The headmaster rose abruptly, and began pacing round the room. His thin hair was dishevelled, and his eyes looked unnaturally hollow with fatigue. One hand was thrust into his pocket, and the other held a cigarette which was burning away unregarded and scattering its ash in little compact clots on to the heavy blue carpet.
‘To be candid, no,’ he answered after an interval. ‘I never liked either of them very much. But that fact is irrelevant, I trust.’
He halted before an old mirror in a delicate gilt frame and made a half-hearted attempt to straighten his hair. Fen continued to contemplate the dioramic reflections on his glass.
‘Tell me about them,’ he said. ‘Character, history, personal ties – that sort of thing.’
‘As far as I can.’ The headmaster resumed his pacing. ‘Love, I think, was the more interesting character of the two. He teaches – taught, I suppose I must say – classics and history. Competent, methodical – a satisfactory man in most ways.’
‘Did the boys like him?’
‘They respected him, I think, but he wasn’t the sort of person who invites affection. He was a puritan, not altogether lacking in shrewdness. Duty was his lodestar. It would be wrong to say that he disapproved of pleasure, but he was inclined to regard it as a necessary medicine, to be taken at specified times, in specified doses. And for all his competence’ – the headmaster abandoned this hazy diagnosis to be more specific – ‘he was never a successful housemaster.’
‘I didn’t realize,’ said Fen, ‘that he was a housemaster.’
‘Not here. At Merfield. When he left Cambridge he came here as an assistant master. Then he went on to Merfield and got a house. And then, when he reached the age limit for house masters, he came back here as an assistant master. That was during the war, when we badly needed staff.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Sixty-two, I think.’
‘Surely most schoolmasters retire at sixty.’
‘Yes. But Love wasn’t the sort of man to retire as long as he kept his faculties and could do his job. The Loves of this world don’t retire; they die on their feet.’ The headmaster took a silver clock from the broad, carved mantel, emptied a key out of a vase, and began winding it. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he went on, ‘Love has been rather a problem to me. Since the war ended, the governors have been clamouring for a staff age limit of sixty, and by rights I ought to have got rid of him. But I persuaded the board to make an exception in his case.’
‘Why?’
‘I had a certain admiration for him,’ the headmaster explained as he restored key and clock to their places. ‘He always seemed to me to be rather like the Albert Memorial – intrinsically graceless, but so uncompromising as to compel respect. And, of course, the soul of probity, even in the smallest and most trivial things; the sort of man who’d return a stamp to the post office if it hadn’t been cancelled. That may have been why he was a failure as a housemaster. Ruling a house too rigidly and meticulously is always a mistake.’
‘A man whom there were none to praise and very few to love,’ Fen remarked sadly. ‘But he is in his grave, and, oh, the difference to me…What about his private life? Was he married?’
‘Yes. His wife’s a wispy, mousy little woman; all the character rubbed out of her, I suspect, by years of ministering to him.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I can’t think of anything. The man you really ought to talk to is Etherege. He knows all there is to know about everyone.’
Fen emptied his glass with a single gulp and set it on the floor beside his chair. The blue curtains stirred, almost imperceptibly, in a breeze too inconsiderable to alleviate the dry, prickly heat. The moth, momentarily quiescent, was clinging to the inside of the lampshade, its outline blurred and exaggerated by the opaque parchment. The remote but persistent baying of a dog suggested that Mr Merrythought was communing with some inward grief. It was the only sound. The building might have been draped and muffled in a pall.
And palls, Fen thought, were not inappropriate in the circumstances. He found a battered cigarette loose in his pocket and, after ascertaining that it did not belong to one of those evil and recondite brands to which the shortage occasionally condemned him, lit it.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll take your advice and talk to Etherege, whoever he may be. And now, what about Somers?’
The headmaster, with that protective deliberation of movement which heat compels, lowered himself into a chair, rubbed his sleeve across his forehead, and yawned.
‘Lord,’ he said, ‘how tired I am…Somers. Yes. Quite a young man. Educated at Merfield, where he was head boy in Love’s house. Love thought the world of him. I should have told you that favouritism was one of Love’s few vices. The way he coddled Somers at Merfield aroused a good deal of resentment.’
He yawned again, and apologized. ‘Somers taught English,’ he went on. ‘Clever, and a shade conceited. Not popular. He came here a year ago, from the army.’
‘Married?’
‘No. He has – had – has – rooms in a rather nice Palladian house in Castrevenford town; it’s supposed to have been designed by Nicholas Revett. I don’t blame him for preferring to live away from the school,’ the headmaster added rather inconsequently. ‘I always used to if possible…However.’
‘Any relatives? Any close friends?’
‘Neither. Parents dead, no brothers or sisters. And as to friends – no, I don’t believe he was intimate with anyone here. Once again, Etherege would be the man to ask. Anything else?’
‘No, thanks.’ Fen blew a smoke ring and watched it expand, opalescent, against the lamp. ‘Not until I’ve seen the bodies, anyway.’ He brooded for a while. ‘I hope,’ he said at last, ‘that the superintendent isn’t going to raise difficulties about allowing me in on this.’
‘I shouldn’t imagine so.’ The headmaster looked up at the clock and saw that the time was twenty-five minutes past eleven. ‘In any case, we shall soon know.’
The superintendent arrived five minutes later. He wore uniform; and an intensification of the habitual expression of alarm on his features suggested that he was oppressed by the magnitude of the disaster. Fen suspected that, like Buridan’s ass, he could not decide what to tackle first. With him were a doctor – an undersized man with bloodshot eyes, neatly bearded and unexpectedly rancorous in utterance – a sergeant, carrying a worn black Gladstone bag, and a constable. Outside, an ambulance was parked, and its white-coated attendants were wandering about spectrally illuminated by its sidelights, until their services should be required.
The social formalities were hurriedly consummated, and Stagge addressed himself to Fen.
‘Murder’s a bit outside my usual province,’ he admitted. ‘If it is murder, that is. So if you’d like to lend a hand, sir, your experience would be most valuable.’ He smiled engagingly, and the admixture of mirth which this gave to his normal mien produced a singularly bizarre and ghastly effect.
Fen murmured his gratification in suitable terms.
‘Splendid,’ said the headmaster, heroically stifling a yawn.
‘You can well understand, Stagge, how distressed I am. Personal feelings apart, this tragedy comes at a very unlucky time for the school. It will be impossible, of course, to keep these deaths a secret, but none the less—’
‘You would wish me to act as unobtrusively as possible.’ Stagge raised his forefinger, apparently in order to focus their attention upon his perspicacity and tact. ‘I appreciate your position, Dr Stanford, and