I
Letter from Jennifer Sutcliffe to her mother:
Dear Mummy,
We had a murder last night. Miss Springer, the gym mistress. It happened in the middle of the night and the police came and this morning they’re asking everybody questions.
Miss Chadwick told us not to talk to anybody about it but I thought you’d like to know.
With love,
Jennifer
II
Meadowbank was an establishment of sufficient importance to merit the personal attention of the Chief Constable. While routine investigation was going on Miss Bulstrode had not been inactive. She rang up a Press magnate and the Home Secretary, both personal friends of hers. As a result of those manoeuvres, very little had appeared about the event in the papers. A games mistress had been found dead in the school gymnasium. She had been shot, whether by accident or not was as yet not determined. Most of the notices of the event had an almost apologetic note in them, as though it were thoroughly tactless of any games mistress to get herself shot in such circumstances.
Ann Shapland had a busy day taking down letters to parents. Miss Bulstrode did not waste time in telling her pupils to keep quiet about the event. She knew that it would be a waste of time. More or less lurid reports would be sure to be penned to anxious parents and guardians. She intended her own balanced and reasonable account of the tragedy to reach them at the same time.
Later that afternoon she sat in conclave with Mr. Stone, the Chief Constable, and Inspector Kelsey. The police were perfectly amenable to having the Press play the thing down as much as possible. It enabled them to pursue their inquiries quietly and without interference.
“I’m very sorry about this, Miss Bulstrode, very sorry indeed,” said the Chief Constable. “I suppose it’s—well—a bad thing for you.”
“Murder’s a bad thing for any school, yes,” said Miss Bulstrode. “It’s no good dwelling on that now, though. We shall weather it, no doubt, as we have weathered other storms. All I do hope is that the matter will be cleared up quickly.”
“Don’t see why it shouldn’t, eh?” said Stone. He looked at Kelsey.
Kelsey said, “It may help when we get her background.”
“D’you really think so?” asked Miss Bulstrode dryly.
“Somebody may have had it in for her,” Kelsey suggested.
Miss Bulstrode did not reply.
“You think it’s tied up with this place?” asked the Chief Constable.
“Inspector Kelsey does really,” said Miss Bulstrode. “He’s only trying to save my feelings, I think.”
“I think it does tie up with Meadowbank,” said the Inspector slowly. “After all, Miss Springer had her times off like all the other members of the staff. She could have arranged a meeting with anyone if she had wanted to do so at any spot she chose. Why choose the gymnasium here in the middle of the night?”
“You have no objection to a search being made of the school premises, Miss Bulstrode?” asked the Chief Constable.
“None at all. You’re looking for the pistol or revolver or whatever it is, I suppose?”
“Yes. It was a small pistol of foreign make.”
“Foreign,” said Miss Bulstrode thoughtfully.
“To your knowledge, do any of your staff or any of the pupils have such a thing as a pistol in their possession?”
“Certainly not to my knowledge,” said Miss Bulstrode. “I am fairly certain that none of the pupils have. Their possessions are unpacked for them when they arrive and such a thing would have been seen and noted, and would, I may say, have aroused considerable comment. But please, Inspector Kelsey, do exactly as you like in that respect. I see your men have been searching the grounds today.”
The Inspector nodded. “Yes.”
He went on: “I should also like interviews with the other members of your staff. One or other of them may have heard some remark made by Miss Springer that will give us a clue. Or may have observed some oddity of behaviour on her part.”
He paused, then went on, “The same thing might apply to the pupils.”
Miss Bulstrode said: “I had formed the plan of making a short address to the girls this evening after prayers. I would ask that if any of them has any knowledge that might possibly bear upon Miss Springer’s death that they should come and tell me of it.”
“Very sound idea,” said the Chief Constable.
“But you must remember this,” said Miss Bulstrode, “one or other of the girls may wish to make herself important by exaggerating some incident or even by inventing one. Girls do very odd things: but I expect you are used to dealing with that form of exhibitionism.”
“I’ve come across it,” said Inspector Kelsey. “Now,” he added, “please give me a list of your staff, also the servants.”
III
“I’ve looked through all the lockers in the Pavilion, sir.”
“And you didn’t find anything?” said Kelsey.
“No, sir, nothing of importance. Funny things in some of them, but nothing in our line.”
“None of them were locked, were they?”
“No, sir, they can lock. There were keys in them, but none of them were locked.”
Kelsey looked round the bare floor thoughtfully. The tennis and lacrosse sticks had been replaced tidily on their stands.
“Oh well,” he said, “I’m going up to the house now to have a talk with the staff.”
“You don’t think it was an inside job, sir?”
“It could have been,” said Kelsey. “Nobody’s got an alibi except those two mistresses, Chadwick and Johnson and the child Jane that had the earache. Theoretically, everyone else was in bed and asleep, but there’s no one to vouch for that. The girls all have separate rooms and naturally the staff do. Any one of them, including Miss Bulstrode herself, could have come out and met Springer here, or could have followed her here. Then, after she’d been shot, whoever it was could dodge back quietly through the bushes to the side door, and be nicely back in bed again when the alarm was given. It’s motive that’s difficult. Yes,” said Kelsey, “it’s motive. Unless there’s something going on here that we don’t know anything about, there doesn’t seem to be any motive.”
He stepped out of the Pavilion and made his way slowly back to the house. Although it was past working hours, old Briggs, the gardener, was putting in a little work on a flower bed and he straightened up as the Inspector passed.
“You work late hours,” said Kelsey, smiling.
“Ah,” said Briggs. “Young ’uns don’t know what gardening is. Come on at eight and knock off at five—that’s what they think it is. You’ve got to study your weather, some days you might as well not be out in the garden at all, and there’s other days as you can work from seven in the morning until eight at night. That is if you love the place and have pride in the look of it.”
“You ought to be proud of this one,” said Kelsey. “I’ve never seen anyplace better kept these days.”
“These days is right,” said Briggs. “But I’m lucky I am. I’ve got a strong young fellow to work for me. A couple of boys, too, but they’re not much good. Most of these boys and young men won’t come and do this sort of work. All for going into factories, they are, or white collars and working in an office. Don’t like to get their hands soiled with a bit of honest earth. But I’m lucky, as I say. I’ve got a good man working for me as come and offered himself.”
“Recently?” said Inspector Kelsey.
“Beginning of the term,” said Briggs. “Adam, his name is. Adam Goodman.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen him about,” said Kelsey.
“Asked for the day off today, he did,” said Briggs. “I give it him. Didn’t seem to be much doing today with you people tramping all over the place.”
“Somebody should have told me about him,” said Kelsey sharply.
“What do you mean, told you about him?”
“He’s not on my list,” said the Inspector. “Of people employed here, I mean.”
“Oh, well, you can see him tomorrow, mister,” said Briggs. “Not that he can tell you anything, I don’t suppose.”
“You never know,” said the Inspector.
A strong young man who had offered himself at the beginning of the term? It seemed to Kelsey that here was the first thing that he had come across which might be a little out of the ordinary.
IV
The girls filed into the hall for prayers that evening as usual, and afterwards Miss Bulstrode arrested their departure by raising her hand.
“I have something to say to you all. Miss Springer, as you know, was shot last night in the Sports Pavilion. If any of you has heard or seen anything in the past week—anything that has puzzled you relating to Miss Springer, anything Miss Springer may have said or someone else may have said of her that strikes you as at all significant, I should like to know it. You can come to me in my sitting room anytime this evening.”
“Oh,” Julia Upjohn sighed, as the girls filed out, “how I wish we did know something! But we don’t, do we, Jennifer?”
“No,” said Jennifer, “of course we don’t.”
“Miss Springer always seemed so very ordinary,” said Julia sadly, “much too ordinary to get killed in a mysterious way.”
“I don’t suppose it was so mysterious,” said Jennifer. “Just a burglar.”
“Stealing our tennis racquets, I suppose,” said Julia with sarcasm.
“Perhaps someone was blackmailing her,” suggested one of the other girls hopefully.
“What about?” said Jennifer.
But nobody could think of any reason for blackmailing Miss Springer.
V
Inspector Kelsey started his interviewing of the staff with Miss Vansittart. A handsome woman, he thought, summing her up. Possibly forty or a little over; tall, well-built, grey hair tastefully arranged. She had dignity and composure, with a certain sense, he thought, of her own importance. She reminded him a little of Miss Bulstrode herself: she was the schoolmistress type all right. All the same, he reflected, Miss Bulstrode had something that Miss Vansittart had not. Miss Bulstrode had a quality of unexpectedness. He did not feel that Miss Vansittart would ever be unexpected.
Question and answer followed routine. In effect, Miss Vansittart had seen nothing, had noticed nothing, had heard nothing. Miss Springer had been excellent at her job. Yes, her manner had perhaps been a trifle brusque, but not, she thought, unduly so. She had not perhaps had a very attractive personality but that was really not a necessity in a Games Mistress. It was better, in fact, not to have mistresses who had attractive personalities. It did not do to let the girls get emotional about the mistresses. Miss Vansittart, having contributed nothing of value, made her exit.
“See no evil, hear no evil, think no evil. Same like the monkeys,” observed Sergeant Percy Bond, who was assisting Inspector Kelsey in his task.
Kelsey grinned. “That’s about right, Percy,” he said.
“There’s something about schoolmistresses that gives me the hump,” said Sergeant Bond. “Had a terror of them ever since I was a kid. Knew one that was a holy terror. So upstage and la-di-da you never knew what she was trying to teach you.”
The next mistress to appear was Eileen Rich. Ugly as sin was Inspector Kelsey’s first reaction. Then he qualified it; she had a certain attraction. He started his routine questions, but the answers were not quite so routine as he had expected. After saying No, she had not heard or noticed anything special that anyone else had said about Miss Springer or that Miss Springer herself had said, Eileen Rich’s next answer was not what he anticipated. He had asked:
“There was no one as far as you know who had a personal grudge against her?”
“Oh no,” said Eileen Rich quickly. “One couldn’t have. I think that was her tragedy, you know. That she wasn’t a person one could ever hate.”
“Now just what do you mean by that, Miss Rich?”
“I mean she wasn’t a person one could ever have wanted to destroy. Everything she did and was, was on the surface. She annoyed people. They often had sharp words with her, but it didn’t mean anything. Not anything deep. I’m sure she wasn’t killed for herself, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not quite sure that I do, Miss Rich.”
“I mean if you had something like a bank robbery, she might quite easily be the cashier that gets shot, but it would be as a cashier, not as Grace Springer. Nobody would love her or hate her enough to want to do away with her. I think she probably felt that without thinking about it, and that’s what made her so officious. About finding fault, you know, and enforcing rules and finding out what people were doing that they shouldn’t be doing, and showing them up.”
“Snooping?” asked Kelsey.
“No, not exactly snooping.” Eileen Rich considered. “She wouldn’t tiptoe round on sneakers or anything of that kind. But if she found something going on that she didn’t understand she’d be quite determined to get to the bottom of it. And she would get to the bottom of it.”
“I see.” He paused a moment. “You didn’t like her yourself much, did you, Miss Rich?”
“I don’t think I ever thought about her. She was just the Games Mistress. Oh! What a horrible thing that is to say about anybody! Just this—just that! But that’s how she felt about her job. It was a job that she took pride in doing well. She didn’t find it fun. She wasn’t keen when she found a girl who might be really good at tennis, or really fine at some form of athletics. She didn’t rejoice in it or triumph.”
Kelsey looked at her curiously. An odd young woman, this, he thought.
“You seem to have your ideas on most things, Miss Rich,” he said.
“Yes. Yes, I suppose I do.”
“How long have you been at Meadowbank?”
“Just over a year and a half.”
“There’s never been any trouble before?”
“At Meadowbank?” She sounded startled.
“Yes.”
“Oh no. Everything’s been quite all right until this term.”
Kelsey pounced.
“What’s been wrong this term? You don’t mean the murder, do you? You mean something else—”
“I don’t—” she stopped—“Yes, perhaps I do—but it’s all very nebulous.”
“Go on.”
“Miss Bulstrode’s not been happy lately,” said Eileen slowly. “That’s one thing. You wouldn’t know it. I don’t think anybody else has even noticed it. But I have. And she’s not the only one who’s unhappy. But that isn’t what you mean, is it? That’s just people’s feelings. The kind of things you get when you’re cooped up together and think about one thing too much. You meant, was there anything that didn’t seem right just this term. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Kelsey, looking at her curiously, “yes, that’s it. Well, what about it?”
“I think there is something wrong here,” said Eileen Rich slowly. “It’s as though there were someone among us who didn’t belong.” She looked at him, smiled, almost laughed and said, “Cat among the pigeons, that’s the sort of feeling. We’re the pigeons, all of us, and the cat’s amongst us. But we can’t see the cat.”
“That’s very vague, Miss Rich.”
“Yes, isn’t it? It sounds quite idiotic. I can hear that myself. What I really mean, I suppose, is that there has been something, some little thing that I’ve noticed but I don’t know what I’ve noticed.”
“About anyone in particular?”
“No, I told you, that’s just it. I don’t know who it is. The only way I can sum it up is to say that there’s someone here, who’s—somehow—wrong! There’s someone here—I don’t know who—who makes me uncomfortable. Not when I’m looking at her but when she’s looking at me because it’s when she’s looking at me that it shows, whatever it is. Oh, I’m getting more incoherent than ever. And anyway, it’s only a feeling. It’s not what you want. It isn’t evidence.”
“No,” said Kelsey, “it isn’t evidence. Not yet. But it’s interesting, and if your feeling gets anymore definite, Miss Rich, I’d be glad to hear about it.”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “because it’s serious, isn’t it? I mean, someone’s been killed—we don’t know why—and the killer may be miles away, or, on the other hand, the killer may be here in the school. And if so that pistol or revolver or whatever it is, must be here too. That’s not a very nice thought, is it?”
She went out with a slight nod. Sergeant Bond said,
“Crackers—or don’t you think so?”
“No,” said Kelsey, “I don’t think she’s crackers. I think she’s what’s called a sensitive. You know, like the people who know when there’s a cat in the room long before they see it. If she’d been born in an African tribe she might have been a witch doctor.”
“They go round smelling out evil, don’t they?” said Sergeant Bond.
“That’s right, Percy,” said Kelsey. “And that’s exactly what I’m trying to do myself. Nobody’s come across with any concrete facts so I’ve got to go about smelling out things. We’ll have the French woman next.”
[Cat Among the Pigeons -Agatha Christie] Nine Cat Among The Pigeons