A Question of Proof

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘Well, yes, I should very much like a cup of tea.’ ‘Tea? Ah, yes, to be sure, tea. I will have a cup sent in to the morningroom for you.’

  Nigel, looking, for him, almost bashful, asked if it might be a pot; to which the headmaster consented, though with the defeated air of one invited to take part in a round game whose rules he does not know. Nigel had only just poured out his third cup when Armstrong was announced. One or two preliminary remarks were passed, which made it clear to Nigel that the superintendent was sparring for a verbal opening, and he decided to get in his own word first.

  ‘As you know,’ he said, ‘I have come down with a rather vague commission to investigate this case in the interests of the school. I should like to assure you at the outset that I shall be doing so in no spirit of antagonism to yourself. Naturally, I hope that I may be able to find a solution which will help to restore the school’s reputation or, at least, damage it no further. But if I am forced to conclude that the criminal is connected with the school, I shall do my best to assist you in proving his guilt.’

  ‘That’s fair enough, sir.’

  ‘Like a cup of tea? No? A cigarette, then. Now, as to my line of action. I know that you professionals get sick to death of amateur theorising. I therefore suggest that we pool the facts, but each keeps his theories to himself until he has a pretty complete case.’

  Armstrong studied his toecaps for a moment or two. He was faintly resentful of Strangeways having taken the initiative thus, nor was he too keen on a pooling of the facts, when all the facts at present were to be contributed by himself. On the other hand, the amateur was in a far better position than himself for the making of further discoveries. So, on the whole, it seemed best to strike the bargain. He therefore proceeded to give Strangeways a detailed and lucid summary of the course of the investigation up to date, ‘And you can see for yourself, sir,’ he concluded, ‘though we have decided to keep our theories to ourselves, that the facts so far are all pointing in one direction.’

  ‘Mrs. Vale and Evans?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Armstrong, rather surprised by the other’s matter-of-fact admission, ‘though I shouldn’t have expected you to agree so readily.’

  ‘Why not? Evans is one of my best friends, but I shan’t help him by shutting my eyes to all evidence against him. If I may sum up your own position, it is this. The murder was committed either by someone outside the school or someone inside. The movements of all vagrants known to be in the district have been satisfactorily accounted for, and besides, there was no sign of the body having been robbed. This, and the entire absence of possible motives, puts the first alternative practically out of court, though one must not altogether leave out of one’s reckoning the man whom Wrench said he spoke to at the beginning of the sports. Take the second alternative. The time-limit appears to be fixed as from one to two-thirty p.m. From about one-forty-five to two-thirty the hayfield was in full view of Griffin and the groundsman. From one-thirty to one-forty-five, there was no one about outside, but the murderer could not reckon on this and it would have been dangerous in the extreme for him to have murdered the boy in the haystack or carried his body to it at a time when anyone might come out of the school. There remains one to one-thirty, when every one’s movements are accounted for, except those of Evans and Mrs. Vale, who admit that they were actually on the spot where the body was found.’

  ‘That’s it, sir, the case against them seems the only possible one. But –’

  ‘But you haven’t got a single fact to support it except a piece of string that might come off anyone of millions of balls, and a silver pencil, which seems to be rather a broken reed itself.’

  ‘It’s extraordinary, Mr. Strangeways. I’ve never heard of a case where there were so few material clues. I’ve been over that field and all the grounds till I was sick. I’ve badgered the servants. I’ve searched the masters’ rooms, though you needn’t tell ’em that. Not a blessed thing to be found. And yet the motive: Mr. Evans and Mrs. Vale seem to have so much the strongest one.’

  ‘By the way, superintendent, I’m surprised that you had so little difficulty in obtaining confirmation of this motive.’

  Armstrong looked uncomfortable, but he could not ignore the question in Strangeways’ remark, and was compelled to give an account of the stratagem he had employed in his last interview with Michael. Nigel stared ruminatively down his nose during this account, then said, ‘Well, you certainly don’t use kid gloves. Don’t think I am criticising you. You people wouldn’t have much chance of catching criminals if you kept to the rules which they break. But there are two points which counsel for the defence can make –’

  Armstrong, who had started very much on the defensive against the amateur, was now entirely at ease and asked him to expound.

  ‘First, it seems unlikely that a murderer would admit from the beginning having been on the spot when the murder was committed. One would expect them either to have cooked up an alibi, or to have put the body somewhere else.’

  ‘It might be a bold kind of bluff, sir, to sidetrack suspicion by putting themselves in the most obviously suspicious position at the start.’

  ‘It might. That has been done, I know, but – well, anyway, my second point is this. Supposing the murder had been done from the motive you suggest, it’s unnatural that a murderer should be so easily induced to betray his motive. One doesn’t give up one’s key position without making a fight for it, more of a fight than Evans seems to have made, at least.’

  ‘I see your point, sir. Yes, I admit that hadn’t occurred to me. Of course, he might just have lost his nerve; though, after that little affair yesterday, my opinion of Mr. Evans’ nerve has gone up. Considerably. Well, I must be getting along. I can see that you don’t need much advice from me, but there is one line which I’d like to suggest. I can’t manage to get anything out of the boys myself –’

  ‘Damned little snobs, most of them, I bet,’ interrupted Nigel.

  ‘That’s just it, sir,’ said Armstrong gratefully, ‘and I believe that they are the only ones who might give us a line on –’

  ‘On what it was that made Wemyss conceal himself so successfully till the murderer was at liberty to finish him for good?’

  ‘Good Lord, Mr. Strangeways, either you’re a thought reader, or else you ought to be running this case instead of me,’ said the superintendent with real admiration. And refusing another offer of tea – to Nigel’s considerable relief, for there was little left, and he wanted a sixth cup – he took himself off.

  Until lunch Strangeways wandered about in the school grounds. He tried, not very successfully, to visualise them as they were on the Sports Day; the running track, the flags, the crowd and the haystacks. He poked his nose into Mould’s hut and pondered the question of the sacks. Someone must have moved them. The murderer? If so, why should he have transferred the body to the hayfield at all? It was hidden just as well in the hut. Why, you poor fool, because he wanted to gain time. He knew the hut would probably be visited before the sports, whereas the hayfield almost certainly would not be. He knew. You are already assuming that the murderer is familiar with the school arrangements. But, granted all this, the main difficulty is unresolved. When was all this done? You believe Michael and his young woman to be innocent; well then, that leaves from one-thirty to two-thirty. One-thirty to one-forty-five, unless the murder was committed while Griffin and Mould were on the Big Field. That has been assumed to be impossible. Is it? The walls of the haystack, Armstrong said, were tall enough to conceal a man stooping inside, therefore the murder might have been committed there unseen. But there still remains the fact that either the murderer, or his victim, or both, would be seen going from the school to the haystack. Of course, Griffin and Mould might have had their backs turned for a moment every now and then; but the murderer couldn’t rely on this; it wasn’t like dashing across a deck between waves. A murderer who has covered his traces so well is surely not the man to have trusted to luck at the most crucial p
oint of his actions.

  Try again. Is that two-thirty fixed? Medical evidence puts four p.m. as the outside limit. Was the murder done during the sports after all? But if it is not reasonable to suppose that a murderer would risk being seen by two people, surely it’s far more wildly unreasonable to imagine that he would have taken the risk with two hundred or so. Supposing it was not done in the haystack at all, and the body put there later, say, when every one was at tea. That means it must have been done by someone outside the school, for boys and masters are all accounted for from tea time onwards. All very fine, but why in the name of the saints should anyone take the trouble of carting the corpse back and dumping it down in a haystack. That’s the most fantastic idea of all. The haystack. Why the haystack, anyway? Surely the solution lies there. If one could only grasp why the murder was done – or at any rate the body deposited – in such an eccentric place, such a public place, such a wildly paradoxical place, one would have the key of the riddle in one’s hands.

  Nigel strolled slowly back into the school, deliberately overlaying this crucial question with other minor ones, hoping it would soon dive into his unconscious mind and emerge in due season bearing the answer with it. It was not long, indeed, before other matters turned up which effectually diverted his attention. He was sitting in Michael’s room after lunch when there was an impetuous knock at the door and a body entered with that unwilling and unseemly haste which, in a prep-school, usually indicates propulsion from behind by a bashful associate. The first figure shot several feet into the room, revealing itself as Anstruther. He was followed by Stevens, looking elaborately unconscious of his companion’s unceremonious entry.

  ‘Please, sir,’ they both said simultaneously, and stopped with a common blush.

  ‘You go on, Stevens,’ said Anstruther.

  ‘Please, sir, may we say something to Mr. Strangeways?’

  ‘You may,’ Michael smiled affectionately at the head of the school, contrasting his unstudied diffidence with the contained and natural arrogance of his slight figure.

  ‘We thought we ought to tell you, sir,’ the boy addressed Strangeways, ‘on the morning that Wemyss was murdered, there was a conversation about him at the prefect’s table.’ Nigel suppressed a faint smile at the stilted opening, and Stevens continued.

  ‘You see, sir, he was becoming rather a menace, I mean, he was a ghastly tick, really, and we thought it was about time he was suppressed.’ Michael stirred uneasily. Heaven forfend that this should turn out to have been a joke that went too far. And Stevens, of all people.

  ‘Of course, we couldn’t do anything ourselves. Percy – Mr. Vale – wouldn’t stand for us reporting a boy for ragging a master. So we decided to get my brother and his gang to deal with him.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘I talked to my brother in recess, and he said he’d get some of his gang to beat up Wemyss after the sports. They call themselves “the Black Spot”; a sort of secret society, it is, sir. Rather a childish business, but it seems to amuse them.’ Stevens spoke with an indulgent, one-man-of-the-world-to-another air, but there was an entirely boyish note of apprehension in his tones as well. It was at this point that Strangeways might very well have lost the battle. If he had taken up a stern moral attitude, or, worse still, if he had tried to laugh off the whole thing, the sensitive Stevens would have retired forever into his shell, and the train of events which finally led to the solution of the crime would never have been started. But Strangeways was neither a moralist nor a hearty blunderer.

  ‘I see,’ he said, ‘that must have made things rather difficult for you and your brother, but I think you were quite right to tell me. And, of course, you needn’t worry about it. I’m quite sure that neither of you is the murderer. But if you or he can give me any information, I’d be extraordinarily grateful, and it won’t go any further than me, unless I think it absolutely necessary to tell the police about it.’

  Stevens gave him a smile of great sweetness, ‘That’s jolly decent of you, sir. Of course, my brother didn’t do anything. But perhaps it would be better if he told you himself. He wasn’t funking it, you know, but – well – he thought at first you might be a mess, like that policeman Johnny.’

  ‘I’d like to see your brother very much; how about this afternoon?’

  ‘Well, he’s been kept in then, but he could come up before tea, about half-past five, if that would do.’

  ‘Would he like to have tea here with me? Could that be arranged?’

  ‘I’m sure he’d love to. But I don’t know whether Mr. Vale would allow him,’ Stevens added dubiously.

  ‘I think I can manage to get his permission,’ said Strangeways with unimpaired gravity. Stevens and Anstruther departed, casting glances of shy admiration at him, as unconscious as he that they were putting one end of the long and tangled clue in his hand.

  VIII

  Initiation of a Detective

  STRANGEWAYS LOOKED FORWARD to his tea-party with mild curiosity. He went into the village and bought suitable cakes and a good supply of chocolate. Returning, he filled in time on the cricket field, in that pleasant mood composed of aesthetic rapture and expert attention which the cricket devotee shares only with the lover of music and the fisherman. In the middle of Big Field the first eleven were bowling against a second team stiffened by the inclusion of Griffin and Tiverton. For the second time since he had entered the school, Nigel was made aware of class; Wrench’s teaching, and now Tiverton’s batting. The man was a born cricketer. As Nigel watched him, dealing in his offhand manner with some by no means despicable bowling, he found himself most irrationally crossing Tiverton off his list of suspects. No man who could bat like that would commit a mean and cowardly murder. Nigel seemed to have been there only a moment or two, held as he was in that timeless trance of the sky, green grass and gracious action, when he looked at his watch and found that it lacked but ten minutes till his tea-party.

  He hurried indoors, boiled water, put out the food, and awaited his guest. There were two of them, as it happened. Stevens II put his head round the door, gave Strangeways a frank stare, and asked, ‘Can I bring someone else?’ ‘Of course, if you like, fetch him along.’ ‘That’s O.K., sir, I’ve got him outside here.’ The face disappeared. A highly audible colloquy took place beyond the door. ‘Come on, he says you can come.’ ‘But look here, what will Percy say?’ ‘Bother Percy! He’ll have to do what the detective jolly well tells him.’ ‘What’s he like?’ ‘Decent. Do come on! There’s milk chocolate on the table.’ ‘Oh, all right. You needn’t pull my ear off.’ Stevens II entered the room, towing a chubby, fiery-faced child behind him, whom he introduced as follows: ‘This is Ponsonby. He’s my lieutenant. Don’t trip over the table, you silly gowk.’

  Ponsonby, under the influence of cakes and chocolate, quickly became his natural self. The dictator had no reserve to shed; he discussed the merits of different kinds of iced drink, told Nigel all about his fleet of model airplanes, and becoming even more convivial, related several grossly scandalous anecdotes about members of the staff. When there was not a speck of food left on any of the plates, he summed up, ‘A jolly good binge, sir. Better than eating train-grease on cardboard in hall.’

  ‘Train-grease on cardboard?’

  ‘He means toast and butter, sir. That’s what we have for tea on Saturdays,’ explained Ponsonby.

  ‘Butter!’ said Stevens darkly. ‘Be your rank! Any fool knows it’s margarine, or worse.’

  Nigel cut short what threatened to be a lecture on dietetics, ‘Well, I suppose we’d better be getting down to business. You were going to tell me something about Wemyss.’

  Stevens knitted his brow. He looked very like his elder brother now, but much more the man of action, the rough diamond, the potential leader.

  ‘It’s rather difficult,’ he said. ‘You see, it’s not really about Wemyss at all. And if I tell you, it’s betraying a secret of the Black Spot.’

  ‘Punishment – expulsion and disgr
ace,’ added his lieutenant portentously.

  ‘So we thought perhaps – that is, if you would become a member of the Black Spot yourself –’

  Strangeways just avoided saying, ‘It would be a great honour,’ realising that Stevens was not the person to accept grown-up politeness.

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘The trouble is that every one has to pass a test before we allow them into the society,’ continued Stevens doubtfully.

  ‘A test?’

  ‘Yes. An ordeal, sort of. To prove their courage and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Couldn’t I go through the ordeal?’

  ‘Well, sir, we make them do rather funny things. I mean, it’s all very well for boys, but I don’t think it’d do for grown-up people,’ said the realist Stevens.

  ‘Couldn’t we make him an honorary member?’ asked Ponsonby.

  ‘Shut up, Pongo, I thought of that long ago, so snoo to you.’

  ‘I’d rather be a proper member, if you don’t mind,’ said Strangeways; thereby, as he came to realise later, making a decision that was to lead him to the criminal.

  ‘Oh, flip! That’s fine! Are you sure you don’t mind, sir? You could have the test tomorrow. We’ll work it out tonight.’

  ‘You’ll give me the same test as you give every one else?’

  ‘Well, we make up a different one for each new candidate. It’s more fun like that. But they’re all the same sort of thing. You’ll get your instructions tomorrow morning and report to me when you’ve finished, that is –’ the boy broke off with a little confusion. There are limits to a dictator’s scope of dictation.

  Strangeways affected not to notice this and a time and place were arranged for the next meeting. From then till it was time to go, Stevens discarded his official dignity, he and Ponsonby finally leaving the room with repeated volleys of, ‘Thanks awfully, sir!’ ‘Thanks frightfully, sir!’ which made Nigel feel as if he had presented them with half the kingdoms of the world. They had scarcely gone when Stevens returned again and, putting his head in at the door, whispered, ‘I say, sir, you’ll not tell anyone about the test, will you, sir? It’s supposed to be awfully secret.’ Nigel reassured him, though he felt by no means reassured himself. The boy had said that what he had to tell him was not about Wemyss at all. That was bad enough, and now he had to waste some valuable time tomorrow undergoing a probably most undignified initiation. Yet an intuition, which had helped him more than once before, told him that he was beginning to grow warm.