Mrs Bradley sketched and scribbled, took out a lens and made a detailed inspection of the hearth, and then sent the students back to College, for it was ten minutes to four, and she was afraid they would miss their tea. Reluctant but obedient, off went Laura. Kitty showed more alacrity. Mrs Bradley, left alone, explored the quarry indefatigably for footprints, and for traces of ingress and egress. The crumbling banks assisting her, she discovered, besides the traces left by herself and the two girls, tracks in several places, but these might have been made at any time and by anybody, for the frequent winter rains had washed out all individuality, and no actual footprints could be detected. She did, however, mark on her sketches the new landslide which marked that part of the bank which she and the students had used. Then she scrambled up it again and went off to the farm to ask permission to use the telephone.
She had other inquiries to make.
‘Where,’ she asked, ‘was it possible to purchase bricks like those she had found in the quarry?’
The answer to this question was a broad stare from the woman who had answered the door, and a request to wait a minute.
Standing in the stone-flagged hall beside the grandfather clock, Mrs Bradley waited. In less than two minutes the woman came back, accompanied by a boy of about fifteen.
‘Tell the lady about Mr Tegg’s bricks,’ said the woman. ‘Her wants to know where to buy some like those her’ve seen in the quarry.’
‘I suppose the police have sent you?’ said the boy.
‘The lady’s just been on phone to ’em, any road,’ said the woman. ‘I told thee, and so did Father, there’d be more to say about they bricks. Now perhaps thee’ll believe us as is older than thyself.’
‘Leave me alone with him,’ said Mrs Bradley. The woman hesitated, and then added, still speaking to the boy, but this time in a tone between apology and anger:
‘Thee’s brought this on thyself, and mun face it out best thee can.’
‘I can take it,’ muttered the boy, shifting his feet, lowering his eyes and giving all the other signs of obstinacy in wrong-doing common to boys in trouble.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Mrs Bradley, taking out her notebook. The boy was silent. ‘Afraid to give his name,’ she added as though saying the words she was writing. The boy looked up.
‘I’m not afraid to give my name. My name’s William Turley, if you want to know. And I did steal the rotten bricks, but it was to oblige a lady. Yes, and I did build a fireplace for her, and I fetched water for her from the beck, and I helped her down with it so that it shouldn’t all get spilt. Let the police get a load of that, if it means anything to them!’
‘Dear me!’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Can you describe the lady?’
‘No. And I wouldn’t, anyway. I don’t get other people into trouble.’
‘Good. So if I told you she was fairly young, dark, active as a cat, sharp-voiced and had a car, you would contradict me, I suppose?’
The boy did not answer, but put his hands in his pockets.
‘And now,’ went on Mrs Bradley, after she had scribbled a few more hieroglyphics, ‘what did Mr Tegg have to say about the bricks?’
‘Nothing, except that they’d been stolen.’
‘How did he trace them to you?’
‘Dad saw them in the quarry. I got mud on my Sunday clothes, and they wanted to know how. I didn’t say, because I ought to have been in church, and I hadn’t been, and Dad recognized the kind of mud, I suppose, and he told Mr Tegg he needn’t look for his missing bricks, and asked him to let the police know I’d had them. That’s all.’
‘Very interesting, too,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘What did Mr Tegg say to that?’
‘I went to him privately and asked for time to pay, but he said he’d promised my father to let the police lay me by the heels.’
‘And now you think they have, do you? My view is that your father paid Mr Tegg long ago. What makes your parents want to frighten you?’
‘No business of yours.’
‘You don’t speak like the boys about here.’
‘I’ve been to a decent school, that’s why. I got sacked.’
‘For thieving?’
‘Yes, if you want to know.’
‘Well, William, thank you very much for your information. I suppose you can’t remember the date when you built the fireplace for the lady?’
‘I might, but not for you.’
‘Oh, that means last summer, then.’ She wrote again. ‘Where were you at school?’
‘London.’
‘Really? That seems a good way to go.’
‘Lived with my aunt and uncle.’
‘And liked it, I know. Pity you messed up your chances, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t want that from you.’
‘No, I can tell that. How did it happen, William?’
‘Foreign stamps.’
‘Oh, yes. Wouldn’t they have kept you if you’d made restitution? Or did you sell the stamps?’
‘No, I didn’t sell them.’
‘I see. There were others in it.’
‘I didn’t say so, any more than I said you were right about the lady.’
‘You have said so now. Well, good-bye William. I’m afraid the police will come, but not about the bricks as such. I should answer their questions, if I were you. Where is your stamp collection now?’
‘Burnt it.’
‘You did?’
‘Dad did. I don’t blame him for that.’
A curious and interesting household, thought Mrs Bradley, returning to the College, not by the footpaths and fields, but by the motor roads which a murderer burdened with a corpse would have had to take in order to arrive at the quarry. She reached the lane which ran past the wall of the College grounds at a quarter past five, stopped to speak to the Chief Engineer as she passed his house and met him coming out of it, and then encountered Kitty and Laura.
‘Did you get any tea?’ she inquired.
‘We only scraped in at the death, but managed to grab a couple of cups and some rolls. Oh, and Kitty spotted an old zinc bath in another quarry, but we didn’t stop,’ responded Laura. ‘Did you have any luck at the farm, Warden?’
‘Yes. More than I expected. The son, a boy of fifteen, helped build the brick fireplace. Of course, it is most likely that the person he assisted is not the person we are after, but some investigation is called for, and I have asked the police to undertake it.’
‘And the receptacle thing you wanted to find?’
‘No sign of anything of the sort, but it may have been your bath. If it can be found, the police will find it, but not yet, because I haven’t mentioned it.’
‘What is this receptacle thing you both talk about? Not really that bath?’ inquired Kitty, as the two students walked over to College for a late lecture in English.
‘No; the pot thing, whatever it was, that the murderer used to boil the flesh off the bones, I think,’ answered Laura. Fortunately for her own peace of mind, Kitty, who had never heard of the unsavoury details of the behaviour of certain murderers confronted by the bodies of their victims, did not believe what she said, and merely murmured reproachfully: ‘Oh, Dog, don’t say such beastly things.’
It was just as they reached the steps that Laura, lingering a moment to tie up her shoe-lace, spotted an unfamiliar car coming slowly along the back drive. But for their recent activities in the quarries, she would have thought nothing of it.
Alice, who was in their group for English, was already in her place in the lecture room, and had kept two front row seats.
‘Why front row, chump?’ grumbled Kitty, seating herself, and looking round for Laura.
‘Because it’s the Deb.,’ replied Alice.
‘And Alice can’t bear anybody else’s fat head to come between them,’ jeered Laura, joining them. There was a fair amount of noise in the room, into which, looking, as usual, thoroughly frightened (in Mrs Bradley’s view) or ‘damned superior’ (in the words and view of Miss Cartwright, who, however, approved of this attitude), came Deborah, carrying her lecture notes, a large Shakespeare with dozens of little bits of paper marking her references, the Group Roll (which she called, on principle, at late lectures because people, she thought, were disposed to cut them), and an ‘acting copy’ of Richard of Bordeaux, a play which she was going to suggest to the First-Years that they should produce in the summer.