Death at the Opera

by Gladys Mitchell

  The girl remained silent.

  “Very well,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Please yourself, my dear. Come and show me the water-lobby where the body was found.”

  “No!” said the girl. “I can’t go round there after dark! I can’t face it!”

  “Very well,” said Mrs. Bradley, as equably as before. There was a note of hysteria in the girl’s voice, so the little old woman laid a skinny claw on her knee and said:

  “I understand that on the night of the performance Miss Ferris cut herself and had to go into the water-lobby to staunch the bleeding. Is that right?”

  Moira began to cry.

  “I promised I wouldn’t tell,” she said, “but as you seem to know, I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

  She was crying so bitterly that Mrs. Bradley had some difficulty in making out the words.

  “It was Mr. Smith. He came charging round a corner and knocked into Miss Ferris and broke her glasses. A bit of broken glass dug in her cheek just under the eye. It made the tiniest little mark, but it bled a good bit and she said she would go and wash it. That’s the last I saw of her. The next day Mr. Smith came round to aunt’s home and said he wanted to speak to me about using our hockey pitch for a boy’s match. It was Saturday”—she was regaining control over herself, and her words were becoming easier to follow—“and we hadn’t a match in the afternoon. Aunt sent for me to talk to him, after he’d told her what he wanted, and when we were in the drawing-room together he told me that Miss Ferris was dead, and asked me to promise not to tell about the accident to Miss Ferris’s glasses. He said he had fearful wind up when he found out that somebody had seen it happen, because it made him partly responsible for her committing suicide by putting the idea of water, that is, drowning, into her head. It seemed silly to me, but, of course, if he thought she had been murdered . . .”

  She broke off suddenly. Mrs. Bradley pursed up her mouth into a little beak, and decided that the girl was not being entirely frank with her. But what Moira was hiding, Time, Mrs. Bradley’s experience informed her, would probably disclose.

  “At what time did the accident take place?” she asked, determined at the moment not to press the girl.

  “Oh, let me see. Very near the beginning of the opera, because I was just going to make my first entrance—you know—the ‘Three Little Maids from School’ bit—so I couldn’t stop and see to poor Miss Ferris. The other two, ‘Yum-Yum’ and ‘Pitti-Sing,’ were already in the wings, only they are both mistresses, so I didn’t like to tack on to them too closely, so neither of them saw it happen. It was only me.”

  “Was there the slightest possibility that anyone else could have witnessed the collision?” Mrs. Bradley asked.

  “Anybody in the men-principals’ dressing-room might have seen it, but I don’t know who was there.”

  “And you were about to make your first entrance?” pursued Mrs. Bradley thoughtfully. “Thank you, Moira. That’s all, then. Cheer up, child.”

  When the girl had gone, Mrs. Bradley switched off the lights in the form-room and made her way to the water-lobby where the death of Calma Ferris had occurred. The schoolkeeper was busy with a broom and a pail of damp sawdust, and politely stood aside to allow her to enter.

  “You aren’t superstitious, ma’am, I see,” he observed, noticing that Mrs. Bradley was pressing the tap which flowed into what he had now become accustomed to refer to at the Hillmaston Arms as “the fatal bowl.”

  “Oh, is this It?” asked Mrs. Bradley, with a show of great interest.

  “It is, ma’am. Took me an hour and ten minutes to get all that nasty messy clay out of the waste-pipe, too. What with that and seeing what was wrong with the electric light switch, I had a busy day Sunday, I can tell you.”

  “I can imagine it,” returned Mrs. Bradley courteously. “And what was wrong with the electric light switch?”

  “Some of them boys had been up to their mischief, I reckon. The switch ’ad worked a bit loose, you see—I was meaning to replace it—and it was easy enough to take it off and put the wiring out of action, and put the whole thing back again. Barring that it hung a bit loose, as I said before, you wouldn’t notice anything wrong, but when you actually went to switch on the light nothing wouldn’t happen, ma’am. See? Them boys do it just for devilment. They done it to all the school switches one Guy Fawkes’s night, and the Headmaster made ’em put ’em all right again. Mr. Pritchard learns ’em all the tricks. He’s real clever at electricity—got the boys in his form to make the school a wireless set—ah, and it’s a beauty, too!—and any of the young devils could have put that switch out of order as easy as look at it.”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Bradley. “The switch was not out of order on the Thursday evening, then, when you did your cleaning?”

  “’Course it wasn’t,” replied the schoolkeeper. “I ’as to have the lights on every night at this time of the year, to do my work, you see. Ah, and I can go further, ma’am. It was all right on the Friday evening, when I cleared up. I didn’t do more than I could help, that Friday evening, as I had to get the hall ready for the concert, but I did happen to come in here, because I remember for why. I does the inks in this lobby and I remembered Mr. Cliffordson asking me about a gallon jar of blue-black that had somehow got mislaid from stock, so I thought I’d just have a deck in here to see if it had got itself mixed up with the ink already in use. I knew it hadn’t, but I’d got to satisfy him with what you might call an official observation and report, and it just happened to occur to me. So I know the switch was all right then, because I used it.”

  “I suppose Miss Ferris herself had not tampered with it?” suggested Mrs. Bradley.

  “Considering the poor lady didn’t know no more about electricity than to ask me to come and look at her electric iron she used in the sitting-room at her lodgings and tell her why it wouldn’t heat up, when all the time one of the wires at the plug end had come right out and she’d never noticed it—” said the schoolkeeper.

  “Odd,” Mrs. Bradley reflected, as she made her way to her new lodgings without having washed her hands, “that Calma Ferris should have gone into a pitch-dark lobby to wash a cut on her face. I should imagine that she did nothing of the sort. However, we shall see.”

  When she arrived at her lodgings she scrutinized the books on Miss Ferris’s little book-shelf, took down the script of The Mikado, was immersed in it when the landlady brought in her tea, and was still immersed in it when the landlady brought in her supper. By the time the woman came in again to clear away, however, Mrs. Bradley had returned the book to the shelf and was playing Patience. She grinned in her saurian fashion at the landlady and asked after her little girl.

  The woman was consumed with curiosity, for she had recognized the book which Mrs. Bradley had been studying. Dozens of times had she good-naturedly held it in her hands and prompted Miss Ferris when the latter had been learning the part of “Katisha.” The amount of time Mrs. Bradley had spent in studying the book, and the sight of Mrs. Bradley’s notebook and pencil, and the undecipherable hieroglyphics with which the only page she could see, as she set the table, had been covered, made her very anxious to talk about her late lodger, in spite of the fact that she had told Mrs. Bradley she did not want to discuss Miss Ferris. She took as long as she could over clearing the supper things away, while Mrs. Bradley, black eyes intent on the small cards, appeared to be absorbed in her game and unconscious that such a person as Calma Ferris had ever existed. At last the woman could bear it no longer. Coming back with an unnecessary brush and crumb-tray, she said:

  “Have you heard anything more, Mrs. Bradley?”

  Mrs. Bradley looked up.

  “Yes, a little,” she said. “Tell me. Did Miss Ferris always wear glasses?”

  “Blind as a bat without ’em, I think,” the woman answered. “At least, she always had two pairs, and I remember once when one pair was at the optician’s, she mislaid the other pair one day, and quite hurt herself walking into the edge of the chest
of drawers in her room, she was that short-sighted.”

  “So that even after she had been made up for her part she would still have worn her glasses up to the moment of going on the stage?” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “I doubt whether she could see to get on to the stage up the steps at the side without them,” said the woman. “She’d have handed them to someone in the wings, I shouldn’t wonder, ready to put on again as she came off.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Yes. Thank you. I think I’ll go to bed. Breakfast at nine o’clock, please.”

  “Why, but that’ll make you late for school, won’t it?” asked the woman.

  “I am not teaching at the school to-morrow,” replied Mrs. Bradley. She sighed. There was a boy in the Lower Third Commercial with, she felt certain, all the psychological peculiarities of the Emperor Caligula. She would have liked to study him.

  CHAPTER V

  INTERROGATION

  FOR nearly the whole of the next morning Mrs. Bradley was closeted with the Headmaster, and the “engaged” notice was hung on the outside of his study door from nine-fifteen until just after twelve.

  “It seems to me,” Mrs. Bradley remarked, “that the evidence in support of the theory that Miss Ferris was murdered in the lobby is sufficiently strong to warrant further investigation, but not sufficiently tangible to offer to the authorities. I have reason to believe”—she took out her notebook—“that, as the result of a collision in the corridor, Miss Ferris had her glasses broken and sustained a small deep cut just beneath one eye. She went into the water-lobby to bathe the cut, and I have not found out yet that anyone went with her.”

  “Who collided with her?” the Headmaster demanded. “The way boys rush down these narrow corridors is most dangerous.”

  “It does not seem to have been a boy,” replied Mrs. Bradley. “It was Mr. Smith.”

  “Smith?” The Headmaster looked astounded. “Surely not! Why, this is serious!”

  Mrs. Bradley did not ask why. She fixed her twinkling black eyes on those of the Headmaster and waited for enlightenment. After a moment or two, it came.

  “You remember, perhaps,” said Mr. Cliffordson, “the clay which was effectually stopping up the waste-pipe so that Miss Ferris’s head was still immersed in water when she was discovered dead?”

  Mrs. Bradley looked intelligent, and nodded.

  “That clay, it was established at the inquest, came from the art-room. Smith is the Senior Art Master. Furthermore, modelling clay was used, I believe, as part of his facial make-up.”

  “Where is the art-room?” asked Mrs. Bradley, who had not been in the school long enough to have learned all the ramifications of its ground-floor plan.

  “Almost opposite the prompt side of the stage.”

  He drew a rough sketch on his blotting-pad, and Mrs. Bradley nodded.

  “So that anybody who knew there was a lump of modelling clay in the art-room could have slipped in and taken enough to stop up that waste-pipe,” she said. “Cheer up, child! Mr. Smith isn’t hanged yet.” She cackled. “This brings me to a particularly important point,” she went on. “How many people were in a position to go into the art-room and/or into the water-lobby that night? Who was allowed behind the scenes—that is to say, apart from those people who were taking part in the opera?”

  The Headmaster began to write on a scribbling-pad which was close at hand on the desk.

  “I am not going to trust entirely to my own memory,” he said. “Mrs. Boyle was in charge of everything that went on behind the scenes, so in a moment, when I have made my list, we will send for her to confirm it. Now, let me see.” He wrote, after two pauses for consideration, a list of six names and handed it to Mrs. Bradley. She took it, and read aloud, with a questioning note:

  “Madame Berotti?”

  “An ex-actress, very old and frail now, who comes to all our school entertainments and makes up the principal characters. A delightful person. An artist to her fingertips. She used to produce for us at one time?”

  “Mrs. Boyle?”

  “Senior English Mistress. The producer,” said the Headmaster. “An ex-actress, too, incidentally. Shakespeare, repertory—all the usual high-brow stuff.”

  “Mr. Hampstead?”

  “He is our Senior Music Master, and was the conductor of the orchestra. He was behind the scenes before the beginning of the opera and again during the interval.”

  “The electrician?”

  “The lighting was important, and our home-made footlights have their disadvantages, so we had the electrician in attendance. I don’t know how long he stayed behind, I’m sure. I know one of the lights went wrong—apart, I mean, from the one in the water-lobby where Miss Ferris was found.”

  “Who found her?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “The girl Malley, poor child. She went to get a drink, it seems, found that the switch was out of order, groped in the darkness, and touched Miss Ferris’s body.”

  “No wonder she is in a highly nervous state, poor girl,” commented Mrs. Bradley. She no longer wondered at Moira’s hysterical refusal to accompany her to the water-lobby on the previous evening. “The next name on the list is that of Mr. Browning,” she continued.

  “Yes. Our Junior English Master. He was acting as prompter. He would have been about behind the scenes before the commencement of the opera and during the interval, unless it proves that he left his post as prompter at any time during the performance. Otherwise he would have been seated in the wings, with the script.”

  “I shall have to see these people,” said Mrs. Bradley, and continued to read from the list.

  “The curtain operator?”

  “Otherwise the schoolkeeper,” said the Headmaster. “Yes. He was in position in the wings at just before the commencement of the performance, but I do not imagine that he stayed there during the whole of the First Act, which, at our rate of playing the opera, lasted for about an hour and twenty minutes. He is certain to have gone away during that time. I don’t know where he went. Probably to the back of the hall to watch the performance. He had been well drilled at three or four rehearsals, and knew exactly when he would be wanted. He takes great interest in everything connected with the running of the school, and is even more enthusiastic and partisan than I am where the boys and girls are concerned. He has been with us since the opening of the school.”

  “That is the last name on your list,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Can we see Mrs. Boyle now?”

  “Surely.” The Headmaster touched an electric buzzer which brought his secretary from an adjoining room.

  “Ask Mrs. Boyle whether she can kindly spare me a moment,” he said. He consulted the large time-table. “She is in Room K.”

  In less than four minutes, Alceste Boyle appeared, and Mrs. Bradley and she exchanged glances. Mrs. Bradley saw a tall, well-made woman on the threshold of middleage, with beautifully dressed dark hair, dark-blue, wide-set eyes under arched eyebrows, a sweet mouth and a broad, noble forehead; it was a gracious and pleasing face, and Mrs Bradley smiled and nodded as her eyes met those of its owner.

  Alceste Boyle saw a woman in the middle sixties, with sharp black eyes like those of a witch, an aristocratic nose, a thin mouth which pursed itself into a queer little birdlike beak as its owner summed her up, and, lying idle for the moment, for Mrs. Bradley had returned his scribbling-tablet to the Headmaster some two minutes before the entrance of Alceste Boyle, a pair of yellow, claw-like hands, the fingers of which were heavily loaded with rings. Alceste’s non-committal cardigan, jumper and dark skirt—a costume which was almost the uniform of the women members of the staff—contrasted oddly with Mrs. Bradley’s outrageous colour scheme of magenta, orange and blue. Notwithstanding all physical and sartorial evidence to the contrary, however, Alceste decided that the queer little old woman was attractive.

  “You wanted me, Mr. Cliffordson?” she said.

  “Yes. Take a seat, Mrs. Boyle. Look here.” He handed her the list of names. “All those people
were behind the scenes on the night of Miss Ferris’s death. Is the list complete, or can you add to it?”

  Alceste scanned the list, thought for a moment, and then said:

  “I had a Fourth Form girl behind with me. She acted as call-boy and general messenger. I sent her on one or two unimportant errands, I know, and she also helped in the search for Miss Ferris.”

  “Who was she?” inquired the Headmaster.

  “Maisie Phillips.”

  “Oh, I know the girl. Nobody else?”

  Alceste shook her head. “Nobody else,” she said. “I was very strict about not allowing unauthorized people behind the scenes. They only want to gossip and get in the way. I’m sure that was everybody, except the boys and girls in the chorus—and the principals, of course.”

  “Thank you.” He turned to Mrs. Bradley. “Mrs. Boyle is my head assistant. I think she should be taken into our confidence.”

  “If you mean that you believe Miss Ferris was murdered—why, so do I,” said Mrs. Boyle, surprisingly. “She was delighted—thrilled—to be taking part in the opera. It’s true she made a hash of the dress-rehearsal, but so did several others, and we all knew it would be different on the night. Besides, at the last rehearsal, which was not a dress-rehearsal, she did ever so well. The pity is that nobody was there to see the difference. But, goodness knows, there are plenty of people who would have been pleased to see her dead! Anyway, I am certain in my mind that she was the last person to commit suicide.”

  “Plenty of people would have been pleased to see her dead?” repeated the Headmaster incredulously. “But surely—she was such an extraordinarily inoffensive woman. . . .”

  He halted, uncertain of what to say. That Mrs. Boyle believed what she was saying, and had foundation for her belief, he had no doubt whatever.

  “I think you will have to tell us everything you know,” he said at last. Alceste folded her large, well-shaped hands in her lap, and nodded.

  “Mrs. Bradley is here to investigate the circumstances of the death, of course,” she said, “and advise us how to proceed if it proves that Calma Ferris was murdered?”