Read Was It Murder? for Free Online Page B

annotated volumes), Revell wrote:  “The Oakington incident is closed.  It was all quite pointless, as I thought from the beginning, but it ended in fond farewells and a cheque for ten guineas; which isn’t really so bad.  I think I rather like Roseveare, nerves or not, but I didn’t greatly care for Ellington.  The real Oakington mystery, I should think, is why such an attractive woman as Mrs. Ellington ever married him.”
     
     
    CHAPTER III
    THE STRANGE AFFAIR IN THE SWIMMING-BATH
     
    More desperately than ever, upon a certain warm June morning, did Revell long for something to happen to him.  And his epic poem in the metre of Don Juan was, by a really curious coincidence, about a young man to whom simply all things happened, one after another and again and again—love affairs, adventures, thrills and escapades of every kind, and some of them not a little scandalous.
    That very morning he had received a letter from an old Oxford friend asking him to join a proposed scientific and geographical expedition to New Guinea.  It was hardly the sort of thing he cared about, even in the role of “writer-up” and general publicity manager; but the terms of the invitation had given him a certain inward fretfulness that he could not shake off.  “Decadent youth,” his friend had written, with what Revell regarded as too ponderous facetiousness, “put away your cocktails and high-brow literary work for two whole years and then go back to them if you feel like it!  We hope to leave in September, and, as it happens, we want a man who can turn our adventures into a book.  I don’t know where this letter will find you, but in case you are in some other part of the world, you can consider the offer open until the middle of August.  DO come—it is a wonderful chance . . . etc., etc.”
    No; decidedly the offer did not attract.  He hated flies, swamps, pigmies, and the sort of men who put adventures into books—guinea books, as a rule, remaindered at four-and-six.  “With Rod and Line in the Sahara, by Major Fitzwallop”—THAT kind of thing—heavens, no—he would not and could not do it.  And yet it was, in a way, infernally unsatisfying to long for something to happen and then to have to turn down something quite exciting when it DID happen.
    Fortunately something else happened that morning which took away all thought of the New Guinea proposal.  On an inside page of his daily paper Revell’s eye caught a small paragraph headed:  “Public School Tragedy.”  It ran:
     
    The swimming instructor at Oakington School made a gruesome discovery yesterday morning when he unlocked the door of the School swimming-bath.  On the floor of the bath, which had been emptied for cleaning, lay the dead body of Wilbraham Marshall, the head prefect of the School, who was to have given a swimming display at the coming Jubilee Speech Day celebrations.  It is surmised that Marshall went for a practice swim at night and dived in, unaware that the water had been drawn away.  By a curious coincidence, it is only nine months since his brother met with a fatal accident at the School.
     
    This time the decadent youth about town wasted no time in pondering.  Almost frantically, and with his mind reacting fiercely to unidentifiable thrills, he consulted a railway guide and sent off the urgent-sounding telegram—“Roseveare Oakington Arriving this afternoon by one-twenty train Revell.”  He calmed down a little as he shaved, put on an O.O. tie, packed a handbag, called at the bank to draw some money, made arrangements with his landlady, and taxied to King’s Cross.  On the train he decided that he had never quite understood why Roseveare had sent for him on that first occasion, and why, having sent for him, he had appeared so eager to dismiss him.  He wished he had a Doctor Watson to talk to; he would have liked to recount the whole dormitory incident, concluding with—“Depend upon it, Watson, we have not yet heard the