The family and servants were still in the library when she went downstairs. They paid no attention to her. It was as though the knife, now wrapped in cellophane and in the inspector’s pocket, had cut them all away from their normal roots, their decent quiet habits of living. Only Jan looked up when Hilda entered, her eyes swollen, and clutching a moist handkerchief in her hand.
“Are they through?”
“Not quite.”
“But this is dreadful. We’re not prisoners. None of us would have hurt Granny.”
“I don’t see how it’s possible for anyone to have done it.”
Carlton turned his head and looked at her with blood-shot eyes. He was holding a highball, and it was evidently not his first.
“Where were you?” he demanded. “I thought your job was to protect her. What do we know about you? How do we know you didn’t do it yourself?”
“Oh, shut up, Carl,” Susie said wearily. “Why would she?”
Watch them all, the inspector had said. They’ll have the gloves off now. Watch Carlton. Watch his wife. Watch the servants, too. They may know something. Tell them about the ladder and the screen. That may make them sit up.
She sat down. The servants were huddled in a corner, Maggie stiff and resentful, Ida staring at nothing, her hands folded in her lap, and William on the edge of a chair, his head shaking with an old man’s palsy.
“Someone may have got in from outside,” she said. “Mrs. Garrison’s screen was open. They’re looking now for a ladder.”
She thought Carlton relaxed at that. He even took a sip of his drink.
“Plenty of ladders about,” he said. “Police have some sense, after all.”
Only Jan showed a sharp reaction. She sat up and stared at Hilda wildly.
“That’s absurd,” she said. “Who would want to do such a thing? And even if they did they couldn’t get into Granny’s room. Miss Adams was always in the hall.”
Hilda watched her. She was not only terrified. She knew something. And Susie was watching her, too.
“Don’t take it too hard, Jan,” she drawled. “They’ve got to try everything. No use getting hysterical. That won’t help.”
It sounded like a warning. Again Hilda wondered if there was a conspiracy among them, a conspiracy of silence. As if, whatever had once divided them, they were now united. She got no further, however. Outside an ambulance drove away, and immediately after the inspector appeared at the door.
“I’d like to talk to you,” he said to the room in general. “There are some things to be cleared up. If there’s a place where I can see everybody, one at a time—”
Carlton got up. His truculence had returned, and he was feeling the whisky.
“I’d better tell you,” he said thickly. “I suppose this Adams woman has already done it. I was in my mother’s room tonight. I went in to turn off the radio. But I didn’t touch her. I thought she was asleep. I—”
“We’ll talk about that later. You’re Mr. Fairbanks, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“And don’t be a fool,” said Susie unexpectedly. “He didn’t kill her. He was fond of her, God knows why. Anyhow he hasn’t got the guts for murder. Look at him!”
Her tone was half contemptuous, half fiercely protective. The inspector ignored her.
“If there is a room I’ll talk to you there, Mr. Fairbanks. And I’ll ask you to come along, Miss Adams, to check certain facts.”
“I’m not talking before her,” Carlton snapped.
“Miss Adams is one of my most able assistants, Mr. Fairbanks. If you prefer to go to my office—”
But the fight was out of Carlton. He looked at Hilda and shrugged.
“All right. God knows I have no secrets. Come in here.”
He led the way to the small morning room behind the library, and the inspector closed the door.
Yet Carlton’s story, as it was dug out of him, offered little or nothing new. He had been in bed when his mother’s radio went on. It was very loud. It wakened him. He had gone in and shut it off. The room was dark. He had seen only her outline, but she had not moved.
“You came out immediately?”
“I did.”
“Are you sure of that? Didn’t you open a closet door while you were in the room?”
The question took him by surprise. He looked uncomfortable.
“I closed it,” he said. “It was standing open.”
“Wasn’t that rather curious? I mean, why do a thing like that?”
“My mother liked it closed. Her safe was there.”
“Did you stop to examine the safe?”
He hesitated.
“Well, I took a look.” He glanced at Hilda. “I didn’t know anything about Miss Adams. I just wondered—” He tried to smile and failed. “My mother was rather peculiar in some ways,” he said. “I’ve never seen inside the safe. But if she had money there—”
His voice trailed off again.
“I thought she was crazy,” he said heavily. “All this talk about bats and things. But I might have known better. Somebody tried to poison her this spring. I suppose you know about that?”
“She told me herself.”
Carlton looked stunned.
“Are you telling me she went to the police?”
“I am. I saw her last Monday, and I sent Miss Adams at her request. She believed that someone in this house was trying to scare her into a heart attack—and death.”
“That’s absurd.” He lit a cigarette with unsteady fingers. “Who would try a thing like that? It’s silly on the face of it.”
He looked profoundly shocked, however. Hilda, watching him, thought that for the first time he was really apprehensive. But the inspector shifted his questions.
“Do you know the combination of the safe?”
“No.”
“Who benefits by her death?”
“That’s the hell of it. We all do.”
“Even the servants?”
“I’m not certain. I haven’t seen her will. Her lawyer has it, Charles Willis. They may get a little. Not enough to matter.”
“Have you any idea of the size of the estate?”
The shift had brought some color back to Carlton’s face. He put out his cigarette and straightened.
“I don’t know, and that’s a fact,” he said bitterly. “My father left about three million dollars. She must have quite a lot left. I wasn’t in her confidence. I tried to talk to her, about her taxes and so on, but she wouldn’t listen. She always thought I was a fool about money. But lately she’s been cutting down expenses. I don’t know why. She should have had a fair income.”
“What do you mean by fair?”
“Oh, forty or fifty thousand a year.”
The inspector smiled faintly. To him that amount represented capital, not income. There was a brief silence. Hilda looked at her wrist watch. It was half past four, and the early June dawn was already outlining the trees outside the windows. When the inspector spoke again his face was grave.
“The medical examiner sets the time of death as approximately between one and two o’clock. Nearer one, he thinks. He may be able to tell us more accurately after the autopsy. The only person known to have entered your mother’s room during that time was yourself, Mr. Fairbanks.”
Carlton leaped to his feet.
“I never touched her,” he said shrilly. “I thought she was asleep. Ask Miss Adams. I wasn’t in the room more than a minute or two.”
He was in deadly earnest now, and cold sober. Hilda felt sorry for him. Of all the family, she thought, he was the only one outside of Jan who had had any affection for the old lady. Marian had resented her, had blamed her for the failure of her marriage. Susie had frankly flouted her. Even Eileen had called her an old devil.
“You went into the room, walked around the foot of the bed, turned off the radio, came back and closed the closet door. That right?”
“That’s right.”
He would not change his story, and at last he was allowed to go. The inspector looked at Hilda. “True or false?” he said.
“Partly true, anyhow. If he closed the closet door, who opened it? He’s keeping something back. Something he’s not going to tell.”
“Any idea what it is?”
“Not the slightest. Unless he knows his wife was outside in the rain. He’s very much in love with her.”
He got out the knife and laid it, still in its cellophane envelope, on the table beside him.
“Let’s show this to Maggie,” he said.
But Maggie, having worked herself into a fine state of indignation, repudiated it at once.
“It’s none of mine,” she said. “And I’d like to say that I’ve been in this house for twenty years and never before—”
“All right,” said the inspector. “Get out and send in the butler and the other woman, Ida. And make some coffee. I’ve got some men who need it, too.”
Maggie, considerably deflated, went out, and William and Ida came in. Neither of them recognized the knife, both had been in bed when Susie’s shrieks wakened them, both were—according to the inspector’s comment after they left—pure as the driven snow and innocent as unborn babes.
“But behaving according to rule,” he said dryly. “Always more emotional than the family in a crisis. Watch it sometime.”
Susie bore this out when she was sent for. She looked faintly amused as she wandered in, a cigarette in her fingers and her raincoat still covering her draggled dressing-gown.
“I suppose the dirty work begins now,” she said, sitting on the edge of the table and ignoring the knife. “I didn’t like her. I’ve had to take her charity and her insults ever since Carl’s business failed. I thought she was an old bitch and I’ve said it. So I suppose I’m the leading suspect.”
The inspector eyed her, the nightgown, the stained bedroom slippers, her hair still damp and straight.
“Not necessarily,” he said dryly. “I’d like to know why you were out in the rain tonight.”
“Your lady friend has told you, hasn’t she? I went out to get some cigarettes from the car, and that damned storm caught me.”
“There were cigarettes all over your room, Mrs. Fairbanks. I saw them there. I don’t believe that was the reason you were outside.”
Susie stared at him.
“So what?” she said defiantly. “I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you want to know.”
“But you admit you didn’t like her.”
“Good God! I don’t like you, but I don’t intend to cut your throat.”
“That’s very reassuring,” he told her gravely. “And I haven’t accused you of killing your mother-in-law. I want to know if you were in Mrs. Garrison’s room tonight?”
Susie’s surprise was apparently genuine.
“Eileen’s? I should say not. I sat in the hall while Miss Adams fastened her screen. She was asleep, thank God. That’s as near as I came to her, and nearer than I wanted to be.”
“You don’t like her, either?”
“She’s another bitch,” said Susie with feeling.
But she was evasive after that. Hilda, watching her, was certain she was frightened, that her assurance covered something close to panic. She stuck to her story, however. She had gone out for cigarettes and the storm had caught her. The garage was locked, as was the door to the stairs leading to Amos’s quarters. She had stood under the eaves of the building for a while. Then she had made a dash for the house.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all,” she said defiantly.
The inspector took a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it.
“‘At five minutes before two,’” he read, “‘a woman yelped under my window. I raised it and looked out. She was standing still, but someone else was going out through the break in the fence. I think it was a man. The woman was Mrs. Carlton Fairbanks. She was rubbing her arm. I watched her until she went back to the house.’”
Susie’s bravado was gone. She pushed back her heavy hair.
“Amos, the dirty skunk!” she said. “All right, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I can’t help you at that. There was a man there. I was trying the door to the stairs when he grabbed me by the arm. I yelled and he beat it. But I don’t know who it was.”
She stuck to that. He had been behind her when he caught her. He hadn’t spoken, and the rain was like a cloudburst. All she knew was that he let go of her when she screamed, and disappeared. She hadn’t said anything to Miss Adams. No use scaring a woman who had to be up all night. She had meant to tell Carl, but he was asleep and snoring. But she had had a shock. She hadn’t felt like going to bed. She had sat in the hall, and then Mrs. Fairbanks had been killed.
She pulled back the sleeve of her raincoat and showed her forearm.
“Take a look at that if you don’t believe me,” she said.
There were two or three small bruises on her arm, as if made by fingers, and they were already turning purple.
“I bruise easy,” she said.
Nothing shook her story. The sun had risen and birds were chirping outside when at last she was dismissed. With a warning, however.
“I think you know who the man was, Mrs. Fairbanks,” the inspector said soberly. “I want you to think it over. It is bad business to keep anything back in a case of this sort.”
She went out, and he looked at Hilda.
“All right, Miss Pinkerton,” he said. “What about it?”
“She’s a fine actress and a pretty fair liar,” Hilda said. “She’s protecting somebody.” She hesitated. “It may be the doctor. He lives across Huston Street, and he uses that break in the fence. But it might have been innocent enough. He’s in love with Jan Garrison. He may have meant to meet her. Or even”—she smiled faintly—“to look up at her window. I believe people in love do things like that.”
The inspector, however, had jumped to his feet.
“The doctor!” he said. “He’s in love with the girl, she inherits under the will, and he was alone outside Mrs. Fairbanks’s door for fifteen or twenty minutes. Where the hell is he?”
“He took an injured woman to the hospital. He may be home now. But he couldn’t have done it. The radio—”
“Oh, blast the radio,” he said.
He went out into the hall and sent an officer to Courtney Brooke’s house. After that he sent for Janice. She came in slowly, her eyes still red, and Hilda felt a wave of pity for her. Before going to bed she had wrapped the long ends of her hair in curlers, and they made her look childish and naïve. Even the inspector spoke gently.
“Sit down, Miss Garrison,” he said. “You know we have to ask all sorts of questions in a case like this. You needn’t be afraid. All we want is the truth.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“I don’t suppose you do. You were asleep when it happened, weren’t you?”
“I don’t know when it happened, but I wasn’t asleep when Susie yelled. I wasn’t sleepy, and Granny’s radio had been turned on full.”
“You hadn’t expected to go out? Into the grounds, I mean.”
Jan looked puzzled.
“Let’s say, to meet someone?”
It took her by surprise. She stared at him. Then a look of horror spread over her face. She looked wildly about the room, at Hilda, at the door. She even half rose from her chair.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she managed to gasp.
The inspector’s voice was still quiet.
“Suppose you meant to meet someone by the garage. Then it rained, and you didn’t go. That would be understandable, wouldn’t it? He came, but you didn’t.”
“Nobody came. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Would you swear on oath that you had no appointment to meet Doctor Brooke by the garage tonight?”
She only looked bewildered.
“Doctor Brooke!” she said. “Certainly not. He can see me whenever he wants to, here in the house.”
He let her go, watching her out with a puzzled look on his face.
“Well, what scared her?” he demanded. “Do I look as formidable as all that, or—What about this Amos, anyhow? Think he’s reliable?”
“He’s a mischiefmaker. Stubborn and sly. He’s probably honest enough.”
“What is ‘honest enough’?” he inquired quizzically.
But Hilda was thinking. She was remembering Jan’s story that Courtney Brooke had seen her father outside the fence a night or two before. That, she was convinced, had been behind Jan’s terror just now. Yet there were so many other things that she felt dizzy. The coldness for a day or so between Carlton and Susie, and Susie’s fainting. Her idiotic story about going to the garage for cigarettes. Carlton, earlier in the week, carrying something from the stable and being locked out. The bats and so on in Mrs. Fairbanks’s room, and the closet door which opened and closed itself.
They must make a pattern of some sort. Only what had they to do with an old woman dead of a knife thrust in a closed and guarded room?
It was just before young Brooke’s arrival that one of the detectives from upstairs came down and stood in the doorway. He looked rather sheepish.
“There’s a bat in that room where the old lady was,” he said. “It was hanging to a curtain, and it acts like it’s going crazy.”
“It hasn’t a thing on me,” said the inspector, and sighed.
It was bright daylight when Courtney Brooke arrived. He looked tired and puzzled, and like Susie he showed evidence of having been caught in the storm. His collar was crumpled and his necktie a limp string.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “I’ve just come back from the hospital. Is Mrs. Fairbanks—”
“Mrs. Fairbanks is dead,” said the inspector dryly. “She was murdered last night.”
The doctor stiffened and looked wildly at Hilda.
“Murdered! All I ordered for her was a sleeping tablet if she couldn’t sleep. If she got anything else—”
“She was stabbed. Not poisoned.”
The full impact seemed to strike him with that. He sat down, as though his legs would not hold him.
“I’d like an account of what you were doing last night, doctor,” said the inspector smoothly. “Begin, if you please, with Mrs. Garrison’s trouble, when you were sent for. You decided to give her a hypodermic. Then what?”
He made an effort to collect himself.
“I didn’t notice the time. She was having pain. She was afraid of a miscarriage. I asked the nurse here to get me some sterile water. She went downstairs. It took some time, and I—”
“You remained outside Mrs. Fairbanks’s door during all that time?”
He looked unhappy.
“Well, yes and no,” he said. “I went back and spoke to Janice Garrison. She had been uneasy about her father. Her stepmother said he had left her, but she didn’t believe it. She thought something had happened to him.”
“Did you stay in the hall? Or did you go into Miss Garrison’s room?”
“I went in. I was there only a minute or two. Long enough to reassure her.”
Hilda spoke.
“You agreed to guard the door,” she said. “Like Cerberus. You remember?”
“Well, look,” he said reasonably. “Only the family was in the house. Nobody would have had time to get in from the outside. And it was poison she was afraid of. Not—being stabbed.” He became suddenly conscious of his appearance. He put a hand to his collar. “Sorry I look like this,” he said. “The fellow who brought me was on the steps. He wouldn’t let me in the house.”
The inspector eyed him.
“Never mind how you look. This isn’t a party. It’s a murder investigation.” He cleared his throat. “That’s all, is it? You stepped into Miss Garrison’s room and out again. Right?”
“I might have been there five minutes,” he admitted. “I’d been telephoning around for her, and—”
“You saw nothing whatever that might be useful? Nobody moving about?”
For an instant he seemed to hesitate, and Hilda remembered the coffee spilled in the saucer and his strange expression as she came up the stairs. But he shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said.
He had gone home after giving Eileen the hypodermic, he said. It was raining a little, and he had taken the short cut by the stable and the break in the fence. He saw no one lurking there. And he was in bed asleep when a man from Joe’s Market rang the bell and said a woman had had an accident at the corner.
“What time was that?”
About two, he thought. It was storming hard by that time. He had telephoned for an ambulance, taken his bag, and gone to the corner. The woman was lying on the pavement, with one or two people with her. She was pretty badly hurt. He had done what he could, and then gone with the ambulance to the hospital.
“I stayed while they operated,” he said. “It’s my old hospital, Mount Hope. They all knew me.”
“At ten minutes to two you were in bed?”
“I was in bed when this fellow rang the bell. I opened a window and he called up to me.”
“You were undressed?”
Brooke grinned.
“I’ll say I was. I haven’t got much on now, under this suit.”
“You didn’t run into Mrs. Susie Fairbanks, at the garage at five minutes to two, and catch hold of her?”
He looked astounded.
But he lost some of his spontaneity after that. He was wary. He answered the routine questions more carefully, and at last the inspector shrugged and let him go. He was irritable, however.
“What’s the idea?” he said to Hilda grumpily. “That fellow knows something. Everybody around here knows something—except me. Even you, probably.” He looked at her keenly. “I wouldn’t put it past you, you know. You’ve held out on me before.”
“Only when I thought it was necessary,” she said, smiling up at him delicately.
But he had enough. He had had too much. He got up and banged the table.
“God damn it, Hilda,” he roared. “If I thought you have any pets around here and are protecting them, I’d—I’d turn you over my knee.”