A Question of Proof

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘No, I don’t thing anything came to light – by Jove, though, how about that extra set of hurdles? Mould swore he’d put out the right number.’

  ‘Good for you, Armstrong, you’ve got it! A perfectly sound practical joke, and it would have come off if Griffin hadn’t gone out to make sure that Mould hadn’t committed one of his apparently frequent bloomers.’

  ‘Perhaps it was one of his apparently frequent bloomers,’ said the superintendent slyly.

  ‘And perhaps not. Assume it was not. We can begin to get some idea of Wemyss’ movements. He couldn’t safely do his hanky-panky with the hurdles before lunch, because some of the day room windows look on to the field. For the same reason he couldn’t have done it after lunch. Therefore he must have done it during lunch – the dining-hall faces the opposite direction. Well, then, on my theory he hid somewhere from twelve forty-five till one; then put out the extra hurdles; then hid again till he went into the haystack – or there might have been some other feat he had to perform before that. Or he may have been told to go into the haystack as soon as he’d done with the hurdles, but found that it was occupied and had to wait till Evans and Mrs. Vale went in. There were five other haystacks to hide in.’

  The superintendent was shaking his massive head slowly and ponderously. ‘Thin, sir; much too thin, and all resting on what was very likely an ordinary mistake of the groundsman’s. Besides, sir, I just can’t stomach all this coincidence: the murderer and your friends choosing the same haystack; the murderer and his victim conveniently waiting till your friends were gone before they did their act. Here, sir, are you feeling ill?’ Nigel had gone pale and his eyes were bulging in his head. He shook himself. ‘No, thanks, I’m quite all right. You’ve just put a pretty staggering idea into my head. But I’m going to exercise our agreement to keep theories to oneself – just for a bit, at any rate. It’s thin, you see – very thin.’

  He wagged his head with an impertinent imitation of the superintendent, which caused that worthy to chuckle fatly in his bull neck, and to opine that Mr. Strangeways was a one. He then suggested that Mrs. Vale might take him back to the school with Nigel. The three-quarters of an hour had not quite elapsed, so Armstrong shouted to his ‘old woman’ to brew their guest a pot of tea. By the time he had drained the greater part of this, Hero had returned and the superintendent dragged him unwillingly into the car.

  When they reached the school, Armstrong drew Nigel aside and asked him if he would be present at the interview with Rosa. The maid was sent for. Nigel eyed her curiously as she came into the morning-room. She was still in the red dress, that showed the division of her breasts and the sleek contour of waist and thighs. She moved to a chair with a slinky, arrogant gait obviously modelled on that of her favourite film actress; a synthetic gentility sat strangely on her broad country face and body. As she passed Nigel she gave him the steady, challenging stare of the born wanton. Then she turned to the superintendent, a very different expression on her face. Nigel wondered what line of attack Armstrong would take up. He could feel the man’s crude but powerful personality imposing itself upon the girl. Armstrong stared at her ruminatively for a moment or two.

  ‘You know, a spell in prison would do you no harm, young woman,’ he began suddenly. Rosa started and relapsed again.

  ‘Pardon?’ she said in an offhand way, patting a curl into place.

  ‘And I’ve a good mind to put you there, what’s more.’

  Her eyes flickered. ‘Lord, what have I done now? Have you nothing better to do on a Sunday than to come bullying a harmless girl?’

  ‘Just a little matter of giving false evidence to the police, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, I’m sure.’

  The superintendent hunched himself together, like a rhinoceros about to charge, and said quietly, ‘You were telling the truth, then, when you said you were alone in your room from two till two-thirty on the day of the murder?’ There was the faintest accent on the word ‘alone.’ Rosa twisted a handkerchief in her thick fingers. ‘Really, Mr. Armstrong, I don’t know what – of course I was.’ Armstrong half raised himself from his chair and barked out, ‘Oho! So Mr. Wrench was not with you, after all.’

  ‘Yes. No. Oh, do leave me alone!’ Rosa’s self-possession had collapsed. Her lip trembled. The rouge, standing out on her pallid cheeks, made her look like a doll. The superintendent pressed home his attack.

  ‘Yes? No? You must know if you were alone or not. Speak up, my girl.’

  ‘You make me so confused. Yes, I tell you, I was alone.’

  Armstrong sat back and threw a meaning glance at Nigel, saying mildly:

  ‘That looks bad for Mr. Wrench, don’t it, sir?’

  ‘Looks bad? Oh God, what do you mean, sir? You’re not –’

  ‘Well, if he wasn’t in your room, we can make a very good guess where he was. That’s all.’

  Rosa stifled a sob; clenched her fingers; said in a flat voice, ‘He was in my room,’ and burst out with hysterical weeping. Nigel felt ill at ease. He didn’t much care for bull-baiting, even in the interests of justice; and he detected a kind of sadism beneath the superintendent’s expression. Armstrong waited till the girl’s outburst was over. Finally he said, ‘So Wrench was in your room, was he? What makes you change your mind about that all of a sudden?’

  ‘Oh, sir, don’t go on at me so! Cyril – Mr. Wrench said I was not to tell you, unless –’

  ‘Unless?’

  The girl buried her face in her hands. They could hardly hear her next statement.

  ‘Unless he – unless you suspected him of having something to do with the murder.’

  ‘And how am I to know you’re telling the truth this time?’ asked Armstrong bluntly. ‘How am I to know you’ve not cooked up this story between you to conceal the fact that Wrench really was –?’

  ‘You must believe me! You must! I swear it’s the truth!’ Rosa sprang up wildly. Her face was burning. Her body trembled as though an electric current was passing through it. She looked very handsome now, as she turned to Nigel with a tense, unstudied movement of the hands, and cried, ‘Please, sir, please make him believe me!’

  ‘Well, well,’ remarked the superintendent, ‘if you want us to believe you, you must tell us all the facts – the truth this time. When did he come up to you?’

  ‘Just after I went up. We’d arranged it. I pretended I was feeling ill.’

  ‘And he left you at two-thirty?’

  ‘I don’t know the exact time. A pistol went off outside, and Cyril said, “Good Lord, that’s the first race starting. I shall be late,” and he ran down stairs.’

  ‘He was in your room all the time?’

  ‘Yes, haven’t I just told you?’

  ‘Describe the clothes he was wearing.’

  ‘Reely, I don’t know if I can remember. He had a blue suit on, I think, and that pink tie of his, I remember that.’

  ‘Now, think carefully. What exactly did he do when he came into your room?’

  ‘Why, I scarcely like to tell you, sir,’ said Rosa, with a faint return of her coquettish expression.

  ‘We’ll take all that for granted. But, besides making love to you, did he say or do anything – something he might remember which would prove that he was with you?’

  ‘Well, he went to the mantelpiece and took up a photograph of my brother and asked who it was. And he kept on saying how dangerous it was for him to be in my room – in a fair panic he was, half the time.’

  ‘Very well. That is all I want from you just now.’

  The girl got up and moved hurriedly to the door. ‘Not so fast, not so fast,’ said Armstrong. He rang the bell and sent for the constable, whom he ordered to keep Rosa under his eye for the next five minutes. ‘We’ll just go and see what Mr. Wrench has to say about all this.’ As they went along the passage and up the stairs Armstrong said, ‘They seem to have got their story pretty pat, eh?’

  ‘You mean, you believe it?’


  ‘Either it’s true or that girl’s a damn good actress, sir.’

  ‘And if she’s telling the truth, Mrs. Vale must be a damn good actress?’ The superintendent shrugged his shoulders.

  Wrench received them with his usual half-defensive, half-aggressive manner. While Armstrong indulged in a little light conversational skirmishing, Nigel took mental impressions of the room. It was the ordinary schoolmaster’s sanctum, overlaid with a thin veneer of aestheticism. He strolled idly over to the bookcase: French novels; the brighter young poets; left wing, but not too extreme, political writers; and a number of educational treatises, which had clearly seen more service than their companions. Nigel suspected that Wrench’s aesthetic and political extravagances were little more than exhibitions to assert his personality amongst his colleagues – a common enough manifestation of inferiority feeling: the main current of his vitality ran through his schoolwork, his career. Nigel went back to his chair and looked noncommittally down his nose. Wrench was saying:

  ‘… But I don’t suppose you’ve visited me just for a spot of light conversation.’

  The superintendent took the hint and proceeded to ask Wrench about the Black Spot note which Sims had confiscated. Oh, yes, he remembered the occurrence and the contents of the note. Yes, Evans had also been present and suggested that no official notice should be taken of it. But what connection had this with the case? Armstrong explained Nigel’s theory; Wrench’s eyes widened and he whistled between his teeth. The superintendent then unmasked his heaviest battery. ‘Now, sir,’ he said, his voice grown suddenly harsh and unfriendly, ‘perhaps you will explain what you meant by giving me an entirely false account of your movements about the time of the murder?’

  A spasm contorted Wrench’s face, but he said coolly enough, ‘So you’ve been third-degreeing Rosa, have you? Well, you can’t do that sort of thing to me. I shall consult a solicitor. Do I have to remind you of the judge’s rules?’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that, young man! If you don’t come out with your new story pretty quick I shall hold you on a charge of obstructing the police.’ Armstrong’s emphasis of the ‘new’ was not lost on Wrench. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t bear to obstruct you any longer. What did Rosa say?’

  ‘Now, now, now, Mr. Wrench; don’t try and put that stuff across on me. I’m asking you for your movements between one-thirty and two-thirty on the day of the sports.’

  ‘As I originally told you, except that I was in Rosa’s room from two till two-thirty. Shocking, isn’t it?’ Wrench’s tone rasped on Nigel’s nerves.

  ‘Two-thirty? You were on the field for the first race, were you?’

  Wrench’s eyes narrowed. After a pause he said, ‘Not exactly. The pistol went off when I was in her room. I ran downstairs at once and was on the field by the end of the race.’

  ‘And what was the point of your story about talking to a parent. Why not have said that you were reading in your room till two-thirty?’

  ‘I had intended to, but during the sports a boy – Smithers–told me that he’d gone up to my room a minute or two before the sports began to bring me an import, and hadn’t found me there, so I thought it safer to invent the man in a brown suit.’

  ‘And you expect us to believe all this?’ said Armstrong heavily.

  ‘Well, of course; hasn’t Rosa told you the same? You couldn’t expect me to admit what I’d really been doing. It’s the end of me, as it is – look here, superintendent, you don’t need to come out with all this to the headmaster, do you?’

  ‘You mistake me, sir. I’m asking how you expect us to believe this new story when your original one was just a pack of lies. How do I know that you and Rosa have not made it up between you?’

  ‘Why on earth should we make it up? Do you think I want to ruin my career?’

  ‘Under some circumstances, you might.’

  ‘What is the man driving at now?’ said Wrench, turning with a nervous smile to Nigel. The latter was getting rather tired of Armstrong’s delayed action tactics and spoke abruptly, not looking at Wrench: ‘He wants just to be sure you weren’t compassing the sheer doom of young Wemyss, that’s all.’

  Wrench started; his next words sounded indignant and alarmed. But Nigel felt that the start, the indignation and the alarm were forced; Wrench knew all along what the conversation was leading up to. Armstrong let him cool down and then asked him what confirmation he had of Rosa’s story. None, he said at first. But by judicious questioning the superintendent elicited the details already given by Rosa about his clothing and the photograph on the mantelpiece. They left him, still retaining his assumed jauntiness, but looking decidedly the worse for wear. The superintendent was obviously put out by Nigel’s intervention and pointedly refrained from asking his company on his next visit, which was to Sims. Nigel, too, had had enough of Armstrong’s company; he was impatient to have a talk with Michael. That notion which Armstrong had put into his head – it all fitted in – yes, he must verify it at once.

  Michael looked up at his friend with unconcealed eagerness as he entered the room. ‘And where have you been all the day?’ he asked, ‘riding about chalking pornograms on the roads?’

  ‘Worse. I have been making myself eligible for the Black Spot.’

  ‘The Black Spot? Oh, yes; the Black Spot; that’s still going, is it? I’m glad. Stevens II is a natural leader. You get one every ten years or so in a school, and every hundred years in a country, if you’re lucky. What happens to all the others I don’t know. Go into an office, or get ruined at their public school, I suppose. But, I say, what are you doing in that gallery?’

  ‘We of the Black Spot do not betray our secrets. But I’ve been mopping up information today. Today, in fact, may be described as the beginning of the end, the thin end of the wedge, or what you will.’

  ‘You mean, you’re on to the criminal?’ said Michael excitedly; ‘do we cease to be under suspicion?’

  ‘You never were, as far as I’m concerned. But I’m afraid the superintendent is still unconvinced. Of course, he’s felt different towards you since that joyride after the late James Urquhart – one can’t share that sort of experience with a person without it affecting one’s attitude towards him, but what facts Armstrong has point to you and Hero; it’s only because they’ve so few of them that he doesn’t arrest you.’

  The strained look that had been in Michael’s eyes for several days returned to them. ‘Well, I did think the worst was over. It seems I’ve just been creating a sort of fool’s paradise,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’m sorry. That sounds ungrateful. Tell me what you’ve found out today.’

  ‘Can I have some tea first?’

  ‘Haven’t you had it yet?’

  ‘Yes. I want some more.’

  ‘Oh, God, I wish you’d take to a hypodermic syringe instead. It would save a lot of trouble.’

  While his friend boiled water and got out the tea, Nigel gave a series of extracts from the information he had collected, omitting the conversation in the wood. Michael was amazed that he had not seen before the connection between Wemyss’ disappearance and the confiscated Black Spot instructions.

  ‘And now to business,’ said Nigel, peering anxiously into the depleted pot. ‘I want to ask you some questions. We’ll get over the most embarrassing ones first.’

  ‘Shoot, mister. We are never embarrassed.’

  ‘How did you and Hero arrange your meetings? Word of mouth?’

  ‘Sometimes. But lately she took to putting notes behind a loose brick in the garden wall. Romantic.’

  ‘Did you ever miss any of them?’

  ‘No – not as far as I know.’

  ‘Mm. You probably wouldn’t. Where did you two meet? I mean, wasn’t it frightfully dangerous?’

  ‘Frightfully. But, you see, one gets so reckless. It was because we really half wanted to be found out and bring things to a crisis, I suppose. We met once or twice in the thicket early this term – the affair only started then – but t
hat was going it a bit too much even for Hero; after that, it was generally somewhere out in the country. We never went to each other’s rooms.’

  ‘And as far as you know, you were never seen?’

  ‘We couldn’t have been. The balloon would have gone up long ago, otherwise. Every one in the country round about knows Hero by sight; and nearer home, well – schoolmasters are about on a level with parsons where scandal is concerned. You can’t conceive what the gossip of a common room is like. I suppose it’s because we were so reckless that we never were found out – like chaps in the war who wanted to be killed and never got a scratch.’

  ‘This meeting in the haystack – how was it arranged?’

  ‘A note in the garden wall. Hero put it there after dinner the night before, actually, and I fetched it in the morning. I had the second period off.’

  ‘You destroyed it, presumably.’

  ‘Oh, yes. What is the point of all this, by the way?’

  ‘I can’t tell you yet. But it’s very satisfactory so far. You know, what worried me all along is why the murderer chose such an odd place to stage his act.’ Nigel cocked an inquisitive eye at his friend. Michael looked puzzled.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well to you,’ said Nigel. ‘You have all the facts. It’ll give you something to think about.’

  ‘The mantle of Holmes sits very ill upon you, I may say,’ remarked Michael acidly.

  ‘And now,’ said Nigel, waving off this unseemly petulance, ‘we come to our second head. I want you to try to remember everything that was done or said in your presence by any of the masters on the day of the sports. We’ll take the rest of the week later.’