the headmaster agreed. ‘It’s just got to be faced. Fortunately we have many more applications for entry to the school than we can possibly deal with. There’ll be a falling-off when the news is published, and some foolish people will take their sons away, but I’ve no doubt it will still be possible to keep the numbers up to the maximum.’ He became abruptly aware that the occasion was not particularly well suited to a recital of his own problems, and stopped short.
‘Let’s get at the bodies, then,’ said the doctor vampirically, ‘or we shall be up all night.’
Stagge nodded, rousing himself. He glanced nervously at Fen. ‘I thought, sir, that we might go and look at Mr Somers first, then go on to Mr Love’s house.’
‘Good,’ said Fen. ‘Let’s make a move, then.’ His words broke the temporary paralysis and, after a little shuffling for precedence, they all trooped out into the darkness.
The headmaster led the way with a torch which he had taken from a drawer of his desk, and during the three minutes’ walk to Hubbard’s Building no word was spoken. The breeze brushed weakly against their faces, tantalizing them with the prospect of a coolness which never came. A layer of cloud obscured all but a handful of stars. Leaving the turf, their shoes rattled with startling vehemence on the asphalt, and they all breathed laboriously, as though the heavy, tepid air were deficient in oxygen. Presently the ivy-covered bulk of the teaching block loomed above them, and they passed inside.
Dim, infrequent lights were burning. They crossed a bare, stone-paved entrance hall and climbed a broad flight of wooden stairs whose treads were hollowed by generations of hard use. The window panes, made mirrors by the blackness beyond them and the illumination within, reflected their silent procession, and their footsteps awoke harsh echoes. The building seemed tranced into stillness as by a magician’s wand. They entered a long corridor, bare, shadowy and deserted. The numbered doors on either side bore the marks of merciless kicking on their lower panels, and near one of them lay a forlorn single sheet of exercise paper, heavily scored over in red ink, and with the dun imprint of a footmark on one corner. At the end of the corridor they came to a door which was more solid and opulent than those of the classrooms. A line of yellow light shone under it. The headmaster pushed it open and they entered the masters’ common room.
It was a large, tall room, symmetrically rectangular. A well-filled green baize noticeboard was fixed to the wall near the single door. Several tiers of small lockers, painted black and bearing their owners’ names on small strips of pasteboard thrust into brass slots, were at the far end. They saw half-empty mahogany bookcases, a worn, mud-coloured, ash-impregnated carpet, a long line of hooks with one or two gowns that had turned green with extreme age. A large table occupied the centre, littered with inkpots, cross-nibbed pens, ashtrays, and bulky envelopes. Smaller tables flanked it. There were three chairs that were comfortable and a large number that were not. The hessian curtains were undrawn and the windows wide open. And on the floor looking up at the small flies which crawled on the ceiling, lay the body of Michael Somers.
Yet their first and strongest impression was not of that, but of the heat. It beat against them in a scorching wave, and they saw that it came from a large electric fire standing about halfway down the room. Wells, the porter, stumbled hurriedly to his feet, the sweat running down his face like rain. He mumbled something, but for the moment no one paid any attention to him. After the first overwhelming shock of the heat, they had eyes for nothing but the body.
It was lying supine by a small table, with an overturned chair beside it. Clearly Somers had fallen back against the table and slid down it, for his head was propped against one of the legs, and his arms were outflung as if he had tried to save himself. Blood had streamed down the left side of his face on to the carpet, and where his left eye had been there was a riven, pulp-encrusted hole at which a bluebottle was feeding.
They looked, and, sickened, turned away again. The headmaster said rather shakily: ‘Why in God’s name have you got that fire on, Wells?’
‘It was like that, sir,’ Wells stammered, ‘when I found him. And you told me not to touch anything.’
He wiped the sweat from his face with a limp and soaking handkerchief. Even the bald crown of his head was a hectic, fever-stricken crimson, and his thin, stooping body seemed on the point of collapse. He felt for a back of a chair, his damp palm slipped on the polished wood, and he staggered momentarily.
Fen loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. He stood at a window and watched while the sergeant, under Stagge’s direction, photographed the body and its surroundings. Then the doctor began his examination. Stagge, meanwhile, had approached the electric fire and was regarding it dubiously. After a moment’s consideration he went to the wall switch to which it was attached and flicked it off with a pencil. The bars of the fire faded from scarlet through orange to ochre, and then became black. Stagge turned to Fen.
‘An extraordinary thing, sir,’ he said, ‘using a fire on a broiling evening like this.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve heard that such methods have been used to warm a corpse, and so create uncertainty about the time of death.’
Fen was fanning himself with his pocketbook, an activity which, he found, generated far more warmth than it dispelled; he desisted abruptly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But in this instance the fire’s several feet away from the body. And since it’s portable, I’m afraid that theory will have to be ruled out.’ Preoccupied, he moved to the small table against which Somers’ body was lying.
‘It looks to me,’ Stagge observed with a diffidence unsuited to so self-evident a proposition, ‘as if this was where he was working.’
They gazed at the table in silence. A blotting pad lay on it, its white surface covered with mirror images of black ink writing. They could make out the words ‘satisfactory’, ‘very fair’, ‘a marked improvement since the beginning of term’, and innumerable repetitions of the initials ‘M.S.’. A pile of small, printed report forms was on the blotter, and scattered around it were several envelopes similar to those on the central table. Each one bore the name of a form, with a list of initials of masters below it, and contained further report forms. For the rest, there was an ashtray with one or two cigarette stubs, a large circular well of blue-black ink, a mark-book, an open bottle of black ink, a long, broad strip of black cloth with the ends knotted together, and a pen.
Stagge turned to the headmaster. ‘These are mid-term reports, I take it?’
‘Yes, superintendent.’ The headmaster had followed Fen’s example in loosening his tie; he looked raffish yet weary. ‘Form masters and visiting masters were due to have finished them by five this afternoon; then they were to have gone to housemasters, and finally to me.’
‘Mr Somers was behind schedule, then?’
‘Yes. I was aware of the fact.’ The headmaster pointed to the strip of cloth on the table. ‘That, of course, is a sling. Somers sprained his wrist a few days ago, just before the reports were put out, and wasn’t able to do any writing until it got better. However, he told me yesterday afternoon that he would have them done by the morning of speech day, and that was early enough.’ He smiled faintly. ‘I always arrange for the terminus ad quem to be a little earlier than is strictly necessary, since even schoolmasters are fallible.’
‘Couldn’t one of the other masters have acted as his amanuensis?’ Fen asked.
The headmaster spoke rather uncertainly. ‘Yes, I suppose so. But probably he didn’t want to burden anyone else with the job. This is a very busy stage of the term, and even filling in “satisfactory” two hundred times takes longer than you’d imagine. What’s more, Somers was a form master, and had to deal with all the various headings for his form, in addition.’
‘Ah.’ Fen was pensive. ‘When the reports are finished, do the housemasters collect them?’
‘No. Wells does that. He divides them up into houses and passes them on to the appropriate men.’
Fen looked at Wells. ‘Apparently,’ he remarked, ‘you’ve taken some of them away already. There don’t