Death at St. Asprey’s School (2 page)

Young Mayring had gone as usual to the stable after breakfast and found that his pet's throat had been cut and the puppy was lying dead in a pool of blood. A more experienced Man would have kept knowledge of this from the Boys, but Mayring was so badly shaken by his discovery, so furiously angry and so heartbroken that he confided in the first persons he met who happened to be Richardson and Plumber, two twelve-year-olds. Before morning school began there was not a pupil at St. Asprey's unaware that Mr. Mayring's dog had been foully murdered, and gory details ran from mouth-to-mouth.

It was the pool of blood that seemed to appeal to the common imagination and Mrs. Sconer lost her head a little when she heard of it.

“It's ruin,” she said to her husband. “With Sports Day next week.”

Not the Hartnell dress in which she had invested for the occasion, not all her crocodile charm with the parents would pacify their anxieties when they heard from their sons of the blood lust and horror abroad in the school. “You should never have engaged Mayring and certainly never allowed him to import livestock.”

“My dear, I was scarcely to know…”

“I have warned you, Cosmo. Perhaps now you will give Sime notice.”

“But what has Sime to do with this?”

“That is for you to find out. I am convinced he is in some way responsible.”

“It seems to me like the work of a maniac.”

“It is. And how do you know that it is not that of a homicidal one?”

“My dear … a dog…”

“The species is no proof. Next time it may be far worse.”

“Really, Muriel. You speak as though we had to anticipate murder in the school.”

“I should not be in the least surprised. Perhaps then you will realize that my advice should have been taken months ago.”

“But
murder
…”

“It's no use your repeating the word, Cosmo. Matron believes her tea was tampered with the other day. She has her suspicions that someone it trying to poison her.”

Mr. Sconer may inwardly have been crying ‘good luck to him!' but his face continued to be sad and anxious.

“She must surely be exaggerating,” he said. ‘Matron says' was not his favourite phrase when it was spoken by his wife.

“She is a shrewd and competent person. I am thankful to have someone I can rely on in the school.”

In the common-room that day not much was said, though at first there was sympathy for Mayring. His threats, however, of what he would do to his dog's assassin if he found him grew tiresome as the day went on and received no encouragement from the other Men who remained sullen and taut, resolving to lock their doors that night.

Richard Duckmore, the fourth of the five assistant
masters, who was always a highly-strung individual, showed signs of overstrain. His hands were unsteady and the twitch which always afflicted him grew more noticeable.

Two nights later the school was again aroused by piercing screams, this time from Matron herself. Mrs. Sconer hurried to her room and found her ally gibbering with disgust and horror as she pointed to her turned-back bed on which a dead rat was incongruously lying.

“I put my foot on it!” she yelled, her eyes staring wildly at the headmaster's wife.

“Some idiotic joke,” suggested Mrs. Sconer.

“Joke! You call that a joke? I shall never be able to get into bed again. I could feel the fur!” went on Matron hysterically.

“Most unpleasant. Whoever did this shall be punished—I promise you that. If it is one of the Men he shall be dismissed instantly.”

Matron had not yet pulled a dressing-gown over her sensible night gown and Mrs. Sconer could not help noticing that without reinforcement Matron's hair was inadequate to conceal her incipient baldness.

“I could not possibly sleep here,” Matron warned her.

“The thing must be removed,” said Mrs. Sconer majestically. “Wait—I'll call Parker.”

In a few moments ‘Jumbo' Parker, looking somewhat puffy and crimson, had picked up the corpse with a newspaper and carried it away. When a senior boy named Chavanne appeared from his dormitory Mrs. Sconer, forgetful for the first time that the boy's father was a millionaire with three younger sons to educate, spoke sharply.

“Back to bed this instant,” she said.

“Please, Mrs. Sconer, I heard someone screaming.”

“You heard nothing of the sort. Chavanne, unless you want to Go To The Study tomorrow.”

Chavanne knew the emptiness of this threat.

“I thought the Vampire had struck again,” he said.

“Don't be ridiculous. Matron was not feeling well. Now back you go to bed and don't talk a lot of nonsense to the other boys.” Chavanne departed wondering and Mrs. Sconer continued to Matron—“You see what happens?”

Matron felt this was an implied reproach.

“I shall have to leave,” she said. “I can't stand any more of this sort of thing.”

“We'll talk about that in the morning,” said Mrs. Sconer, sounding friendlier, as she prepared to return to her room.

The habit of years impelled Matron, even in this crisis, to confide her latest discovery.

“Jim Stanley and the Westerly girl went out together again this afternoon,” she said.

‘The Westerly girl' was Mollie Westerly, teacher of the most junior class, a pretty young person believed to be an heiress who had joined the staff that term.

“They did?”

“I saw them leave. Then Sime was up on the church tower again with the field glasses from the rifle range.”

“You are sure?”

“Positive. I know he's watching them.”

“It's all very disturbing, Matron. You had better sleep in the little spare room for tonight.”

“Yes,” said Matron. “I don't think I could sleep here again.”

This was less positive than Matron's last refusal, but still argued her position. She had never liked her bedroom, and was determined to change it. Mrs. Sconer, however, had no intention of permitting the change.

“I don't wonder,” she said with a benign smile. “It must have been horrid for you. We shall have to see that this
room gets a good old turn-out tomorrow and a change of sheets and blankets.”

“I don't know whether…”

“
Good
night, Matron,” said Mrs. Sconer and with a speed remarkable in a woman so statuesque was gone.

She found her husband anxious and irritable.

“What wash that infernal noish?” he asked thickly for he had not put in his teeth.

“It was Matron,” said Mrs. Sconer.

“Matron? What on earth wash matter with the woman?”

“Hysterics,” said Mrs. Sconer concisely. “She's all right now.”

“Shterish? There wash surely no need to make all that noish?”

“Don't be unimaginative, Cosmo. Someone had put a dead rat in her bed. Its enough to give anyone hysterics. I had to get Parker to remove it. They carry the most frightful germs, I believe.”

“Bubonic plague,” said Mr. Sconer knowingly. “Who put the thing in Matronsh bed?”

“What on earth's the use of asking such an absurd question, Cosmo? Do you think I should be standing here quietly if I knew? I have a pretty good idea, but that's another matter.”

“You're going to say it-sh Shime I sherpposhe? Where do you think Shime could have got a dead rat from? And why would he put it in Matronsh bed? Itsh not loshical.”

“Oh go to sleep, Cosmo. It's really no good talking to you. You'll let the school be ruined before you act.”

For some days there was no incident large enough to threaten the routine of St. Asprey's, though several members of the staff looked as though they were sleeping badly, and Horlick, the gardener, complained that his beds were trampled by large feet during the hours of darkness. Then happened something which could no longer be dismissed, by even the most sceptical, as sick humour at work, or as anything less than a serious, nearly fatal attack on one of the staff which some did not hesitate to call attempted murder.

The original building of St. Asprey's had been the manor house of Pyedown-Abdale, a village in Gloucestershire, for St. Asprey's, like every other preparatory school was situated in one of the healthiest positions in Great Britain. It was a very large house patched and added to at different periods and set among great whispering trees. Its nearest building was the church, a rather splendid piece of architecture which recalled by its size that Pyedown-Abdale, now
a straggle of labourers' cottages, had once held an important wool market. The Rectory was on the village side of the church, so that the school buildings with a cottage or two were isolated from human habitation and watched over by the church tower. If Matron's story of Colin Sime was true, this fact had aided him in his observations, for she claimed that he climbed the tower with field glasses.

The boys attended eleven o'clock service on Sunday mornings and there was close co-operation between church and school, the Rector, the Reverend Austin Spancock, giving weekly divinity classes at the school, and Jumbo Parker having been for more than half of his twenty years at St. Asprey's organist and choirmaster at the church. A few terms earlier his tenure of this office had been threatened by Duckmore who was a far better organist but by dint of his years of past work he managed to retain it. A number of the boys, by special permission of their parents, democratically sang in the choir and attended choir practice.

Jumbo Parker, a stout and happy-faced man, enjoyed playing the organ almost as much as he enjoyed sitting in the bar of the Windmill Inn over a pint glass of rough cider. He did not play very well but was lucky in his instrument for the last squire of Pyedown-Abdale, whose heirs had sold the manor house cheaply to Mr. Sconer, had endowed the village church with an unusually fine organ. Jumbo occasionally walked across the fields to the church to play for his own entertainment, and almost invariably practised on Saturday afternoons. It was on the occasion of one of these Saturday visits that the Thing happened which destroyed the last vestiges of peace at St. Asprey's.

Jumbo had to tell the story so often afterwards that it fell into a series of cliches. He went, he said, intending to
spend an hour at the organ. On that Saturday afternoon there happened to be an Away match and young Mayring had gone by coach with the team to play St. Bensons, another Cotswold school. Mr. and Mrs. Sconer were receiving a visit from some prospective parents. Several of the staff and a married couple named Ferris, whose son was at the school had gathered on a lawn behind the staff bungalow to practise archery, for it was a craze among the adults that term. These were Jim Stanley the third assistant, a man named Kneller, and Mollie Westerly. Duckmore, the other assistant, was in charge of the boys on the cricket field. So Jumbo Parker was free to indulge in one of his favourite occupations—playing the church organ.

He told how he strolled across the meadows delighting in the sunlight and without the smallest foreboding of anything unpleasant. He entered the church and it seemed its usual self, the faint musky smell and the light coming through the stained glass windows just as he had known them so well all these years. At first there was silence then he was aware of a faint moaning which seemed to come from the West end of the church.

Jumbo Parker described it afterwards as a somewhat eerie sound. His mind which had been easy during his walk, returned to the disturbing events of the last few weeks. He made his way towards the sound and realized that it came from beyond the oak door leading to the stairway to the tower. He opened this and to his alarm and horror released a human body which rolled to his feet. It was that of Colin Sime who was now unconscious.

Parker acted quickly. He gathered at once that Sime had fallen down the staircase from the loft above in which the bell-ringers performed. He saw that he was not dead but gravely injured. He made him as comfortable as he could with his head on a hassock then rushed out to get assistance.
‘By the grace of God', as he said afterwards, he found the Rector arriving in his old car. (Mr. Spancock explained afterwards that he had seen someone on the tower of his church and as this had happened several times lately he had hurried across to investigate.)

The Rector was an elderly man with chin and forehead which both receded from the central and most prominent feature of his face, the tip of a large, almost triangular nose. He spoke in a throaty and hollow voice which lent itself to mimicry by choirboys and clipped his sentences to a minimum.

He took in the situation at a glance, or enough of it to tell him how to act.

“Stay here,” he said to Parker in the curt way he normally adopted. “I'll get help.”

Nothing more was said as the Rector drove hurriedly away. There were malicious suggestions afterwards that he might have gone to a nearby farm for the age-old expedient of a hurdle on which to carry the injured man, but that he preferred to make use of the members of his First Aid class who had to be gathered together in the village. The Rector was a keen believer in First Aid and this was his first chance to test the proficiency of his pupils. It was in fact more than half-an-hour before Sime had been placed, by the method prescribed in the book of instructions, on a stretcher. Only then was it realized that no one had phoned for a doctor or an ambulance. In these circumstances, the church being some distance from a telephone, it was decided to carry Sime across to the school and from there summon Dr. Cromarty. If it was necessary for Sime to go into hospital he could be moved from St. Asprey's.

The first words that Sime was heard to speak were brief and to the point.

“I was pushed,” he said.

The doctor examined him and decided that the injury to his legs should be X-rayed for which he must be taken to hospital. But Sime resisted this passionately. He wanted to stay where he was, in his own room at the school, and nothing would induce him to enter a hospital. He appeared to have recovered at least from the shock and after much dispute, in which Dr. Cromarty told him tartly what kind of a fool he was, he got his own way and was left in bed, impotent to move but able to speak his mind.