Was It Murder? (6 page)

Revell, caught just very slightly unawares, hesitated a second before replying:  “Yes, that’s it.”

“It won’t be much of a festival, I’m afraid, with this latest affair hanging over it.  Of course you’ve heard.”

“Oh yes.  It was in all the papers.  Pretty terrible, eh?”

Lambourne raised himself in his chair.  “You know, Revell, you do rather give yourself away—to me, at any rate.  Why don’t you admit that you’re here for the same reason as last time—because of the Marshall affair?”

Revell almost dropped the biscuit-tin he was holding.  “Really?

And—and what makes you think that?”

Lambourne laughed.  “Oh, just a suspicious instinct I happen to be blessed with.  But I’m proud to say I had my doubts from the first.  You overdid it, I’m afraid—or rather, you UNDERDID it.  Anyone would have thought that boys were killed every night in their dormitories, the way YOU talked about it.  Even Daggat remarked to me afterwards that he didn’t think you’d been very interested in our local gossip.  Now if you’d only insisted on visiting the fatal dormitory and sniffing about like a stage Sherlock, I might have believed in you.”

Revell shrugged his shoulders hopelessly.  “You make me feel I must be a tremendous fool,” he said.  “Of course your suspicions about me are right—there doesn’t seem to be any point in denying it.  But I didn’t think I was doing things quite so obviously.”

“Oh, don’t think that—you aren’t.  It’s only my own exceptional acuteness that pierces your otherwise excellent disguise as the Old Boy revisiting his Alma Mater.  And you needn’t fear I shall breathe a word of it to anyone else.  But I really would be interested to know all about the affair from your point of view.”

It was just what Revell had been wanting—to tell somebody.  He did so, fully, and by the time he had finished the rain had stopped and sunlight was pouring into the room.  “I must admit,” he said, by way of conclusion, “that there seems just a touch of queerness about it all.  Roseveare seemed far more suspicious about the first affair, when he hadn’t any real cause, than he does now, when anyone would think he had cause enough.”

“Suspicious?” echoed Lambourne, as if weighing the word.  “Are YOU suspicious, then?”

“Perhaps I am.”

“Of what?”

“That’s just the point—I hardly know.  It might be almost anything, but I’m pretty certain it’s something.”

“What evidence have you?”

“None that would stand a moment’s examination in a court of law.  None at all, really.  Just the coincidence of the two accidents, and the Head’s puzzling attitude, and my own feeling about it.  It’s all queer, to say the least.”

“As you say, to say the least.  Why not say a little more and call it a double murder committed with diabolical ingenuity?”

“WHAT?” Revell gasped.  “I suppose you’re joking—“

“Not at all.  As a mere matter of theory, isn’t it possible?  Isn’t the really successful murder not merely the one whose perpetrator never gets found out, but the murder that doesn’t even get suspected of being a murder?”

“But, my dear man, as you said to me just now, where’s your evidence?”

“Exactly.  I haven’t got any—I’m in the same boat as you.”

“Are you—are you—really quite serious about all this?”

“Perfectly.  I suspected it, as a matter of fact, from the moment the news of the first accident reached me.  But then I’m afraid I nearly always do suspect things—I have a thoroughly morbid mind.  I never hear of a drowning accident but what I wonder if somebody pushed the fellow in.  And it’s such a dashed clever way of murdering anybody, you know—letting a gas-pipe fall on ‘em.”

“And what about this latest affair?”

“A mistake.  No one, however clever, should expect to get away with more than one murder.  Tempting Providence, you know.  Not that it isn’t more than likely that the dear old country Coroner and his twelve good men will swallow this just as willingly as they did the first one.  Only, from a purely technical point of view—the only point of view that interests me—the repetition mars the symmetry of the thing.”

“But surely, man, if you have suspicions of this sort, you can’t be satisfied to leave things as they are?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  Hardly my business, eh?”

Revell was indignant; he was even (a rare accomplishment) shocked.  Lambourne’s attitude of cynical indifference was one he had very often adopted himself, yet now he saw it in another he reacted against it instantly.  “I don’t know how you can say that,” he said.

“No?  Well, maybe I’m different from you, that’s all.  After seeing three years of purposeless slaughter backed by all the forces of law and religion, I find it hard to share in the general indignation when somebody tries on a little purposeful though no doubt unofficial slaughter on his own.  That’s my attitude—maybe a wrong one, but I can’t help it.  I’ll talk things over with you, of course, as much as you like—give you my ideas and all that.  Only don’t expect me to give any active assistance.”

Revell laughed.  “You’re almost as queer as all the rest of the business. . . .  Look here, Lambourne, I do want to get to the bottom of things, if I can.  It’s building bricks without straw for the present, I know, but that doesn’t matter.  You suspect a double murder, eh?  Well, the first thing to look for, then, is a motive— unless, of course, we’re dealing with a homicidal maniac.  Do you agree?”

“Quite.”

“Well, the only motive I can think of is money.  Two schoolboys can hardly have had any personal enemies.  But it did occur to me that since all Robert Marshall’s money went to his brother Wilbraham, it would be interesting to know where Wilbraham’s money goes now?”

“I can tell you that—it’s fairly common knowledge, in fact.

Ellington gets it.”

“Ellington?  The devil he does!  I say, that’s a bit astonishing, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  Ellington’s his cousin and next-of-kin.  He couldn’t very well leave it to anybody else.”

“How much—roughly—does it amount to?”

“Matter of a hundred thousand or so.”

Revell whistled.  “Quite enough to make some people commit a couple of murders.”

“Oh, bless you, yes.  Some folks would commit twenty murders for a fiver, for that matter. . . .  Anyhow, that’s one thing settled.  We’ve found the murderer.  The only thing left to do now is to find out whether there’s really been a murder or not.”

“You needn’t be so sarcastic,” answered Revell, smiling.  “After all, in a case like this, doesn’t everything depend on personality and motive?  Find the murderer, then you know there’s been a murder.  If you can’t find a murderer, then you’ll have to believe that the whole thing’s been purely accidental.”

“Good, Revell—you have, I am delighted to see, an intricate mind.  Ellington’s our man, of course.  But unfortunately there’s not a scrap of evidence against him.  All you can say is that he comes into a bit of money through the two successive accidents.  Ah, but stay—there IS just one other little matter.  I’d almost forgotten it.  Ellington was one of the very few people who knew that Marshall was sleeping in the dormitory on the night of the first accident.”

“Good Lord—I never heard anything about that!”

“No, I don’t suppose you did,” replied Lambourne, relishing his little sensation.  “It was a point that didn’t come out at the inquest—although, mind you, there was no reason why it should.  Young Marshall, you see, had spent the greater part of his summer vacation abroad—he’d been, I think, with his guardian in Italy.  Anyhow, owing to timetables and what not, the Head had given him special permission not to return until the Monday—the rest of the School, you will remember, having re-assembled on the previous Saturday.  Did they, by the way, have the system of dormitory prefects in your time?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, then you’ll understand how it all came about.  Marshall was the dormitory prefect of the junior dormitory.  Now the rule is very strict about having somebody in charge, and as Marshall was to be away on the Saturday and Sunday nights, somebody had to step into the breach, and that somebody was Ellington.  I know, because the fellow asked me if I’d oblige, but I made some excuse—I sleep badly enough as it is, without the additional miseries of a dormitory mattress.  Besides, as housemaster, it was his job, not mine.  Anyhow, he did it on the Saturday night, and was doubtless prepared to repeat the performance on the Sunday night as well.  All the staff knew about it—he’d been cursing his luck in the Common Room.  But then, quite unexpectedly, about half-past five on the Sunday evening, Marshall turned up.”

Certainly, Revell thought, Lambourne had the knack of making things sound devilishly significant, whether they were so or not.

“Yes—he’d caught an earlier cross-Channel boat than he’d reckoned on, or some simple enough reason like that.  Anyhow, he went into Chapel and Hall afterwards in the usual way.  Daggat may possibly have noticed him—he was preaching that night, which was the reason, as you can guess, why most of the older masters kept away.  I did, and so did Ellington.  Ellington, as a matter of fact, didn’t know that Marshall had come back until nine o’clock, when the boy went to see him in his room next to the dormitory.”

“Not in his private house?”

“No.  His wife was out visiting, so he was filling in the time marking papers, I believe.  He was surprised to see the boy, naturally, though glad enough to discover he could spend the night on his own feather-bed after all.  The boy went to bed in the dormitory at the usual time, and Ellington stayed up to finish his marking—at least, that’s what he said at the inquest.  The point is, you see, that his wife wouldn’t be expecting him, and might well be asleep when he DID go to bed—whenever that may have been.”

“Pretty quick work, though, to plan a thing like that at such short notice.”

“Oh, I know.  I’m not suggesting he did.  It may have all been planned beforehand, and he just seized the favourable opportunity as it came.”

“Quite.  But I’m afraid it all shows how equally well the whole business MAY have been an accident.  Assuming it was pure chance that the boy got killed and not Ellington himself.”

“Oh yes.  Exactly what Ellington said himself the morning after.”

“Which, of course, he WOULD say, if he WERE the murderer.”

“Naturally.”

“Oh Lord, what a lot of assumptions we’re making!  I wish we had more evidence.  Can you connect Ellington with this latest affair in any way?”

“’Fraid I can’t, on the spur of the moment.  That’s your job— you’re the detective.  If I were you, I should have a look round pretty soon—if there’ve been any clues left lying about, I don’t suppose they’ll stay there for ever.”

It was a hint, perhaps, and Revell, who felt he would like to be on his own for a while to think things over, was glad enough to take it.  “Come and chat with me again as often as you like,” was Lambourne’s farewell remark, and Revell assured him that he would.

The grounds of Oakington School were roughly circular, and round them ran a pleasant tree-sheltered pathway popularly known as the Ring.  Four successive generations of Oakingtonians had found that to make its complete circuit, at strolling pace, was an agreeable way of spending a quarter of an hour when there was nothing else to do, and upon this Wednesday afternoon in June Revell followed almost instinctively the familiar trail.  The sunlight blazed bountifully through the washed air; the scents of moist earth and dripping vegetation rose around him in a steamy cloud.  From time to time he passed groups of strolling boys who stared at him with that slight and politely disguised curiosity that is, perhaps, the “fine fleur” of the public-school tradition.  He could well guess the chief subject of their conversations.  He could imagine the sensation that the double affair of the Marshall brothers would have caused at the Oakington of his day.  It was, undoubtedly, the most spectacular of sensations—only less so, perhaps, than Lambourne’s theory if it could be proved correct.  But WAS it?  That, naturally, was the all-engrossing problem that occupied his mind during the half-mile circuit.

The chief trouble, of course, was that it was so fearfully difficult to verify anything that might or might not have taken place nine months before.  People so easily forgot details, or even if they didn’t, they could easily say so if they were asked awkward questions.  He quite saw that there was very little he could hope to discover about that first affair.

He thought a little cynically of the bright new electric fittings that met the eye all over the School.  That had been the Head’s doing—natural enough, in a way, but a pretty efficient method of clearing up traces if there had been anything wrong.  Had the Head, by the way, known of Marshall’s sudden and unexpected arrival at the School that night?

He lit a cigarette as he began the second circuit of the Ring.  The easiest thing, undoubtedly, was to believe that things were just as they seemed.  Two fatal accidents to two brothers—well, it was unusual, even remarkable, but was it more so than any conceivable alternative supposition?

Anyhow, as Lambourne had said, he had better tackle the more recent affair, since not only was there a greater chance of discovering things from it, but also his inquiries could be made more openly, as springing from the mere natural curiosity of an Old Oakingtonian about an affair that was for the time being on everybody’s lips.  And so, as he came round to the School buildings again, he made his way to the low, squat, red-bricked erection, some distance away from the rest, in which, ten years before, he had splashed about on many a summer’s afternoon.

His lips tightened irritably as he turned the handle of the door and found it unlocked.  The place ought not, he felt, to have been thus left open to any casual sensation-seeker, though of course it suited him well enough to be able to enter so easily.  He walked through the small entrance-hall, past the shower-baths and the drying-room, and into the main glass-roofed building.  Four elderly charwomen were kneeling on the floor of the bath, busily engaged in scrubbing the white porcelain tiles.  At the farther end, by the diving-platforms, a rough-looking fellow in grey flannels and a brown cardigan was noisily dismantling an improvised grandstand consisting of several tiers of wooden benches.  Revell watched the scene for over a minute before anyone saw him, and even then no one took any particular notice.  It was only too obvious that there had been many previous visitors.  At length he walked along the edge of the bath and approached the man at the far end.  “Busy cleaning up, I see?” he commented, with the air of the fatuous sightseer.