AT THE DETECTIVES’ CLUB it is still told how Dr. Fell went down into the valley in Somerset that evening and of the man with whom he talked in the twilight by the lake, and of murder that came up as though from the lake itself. The truth about the crime has long been known, but one question must always be asked at the end of it.
The village of Grayling Dene lay a mile away towards the sunset. And the rear windows of the house looked out towards it. This was a long gabled house of red brick, lying in a hollow of the shaggy hills, and its bricks had darkened like an old painting. No lights showed inside, although the lawns were in good order and the hedges trimmed.
Behind the house there was a long gleam of water in the sunset, for the ornamental lake—some yards across—stretched almost to the windows. In the middle of the lake, on an artificial island, stood a summerhouse. A faint breeze had begun to stir, despite the heat, and the valley was alive with a conference of leaves.
The last light showed that all the windows of the house, except one, had little lozenge-shaped panes. The one exception was a window high up in a gable, the highest in the house, looking out over the road to Grayling Dene. It was barred.
Dusk had almost become darkness when two men came down over the crest of the hill. One was large and lean. The other, who wore a shovel-hat, was large and immensely stout, and he loomed even more vast against the skyline by reason of the great dark cloak billowing out behind him. Even at that distance you might hear the chuckles that animated his several chins and ran down the ridges of his waistcoat. The two travelers were engaged (as usual) in a violent argument. At intervals the larger one would stop and hold forth oratorically for some minutes, flourishing his cane. But, as they came down past the lake and the blind house, both of them stopped.
“There’s an example,” said Superintendent Hadley. “Say what you like, it’s a bit too lonely for me. Give me the town—”
“We are not alone,” said Dr. Fell.
The whole place had seemed so deserted that Hadley felt a slight start when he saw a man standing at the edge of the lake. Against the reddish glow on the water they could make out that it was a small man in neat dark clothes and a white linen hat. He seemed to be stooping forward, peering out across the water. The wind went rustling again, and the man turned around.
“I don’t see any swans,” he said. “Can you see any swans?” The quiet water was empty.
“No,” said Dr. Fell, with the same gravity. “Should there be any?”
“There should be one,” answered the little man, nodding. “Dead. With blood on its neck. Floating there.”
“Killed?” asked Dr. Fell, after a pause. He has said afterwards that it seemed a foolish thing to say; but that it seemed appropriate to that time between the lights of the day and the brain.
“Oh, yes,” replied the little man, nodding again. “Killed, like others—human beings. Eye, ear, and throat. Or perhaps I should say ear, eye, and throat, to get them in order.”
Hadley spoke with some sharpness.
“I hope we’re not trespassing. We knew the land was enclosed, of course, but they told us that the owners were away and wouldn’t mind if we took a short cut. Fell, don’t you think we’d better—?”
“I beg your pardon,” said the little man, in a voice of such cool sanity that Hadley turned round again. From what they could see in the gloom, he had a good face, a quiet face, a somewhat ascetic face; and he was smiling. “I beg your pardon,” he repeated in a curiously apologetic tone. “I should not have said that. You see, I have been far too long with it. I have been trying to find the real answer of thirty years. As for the trespassing, myself, I do not own this land, although I lived here once. There is, or used to be, a bench here somewhere. Can I detain you for a little while?”
Hadley never quite realized afterwards how it came about. But such was the spell of the hour, or of the place, or the sincere, serious little man in the white linen hat, that it seemed no time at all before the little man was sitting on a rusty iron chair beside the darkening lake, speaking as though to his fingers.
“I am Joseph Lessing,” he said, in the same apologetic tone. “If you have not heard of me, I don’t suppose you will have heard of my stepfather. But at one time he was rather famous as an eye, ear, and throat specialist. Dr. Harvey Lessing, his name was.
“In those days we—I mean the family—always came down here to spend our summer holidays. It is rather difficult to make biographical details clear. Perhaps I had better do it with dates, as though the matter were really important, like a history book. There were four children. Three of them were Dr. Lessing’s children by his first wife, who died in 1899. I was the stepson. He married my mother when I was seventeen, in 1901. I regret to say that she died three years later. Dr. Lessing was a kindly man, but he was very unfortunate in the choice of his wives.”
The little man appeared to be smiling sadly.
“We were an ordinary, contented, and happy group, in spite of Brownrigg’s cynicism. Brownrigg was the eldest. Eye, ear, and throat pursued us: he was a dentist. I think he is dead now. He was a stout man, smiling a good deal, and his face had a shine like pale butter. He was an athlete run to seed; he used to claim that he could draw teeth with his fingers. By the way, he was very fond of walnuts. I always seem to remember him sitting between two silver candlesticks at the table, smiling, with a heap of shells in front of him, and a little sharp nut-pick in his hand.
“Harvey Junior was the next. They were right to call him Junior; he was of the striding sort, brisk and high-colored and likable. He never sat down in a chair without first turning it the wrong way round. He always said ‘Ho, my lads!’ when he came into a room, and he never went out of it without leaving the door open so that he could come back in again. Above everything, he was nearly always on the water. We had a skiff and a punt for our little lake—would you believe that it is ten feet deep? Junior always dressed for the part as solemnly as though he had been on the Thames, wearing a red-and-white striped blazer and a straw hat of the sort that used to be called a boater. I say he was nearly always on the water: but not, of course, after tea. That was when Dr. Lessing went to take his afternoon nap in the summerhouse.”
The summerhouse, in its sheath of vines, was almost invisible now. But they all looked at it, very suggestive in the middle of the lake.
“The third child was the girl, Martha. She was almost my own age, and I was very fond of her.”
Joseph Lessing pressed his hands together.
“I am not going to introduce an unnecessary love story, gentlemen,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Martha was engaged to a young man who had a commission in a line regiment, and she was expecting him down here any day when—the things happened. Arthur Somers, his name was. I knew him well; I was his confidant in the family.
“I want to emphasize what a hot, pleasant summer it was. The place looked then much as it does now, except that I think it was greener then. I was glad to get away from the city. In accordance with Dr. Lessing’s passion for ‘useful employment,’ I had been put to work in the optical department of a jeweler’s. I was always skillful with my hands. I dare say I was a spindly, snappish, suspicious lad, but they were all very good to me after my mother died, except butter-faced Brownrigg, perhaps. But for me that summer centers around Martha, with her brown hair piled up on the top of her head, in a white dress with puffed shoulders, playing croquet on a green lawn, and laughing. I told you it was a long while ago.
“On the afternoon of the fifteenth of August we had all intended to be out. Even Brownrigg had intended to go out after a sort of lunch-tea that we had at two o’clock in the afternoon. Look to your right, gentlemen. You see that bow window in the middle of the house, overhanging the lake? There was where the table was set.
“Dr. Lessing was the first to leave the table. He was going out early for his nap in the summerhouse. It was a very hot afternoon, as drowsy as the sound of a lawn mower. The sun baked the old bricks and made a flat blaze on the water. Junior had knocked together a sort of miniature landing-stage at the side of the lake—it was just about where we are sitting now—and the punt and the rowing-boat were lying there.
“From the open windows we could all see Dr. Lessing going down to the landing-stage with the sun on his bald spot. He had a pillow in one hand and a book in the other. He took the rowing-boat; he could never manage the punt properly, and it irritated a man of his dignity to try.
“Martha was the next to leave. She laughed and ran away, as she always did. Then Junior said, ‘Cheerio, chaps’—or whatever the expression was then—and strode out leaving the door open. I went shortly afterwards. Junior had asked Brownrigg whether he intended to go out, and Brownrigg had said yes. But he remained, being lazy, with a pile of walnut shells in front of him. Though he moved back from the table to get out of the glare, he lounged there all afternoon in view of the lake.
“Of course, what Brownrigg said or thought might not have been important. But it happened that a gardener named Robinson had taken it into his head to trim some hedges on this side of the house. He had a full view of the lake. And all that afternoon nothing stirred. The summerhouse, as you can see, has two doors, one facing toward the house, the other in the opposite direction. These openings were closed by sun-blinds, striped red and white like Junior’s blazer, so that you could not see inside. But all the afternoon the summerhouse remained dead, showing up against the fiery water and that clump of trees at the far side of the lake. No boat put out. No one went in to swim. There was not so much as a ripple, any more than might have been caused by the swans (we had two of them), or by the spring that fed the lake.
“By six o’clock we were all back in the house. When there began to be a few shadows, I think something in the emptiness of the afternoon alarmed us. Dr. Lessing should have been there, demanding something. He was not there. We halloo’d for him, but he did not answer. The rowing-boat remained tied up by the summerhouse. Then Brownrigg, in his cool fetch-and-run fashion, told me to go out and wake up the old party. I pointed out that there was only the punt, and that I was a rotten hand at punting, and that whenever I tried it I only went ’round in circles or upset the boat. But Junior said, ‘Come-along-old-chap-you-shall-improve-your-punting-I’ll-give-you-a-hand.’
“I have never forgotten how long it took us to get out there while I staggered at the punt-pole, and Junior lent a hand.
“Dr. Lessing lay easily on his left side, almost on his stomach, on a long wicker settee. His face was very nearly into the pillow, so that you could not see much except a wisp of sandy side-whisker. His right hand hung down to the floor, the fingers trailing into the pages of Three Men in a Boat.
“We first noticed that there seemed to be some—that is, something that had come out of his ear. More we did not know, except that he was dead, and in fact the weapon has never been found. He died in his sleep. The doctor later told us that the wound had been made by some round sharp-pointed instrument, thicker than a hat-pin but not so thick as a lead-pencil, which had been driven through the right ear into the brain.”
Joseph Lessing paused. A mighty swish of wind uprose in the trees beyond the lake, and their tops ruffled under clear starlight. The little man sat nodding to himself in the iron chair. They could see his white hat move.
“Yes?” prompted Dr. Fell in an almost casual tone. Dr. Fell was sitting back, a great bandit-shape in cloak and shovel-hat. He seemed to be blinking curiously at Lessing over his eyeglasses. “And whom did they suspect?”
“They suspected me,” said the little man.
“You see,” he went on, in the same apologetic tone, “I was the only one in the group who could swim. It was my one accomplishment. It is too dark to show you now but I won a little medal by it, and I have kept it on my watch-chain ever since I received it as a boy.”
“But you said,” cried Hadley, “that nobody—”
“I will explain,” said the other, “if you do not interrupt me. Of course, the police believed that the motive must have been money. Dr. Lessing was a wealthy man, and his money was divided almost equally among us. I told you he was always very good to me.
“First they tried to find out where everyone had been in the afternoon. Brownrigg had been sitting, or said he had been sitting, in the dining room. But there was the gardener to prove that not he or anyone else had gone out on the lake. Martha (it was foolish, of course, but they investigated even Martha) had been with a friend of hers—I forget her name now—who came for her in the phaeton and took her away to play croquet. Junior had no alibi, since he had been for a country walk. But,” said Lessing, quite simply, “everybody knew he would never do a thing like that. I was the changeling, or perhaps I mean ugly duckling, and I admit I was an unpleasant, sarcastic lad.
“This is how Inspector Deering thought I had committed the murder. First, he thought, I had made sure everybody would be away from the house that afternoon. Thus, later, when the crime was discovered, it would be assumed by everyone that the murderer had simply gone out in the punt and come back again. Everybody knew that I could not possibly manage a punt alone. You see?
“Next, the inspector thought, I had come down to the clump of trees across the lake, in line with the summerhouse and the dining room windows. It is shallow there, and there are reeds. He thought that I had taken off my clothes over a bathing suit. He thought that I had crept into the water under cover of the reeds, and that I had simply swum out to the summerhouse under water.
“Twenty-odd yards under water, I admit, are not much to a good swimmer. They thought that Brownrigg could not see me come up out of the water, because the thickness of the summerhouse was between. Robinson had a full view of the lake, but he could not see that one part at the back of the summerhouse. Nor, on the other hand, could I see them. They thought that I had crawled under the sun-blind with the weapon in the breast of my bathing suit. Any wetness I might have left would soon be dried by the intense heat. That, I think, was how they believed I had killed the old man who befriended me.”
The little man’s voice grew petulant and dazed.
“I told them I did not do it,” he said with a hopeful air. “Over and over again I told them I did not do it. But I do not think they believed me. That is why for all these years I have wondered …
“It was Brownrigg’s idea. They had me before a sort of family council in the library, as though I had stolen jam. Martha was weeping, but I think she was weeping with plain fear. She never stood up well in a crisis, Martha didn’t; she turned pettish and even looked softer. All the same, it is not pleasant to think of a murderer coming up to you as you doze in the afternoon heat. Junior, the good fellow, attempted to take my side and call for fair play; but I could see the idea in his face. Brownrigg presided, silkily, and smiled down his nose.
“ ‘We have either got to believe you killed him,’ Brownrigg said, ‘or believe in the supernatural. Is the lake haunted? No; I think we may safely discard that.’ He pointed his finger at me. ‘You damned young snake, you are lazy and wanted that money.’
“But, you see, I had one very strong hold over them—and I used it. I admit it was unscrupulous, but I was trying to demonstrate my innocence and we are told that the devil must be fought with fire. At mention of this hold, even Brownrigg’s jowls shook. Brownrigg was a dentist, Harvey was studying medicine. What hold? That is the whole point. Nevertheless, it was not what the family thought I had to fear, it was what Inspector Deering thought.
“They did not arrest me yet, because there was not enough evidence, but every night I feared it would come the next day. Those days after the funeral were too warm; and suspicion acted like woolen underwear under the heat. Martha’s tantrums got on even Junior’s nerves. Once I thought Brownrigg was going to hit her. She very badly needed her fiancé Arthur Somers; but, though he wrote that he might be there any day, he still could not get leave of absence from his colonel.
“And then the lake got more food.
“Look at the house, gentlemen. I wonder if the light is strong enough for you to see it from here? Look at the house—the highest window there—under the gable. You see?”
There was a pause, filled with the tumult of the leaves.
“It’s got bars,” said Hadley.
“Yes,” assented the little man. “I must describe the room. It is a little square room. It has one door and one window. At the time I speak of, there was no furniture at all in it. The furniture had been taken out some years before, because it was rather a special kind of furniture. Since then it had been locked up. The key was kept in a box in Dr. Lessing’s room; but, of course, nobody ever went up there. One of Dr. Lessing’s wives had died there in a certain condition. I told you he had bad luck with his wives. They had not even dared to have a glass window.”
Sharply, the little man struck a match. The brief flame seemed to bring his face up towards them out of the dark. They saw that he had a pipe in his left hand. But the flame showed little except the gentle upward turn of his eyes, and the fact that his whitish hair (of such coarse texture that it seemed whitewashed) was worn rather long.
“On the afternoon of the twenty-second of August, we had an unexpected visit from the family solicitor. There was no one to receive him except myself. Brownrigg had locked himself up in his room at the front with a bottle of whiskey; he was drunk or said he was drunk. Junior was out. We had been trying to occupy our minds for the past week, but Junior could not have his boating or I my workshop; this was thought not decent. I believe it was thought that the most decent thing was to get drunk. For some days Martha had been ailing. She was not ill enough to go to bed, but she was lying on a long chair in her bedroom.
“I looked into the room just before I went downstairs to see the solicitor. The room was muffled up with shutters and velvet curtains, as all the rooms decently were. You may imagine that it was very hot in there. Martha was lying back in the chair with a smelling-bottle, and there was a white-globed lamp burning on a little round table beside her. I remember that her white dress looked starchy; her hair was piled up on top of her head and she wore a little gold watch on her breast. Also, her eyelids were so puffed that they seemed almost Oriental. When I asked her how she was, she began to cry and concluded by throwing a book at me.
“So I went on downstairs. I was talking to the solicitor when it took place. We were in the library, which is at the front of the house, and in consequence we could not hear distinctly. But we heard something. That was why we went upstairs—and even the solicitor ran. Martha was not in her own bedroom. We found out where she was from the fact that the door to the garret-stairs was open.
“It was even more intolerably hot up under the roof. The door to the barred room stood halfway open. Just outside stood a housemaid (her name, I think, was Jane Dawson) leaning against the jamb and shaking like the ribbons on her cap. All sound had dried up in her throat, but she pointed inside.
“I told you it was a little, bare, dirty brown room. The low sun made a blaze through the window, and made shadows of the bars across Martha’s white dress. Martha lay nearly in the middle of the room, with her heel twisted under her as though she had turned ’round before she fell. I lifted her up and tried to talk to her; but a rounded sharp-pointed thing, somewhat thicker than a hat-pin, had been driven through the right eye into the brain.
“Yet there was nobody else in the room.
“The maid told a straight story. She had seen Martha come out of Dr. Lessing’s bedroom downstairs. Martha was running, running as well as she could in those skirts; once she stumbled, and the maid thought that she was sobbing. Jane Dawson said that Martha made for the garret door as though the devil were after her. Jane Dawson, wishing anything rather than to be alone in the dark hall, followed her. She saw Martha come up here and unlock the door of the little brown room. When Martha ran inside, the maid thought that she did not attempt to close the door; but that it appeared to swing shut after her. You see?
“Whatever had frightened Martha, Jane Dawson did not dare follow her in—for a few seconds, at least, and afterwards it was too late. The maid could never afterwards describe exactly the sort of sound Martha made. It was something that startled the birds out of the vines and set the swans flapping on the lake. But the maid presently saw straight enough to push the door with one finger and peep round the edge.
“Except for Martha, the room was empty.
“Hence the three of us now looked at each other. The maid’s story was not to be shaken in any way, and we all knew she was a truthful witness. Even the police did not doubt her. She said she had seen Martha go into that room, but that she had seen nobody come out of it. She never took her eyes off the door—it was not likely that she would. But when she peeped in to see what had happened, there was nobody except Martha in the room. That was easily established, because there was no place where anyone could have been. Could she have been blinded by the light? No. Could anyone have slipped past her? No. She almost shook her hair loose by her vehemence on this point.
“The window, I need scarcely tell you, was inaccessible. Its bars were firmly set, no farther apart than the breadth of your hand, and in any case the window could not have been reached. There was no way out of the room except the door or the window; and no—what is the word I want?—no mechanical device in it. Our friend Inspector Deering made certain of that. One thing I suppose I should mention. Despite the condition of the walls and ceiling, the floor of the room was swept clean. Martha’s white dress with the puffed shoulders had scarcely any dirt when she lay there; it was as white as her face.
“This murder was incredible. I do not mean merely that it was incredible with regard to its physical circumstances, but also that there was Martha dead—on a holiday. Possibly she seemed all the more dead because we had never known her well when she was alive. She was (to me, at least) a laugh, a few coquetries, a pair of brown eyes. You felt her absence more than you would have felt that of a more vital person. And—on a holiday with that warm sun, and the tennis-net ready to be put up.
“That evening I walked with Junior here in the dusk by the lake. He was trying to express some of this. He appeared dazed. He did not know why Martha had gone up to that little brown room, and he kept endlessly asking why. He could not even seem to accustom himself to the idea that our holidays were interrupted, much less interrupted by the murders of his father and his sister.
“There was a reddish light on the lake; the trees stood up against it like black lace, and we were walking near that clump by the reeds. The thing I remember most vividly is Junior’s face. He had his hat on the back of his head, as he usually did. He was staring down past the reeds, where the water lapped faintly, as though the lake itself were the evil genius and kept its secret. When he spoke I hardly recognized his voice.
“ ‘God,’ he said, ‘but it’s in the air!’
“There was something white floating by the reeds, very slowly turning ’round with a snaky discolored talon coming out from it along the water, the talon was the head of a swan, and the swan was dead of a gash across the neck that had very nearly severed it.
“We fished it out with a boathook,” explained the little man as though with an afterthought. And then he was silent.
On the long iron bench Dr. Fell’s cape shifted a little; Hadley could hear him wheezing with quiet anger, like a boiling kettle.
“I thought so,” rumbled Dr. Fell. He added more sharply: “Look here, this tomfoolery has got to stop.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Joseph Lessing, evidently startled.
“With your kind permission,” said Dr. Fell, and Hadley has later said that he was never more glad to see that cane flourished or hear that common-sense voice grow fiery with controversy, “with your kind permission, I should like to ask you a question. Will you swear to me by anything you hold sacred (if you have anything, which I rather doubt) that you do not know the real answer?”
“Yes,” replied the other seriously, and nodded.
For a little space, Dr. Fell was silent. Then he spoke argumentatively. “I will ask you another question, then. Did you ever shoot an arrow into the air?”
Hadley turned ’round. “I hear the call of mumbo-jumbo,” said Hadley with grim feeling. “Hold on, now! You don’t think that girl was killed by somebody shooting an arrow into the air, do you?”
“Oh, no,” said Dr. Fell in a more meditative tone. He looked at Lessing. “I mean it figuratively—like the boy in the verse. Did you ever throw a stone when you were a boy? Did you ever throw a stone, not to hit anything, but for the sheer joy of firing it? Did you ever climb trees? Did you ever like to play pirate and dress up and wave a sword? I don’t think so. That’s why you live in a dreary, rarefied light; that’s why you dislike romance and sentiment and good whiskey and all the noblest things of this world; and it is also why you do not see the unreasonableness of several things in this case.
“To begin with, birds do not commonly rise up in a great cloud from the vines because someone cries out. With the hopping and always-whooping Junior about the premises, I should imagine the birds were used to it. Still less do swans leap up out of the water and flap their wings because of a cry from far away; swans are not so sensitive. But did you ever see a boy throw a stone at a wall? Did you ever see a boy throw a stone at the water? Birds and swans would have been outraged only if something had struck both the wall and the water: something, in short, which fell from that barred window.
“Now, frightened women do not in their terror rush up to a garret, especially a garret with such associations. They go downstairs, where there is protection. Martha Lessing was not frightened. She went up to that room for some purpose. What purpose? She could not have been going to get anything, for there was nothing in the room to be got. What could have been on her mind? The only thing we know to have been on her mind was a frantic wish for her fiancé to get there. She had been expecting him for weeks. It is a singular thing about that room—but its window is the highest in the house, and commands the only good clear view of the road to the village.
“Now suppose someone had told her that he thought, he rather thought, he had glimpsed Arthur Somers coming up the road from the village. It was a long way off, of course, and the someone admitted he might have been mistaken in thinking so …
“H’m, yes. The trap was all set, you see. Martha Lessing waited only long enough to get the key out of the box in her father’s room, and she sobbed with relief. But, when she got to the room, there was a strong sun pouring through the bars straight into her face—and the road to the village is a long way off. That, I believe, was the trap. For on the window-ledge of that room (which nobody ever used, and which someone had swept so that there should be no footprints) this someone conveniently placed a pair of—eh, Hadley?”
“Field-glasses,” said Hadley, and got up in the gloom.
“Still,” argued Dr. Fell, wheezing argumentatively, “there would be one nuisance. Take a pair of field-glasses, and try to use them in a window where the bars are set more closely than the breadth of your hand. The bars get in the way—wherever you turn you bump into them; they confuse sight and irritate you; and, in addition, there is a strong sun to complicate matters. In your impatience, I think you would turn the glasses sideways and pass them out through the bars. Then, holding them firmly against one bar with your hands through the bars on either side, you would look through the eyepieces.
“But,” said Dr. Fell, with a ferocious geniality, “those were no ordinary glasses. Martha Lessing had noticed before that the lenses were blurred. Now that they were in position, she tried to adjust the focus by turning the little wheel in the middle. And as she turned the wheel, like a trigger of a pistol it released the spring mechanism and a sharp steel point shot out from the right-hand lens into her eye. She dropped the glasses, which were outside the window. The weight of them tore the point from her eye; and it was this object, falling, which gashed and broke the neck of the swan just before it disappeared into the water below.”
He paused. He had taken out a cigar, but he did not light it.
“Busy solicitors do not usually come to a house ‘unexpectedly.’ They are summoned. Brownrigg was drunk and Junior absent; there was no one at the back of the house to see the glasses fall. For this time the murderer had to have a respectable alibi. Young Martha, the only one who could have been gulled into such a trap, had to be sacrificed—to avert the arrest which had been threatening someone ever since the police found out how Dr. Lessing really had been murdered.
“There was only one man who admittedly did speak with Martha Lessing only a few minutes before she was murdered. There was only one man who was employed as optician at a jeweler’s, and admits he had his ‘workshop’ here. There was only one man skillful enough with his hands—” Dr. Fell paused, wheezing, and turned to Lessing. “I wonder they didn’t arrest you.”
“They did,” said the little man, nodding. “You see, I was released from Broadmoor only a month ago.”
There was a sudden rasp and crackle as he struck another match.
“You—” bellowed Hadley, and stopped. “So it was your mother who died in that room? Then what the hell do you mean by keeping us here with this pack of nightmares?”
“No,” said the other peevishly. “You do not understand. I never wanted to know who killed Dr. Lessing or poor Martha. You have got hold of the wrong problem. And yet I tried to tell you what the problem was.
“You see, it was not my mother who died mad. It was theirs—Brownrigg’s and Harvey’s and Martha’s. That was why they were so desperately anxious to think I was guilty, for they could not face the alternative. Didn’t I tell you I had a hold over them, a hold that made even Brownrigg shake, and that I used it? Do you think they wouldn’t have had me clapped into jail straightaway if it had been my mother who was mad? Eh?
“Of course,” he explained apologetically, “at the trial they had to swear it was my mother who was mad; for I threatened to tell the truth in open court if they didn’t. Otherwise I should have been hanged, you see. Only Brownrigg and Junior were left. Brownrigg was a dentist, Junior was to be a doctor, and if it had been known—But that is not the point. That is not the problem. Their mother was mad, but they were harmless. I killed Dr. Lessing. I killed Martha. Yes, I am quite sane. Why did I do it, all those years ago? Why? Is there no rational pattern in the scheme of things, and no answer to the bedeviled of the earth?”
The match curled to a red ember, winked and went out. Clearest of all they remembered the coarse hair that was like whitewash on the black, the eyes, and the curiously suggestive hands. Then Joseph Lessing got up from the chair. The last they saw of him was his white hat bobbing and flickering across the lawn under the blowing trees.
