‘Is there no material evidence to be obtained from an examination of the documents themselves?’ asked Miss Pyke. ‘Speaking for myself, I am quite ready to have my finger-prints taken or to undergo any other kind of precautionary measure that may be considered necessary.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Harriet, ‘the evidence of finger-prints isn’t quite so easy a matter as we make it appear in books. I mean, we could take finger-prints, naturally, from the S.C.R. and, possibly, from the scouts – though they wouldn’t like it much. But I should doubt very much whether rough scribbling-paper like this would show distinguishable prints. And besides—’
‘Besides,’ said the Dean, ‘every malefactor nowadays knows enough about finger-prints to wear gloves.’
‘And,’ said Miss de Vine, speaking for the first time, and with a slightly grim emphasis, ‘if we didn’t know before, we know it now.’
‘Great Scott!’ cried the Dean, impulsively, ‘I’d forgotten all about it’s being us.’
‘You see what I meant,’ said the Warden, ‘when I said that it was better not to discuss methods of investigation too freely.’
‘How many people have handled all these documents already?’ inquired Harriet.
‘Ever so many, I should think,’ said the Dean.
‘But could not a search be made for—’ began Miss Chilperic. She was the most junior of the dons; a small, fair and timid young woman, assistant-tutor in English Language and Literature, and remarkable chiefly for being engaged to be married to a junior don at another college. The Warden interrupted her.
‘Please, Miss Chilperic. That is the kind of suggestion that ought not to be made here. It might convey a warning.’
‘This,’ said Miss Hillyard, ‘is an intolerable position.’ She looked angrily at Harriet, as though she were responsible for the position; which, in a sense, she was.
‘It seems to me,’ said the Treasurer, ‘that, now that we have asked Miss Vane to come and give us her advice, it is impossible for us to take it, or even to hear what it is. The situation is rather Gilbertian.’
‘We shall have to be frank up to a point,’ said the Warden. ‘Do you advise the private inquiry agent, Miss Vane?’
‘Not the ordinary sort,’ said Harriet; ‘you wouldn’t like them at all. But I do know of an organisation where you could get the right type of person and the greatest possible discretion.’
For she had remembered that there was a Miss Katherine Climpson, who ran what was ostensibly a Typing Bureau but was in fact a useful organisation of women engaged in handling odd little investigations. The Bureau was self-supporting, though it had, she knew, Peter Wimsey’s money behind it. She was one of the very few people in the Kingdom who did know that.
The Treasurer coughed.
‘Fees paid to a Detective Agency,’ she observed, ‘will have an odd appearance in the Annual Audit.’
‘I think that might be arranged,’ said Harriet. ‘I know the organisation personally. A fee might not be necessary.’
‘That,’ said the Warden, ‘would not be right. The fees would, of course, have to be paid. I would gladly be personally responsible.’
‘That would not be right either,’ said Miss Lydgate. ‘We certainly should not like that.’
‘Perhaps,’ suggested Harriet, ‘I could find out what the fees were likely to be.’ She had, in fact, no idea how this part of the business was worked.
‘There would be no harm in inquiring,’ said the Warden. ‘In the meantime—’
‘If I may make a suggestion,’ said the Dean, ‘I should propose, Warden, that the evidence should be handed over to Miss Vane, as she is the only person in this room who cannot possibly come under suspicion. Perhaps she would like to sleep upon the matter and make a report to you in the morning. At least, not in the morning, because of Lord Oakapple and the Opening; but at some time during to-morrow.’
‘Very well,’ said Harriet, in response to an inquiring look from the Warden. ‘I will do that. And if I can think of any way in which I can be helpful, I’ll do my best.’
The Warden thanked her. ‘We all appreciate,’ she added, ‘the extreme awkwardness of the situation, and I am sure we shall all do what we can to co-operate in getting the matter cleared up. And I should like to say this: whatever any of us may think or feel, it is of the very greatest importance that we should dismiss, as far as possible, all vague suspicions from our minds, and be particularly careful how we may say anything that might be construed as an accusation against anybody at all. In a close community of this kind, nothing can be more harmful than an atmosphere of mutual distrust. I repeat that I have the very greatest confidence in every Senior Member of the College. I shall endeavour to keep an entirely open mind, and I shall look to all my colleagues to do the same.’
The dons assented; and the meeting broke up.
‘Well!’ said the Dean, as she and Harriet turned into the New Quad, ‘that is the most uncomfortable meeting I have ever had to sit through. My dear, you have thrown a bombshell into our midst!’
‘I’m afraid so. But what could I do?’
‘You couldn’t possibly have done anything else. Oh, dear! It’s all very well for the Warden to talk about an open mind, but we shall all feel perfectly ghastly wondering what other people are thinking about us, and whether our own conversation doesn’t sound a little potty. It’s the pottiness, you know, that’s so awful.’
‘I know. By the way, Dean, I do absolutely refuse to suspect you. You’re quite the sanest person I ever met.’
‘I don’t think that’s keeping an open mind, but thank you all the same for those few kind words. And one can’t possibly suspect the Warden or Miss Lydgate, can one? But I’d better not say even that. I suppose. Otherwise, by a process of elimination – oh, lord! For Heaven’s sake can’t we find some handy outsider with a cast-iron alibi ready for busting?’
‘We’ll hope so. And of course there are these two students and the scouts to be disposed of.’ They turned in at the Dean’s door. Miss Martin savagely poked up the fire in the sitting-room, sat down in an armchair and stared at the leaping flames. Harriet coiled herself on a couch and contemplated Miss Martin.
‘Look here,’ said the Dean; ‘you had better not tell me too much about what you think, but there’s no reason why any of us shouldn’t tell you what we think, is there? No. Well. Here’s the point. What is the object of all this persecution? It doesn’t look like a personal grudge against anybody in particular. It’s a kind of blind malevolence, directed against everybody in College. What’s at the back of it?’
‘Well, it might be somebody who thought the College as a body had injured her. Or it might be a personal grudge masking itself under a general attack. Or it might be just somebody with a mania for creating disturbance in order to enjoy the fun; that’s the usual reason for this kind of outbreak, if you can call it a reason.’
‘That’s sheer pottiness, in that case. Like those tiresome children who throw furniture about and the servants who pretend to be ghosts. And, talking of servants, do you think there’s anything in that idea that it’s more likely to be somebody of that class? Of course, Miss Barton wouldn’t agree; but after all, some of the words used are very coarse.’
‘Yes,’ said Harriet; ‘but actually there isn’t one that I, for example, don’t know the meaning of. I believe, when you get even the primmest people under an anaesthetic, they are liable to bring the strangest vocabulary out of the subconscious – in fact, the primmer the coarser.’
‘True. Did you notice that there wasn’t a single spelling mistake in the whole bunch of messages?’
‘I noticed that. It probably points to a fairly well educated person; though the converse isn’t necessarily true. I mean, educated people often put in mistakes on purpose, so that spelling mistakes don’t prove much. But an absence of mistakes is a more difficult thing to manage, if it doesn’t come natural. I’m not putting this very clearly.’
‘Yes, you are. A go
od speller could pretend to be a bad one; but a bad speller can’t pretend to be a good one, any more than I could pretend to be a mathematician.’
‘She could use a dictionary.’
‘But then she would have to know enough to be dictionary-conscious – as the new slang would call it. Isn’t our poison-pen rather silly to get all her spelling right?’
‘I don’t know. The educated person often fakes bad spelling rather badly; misspells easy words and gets quite difficult ones right. It’s not so hard to tell when people are putting it on. I think it’s probably cleverer to make no pretence about it.’
‘I see. Does this tend to exclude the scouts? . . . But probably they spell far better than we do. They so often are better educated. And I’m sure they dress better. But that’s rather off the point. Stop me when I dither.’
‘You’re not dithering,’ said Harriet. ‘Everything you say is perfectly true. At present I don’t see how anybody is to be excluded.’
‘And what,’ demanded the Dean, ‘becomes of the mutilated newspapers?’
‘This won’t do,’ said Harriet; ‘you’re being a great deal too sharp about this. That’s just one of the things I was wondering about.’
‘Well, we’ve been into that,’ said the Dean, in a tone of satisfaction. ‘We’ve checked up on all the S.C.R. and J.C.R. papers ever since this business came to our notice – that is, more or less, since the beginning of this term. Before anything goes to be pulped, the whole lot are checked up with the list and examined to see that nothing has been cut out.’
‘Who has been doing that?’
‘My secretary, Mrs. Goodwin. I don’t think you’ve met her yet. She lives in College during term. Such a nice girl – or woman, rather. She was left a widow, you know, very hard up, and she’s got a little boy of ten at a prep. school. When her husband died – he was a schoolmaster – she set to work to train as a secretary and really did splendidly. She’s simply invaluable to me, and most careful and reliable.’
‘Was she here at Gaudy?’
‘Of course she was. She – good gracious! You surely don’t think – my dear, that’s absurd! The most straightforward and sane person. And she’s very grateful to the College for having found her the job, and she certainly wouldn’t want to run the risk of losing it.’
‘All the same, she’s got to go on the list of possibles. How long has she been here?’
‘Let me see. Nearly two years. Nothing at all happened till the Gaudy, you know, and she’d been here a year before that.’
‘But the S.C.R. and the scouts who live in College have been here still longer, most of them. We can’t make exceptions along those lines. How about the other secretaries?’
‘The Warden’s secretary – Miss Parsons – lives at the Warden’s Lodgings. The Bursar’s and the Treasurer’s secretaries both live out, so they can be crossed off.’
‘Miss Parsons been here long?’
‘Four years.’
Harriet noted down the names of Mrs. Goodwin and Miss Parsons.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘for Mrs. Goodwin’s own sake we’d better have a second check on those newspapers. Not that it really matters; because, if the poison-pen knows that the papers are being checked, she won’t use those papers. And I suppose she must know, because of the care taken to collect them.’
‘Very likely. That’s just the trouble, isn’t it?’
‘How about people’s private newspapers?’
‘Well, naturally, we couldn’t check them. We’ve kept an eye on the waste-paper baskets as well as we can. Nothing is ever destroyed, you know. It’s all thriftily collected in sacks and sent to the paper-makers or whoever it is that gives pence for old papers. The worthy Padgett is instructed to examine the sacks – but it’s a terrific job. And then of course, since there are fires in all the rooms, why should anybody leave evidence in the W.P.B.?’
‘How about the gowns that were burnt in the quad? That must have taken some doing. Surely more than one person would have been needed to work that.’
‘We don’t know whether that was part of the same business or not. About ten or a dozen people had left their gowns in various places – as they do, you know – before Sunday supper. Some were in the Queen Elizabeth portico, and some at the foot of the Hall stairs and so on. People bring them over and dump them, ready for evening Chapel.’ (Harriet nodded; Sunday evening Chapel was held at a quarter to eight, and was compulsory; being also a kind of College Meeting for the giving-out of notices.) ‘Well, when the bell started, these people couldn’t find their gowns and so couldn’t go in to Chapel. Everybody thought it was just a rag. But in the middle of the night somebody saw a blaze in the quad, and it turned out to be a merry little bonfire of bombazine. The gowns had all been soaked in petrol and they went up beautifully.’
‘Where did the petrol come from?’
‘It was a can Mullins keeps for his motor-cycle. You remember Mullins – the Jowett Lodge porter. His machine lies in a little outhouse in the Lodge garden. He didn’t lock it up – why should he? He does now, but that doesn’t help. Anybody could have gone and fetched it. He and his wife heard nothing, having retired to their virtuous rest. The bonfire happened bang in the middle of the Old Quad and burnt a nasty patch in the turf. Lots of people rushed out when the flare went up, and whoever did it probably mingled with the crowd. The victims were four M.A. gowns, two scholars’ gowns and the rest commoners’ gowns; but I don’t suppose there was any selection; they just happened to be lying about.’
‘I wonder where they were put in the interval between supper and the bonfire. Anybody carrying a whole bunch of gowns round College would be a bit conspicuous.’
‘No; it was at the end of November, and it would be pretty dark. They could easily have been bundled into a lecture-room to be left till called for. There wasn’t a proper organised search over college, you see. The poor victims who were left gownless thought somebody was having a joke; they were very angry, but not very efficient. Most of them rushed round to accuse their friends.’
‘Yes; I don’t suppose we can get much out of that episode at this time of day. Well – I suppose I’d better go and wash-and-brush-up for Hall.’
Hall was an embarrassed meal at the High Table. The conversation was valiantly kept to matters of academic and world interest. The undergraduates babbled noisily and cheerfully; the shadow that rested upon the college did not seem to have affected their spirits. Harriet’s eye roamed over them.
‘Is that Miss Cattermole at the table on the right? In a green frock, with a badly made-up face?’
‘That’s the young lady,’ replied the Dean. ‘How did you know?’
‘I remember seeing her at Gaudy. Where is the all-conquering Miss Flaxman?’
‘I don’t see her. She may not be dining in Hall. Lots of them prefer to boil an egg in their rooms, so as to avoid the bother of changing. Slack little beasts. And that’s Miss Hudson, in a red jumper, at the middle table. Black hair and horn rims.’
‘She looks quite normal.’
‘So far as I know, she is. So far as I know, we all are.’
‘I suppose,’ said Miss Pyke, who had overheard the last remark, ‘even murderers look much like other people, Miss Vane. Or do you hold any opinions about the theories put forward by Lombroso? I understand that they are now to a considerable extent exploded.’
Harriet was quite thankful to be allowed to discuss murderers.
After Hall, Harriet felt herself rather at a loose end. She felt she ought to be doing something or interviewing somebody; but it was hard to know where to begin. The Dean had announced that she would be busy with some lists, but would be open to receive visitors later on. Miss Burrows the Librarian was to be engaged in putting the final touches to the Library before the Chancellor’s visit; she had been carting and arranging books the greater part of the day and had roped in a small band of students to assist her with the shelving of them. Various other dons mentioned that they had work t
o do; Harriet thought they seemed a little shy of one another’s company.
Catching hold of the Bursar, Harriet asked whether it was possible to get hold of a plan of the college and a list of the various rooms and their occupants. Miss Stevens offered to supply the list and said she thought there was a plan in the Treasurer’s office. She took Harriet across into the New Quad to get these things.
‘I hope,’ said the Bursar, ‘you will not pay too much attention to the unfortunate remark of Miss Burrows’ about the scouts. Nothing would please me more, personally, than to transfer all the maids to the Scouts’ Wing out of reach of suspicion, if that were practicable; but there is no room for them there. Certainly I do not mind giving you the names of those who sleep in College, and I agree, certainly, that precautions should be taken. But to my mind, the episode of Miss Lydgate’s proofs definitely rules out the scouts. Very few of them would be likely to know or care anything about proof-sheets; nor would the idea of mutilating manuscripts be likely to come into their heads. Vulgar letters – yes, possibly. But damaging those proofs was an educated person’s crime. Don’t you think so?’
‘I’d better not say what I think,’ said Harriet.
‘No; quite right. But I can say what I think. I wouldn’t say it to anybody but you. Still, I do not like this haste to make scapegoats of the scouts.’
‘The thing that seems so extraordinary,’ said Harriet, ‘is that Miss Lydgate, of all people, should have been chosen as a victim. How could anybody – particularly one of her own colleagues – have a grudge against her? Doesn’t it look rather as though the culprit knew nothing about the value of the proofs, and was merely making a random gesture of defiance to the world in general?’