‘Nobody likes me here,’ began Miss Giggs.
‘I don’t think that can be true. But go on.’
‘I got my shoes all messed up, and I thought it was one of their senseless practical jokes. It’s nothing but silly ragging, and I don’t see we’re here to rag. I want to work, and I don’t see why a lot of jealousy should upset it’
‘Neither do I,’ said Deborah uncomfortably. ‘But it wasn’t — it couldn’t have been — directed at you, don’t you see? It was all over that part of the floor. Anybody might have trodden in it. It couldn’t have been — have been specially meant.’
‘I don’t see that. They know I always stay in and work on a Saturday afternoon. And they know I keep — well — biscuits in my trunk. And because I don’t hand them round, I suppose they don’t like it. But my father can’t afford biscuits for everybody. He sends them to me — he can’t afford that, really — but he wants me to keep up my strength. You see, when I leave College and get a job, he’ll be able to give up his job. We’ve got it all planned out. I’m going to have a little country school — you can get those when you first leave College — and he’ll do a bit in the garden, and I shall help him, and…’
She broke off, looked vaguely at Deborah, and then added:
‘Does the Warden think I spilt the paint?’
‘No, she doesn’t. She knows you didn’t, and she wanted to give you a chance to make your explanation about the shoes before she speaks to the rest of the students. I feel that you have made your explanation, Miss Giggs, and, if I were you, I shouldn’t think about the ragging and the jealousy. I should just be as nice to the others as I could, and go on working, and — and thinking about the future.’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Giggs, as she blew her nose, ‘that’s all very well, Miss Cloud, but if it wasn’t intended for me, why should somebody have run up the back stairs just in front of me? If I hadn’t stopped to take my shoes off, I should have seen who it was.’
‘Oh, dear! Have you any idea?’
‘No. I sort of felt it was someone I’d seen before, but whoever it was had on quite a long dress, I saw it swish round the bend of the stairs as she ran.’
‘A lie,’ thought Deborah, grimacing as the door closed behind the student’s back.
‘She didn’t do it,’ she said to Mrs Bradley, after she had detailed the conversation. Mrs Bradley grinned, but offered no other comment. She touched the bell, and Lulu appeared.
‘Ask Miss Trevelyan to come and see me,’ said Mrs Bradley; adding, when Lulu had gone, ‘You’d better sit in on this. We must look horribly official.’
‘Oh, dear!’ said Deborah, who was very much attached to Kitty. ‘You’re going to chew her up.’
‘Duty must be our watchword,’ said Mrs Bradley, with a fiendish, anticipatory grin. Kitty entered nervously.
‘Warden?’ she said.
‘And Sub-Warden,’ said Mrs Bradley, indicating Deborah, who was sitting on the very edge of a chair and was looking thoroughly scared.
‘How do?’ said Kitty, clearing her throat. At this Deborah had a sudden desire to giggle, and, to conquer it, she reverted to the formula of her youth, that of thinking about her dead grandmother whom, incidentally, she could not remember at all clearly.
‘Miss Trevelyan,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘you had better sit down.’
‘Yes, Warden.’
‘Now, Miss Trevelyan, what have you to say for yourself?’
‘I — I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Don’t you try those schoolgirl gambits on me! ’ said Mrs Bradley, more bolt-upright than before. ‘Search your conscience, Miss Trevelyan, search your conscience! When you have done so, excuse yourself if you can.’
‘Oh — breaking and entering,’ said Kitty, giving way at once in this battle of nerves. ‘Yes, I — I did do that. It seemed sort of necessary at the time.’
‘And now?’
‘Well, I can see why I did it’
‘So can I,’ said Mrs Bradley deliberately. ‘You were actuated by what, for want of more original wording, I can only call sheer, vulgar, spiteful curiosity.’
‘Oh, no, Warden!’ wailed Kitty, stung to the quick by this uncompromising view of her detective faculties.
‘How dare you enter another student’s room without her permission?’
‘Oo, Warden!’
‘I say nothing about prying,and probing into her private affairs…’
‘Oh, I say!’
‘Abstracting her property…’
‘Oo, but…’
‘As to the hiding-place you chose in order to get rid of the evidence of your crime…’
‘Oh, I object to crime, Warden! No, honestly, I do call that a bit thick, I mean! No, really, dash it, Warden, I say!’
‘What exactly did you think you were doing?’ concluded Mrs Bradley mildly. Kitty looked at her, gulped, and then grinned.
‘I knew you were kidding,’ she said. At this ingenuous statement Deborah broke into a sudden squeal of laughter. Mrs Bradley stared at her disapprovingly, with a look which Deborah, with an absurd little shiver of anticipation, translated as ‘I will deal with you later.’ All that Mrs Bradley said was: ‘Come on, Miss Trevelyan. If you can give me any sort of reasonable explanation, I am prepared to overlook your really outrageous conduct.’
‘O.K., Warden. Well, you see, it began with that string. I knew, and Dog knew — I don’t know about Alice — that when you came in and busted us that first night, you knew we jolly well didn’t know anything about it. Well, Dog put two and two together, as you know she’s fairly well given to do…’
‘Yes. I do not underrate Miss Menzies’ intelligence,’ Mrs Bradley admitted.
‘Good old Dog. Well, she said if we hadn’t done it, who had? Because you’d hardly put that kind of thing down to the servants, and as for suspecting the senior student — well, that’s all rot, whatever you may say.’
‘I have never suspected the senior student, Miss Trevelyan, of tying pieces of string across doorways.’
‘No, of course not. Well, then, who are we left with? The lecturers, etc.,’ concluded Kitty dramatically. ‘So Dog said: “How about some silly — some lecturer who’d hoped to be made Warden of Athelstan, and hadn’t clicked?” Some women are very funny, you know.’
‘Yes, I had noticed it,’ Mrs Bradley drily agreed. ‘Go on, Miss Trevelyan, please.’
‘Well, then, the — er — the What-Names, all piled up during the Second-Year rag… Remember?’
‘Perfectly, Miss Trevelyan.’
‘Well, that was another case of Oo-dun-it. Or was it?’
‘It most certainly was, if I understand your idiom correctly.’
‘So said all of us. Well, there’s one thing I can tell you, Warden. It’s this: those What-Names were abstracted before dinner. I know, because we’d investigated ours, and — er — ’
‘Yes. I seem to remember an impromptu game of Rugby football,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘in which one of the promiscuous vessels figured as the ball. Am I right or wrong in supposing that Miss Menzies scored a try with her vessel at the top of the students’ staircase?’
‘Perfectly right, but — well, anyhow, I can swear to it they were there at five-fifty-five, pip emma. And nobody came into any of our three study-bedrooms while the Second-Year rag was in progress. That means those things were sneaked out of the rooms just before dinner. Was anybody absent from dinner?’
‘No, child. I am prepared to swear to that, and so is Miss Cloud.’
‘Me, too. Miss Mathers came round with a Hall list, and ticked off all the names. Well, what are we back to, again? The Staff. Q.E.D.’
‘Or some outside person or a servant. It’s not a very good point, Miss Trevelyan. All the same I can’t see why you suspected poor Miss Giggs.’
‘Oh, well, that was kind of by the way,’ said Kitty. ‘But, Warden, you remember the snakes? You do, anyway, Miss Cloud. You know, the snakes in Miss Harbottle’s Dem.’