Free Was It Murder? by James Hilton Page A

complimented his staff and thanked them for their loyalty.  He mentioned one or two scholastic successes.  He made, in short, the perfect speech for the somewhat difficult occasion.
    In place of the swimming display there was a rapidly improvised concert of appalling badness.  Then came a garden-party tea on the quadrangle, during which Revell chatted to several Old Oakingtonians whom he knew and who had brought their families with them.  They were all, of course, agog with excitement about the Marshall affair, and the known fact that the body lay in the locked gymnasium awaiting the inquest on the morrow gave them a particular thrill.  “Too bad—to have happened just now,” was a frequent comment, but Revell imagined that in many cases a more truthful one would have been—“Too good—to be able to get a genuine Edgar Wallace thrill out of a Speech Day.”  For already the place was alive with the wildest and most sinister rumours.
    But by seven at night almost the last of the visitors had departed.  Many of the boys whose homes were within moderate distance had gone back with their parents for the traditional week-end holiday; the school servants were busily clearing away the tea-party litter from the quadrangle; and the whole school, after the turmoil, seemed lonely and forlorn.
    Revell, from sympathy with the Head after the strain of such a day, would not have mentioned the Marshall affair on his own account.  He could hardly avoid doing so, however, when Roseveare calmly asked him what train he intended catching the next day.  The question was put so artlessly and with such apparent casualness that Revell was for the moment taken aback.  Roseveare seemed to notice this, for he added:  “Please don’t think I particularly want you to go—I only imagined you might have other affairs to attend to, now that Speech Day is over.  There is the inquest to-morrow morning, which you might care to attend, but no doubt it will be over by lunch-time.”
    After a thoughtful pause Revell said:  “If you don’t mind, I should rather like to stay on a few days longer.”
    “You would?  Very well, I shall be delighted, of course.  May I take it that your investigations are bearing fruit?”
    The question was neither sarcastic nor contemptuous, but perhaps it was just a shade too bland.
    “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Revell answered.  “Only I just feel I’d like to poke about a bit more, that’s all.”
    Roseveare nodded with complete geniality.  “You’re a conscientious fellow, Revell, and deserve a far better fate than to be probing a mystery that isn’t, I’m afraid, much of a mystery at all.  I know the place is full of rumours, but most of them contradict each other, and in any case, the theories of a generation reared on crook dramas and detective novels are hardly worth taking seriously.  I do not, of course, expect that even the inquest to-morrow will stop these unpleasant fiction-mongers.  They will just go on till they are tired, and we shall have to put up with it.”
    Revell was silent, and the other continued:  “I hope you are not forgetting the boy’s wrist-watch which was found on the top diving-platform.  That, more perhaps than anything else, seems convincing evidence of what happened.”
    “Possibly, though I don’t see why he shouldn’t have left it down below, with his dressing-gown and slippers.”
    “He may have forgotten it until the last minute.  It was radium-pointed, so that in the dark its illumination may have attracted his attention just as he was on the point of diving.  Would you like to see the watch, by the way?  It will be one of the exhibits shown to the jury to-morrow.”
    “Oh no, don’t bother—I don’t think it would help me much.”
    As he exclaimed rather peevishly to Lambourne an hour or so later:
    “What the hell was the use of looking at the damned watch after it had been mauled about by Wilson and Roseveare himself and God knows who