Death at the Opera mb-5

by Gladys Mitchell

  There was, of course, the question of opportunity. Alceste, free to rove about behind the scenes during the whole of the First Act, her comings and goings, appearances and disappearances unquestioned, had had as much opportunity as anyone of drowning poor Miss Ferris if she had made up her mind to drown her. On the other hand, her general behaviour, described by herself and corroborated wherever corroboration was possible by members of the company, was not that of a murderer coming fresh from the scene of the crime. She had searched, and had set others to search for Miss Ferris. She had appealed to Miss Camden to play the part, had been refused, and had gone on herself to play it. Would she have risked sending out a search party if she thought there was any chance of their discovering the body of the victim? It seemed unlikely. On the other hand, again, a very clear, far-seeing and courageous person might have risked it, and Alceste could certainly be described by those three adjectives, Mrs. Bradley reflected.

  But the electric light! Could Alceste have tampered with the switch? If she had, it would go to prove that she had taken the minimum of risk when sending out the search party, for nobody would be likely to explore a place that was in pitch darkness. But very few women would have thought of disconnecting the switch. Most would have turned off the light and trusted to luck. Then, again, Alceste had immediately disposed of her own supposed motive for the murder by confessing to the Headmaster the love she had for Hampstead. True, she had refused to give the name of the man, but it was easy enough for Mr. Cliffordson to put two and two together. It had to be Hampstead or Smith, and with Smith there would have been no obstacle to the marriage, since he was a bachelor. Under the heading of Opportunity, Alceste remained on Mrs. Bradley’s list of suspected persons, but on every other count she was ruthlessly and finally crossed off.

  The next suspect on Mrs. Bradley’s list was Mr. Smith. Her feelings about this man were mixed. That he was capable of murder she felt certain. That he had committed this particular murder she was slow to believe. Any motive which she could assign to him was weak. Admitted that he might have nursed a desire to retaliate on Miss Ferris for the loss of his Psyche, it was difficult to believe that he would have killed her as an act of revenge. The only other motive which he may have had, Mrs. Bradley decided, was that of saving Alceste Boyle, whom he loved in the way that some small boys love their mothers, from the consequences of Calma Ferris having discovered her relationship with Frederick Hampstead.

  The point at issue here, Mrs. Bradley told herself, was whether Smith knew of Miss Ferris’s discovery of Alceste’s secret. Alceste, she felt certain, would not have discussed the point with Smith, and Hampstead would scarcely have deemed it delicate to do so. Apart from the question of motive, Smith would have to remain fairly high on the list of suspects, she thought, since he was one of the people who had had the whole of the First Act in which to commit the crime.

  The other person with almost unlimited opportunity was the ex-actress, Mrs. Berotti. Here, although temperamentally she would make an ideal murderer, possessing the artistic instinct, courage, a sort of divine exasperation with fools, resourcefulness and an actress’s self-command, it was difficult to assign to her any motive for the crime. A murder without motive is the act of a maniac, and Mrs. Berotti, whatever her shortcomings of temper and impatience, was certainly not mad.

  The bogus electrician, Helm—if Helm it had been: a theory that needed proving—must have had opportunity, but where, again, was his motive? Calma Ferris had left a will bequeathing her property—two or three hundred pounds—to the school. She would have inherited something from her aunt, it was true, but only if she had survived her. Helm had offered her marriage, by which ultimately he might have gained something, but, as matters stood at the time of Miss Ferris’s death, he could gain nothing whatever by that death.

  Miss Camden was the most likely person to have committed murder, it seemed. She was extravagant enough, perhaps, to waste life as well as money; she was perverse, ill-dispositioned and thwarted; she had hated the dead woman and had intended to be revenged on her…

  At this point Mrs. Bradley discovered that she had to change at the next station, so she stowed away notebook and pencil and sat staring out of the window on to the flying landscape. Greys and browns predominated in the colouring of vegetation and sky. It ought to have been a dispiriting reflection that winter was only just beginning, but Mrs. Bradley, who was insensible to changes in the weather, and was equally undisturbed by the climates of Greenland and Southern India—she had experienced both —did not find it so.

  Instead, when the train drew up at the next station, she hopped blithely on to the platform and was greatly surprised to find a young friend of hers, the Reverend Noel Wells, seated upon the nearest bench, his long black-trousered legs uncanonically sprawling, his soft black hat tilted over his eyes, his mouth wide open and an expression of imbecile contentment on his vacuous, sleeping face. Mrs. Bradley set down her small suit-case and prodded him gently with the ferrule of her neat umbrella.

  “Well, child,” she said. Wells sat up and stared.

  “Well, I’m blowed,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I am chasing a murderer,” said Mrs. Bradley, concisely. “And you?”

  “Doing a locum job at Bognor. At least, it’s a little village outside. I’ve got to go to Bognor and then walk or bus or something. Wouldn’t be bad if it were August, of course.”

  “And Daphne?” inquired Mrs. Bradley.

  “South of France. You knew we were married? I say, you know, this is a bit of luck! I suppose you’re not going to Bognor by any chance?”

  “But I am, dear child,” said Mrs. Bradley. “This is splendid. Listen, child. If the circumstances warranted it would you be prepared to practise a little innocent deception?”

  “Rather. What is it!” inquired the young curate.

  “Pretend to be my son,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Rather. I get you, although you might not think I could rise to it,” said Wells. “You want to persuade someone that you’re a bit of a goop, and you think that the party will take one good look at me, shake his or her head sadly, observe pensively, ‘Like mother, like son,’ and that’ll be that.”

  “You know, child,” said Mrs. Bradley, in all sincerity, as she stepped back a pace to get a better look at him, “there are moments when your intelligence staggers me.”

  “It’s being married to Daphne,” the young curate explained modestly. “Bucks up the intellect no end. I’m supposed to be having a pop at a bishopric, you know.”

  He laughed, and they talked about matters of interest common to them both until the train came in.

  “And now,” said Mrs. Bradley, when they were settled in opposite corners of the compartment, “for a little further investigation into the case of Mr. Donald Smith.” And, without taking any further notice of the Reverend Noel Wells, who proceeded to smoke his pipe and gaze peacefully out of the window, she took out her notebook and pencil, turned up the pages she had devoted to the evidence supplied by and on behalf of the Senior Art Master, and reconsidered it.

  Smith worried her. He was almost as obvious a choice for the murderer as Miss Camden. Motive and opportunity here were strong, she decided, again. The whole of the First Act had been Mr. Smith’s opportunity, the damaged clay figure of the Psyche his chief motive. But there were snags. Mr. Smith was not the type to brood for two or three days over a wrong. If he had been going to kill Calma Ferris for damaging his work he would have snatched up the nearest heavy object and brought it down on the top of her head there and then, Mrs. Bradley decided. Besides, the motive in his case was not so strong at a second glance as it had seemed at first sight. He was not interested in that particular figure, it appeared, except as a money-making proposition. It had been commissioned, and he was in debt, and with the money he obtained from the sale of the commissioned work he was going to pay his debts. Well, the clay figure had been damaged past repair by Calma Ferris, but Alceste Boyle had c
ome to the rescue, lent the money and comforted the artist.

  True, Smith had been the person to cause Calma Ferris’s injury, but it was permissible to believe that the collision in the darkened corridor was accidental. It was not to be supposed that Smith imagined he could seriously injure the unfortunate woman by charging down the corridor, since he would not even have known she was there until they collided; for there was nothing to show that he had asked Calma Ferris to come that way or that he could have seized upon the exact moment of her coming. He might possibly have foreseen that she would be wearing eyeglasses with her make-up, but not that she would cut her face; nor that she would have gone to that particular water-lobby to bathe the cut, since it was not the only place on the ground-floor behind the scenes where running water was available.

  Smith might have tampered with one or both of the electric lights that failed, since he had plenty of time on his hands, but it was fantastic to suppose he had done so before the murder, unless he had experimented on the corridor light that went wrong in order to make certain that he could cut out the one in the lobby when the time came.

  His plea of a bad memory was suspicious, if he were the murderer, but, on the other hand, people of his peculiarly erratic, nervous type often did have bad memories.

  The business of the modelling clay from the art-room which had been used to stop up the waste-pipe reacted for and against Smith, Mrs. Bradley decided. On the one hand, it was the kind of non-porous agent which would have occurred to a man who had been using it for modelling purposes a short time previously, but, on the other hand, would any murderer have been so foolish as to use something which so obviously suggested his guilt?

  Mrs. Bradley, shaking her head over all the classic instances of murderers’ foolhardiness, reluctantly confessed to herself that Smith might easily have used the modelling clay to stop up the waste-pipe. One more thought presented itself in connection with the clay. Had someone else used the clay, foreseeing that its discovery in the waste-pipe might incriminate Smith?

  It was an interesting question which, up to the moment, it was impossible to answer. The very proximity of the art-room to the water-lobby might in itself have suggested the clay, and the murderer might never have considered for an instant that the discovery of the clay might implicate Smith.

  At this point a new idea came to her, and an unwelcome one. She looked across at Wells and said:

  “Child, if you were going to make a statue called Psyche, how old do you think your model would have to be?”

  Wells rubbed his Wellingtonian nose and, having given the question a good deal of earnest thought, replied vaguely:

  “Oh, I dunno. Somewhere between fifteen and eighteen, I suppose.”

  “Exactly,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Child, I’m alarmed.”

  “Bottom fallen out of your conclusions?” inquired Wells, sympathetically. Mrs. Bradley shuddered.

  “I hope not. But I am conscious of hideous doubts, child.”

  She had wondered once or twice what Smith’s reason could have been for doing his modelling at school instead of in his studio at home. It struck her now that the reason must be that he was using someone at the school for a model—someone who could stay at school after hours, perhaps, but who could not have gone alone to Smith’s studio.

  “At the next stop I must telephone,” she said. She put through the call to Alceste Boyle.

  “Please find out for certain whom Mr. Smith was using as a model for his Psyche, will you?”- she said, when communication between herself and Mrs. Boyle had been established. The reply was a foregone conclusion.

  “Moira Malley. He was using her figure, but not her head,” said Alceste.

  “No wonder,” said Mrs. Bradley, when they had again made their connection and were en route for Bognor Regis, this time on a main line and in a much faster train, “that Mr. Smith was sufficiently in touch with Moira Malley to get her to promise not to tell anyone that he was responsible for the accident to Miss Ferris’s glasses.”

  But the outcome of this new discovery was likely to be perturbing in the extreme. Mrs. Bradley had never seriously considered the Sixth Form Irish girl as a probable murderer, but it was possible to suppose that she had given the sittings secretly to Smith, and it was possible that Miss Ferris had discovered that she was sitting to him.

  Mrs. Bradley decided that if the spectacle of Hurstwood kissing Miss Cliffordson had shocked Miss Ferris, the spectacle of a naked Sixth Form girl posing after school hours for the Art Master would have shocked her a good deal more. Another point at issue was that although Smith himself had probably regarded the girl’s action as natural, justifiable, convenient and right (and probably, too, in view of the girl’s chronically impecunious state, as a business proposition entirely), Mrs. Bradley thought it more than possible that to the girl herself, fanatically chaste and unreasoningly modest as only an Irish person can be, the sittings were a source of constant war between her conscience and her desire to please Smith, with whom, thought Mrs. Bradley, groaning with humorous despair, she was probably in love.

  There was nothing humorous, however, about the conclusion towards which this latest discovery tended. If Moira Malley thought that Miss Ferris would report to the Headmaster that she had discovered her standing naked in the art-room, no matter for what purpose or reason, the motive for Moira Malley’s having killed Miss Ferris was overwhelmingly strong.

  Mrs. Bradley felt old and tired. Her previous conclusions as to the identity of the murderer began to rock on their foundations. Fortunately, she decided, it would be impossible now to prove whether Miss Ferris had known of the sittings or not, and, without such proof, the case against Moira Malley fell to the ground. All the same, a little demon insisted upon repeating in Mrs. Bradley’s mental ear a snippet of the conversation she herself had had with Moira Malley on the subject of the time the girl was expected to be home from school.

  “But what about your people?”

  “Aunt doesn’t mind. Often she doesn’t know whether I’m in the house or not, until supper-time…”

  “Oh, dear,” sighed Mrs. Bradley. “I do hope you didn’t do it, you poor child, because you’ll never get over it if you did.”

  There had been the girl’s outburst, too, when Mrs. Bradley had suggested that she should conduct her to the water-lobby where the body had been found.

  “I can’t go round there after dark! I won’t face it!”

  Well, it was natural enough, considering that the girl had been the first person to discover the dead body. On the other hand, that “discovery” in itself was suspicious. So many murderers, overcome by their own nervous inability to escape from the scene of the crime, have “discovered” the body with intent to begin the very inquiries they most dread having set on foot.

  It looked bad—Wells, looking across at Mrs. Bradley, noted the sunken lines round her mouth and the pucker between her brows—it looked very bad for Moira Malley. But still—Mrs. Bradley turned over another page of her notebook—there were several other people to be considered. There was still Miss Camden, for example, and there was still the electrician. If the electrician should prove to be the man Helm, he would have to explain away a good deal of very suspicious matter in connection with his obviously clandestine visit to the school, Mrs. Bradley decided. She resolved not to consider him further until she had visited Miss Ferris’s aunt at Bognor Regis and had learned all she could from her about Helm and the dead woman.

  Miss Camden, however, was in a different category of suspects. In her case the motive seemed fairly obvious— she had had what might be called a double motive, in fact —and temperamentally she was capable of murder. She possessed a good many, if not all, of the qualities required in the carrying out of this particular crime. Her course as a Physical Training and Games Mistress had made her alert, physically powerful, able to grasp opportunity quickly, ruthless in the sense that in her had been developed the “will to win” at the expense, so far as Mrs. Bradley could determ
ine from a very imperfect study of the girl, of gentler qualities.

  The difficulty in her case, Mrs. Bradley repeated to herself, was the question of opportunity. But the more Mrs. Bradley thought it over, the more possible it seemed that Miss Camden might have had as much opportunity as any other person with a motive for committing the crime. It was easy enough to prove that she had been seated at the end of a row in the auditorium at the beginning of the performance, and it was apparent, from Alceste Boyle’s evidence, that she had been in the same seat towards the end of the act.

  But the point at issue, so far as Mrs. Bradley was concerned, was whether she had remained there during the whole of the intervening time. If it could be shown that she had left her place at any point between, say, half-past seven and a quarter-past eight, for instance, there would be a certain amount of reason for keeping her high on the list of suspected persons.

  She was a person with little or no power of thinking ahead; she was inclined to yield to sudden temptation (if the story of the cashed and altered cheque was true); she was a disillusioned creature, and she was obviously the victim of nervous strain brought on by overwork. On the other hand, she had admitted to having had what she called a “row” with Miss Ferris, and she had sufficiently confessed the incident of the Headmaster’s cheque for Mrs. Bradley to find out the complete story. It was difficult, too, to determine exactly how she had discovered that Miss Ferris had been using the water-lobby. Mrs. Bradley wrinkled her brows over this. Suddenly light came.