Death at St. Asprey’s School

by Bruce, Leo

  “Yes,” Carolus said. “I do. I’m a schoolmaster myself. But don’t be too pessimistic about the school.”

  Carolus did not see the Bishop that afternoon but in a breathless confidence from Matron just after tea he heard that he had arrived. Matron was as enthusiastic about delivering her news as about gathering it, and baulked of immediately informing Mrs. Sconer (who was entertaining the Bishop to tea) of the afternoon’s events she fell back on Carolus.

  “Duckmore has been behaving in a most peculiar way all the afternoon,” she said, “until the Bishop’s car arrived. Fortunately the boys don’t seem to realize what’s going on because Mayring had his first rehearsal on the cricket field and little Swinton came to me in tears because he’s not going to be Peaseblossom or some such thing. Parker has ben in the study with Mr. Sconer for half an hour—what they think they can do without Mrs. Sconer is a mystery to me. Now the Bishop’s in the drawing-room and they’re using the Parents’ Tea Service. What will happen tomorrow I don’t know.”

  Carolus stared at Matron in wonder at this confession.

  “You don’t?”

  It was not until well after five that Duckmore came to Carolus in the common-room. He looked very calm and serious.

  “I’m ready now,” he said. “If you’d be kind enough to drive me down to the village. I’m told that the Detective in charge of the case is staying at the local policeman’s cottage. I hope he’ll be there now.”

  “If not I’ll run you into Woldham,” said Carolus.

  As they went to the car Carolus was aware of a face at Matron’s window, but even Matron might not yet have realized where they were going. Or had she?

  Carolus was relieved to see Osborne’s car outside the cottage distinguished by a sign, County Police. He asked for Osborne and the local policeman’s wife took them into a small sitting-room where Osborne sat alone over the remains of a high tea. Carolus said nothing, waiting for Duckmore to make his announcement.

  “Well?” said the Detective Superintendent.

  “I’ve come to give myself up,” said Duckmore.

  Osborne’s reaction to this was curious. He seemed to take no notice of Duckmore and his melodramatic announcement, but turned to Carolus.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Just to hear that,” said Carolus. “Now I must be off.”

  “Are you responsible for this man coming here?”

  “Not at all. It is entirely his own idea. I merely drove him here in my car.”

  “I need not delay you then,” said Osborne and turned to Duckmore.

  As Carolus left the room he heard Duckmore say distinctly and firmly—“I killed Colin Sime.”

  On his way back to the school for what he hoped would be his last night there he decided to call at the Windmill Inn. It was as well he did so for leaning over the bar was Mr. Gorringer, his own headmaster. But Carolus’s cheerful greeting was checked by a raised hand.

  “I am staying the night here,” said Mr. Gorringer, “but that is not what brings me here at this hour of the day. When I found that you were not at the school I knew, unhappily, where I was most likely to find you. The local hostelry has ever an almost magnetic attraction for you during your investigations, I find.”

  “Heard you were coming,” said Carolus.

  “Against my will,” said Mr. Gorringer gloomily. “But what else could I do? When my old acquaintance Cosmo Sconer told me of the position here, I was left with no alternative.”

  Carolus asked Mr. Pocket, who was eagerly listening to this, for drinks.

  “What position?” Carolus asked Mr. Gorringer.

  “You can scarcely pretend to be unaware of it, Deene. Sconer informed me that no sooner had you arrived than there was a very unfortunate accident at the school which cost the life of one of his assistants. This you insisted on describing as murder.”

  “It was murder,” said Carolus. “But go on, headmaster.”

  “When my friend Sconer then suggested that you could be of no assistance to him, indeed that your presence only exacerbated the situation, you threatened to remain in the village. Now, driven to despair, the reputation of his school hanging by a thread, his life’s work in jeopardy, with an Inquest impending, he has appealed to me to use my influence with you. He wants you to leave after the Inquest tomorrow.”

  “That may well be possible,” said Carolus.

  Mr. Gorringer ignored this.

  “I need not say how deeply I have regretted that I ever agreed to your coming here, Deene. It has been an embarrassment to me. I might have known that where you went a violent death would follow. Moreover, I understand that the police in this case are more than usually exasperated by your ill-timed intervention.”

  “That’s true,” put in Mr. Pocket unexpectedly from across the bar. “The local man was telling me. What they say about amateur detectives would raise your hair. Well, you can’t wonder, can you? They’ve got a job of work to do.”

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Gorringer, who seemed determined to behave like the Forsaken Merman. “What is more, your own duty calls you. The Upper Fifth…”

  “I think it is more than probable that the last loose ends will be tied up tomorrow,” said Carolus.

  “You speak of the last loose ends,” said Mr. Gorringer. “Have you then a suspect for this hypothetical murder?”

  “A man has just given himself up to the police as the murderer of Sime.”

  Not only Mr. Gorringer’s protruberant eyes but Pocket’s beadier ones were, in an expressive metaphor, popping out.

  “A man? What man?” cried Mr. Gorringer.

  “One of the assistant masters. Character named Duckmore.”

  “This is a grave matter,” annunced Mr. Gorringer. “One assistant master in a school confessing to the murder of another. I scarcely know what to say.”

  “I wonder it doesn’t happen more often, myself,” said Carolus cheerfully. “Think of Hollingbourne.”

  “Deene,” said Mr. Gorringer. “This is not a matter for frivolous reflections.”

  “Nor is Hollingbourne, when you come to think of it.”

  “Enough,” said Mr. Gorringer. “Does my poor friend know of this latest and most untoward development?”

  “Not from me,” said Carolus. “But his wife has an information service such as the C.I.A. might envy. I’d be surprised if Matron hadn’t caught a whiff of events.”

  “Ah. Indeed. That’s how the wind blows is it? I often think, my dear Deene, that we should pause sometimes to record our appreciation of our excellent Miss Pink. But whether or not the Sconers have heard rumours it is for you, I feel, to tell them manfully and frankly what has taken place. In a word allonsl”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Then suddenly, alone in his room before dinner Carolus had a sense of danger, of resolute black menace deliberately aimed which drove away all more frivolous aspects of the case. It was as if he realized for the first time that this was no delightful problem to be solved with his usual flippancy, but something threatening, directed perhaps at him, something which would need all his courage and resource to defeat.

  The people here were, he told himself, a second-rate, tawdry and malicious set such as one might find in the common-room of any preparatory school, but they had qualities unusually bleak about them, their empty lives and their petty hatreds. Forgetting the method used and the skill necessary, there was not one of them who—psychologically—seemed to Carolus incapable of murdering Sime, and there was not one of them whom he believed incapable of murdering again. In a way he liked and was sorry for old Parker, otherwise he found most of them odious and rather sinister.

  Moreover he had a feeling that he was being watched for a good part of that day. This might be due to his knowledge of Matron’s indomitable powers of observation, but it seemed to him more than that. Someone had him under observation, someone who had reason for concealment, probably, and who was waiting for the moment when Carolus learned something which
had so far been kept from him.

  He was stretched out in a low armchair of his room as he thought of these things and, instinctively perhaps, he had taken a place from which he could see anyone entering. This part of the house was surprisingly still and silent and he heard no one approaching his door, but as he watched the handle, an old-fashioned oval thing of brass, it began slowly to turn.

  Carolus soundlessly straightened himself in his chair. But he realized that as he was smoking a cheroot and his light was on the intruder would be aware of his presence as soon as the door was ajar.

  He was. Very slowly the door was pushed forward a couple of inches then as slowly and as silently closed. It took Carolus a second or two to rise from his deep chair and another few to cross the room, but that was enough for the intruder. When Carolus flung open the door he found the landing empty. Shaken more by the swiftness of the other’s movement than by the fact that he had come to his room, Carolus poured himself a drink and stood thoughtfully with it in his hand. He would have sworn it was impossible for anyone to be out of sight in that time.

  He was angry, too. It was ridiculous to find himself in danger in this wretched little school among a lot of people who apparently acted from more or less petty malice. It was ridiculous and unnecessary. He took from his table a row of four unused postage stamps which he had purchased in the village for some letters he intended to write. Going out in the passage he stuck these to his door and lintel to make a rough temporary seal. Then he went down to the drawing-room and found Mrs. Sconer.

  “I want the key of my bedroom,” he said.

  “Mr. Deene, I find this an intrusion. We do not, for reasons which you should understand, supply the staff with facilities for locking their rooms.”

  “I’m not interested in your staff. I want the key of the room I am occupying. At once, please. I have good reason for insisting on this.”

  “Insisting, Mr. Deene?”

  Carolus felt vulgar.

  “You heard,” he said. “You don’t want another murder, or attempted murder, in the school do you?”

  “You are evidently unaware of what has taken place One of the Men, Duckmore, has confessed to the murder of Sime, and has been taken into custody. It follows that your fears are unnecessary.”

  “Nothing of the sort follows, I’m afraid. I must warn you, in fact, that there is very real danger for almost everyone connected with the school. That is not my only reason for insisting on locking my room, however.”

  Mrs. Sconer stared at Carolus.

  “Surely,” she said less confidently, “we are not going to receive further shocks? Where will this end?”

  Carolus seemed to cool down.

  “I am sorry if I spoke brusquely,” he said. “May I please have the key of my room?”

  Without another word Mrs. Sconer crossed the room and opened the drawer of a bureau. It held many keys, carefully labelled. She searched among these and handed him one marked ‘Spare Room’.

  “I understand you are leaving tomorrow,” she said.

  “It is probable. Yes.”

  “Mr. Gorringer informs us that you will be leaving with him, after the Inquest.”

  Carolus held up the key. “Thank you for this,” he said, and left Mrs. Sconer standing, massive and inscrutable, beside the bureau.

  The seal had not been disturbed.

  At dinner everyone seemed dour and watchful—a most unpleasant atmosphere. Instead of relieving the strain, as one would have thought, Duckmore’s disappearance, answering so many questions, seemed to have increased it. No one made any real attempt at conversation, except Mr. Gorringer who boomed with ghastly cheerfulness about county cricket, Mrs. Sconer’s roses, politicians as television stars, television stars as politicians, and finally, after failing to awaken the interest of his audience in any of these, Mayring’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

  “A choice of dubious wisdom, I should have thought,” he announced. “I disapprove of boys being fairies.”

  Mayring hotly defended his production and claimed that it had been successul in diverting the boy’s attention from—he caught Mrs. Sconer’s eye—‘other things’.

  “Ah yes. No doubt. Admirable,” admitted Mr. Gorringer, “but I still think a more virile play should have been chosen.”

  After dinner Carolus escaped to his room. He felt that he could not take any more from the people among whom he had now spent a week and in his present mood he found Gorringer’s pomposity intolerable. There were times when he enjoyed the old-fashioned cliches and Mr. Pooler phraseology of his headmaster, but tonight was not one of them.

  He looked from his window and though it was nine o’clock the day was long in dying and the gardens, the road to the village, even the church tower in the distance were discernible. But the air was almost scentless as in most parts of the Cotswolds where the earth is bald. Carolus did not like the area and again he thought that the people he had met here in the school were quite detestable. They were not, any of them, Gloucestershiremen, but the whole atmosphere seemed rancid and Carolus longed to return to his own small house in Newminster.

  Not that the case had not interested him—as a problem it had been, and was, fascinating. But there was something abysmally mean and sordid about it. Perhaps that came from the character of the murdered man who seemed to have inspired no affection at all among his colleagues.

  Before turning out his light at something past eleven that evening, Carolus locked the door of his room. Then, pulling back the curtains he stood watching an eerie world lit by the intense moonlight of midsummer.

  Someone was crossing the lawn, coming towards the house. He recognized Mollie Westerly and watched her as with some difficulty she broke a spike of bloom—lupin, was it?—from the herbaceous border. “In such a night Stood Dido with a willow in her hand,” mused Carolus, while from the direction of the staff bungalow came the sound of a door being carelessly closed to suggest that Stanley had just parted from Mollie and gone to his room. Murder and its sequels, detection, confession, Inquest, did not seem to have much effect on that pedagogic idyll, anyway.

  Carolus left his window wide open to the night and got into bed, but he did not sleep. He remained for perhaps an hour gently dozing, half aware of the silent house and the shadowy night. Then all his senses were alert in a moment for footsteps were passing his door. They were light and furtive but not slow.

  This time he did not rush hurriedly across to open his door, but rose quietly, pulled on a dressing-gown and crossed to the window, taking up a position from which, hidden by one curtain, he could once again watch. He had not long to wait. Though he heard nothing, no closing door or footsteps, he saw a dark outline, the figure of a man, on the grass verge beside the drive. In that curious silver half-light, enough to distinguish only a patch of darkness moving farther from the house, it seemed that the man was gliding without noise over the grass.

  In less than two minutes Carolus had pulled on trousers and jacket and carrying his shoes had gone silently downstairs. He closed the front door noiselessly behind him, pulled on his shoes and set off in the direction taken by the man he had seen. Man? At least someone wearing man’s clothes. As though this gave him an idea he turned from cover to look up at Matron’s window. No one was visible there.

  Had he not judged correctly which way his quarry would go he might have lost him, for his range of sight, now that he was on the ground, was not large. But guided by instinct or logic he took the cross-country path which led to the church and before long saw the black outline in motion ahead.

  Pursuit became difficult. At first there was plenty of cover and he could remain unseen while not losing sight of the man he was following. But later there was a piece of open ground which he could not cross unobserved. He waited several minutes, calculating the time that it would take his man to have passed beyond sight of the open stretch, then embarked on it. After that he could only continue on the assumption that the trail would lead to the church.


  For the rest of the distance he could not be sure whether or not he himself was under observation. Whoever had left the school so secretively might still be well ahead and continuing on his way, but he might have paused beyond the open ground, seen Carolus and taken cover. It was an ugly thought, in no way mitigated by the fact of Duckmore’s confession to the murder of Sime.

  At last Carolus approached the church. Its grey stone looked bright and silvery and the crosses and headstones of the churchyard stood starkly white against the black-green yews. As though careless of observation now Carolus hurried forward, passed through the lych-gate and reached the porch.

  His only means of illumination here was his lighter which, in the way of lighters when one needs them, required petrol. It gave a sickly little light now, but this would cease after a few more strikings. He stretched up and groped in the niche which Spancock had shown him as the hiding-place for the key, but no key was there. It was reasonable to suppose—but not with complete security—that the man he was following had taken it down and used it and was therefore in the church ahead of him.

  As soon as he had entered the church, Carolus was sure of this. The place was in darkness and silence but he knew that someone was there. It was a strange fact, he reflected, that the presence of a human being in a closed place, even one so large as this, is nearly always perceptible, and not necessarily by sound, or smell, or sight. A human presence was in some occult way in the air. But he had no idea where that person might be.

  Carolus knew from his tour of the church with Mr. Spancock that the lights were controlled from the vestry and he intended to make for the switches as soon as he could see enough to find his way. Meanwhile, having closed the door quietly behind him he stood motionless, waiting for his eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness, or for the other man to give some sensible indication of his presence. He remained there for several minutes till slowly the arches, pillars and pews took vague shapes.

  He could hear nothing and could only suppose that whoever was there was aware of him, and was waiting, as he was, for movement. Perhaps behind a pillar, perhaps in a pew, someone must be breathing silently and watching him.