Mrs. Bradley locked her door as a precautionary measure, and very soon fell asleep. She had not been asleep for more than half an hour before she was awakened by a sound of shrill squealing which appeared to be directed into the keyhole of her door. At the same time she was aware that a high wind was still shrieking round the house, and she could hear the sullen booming of the sea like gunfire a long way off. She woke completely, put on a dressing-gown enriched with peacock designs and colourings, and shouted through the keyhole:
“Who’s there? What do you want?”
“Fire! Fire!” squealed the unknown. There was a nerve-trying noise of crackling somewhere at hand, but Mrs. Bradley, sniffing, could not smell any smoke. She gripped the hammer, which she had placed underneath her bolster, and flung open the door, prepared for trouble. Nobody but poor Sister Bridget stood outside. She clutched at Mrs. Bradley, gibbering anguishedly. Mrs. Bradley gathered, fairly soon, that she thought her pet mouse was in danger. Mrs. Bradley went with her to her room. The crackling here was now a triumphant roaring. The bed was on fire, and part of the window curtains, as Mrs. Bradley entered, fell in a mass of flame. Mrs. Bradley picked up the bolster which the smouldering fire on the bed had not yet reached, and used it to put out the flames, beating away with the heavy, unwieldy thing as men beat out a prairie fire with branches.
Suddenly there was a squeal of triumph, and in the midst of what looked like hell, with Mrs. Bradley chief devil, danced Sister Bridget. She had the mouse on her arm. She ran to the door, pulled it open and then shut it behind her with a crash, leaving Mrs. Bradley inside. Fortunately the lock did not jam, as Mrs. Bradley half thought it might with this treatment. She picked up the ewer, which was empty, dashed for the bathroom, filled the ewer and, returning, emptied it freely all over the bed. After the third jugful the flames gave up the fight, and she went out to find Sister Bridget. She called her name quietly in case she was in hiding but there was no response, so at last she went back to bed, but lay awake with something nagging at her consciousness. She turned over several times, fretted, racked her brains, but could not account for her own disturbed state of mind. She was too much accustomed to dealing with homicidal patients to allow her nerves to be upset by the hammer-throwing incident, and Sister Bridget, she was certain, had not been hurt in the fire. It was of no use to try to reassure herself, however, so she got up again, lighted the gas, took out her notebook and studied it. Any last doubts which she might have had respecting one aspect, at least, of the affair, had been dispersed by the hammer-throwing incident. She had no doubt that the hammer had been slung directly and deliberately at her head, which must have made a good target, dead black against the light of the solitary candle before which she had been seated to read her little book and look at its pictures. Somebody obviously held the opinion that she was becoming a nuisance, and this fact gave Mrs. Bradley the considerable satisfaction which some American editors experience when people begin to plug at them through the window. She wondered whether, when she told her tale in the morning, Mother Benedict would still refuse to consider the possibility that the child had been murdered. She began to dissect her mind to discover the true cause of her uneasiness, and decided that she was thinking of Sister Bridget.
“Nonsense,” she said, denying the truth of her own diagnosis of her symptoms. “There’s nothing to fear from that source.” She even felt under the bolster for the hammer as soon as she got back to bed.
So her nagging mind let her alone, and she slept at last, but not deeply. When she woke, she discovered that her hand, almost paralysed with cramp, was under the pillow, and that she still had the hammer in her grasp. ( 2 )
The hour of Prime was ordinarily at six-thirty, and the choir-sisters, upon rising, always went straight to the church. The lay-sisters rose about half an hour earlier than the choir-sisters, and did more than an hour’s work before their half-hour of meditation.
Mrs. Bradley was not the only person in the guesthouse who had slept badly. Sister Margaret, whose week on duty it was, had been disturbed, as had everyone else, to some extent, by the storm which had swept on its way south-westward until two o’clock in the morning, but even when it died down she had not settled to sleep. Why this should be she had not the least idea. Her conscience was clear, except for a few uncharitable thoughts about Sister Geneviève, the boarders’ matron, with whom she had never found herself in complete accord since that time last summer when they had had a difference of opinion over some towels torn on the gooseberry bushes where Sister Margaret had spread them out to dry. These uncharitable thoughts she proposed to confess, as usual, to Father Clare, together with one or two other specific but undetailed sins of a venial nature which she customarily added as makeweight in case Father Clare should think her confession lacking in Christian humility, but, beyond all this, which was pure routine, there was nothing, and yet she could not sleep. So she got up and said a few prayers, but even these did not bring her repose, although she found them as comforting as usual. At four o’clock in the morning she was still awake, so she got up, dressed, and very quietly got through most of her Sunday morning’s work. Then she went noiselessly out of the guest-house with the pious intention of cleaning the windows of the metal-work room—a job, as she had noted on the previous afternoon, that badly needed doing, and was usually given to the orphans as a penance.
She did not get far, however, for there was work to do nearer at hand. She picked up the key of the gatehouse from the table in her room, and, holding it in her hand—it was a large, impressive key about five inches long—she walked briskly round the angle of the wall from the guest-house to the convent entry. It was Mother Ambrose’s key, and Mother Ambrose had been vexed at having to lend it, for the key which Sister Margaret should have been able to borrow was the spare one which hung in the Common Room. That key, unaccountably, had not been there when she went to look for it on the Friday. It was seldom that anyone wanted it, and enquiry had failed to elicit the exact last time when it was known to have been hanging on its hook on the chimney-breast, underneath a little metal plaque of St. Anthony.
So, key in hand, and shivering in the raw cold of the early March morning, she came to the convent gate.
But the gate was already open, and not far along the gravelled path lay the sprawling obscenity of a body clad in a thick, long-sleeved nightdress over most of its underclothing. It was the thick black woollen stockings which, for some reason, struck the most disgraceful note, in Sister Margaret’s opinion. Perhaps it was because there was so much of them, for death— if this were death, and it looked exactly like it—is no respecter of persons, and had contrived to make poor Sister Bridget—for she it was, as Sister Margaret could see at half a glance—look not so much dead as completely and shockingly inebriated, and this effect was enhanced by her iron-grey, short, sprouty hair which was matted with dried and clotted blood. The weapon with which her injury had been inflicted was lying on the gravel path beside her, where her assailant had dropped it after striking her on the head. It was a hammer, and there was no doubt of its complicity in the affair, for the end was bloody, and a few grey hairs adhered.
Sister Margaret, innocent of all knowledge of police procedure, picked it up and rubbed the blood-stained end upon the grass. Then she laid it aside very carefully, because it was convent property and the convent was very short of money, and turned her attention to the body.