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have smelt a rat.’
    â€˜That’s all right, Doctor,’ interrupted Detective-Constable Crosby largely. He uncoiled himself from the bench against which he had been leaning. ‘After all, down at the station we’re in the rat-catching business, aren’t we?’
    Miss Simpson, Headmistress of the Berebury Grammar School for Girls, picked up a piece of paper from her desk and studied it carefully. The Deputy Head of the school, Miss Walsh, had just brought it into her study and laid it before her. The two women, seasoned schoolmistresses both, knew without discussion exactly how much burning of midnight oil the finished document represented.
    It contained all the revisions in the school timetable made necessary by the sudden demise of the senior chemistry mistress.
    Miss Simpson let it lie in her hands for a moment before she considered it, thinking instead of Beatrice Wansdyke. From now on someone else was going to have to persuade girls to think scientifically, to take a proper interest in those twins of fundamental discovery, Boyle and Charles and their laws, and to learn about elements and atoms and (as far as Miss Simpson was concerned – she was an English specialist herself) other things.
    Anyway, from now on another teacher of chemistry was going to have to be categoric about nitric and nitrous and nitrate and somehow inculcate into her charges the intellectual reaches opened up by the study of organic chemistry.
    Miss Wansdyke’s syllabus would be up-to-date. There wouldn’t be any worry there. The Upper Sixth’s chances of university entrance would not be spoilt by her death. They would only suffer by loss of contact with a good mind. It had been a mind that had always been ready and prepared to stretch the thinking of the young. Girls who made sweeping statements once seldom made them a second time.
    It had been much the same in the staff-room. Colleagues who made unsupported assertions were apt to have them challenged pretty speedily. Miss Simpson sighed. Unfortunately staff-room politics seldom had anything to do with principles – scientific or even first.
    Miss Simpson let her eye fall on the timetable. Had Miss Walsh … yes, she had. The Head was not surprised to see that in her attempt to fill the gap in the timetable the Deputy Head had slipped in a couple of extra Economics classes for the Fifth Form. Beatrice Wansdyke wouldn’t have liked that. As a scientist, she had always resented the intrusion of Economics into the curriculum as a separate subject. Economics, she maintained, was not a proper teaching entity at all, but an ill-defined grey area which knew no morality, somewhere between geography and history. And the proper study of history, she was wont to parody Alexander Pope, is power, and if economics didn’t come into that she didn’t know what did. A science, she would insist, jealous of the purity of her own subject, it certainly was not.
    The aggrandisement of economics as a study apart though, thought Miss Simpson thankfully, Beatrice Wansdyke would not have minded the waters closing so quickly over the hole left by a departed chemistry mistress. The last thing she would have wanted was fuss. She would have thoroughly approved of the quiet rearrangement of the timetable and the stepping into her shoes of another teacher. The show, all dedicated pedagogues were agreed, must go on. Miss Collins would mind, of course. Hilda Collins and Beatrice Wansdyke had been good friends over the years – but then Hilda was a biologist and they were seldom sentimentalists.
    The Head paused in her thinking. She would have to decide herself whether to recommend to the Governors that young Miss Peel should go up a rung in the academic ladder. A promising youngster, Miss Wansdyke had thought her …
    Mentally apologizing to Beatrice’s memory for meditating on her successor quite so soon, Miss Simpson was confronted by the thought that her late