Kitty, who often acted upon impulse, put down her plate and hurried after her.
‘The footwear,’ she said. ‘How come?’
‘Oh, my slippers?’ said Miss Giggs, looking at a pair of scarlet satin evening shoes in an embarrassed manner and tilting her full plate dangerously. ‘I — well, it was just to rest my feet while I did my Advanced English essay.’
‘Very tasty,’ said Kitty; and, before Miss Giggs knew what had happened, she had left her and was tearing up the front staircase as hard as she could go. She knew Miss Giggs’ room. It was on the same floor as her own. Miss Giggs occupied Number Thirty-three, next to the bathrooms.
Actuated, she stated later to the grinning Laura and the scandalized Alice, by the highest motive of all, that of pure detective fever, she burst into Miss Giggs’ room and dragged open her hat-box. These receptacles were large and square, and were made of wood, forming an extra seat in each study-bedroom. In Miss Giggs’ hat-box was a pair of shoes so sticky that the newspaper on which they had been placed came up with them. The smell given off by the hat-box was undoubtedly that of strong disinfectant.
Kitty knew that it would be some seconds before Miss Giggs, carrying a full plate, could reach the cubicle, so she stole, with her prize, back to the front staircase, and descended to the first floor. She knew that Mrs Bradley and Deborah were both out, so she nipped round the first corner she came to, entered the Warden’s bathroom, and placed the shoes, still on their newspaper, at the far end, underneath the bath. Then she descended the front stairs to the Servery, retrieved her plate, and went pensively into the Common Room. Once there, she ate the food as quickly as she could, did not go back to the Servery for cakes or a cup of tea, but paid a hasty visit to the boxroom.
At about half-past six Alice came back to Athelstan, and a quarter of an hour later Laura arrived. Both were tired; Laura disgruntled.
‘Got a goal; a beauty,’ she began.
‘Offside,’ concluded Alice and Kitty in chorus. Laura grinned.
‘Win?’ inquired Kitty of Alice.
‘Eighteen, three. Good game, though. Better than it sounds,’ Alice replied. ‘Have you enjoyed yourself?’
Kitty seized the opportunity.
‘Is Mathers back in Hall yet?’ she inquired.
‘No. Why?’ inquired Alice; but Laura, who had been acquainted with Kitty for some years, seized her by the sleeve and said: ‘Spill.’
‘Somebody’s been assing about in the boxroom again.’
‘What? Not more clothes chewed up?’
‘Not this time. At least, I don’t think so. I want to get hold of Mathers, though, and tell her to shove up a notice warning people not to go paddling about down there. It’s in the most frightful mess.’
‘Blood?’ asked Laura, rolling her eyes at Alice.
‘No; as a matter of fact it is that creosote stuff the odd man uses for disinfectant. Somebody has kicked a tin of it over, deliberately I should think, and what’s more, I know who, and she doesn’t want it known, so I’ve swiped her shoes as evidence.’
‘Be yourself, dear,’ urged her friend. ‘You befog me. Does she befog you, Alice?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ replied Alice seriously. ‘She means someone’s been assing about again, and this time she knows who it is.’
‘Considering that in the Matric. paper she didn’t know Hamlet was the hero of Hamlet, I doubt that very much indeed,’ retorted Laura. ‘But, come on, K. Don’t leave us agonizing like this. Tell us all. Come on upstairs, anyway. Why are we wasting strength propping up this beastly Common Room?’
‘I can’t tell you anything upstairs, because it’s Giggs,’ returned Kitty. ‘Come closer. I don’t want to shout.’
‘But we ought to find out more about it,’ said Deborah. ‘After all, if it isn’t carelessness it’s some more of this horrible destructiveness, like those clothes belonging to the twins, and I do think we owe it to the innocent students to find out the guilty ones, don’t you?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I want you to come with me to have another look at it, now that they’re all in bed — or, at any rate, upstairs.’
The inmates, as Laura preferred to call herself and her fellow-students, had been duly warned about the state of the boxroom floor, and had been particularly requested by the Warden not to tread the disinfectant about the house. The warning and the request had been observed, and the boxroom was in about the same condition as when Kitty had seen it.
‘And now,’ said Mrs Bradley, stepping delicately, ‘for our most interesting exhibit, which is not, as you seem to imagine, the dark and treacly fluid which is crawling over the floor, but the reason for its egress from the tins.’
The tins were large, green and rectangular. Each had a small handle on top, after the style of those on petrol cans. There were six tins. Each one had a small circular perforation in the middle of one side.
‘Quite deliberately done, you see,’ Mrs Bradley went on. ‘No fumbling; no having several shots, as many people do when they attempt to open a tin; just a neatly-drilled hole expressive of a determined and bold personality.’
‘Expressive of a man, not a woman,’ suggested Deborah.
‘I don’t know. Some of the games-playing young are surely capable of a smack like that on a tin.’
‘Do you think Miss Giggs is our man?’
‘No, child. But it would be interesting to know, all the same, why Miss Giggs, instead of complaining bitterly about the damage done to her shoes, should have gone off and hidden them in her hat-box.’
‘I think one of us ought to interview her. After all, several of the students know about the shoes. We ought to accuse her and let her make an explanation.’
‘Very well, child. Suppose you interview her tomorrow morning immediately after breakfast?’
‘I thought perhaps you’d be the better person.’
‘Yes, I should be. But you are more sympathetic,’ said Mrs Bradley grinning. ‘Well, Oates will have a very pleasant task cleaning up all this mess tomorrow. Come along, child. Time you went to bed.’
Deborah interviewed Miss Giggs in the morning, as Mrs Bradley had suggested. Although in a sense she felt sorry for the friendless girl, she could not shake off a feeling of acute dislike, an unpleasant impression of repulsion, when the student came into her room. She appeared armed with the Book of Common Prayer, Hymns Ancient and Modern, and was wearing gloves and a hat.
‘Oh, I’m going to make you late for Church,’ said Dehorah, apologetically, afflicted immediately by a sensation familiar to her at her last post, that of being, somehow, put in the wrong by a culprit before she could begin an unpleasant interview. It was one of the reasons why she had given up a teaching post.
‘It’s quite all right,’ replied Miss Giggs, ‘It’s about my shoes, of course. Well, I do think the Warden ought to have a rule about people going to other people’s hat-boxes, especially Juniors. I mean to say…’
‘Yes,’ said Deborah, ‘that’s what we’re going to talk about. Now, first…’ The student tried to interrupt, but Deborah held on firmly. ‘Now, first,’ she repeated, ‘let me assure you, Miss Giggs, that the Warden has your grievance in hand, and it and the offender will be dealt with. Please don’t let us refer to that again for a while. What I want to know is what made you put those shoes into your hat-box?’
‘There’s no rule against putting shoes into a hat-box. I kept mine there all last year.’
‘Miss Giggs,’ said Deborah, beginning to feel desperate, ‘more lies behind this than you seem to realize. Your shoes were dirty, weren’t they? You had been in the basement, hadn’t you? Don’t you think it would be best, if you have nothing to hide, to tell me, just straightforwardly, what your idea was?’