A Question of Proof (16 page)

‘You win, Mr. Strangeways – Nigel,’ she said, touching his hand. ‘You seem to know so much about me that I’m sure you’ll forgive my exhibition of bad temper. Oh, it’s terrible. It’s like a nightmare. There is Michael, stretching out his hands to me, wanting me so badly, and I try to run to him and it’s like running through deep sand. Tell me, they don’t still suspect him, do they?’

‘I’m afraid they suspect both of you. You see, the case against you is the only possible one that can be built on the facts the superintendent has got so far. However, I’ve something to tell him now which may change his ideas. By the way, I shall be some time. You’d better not wait for me. I’ll get a bus back.’

‘No, I’ll wait. But what makes
you
so sure we didn’t do it?’

Nigel laughed. ‘Oh, I’m not a very good detective. If I was the proper inhuman, cold-blooded, scientific sleuth, I should probably be suspecting you hard. But I’d always believe my friends sooner than the facts.’

‘You
are
nice, Nigel. I shall stop being jealous of you.’

They soon reached the Staverton police station, whence they were directed to Armstrong’s own house. Hero arranged to call back for Nigel in three-quarters of an hour and he went in to see the superintendent. Preserving a discreet reticence about the events that had led up to it, he related the conversation he had heard in Edgworth Wood, and then told Armstrong of the confiscated note, the procedure of the Black Spot and his talk with Sims. Armstrong was not slow to draw the same deductions as Nigel had.

‘Well, sir, I always suspected that some of those boys must have known more than they cared to let out. But it’s you who’ve proved it and I’m very grateful. The chief constable is getting a bit restive, though he hasn’t been able to suggest any other lines that I could work on. Now I shall be able to make a move. I’ll come up this evening and chivvy that Rosa first. Once we’ve got the real story out of her, we can deal with Wrench. It seems pretty clear that he was either with Rosa after two o’clock, or committing the murder. But the question still remains – how? We’ve more or
less
decided that it couldn’t have been done after one-forty-five, when Griffin and Mould came out.’

‘Well, we’ve just got to find a loophole, that’s all.’

The superintendent shifted in his chair and fingered his top coat-button. ‘Sims and Evans knew about this note, too,’ he said with some hesitation. Nigel looked down his nose. ‘What I mean is,’ went on the superintendent, ‘I take it we are agreed that the murderer wrote a similar note to Wemyss, telling him that he was to remain hidden from twelve forty five – for an hour, or till the Black Spot came and found him, or something like that – told him to hide in the haystack, to my way of thinking,’ Armstrong concluded firmly.

‘He couldn’t have hidden there at once. Evans and Mrs. Vale were there,’ replied Nigel with equal firmness. The superintendent shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome to your own opinion, sir, but you can’t expect me to alter mine. Evans knew the contents of the Black Spot instructions. What’s more, it was he who originally suggested that Sims and Wrench and himself should hush it up –’

‘Which proves absolutely nothing at all,’ interrupted Nigel sharply.

Armstrong’s brow furrowed. ‘You don’t need to tell me that, Mr. Strangeways. Nor does the fact that Mr. Evans is your friend prove that he didn’t commit the murder. Anyway, it was simple enough for him to have slipped a note in Wemyss’ desk, say, telling him to hide in the haystack immediately after lessons, and
then
to have slipped out himself at one o’clock and strangled him –’

‘With Mrs. Vale applauding loudly from the front row of the stalls!’

‘You will have your little joke, sir. Well, at least you must admit that she and Mr. Evans had about a hundred percent better an opportunity to pull it off than anyone else – to say nothing of motive.’

‘Oh, yes, I admit all that,’ said Nigel wearily, ‘but you’ll not get me to believe that either of them strangled that wretched youth, unless you produce about three independent eyewitnesses. And what about that anonymous note to Urquhart? How on earth was Evans to know that he had been embezzling Wemyss’ money?’

‘It is possible that Mrs. Vale had found out. Or, as you said yourself, sir, it might have been a shot in the dark.’

‘Seems to me a mad sort of thing to have done. Unless the murderer was pretty sure that Urquhart had been up to some dirty work, he could not have relied on his burning the note.’

‘Well, at any rate, he did go to the wood. His servants confirm his absence, and my men report that his car was seen outside the wood at one-fifty. By the way, Tiverton, Wrench, Evans and Mr. Vale himself own typewriters.’

Nigel leaned forward earnestly. ‘Look here, let’s assume – just for argument’s sake, if you like – that the murder was not committed by Evans and Mrs.
Vale
or till after one-thirty. What follows? First of all, that Wemyss could not have been in the haystack. That implies that he was given instructions to perform more than one exploit. Now I happen to know’ – Nigel spoke rather hurriedly here – ‘the sort of things Stevens’ gang make people do: practical jokes they are, mainly. Do we know of anything in the nature of a practical joke that took place that day?’

‘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: