As she had no lectures to deliver that morning, she settled the household affairs in Athelstan, and then walked in the direction taken by the young men who had fled from the sound of George’s voice on the previous night. From Athelstan past the bakehouse ran a wide gravel path, which, skirting on one side the garages and on the other the gymnasium, the laundry and the engine-room, passed the Chief Engineer’s house and led into the lane which was bordered by the south wall of the College grounds.
‘Easy enough, madam,’ said George, joining her as she stood looking over the gate. ‘That was the way they came in, and that was the way they went out. Over the top.’
‘Yes. I wonder, George, who and what they were?’
‘Gentlemen from Wattsdown College, three miles over towards Wattsdown Hill, madam. They had a challenge by post from the young ladies, and accepted it.’
‘Ah, yes, of course,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I have to thank you for your timely assistance, George. We had to scatter them somehow. It would never have done for me to have caught one of them. I should have been obliged to report him, and then the fat would have been in the fire.’
‘But I thought you did apprehend one, madam?’
‘No, George, that was one of the young ladies. A very different matter, and one which I can deal with without troubling the Principal.’
The students lunched in their halls of residence at a quarter past one, and during the afternoon there were very few lectures until about half past four. Nobody turned up to interview Mrs Bradley after lunch, so she waited until tea-time and then sent Bella, the head servant, into the dining-room, to request that Miss Morris would favour the Warden with a visit as soon as she had finished her tea.
Not at all to Mrs Bradley’s surprise, a tall, thin, spectacled student responded to the invitation to come in, and stood respectfully awaiting the Warden’s remarks.
‘Miss Morris,’ said Mrs Bradley without preamble, ‘you are a Second-Year Student?’
‘Yes, Warden.’
‘Did you put on a pair of dark-coloured trousers and dance round the bonfire in front of Hall last night?’
‘No, Warden.’
‘Thank you, Miss Morris. Are you the only Miss Morris in Athelstan?’
‘Yes, Warden.’
‘And in College?’
‘There is a Miss Morris in the Second-Year in Bede.’
‘Thank you, Miss Morris.’
‘Anything more, Warden?’
‘No, child. I hope you didn’t hurry over your tea?’
‘Oh, no, not at all, thank you.’
The student retired to collect her books for a lecture, and Mrs Bradley picked up the telephone and established contact with Bede.
‘Athelstan speaking,’ she observed. ‘Have you a student named Morris?’
‘Yes. A Second-Year.’
‘Is she likely to wear trousers and dance around bonfires at eleven o’clock at night?’
‘You’d better ask her,’ replied the voice at the other end of the line. ‘Half a minute, and I’ll ask the Warden of Bede to bung her over. I’m answering the phone under false pretences. I’m only a visitor here. My name’s Topas. I really live at Rule — at Columba. I’m the Sub. Do come over this evening and bring your baby girl.’
‘To Columba?’
‘Yes. But I’ll see you get your Miss Morris. Is it true you had a Walpurgis Night at Athelstan?’
‘You shall know all,’ said Mrs Bradley.
Chapter 5
INTRUSION OF SERPENTS
« ^ »
MISS Morris of Bede proved to be a chubby, ingenuous student with a Midlands accent, and Mrs Bradley acquitted her at the end of her second sentence.
Rightly interpreting the reference to her baby girl, she took Deborah along to Columba Hall after dinner, and received her first impression of, according to Kitty, ‘the live-est wire at Cartaret.’
Miss Topas made the coffee herself, explaining that she always made her own, that the Warden, fortunately, liked it made that way, and that, anyway, they hadn’t a maid in the place who had any ideas beyond boiled water poured on to chicory, and that she had heard they had had a very fine first-night rag at Athelstan. She added that Mrs Bradley was to be congratulated, and that she wished she had been there to see.
In short, she babbled on until the Warden of Columba, a grey-haired, slightly deaf lady of nearly sixty, excused herself on the plea of two references to look up for her divinity lecture next day, and departed.
‘And now,’ said Miss Topas, coming back to the fireside after closing the door behind the Warden, ‘let’s hear all about poor Miss Murchan.’
‘I don’t think there’s much I can tell you,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘The police are going on the assumption that the grandfather of the child is the person responsible for Miss Murchan’s disappearance. He went into a mental hospital after the inquest, you know, but he came out, apparently cured, about midway through last term — actually on the eighth of May.’
‘Still vowing vengeance?’
‘Well, the police don’t claim that’
‘What about the man himself?’
‘He has gone away for a rest and change.’
‘Still, I don’t see how he spirited Miss Murchan away at the end of a College dance.’
‘You don’t? I was hoping I should be able to find some evidence of how that could have been done.’
‘Frightfully difficult. You see, that particular dance is different from the other end-of-term dances, because the students can invite men friends. The result is — or was, last term, as I can testify — that the whole of the College grounds are crawling with couples after about nine o’clock. You sit on them on the benches, you bump into them by the rockeries, and you tread on them on the field. Horribly embarrassing, poor things.’
‘And you think that Miss Murchan, attended by a cavalier, would have excited attention?’
‘Not a doubt of it No man alive could have got Miss Murchan out of the College grounds on such a night without at least two dozen witnesses coming forward to testify to it. Either she left the grounds of her own accord and alone, or else the man had a — what do they call it — a female accomplice.’
‘That is very clear,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘By the way, would you mind giving me a description of Miss Murchan? I’ve seen her photograph at the school she came from, but I never think people look themselves surrounded by thirty children.’
‘Miss Murchan? Well, she was about forty-two or forty-three, I should think. Rather a faded-looking person; fair hair going grey, withered skin, weak mouth, but rather arresting eyes — grey-green and alive-looking, which the rest of her certainly wasn’t. She was very reserved, and not very popular, either with the students or with us. But I was only here one term with her, you know.’
‘Demonstration lesson,’ said Miss Menzies impartially, ‘to Group A.1. on Poetry — capital P, by Miss D. K. St P. Cloud at 11.35 a.m. And very nice, too. Kitty, and thou, Alice, I think this merits our support and close attention.’
‘I’m not going to rag Miss Cloud,’ said Alice, mildly but with determination.
‘And who says otherwise?’ demanded Laura. ‘I say we ought to give Athelstan a good hand. And now, to change the subject to one of even greater importance: who’s got any money for the cakes and ale at break?’
It was eight-fifty on the second Tuesday morning of term. Prayers (optional) were concluded, the Principal, and those lecturers who had elected to uphold her, had left the College hall, and the students who had attended the ten-minute ceremony were on the point of dispersal.
Deborah had attended prayers and had no lectures that morning now that her Demonstration lesson was in view. This Demonstration lesson, wished on her at short notice by the Senior English lecturer who had contracted a severe cold, was, she knew, not sufficiently prepared, and the poem was not one which she herself would have chosen. Since, however, thirty hectographed copies of it, and of the aim, material and method of the lesson, had already been circulated to the students, she had no option but to do the best she could. This, she thought miserably, would be surprisingly below the general standard of the College. She had become aware, as the term got into its stride and the students settled down, that Mrs Bradley’s lectures in psychology and Miss Topas’s lectures in medieval history were always crowded, even by students who had no particular reason for attending them, whereas her own lectures in English literature were attended only by those students who had neither the effontery nor the bad manners to cut them. Her Demonstration lessons, she felt, would be equally uninspiring.