Vivian's Lesson

by Elizabeth W. Grierson

Little Claude, with a tearful, scared face, was standing holding Mary’s hand at the foot of the stairs, silently watching two policemen who were down on their knees on the parquetry floor, carefully examining some marks which had been made on the polished surface. It was plain that some one had walked across it with heavy boots on. In the opposite corner stood Mr Osbourne, his face stern and grave; and Anne, who had now got into a clean cap and apron, and was giving a concise account of how she had locked up the house on the previous evening to a tall man in a plain blue uniform, evidently a police inspector, who was taking down her story in a note-book. Aunt Dora was nowhere to be seen. The dining-room door was open, and they could see how the drawers in the sideboard and plate-cupboard had been forced, and their contents rifled, and most of them carried away.

Vivian would have gone into the room, but Mary pulled him back.

‘No one has to go in there, Master Vivian,’ she whispered; ‘it has to be left as it is until some very clever man, a detective from Scotland Yard, comes. They have telegraphed for him, and they expect him every minute. Till he comes, none of us has to go out or even up to our bedrooms.’

Mary spoke with a sort of gasp, and her rosy face was whiter than usual. She was an honest country girl, brought up in a quiet Suffolk village, and this was her first experience of service in London; and although her conscience was quite clear, and she could prove where she had been, and what she had done every minute of yesterday afternoon, she dreaded the interview, which she knew must come, with the detective, ‘who,’ Anne had informed her, ‘would begin by suspecting them all, and looking in all their boxes before he made up his mind that it had been none of them who had done it.’

Yesterday had been her Sunday out, so she felt that she would have even more questions to answer than the rest of her fellow-servants, and she kept saying over and over again to herself that she could tell him quite easily where she had been. She had gone to church in the morning, and then she had spent the rest of the day with a cousin who lived at Cricklewood, and her cousin’s husband, a respectable joiner, had seen her home at nine o’clock.

Presently Ralph came running in, looking flushed and important. He had been downstairs early, and had just been out for a tour of inspection on his own account.

‘I say, father,’ he cried, ‘do you know what I have discovered? The fellows have smashed two of the summer-house windows. The glass is lying all over the path.’

In his haste he had forgotten to wipe his shoes, and a muddy mark on the polished floor, which completely hid a tiny scratch, made one of the policemen glance up at his superior officer with a look of annoyance. Ralph had taxed their patience severely already, for he had been following closely at their heels for the last half-hour, pouring out remarks and suggestions in his own superior, self-confident way, quite regardless of their civil hints that they could get on better with their work if he left them to find out things for themselves.

The inspector noticed the glance at once. There was very little that his sharp eyes did not notice.

‘I think, sir,’ he said, turning to Mr Osbourne, ‘we would get on quicker without the children. The fewer people who are about at this sort of thing the better.’