A Question of Proof Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter I: Enter Severally

  Chapter II: Lyric and Elegiac

  Chapter III: Enter a Posse

  Chapter IV: Viva Voce

  Chapter V: Obverse and Reverse

  Chapter VI: Two Balloons Go Up

  Chapter VII: About it and About

  Chapter VIII: Initiation of a Detective

  Chapter IX: Retrospects and Prospects

  Chapter X: Annihilation of a Schoolmaster

  Chapter XI: ‘I Have Thee Not …’

  Chapter XII: Shocks All Round

  Chapter XIII: ‘Give Me Some Light: Away!’

  Chapter XIV: Memoirs and Commentary

  More from Vintage Classic Crime

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The annual Sports Day at respected public school, Sudeley Hall, ends in tragedy when the headmaster’s obnoxious nephew is found strangled in a haystack. The boy was despised by staff and students alike but English master Michael Evans, who was seen sharing a kiss with the headmaster’s beautiful young wife earlier that day, soon becomes a prime suspect for the murder. Luckily, his friend Nigel Strangeways, nephew to the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, is on hand to help investigate the case.

  A Question of Proof is the first Nigel Strangeways Mystery and is the perfect introduction to this most charming and erudite detective from the Golden Age of crime writing.

  About the Author

  Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.

  During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  Thou Shell of Death

  There’s Trouble Brewing

  The Beast Must Die

  The Widow’s Cruise

  Malice in Wonderland

  The Case of the Abominable Snowman

  The Smiler with the Knife

  Minute for Murder

  Head of a Traveller

  The Dreadful Hollow

  The Whisper in the Gloom

  End of Chapter

  The Worm of Death

  The Sad Variety

  The Morning After Death

  FOR

  MARGARET

  NICHOLAS BLAKE

  A Question of Proof

  I

  Enter Severally

  THE SCENE IS a bedroom in Sudeley Hall preparatory school: not one of the airy, green-washed, ostentatiously hygienic dormitories so reassuring to the science-ridden mind of modern parenthood; but one of those bedrooms, resembling in its extreme narrowness and draughtiness nothing so much as a section of corridor in an express train, which tradition assigns to dons, schoolmasters and the lower ranks of domestic servant. The time is seven forty-five on the twentieth of June, 193–. There is a confused noise without, the pandemonium of eighty boys shaking off dull sloth and preparing to run their daily stage of duty, punctuated by occasional explosions from the master on duty. The incidental music is provided by a chorus of blackbird, thrush and sparrow, by the motor lawn mower giving a final trim to Big Field in view of today’s festivities, and by the first of our dramatis personae, Michael Evans, who is singing snatches of the ‘lament for Patrick Sarsfield’ to his reflection in the mirror. The lower part of his face, a not too prominent chin and an amiable mouth, are concealed by lather; but he is noting with his usual faintly surprised approval the rather haughty set of nostril and brow, the curious dark blue of his eyes, and the black hair, disordered but not, he considered, uninteresting in its general effect. ‘Really, you might have done a good deal worse,’ he apostrophised the man in the looking glass. ‘You are no Ramon Navarro, it is true. But on the other hand, you are not a human mouse like poor Sims or a battered Adonis like Gadsby. In good taste without being gaudy. A Beta Plus face, on the whole. … “But far from you country you lie cold and low …” Damn this blade!… “Ah, why, Patrick Sarsfield, ah why did you go?”’ He wiped off the remains of lather and resumed his soliloquy, ‘Today being Sports Day we will drape ourselves in an old boys’ tie. One can never be too careful about impressing the parents with one’s essential old boyhood and alma maternity. Faugh, what a riot of colour! What maniac could ever have conceived this blend of magenta, green and orange? Thank God it’s faded, anyway. And this unseemly length of silk is a passport to respectability, and open sesame to the great heart of the British middle-classes … Why is it that the boys are all so nice, cheerful, unaffected, honest even and intelligent; and the parents – Lord save us – nasty, dull, brutish and short, or however it goes. That, I suppose, is the baneful influence of us schoolmasters. … Beta, perhaps, rather than Beta Plus. “No, I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be.” That reminds me – must borrow a pair of property swords for that duel scene with the Fifth. … Still, Hero seems to like it all right. How lovely and sweet she is … “with beauty like a tightened bow” … and what on earth is going to come of all this? And tomorrow she is going away and I shan’t see her till next term. Three months, three Godforsaken months.’

  From which soliloquy the observant reader will deduce that Michael Evans is sensitive to colour, and something of a Bolshie, as they say; that he had the schoolmaster’s conventional disrespect for parents en masse; that he is a good schoolmaster; that he has a sufficiency of that double-edged quality known as a sense of humour; that he is an English master, and really quite up to date; and that he is in love. Unfortunately for Michael, who liked facts to be decorous almost as much as he liked ideas to be dynamite-ish, he was in love with the headmaster’s wife. And though she returned his love with all the gaiety and abandon of her happy nature, he could not help feeling a certain distaste at being protagonist in a situation so hackneyed by the contemporary novel and drama. Moreover, they had been lovers now for nearly two months, ever since that memorable and breathless moment when they had found themselves alone and then suddenly in each other’s arms in – of all places – an empty classroom: and the situation was becoming increasingly irksome for both of them. Hero was being fretted by the inevitable intimacy with her husband, whom she must have married – she said to herself – in one of her periodic fits of absent mindedness. Michael, surprised at first to feel none of the traditional ‘guilt’ but only a perfect naturalness in the exploits of their love, was beginning more and more to dislike the stratagems necessary for its free play. He was alarmed, too, even while he admired it, by the recklessness of Hero; she seemed utterly oblivious to the possibility of their being caught out and its inevitable consequences. Those consequences would certainly be fatal to Michael. He would never get another job and he had no private means. And even if Percival Vale consented to a divorce, which he suspected was unlikely, Michael would be no better off. For parents, however well acquainted w
ith the divorce courts they might be themselves, had a fixed antipathy to handing over their children to be educated by co-respondents.

  We shall meet Michael and Hero again this afternoon, in circumstances which turned out to be compromising in more ways than they could possibly suspect, so we may leave him for the moment to run our eye over some other principals in the cast, lingering only to remark that Michael’s glass did not crack, that his bust of Dante did not sweat blood, that no hailstones fell out of the flawless sky – in fact, that none of the classical portents showed to warn him of the disastrous events soon to pile themselves upon his head.

  Sweeny, the factotum, a querulous and disappointed man, is ringing the ponderous bell for breakfast, unconscious of the circumstances under which he will be ringing the same bell tomorrow. Upstairs the din is cut short. A few stragglers are hurling themselves in grim silence into their outer garments while the rest marshal themselves for the procession downstairs, for the Rev. Percival Vale is a great stickler for the more flashy manifestations of discipline. A long stride resounds over the uncarpeted floors and a voice adjures some sluggard to ‘brace up, for goodness’ sake, Smithers! I want my breakfast.’ It is the gamesmaster, Edward Griffin. And as he is, like most gamesmasters, a very nice man indeed, we may go up and be introduced. He is tall and bulky, thirty years of age, with a rolling walk and the genial efficient air of an explorer, an old Oxford rugger blue, his never too equable temper rendered permanently explosive by the devices of the front-row forwards of certain Welsh clubs encountered in his youth. His other acomplishments include a talent for the piccolo and a positive genius for extempore charades. He has also been infected by Michael, his best friend, with a relish for morbid psychology, exercised frequently upon those of his colleagues who meet least with his approval.

  Leaving the rank and file to enjoy their breakfast for a little, we now penetrate into the private side where the Rev. Percival Vale is sitting down to his, unattended by his wife, who has pleaded the necessity for a long lie in view of the afternoon incursion of parents. He is fifty years of age, with thin lips, a rosy-apple face, a precise delivery, a keen appreciation of his position as the fixed centre of a stable little universe and an outspoken contempt for all failures within it. The boys, out of hearing, call him ‘Pedantic Percy’: within his hearing they are apt to call him ‘Percy,’ for they have realised that he is not above a little mild flattery and gets quite a kick out of the more respectful form of his nickname. He is an excellent classical scholar, a capable headmaster on strictly conventional lines, and – on the same lines – a decent enough, though unsympathetic, person. It is, in fact, rather a pity that such unpoleasant things are to happen to him and his microcosm. No shadow of coming events, however, falls upon his smooth brow and uplifted egg-spoon. He is wondering which of the parents he can touch for a subscription towards the new fives-court, whether Anstruther has a chance for Winchester, and how he shall word his rebuke to Sims for the indiscipline of his French classes.

  Let us return, then, to the hall and listen in to one or two conversations which may or may not have a bearing on events to follow. At the head of the high table sits Tiverton, the senior assistant master; he has a sour mouth, but friendly, sensitive eyes; he has somehow or other fallen into the position of common-room cynic – probably owing to his boyish love of a phrase, for he is really an enthusiast. On his left and right sit Gadsby and Sims, who have already figured in Michael’s soliloquy. Sims is one of those nondescript persons who gravitate into education as mud sinks to the bottom of a river, but are a good deal more difficult to stir up. He has a weedy moustache and protruding teeth, and spends his summer holidays on the Continent, ostensibly to rub up his languages, but according to Griffin for more dubious reasons. Gadsby, the local bore, must once have been handsome, but now, partly from drink and partly from mental inertia, is rapidly becoming a ruin. He had been an infantry officer in France, and was not averse to fighting his battles over again: as Tiverton put it – ‘he has done the state some service and he’ll damn well see that they know it.’ Beyond these two sit Evans and Griffin, and at the other end of the table Cyril Wrench is reading the Daily Herald with an air of defiance. He has lately come down from one of the minor Oxford colleges, an aesthete by choice but an incurable petty bourgeois by nature.

  ‘Terrible affair, this Staveley murder,’ exclaimed Gadsby, rustling his Daily Express in a marked manner. ‘I see they’ve nearly finished the fullah’s trial. I always say’ – Michael trod heavily upon Griffin’s toe under the table – I always say, ‘Tiverton, that you never know what a fullah’s capable of when there’s a woman in the case.’

  Griffin and Evans sighed rapturously at this new specimen for their collection – they were confirmed platitude-hunters – while Gadsby proceeded on his remorseless way:

  ‘Here’s this chap Jones, a bank-clerk, married man, exemplary life; suddenly falls for a barmaid; trots round the corner for a packet of arsenic; does his wife in. What amazes me, Griffin, is the nerve some of these quiet little chaps have. I remember in my platoon –’

  Griffin interrupted hastily to dam the torrent: ‘Yes, when we find you lying in a pool of gore, we’ll search Sims first for the blunt instrument. He’s a nasty look in his eye, has our Mr. Sims.’

  Gadsby gave vent to a bellow of laughter, which occasioned an acid comment from the prefects’ table – ‘Old Gaddie’s giving tongue again.’ Sims sniggered feebly, rather pleased by the suggestion:

  ‘Oh, come, Griffin, I mean to say – What am I to murder Gadsby for? After all, he hasn’t got a wife.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ put in Tiverton, and winced at the still louder peals of laughter elicited from Gadsby by his remark.

  ‘No cherchez la femme for me,’ said Evans. ‘If I was looking for a murderer I should look for an egotist. Wrench is my man.’

  The prospective culprit shot a venomous glance at him over the top of his paper. Evans turned to Tiverton, ‘Though I can’t see any of us qualifying as a victim. It’s only in school stories that the staff are always assaulting each other with umbrellas and living in a perpetual welter of bad blood.’

  ‘Quite right, Evans,’ said Gadsby, ‘all morbid nonsense. We’re all matey enough here, old man, aren’t we?’

  ‘One big, happy family, as Percy puts it,’ remarked Tiverton distastefully.

  ‘Well, chaps,’ Griffin exclaimed, ‘if murder’s done here, it will be committed by me upon the person of that human wart, young Wemyss. Just because he’s Percy’s nephew he thinks he can boss the whole bloody place. Of all the slimy, overfed specimens – and he’s just enough low cunning to keep out of serious trouble himself. But whenever there’s a row on he’s at the back of it –’

  ‘Like one of Buchan’s Napoleons of international crime,’ put in Evans.

  ‘Napoleons of international –’ retorted Griffin obscenely. ‘I’ll wring his neck for him one of these days. Do you know what he did –’

  We may safely leave Griffin to his cataloguing of the crimes of the boy Wemyss and tune in to another station, the prefects’ table.

  ‘What’s the first race this afternoon?’

  ‘The 440, you boob. It’s all up on the notice board. Oh, I forgot, you can’t read.’

  ‘Funny boy! I say, Stevens, I heard the Griffin say you might bust the record.’

  ‘Oh, rot! I haven’t an earthly; anyway, old Simmie will probably muck up the stopwatch like he did last year.’

  ‘Talking of Simmie, have you heard what Wemyss did in his French class yesterday?’

  ‘Stale! Tell us something new!’

  ‘But seriously, it’s about time that squit Wemyss was suppressed. Pedantic Percy’s little pet is getting above himself. He tried to bribe Patterson to beat up Smithers at the hay battle last night.’

  ‘Well, are you going to report him to Percy?’

  ‘Be your rank! A-ah, I strongly deprecate idle talebearing: I choose my prefects to govern, not to �
� hahum – gossip.’ This last in a devilishly accurate reproduction of the Rev. Vale’s more didactic utterances.

  The head of the school, a serious, comely child of thirteen, now delivers judgement:

  ‘No, there’s no use applying to Percy. But we might hold a court on him –’

  ‘I’m prosecutor!’

  ‘I’m executioner!’

  ‘Shut up! It isn’t a joke. It’s a bit thick the way he carries on with old Simmie. Ever since he came –’

  ‘Mother Stevens protecting her little Simmie!’

  ‘Oh, fry your face! I’m sorry for Simmie. He’s a born ass, but Wemyss goes a bit too far.’

  ‘I say, Stevens, what about getting your brother to set his gang on him? Wemyss is not one of the Black Spot, is he?’

  ‘I don’t think so; but they’re jolly secret about their members. That’s a crazy notion, though. I’ll talk to my brother in recess.’

  ‘Secret society beats up headmaster’s nephew.’

  ‘To hire mercenaries – I may even say thugs, is scarcely the a-ah conduct of a Sudeley Hall prefect or an English gentleman, etc., etc.’

  Let us turn from the deliberations of the prefects to another table. A small, puffy boy of eleven years or so, with a vicious expression and the usual hallmarks of too much pocket-money, is guzzling his porridge and tormenting his neighbor alternately. It is the abhorrent Wemyss, or more correctly the Hon. Algernon Wyvern-Wemyss. His neighbour is a fat youth, heavy and resentful of eye, incurably slow in speech and action; his parents are farmers and he is here as a sacrifice to their craving for social elevation. There are one or two of him in most schools, born to be baited: the parents of such, Michael was wont to say, should be prosecuted in the criminal court for sending them.

  ‘Well, Smithers, how are the livestock doing?’

  ‘Oh, funny!’

  ‘Fatting ’em up, and killing ’em off?’ This was a phrase incautiously used by Smithers in an expansive moment some terms ago, and had not ceased to be used in evidence against him.