Was It Murder? by James Hilton

you’d only insisted on visiting the fatal dormitory and sniffing about like a stage Sherlock, I might have believed in you.”
    Revell shrugged his shoulders hopelessly.  “You make me feel I must be a tremendous fool,” he said.  “Of course your suspicions about me are right—there doesn’t seem to be any point in denying it.  But I didn’t think I was doing things quite so obviously.”
    “Oh, don’t think that—you aren’t.  It’s only my own exceptional acuteness that pierces your otherwise excellent disguise as the Old Boy revisiting his Alma Mater.  And you needn’t fear I shall breathe a word of it to anyone else.  But I really would be interested to know all about the affair from your point of view.”
    It was just what Revell had been wanting—to tell somebody.  He did so, fully, and by the time he had finished the rain had stopped and sunlight was pouring into the room.  “I must admit,” he said, by way of conclusion, “that there seems just a touch of queerness about it all.  Roseveare seemed far more suspicious about the first affair, when he hadn’t any real cause, than he does now, when anyone would think he had cause enough.”
    “Suspicious?” echoed Lambourne, as if weighing the word.  “Are YOU suspicious, then?”
    “Perhaps I am.”
    “Of what?”
    “That’s just the point—I hardly know.  It might be almost anything, but I’m pretty certain it’s something.”
    “What evidence have you?”
    “None that would stand a moment’s examination in a court of law.  None at all, really.  Just the coincidence of the two accidents, and the Head’s puzzling attitude, and my own feeling about it.  It’s all queer, to say the least.”
    “As you say, to say the least.  Why not say a little more and call it a double murder committed with diabolical ingenuity?”
    “WHAT?” Revell gasped.  “I suppose you’re joking—“
    “Not at all.  As a mere matter of theory, isn’t it possible?  Isn’t the really successful murder not merely the one whose perpetrator never gets found out, but the murder that doesn’t even get suspected of being a murder?”
    “But, my dear man, as you said to me just now, where’s your evidence?”
    “Exactly.  I haven’t got any—I’m in the same boat as you.”
    “Are you—are you—really quite serious about all this?”
    “Perfectly.  I suspected it, as a matter of fact, from the moment the news of the first accident reached me.  But then I’m afraid I nearly always do suspect things—I have a thoroughly morbid mind.  I never hear of a drowning accident but what I wonder if somebody pushed the fellow in.  And it’s such a dashed clever way of murdering anybody, you know—letting a gas-pipe fall on ‘em.”
    “And what about this latest affair?”
    “A mistake.  No one, however clever, should expect to get away with more than one murder.  Tempting Providence, you know.  Not that it isn’t more than likely that the dear old country Coroner and his twelve good men will swallow this just as willingly as they did the first one.  Only, from a purely technical point of view—the only point of view that interests me—the repetition mars the symmetry of the thing.”
    “But surely, man, if you have suspicions of this sort, you can’t be satisfied to leave things as they are?”
    “Oh, I don’t know.  Hardly my business, eh?”
    Revell was indignant; he was even (a rare accomplishment) shocked.  Lambourne’s attitude of cynical indifference was one he had very often adopted himself, yet now he saw it in another he reacted against it instantly.  “I don’t know how you can say that,” he said.
    “No?  Well, maybe I’m different from you, that’s all.  After seeing three years of purposeless slaughter backed by all the forces of law and religion, I find it hard to share in the general indignation when somebody tries on a little purposeful though no doubt unofficial slaughter on his own.  That’s my