‘I call it very grubby and little-boy, to take all this morbid interest,’ said Kitty, witheringly, forgetting her past.
‘Do you? We’re on to a big thing here, if I mistake not,’ replied her friend. ’Don’t you see that Cook simply went the way of all flesh — to wit, the way Miss Murchan went last term?’
‘Oh, rot!’ said Kitty and Alice with one accord.
‘And how will you go in? You can’t undress on the bank, and you haven’t even got a towel, let alone a bathing costume,’ said the former. ‘You’re an ass, Dog!’
‘And you’d catch your death of cold,’ said Alice. Laura patted herself on the stomach.
‘Costume on under my clothes; towel round my waist to hide it from our smirking acquaintance as we came through the park,’ she announced. ‘And what’s the use of a pub if you can’t ask permission to use the summer-house on their bowling green as a dressing-room?’
This amount of generalship took away speech from her companions. Moreover, by some gift known to herself but not to them, she did indeed obtain permission to use the summer-house.
‘Here, hang on to my watch, Kitty,’ said she, emerging on to the bank, tall and big-limbed in her scanty bathing suit.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do it, Laura,’ said Alice. ‘You’ve no idea how cold it will be.’
‘Sez you!’ retorted Laura, dancing up and down on the grass. ‘Well, here goes. I’m going to wade in and try it for depth and currents first. Then I’ll come up on the bridge and drop in off the parapet. “When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs” — Ow! Wow! It’s freezing! — “for me! Plant thou — ” ’; She thrust in, waist deep, and then struck out into midstream, waved to the watchers, and began to thresh down-river. Kitty remained where she was, but Alice, herself a swimmer, walked anxiously along the bank, after having loosened her shoe-laces and unfastened all but a single hook on her skirt. She knew the cramping effects of extremely cold water, and was on hand to render assistance.
Laura, however, needed none. She turned after about a hundred yards of strong, swift crawl, and began to come upstream in a series of duck-dives, testing the depth of the water. It was amusing to watch the white legs and the very white soles of the feet breaking water at every seven or eight yards, and after a few minutes Alice realized that she and Kitty were not the sole observers of the scene. Several of the other students, also out for walks, had come up, and one or two villagers, mostly from the inn, were also upon the bridge or upon the bank.
Having carried out the first part of her experiment, and taking no notice of the spectators, Laura waded through shallow, very muddy water to the bank, climbed out, and trotted up to the bridge.
‘Do hurry up and come out, Dog. We’re attracting attention,’ urged Kitty. But Laura briefly invited her to pass the hat round, and, climbing on to the parapet of the low bridge, breathed deeply and — a martyr to her thirst for knowledge — fell awkwardly and painfully in.
‘No good diving. Wouldn’t have the same effect as tipping in somebody with their hands tied,’ she told the others later.
The current was fairly strong because of the rush from the weir. It carried her, half-drowned (for she did not like to mar her experiment by coming to the surface to breathe more often than she could help), past the inn and towards the right bank of the river. At last, exhausted, and beginning to feel that warning cold which seems to strike internally, she came up, breathed deeply once or twice, and then began to race about to get warm. The patient Alice kept pace along the bank, the public-house portion of the audience offering bets among themselves, meanwhile, as to what it was all about; one section holding that it was for a wager, the other certain that the young lady was in training for something, and that Alice was her trainer.
It was Alice who saw the corsets; at least, it was Alice who, suddenly cupping her hands round her mouth, yelled:
‘Laura! Something pink! Laura! Look, Laura!’
Laura did not hear at first, and was amazed to see Alice come down to the water’s edge as though she were going to wade in. So she would have done, had not Laura’s attention been attracted just in time.
Laura, treading up mud, handed her the corsets. Alice rolled them up, but the watchers had seen what they were, and, having no idea at that moment of connecting them with the body which had been dragged out by the police, now cancelled all bets and assumed, with beery joviality, that they were the object of Laura’s researches. There was some crude chaff, at which the girls grinned and Alice also blushed, and then Laura trotted off to get dressed.
The others accompanied her, and Alice, offering money which was not accepted, obtained the use of two more towels from the publican, and whilst Laura, now shaking with cold and with hands too numb to dry herself, fumbled with the towel she had brought out from College, Alice and Kitty got to work on her like ostlers working on a horse, and, deaf to her protests that they were taking all the skin off, had her, except for her hands and feet, quite warm again by the time they had crammed on her vest and heavy sweater. Then, taking her by the arms, they trotted her up and down the stone-flagged path which bordered the bowling-green until she pronounced her circulation fully restored. By this time the watchers had dispersed, and the three went back to College.
‘And didn’t you scold her?’ asked Deborah. She and Mrs Bradley were having tea in Mrs Bradley’s sitting-room.
‘No. Why should I? I gave them all some parkin, and Miss Menzies a cup of Bovril,’ said the head of the house composedly.
‘But she might have got pneumonia!’
‘My scolding her would not prevent that, dear child. And look at the prize they brought in! Although I must say I can’t imagine how the police came to overlook it. Something to do with the action of the current, I suppose.’
‘But what did they bring in?’ asked Deborah.
‘Haven’t you heard? I feared it was all over Hall. Perhaps they’ve kept their mouths shut after all. They found Cook’s corsets in the river!’
Chapter 10
THE FLYING FLACORIS
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‘We’ve traced her movements over the week-end, madam,’ said the inspector, ‘and although we can’t find anybody who actually saw her enter the College grounds, she was seen, acting in a furtive manner, between the two stiles leading to the backs of your five houses of young ladies. That was at half-past nine on Monday evening. She was seen by Mr Titt, of the Watch Committee.’
‘I bet she was!’ said Miss Topas, when she heard this. ‘That man ought to be in prison!’
The two stiles referred to by the inspector were on College property. Behind the five Halls ran a drive, and behind the drive, and parallel with it, was a fairly high wall. Midway in this wall, and behind Beowulf Hall, there was a gap closed by a stile. A short footpath ran from this stile to another stile across a waste piece of ground used by the lecturers in botany as a kind of research-station for wild plants. The second stile was also set in a high wall, and beyond it stretched open fields which, in their turn, gave place to the moor. One of these fields was used by the College for hockey, but all the others belonged to farmers, and there was a right of way across to the College stile from the moorland highway, now an almost unused track since the stone-quarries there had been abandoned.
‘She went to Bradford,’ the inspector went on, ‘to her relations there. Respectable people; a man and his wife and three children. Nothing against them in any way. She stayed with them over Sunday, and then on Monday morning she told them she’d got a letter about a situation in York. They didn’t see any letter, but as she’d gone to the door herself to collect the post, they couldn’t question it.
‘And now, madam, comes a funny item. On Friday morning she went to the Post Office in Wantley — not here in the village, you’ll notice, nor anywhere near the College — and put fifty pounds into her Savings Bank account. Further to that, she put another fifty in on the Saturday before she visited her relatives, and not in Wantley this time, but in Bradford itself; and, even then, not at the branch office where her relations, living in the part they do, would be most likely to go. What do you make of that?’