Laurels Are Poison mb-14 Page 3

  ‘No,’ said Alice Boorman. ‘What?’

  ‘What, indeed?’ responded Laura cordially. ‘Kitty, love, has anything struck you?’

  ‘Nope. Nothing ever does. But as soon as Miss du Mugne insisted upon availing herself of my services, I raced back here and secured from that Miss Mathers who deals in lists and things, three perfectly good little dungeons on the second floor, all side by side and hotsy-totsy. I thought we ought to be all three together.’

  ‘Good for you!’ said Laura, with enthusiasm. ‘Now, young Alice Where Art Thou! Do you, or do you not, become the Third Musketeer?’

  ‘Wilt thou, Alice, take this Thingummy as thy wedded what-do-you-call-it?’ demanded Kitty idiotically.

  ‘I will,’ said the pale Alice, looking pleased but also slightly apprehensive. ‘But I’ve come here to work, you know.’

  ‘The bleating of the two kids excites the tiger,’ observed Laura, linking her arm in that of the third musketeer. Deborah found herself unable to decide whether Alice had chosen wisely or not. The four of them went into the students’ Common Room, and at the end of about half an hour Deborah pleaded that she wanted to unpack, and was conducted by one of the maids to her bedroom, and then shown her sitting-room. The Warden and Sub-Warden were similarly accommodated, she had been pleased to see. She had had not more than sufficient time to take a hasty but pleasantly proprietary glance about the large-windowed squarish room when the house-telephone rang, and she discovered that she was connected with Mrs Bradley’s sitting-room.

  ‘Let’s go to dinner in York,’ proposed the head of the house. ‘These children can’t come to much harm between now and midnight, and I find myself, as Miss Menzies would say, cribbed, cabined and confined in the College atmosphere. Don’t loiter. George has the car at the door.’

  Chapter 3

  CLINICAL THERMOMETER

  « ^ »

  Deborah enjoyed her dinner. Neither the College nor her companion’s real business there was mentioned until she herself broached both subjects on the way home.

  ‘Oh, dear!’ she said. ‘I forgot to get the time-table of my lectures from the Assistant-Principal. Do you suppose I shall have to begin tomorrow?’

  ‘I know you will not,’ replied Mrs Bradley. ‘Tomorrow the rest of the children arrive and are to be received by their various tutors. Apart from that, nothing unpleasant is contemplated. I myself am to lecture during the term, but how, when, where, to whom and on what I have not the faintest idea.’

  Deborah giggled.

  ‘I suppose you do lecture, though, sometimes, don’t you?’ she inquired. ‘To the outside world, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, child.’ Mrs Bradley turned back again to look at the moonlight over the moor. Deborah stared out of her own window for a minute or two; but she was, without being fully conscious of the fact, not very anxious to return to the College. By night the fact of Miss Murchan’s disappearance took on a deeper, more sinister significance than by day. It reminded her of her childhood attitude to ghost-stories.

  ‘I would like to know,’ she said, speaking very quietly in case Mrs Bradley did not want George (who was, however, separated from them by a glass screen against which his sturdy back looked powerfully reassuring) to hear what she was saying, ‘a bit more about Miss Murchan’s actual disappearance. You said it was at a College end-of-term dance.’

  ‘Yes; an extraordinary time to choose; and the facts of the disappearance, so far as I have been able to obtain them, do seem a little curious. Have you a mental picture of the situation of the College?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Well, on the night of the College Dance, Miss Murchan was most certainly present up to the Twilight Waltz.’

  ‘Twilight Waltz?’ said Deborah, amused.

  ‘That is what they call it. It seems to be an institution here, and comes almost at the end of the programme. The students are permitted to invite men friends to this one party of the year, and the College Hall was crowded. Now, the senior student of last year at Athelstan — not the girl we have seen today, but her predecessor in office — seems to have thought it incumbent upon her to dance with the Warden at least once during the evening, and the Warden, who appears to have been slightly obtuse, selected this particular dance, although the senior student’s young man had already initialled it on the student’s programme.’

  ‘And then Miss Murchan disappeared?’

  ‘Well, when the dance ended and the lights were turned up, Miss Murchan discovered that her back hair was coming down. As a matter of fact, the student herself remarked on it. Her story was that the Warden’s hair was hanging down and looked very untidy and, to quote the student’s exact words, “a bit Bacchanalian,” and that she told the Warden of it, but not in those exact words, and that Miss Murchan then said : “Yes, I thought I felt someone grasp my hair during the dance. The lights were very low; I must have been mistaken for someone else. There is always horse-play during this dance. I should have sat it out.”

  ‘Upon this she excused herself to the student, and went away to tidy herself up. She has not been seen again by any of her friends, or by anyone at the College.’

  ‘That certainly does seem odd. I suppose there is no chance that she committed suicide?’

  ‘If so, where is the body?’

  ‘Yes, where is the body?’ Deborah repeated. ‘But you would have to ask the same question if you thought she had been murdered, wouldn’t you? Oh, but, of course, the murderer would remove it’

  They were silent after that, until they reached the College grounds, which they did at five minutes to eleven. The Halls were in total darkness, and Deborah, stepping out of the car and into the moonlight, felt a chill which was not altogether that of the night air as George drove off towards the garages, which were behind the main College building. Against her inclinations, she found herself filled full of uncomfortable fears engendered by the implications of the conversation she had just concluded.

  She followed her companion across the lawn and up the flight of steps between the rockeries. She waited whilst Mrs Bradley produced a latch-key and opened the front door.

  ‘You go and make sure our three little birds are safely in their nests,’ said Mrs Bradley, switching on the lights. ‘I think we can trust that the senior student has already retired to rest, and time alone will show how far we can trust the servants about bedtimes and everything else.’

  Deborah hesitated — and then began to mount the stairs. Mrs Bradley waited in the entrance hall, and then, when she saw the landing light switched on, she herself unlocked the door to the basement and servants’ quarters and explored below before she followed her. The study-bedrooms occupied by the three new students were on the second floor, the bedrooms of the Warden and Sub-Warden at opposite ends of the first floor. It had occurred to Mrs Bradley, upon her very first inspection of the premises, that a remarkable field for Hide-and-Seek, whether of an innocent or a criminal nature, existed in a house built on the plan which had been adopted in constructing each of the Halls at Cartaret. The two staircases were replicas one of the other, and were called the ‘back’ and the ‘front’ staircase, respectively, merely for reasons of convenience in nomenclatuse. Actually they were exactly alike, apart from the fact that the ‘front’ staircase began opposite the Warden’s sitting-room and the ‘back’ staircase mounted from outside the Students’ Common-Room. What was called the entrance hall was nothing more than a fairly wide passage which went from side to side of the house.

  There was also the basement floor where the servants lived. This, too, had its corridor, the most extraordinary feature of which was that it was carried, by a covered way, completely through all five of the College Halls, beginning, in fact, in the bakehouse, which was used only twice a week to bake bread and pastry for the whole College, and then traversing in turn Athelstan, Edmund, Beowulf, Bede and Columba. Beyond Columba lay the Infirmary, and the corridor led to that, too, so that it was possible to convey a sick student all t
he way from Athelstan to the Infirmary without once emerging into the open air, or having to go up and down steps except from the one bedroom to the other.

  ‘Amazing,’ Mrs Bradley had observed, when the Principal, who had led her on a personally-conducted tour, pointed out the supreme advantages which this method of joining up the various Halls must confer upon Wardens and students. ‘And the same key, I suppose, fits all the doors?’

  ‘Yes, naturally,’ the Principal had replied. Then Mrs Bradley’s obvious lack of enthusiasm caused her to add with some haste: ‘But, of course, whatever has happened to poor Miss Murchan could not possibly have happened to her here.’

  To this illogical remark Mrs Bradley had made no reply. As she followed Deborah up the front staircase she was thinking about it, however, and, perhaps for this reason, was sufficiently on the alert to make an irritating but interesting discovery.

  Her bedroom doorway was in a small recess. Across this recess, in a business-like manner, a thick piece of string had been stretched. Two U-shaped staples had been driven, the one into a landing cupboard, the other into a wooden partition which formed the bathroom wall, and the string was stretched tightly between them about eight inches from the ground. Anyone going into the room would most likely have failed to see it in time, for it had been painted white to, match the bedroom door, and, as a piece of white drugget had been used as a slip-mat, the effect, concluded Mrs Bradley, studying the booby-trap thoughtfully, was that of complete camouflage.

  Leaving the string exactly where it was, she stepped along the landing to Deborah’s door, to find that the artist, whoever she was, had exactly repeated her effects. She waited there until Deborah came down from the floor above.

  ‘All serene, although not, I am sorry to say, asleep,’ Deborah remarked. ‘In fact, the little blighters have been smoking. Is it allowed, do you think?’

  ‘It will be,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I must put up a notice about it. Look, child. The “little blighters” appear to have been doing something other than smoking.’

  Deborah looked at the contraption. Then she knelt down and looked at it again. Mrs Bradley noted, approvingly, that she did not attempt to touch it.

  ‘Those three didn’t do this,’ she said, rising from her knees. Mrs Bradley looked at her with interest and with even more marked approval.

  ‘Are you sure, child?’

  ‘Well, Laura and Kitty — I mean Miss Menzies and Miss Trevelyan — aren’t the sort to think a hobbledehoy trick like this a bit funny, and I can’t see the senior student doing it.’

  ‘No. Remains the fair Alice,’ said Mrs Bradley complacently.

  ‘Or the servants — who may not like us.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Mrs Bradley, grinning. ‘Come on; let’s go up and bully the witnesses.’

  ‘If any,’ said Deborah, following her up the stairs. ‘By the way,’ she added, as they reached the next landing, ‘I do hope we shall remember those beastly strings, and not go tripping over them when we come down again.’

  ‘I shall remember mine, but I think I’ll untie yours,’ said Mrs Bradley, going down again. The driving-in of the staples, she was particularly interested to notice, had splintered the soft wood, but the splintering had been rendered almost unnoticeable by the application of more of the white paint. Nevertheless (and she had a keen sense of smell) not the slightest odour of paint could be detected.

  ‘Hm!’ said Mrs Bradley, switching off her powerful torch and rising from her knees. ‘Very painstaking.’

  She went up on to the next floor when she had detached Deborah’s string, to find the Sub-Warden seated on Alice’s hat-box and Alice looking scared and uncomfortable.

  Chapter 4

  A MULTIPLICITY OF PROMISCUOUS VESSELS

  « ^ »

  ‘You know,’ said Kitty, sitting up in her narrow bed and yelling over the partition, ‘the old girl was up to something last night. What do you suppose was the object of all that third-degree velvet-glove stuff she pulled?’

  There was no reply from Laura, but Alice put her head over and observed: ‘I didn’t know what she meant, and I don’t now.’

  ‘But I do,’ said Laura, appearing in the doorway of Alice’s cubicle. ‘On the excuse, if asked, of losing my way to the bathroom — not that you can lose your way anywhere in this geometrically-constructed loose-box — I’ve been down and had a snoop at those doors. I fig-ew-er that the Duchess of Main put on burglar’s gloves and undid those knots with a hairpin. The cords still lie in statu quo, or very nearly so, my loves, and the staples are still fixed firmly in the doors. Ergo, there is going to be one devil of a fine pow-wow-plus-fight; referee and timekeeper that vicious and unstable Old Maid of the Mountains Principal du Mugne, plaintiffs Old Mutt and Young Jeff, defendants our humble selves. What say you, comrades?’

  ‘Oh, I do hope not,’ said Alice, who was now doing her hair. ‘I don’t want any more questions. It’s horrible. It makes you begin to wonder whether perhaps you did do it, after all.’

  ‘Well, did you?’ asked Laura. ‘Personally, the orange-skin banana-peel jest, ripe though it may be, has never appealed to yours truly. It’s unsubtle.’

  She went into her own cubicle, and the other two could hear drawers being flung open and thrust in again to the accompaniment of a considerable amount of blasphemous comment.

  ‘What have you lost, Dog?’ inquired Kitty, who retained her comfortable attitude in bed.

  ‘Belt,’ replied Laura. ‘I received a nasty hint yesterday that we’re supposed to wear stockings to go over to College, and I’ve got nothing to hang mine on to.’

  ‘Coming over,’ said Kitty obligingly. ‘I can wear my evening one.’

  ‘Oh, thanks. Mine’s sure to turn up later on. It may be in my trunk. Where are our trunks, by the way?’

  ‘Down in the basement,’ said Alice, who, they soon discovered, was able to obtain this kind of information, apparently by clairvoyance. ‘We’re supposed to unpack them down there, I think, and carry our things up bit by bit. I’ve got to get a few things out of mine, so if you’d like to give me your keys I’ll bring you up anything you want if you can tell me where to lay hands on it without turning everything else upside down.’

  ‘I shouldn’t know, love. My mother always does my packing. She says I can’t pack properly, and, so far as I can see, if she persists in that view, I never shall. I’ll come down with you. As for you, Kitty, you’d better get up, or you’ll get no breakfast, if I read the book of words aright.’

  On the first-floor landing they met Deborah in her dressing-gown. She was coming out of her bathroom.

  ‘Isn’t she lovely!’ said Alice, flushing a little.

  ‘Not bad,’ Laura responded. ‘But she must be at least twenty-five.’

  ‘Do you think she thinks we did it?’

  ‘Did what? Oh, the screamingly funny string joke? No, I don’t In fact, she knows we didn’t. So does Aunt Glegg.’

  ‘The Warden isn’t in the least like Aunt Glegg.’

  ‘She is to me.’

  ‘But she can’t be. Aunt Glegg — oh, I don’t know how to put things, but she definitely isn’t and never could be in the very least like Aunt Glegg. You, with your strong literary sense, ought not to talk such rot. You know, you’re like most very clever people — you’re lazy.’

  ‘Golly!’ said Laura, regarding her companion with such intentness that she almost fell down the stairs. ‘Are you, by any chance, a dark horse, young Alice?’

  ‘Good heavens, no! ’ said Alice blushing.

  ‘Well, I’ve been chewing over a few outstanding points during the night watches. I’m no sleeper, although you wouldn’t guess it. And I knew I’d placed our Boadicea aright Her name’s Bradley.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Mrs Bradley.’

  ‘Yes. I expect she’s a widow or something.’

  ‘ “Or something” about whangs the old nail on the clock, snout or beezer. She is, in short (and in ful
l, see Timothy Shy’s special news-service, copyright in all languages including Sanskrit), Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, with degrees from every University except Tokio. And she chooses to come here! What I keep asking myself is — why ?’

  ‘But — then she’s a detective!’ said Alice.

  ‘And what a detective,’ said Laura. ‘Do you know what I suspect, young Alice?’

  ‘No. At least, I hope not’

  This subtlety was lost on Laura, who replied: ‘Is it a dagger that I see before me, its ’andle to my ’and? No, but it is that same circular saw with which Hawley Harvey carved up his spouse, et voici la plume de ma tante. Goroo! Goroo! (Dickens — or thereabouts.) Stop me if you’ve heard it before. Young Alice, there must be a murderer on the premises!’

  All that day, from about eleven in the morning onwards, students continued to arrive. Every train disgorged them, until by seven-thirty the whole College was assembled in the various Halls for dinner. After dinner, on this first day of term, there was a short meeting of all students in the College Hall, but by half-past eight students in couples, groups, platoons, or, in a few cases, singly, were walking across the lawns, through the orchard or upon the gravel paths, back to the various Halls of Residence.

  The Athelstan contingent was made up equally of First-Years and Second-Years. There were no Third-Years. These were housed, together with the One-Year Students (practising teachers of some years’ experience who had come to College to obtain a Board of Education Certificate) in Columba, which thus differed from any other of the Halls, and was referred to by the rest (for no reason that Mrs Bradley ever discovered) as Rule Britannia’s.

  From their time of arrival until dinner-time most of the students in Athelstan had been occupied in greeting their Warden, meeting their tutor, re-arranging (to the confusion and irritation of Deborah and the senior student) the allotment of study-bedrooms, meeting and greeting one another on the stairs, in passages and even whilst opening and shutting the doors of the W.C.s, and in general creating so much pandemonium that even Deborah, accustomed as she was to the beginning of term at a girls’ school, felt, by the time that dinner was over, as though she had added long, heavy years to an already over-burdened existence.