Saint Faith’s Senior Girls’ School lay in a little clearing amid some riverside slums. It was not on the telephone, and Mrs Bradley took it by surprise.
The headmistress was taking a class, and had to be brought out of it to answer Mrs Bradley’s questions. Fortunately Mrs Bradley did not need to keep her very long.
‘A Miss Cornflake?’ she said, looking puzzled. ‘No, we have never had an assistant of that name, I’m sure.’
‘This girl I am trying to trace went to Cartaret Training College last September,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘She may have called herself Flack, or even Paynter-Tree or Tree.’
But this suggestion met with no response from the headmistress.
‘I have only three assistants,’ she said. ‘Their names are Smith, Wakefield and Cotts. They have been with me a number of years now. They are all certificated teachers.’
Mrs Bradley thanked her, apologized for taking up her time, and departed, well satisfied. The darker the horse, she concluded, thinking of Miss Cornflake and her apparently mysterious antecedents, the better. The problem now seemed to be to choose the best time at which to show her hand, confront Miss Cornflake with the evidence, such as it was, and ask her to explain herself.
The holiday, at any rate, was not the right time. She drove back to Athelstan. The motives for the death of the child and of Miss Murchan’s disappearance seemed to be coming to light. The means used to accomplish the child’s death had never been in question. The means used to kill Miss Murchan, if she had been killed, were still obscure, and were likely to remain so until, for one thing, the time, place and fact of the death had been established. Opportunity in both cases was also difficult to show. The child had been killed at the (in the circumstances) extraordinary hour of seven in the evening, or later. Miss Murchan had disappeared during or after the College dance. Had both been decoyed? And by what agency?
Mrs Bradley sat at her desk and unlocked the top long drawer. She drew out her notebook and shook her head at it. There was much to do, much to discover, before this curiously baffling task she had undertaken could come to an end.
She opened the notebook. There was also Cook’s death to be investigated. The police had been persuaded that it was murder. She glanced out over the Cartaret grounds, now becoming misty in the dusk. The College was a pleasant place, on the whole. She wished she could have come there on some more savoury errand. She sighed, affected to make another entry in the notebook and closed the drawer. A curious sixth sense, which she trusted, was informing her that all was not as it should be.
‘Reach for it,’ said a voice.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Mrs Bradley, blessing the sixth sense, not for the first time in her life.
‘You heard! Stick ’em up,’ said the voice. Mrs Bradley turned her head as she put up her hands. There was still that bulge behind one of the long dark curtains.
‘Now pick up that notebook with your right hand and chuck it this way,’ the voice went on. ‘I know you can aim accurately if you want to. Hip it across, and no funny business. You’re covered, and I shan’t miss, mind.’
‘I’m sure you won’t,’ said Mrs Bradley courteously. She was not unaccustomed to homicidal maniacs. ‘But may I suggest, first, that you are mixing up two entirely different American accents, to wit, that of the Bronx with that of Chicago; secondly, that you are superimposing upon the mixture a kind of stage Cockney which — forgive me — you don’t do terribly well, and, thirdly, that even if…’
‘Stow the gab and shoot the loot!’ said the voice. The curtains quivered slightly.
‘Even if, I was about to remark,’ Mrs Bradley continued, in her deep, agreeable voice, ‘I do toss you my notebook, I can’t see that it will benefit you at all, since I am prepared to declare that you will not be able to read a word of my writing.’
‘That’s my funeral,’ said the voice, ‘and I’m getting impatient. Don’t you know who it is that you’re keeping waiting?’
‘Can you really see me through that curtain?’ asked Mrs Bradley. ‘I should scarcely have thought…’
‘Near enough to plug you if you don’t stow the gab and up with the…’
Mrs Bradley suddenly moved faster than could possibly have been expected of an elderly lady. She seized, not her notebook, but a beautiful little bronze which she used as a paper-weight. It represented the shepherd boy David.
‘Down with Goliath,’ she said with an unearthly cackle, as the heavy missile found its mark and she, like a tigress, leapt after it towards the bulge. The bulge fell forward with a crash which shook the room.
‘My own revolver, too. I knew there was something wrong with the look of that drawer,’ she said to the police when they arrived. Her victim, who was seated in an easy chair with bandaged head and an expression of extreme misery due to the most oppressive headache he had ever had in his life, looked dully at her.
‘You will be Mr Princep, no doubt,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘How did your wife know where you would find me?’
Mr Princep refused to answer this question. His head fell back, and he began to moan. Foam appeared at the corner of his mouth.
‘Looks like a loony,’ said the sergeant.
‘His looks, poor man, do not belie him,’ said Mrs Bradley.
Chapter 13
HARLEQUINADE AND YULE LOG
« ^ »
‘You’re going to charge him, ma’am, I suppose?’ said the inspector. They were out of earshot of the patient, who was, at the moment, lying on the settee, with a sergeant and a constable in close attendance, whilst Mrs Bradley had carried off the inspector to Deborah’s sitting-room whilst they had their little chat. ‘Of course, he’s loco, as you know, especially if it turns out he’s the man you think he is.’
‘Well, his wife will be here tomorrow,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘She will identify him fast enough, I should think.’
‘But if she gave him the dope where he would find you, she may be in league with him, and refuse to say she recognizes him. It wouldn’t hold us up for long, but it’s a possibility.’
‘I don’t think it is,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘for the very simple reason that his wife could not possibly have told him that I was here. She has no reason to connect me with Cartaret College, and I doubt, as a matter of fact, whether she knows of such a place. I certainly did not mention it in my conversation with her.’
‘That’s funny, then,’ said the inspector. ‘What could have brought him along?’
‘Not what, but who,’ said Mrs Bradley.
‘Now think carefully, ma’am. Who could have known you were going to stay here tonight?’
‘The whole College, if they were interested. My own students all know, because some of them asked me, and I answered them.’
‘Risking rather a lot, ma’am, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. I’m glad I did risk it, too. What I anticipated would happen has happened much sooner than I expected it would, that’s all. Tomorrow, therefore, I send my nephew a telegram informing him that I am able to spend Christmas in Oxfordshire, after all, instead of by myself, up here.’
‘Do you mean to say you were going to hang on here alone, and wait for that fellow to turn up?’ demanded the inspector.
‘Well, I wanted to see what he was like, and I wanted to know whether he was mad.’
‘Oh, he’s mad all right. Went right off the handle in the coroner’s court, and spent two years in the bin,’ replied the inspector.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘so I seem to have heard, but I’d rather make my own tests. He can’t be moved tonight. You’ll have to leave somebody with him. In the morning he may feel a little better. I shan’t worry him or hurt him, but his mental condition interests me very much indeed.’
‘It’ll interest the judge,’ said the inspector.