Free A Question of Proof by Nicholas Blake

look on his face. Only Griffin seemed to be himself. He stood up like a cliff in front of Gadsby, took him by the shoulders, twirled him round and put him into the passage, saying quietly: ‘You seem to have done enough mischief for tonight; your presence will not be required any more.’ Then he turned round and got the sobered Sims to help him bring Wrench up to his bedroom. Tiverton and Evans were left alone in the devastated room. Tiverton still had that strange, faraway expression, as though he were trying to think out the answer to a conundrum.
    ‘Now what on earth,’ he said slowly, ‘what on earth made me say that?’
    ‘We all seem to be a bit bedlamite this evening,’ answered Michael lamely. ‘Well, I think I’ll go along. Good-night.’
    And he went to bed, where he lay awake for hours, coming to realise how the dirty work of murder was only beginning when the victim was dead: going over details of the past day, and as it were piecing together thus the new, changed relationship amongst his colleagues. For there was a change: a kind of reservation beneath the surface. It came upon him with a sickening impact that he and they felt that the murderer was one of their number, and that the events of the evening had been a violent revolt of masked suspicions. He was very glad indeed that Nigel Strangeways was commg.
    While the Sudeley Hall staff were showing these premonitory signs of a collapse of morale, Superintendent Armstrong and Sergeant Pearson were holding an informal council of war over whiskies and sodas in the former’s house. Sergeant Pearson made his report first. He was a young, keen, open-faced officer. His curly flaxen hair and general air of blue-eyed innocence made him a favourite, especially with middle-aged women, and a success as an interviewer. His face so accurately mirrored his mind, which was entirely straightforward in its workings, that criminals were apt to open their hearts to him as to a brother, or else – hopelessly rattled by his extreme ingenuousness – suspect that it concealed a diabolic cunning and tie themselves up accordingly in knots of duplicity.
    His report was long but apparently barren. He and the Sudeley constable had first verified Gadsby’s alibi at the Cock and Feathers. He had arrived and left at the hours stated. He had been alone in the private room for five or six minutes after his arrival, but had then sought the more congenial atmosphere of the public bar. Pearson had then gone the rounds of all the parents living in the vicinity who had attended the sports. None of them had seen the unfortunate Wemyss. Only one recollected talking to Mr. Wrench at the sports, and that was after the 440 yards race; neither had he blue eyes nor a son called ‘Tom.’ None of them had noticed Mr. Wrench talking to a blue-eyed man in a brown suit at any time before or during the sports; though several fathers had had the requisite colour of eyes and clothing.
    Meanwhile some of the sergeant’s men had been combing the neighbourhood; but, if the boy had left the school grounds at all, he apparently had done it in a cap of invisibility. An extensive inquiry had also been set on foot into the whereabouts of that class described as ‘having no fixed abode’; the results of this were still coming in, and no support for the headmaster’s theory had as yet been found. The labourers who had found the body had been put through a searching examination, the result of which was nil.
    All these facts Pearson retailed in a regulation voice, sitting bolt upright and gazing dreamily at a picture of some anatomically deformed angels above the superintendent’s head. He now relaxed, transferred his attention from angels to whisky, and waited for Armstrong to speak.
    ‘Well, George,’ the superintendent said, ‘you’ve done a good day’s work. I didn’t really expect those lines to lead anywhere, but it narrows down the field to be shut of them.’
    He then proceeded to outline his