Was It Murder? (8 page)

After a thoughtful pause Revell said:  “If you don’t mind, I should rather like to stay on a few days longer.”

“You would?  Very well, I shall be delighted, of course.  May I take it that your investigations are bearing fruit?”

The question was neither sarcastic nor contemptuous, but perhaps it was just a shade too bland.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Revell answered.  “Only I just feel I’d like to poke about a bit more, that’s all.”

Roseveare nodded with complete geniality.  “You’re a conscientious fellow, Revell, and deserve a far better fate than to be probing a mystery that isn’t, I’m afraid, much of a mystery at all.  I know the place is full of rumours, but most of them contradict each other, and in any case, the theories of a generation reared on crook dramas and detective novels are hardly worth taking seriously.  I do not, of course, expect that even the inquest to-morrow will stop these unpleasant fiction-mongers.  They will just go on till they are tired, and we shall have to put up with it.”

Revell was silent, and the other continued:  “I hope you are not forgetting the boy’s wrist-watch which was found on the top diving-platform.  That, more perhaps than anything else, seems convincing evidence of what happened.”

“Possibly, though I don’t see why he shouldn’t have left it down below, with his dressing-gown and slippers.”

“He may have forgotten it until the last minute.  It was radium-pointed, so that in the dark its illumination may have attracted his attention just as he was on the point of diving.  Would you like to see the watch, by the way?  It will be one of the exhibits shown to the jury to-morrow.”

“Oh no, don’t bother—I don’t think it would help me much.”

As he exclaimed rather peevishly to Lambourne an hour or so later:

“What the hell was the use of looking at the damned watch after it had been mauled about by Wilson and Roseveare himself and God knows who else?  Besides, I’m not a finger-print expert, even if the murderer’s paw-marks were plastered all over it!”

“Yet you have, I suppose, a theory of your own by this time?”

Lambourne queried.

Revell nodded rather gloomily.  “Yes, I have, and it would be about as easy to prove to that jury to-morrow as the Einstein theory.  Not that I care much about the inquest.”

“Don’t you?  Well, neither do I.  Which is why I intend to suppress a little evidence which, even if I took pains to blurt it out, would only be considered highly irrelevant.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, it would.  If I told them that about midnight on the night before last Ellington was seen walking about the grounds, they’d probably ask me what the devil it had to do with Marshall.”

“Good heavens!  Who saw him?”

“I did.”

“YOU?”

“Myself alone.  You see, I happen to be a very bad sleeper, and I often go for a stroll late at night.  And that night was the hottest of the year—I knew I should find it hard to get a wink, so I thought I’d take a turn round the buildings.”

“And you saw Ellington?”

“More than that, I met him and spoke to him.  He told me he was doing exactly the same thing—taking a stroll because of the heat.  I don’t care for his company much, but it seemed churlish not to chat with him, so I did—for perhaps a quarter of an hour or so.  In fact, we walked once round the Ring and then went back to our respective habitations.  At least, he saw me go into School House, and I presume he let himself into his own immediately afterwards.”

“But, my dear fellow, this seems frightfully important.  Why on earth didn’t you tell me about it before?”

“Because I didn’t want you to know too much against Ellington all at once.  It might have biased you in deciding whether the accident was faked or not.  Now that you’re pretty certain of that, I don’t mind you knowing the lot.”

“How do you know I’m pretty certain the accident was faked?”

“Because you had the excellent idea of visiting the swimming-bath in the dark.  I was taking another stroll and I saw you—funny what a lot of things I see on my strolls.  I saw you go in and I saw you come out again in about half a minute, which is roughly the time it would take any reasonably intelligent person to spot what really happened.  Or at any rate, what really couldn’t have happened.”

“Yes, quite,” said Revell eagerly.  “I could see the water rippling distinctly.  And I noticed, too, that footsteps sound differently when the bath is full.”

“You might add that the whole place smells differently—there’s nothing quite so unmistakable as the smell of the water in a swimming-bath. . . .  Oh yes, the accident theory is hopelessly impossible.  Unless, of course, you begin by bringing evidence that three of the boy’s senses were deficient.”

A silence followed, which Revell broke by the question:  “What did you and Ellington talk about when you met that night?”

“Shop, of course.  Have you ever heard Ellington talk anything else?”

“It would be amusing if he gave evidence that he met YOU at that suspicious hour.  And rather clever of him, too.”

Lambourne laughed.  “You bet he won’t.  As a matter of fact, he visited me here an hour ago to discuss that very point.  And we both agreed that we would not waste the Coroner’s valuable time by mentioning such a trivial matter.”

“Good Lord!  You’ve got a nerve!”

“Well, it seemed a fairly reasonable arrangement, I must admit.  He promised not to say he’d seen me if I promised not to say I’d seen him.  After all, in the eyes of the law, I suppose we should both be equally suspect if there were suspicion at all.  Anyhow, the inquest’s bound to be the biggest farce you ever saw, so what does it matter?”

And Revell, though he completely agreed with the other’s sentiments, could not forbear a slight shudder at the tone of cynical indifference in which they had been expressed.

The inquest was held in the School gymnasium the following morning amidst the gathering heat of a typical midsummer day.  It began at ten o’clock and was over within the hour.  Revell had never seen anything quite so slickly performed.  Dr. Roseveare, calm and weightily sorrowful, brooded over the proceedings like some kindly deity whom it would have been ungenerous and even impious to frustrate.  Both Coroner and jury seemed anxious to spare the feelings of such a well-known and valued citizen of Oakington.  Indeed, it might almost have appeared that general sympathy was as much with the doctor as with the deceased.

Medical evidence was given by Murchiston in a decorous and hardly audible undertone.  The injuries (technically specified) were, he declared emphatically, such as might have arisen through a fall from a considerable height on to a hard surface.  Wilson, dressed in his Sunday clothes, described his finding of the body and of his later discovery of the wrist-watch on the top diving-platform.  The jury, having previously seen the body, were then conducted into the swimming-bath and shown the place where the body had been found.  They also climbed (some of them) and examined the diving-platform.  On the return of the entire party to the gymnasium, Roseveare was called upon to give evidence; he explained the boy’s habits more or less as he had previously explained them to Revell.  No further evidence was called, but one of the jurors insisted on asking at what hour the wrist-watch had stopped.  As it had stopped through want of winding and at eleven minutes past three on the afternoon following the boy’s death, it was not easy to see the point of the matter, but it served at any rate to prevent the asking of any further and perhaps less foolish questions.

The jury retired and brought in an almost immediate verdict of “Accidental Death”.  Then the Coroner expressed sympathy all round— with the relatives of the boy, with the Head, with the School, and even with the jury for being called upon to investigate such a distressing affair.  “It is only too clear how it happened,” he remarked.  “Boys will be boys, and we all of us know the temptation of a swim in weather like this.”

“And then,” as Revell remarked to Lambourne afterwards, “the fatuous idiot wiped the sweat off his thick head.  Man, it was awful to have to sit there and listen to it all.  Roseveare had ‘em absolutely in the hollow of his hand.  Of course, I know he’s the biggest pot in Oakington, and half the jury were tradesmen who depended on the School, but still—even THAT doesn’t altogether explain it.  Englishmen aren’t really corrupt enough to connive at murder.  The trouble is, they never SUSPECTED.  They’ve heard all the queer rumours, but when it came to the point, Roseveare simply hypnotised the lot of ‘em!

“ONLY TOO CLEAR HOW IT HAPPENED!  God—I nearly laughed when the Coroner said that!  Only too clear why a boy should dive into an empty bath in the middle of the night. . . .  And I suppose the first inquest was pretty much the same kind of farce?”

“Quite,” replied Lambourne calmly.  “Yet I wonder you’re even surprised at it—it’s all so much the sort of thing one has to expect.  Most people in this world are incapable of any really critical observation—they won’t and can’t see anything unless they have a previous hint that it’s going to be there.  If Scotland Yard men had examined the gas-fittings after the first accident, they might have discovered something rather interesting about them, but as it was, you see, the examiners were merely gas company officials bent on exonerating their own firm.  What they may have wondered, among themselves, I’ve often speculated on—though it’s quite possible that they didn’t wonder anything at all.  That Tunstall fellow, though, seemed to think somebody had been playing the fool with things—only the dear old Head shut him up—reputation of the School at stake and all that sort of thing, don’t you know.  Mind you, we mustn’t blame anyone TOO much, for there IS a distinct initial improbability about a falling gas-fitting being in reality a diabolically-contrived murder.”

“Yet YOU suspected it?”

“Oh yes, but then, as I said before, I suspect everything and everybody.”

The attitude, which had been amusing enough at first, only served to irritate Revell now that his thoughts had become further engrossed in the case.  That evening, in the privacy of his bedroom, he wrote out a short summary of the whole Marshall affair, concluding with a few supplementary memoranda which might, he felt, help him by being set down logically on paper.  Under the heading—

“Have there really been murders?” he wrote:

“I think so.  The first ‘accident’ will be hard and perhaps impossible to elucidate, but if the second ‘accident’ is definitely proved to be murder, then a considerable balance of probability will lie in favour of the first accident having been murder also, especially if there can be found any adequate motive for the double event.  And such a motive undoubtedly exists.

“Let us, then, examine the second ‘accident’.  Clearly, there are only three possibilities--(1) a bona-fide accident, (2) suicide, and (3) murder.  The following points weigh heavily against the first possibility:

“(1) Even on the darkest night any person of normal eyesight can see the water in the swimming-bath—therefore, he would most likely notice the absence of it.  If also he were familiar with the bath, as was the deceased, he would probably notice the totally different sound of his own footsteps caused by the emptiness of the bath.

“(2) The wrist-watch discovered on the top diving-platform is a rather suspiciously direct pointer to the theory of the dive.

“(3) The burned-out fuses.  Here again we have something by no means intrinsically suspicious, but one must admit that it happened very fortunately or unfortunately upon this particular night out of all other nights.

“We have, then, disposed of the accident theory, though maybe not conclusively enough for a jury—especially a Coroner’s jury.  There remain the two other possibilities.  Suicide seems out of the question; we are thus left with the third—murder—by process of elimination.”

Under the heading “Why suspect Ellington?” Revell went on to write;

“(1) He is the only person who apparently benefits by both the accidents together.  (Note that he would not have benefited in any way by one of them separately.)

“(2) He is known to have been walking about the School grounds at a time when the murder MAY have been committed.”

Lastly, under the heading “Questions to be solved”, he wrote:

“(1) In the case of both accidents, how EXACTLY was the thing done?

“(2) Why did the Head send for me last December?  Why did he appear to have suspicions then?  And why hasn’t he any (apparently) now?  Why does he seem as though he would be glad if I went back and forgot the whole business?

“(3) Is Lambourne entirely trustworthy?  Is his pose of indifference sincere?”

And upon these wise and cautious speculations Revell went to bed and to sleep.

Revell stayed on at Oakington, and each morning at breakfast Dr.  Roseveare’s welcome was just a shade more ironical.  The dead boy’s body was in the meantime coffined and taken away by motor-hearse for burial in the family grave in Herefordshire; the living boys returned after their Speech Day holiday, full of other and various topics; the swimming-bath again echoed to the shrieks of the junior learners.  Oakington, in fact, began to function normally again, and the second Marshall affair seemed as if it might soon sink into impenetrable limbo with the first.

But to Revell, of course, the problem of the two deaths was an ever-insistent reality.  He pondered over it night and day, and the readiness of the others to forget only increased his determination.  The trouble was, as it had been right from the beginning, that although he had plenty of theories, there was precious little evidence in support of any of them.  Nor did his most careful investigations bear much result.  He got into diplomatic conversation with various boys who had known the two brothers, but none could tell him anything of importance, and even their “suspicions”, when he probed them, turned out to be based on nothing more than the mere coincidence of the double tragedy.

Several times he strolled casually into the swimming-bath, professing a keen interest in the School swimming, but really in the hope of discovering something hitherto overlooked or of surprising Wilson at some suspicious task—one of his theories had included the baths-attendant as an accomplice.  But he discovered nothing, and all Wilson’s occupations seemed entirely innocent.