Murder in the Basement

by Anthony Berkeley

  Mr. Harrison rose from his desk, swinging his glasses on their thin black cord. He felt a different man now. Why could he not have had a daughter like this graceful, charming girl, to whom one really could be a father?

  He laid his hands paternally on the charming girl’s still quivering shoulders. “Just keep a closer eye on the boys’ garments, my dear. They’re young ruffians, you know. Just keep a closer eye on that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, I will, Mr. Harrison—I will.”

  “I’m sure you will, my dear.” Mr. Harrison bent his head and kissed Miss Jevons, paternally but most un-professionally, on the forehead.

  Equally unprofessionally, but not at all filially, Miss Jevons threw her arms round his neck, gave him a swift but most efficient hug, kissed him warmly on the cheek, and ran out of the room. Once again Mr. Harrison found himself staring at a closed door; but this time with a very different expression on his face.

  The expression gradually faded, to be replaced by a worried frown. Mr. Harrison’s awkward length drooped once more in the chair before his desk.

  The thought of Amy was seldom out of the mind of any inhabitant of Roland House for long.

  II

  The day was a hot one, towards the end of July.

  In the masters’ sitting-room the windows were wide open on to the big lawn at the back of the house. With pipes in their mouths and newspapers in their hands three men sprawled at ease. The time was that blessed half-hour after the midday meal before cricket begins, when only one master is on duty and the others get their first chance since breakfast to be human beings. A richly contented silence, broken only by the rustling of the newspapers and the bubblings of Mr. Parker’s pipe, which could never be induced to behave quite as other men’s pipes, filled the room.

  For ten minutes there was no action, but for Mr. Duff’s exchange of the Daily Mail for the Morning Post, and Mr. Rice’s discarding of the Daily Mirror in favour of the Daily Sketch. Mr. Parker never read anything but The Times.

  It was Mr. Rice who opened a topic of conversation.

  This was not uncommon, in the masters’ sitting-room. With a laboured courtesy, from which condescension was excluded obviously only with care and difficulty, Mr. Rice would address a remark to the company at large, as if bent on showing that to him at any rate there was no gap between his colleagues and himself, however conscious of such a thing they might be; for the present at any rate they were all on the same plane. For Mr. Rice, twenty-four years old and only two of them down from Cambridge, with a blue for cricket and a half-blue for swimming, had made no secret of the fact that the couple of years he was putting in at Roland House were makeshift ones only, while he awaited the vacancy which had been promised him at his own important public school.

  “Yorkshire all out for under the century, I see,” observed Mr. Rice kindly to the masters’ sitting-room. “Pretty bad show.”

  Mr. Parker, who did not like Mr. Rice, lurked behind The Times and said nothing.

  Mr. Duff poked his small head round the edge of the Morning Post, looking, as he often did, exactly like a tortoise in pince-nez, and smiled. “Really?” he said brightly. Then, as if realising that the failure of Yorkshire was no occasion for brightness, was indeed a pretty bad show, he switched his smile into a frown. “Really?” he said.

  “Fact,” Mr. Rice assured him.

  Mr. Duff made a small sound, which might have been expressive of scorn, disappointment, disgust, chagrin, or indeed anything that suited Mr. Rice’s convenience, and after blinking rapidly for a moment, withdrew his head again into the shell of the Morning Post.

  “Looked as if they might develop into quite a decent batting side at the beginning of the season,” added Mr. Rice, and out shot Mr. Duff’s small, rather bald head again to nod vigorous confirmation of this late possibility. The fact that Mr. Duff had not so much as glanced at the cricket page in any newspaper for the last fifteen years, and that Mr. Rice was quite well aware of this deficiency, detracted in no way from the amenity of the exchange.

  Mr. Parker, like Brer Rabbit, continued to lurk and say nothing. Unlike Brer Rabbit he emitted a vigorous upward blow through his rather bushy grey moustache.

  This was a not uncommon phenomenon on the part of Mr. Parker. On this occasion, however, the blow was more vigorous than usual, and Mr. Duff at once and characteristically interpreted it, and this time quite correctly, as a wordless comment upon himself. His thin, sallow face flushed slightly as it darted back once more into its shell. If Mr. Duff had been capable of disliking anyone, he would have disliked Mr. Parker.

  Mr. Rice tossed the Daily Sketch with a careless gesture into a corner of the room, as if to intimate that he was now ready to put aside the weightier things of existence and devote himself to brightening the drab lives of those about him.

  “What was the row this morning between Harrison and Leila, eh?”

  Whereas his colleagues invariably spoke of “Miss Jevons,” the matron, “Miss Waterhouse,” the governess, “Miss Harrison” and “Mrs. Harrison,” it was Mr. Rice’s more genial habit to refer to them respectively as “Leila,” “Mary,” “Amy,” and “Phyllis.”

  At Mr. Rice’s question Mr. Duff discarded his shell altogether. The Morning Post dropped across his knees. He looked vaguely apprehensive.

  “What row?”

  “I hear the old man had her on the carpet.”

  “Indeed?”

  “She was weeping when she came out.”

  Mr. Duff’s expression tautened. “I haven’t heard anything about it.”

  “No?” Mr. Rice was now plainly bored with the subject. He had made old Duff sit up, and that was all he wanted. He took manly pity on his victim. “Cheer up, Duff. I don’t suppose he sacked her, or it would have been all round the place by now.”

  “Yes.” Mr. Duff looked relieved. “Yes; that’s true, of course.”

  Mr. Parker blew through his moustache.

  Mr. Rice yawned.

  Mr. Duff, the Morning Post still on his knees, gazed thoughtfully through his rimless pince-nez at the garden outside.

  Mr. Rice looked at The Times, a shield between Mr. Parker and such contacts as Mr. Parker did not welcome. Any kind of shield Mr. Rice looked on as a challenge.

  He took a mild tilt at this one.

  “Coming down to the field this afternoon, Duff?” he enquired, with perhaps rather more loudness than was quite necessary.

  “This afternoon?” Mr. Duff repeated vaguely.

  “Final of the cricket league.”

  Mr. Parker blew through his moustache.

  Since coming to Roland House Mr. Rice, by virtue of his blue and a half, had of course taken the games in hand. He had dealt with them drastically. In cricket, for instance, he had revolutionised the batting style, briefly dismissing the strained attitudes hitherto cultivated and the worship of the straight bat, as old-fashioned tosh. Mr. Parker, who had reigned unquestioned in this kingdom for the last twenty years, looked on from the boundary in pain and distress, blowing contemptuously through his moustache. To Mr. Parker a straight bat was a holy thing, on a par with the House of Lords, the Athenaeum Club, The Times, and all those noble institutions for which Mr. Parker considered England stood.

  It was therefore doubly distressing to Mr. Parker that the bats of Roland House should not only be no longer straight, but should have crookedly scored this season more runs than ever in history before. For the first time on record not a single school cricket match had been lost. Mr. Parker had continued to blow defiance through his moustache on the boundary, but more and more forcedly as the season progressed. Mr. Parker was not a blue.

  Another innovation of Mr. Rice’s had been the cricket league. The sixty odd boys had been divided into four teams, the Reds, the Blues, the Greens, and the Yellows, a team and a spare man apiece, and the remainder under the name of Reserves t
o encourage their players from the boundary. Mr. Parker had gone about mattering darkly of professionalism, but the scheme had been a success. In justice to himself, however, Mr. Parker continued to blow through his moustache whenever these evidences of the modern professional spirit in games were mentioned before him.

  “Oh!” Mr. Duff now said guiltily. “Oh, yes; yes, of course. Yes, I must see that undoubtedly. The final, yes. That is, if I can get the Fourth’s Latin grammar paper corrected in time.” The day was a Monday, and the end-of-term examinations had begun that morning. It was Mr. Duff’s terminal ambition to keep abreast of the papers for which he was responsible by getting each one corrected on the day it was done; an ambition which in fifteen odd years of schoolmastering had never once yet been fulfilled.

  The conversation again lapsed.

  Mr. Parker’s shield remained undislodged.

  Young Mr. Rice lifted his large body out of the chair and stretched it greatly. “Ah, well,” he observed. “Must get along and change, I suppose. Promised I’d give Phyllis a spot of coaching on her backhand before the match. Bit of a nuisance sometimes, women, eh, Duff? Or don’t they worry you?”

  Mr. Duff smiled nervously.

  Mr. Rice lumbered out of the room, his hands in his pockets and an expanse of grey-flannelled stern very much in evidence.

  Mr. Parker lowered his shield at last.

  “Insufferable young jackanapes,” growled Mr. Parker, and blew so vigorously that it was a wonder his moustache remained on his lip at all.

  III

  In the matron’s room three very excited young women were drinking tea. Reading from left to right, as the illustrated papers say, these were Miss Jevons, Miss Waterhouse, and Miss Crimp. Miss Waterhouse combined the duties of governess to the infants’ class and secretary to the headmaster (which meant, more often, secretary to the headmaster’s daughter); Miss Crimp taught music and dancing. Alone among the staff of Roland House (except for the Rev. Michael Stanford, who came on Monday mornings to take the sixth form in catechism and the scriptures) Elsa Crimp did not live on the premises. She was the daughter of a local artist, of some considerable reputation, and, like Mr. Rice, she let it be known that her presence at Roland House was in the nature of a kindness to that institution. At normal times Miss Crimp took pupils after lunch; she had forgotten that this was examination week and music lessons were in abeyance, and so found that she had arrived at Roland House that afternoon to no purpose.

  Naturally, therefore, she had wandered up to Miss Jevons’s room—to learn that she had not arrived to no purpose after all.

  Leila Jevons was one of those women who can never keep a good thing to themselves. Whatever entered the field of Miss Jevons’s experience trickled out again through her mouth. She had just finished telling her two enthralled listeners, for the third time, the story of Mr. Harrison’s Astounding Behaviour. It was a good story, and it got better with each repetition.

  “My dear, how terrible for you,” said Mary Waterhouse, with big eyes.

  “I had to let him, you see,” explained Miss Jevons, with pleased masochism, “or I’d probably have got the push after all. I bet Amy had done her best to make him give it me, curse her. And all over a wretched pair of pants, my dear.”

  “Well, I should never have thought Mr. Harrison was that sort,” said Miss Waterhouse.

  “Hasn’t he ever tried anything like that on with you?”

  “I should hope not,” exclaimed Miss Waterhouse virtuously. “He knows I wouldn’t let a married man mess me about.” Miss Waterhouse, as everyone knew, was a stickler for duty. Her favourite expression was, “One does one’s job.” She was quite pretty enough to have been nothing of the sort.

  “Nonsense!” observed Miss Crimp robustly. “You know perfectly well you would, Mary, if you thought he was really interested. You’re sexually starved, just as Leila is. You’re both ready to fall into the arms of the first man who opens them, married or not.” As the daughter of an artist Miss Crimp cultivated a healthy, if somewhat self-conscious, unconventionally. Her favourite expression was “sexually starved.”

  Leila Jevons uttered a faint moo of protest; Mary Waterhouse merely smiled tolerantly.

  “Don’t tell the Duffer, that’s all, Leila,” added Miss Crimp, with a slight wink. “We don’t want any blood shed over you.”

  “Elsa, don’t be so absurd,” cried Miss Jevons, turning, to her companions’ gratification, bright pink.

  “Has he . . . yet?” asked Miss Waterhouse with interest.

  “Of course he hasn’t.”

  The entrance of a small boy cut short this promising theme. (“Matron, can I have a clean handkerchief, please? Mr. Wargrave said I was to come and ask for one.” “Why did Mr. Wargrave say that, Wyllie?” “Because he saw me blowing my nose on a dock-leaf, I think, matron. Jolly good things, dock-leaves, when you haven’t got a handkerchief, matron.” “Where’s the handkerchief you had clean yesterday morning?” “I don’t know, matron. I think I must have lost it. I can’t find it anywhere, matron. Honour bright! P’raps old Posh pinched it, to wipe up Nora’s tears, ’cos she won’t see him again till next term.” “That will do, Wyllie. Here’s your handkerchief. Don’t lose this one.” “Oo, thank you, matron. Don’t tell Goggle-eyes, will you?” “That will do, Wyllie.”)

  “What is all this about Mr. Parker and Nora?” demanded Miss Crimp, almost before the door had closed. “I’m always hearing references to it.”

  “Just a silly joke of the boys’,” Miss Jevons replied, a little absently, for she was wondering how to account to Amy Harrison for Wyllie’s missing handkerchief without giving the boy away.

  “Yes, but is there anything in it?”

  “Of course not,” said Miss Waterhouse, looking down her rather pretty nose. “Mr. Parker’s the last man to interfere with one of the maids. It’s just one of their ridiculous ideas. I believe they use it to try to annoy Sergeant Turner. He and Nora are supposed to be going to make a match of it.”

  “Posh and the Parlourmaid,” meditated Miss Crimp. “Rather a nice title, don’t you think? It’s astonishing how apt the boys’ nicknames are. ‘Posh’ is exactly the right name for Mr. Parker.”

  “It’s all very absurd,” Miss Waterhouse observed severely, “and rather unpleasant.”

  “But there’s seldom smoke without fire,” opined Miss Crimp hopefully.

  Miss Waterhouse frowned in a pained way. “Sometimes I’m inclined to think, Elsa, that you’ve got rather a nasty mind.”

  “Well, that’s better than having no mind at all, my dear,” retorted Miss Crimp cheerfully.

  “Are you ready for some more tea, Elsa?” asked Miss Jevons, with tactless hastiness.

  Miss Crimp smiled, and declined another cup of tea. Leaning back in her chair she crossed her rather short legs and introduced the topic which more than any other had engaged the breathless attention of the female side of the Roland House staff during the latter half of the present term. As an abiding source of discussion it could oust even such items of compelling but temporary interest as the Astonishing Behaviour of Mr. Harrison.

  “How has Amy been getting on the last few days?” she asked. “Made any progress?” It was not in the least necessary to refer any more specifically to the particular matter in which Amy might have made progress.

  “They were walking round the garden together for simply hours last night, after supper,” reported Miss Jevons eagerly.

  “But no definite announcement yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “She’ll have to hurry if she’s going to bring it off before the end of the term,” pronounced Miss Crimp.

  Miss Waterhouse smiled: the rather superior smile of one who has already brought “it” off. And she glanced, as if unconsciously, at the neat ring on the third finger of her left hand.

  The other two, plunging at once int
o their hundredth discussion of Amy’s chances, affected to notice neither the smile nor the glance.

  Up till the middle of the term it had been impossible to deal adequately with this entrancing topic in the presence of Miss Waterhouse without embarrassment, for during the previous term Mr. Wargrave had, to eyes knowledgeable in such matters, shown distinct signs of being interested in Mary Waterhouse herself; moreover Mary Waterhouse, to those same eyes, had shown equal signs of nourishing and returning such interest. Both were earnest souls, and the feminine side of the staff had been already prepared to sit back and bless the solemn union. Mr. Wargrave was the third master, next in seniority to Mr. Duff and superior only to Mr. Rice; and though the third master in a preparatory school can hardly be considered any great catch, he is undoubtedly better than no catch at all.

  This term, however, Miss Harrison had intervened. She had not troubled to hide her intentions. It had been very plain indeed that during the holidays she had thought the matter over, decided to approve of Mr. Wargrave, and now meant to have him; and she had gone about the acquiring of him in her usual direct fashion. She was, in fact, following in mother’s footsteps. And whether in consequence of this direct attack or not, it was nevertheless a fact that Mr. Wargrave’s attentions to Miss Waterhouse had quite abruptly ceased.

  Sympathy was entirely with Miss Waterhouse, who bore her presumed disappointment with fortitude and patience. Miss Crimp indeed had gone so far as to assert that Mr. Wargrave was a Schemer: that having early noticed possible evidences of interest in himself on the part of Miss Harrison, he had deliberately played up the innocent Miss Waterhouse in order to quicken the beating of Miss Harrison’s heart; for just as it was indisputable that whoever married Miss Harrison would one day inherit Roland House, so was it indisputable that Mr. Wargrave was an ambitious as well as an earnest young man.

  Miss Waterhouse herself, when this theory had been tentatively hinted to her by the sympathetic but tactless Miss Jevons, had laughed heartily. There had never been anything at all between herself and Mr. Wargrave, she had declared frankly, beyond a certain community of interests, not even the very mildest flirtation; and indeed it was difficult, even for Miss Crimp’s agile invention, to imagine Mary Waterhouse flirting. Nevertheless this statement, when reported by Miss Jevons to Miss Crimp, had at once been attributed to Pride, covering a Bruised Heart; it was therefore something of a shock to both her colleagues when Miss Waterhouse, returning from the usual half-term weekend, had announced with modest pleasure that she had become engaged to an Australian sheep-farmer and had at once given notice to leave at the end of the term in order to go out to Australia and marry him. Australian sheep-farmers, Miss Waterhouse had discreetly allowed it to be gathered, are an impatient race.