“I don’t know. That’s why I sent for you.”
Plaxton was beginning to sound like a broken phonograph record. I took one long, last, lingering look at the body in the bathtub.
“Can we talk in your room?” I asked. Fascinating as it might be, discussing the details of its own murder within earshot of a corpse seemed to me not in the best of taste. Besides, I wanted to have a discreet peek at Plaxton’s study.
“Tell me,” I said, when I was seated in his best basket chair, “about the other boys on Staircase Number Three, beginning with Parker and Cosgrave.”
“Cosgrave’s all right,” he replied. “He’s the captain of the first eleven. His father’s a professor of chemistry, at Cambridge.”
“Not Harrison Cosgrave?” I asked. “The author of Sidelights on Thiocarbanilide?”
The book had a permanent place on my bedside table.
“It could be, I suppose. He’s a queer old duck. Comes up for Founders’ Day.”
“When’s Founders’ Day?”
“It was yesterday. The seventeenth.”
“And Harrison Cosgrave was here?”
“Yes.”
Confound it! I thought. I’d have given my liver to have met him.
“And Parker?” I asked.
“Keeps to himself. Plays American jazz on his gramophone in the middle of the night.”
I made a mental note that gramophone music might well mask the sounds of murder and its aftermath.
“Whyever would they think you killed Mr. Denning?” I asked, hoping that a question out of the blue might startle the truth out of him.
“Because of the flaming great row we had a couple of days ago.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“I threatened to kill him,” Plaxton blurted.
“Good lord!” I said. “Did anyone hear you?”
“Everyone on Staircase Number Three, I expect. We were making the most frightful uproar. It ended in his slapping my face. I’m afraid I lost my head for a moment.”
“What was the row about?” I asked.
Plaxton wrung his hands so hard that I was expecting water to dribble out. “The bath,” he said. “Rather than using his own facilities, Mr. Denning preferred to come up here, away from it all, and soak in silence. He’d put a sign on the door and stay in the tub for hours, reading.”
“Did he place the OUT OF ORDER! NO ENTRY! sign on the door, or did you?”
“I did,” Plaxton admitted. “Although it was the same wording as the one he always hung out. I thought he might take the hint.”
“Ha!” I said. “And now, because it’s in your handwriting, you think the police will suspect you posted it to keep anyone from discovering the corpse.”
“Something like that.”
“Why didn’t you remove it?”
“Because it’s evidence,” Plaxton said. “And no matter what you may think, I am not a killer.”
“All right, then,” I said, as if it didn’t matter. “Who is?”
Plaxton had a habit of furrowing his brow when he was thinking intently, and he furrowed it now.
“Well,” he said at last, “Lawson’s father is a chemist, in Leeds. He could easily get his hands on copper sulfate. Besides, he’s the biggest boy at Greyminster. His biceps are like farm fence posts. He could easily lift someone the size of Mr. Denning.”
“What makes you think copper sulfate was involved?” I asked casually. To tell the truth, I was a little peeved that he was getting so far ahead of me.
“It’s a required subject here,” he answered. “We grow blue crystals in hot water and do another experiment with carbon rods and a battery. I say! You don’t think—”
“Who’s your chemistry master?” I asked.
“Mr. Winter. He’s a good sport, old Winter is. Lets us drive his Jaguar at speed when he’s in a good mood.”
“And when he’s not?”
“He’s a right tartar! Squabbles with everyone.”
“Including Mr. Denning?”
Plaxton furrowed his brow again. But before he could answer, there was sudden thunder on the stairs and the room was filled with shiny red faces and blue blazers.
“What’s this?” one of them cried, a portly lad whose sheer size hinted of the sweet shop and regular picnic baskets from home. “A girl in your room? You surprise us, Plaxton!”
A general uproar followed. Surrounded by his nudging schoolmates, Plaxton looked at me helplessly. The place had suddenly become a boy’s world and I needed to speak the language.
“Oh, grow up!” I said loudly. “I’m his cousin Veronica.”
The portly one stuck out a hand. “I’m Smith-Pritchard,” he said. “But you may call me Adrian.”
I ignored the hand. “I’ve heard the name before,” I told him. “On the wireless, perhaps. Isn’t your father something or other in the government?”
“He’s in Parliament—the member for—”
“No point in telling me,” I interrupted. “I have no head for that sort of thing. I’d rather hoped he raced Aston Martins, which would at least be worth talking about.”
“I say!” said the tall, good-looking lad on Smith-Pritchard’s left. “Are you keen on cars?”
I recognized him at once: He was the spitting image of his father, George “Taffy” Wagstaffe, the celebrated Battle of Britain pilot who had shot down an enemy aircraft as it attacked Westminster Abbey and, after taking a direct hit himself from the rear gunner of the doomed bomber, parachuted into the Abbey’s garden and stayed for tea with the dean and chapter. He was now, five years after the war, the director of his family firm, Wagstaffe Chemicals.
“Dead keen,” I replied. “I live on petrol fumes and swill motor oil for breakfast.”
There was a silence.
“What do you think of the Maserati 4CLT/50?” someone else asked in a quietly menacing voice.
I recognized that I was being tested.
“Not such a bad car,” I said, offering up thanks that I had kept my ears open while hanging round Bert Archer’s garage in the village. “Though not quite up to the Alfa 158 in the ferocity of its engine.”
My questioner was a slender boy, so pale that he looked almost like a photographic negative. A whitish cowlick covered his forehead. I squirmed inwardly at his spectral stare.
“Who’s that?” I whispered, turning to Plaxton.
“Wilfrid Somerville,” Plaxton whispered back. “They say he dabbles in the occult.”
“Does he?” I asked.