Strong-minded persons in authority can ordinarily grapple with practical problems of facts. Facts, no matter how outrageous, can be dealt with by other facts. The problems of mood and atmosphere known to the Press as ‘Situations’ are infinitely more sinister. A ‘situation’ cannot be pigeonholed for reference and the appropriate answer pulled out of a filing cabinet. An atmosphere can be generated overnight out of nothing or everything, anywhere that human beings are congregated in unnatural conditions. At the Court of Versailles, at Pentridge Gaol, at a select College for Young Ladies where the miasma of hidden fears deepened and darkened with every hour.
Waking next morning from uneasy sleep, the Headmistress could feel its pressure on a head already heavy under a hedgehog assortment of steel curling pins. In the dragging hours between midnight and dawn she had resolved, not without certain misgivings, on a change of policy: a mild relaxation of discipline and variation of the daily scene. To this end, the boarders’ sitting-room was hastily re-papered in a ghastly shade of strawberry pink, and a grand piano was installed in the long drawing-room. The Reverend Lawrence and his wife were invited to drive out one evening from the Vicarage at Woodend with lantern slides of the Holy Land to be shown in the drawing-room, where Mr Whitehead’s choicest hydrangeas were banked up in the fireplaces and coffee, sandwiches and fruit salad were served by the maids in long-tailed caps and frilled aprons. The whole thing presented the perfect picture of a fashionable boarding school at the height of material prosperity and educational well-being. Yet little Mrs Lawrence drove away with a migraine, unaccountably depressed. In vain were the senior girls sent into Bendigo by train with a governess to witness a matinée of The Mikado. They returned if anything in lower spirits: people in the audience had stared and whispered as they took their seats in the front row. They felt themselves a part of the spectacle – the cast of the College Mystery – and were thankful to climb into the waiting wagonettes.
Conscious of a tactical blunder, the Headmistress decided on other and harsher means; a tighter rein on the always too talkative staff and enforcement of the rule forbidding confidential chattering of groups unattended by a governess. Henceforth the daily crocodile of girls in their summer uniforms and ugly straw hats wound its way two and two along the Bendigo high road in the prescribed and grudging silence of a female chain gang.
Easter was approaching and with it the end of the term. Already the summer flowers were fading and one morning splashes of gold appeared amongst the willows fringing the creek behind the house. The garden held no autumn delights for the Headmistress to whom well kept beds and lawns were no more than a symbol of prestige. Neatness was all – and a continuous array of showy blooms to be admired beyond the stone walls by passers-by on the high road. The leaves fluttering down from the little tree outside her study window were an unnecessary reminder of the passing of time. It was now nearly a month since the day of the picnic. Mrs Appleyard had lately spent a few days in Melbourne, largely at police headquarters in Russell Street. Here the first thing to catch an eye continually on the alert was a notice pinned on an official board: MISSING. PRESUMED DEAD above a detailed description and three extremely bad photographs of Miranda, Marion and Greta McCraw. The word DEAD leaped obscenely from the printed page. Yes, it was possible, but highly unlikely, said the Senior Detective with whom she was closeted for two hours in a stuffy room, that the girls had been abducted, lured away, robbed – or worse. ‘And what,’ asked the Headmistress, tightlipped and clammy with fear and the insufferable heat of the room, ‘could be worse, may I ask, than that?’ It appeared that they might yet be found in a Sydney brotheclass="underline" such things happened now and then in Sydney when girls of respectable background disappeared without a trace. Not often in Melbourne. Mrs Appleyard could only shudder. ‘They were exceptionally intelligent and well-behaved girls who would never have allowed any familiarity from strangers.’
‘As far as that goes,’ said the detective blandly, ‘most young girls would object to being raped bya drunken seaman, if that’s what you have in mind.’
‘I did not have it in mind. My knowledge of such things is necessarily limited.’ The detective drummed squat tobacco-stained fingers on the top of his desk. These perfect ladies were the Devil. Dirty minded as they come, he wouldn’t mind betting. Aloud he said mildly, ‘Exactly. Most unlikely under the circumstances. However, we policemen have to consider every possible avenue in a case of this kind where not a single clue has come to light since the day it was reported. February the fourteenth, if I remember without looking it up.’
‘That is so. Saint Valentine’s Day.’
For a moment he wondered if the old girl was going off her head. Her face was an unpleasant mottled red. He didn’t want her fainting on him and rose, declaring the abortive interview at an end. For Mrs Appleyard, staggering out into the glaring heat of the street, the interview was over, but the nightmare remained and would not be exorcised by a sleeping pill, nor a glass or two of brandy at her city hotel.
Back at the College, a series of setbacks and disturbing happenings had been accumulating. During her absence a father had called with a seemingly reasonable excuse for taking his daughter away with him then and there. Without the support of Greta McCraw, who in times of crisis could be unexpectedly shrewd, even practical, Mademoiselle had felt obliged to comply, and Miss Lumley was requested to arrange for the packing and despatch of Muriel’s boxes to Melbourne. Worse still, the French Governess had handed in her resignation, ‘on account of my approaching marriage to M. Louis Montpelier, shortly after Easter,’ as soon as Mrs Appleyard had taken off her hat in the hall. The Headmistress knew a lady when she saw one, and Mademoiselle de Poitiers was definitely a social assec on the staff, not to be easily replaced. Miss McCraw’s position had already been filled by a breezy young graduate with prominent teeth and the unhappy name of Buck, to whom the boarders had taken an instant dislike. Greta McCraw for all her impersonal barking had never been known to bite an individual wrong-doer.
There was a pile of correspondence on Mrs Appleyard’s desk this evening, which had to be read through, weary as she was, before she could allow herself to go to bed. Thank Heaven, nothing with a Queensland postmark! First to be opened was a request from a South Australian mother, that her daughter ‘for urgent family reasons’ be sent home immediately on the Adelaide Express. The girl’s people were well off, highly respected citizens. What irresponsible talk had they been listening to, smug in their suburban mansion? Family reasons! Pah! She took the brandy bottle from the cupboard and had opened two more letters before noticing Mr Leopold’s telegram at the bottom of the pile. Sent a few days ago, from some God-forsaken address in Bengal, the peremptory wording was utterly unlike the usual extravagant Leopold technique. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS MY DAUGHTER TO RETURN TO APPLEYARD COLLEGE. LETTER FOLLOWS. To lose in such a manner her richest and most admired pupil made her feel physically faint, almost sick. The implications of this new catastrophe were dangerous and unending. Only a few weeks ago the Headmistress had been telling the Bishop’s wife: ‘Irma Leopold is such a charming girl. Worth half a million when she turns twenty-one, so I understand . . . her mother was a Rothschild, you know.’ Two enormous bills from butcher and grocer completed the day’s tally of woe.