Was It Murder? by James Hilton Page A

somebody had been playing the fool with things—only the dear old Head shut him up—reputation of the School at stake and all that sort of thing, don’t you know.  Mind you, we mustn’t blame anyone TOO much, for there IS a distinct initial improbability about a falling gas-fitting being in reality a diabolically-contrived murder.”
    “Yet YOU suspected it?”
    “Oh yes, but then, as I said before, I suspect everything and everybody.”
    The attitude, which had been amusing enough at first, only served to irritate Revell now that his thoughts had become further engrossed in the case.  That evening, in the privacy of his bedroom, he wrote out a short summary of the whole Marshall affair, concluding with a few supplementary memoranda which might, he felt, help him by being set down logically on paper.  Under the heading—
    “Have there really been murders?” he wrote:
    “I think so.  The first ‘accident’ will be hard and perhaps impossible to elucidate, but if the second ‘accident’ is definitely proved to be murder, then a considerable balance of probability will lie in favour of the first accident having been murder also, especially if there can be found any adequate motive for the double event.  And such a motive undoubtedly exists.
    “Let us, then, examine the second ‘accident’.  Clearly, there are only three possibilities--(1) a bona-fide accident, (2) suicide, and (3) murder.  The following points weigh heavily against the first possibility:
     
    “(1) Even on the darkest night any person of normal eyesight can see the water in the swimming-bath—therefore, he would most likely notice the absence of it.  If also he were familiar with the bath, as was the deceased, he would probably notice the totally different sound of his own footsteps caused by the emptiness of the bath.
    “(2) The wrist-watch discovered on the top diving-platform is a rather suspiciously direct pointer to the theory of the dive.
    “(3) The burned-out fuses.  Here again we have something by no means intrinsically suspicious, but one must admit that it happened very fortunately or unfortunately upon this particular night out of all other nights.
     
    “We have, then, disposed of the accident theory, though maybe not conclusively enough for a jury—especially a Coroner’s jury.  There remain the two other possibilities.  Suicide seems out of the question; we are thus left with the third—murder—by process of elimination.”
     
    Under the heading “Why suspect Ellington?” Revell went on to write;
     
    “(1) He is the only person who apparently benefits by both the accidents together.  (Note that he would not have benefited in any way by one of them separately.)
    “(2) He is known to have been walking about the School grounds at a time when the murder MAY have been committed.”
     
    Lastly, under the heading “Questions to be solved”, he wrote:
     
    “(1) In the case of both accidents, how EXACTLY was the thing done?
    “(2) Why did the Head send for me last December?  Why did he appear to have suspicions then?  And why hasn’t he any (apparently) now?  Why does he seem as though he would be glad if I went back and forgot the whole business?
    “(3) Is Lambourne entirely trustworthy?  Is his pose of indifference sincere?”
     
    And upon these wise and cautious speculations Revell went to bed and to sleep.
    Revell stayed on at Oakington, and each morning at breakfast Dr.  Roseveare’s welcome was just a shade more ironical.  The dead boy’s body was in the meantime coffined and taken away by motor-hearse for burial in the family grave in Herefordshire; the living boys returned after their Speech Day holiday, full of other and various topics; the swimming-bath again echoed to the shrieks of the junior learners.  Oakington, in fact, began to function normally again, and the second Marshall affair seemed as if it might soon sink into impenetrable limbo with the first.
    But to Revell, of course,