Was It Murder? (17 page)

“You are really too generous, sir.”

But it was difficult not to be put in a good humour by such jovial and beneficent methods.

Yet, for all that, Revell was slightly annoyed, and his annoyance centred upon Guthrie.  It was unmannerly of the fellow, to say the least, to clear off without a word of explanation or thanks to one who had undoubtedly assisted him to the best of a perhaps more than average ability.  Then an idea struck him; if he were going to stay on at Oakington for the rest of the Term, he must first go back to his rooms and make arrangements with his landlady, pack a few extra things, and so on.  Why not go that very afternoon and travel on the same train as the detective?

Thus it came about that the two of them met in a compartment of the three-twenty train to King’s Cross.  Guthrie seemed not in the least surprised, and welcomed Revell quite cordially.  “Another deserter, eh, Revell?  Given up the Oakington case as hopeless even to the amateur?”

“I’m staying on at Oakington till the end of Term,” Revell explained.  “The Head asked me to.  But I’m just going back to pick up a few things.”

“Oh, so you’ve taken the secretary’s job, then?  He told me he was going to ask you.”

“I’m trying it till the end of the Term, anyhow,” replied Revell, cautiously.

“Congratulations.”  And Guthrie laughed.  “Not at all a bad job, I should think.  Precious little work, and plenty of time to flirt with the charming Florence Nightingale, eh?”

Revell found himself, to his intense annoyance, flushing like a schoolboy.

“Oh come now, no need to look shocked!  She’s a pretty little piece for those who like their multum in parvo.  Can’t say I do, myself, but tastes differ, don’t they?”  He added:  “I’m glad we’re to travel together—it will save me writing you a very nice letter of thanks.”

“What I’d like as much as thanks,” said Revell, “is to know a little bit more about what exactly happened.”

“Oh?  You want me to go over the ground like the fiction detective, do you, and explain every point?  The trouble is there’s not much to explain, I’m afraid.  Lambourne’s confession closes the affair, of course, and neither the professional nor the amateur branch of the service can really claim to have covered itself with glory.  It’s rather an annoying thing, to get a confession at second-hand.  Legally, you see, it doesn’t count.  It’s a particularly vicious example of what the soldier said.”

“You mean that you can’t even announce it to the public?”

“Advisable not to—so they tell me at headquarters.  Can’t be proved, you see.  Some relative of Lambourne’s, if he has any, might up and sue me for slandering the family name.  Dashed queer thing, the law, isn’t it?”

“So the Oakington murders will go down into history as unsolved crimes?”

“If they go down to history at all, I suppose they will.  Of course I’ve had to tell my superiors the truth about it.  But nobody else.  And I should advise YOU not to, either.”

“Haven’t you told Roseveare?”

“No.  Why should I?  Let the poor man stick to his suicide theory— it’s less unpleasant for the School’s reputation, and that’s all he cares about.”

He leaned back amongst the cushions and puffed contentedly as the train gathered speed out of the station.  “It’s been a disappointing case altogether—there’s no doubt about it.  By the way, I understand the inquest went off all right?  Were you there?”

“Yes.  They brought in an open verdict.”

“Good.  Mrs. Ellington and Roseveare and I were anxious that that should happen.  No use bringing more scandal on the School, was there?”

“Yet you think it was suicide?”

“I’m positive of it.  Suicide to escape a murder charge.  But I could hardly have said that in the court, could I?”

Revell thought for a moment.  At last he said:  “It’s a queer business, the whole thing.  What sort of a man do you think Lambourne really was?”

“You want a character study, eh?  Well, I’m not particularly good at that sort of thing, but I’ll do my best.  I should say his chief characteristic was cowardice.”

“Cowardice?”

“Yes.  You know, Revell, behind all the sentimental stuff, there isn’t very much to be said for the coward.  And Lambourne, I’m afraid, WAS one—utterly.  During the War, for instance—I wonder why nobody beside me ever thought of looking up his record.  Oh yes, I know he was shell-shocked—and I’m not talking of anything he did after that—it may have been excusable then, but it wasn’t before.  Anyhow, he narrowly escaped a court-martial death-sentence.”

“For cowardice?”

“Yes.  It’s on the record.  That sarcastic manner of his, too—it’s very often the mark of the coward, especially in dealing with boys.  Then again, if he had a passion for Mrs. Ellington, why on earth didn’t he have an affair with her if he could persuade her to it?  That’s what a normal man does in such circumstances.  He doesn’t plan a complicated system of murders to bring her husband to the scaffold.  Finally, of course, there was the suicide.  Perfectly in character—a last act of cowardice rather than face the music.”

“Would you have got him, do you think, if he hadn’t confessed?”

Guthrie smiled.  “That’s tempting me, isn’t it?  To be perfectly frank, I don’t know.  His brains were so much better than his nerves.”

“What puzzles me is that he should have bothered to make the murder look like an accident at all.  Why not leave all the clues pointing straightforwardly to Ellington if his object were merely to get Ellington hanged?”

“Because, my dear boy, he was far too clever for that.  Murderers don’t leave clues pointing straightforwardly to themselves.  Don’t you see that by making the thing look like an accident he was really making the case blacker than ever against Ellington?  It was clever, damnably clever, I admit.  But even cleverness can’t circumvent fate.  And it was fate that made Brownley see him that night as he left the swimming-bath with the cricket-bat under his arm.”

“Oh, it was Brownley, then, who saw him?  But he had a pretty marvellous explanation of it all, didn’t he?”

“Marvellous, as you say.  To twist it round to make things look blacker than ever against Ellington was sheer genius—nothing less.  Perhaps he WAS a genius, in his way.  Ah well, the case is over and done with, and perhaps it’s as well he did take his own life—it’s saved the world a lot of trouble.  Even if we’d got a full confession written out and signed by him, a clever lawyer might easily have cast doubts upon it.  The law never likes too much to depend on the word of the man in the dock—whether it’s for or against him.”  He yawned for the second time.  “Let’s forget it, Revell, if we can.  Always a mistake to think too much about these things.  That was the trouble with Lambourne—he STUDIED crime— read all the high-brow books about it—got ‘em locked up in a little bookcase in his bedroom—ever see it, by the way? . . .  Ah well, if the Oakington affair’s done nothing else, it’s made us acquainted—maybe we shall meet again some day.”

“I hope so,” answered Revell sincerely enough.

They chatted on until King’s Cross was reached, and then, at the entrance of the Tube station, shook hands with great cordiality.

Four hours later, having done all he wished, Revell was again at the station on his way back to Oakington.

CHAPTER IX

THEORIES

He was glad to be back.  He realised it as he stepped out of the train at Oakington station; the sham Gothic towers and buttresses no longer repelled as formerly, but lured with a sinister fascination that grew as he walked along the lane towards them.  Two boys—two brothers—had been killed within those grotesque precincts.  The murderer had then killed himself.  Yet somehow, instead of the apathy that usually follows the final closure of an unsavoury incident, Revell was conscious of a widening and deepening interest in the whole affair.  It was closed, finished, wound up—yet he was still a little curious; there were still things that he wanted to know about it.

That evening the Head talked to him of the harm that the affair had done to the School’s reputation.  Revell sincerely sympathised;

Roseveare, as always, exercised a queer personal fascination over him.  “It’s been pretty awful, I know,” he said, “but it’s over and done with now, and people soon forget.”  (He did not really think so, but it was the thing to say.)

“They never forget a name,” Roseveare answered.  “Long after I am dead—perhaps long after you are dead, even—people will still say, when they hear ‘Oakington’ mentioned—‘Why, isn’t that the school where those two boys were killed?’  Don’t you think they will?  Don’t people still remember Rugeley as the town where Palmer poisoned his victims?”

It was true, Revell admitted to himself.  Merely during his hasty visit to London he had been able to estimate the extent to which the Oakington tragedies had impressed themselves on the popular imagination.  In Oakington village it was only to be expected that the School’s affairs would loom largely, but it had been rather a shock to see the word “Oakington” on half the newspaper placards in London.  His landlady, even, had added the name to the small list of notorieties that formed the currency of her street-door and garden-wall chatter.  And she had shown him proudly an article she had cut from one of the cheaper and more lurid weeklies; it was headed—“Dormitory Death-Drama and Swimming-Bath Shooting Shambles;

Oakington’s Two Mystery Tragedies Now Capped by Schoolmaster’s Sudden Death.”

Revell recollected all this as Roseveare talked.  The smooth and rolling periods followed each other majestically; Roseveare had acquired the rare knack of talking like a book without sounding like one.  “For weeks, Revell, we have lived in a state of siege; we have had forced upon us such indignities and espionage as no community can endure without contamination.  The good feeling between master and master has been sadly affected—how, indeed, could it have been otherwise, when each one of us has had an eye on someone else as a possible murderer?  Discipline—esprit de corps— the tonic life-blood of the School—has almost ceased to exist.  A deplorable state of affairs, but now, perhaps, we may feel that the worst is over, and may begin the task of restoration.  And the first step, since this terrible chapter of mysteries has been left unsolved by the authorities, is to establish some basis of hypothesis on which the matter may conveniently be discarded.  It was with this in mind that this afternoon, while you were away, I allowed myself to be interviewed by a group of newspaper-men.”

“Oh?  I’ll bet they were pleased.”

“They were.  I made them a short statement which will doubtless appear in the papers to-morrow.  A judicious statement, I hope, which will do good, whether it is true or not.  But,” he added, “it is just as likely to be true as any other supposition.  When one is faced with so many theories, all without tangible foundation, one has surely a right to choose the least objectionable?”

“Surely,” agreed Revell.

The next morning, therefore, in common with some millions of others throughout the United Kingdom, he was able to read “the first authentic interview with the Headmaster of Oakington”.  It was amusing to learn that “Dr. Roseveare is a tall, handsome man with a charming smile and a quiet, forceful personality.  He greeted our representative most affably, and begged to be excused for not having received him before.  ‘I felt’, he explained, ‘that while the case was as it was, it had better not be discussed.  Now, however, that circumstances have altered, I am glad to be able to make a statement.’”  (All of which, as Revell perceived, meant exactly nothing at all.)

“’First,’” continued the statement, “’I think I may tell you definitely that the police have retired from the case.  They have discontinued the quest for the murderer, which they would hardly do if they still believed he existed.  I conclude, then, that they do not now believe that any murder was committed at all.  As this corresponds with the personal opinion I have myself held all along, I cannot pretend to be surprised.

“’The first death—that of poor Robert Marshall—was, I think, undoubtedly an accident.  There has never appeared, at any rate, the slightest scrap of definite evidence to the contrary.

“’The second of the unfortunate brothers—Wilbraham—was shot, it is true, but no substantial evidence has appeared to point to any person as the assailant.  The only conclusion to be reached, then, is that he died by his own hand.

“’I myself have little doubt that this was so.  The poor boy had been greatly depressed since the death of his brother, to whom he had been very closely attached.

“’Perhaps I ought to add that the tragic death of Mr. Lambourne, one of the School staff, appears to have been quite unconnected with the other events.  Mr. Lambourne, as I said at the inquest, was a peculiarly unhappy victim of the War, and had been in a poor state of health for many years.  The jury rightly returned an open verdict, but my private opinion, for what it is worth, is that the overdose of veronal which caused his death was taken accidentally and not at all with suicidal intent.

“’That, gentlemen, is really all I have to say.  We at Oakington have gone through a gruelling time; for nearly a year it has seemed as if some malign fate were working against us at every turn.  I can only say that the School will try to forget these terrible days as soon as possible, and will strive to do its duty in the future as nobly as it has done in the past.’”

As Revell read, he could almost hear the suave, well-chosen words spoken in the calm, soothing voice of the Head himself.  The whole thing, in its evenness, its urbanity, its air of serene reasonableness, was thoroughly typical of the man.  Yet was it not in some sense a shade TOO reasonable?

He was not quite reckless enough to suggest as much to its author.  Indeed, at breakfast he congratulated Roseveare wholeheartedly on the statement, and expressed the belief that it would help a great deal towards the closing of the whole affair.  Then, after the meal, he strolled out in the open air and smoked a languid cigarette.  It was another of those glorious summer days of which the season had already been so generous; there was to be a big cricket-match against Westerham in the afternoon, and already the life of the School was noticeably beginning to revolve in a more normal orbit.