as a distinguished guest, but to open, of her own accord and without any prompting from the black-eyed visitor, the whole subject of what she still regarded as her niece’s suicide.
“But why should she have committed suicide?” Mrs. Bradley asked. Miss Lincallow shook her head.
“Before the inquest I should have said she had fallen and couldn’t face the future,” she observed, “but since the inquest—well, what can you think? It seems she was as virtuous as you or me.”
Mrs. Bradley, who had never regarded herself as particularly virtuous in either a moral or a physical sense, nodded solemnly and assumed the sombre expression of countenance which she imagined might pass for the outward, visible sign of deep intelligence.
“Of course, one never knows,” she said. To Miss Lincallow this apparently meaningless phrase must have conveyed something at once serious and profound, for she nodded in her turn, sighed loudly—almost groaned, in fact—while her greenish eyes turned slowly ceilingwards.
“Poor Calma,” she said. “She had her suspicions of that man at once. She sat opposite him at table the first day of her holiday here, Mrs. Bradley, and at the end of the meal—lunch, I believe it was, but I’m not quite sure— she came to me and said: ‘Auntie, you must please move me away from that sinister middle-aged man.’
“ ‘What sinister middle-aged man, dear?’ I said, all middle-aged men looking alike to me as far as sinister is concerned—you know what I mean: all of them with wives they’ve got tired of—especially when they come and stay in a nice town like Bognor all alone, or any other high-class watering-place, for that matter—‘what sinister middle-aged man, dear? ’ I said.
“When she pointed him out I quite understood. A commercial, Mrs. Bradley, if ever I saw one, and you know what they’re like when they’re away from home! Worse than sailors, I always say, because, after all, sailors are subject to some sort of discipline on board ship if not actually while they are ashore, and also, of course, they do have a chaplain to read the prayers at sea and teach them to be God-fearing on the water, if nowhere else; but commercials! Why, their whole living depends on them telling more lies than anyone else can think of, doesn’t it, now?”
Mrs. Bradley, to whom this aspect of a commercial traveller’s means of livelihood had not previously presented itself, assented meekly, but, without waiting for her hearer’s comment, Miss Lincallow continued:
“And then, that night! Oh, dear! That night! Never shall I forget it! Mind you, I could hardly believe it at the time, and looking back now it all seems a dream. But, burglars or not—although, if I were on my dying oath, nothing whatever was missing from the house or in any of the visitors’ rooms or anywhere—but, burglars or not, as I say, they were in Calma’s room, both poor Calma and that man together. Nefarious, I call it, don’t you?”
Mrs. Bradley, who had never used the word in her life, again assented.
“I didn’t say a word to Calma, mind you,” Calma’s aunt continued. “It wouldn’t have done. There she was, paying almost as much for her room as anyone, and quite old enough to take care of herself, and with her father’s independent character, for all that she seemed somehow so mild. She had a strong nature, Calma had, and if she was set on doing a thing, do it she certainly would. Not headstrong, just determined in a quiet way. Behaved as though you weren’t there, if you know what I mean. You couldn’t domineer over her at all. So I said nothing, and he stayed a good while, longer than a commercial ought to, I should have thought, and I couldn’t find out what he travelled in. And then we heard why. And when we heard why, I asked my lord to leave, quick, sharp!” She sank her voice to a blood-curdling whisper. “Murder, Mrs. Bradley. But acquitted. You remember the George Bryan Cutler case last year?”
Mrs. Bradley recollected a murder trial, at the termination of which a man known as George Bryan Cutler had been found Not Guilty of drowning his wife for her insurance money. She nodded.
“Ah, I thought you would,” said Miss Lincallow. “Well, this Helm is that Cutler, and when I heard that my Miss Sooley here had given that monster the school address where Calma was teaching, I thought the least I could do was to send the poor girl a warning. That Sooley’s a fool. He happened to mention the school, and straight away she tells him that my niece is there.”
“You are referring to the telegram you sent?” said Mrs. Bradley, returning to the warning message.
“That’s right. I sent a telegram, and then I wrote a letter. Why, when you come to think of it, if the poor girl hadn’t committed suicide she might easily have been murdered by that wretch!”
“Where is Mr. Cutler now?” asked Mrs. Bradley, not attempting to cope with the implications of the last of Miss Lincallow’s remarks.
“If you ever heard such boldness, he is in this very town. At least, he’s taken one of those railway-carriage bungalows further along the beach, just out of Bognor. I keep wondering whether the Council ought to know. What do you think?”
“Do you know the name of the bungalow?” asked Mrs. Bradley.
“ ‘Clovelly,’ ” replied Miss Lincallow without hesitation. “But don’t you go anywhere near it. I shouldn’t, really. I believe he’s dangerous.”
For the only surviving relative of the unfortunate Miss Ferris, Miss Lincallow did not appear to be unduly grief-stricken, Mrs. Bradley decided. She retired to her room after lunch, and made a note of the most enlightening points which had occurred to her as a result of the interview. She dismissed as fantastic a notion that Miss Lincallow was relieved rather than otherwise at the thought that her niece was dead, but it recurred so strongly that she sought further opportunity for enlightenment.
“Tell me,” she said to Miss Sooley, who was what might be called Miss Lincallow’s junior partner in the running of the boarding-house, “what do you suppose Miss Lincallow thought when she received the news of her niece’s suicide?”
It was the kind of idiotic question which might evoke answer false or true, or it might evoke no answer at all, Mrs. Bradley reflected, as, fixing her sharp black eyes on Miss Sooley’s round, red countenance, she waited for some kind of response. Miss Sooley looked startled, twisted the black silk apron she wore into a crumpled mess, shook her head, and said that she was sure she did not know. This was a sufficiently promising beginning, from Mrs. Bradley’s point of view, to warrant further research, so, with a basilisk grin intended to be propitiatory but having the result of causing Miss Sooley to retreat two steps and gaze wildly round at the bell-push with the indescribable feeling of one who had stepped on the crocodile in mistake for a log of wood, she continued: