An Oxford Tragedy by J. C. Masterman Page A

taken.
    â€˜We can’t do anything more here to-night,’ said the Inspector. ‘The rooms must be locked up, and I think that the night porter had better keep an eye on them, too. I’ll be round first thing in the morning. Have you got a key of the outer room, Sir?’
    â€˜I think,’ said Maurice, ‘that my key’s probably in his pocket.’ He indicated Shirley’s body with a movement of his head.
    Rather gingerly, I thought, the Inspector crossed theroom and fumbled in the dead man’s pocket. He pulled out a key and showed it to Maurice.
    â€˜Is that the one?’
    â€˜Yes, that’s it. Now we had better lock up. But first I’ll get a few things for the night from my bedroom.’ He seemed now to have recovered his usual habit of command. As he collected pyjamas and shaving tackle from the room within he decided all the questions which had been agitating my mind. ‘Francis, you must give me a shake-down in your room for the night. Inspector, you and your men must come down and have something to drink before you leave – and you, too, Kershaw – we all need something pretty stiff after this. The Common Room will still be open, and there are drinks there. Brendel, we shall want your help over this matter. If this isn’t a real murder then nothing is.’ I felt that the direction of affairs had been assumed by stronger hands than mine.
    It was just then that Prendergast spoke, and presented us without warning with a new problem.
    â€˜Who,’ he said quite suddenly and very quietly, ‘who is going to tell Ruth?’

Chapter Five
    When first I started this chronicle I said that I would tell a plain tale in a straightforward way, nor, in my simplicity, did it occur to me that that would be any very difficult task. And yet what could be harder? For here I have already written four chapters, and still the most important characters have not appeared. What should I say to a pupil who wrote me an essay and never really began to grapple with the subject till his essay was a third done? How easily I should point out the importance of striking at once to the heart of a problem, of fixing the interest of the reader on the main topic, of concentrating upon the essential figures. How easy is criticism, how woefully difficult is construction! How now, at long last, I begin to respect the artist, be his creation never so humble! It is a humiliating confession for me, who all my life have watched and encouraged and criticized, and always with the secret thought that I could easily outshine the writers and the doers if only I cared to make the effort. And now I begin to see that it is not just fastidiousness, not even just idleness which has restrained me, but a lack, a miserable lack, of creative energy and artistic power. Humiliation indeed! I, who in my superior wisdom have lightly criticized so many youthful essays and reviewed so many books, cannot now set a plain tale on paper without hesitations and omissions and turnings back to events that should have been narrated three chapters since. I cannot now start this chronicle again; such as it is it must stand. But at least I must postpone no longer an account of the Verekers – of the President of St Thomas’s and his two daughters. For how otherwise could I face old members of the college? They might read a few chapters of this book out of loyalty to their old college, or even out of curiosity, but would they not then throw it impatiently aside?‘Nothing about the Verekers,’ they would say, ‘but then it’s
not
St Thomas’s’.’ So the effort must be made, however unfitted the author to the task. And first for the bald facts.
    Henry Vereker had been elected President of St Thomas’s nineteen years before – to be exact, in the glorious warm summer of 1911, and since then he had ruled over us – a courtly, white-haired, gentle, rather frail man, who lived