Here Lies Gloria Mundy

‘I take it that you know the magistrates have decided I must stand trial,’ said Coberley. ‘It means the end of the school, so far as I am concerned, of course, but my first assistant will carry on and if the boys stay he will buy me out and take over completely. That is all arranged. Whatever the result of the trial, I can hardly go back there myself. I shall miss the boys, of course, but Marigold will enjoy living in our villa in the south of France. I am pretty sure I shall be able to join her there. I don’t see how this charge can possibly stick. There isn’t enough evidence against me to hang a dog.’

‘A pity the magistrates did not share that view,’ said Dame Beatrice drily.

‘Oh, the Bench always believe the yarns the police cook up,’ said Coberley, appearing less and less like my previous picture of him. ‘The Chief Constable brought pressure to bear on that rather obtuse detective-inspector, I think, so an arrest had to be made and I drew the short straw.’

‘Why was that, do you suppose?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’m an old lag, you know. I’ve done time for assault and battery. I was an obvious choice, since a choice had to be made.’

‘Who, in your opinion, were the other candidates for incarceration?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

‘Well, I don’t want to sound unchivalrous, but, speaking quite objectively, I see this as a woman’s crime. There were a number of guns in the house  — ’

I looked up and said, ‘I never saw any. Wotton prided himself on not being one of the hunting, shooting and fishing crowd.’

‘His father was one of them, though,’ said Coberley, ‘and he left a little armoury in that room Wotton uses as a den. I don’t suppose you have ever seen inside the big cupboard in there. My point is that a man would have shot the girl, not stabbed her in the back.’

I apologised for the interruption, but Dame Beatrice waved a benedictory yellow claw at me and remarked that it was a good thing to get these matters clear. Then she turned again to Coberley and said: ‘So you think that a man would have shot Miss Mundy.’

‘At least a man would not have needed to stab her in the back, as I said. She was a slight, waif-like little thing whom a man could have strangled with one hand. That would have settled the thing if he thought a shot would be heard.’

‘Before we continue this interesting discussion,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘apart from your record of violence, what other evidence do you suppose the police have against you? I have my own theories, of course, but what are yours?’

‘Oh, that’s an easy one,’ said this new and, to me, astonishing Coberley. ‘It boils down, as I see it, to a question of alibis. Before I was arrested we heard a load of codswallop about gangs of town hooligans. They are supposed to have buttered the steps of my house, mugged Gloria Mundy, set fire to the old house and all the rest of it.’

‘You mentioned a question of alibis.’

‘That’s right, so I did. Well, upon thinking things over and also consulting with my lawyer, it seems likely that the men who were at Beeches Lawn can more or less account for one another. I’m the odd man out because, of course, I was over at the school a good deal of the time and, when I hang a notice on the headmaster’s door asking not to be disturbed — which, in effect, means I don’t want naughty boys brought to me by incompetent masters who can’t keep order and on whose behalf I am expected to cane their boys, an operation I dislike intensely and resort to as few times as possible — nobody, not even my wife or my head assistant, can account for my movements. The fact that on such occasions I merely put my feet up, have a quiet drink and a smoke and study the stock market, in which I still have an interest, is neither here nor there. For the space of, say, a couple of hours, I do not exist, so far as is known, and, thus disembodied, could be up to anything, including murder and arson.’

‘Excellent,’ said Dame Beatrice in an absentminded way which made me think that she had spotted something in all this which might be a help to her. ‘To resume our previous topic at the point where I digressed from it, granted that you are right and that the murder of Gloria Mundy was a woman’s crime, which woman have you picked for the rôle of villainess?’

‘I believe you are laughing at me,’ said Coberley, ‘but I will answer the question in all seriousness because the fact is that I simply do not know. It could be any single one of them, or even two in collusion.’

‘You said that, with the exception of yourself, the men could alibi one another. Could not the women, with the possible exception of your wife, do the same?’