Laurels Are Poison mb-14 Page 13

  They passed several groups and couples of students as they went through the park, but encouraged no one to join them.

  ‘Business is our pleasure this afternoon,’ said Laura to tentative hangers-on; and she spoke so determinedly that she shook off all potential companionship.

  ‘What’s the big idea, Dog?’ asked Kitty plaintively. ‘Why do we act as though we’ve got the plague or something?’

  ‘We’re going down to have a look at the old bridge,’ Laura replied. ‘And then I’m going to have the inside out of that mermaid Cartwright’

  As she vouchsafed no more, but seemed intent upon reaching Caddy Old Bridge in the shortest possible time, the others asked no more questions, and were soon warmed through by the pace she set.

  Caddy Old Bridge was thus named to distinguish it from Caddy Swing Bridge, which had been built some centuries later, and spanned not the river but the canal.

  A few yards upstream from the Old Bridge was a weir, and the three students stood on the bridge for some moments, absorbed in watching the foaming water.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Laura, ‘the murderer’s idea was that the force from the weir would carry Cook’s body further downstream than where the police actually found it.’

  ‘But we don’t know where they found it. It didn’t tell that in the papers,’ objected Alice.

  ‘Bobby Breen told me,’ replied the leader of the expedition. (Constable Breen received inevitably this soubriquet.)

  ‘He ought not to have said. He might get into trouble,’ said Alice.

  ‘Well, I asked him, casually, and he did say. Anyway, all the errand-boys know, because I checked the information with Miggin’s Albert, and he said exactly the same thing. We’re going along there in a minute to have a look, and then I’m going in, à la the corpus, to see what really does happen. Mrs Croc. isn’t the only pebble on the beach when it comes to a spot of detection.’

  ‘I call it very grubby and little-boy, to take all this morbid interest,’ said Kitty, witheringly, forgetting her past.

  ‘Do you? We’re on to a big thing here, if I mistake not,’ replied her friend. ’Don’t you see that Cook simply went the way of all flesh — to wit, the way Miss Murchan went last term?’

  ‘Oh, rot!’ said Kitty and Alice with one accord.

  ‘And how will you go in? You can’t undress on the bank, and you haven’t even got a towel, let alone a bathing costume,’ said the former. ‘You’re an ass, Dog!’

  ‘And you’d catch your death of cold,’ said Alice. Laura patted herself on the stomach.

  ‘Costume on under my clothes; towel round my waist to hide it from our smirking acquaintance as we came through the park,’ she announced. ‘And what’s the use of a pub if you can’t ask permission to use the summer-house on their bowling green as a dressing-room?’

  This amount of generalship took away speech from her companions. Moreover, by some gift known to herself but not to them, she did indeed obtain permission to use the summer-house.

  ‘Here, hang on to my watch, Kitty,’ said she, emerging on to the bank, tall and big-limbed in her scanty bathing suit.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t do it, Laura,’ said Alice. ‘You’ve no idea how cold it will be.’

  ‘Sez you!’ retorted Laura, dancing up and down on the grass. ‘Well, here goes. I’m going to wade in and try it for depth and currents first. Then I’ll come up on the bridge and drop in off the parapet. “When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs” — Ow! Wow! It’s freezing! — “for me! Plant thou — ” ’; She thrust in, waist deep, and then struck out into midstream, waved to the watchers, and began to thresh down-river. Kitty remained where she was, but Alice, herself a swimmer, walked anxiously along the bank, after having loosened her shoe-laces and unfastened all but a single hook on her skirt. She knew the cramping effects of extremely cold water, and was on hand to render assistance.

  Laura, however, needed none. She turned after about a hundred yards of strong, swift crawl, and began to come upstream in a series of duck-dives, testing the depth of the water. It was amusing to watch the white legs and the very white soles of the feet breaking water at every seven or eight yards, and after a few minutes Alice realized that she and Kitty were not the sole observers of the scene. Several of the other students, also out for walks, had come up, and one or two villagers, mostly from the inn, were also upon the bridge or upon the bank.

  Having carried out the first part of her experiment, and taking no notice of the spectators, Laura waded through shallow, very muddy water to the bank, climbed out, and trotted up to the bridge.

  ‘Do hurry up and come out, Dog. We’re attracting attention,’ urged Kitty. But Laura briefly invited her to pass the hat round, and, climbing on to the parapet of the low bridge, breathed deeply and — a martyr to her thirst for knowledge — fell awkwardly and painfully in.

  ‘No good diving. Wouldn’t have the same effect as tipping in somebody with their hands tied,’ she told the others later.

  The current was fairly strong because of the rush from the weir. It carried her, half-drowned (for she did not like to mar her experiment by coming to the surface to breathe more often than she could help), past the inn and towards the right bank of the river. At last, exhausted, and beginning to feel that warning cold which seems to strike internally, she came up, breathed deeply once or twice, and then began to race about to get warm. The patient Alice kept pace along the bank, the public-house portion of the audience offering bets among themselves, meanwhile, as to what it was all about; one section holding that it was for a wager, the other certain that the young lady was in training for something, and that Alice was her trainer.

  It was Alice who saw the corsets; at least, it was Alice who, suddenly cupping her hands round her mouth, yelled:

  ‘Laura! Something pink! Laura! Look, Laura!’

  Laura did not hear at first, and was amazed to see Alice come down to the water’s edge as though she were going to wade in. So she would have done, had not Laura’s attention been attracted just in time.

  Laura, treading up mud, handed her the corsets. Alice rolled them up, but the watchers had seen what they were, and, having no idea at that moment of connecting them with the body which had been dragged out by the police, now cancelled all bets and assumed, with beery joviality, that they were the object of Laura’s researches. There was some crude chaff, at which the girls grinned and Alice also blushed, and then Laura trotted off to get dressed.

  The others accompanied her, and Alice, offering money which was not accepted, obtained the use of two more towels from the publican, and whilst Laura, now shaking with cold and with hands too numb to dry herself, fumbled with the towel she had brought out from College, Alice and Kitty got to work on her like ostlers working on a horse, and, deaf to her protests that they were taking all the skin off, had her, except for her hands and feet, quite warm again by the time they had crammed on her vest and heavy sweater. Then, taking her by the arms, they trotted her up and down the stone-flagged path which bordered the bowling-green until she pronounced her circulation fully restored. By this time the watchers had dispersed, and the three went back to College.

  ‘And didn’t you scold her?’ asked Deborah. She and Mrs Bradley were having tea in Mrs Bradley’s sitting-room.

  ‘No. Why should I? I gave them all some parkin, and Miss Menzies a cup of Bovril,’ said the head of the house composedly.

  ‘But she might have got pneumonia!’

  ‘My scolding her would not prevent that, dear child. And look at the prize they brought in! Although I must say I can’t imagine how the police came to overlook it. Something to do with the action of the current, I suppose.’

  ‘But what did they bring in?’ asked Deborah.

  ‘Haven’t you heard? I feared it was all over Hall. Perhaps they’ve kept their mouths shut after all. They found Cook’s corsets in the river!’

  Chapter 10

  THE FLYING FLACORIS

  « ^ »

/>   ‘We’ve traced her movements over the week-end, madam,’ said the inspector, ‘and although we can’t find anybody who actually saw her enter the College grounds, she was seen, acting in a furtive manner, between the two stiles leading to the backs of your five houses of young ladies. That was at half-past nine on Monday evening. She was seen by Mr Titt, of the Watch Committee.’

  ‘I bet she was!’ said Miss Topas, when she heard this. ‘That man ought to be in prison!’

  The two stiles referred to by the inspector were on College property. Behind the five Halls ran a drive, and behind the drive, and parallel with it, was a fairly high wall. Midway in this wall, and behind Beowulf Hall, there was a gap closed by a stile. A short footpath ran from this stile to another stile across a waste piece of ground used by the lecturers in botany as a kind of research-station for wild plants. The second stile was also set in a high wall, and beyond it stretched open fields which, in their turn, gave place to the moor. One of these fields was used by the College for hockey, but all the others belonged to farmers, and there was a right of way across to the College stile from the moorland highway, now an almost unused track since the stone-quarries there had been abandoned.

  ‘She went to Bradford,’ the inspector went on, ‘to her relations there. Respectable people; a man and his wife and three children. Nothing against them in any way. She stayed with them over Sunday, and then on Monday morning she told them she’d got a letter about a situation in York. They didn’t see any letter, but as she’d gone to the door herself to collect the post, they couldn’t question it.

  ‘And now, madam, comes a funny item. On Friday morning she went to the Post Office in Wantley — not here in the village, you’ll notice, nor anywhere near the College — and put fifty pounds into her Savings Bank account. Further to that, she put another fifty in on the Saturday before she visited her relatives, and not in Wantley this time, but in Bradford itself; and, even then, not at the branch office where her relations, living in the part they do, would be most likely to go. What do you make of that?’

  ‘At any rate, I know what you make of it, inspector,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘She received half the payment before she performed some task, and the other half when the task was satisfactorily completed.’

  ‘Question is, what was she bribed to do?’ inquired the inspector. Mrs Bradley would have enlightened him if it had been in her power to do so.

  ‘A woman like Cook,’ argued Laura, ‘would have put her stays on, chance what.’

  As there was no dissenting voice, she glared militantly round her small circle of listeners and then lit a cigarette and smoked it half through before she continued her argument.

  ‘So what do we get?’ she went on. ‘I’ll tell you.’’

  ‘Bad teaching, Dog,’ observed Kitty. ‘If you ask a question, you shouldn’t answer it yourself.’

  ‘I’ll tell you,‘ repeated Laura firmly. “”We get this: somebody drowns poor old Cook in the bath; the other servants, used to the goings-on of that idiot Cartwright, don’t take any notice; the body is then dried and clothed, but the murderer, like a chump, doesn’t put on the corsets.’

  ‘Why not?’ Kitty inquired.

  ‘Ass! Can you imagine Cook without them? I bet the murderer gave one goggle-eyed look at the mass of adipose tissue, then took a despairing flip at the corsets, decided two into one won’t go, and slung the corsets into the river after the body, never dreaming that they’d fetch up where they did. You see, allowing for drift, current, prevailing winds, seasonal variations, present height of river, mean annual rainfall and the character of the local vegetation, that garment ought to have floated down ever so much farther than the body; instead of which, it got caught in weed, and hardly drifted at all. So when the police found the body at Spot A, they didn’t bother too much to search the bank at Spots A minus x, x being the unrecorded distance between the bridge and the body. Do I make myself clear to the lower division of the class?’

  ‘You’re an ass, Dog,’ said Kitty.

  ‘I see what you mean. I wish I could work things out,’ said Alice.

  ‘Old Dog made up most of that,’ said Kitty. ‘What a hellish day Sunday can be. Let’s go out and sweat at something, shall we?’

  ‘Let’s go into the gym,’ suggested Laura, who was still childish enough to delight in forbidden pleasures.

  ‘May we?’ inquired Alice. Her friends regarded her anxiously, and Kitty felt her pulse.

  Entrance (unofficial) to the gymnasium was gained by means of the gallery, for the wall-bars prevented ingress by the lower windows. It was not a difficult matter to obtain possession of the groundsman’s ladder, and Laura and Alice soon reared it against the gallery end of the building. The long windows of the gallery were always open, and even if the groundsman came up in search of his ladder and removed it, it was possible (for Alice, the most agile of the three, had tried it as a test exercise once, under the eye of the lecturer) to leave the building by one of the downstairs windows behind the wall-bars. It was tricky, and required, besides a certain amount of careful judgement, the sinuousness of a cat, a monkey or a little boy. Nevertheless, it could be done.

  ‘Better not make a row going in,’ said Laura, as they eyed the ladder before commencing the ascent, ‘because you never know when Miss Pettinsalt isn’t in there, having a private practice. I suppose these lecturers have to keep up to scratch, and maybe they find Sundays boring, too.’

  She led the way, but, upon gaining the window-sill, she signalled the others to be silent. She herself stepped cautiously over the ledge, and made an almost soundless landing on the wooden boards which formed the gallery floor. There was certainly somebody practising in the gymnasium. If it was another student, they could proceed without fear, but if it should prove to be the india-rubber Miss Pettinsalt, then it would be better to give up the attempt and find some other way of getting through the day until tea-time.

  She crept to the gallery rail. There was the performer; pretty agile, too, thought Laura, watching the smooth work and beautiful timing.

  ‘Golly, she’s pukka,’ she thought. She could not, however, recognize the figure, although Miss Topas would not have hesitated. It was not, at any rate, a lecturer. Laura crept back to the window and beckoned her henchmen to mount.

  ‘Somebody here,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know who it is, but it ain’t Staff. You have a look, Alice. Don’t let her hear you, if you can help it.’

  Alice went forward with the stealth usually associated with Red Indians, gave one glance, and then returned.

  ‘Oh, that’s Thingummy,’ she remarked. ‘Wizard, isn’t she?’

  ‘What, that —?’

  ‘It’s only that woman from Rule Britannia’s. The one at our Practice School. Cornflake. She looks different without her glasses.’

  They watched Miss Cornflake as she finished her wall-bar exercises.

  ‘She’s coming up a rope,’ said Laura. ‘We don’t want to give her a fit of the vapours when she looks along and sees us all parked here like Tom Sawyer at the funeral. Might fall and break her neck. Better get on down.’

  This humane suggestion was immediately carried out, so that when Miss Cornflake came level with the gallery it was empty, the Three Musketeers having descended by way of the staircase which came down at the left-hand side of the gymnasium.

  Miss Cornflake did not notice them until she reached ground-level. Then her eyebrows shot up and her lip curled back like that of a snarling dog. Her whole demeanour thoroughly alarmed Alice, for whom the wrath of authority had always held that peculiar terror which is the hell of the law-abiding when, by chance, they fall from grace.

  ‘And what are you people doing here?’ demanded Miss Cornflake.

  ‘Well, I’m damned!’ said Laura, with a round frankness which astonished two of her hearers and was silently approved of by the third. ‘And who on earth might you be?’

  Miss Cornflake was visibly taken aback by this spirited challenge. She appeared t
o be confused.

  ‘You startled me. You see, I haven’t permission to be here.’

  ‘Neither have we, so that’s all right,’ said Laura, climbing out of her skirt, beneath which she was wearing her gymnasium shorts. She climbed the rope which Miss Cornflake had just left swinging, slapped the metal fastening at the top, reversed slowly and gracefully and came down head-first until she was within five or six feet from the floor. Then she reversed again, and dropped to the floor.

  ‘Good,’ said Miss Cornflake, condescendingly. ‘Well, I’ll just have a short skip and a shower, and then I’m through. I take it you people don’t want your presence advertised?’

  ‘Up to you,’ said Laura coolly. ‘Our hands are clean.’

  This odd expression appeared to disconcert Miss Cornflake. She opened her eyes wide, then opened her mouth as though to reply, but walked off, in the end, without a word. Laura, still holding the rope, gazed after her and watched her take a skipping-rope from the box under the gallery. Miss Cornflake, with lowered gaze, walked past her, and, going to the far end of the hall, began to skip to a measured rhythm and with the automatic concentration of an athlete in training.

  Laura, without saying anything more, walked over to the ‘horse’ and began to push it out into the middle of the floor. Alice and Kitty went to her assistance. Miss Cornflake put back her skipping-rope and went off to have her shower.

  Laura, however, was thoughtful. When she and her companions had taken their showers, put their towels in the drying cupboard, and gone back to Hall for tea, she would not listen to the chatter about her, but sat with hunched shoulders and ate large quantities of bread, butter and fish paste, obviously brooding so darkly that no one dared interrupt her thoughts.

  At five she went abruptly to Mrs Bradley’s sitting-room and found Miss Topas there.

  ‘Come in,’ said the Warden’s exceptionally beautiful voice. ‘Ah, good afternoon, Miss Menzies! I hope you have come, as is meet, to confess your sins.’

  ‘Confess my — oh, you don’t catch me that way, Warden,’ responded Laura, grinning. ‘You name the sin, and I’ll confess it.’