by J F Straker
‘That must have shaken her,’ said Colin.
‘It did. Moull, you see, was the jealous lover; he knew there was something between her and James. He suspected that James had spent the night at the cottage’ — so that, thought Anne, was why Chris wouldn’t take James’s prep; he wasn’t going to make it easy for him — ‘and that Miss Farling had cycled back to the school with him that morning and was now on her way home. To appease him she told him she had spent the night with Mrs Bain; Bain was on night duty, and the old lady was nervous of being alone at night. But she also said Mrs Bain didn’t want anyone to know that; if her husband found out he would worry about her, and if the school knew they might tell Bain and repeat their suggestion that one of the male staff should sleep there. And Mrs Bain didn’t want that either, she said; her daughter comes home for occasional weekends, and the daughter is attractive. She is also promiscuous, I’m told.’
‘And Moull swallowed that?’ Mr Latimer asked incredulously.
‘Why not? Much of it he knew to be true. And Miss Farling was about to go on her way, having rescued herself from a very tricky situation, when she heard Bain’s auto-cycle. So she thrust her bicycle at Moull and dived into the bushes, telling him she did not want anyone to see her dressed in that fashion.’
‘But didn’t Bain notice that it was a woman’s bike?’ asked Colin. ‘Didn’t he mention that when you spoke to him?’
‘No. In fact, when I asked him outright on Monday morning he said it was a man’s.’ Pitt smiled. ‘At one time, Mr Russell, you held the clue to that problem in your own hands.’
‘I did?’
‘Yes. Remember those two boys fighting with sticks? One of them, Locking, had part of a broom-handle painted black. He told me on Monday that he had picked it up by the river when on a walk.’ He smiled at Anne. ‘I was fishing for it, not with it, Miss Connaught, when you saw me in the bushes. I remembered that Mr Russell had thrown it there.’
‘She rigged it up as a cross-bar, eh?’ said Colin.
‘That’s right. It was enough to deceive the casual observer, but naturally Moull spotted it when he was holding the machine. Miss Farling explained that she had been nervous of cycling over from Chaim the previous evening and had wanted to deceive any would-be molester into mistaking her for a man. Then she took the bar off and threw it away. And Locking found it.’
Anne remembered how puzzled Chris had looked the next day when Diana had said she was not afraid of cycling home alone in the dark. Well, after two such contradictory statements he had a right to be puzzled, she thought.
‘Moull seems to have been a most foolishly credulous young man,’ said the headmaster. Now that he had recovered from the first shock of his son’s behaviour he looked more himself.
‘Perhaps. But he was also in love,’ said Pitt, and wondered if that had any meaning for Joseph Latimer. ‘And he didn’t stay credulous.
‘The next afternoon, the Sunday, Miss Farling cycled back to the school; ostensibly to offer sympathy and help, but in reality to ensure that the Lodge was unoccupied. Finding that it was, she waited until dusk and then, on her way home, used Mr Connaught’s keys to let herself in and take the letter from his desk. It wasn’t in the envelope, so she presumed the envelope had been destroyed; and it was while searching for the letter that she came across Mr James’s IOU.’
Joseph Latimer came to life with a bang.
‘IOU? You mean James had borrowed money from J.C.?’ He stressed the last initials.
‘I’m afraid so. Buying that cottage had left him short of cash.’ Pitt decided to omit the details; Latimer, he thought, had been harassed enough. ‘Realizing that it might incriminate him, she took that also, and later sent it to him anonymously. No doubt she would have liked to let him know that she was his benefactress; but she could not do that without proclaiming herself a murderess.’
Was that what James was trying to thank me for last Thursday? Anne wondered. Did he think I had returned his IOU? No wonder he said I was sporting!
Pitt turned to the headmaster. ‘It was after lunch on the following Saturday, wasn’t it, that you told Miss Farling you had arranged for Moull to lodge with the Bains?’ he asked. But Mr Latimer’s mind was too full to recall trivialities. ‘It was after the inquest,’ he said. ‘That’s all I can tell you.’
‘Well, it put her in a spot,’ Pitt said. ‘Moull was still suspicious of her and Mr James. With Mrs Bain’s acceptance of a lodger Moull would say there was no further need for secrecy, and in no time at all he would find out from the old lady that she had lied about where she had spent that night. She went down at once to persuade Mrs Bain to reverse her decision — and found no one there. Wandering round the cottage, she came to the shed, saw the lamps and the tin of petrol, and decided that in them lay her escape. She emptied the paraffin out of the biggest lamp and partly refilled it with petrol, hoping that the explosion, when it came, would cause sufficient damage to upset the arrangement for Moull to lodge there. Of course, when she walked down the hill with Moull later she couldn’t anticipate that the explosion would come while she was actually there. But I imagine she considered the result highly satisfactory, if not quite as expected.’
‘But Mrs Bain!’ Miss Webber exclaimed, aghast. ‘Didn’t Diana consider what might happen to her?’
‘I doubt it. Miss Farling seems to be a very single-minded young woman,’ Pitt said drily. ‘She was determined to marry Mr James, and nothing or nobody was going to stop her.’
‘But you couldn’t know all this,’ Anne protested, horrified that one of her sex could be so callous.
He looked at her gravely. ‘About the lamp, you mean? No, I didn’t know. Not until she told me.’
‘And Chris didn’t suspect?’
‘Why should he? Did anyone? But when Mr Russell told him the next day that he thought Connaught had been murdered he did begin to wonder whether it might have been murder, and not Mr James, that had been responsible for her presence on the towpath that Saturday morning. The poison in Mr Russell’s milk had him really worried. Unfortunately, at the time I questioned him he had not yet decided where his loyalties lay.’
So that was why Chris and Diana were arguing on the front drive that afternoon, thought Anne. And I imagined romance and a lovers’ quarrel!
‘But Miss Farling knew which way his loyalties were heading,’ Pitt said, his voice grave. ‘And when she overheard Sergeant Maddox and myself discussing the evidence against him she knew he would crack under our questioning. To her mind, therefore, there was only one solution — murder.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose that after one has committed a singularly cold-blooded murder there can be nothing very horrifying about another.’
Miss Webber shivered. She had often felt that hers was a colourless life. Now there was too much colour — but of the wrong hue. It was the aura of romance she had craved, not that of death.
‘When you heard that Chris had disappeared did you know she had killed him?’ Colin asked doubtfully.
‘Not until that evening.’ Pitt told them of the walk he had taken with Diana. ‘When I gave her the opening she leapt at it. Yes, Moull had spent the night before Connaught died at her cottage, she said; he had left early the next morning. But I knew it hadn’t been Moull who had nearly collided with the milkman, and it seemed unlikely that there had been two separate cyclists in duffel-coats and berets. So I decided she was lying. And that was when I knew Moull was dead.’
‘How did she kill him?’
‘She arranged to meet him by the bridge (that was a favourite meeting place of theirs) at midnight on Saturday, and distracted the constable’s attention while Moull left by a side door. After Mr James had locked up she locked the commonroom door, climbed out through the window, and went down to the bridge. And if she still had any hopes of winning him back he wrecked them at once by telling her that he had already written and signed a true statement which he intended to give me in the morning. At that she lost her temper and went for him; he
backed away, the handrail broke — and over he went.’ Pitt shook his head doubtfully. ‘That, at any rate, is her version of what happened. And it was not until some hours later she remembered the statement. He might have had it on him, or it might be in his room. Well, it was in his room; it was Miss Farling, not Moull, whom you heard at 3 a.m., Mr Russell.’
He paused, and for a moment sat staring at Colin, who fidgeted under his gaze. And as the silence lengthened there were others who fidgeted. It was Mr Latimer who eventually put the question that was in most of their minds.
‘Why did Miss Farling attempt to poison Russell?’
Pitt continued to stare at Colin. ‘She didn’t,’ he said laconically.
‘Then who did?’
‘No one. Mr Russell added the poison himself.’
Pitt waited for the storm to break, but none came. For a moment they stared at him in disbelief, then all eyes were focused on the red-faced Colin. All except Anne’s. She sat gazing down at her lap, a slight frown on her pretty face. I suppose he has already told her, thought Pitt.
‘Mr Russell might like to explain that himself,’ he said.
Colin, looking very foolish, explained.
‘I was merely trying to speed things up,’ he said, carefully avoiding the beetle-browed glare of the headmaster. ‘My first effort was a flop; nobody panicked when I said I knew who had killed J.C.; and that afternoon, while I was talking to my friend at Wisselbury in the lab (it’s a private lab; she does a lot of research work), I got the idea that if I could pretend that someone had tried to poison me — well, I might get a bit of co-operation for a change,’ he said defiantly. ‘So when she was called to the phone I picked up an empty bottle, poured a little of the cyanide into it, and shoved it in my pocket.’
‘Well, of all the —’ began Mr Latimer. But Colin did not let him finish.
‘I was late home on purpose, so that the milk would be in my room long enough for J.C.’s murderer not to have an alibi,’ he went on hurriedly. ‘I poured the cyanide into the milk, put the glass on the floor (I didn’t want to drink it by mistake!), and wrote a letter. And when I looked under the bed for my slippers there was the cat — dead.’
‘Crystallizing your point very neatly for you, eh?’ said Pitt.
‘It did, didn’t it? Well, I went downstairs to tell Mr Latimer, and on my way I hid the empty bottle in a boxing-glove in the gym and shoved it under the vaulting-horse. I meant to retrieve it later and bury it, but whenever I tried to do so there was always someone around. And then Anne found it.’
‘So you took it from her and got rid of it, eh? And then told me that cock-and-bull story about its having been filched from your raincoat pocket. Not very helpful,’ said Pitt.
‘I know. I’m very sorry. But at least it worked,’ said Colin. ‘I was right about J.C. being murdered, and if I’d taken no action at all Diana would have got away with it.’
‘And Moull would still be alive,’ said Latimer.
There was a shocked silence. Colin went very white. Anne took his hand and gripped it tightly.
‘Why did you ask me about the M on the bottle, Inspector?’ she asked, hoping to lessen the tension in the room.
‘Because when I realized it was Mr Russell who had added the poison I guessed he must have got it on his visit to Wisselbury. So the letter had to be a W, not an M; and your drawing confirmed that. You had looked at it upside down. But I should have guessed it before from Mr Russell’s unconcern (as though he were daily accustomed to escaping death by a miracle!), from the fact that no one but he went out that afternoon, and from his remark to you when you told him you had put the milk in his room yourself. He mentioned cyanide then; yet at that time only the poisoner could know that cyanide had been used.’ He shook his head. ‘You had me thoroughly confused, Mr Russell. Miss Farling was one of the two people who could not have tried to poison you, so that I tended to ignore her in connection with the other crime.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Colin said again. It was inadequate, he knew, but he could think of nothing better.
‘And so you should be.’ Mr Latimer stood up, his eyebrows working overtime. ‘You lied to me, you lied to the police you ... you ... well, don’t ask me for a testimonial, young man, because you won’t get one. I never liked you; I knew you for a damned interfering young fool who was doing his best to ruin me. But at least I thought you were honest.’
He strode angrily to the door.
‘Just one moment, Mr Latimer.’ Pitt’s voice was ominously smooth. ‘Talking of lies — what did you do with the potassium cyanide you bought in the King’s Road, Chelsea, on June the twenty-second?’
The tall figure stiffened and turned slowly.
‘I threw it away,’ he said, voice and face expressionless. ‘I threw it away because I knew that if you found it you would, like most of your kind, cease to look further. I did not lie to you. I told you that there was no cyanide in my darkroom, and that was the truth.’
‘But not, perhaps, a very honest truth,’ Pitt suggested. ‘Almost bordering on a lie, don’t you think? Personally, I prefer Mr Russell’s intention to yours.’
Joseph Latimer stared at him bleakly and then walked out of the room.
‘Well! Well!’ said Miss Webber. ‘This has been quite an afternoon, I must say.’
‘You remember I told you Moull wasn’t in his room on Thursday evening when I went up to borrow a book,’ said Smelton. ‘Did you ever find out where he’d got to?’
‘Yes, sir. He was in Miss Farling’s room. Mr Russell’s assertion that he knew who had killed John Connaught had shaken him badly, and he wanted to talk to her about it. When Miss Farling found him there, shortly after eleven o’clock, she was furious and got rid of him as soon as she could.’ Pitt turned to Colin. ‘You didn’t hear him go back to his room, did you?’
‘No. But perhaps that was after I’d gone downstairs.’
Anne went over to the Inspector.
‘What will happen to Colin?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Will he get into trouble?’
‘I don’t know, miss. I hope not, for your sake. I think it would be a matter for the Director of Public Prosecutions to decide.’ He looked at her, his head a little on one side. ‘What would be the charge? Attempted suicide? No, I think not. Obstructing the police? Well, he hoodwinked us properly, and he certainly took the law into his own hands at the end, didn’t he? But then he was also largely instrumental in bringing a criminal to justice. That should count in his favour.’
‘You think he might get off, then?’ Anne said, swaying slightly as Colin came up and put an arm round her waist.
Pitt smiled at them both.
‘He might. But I’m in agreement with Mr Latimer on one point.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Colin, surprised. He had begun to like the Inspector.
‘If you ever think of joining the police force, Mr Russell, don’t come to me for a testimonial — because you won’t get one!’
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