At ten thirty-five p.m. on Christmas Eve, Noel Carter said to Janice Mond:
‘This is perfectly senseless, Janice. What does it matter if we are discovered?’
‘If you’re going to play a game at all, Noel,’ said Janice sententiously, ‘you must play it properly.’
‘I didn’t ask to play the damned game. Anyway, it’s obviously unfair to be hiding outside the house – quite apart from the fact that we shall both be laid low with pneumonia in a few hours. Good heavens, Janice, it’s freezing. I don’t know how you can stand it. You’ve got practically nothing on.’
‘You ought to be very pleased,’ Janice replied coolly. ‘After all, Noel, the sole purpose of playing hide-and-seek is to allow people to make love in decent privacy for a few minutes. Nothing will make me believe that Duncan is actually looking for anyone.’
‘I wish he’d find us,’ said Noel unchivalrously. ‘I wish he’d find us and take us back to the fire. I should like some whisky. I wish you were a salamander.’
Janice sighed, but made no remark. Noel got up and went to the door of the little summer-house, from which he surveyed the black bulk of Rydalls looming against a star-lit but moonless sky, and the thin sheet of snow, marked only with their own foot-prints, which stretched bleakly in every direction. A small but chilling wind was moving among the bare branches of the trees in the park, and the only sound was the distant howling of a dog. It rose and fell on the night air with a monotonous persistency which became, after a few minutes, extremely trying.
‘Dogs only make that noise,’ Noel observed, ‘when there are vampires leaving their graves.’
‘Come and make love to me, Noel,’ said Janice from the gloom at the back of the summer-house.
‘Darling, I should love to,’ said Noel carefully, ‘if it weren’t for the fact that my animal heat – which, I may say, is always rather precarious – has now quite deserted me … How much longer do we have to stay in this detestable hovel?’
Janice felt in her handbag and produced a tiny gold cigarette-lighter. Its wavering flame lit up her ash-blonde hair and her pretty, petulant, childish features. She could not, thought Noel, be more than twenty. She looked at her wrist-watch, a tiny, jewelled rectangle on her slender wrist.
‘Ten minutes,’ she announced. ‘Then they’ll ring the gong, and we can go back, and you can have your damned whisky.’ She paused, and then said:
‘You don’t approve of me, do you, Noel?’
‘I think you’re very attractive indeed,’ he answered – with truth, since the lighter was gleaming on her slim and gently rounded body in its white slipper satin gown, and her bare arms were smooth and soft to look at.
‘Then why don’t you make love to me?’
‘Because’ – the remark sounded a trifle priggish – ‘I just don’t make love to every pretty girl I happen to meet.’
‘Why not?’ she asked disconcertingly.
‘I have principles,’ Noel replied mendaciously. As a matter of fact he had none.
‘You mean you’re terrified of getting involved.’
‘Very well.’ Noel was annoyed at so much perceptivity. ‘I’m terrified of getting involved. Also, I’m cold.’
‘You needn’t worry,’ said Janice, with all the scorn of her youth. ‘I shan’t run after you … Damn, this thing’s getting hot—’
The lighter fell with a clatter on to the uneven wooden floor of the summer-house. They were in darkness again. Noel dutifully groped about for it.
‘I suppose the fact is,’ Janice resumed in implausibly casual tones, ‘that you’re interested in Patricia.’
‘Here’s your lighter.’
‘Thanks. Of course I don’t blame you. Patricia’s a very attractive girl, though I must say, I wish she wouldn’t use that particular shade of lipstick.’
‘Puss, puss.’
‘Oh, don’t be childish, Noel … I wonder who it was attacked her the other night?’
They heard a car coming up the drive, its tyres crackling in the frozen snow. The dog gave one last, devastating howl, and then was mercifully silent. When the ignition of the car was turned off, it was possible to hear the high, metallic singing of the telephone wires in the road beyond the low flint wall which bounded the little estate. A freezing gust of wind blew through the summer-house door; Noel shivered.
‘A servant, I suppose,’ he replied. ‘Apparently it was just an ordinary attempt at petty thieving. If Patricia hadn’t rushed in and tried to apply ju-jitsu, she wouldn’t have got hurt at all.’
‘Anyway, I’ve taken to locking my door at night.’
‘Wise girl,’ Noel commented ironically. ‘But I shouldn’t worry. A repetition’s not very likely. Besides, nothing valuable was taken.’
‘The diary.’
‘I don’t believe Patricia ever had a diary … Oh, what a comfortable way to spend Christmas Eve this is.’
‘Will you please put your arms round me, Noel. I’m cold … Lord, that can’t be the gong, can it?’ Janice sounded distinctly peevish. ‘It’s five minutes early.’
However, it was undoubtedly the gong. ‘I’ll tell you why it’s early,’ said Noel. ‘They’re making a last attempt to snatch us back from the jaws of the grave.’
‘Race you to the front door.’
‘You can’t race in an evening dress. You’ll fall.’
‘I’ll hold my skirt up. Come on.’
‘How you would have enjoyed living in Sparta,’ Noel remarked.
But Janice, with a finely feminine contempt for the laws of sport, had already left the summer-house and was running across the white expanse of lawn. A little slip of moon was rising above the trees of the park. Its light was just sufficient to give precision to the outline of Rydalls and to evoke a watery, answering gleam from the bonnet of the car which stood, some hundreds of yards distant, below the steps of the terrace.
Sighing deeply, Noel exerted himself to follow.
He ran clumsily, for his feet were so cold that he could hardly feel them, but he succeeded, none the less, in catching Janice up just as she rounded the corner of the house by the billiard-room. Lights flashed out from many of the windows; evidently the game was well and truly over. Giggling noisily, they panted up the terrace steps. These were dangerous, for the snow had hardened into a slippery, irregular surface; and Noel, cursing vehemently, nearly fell down on his face as he climbed them. They came in view of the windows of the long gallery.
‘Look, Noel,’ Janice gasped, catching him suddenly by the arm. ‘Isn’t – isn’t that sweet?’
Secure in the conviction that Janice had only stopped the race because she knew she was going to lose it, Noel looked.
The long gallery was dimly illuminated, by a lamp at the far end, where a door led into a vestibule giving on to the main hall; but in an alcove beyond the window at which they were standing a man and a woman were embracing beneath a branch of mistletoe. The man had his back to them, and since a dinner-jacket, in a dinner-jacketed party, provides a very respectable form of anonymity, they were quite unable to make out who he was.
‘But the girl’s Louise,’ Janice whispered.
‘Louise?’
‘Louise Munro. I know by the jade bracelet she’s wearing. A note of indignation came into Janice’s voice. ‘I must say, she’s being very languid about it all.’
‘Well, don’t stand and stare at them. It’s a perversion.’
‘A perversion?’
‘Called mixoscopy. Come in and get warm.’ They walked on to the front door.
‘Kiss me, Noel,’ said Janice.
‘If you’ll promise to come inside immediately afterwards.’
‘Of course I promise.’
Noel found it a disturbingly pleasant kiss. Janice knew this, and he knew that she knew. The whole thing, he reflected, was distinctly a defeat for him.
‘Now you must keep your promise,’ he said.
‘Of course, Noel,’ Janice replied demurely.
The drawing-room, when they reached it, was crowded; virtually the whole party had returned there at the conclusion of the game, and Noel and Janice seemed to be the last to arrive. Their host, Duncan MacAdam, approached them. He was a man of about forty, tall, slim, and immaculately dressed, with prematurely greying hair, the attractive accent of an educated Scot, and a mobile, expressive, rather plump face. He appeared to have money in his own right, and he had bought Rydalls seven years previously. He lived as comfortably as governmental extortions permitted, and spent the greater part of his time in giving house-parties. In fact they ran almost non-stop at Rydalls, for MacAdam’s circle of acquaintance was large. Yet he seemed to have no intimate friends, and no woman – though many had tried – had, as yet succeeded in marrying him.
‘You’ve been outside,’ he said accusingly. ‘That constitutes cheating.’
‘I told you,’ said Noel to Janice.
‘Anyway, Duncan,’ Janice returned, ‘I don’t believe you attempted to find anyone.’
MacAdam grinned. ‘I found Murchison,’ he said, ‘who was rather inadequately concealed at the sideboard, and betraying his presence by swilling noises. After that, I admit, I didn’t get much further.’
‘Why the sudden recall?’
MacAdam grinned again. ‘Sorry if it disturbed you. A new guest arrived in medias res. Poor fellow, he was a bit distressed at finding the whole house in darkness. I think it must have reminded him of The Travelling Grave – you remember?’
‘Who is it?’ Noel asked. ‘Anyone I know?’
‘Peter Hadow.’
‘The man who writes detective novels?’
‘Yes. Come and meet him.’
‘Can we meet him somewhere in front of the fire?’
‘Of course. You must be frozen. Come along.’
They pushed through the chattering groups of guests towards a huge edifice of flaming logs. The room was brilliantly lighted by two electric chandeliers and a profusion of standard lamps. It was in the Queen Anne part of the house, tall, long, panelled in pine, and richly ornamented on the overmantel, the cornice and the pediment above the door; but the furniture was modern throughout. ‘I possess no aesthetic sense,’ MacAdam was accustomed to say, ‘but my bodily perceptions are very acute … Properly sprung chairs I must have.’
Peter Hadow was talking to Patricia Davenant and Richard Neame. For a specialist in the macabre he looked remarkably jumpy. He was a man of about thirty-five, precise to the point of pedantry in his speech, with an untidy mop of dark hair, a long, thin, enquiring nose, and small, weak blue eyes. He held a glass in one hand, and with the other tapped his pince-nez, in a fidgety manner, against a waistcoat button.
The courtesies were observed; conventional enquiries as to health conventionally disposed of; an antiphonal commentary on the weather and the state of the roads duly accomplished. MacAdam departed to fetch drinks for Noel and Janice.
‘Patricia dear,’ said Janice, ‘what have you been doing to your dress?’
‘I must go and deal with it,’ Patricia Davenant answered. She was a tall and lovely girl, with a splendid head of red hair and a curiously ingenuous manner.
‘No further trouble, I hope?’ asked Noel.
Patricia smiled and shook her head. ‘Just an accident. My shoulder-strap broke.’
She was holding the dress hunched up under her left arm. ‘I’d better change.’
‘Patricia dear, you look charmingly like a Maenad,’ said MacAdam, returning with the drinks. ‘But as the male element of this party is remarkable rather for modesty than for brains, you’re embarrassing everyone. Would you like to be lent a safety-pin?’
Richard Neame frowned perceptibly.
Patricia giggled. ‘No, thanks. I’ll get out of the wretched frock altogether. Excuse me.’ She left the room and went upstairs.
‘You won’t’ – Peter Hadow turned to MacAdam – ‘you won’t of course inform the young lady of my reason for wishing to meet her? Or say anything about the book?’
‘Certainly not,’ MacAdam agreed; there was a twinkle in his eye. ‘The young lady,’ he explained to the others, ‘is Louise. She was tied up with the Forrest case just before the war – or rather her brother was. Peter based one of his novels on it, and wants to talk to her.’
‘You know the book?’ Peter Hadow enquired.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Noel and Janice simultaneously. ‘Oh, certainly.’
‘Splendid.’ Hadow appeared pleased. ‘Of course, it isn’t published yet,’ he added gently. ‘There were certain difficulties about libel.’
‘It was a murder case, wasn’t it?’ said Richard Neame. He was a rather colourless man of about thirty-five who was engaged to marry Patricia Davenant. ‘Will she want to talk about it?’
‘That,’ said MacAdam, ‘is the problem. Don’t for heaven’s sake upset the girl, Peter.’
‘If she doesn’t offer to talk about it,’ Hadow assured him, ‘I’ll drop the whole thing … Can you point her out to me, by the bye?’
MacAdam craned his neck to look round the room. ‘She doesn’t appear to be in here.’
‘She was in the long gallery when we came in,’ said Janice, ‘and I suppose may be there still. There was a man with her,’ Janice added rather primly.
‘This house seems to be a temple to Aphrodite Pandemos,’ MacAdam observed. ‘Well, I’ve no doubt she’ll turn up sooner or later … Weren’t we going to play charades?’
‘I’m very good at charades,’ Hadow announced unexpectedly, ‘so you must put me in charge of one of the sides. But I think I’d better get my car under cover first.’
‘Oh, I’ve told someone to deal with that,’ said MacAdam. ‘Have another drink, and then I’ll show you your room, and then we can make a start. I don’t suppose anyone has the least desire to play charades, but I refuse to allow dancing to begin until midnight.’
A quarter of an hour later he was issuing instructions to the party at large – with the exception, that is, of four people who had pleaded age and lack of histrionic ability and had slunk off into the library to play bridge. The party responded with cries of not unmixed enthusiasm.
‘And by the way,’ said MacAdam, ‘it scarcely seems to me that we’re all here. Isn’t Patricia back yet?’
‘Give her a chance,’ said Richard Neame. ‘You know how long women take over these things.’
‘And where is Louise?’ MacAdam’s plump face grew comical with dismayed enquiry. ‘Has anyone seen Louise?’
No one, apparently, had seen Louise since before the game of hide-and-seek.
‘But you might check up on the men,’ Noel suggested sotto voce. He was rather surprised when, in the event, all of them were accounted for.
‘We’d better look in the long gallery,’ said Janice. ‘I hope she isn’t ill, or anything.’
A voluntary search-party left the drawing-room. It consisted of Noel, Janice, MacAdam, Peter Hadow, Richard Neame and a middle-aged man named Simon Moore, who was correctly assumed by everyone to be trying to marry Louise Munro for her money. They crossed the hall, with its broad, green-carpeted staircase, passed through the vestibule and entered the long gallery.
It was the least used room in the house, but its size and its polished floor made it eminently suitable for dancing. Consequently there was little furniture in it at this time, apart from a tiny improvised bar, a large radiogram, and rows of chairs against the walls. The standard lamp by the door was still on, but blue velvet curtains had been drawn across the windows. Their footsteps echoed a little as they walked up to the far end.
MacAdam was ahead of the others. They saw him stop abruptly as he reached the alcove, and heard him utter a stifled exclamation. Louise Munro had always been considered an attractive woman, but strangulation and a blood-soaked body are not calculated to enhance anyone’s charms.
Some fifteen miles away, in the North Oxford home of the university Professor of English Language and Literature, a children’s party was in progress.
Its host was seated, glowering, at one end of the drawing-room. He was attempting, simultaneously, to construct a crane out of Meccano, drink a glass of whisky, and keep off a small and solemn-looking girl whose pleasure it seemed to be to buffet him disinterestedly about the ears. His clean-shaven face was ruddy with effort, and his brown hair stood up in spikes from the crown of his head. A few feet away from him, an aged colleague named Wilkes was engaged in improvising a rather lurid and improbable fairy-story.
‘Heh,’ he was saying. ‘So the wicked queen left the mirror and ran through the corridors of the great castle, and came to the huge deserted kitchen. And in the floor of the kitchen there was a heavy trap-door bound with rusty iron hinges. So the wicked queen lifted the trap-door and climbed down the damp and slimy steps into the dark dungeons. Heh.’
‘Sounds corny to me,’ said a rather unpleasant boy.
‘What was it like in the dungeons?’ asked a saccharine little girl with a blue bow in her hair.
‘It was ruddy awful,’ said Wilkes ill-advisedly.
‘Ruddy awful,’ screamed the children in chorus. ‘It was ruddy awful.’
In the hall outside, the telephone could be heard ringing. Mrs Fen, a pleasant, plain, bespectacled woman, came in and approached her eccentric husband.
‘Gervase,’ she said, ‘you’re wanted.’
‘Thank God for that,’ said Fen, wiping his brow. The crane by now somewhat resembled a skyscraper in course of demolition by high explosive. ‘Look here, it’s late. Oughtn’t all these children to go home?’
‘We’ll send them away,’ said his wife soothingly, ‘when Dr Wilkes has finished his story.’
‘Ah,’ said Fen. He rose to his feet. An aeroplane driven by elastic sailed across the room and caught him a glancing blow on the left temple. A freckled child of indeterminate sex had got hold of his whisky. Leaving his wife to deal with the situation, he beat a hasty retreat.
‘Well?’ he said into the telephone. ‘Fen here.’
‘This is Dick Freeman,’ said the Chief Constable of Oxford from his house on Boar’s Hill.
‘Oh, is it,’ Fen replied affably. ‘And a Merry Christmas to you.’
‘You’re not sober,’ said Sir Richard Freeman with some certainty.
‘Well, don’t you believe in celebrating Christmas, you puritanical old dullard?’
‘No.’
‘Every time you say that,’ said Fen reproachfully, ‘a fairy dies somewhere … What do you want?’
‘There’s been a murder.’
‘A scientist, one hopes.’
‘No, a girl. I thought it might interest you to go along.’
‘Where is it?’
But for the moment this information was not forthcoming. Heralded by a sound like a cork coming out of a bottle, a feminine voice of positively obscene gaiety enquired whether they had finished.
‘No, I haven’t,’ said Sir Richard Freeman. ‘I’ve hardly begun.’
‘A merry Christmas to you.’
‘Don’t you cut me off,’ said Sir Richard with sudden suspicion. ‘I’m the Chief Constable. You can’t cut me off. I’m the—’
There was a dull crackling, like thorns beneath a pot, and then silence. Fen joggled the receiver-rest experimentally two or three times, and then replaced the instrument. From the drawing-room, Wilkes could be heard banging about with the fire-irons in attempt to simulate rattling chains. The freckled child who had seized Fen’s whisky was hurried by Mrs Fen through the hall into the cloakroom to be sick. In a few moments the telephone rang again.
‘The house is called Rydalls,’ said Sir Richard. ‘At Sanford Angelorum. And if the blasted exchange cuts me off again I’ll have them all by the ears.’
‘Or lay them all by the heels, of course,’ Fen suggested. ‘Sanford Angelorum’s a long way away.’
‘You’ve got a car, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Fen, brightening. ‘So I have. Are you going to be there?’
‘No. I’m off to bed.’
‘Who’s in charge?’
‘A local man – by name Wyndham. I’ll let him know you’re coming.’
‘That’s the way,’ said Fen approvingly. ‘Sleep tight.’
He rang off, and went into the drawing-room to announce his departure. It was accepted with indifference. A pugnacious little girl took a swipe at his leg, missed, and toppled over. Her wails pursued him out of the house.
He drove to Rydalls in his small red sports car, which was named Lily Christine III, and sang loudly to keep out the cold. His voice mingled hideously with the voices of peregrinating bands of carol singers, woke sleeping dogs, and bedevilled the dreams of rustics.
There were already two police-cars standing in the drive when he arrived at Rydalls. He was welcomed by Wyndham, an obese, gentle, worried-looking inspector of police, and taken into MacAdam’s study, which was being used as an office. It was a small room compared with the others in the house, snug, well-to-do, and little suggestive, despite its broad, flat-topped desk, of any kind of work. Despite MacAdam’s pretensions to Philistinism, the pictures on the walls showed a certain taste.
‘It’s a mess, sir,’ said Wyndham without further preliminary. He had an unexpectedly high, piping voice. ‘And a cruel mess at that.’
‘Who was the girl?’
‘A Mrs Louise Munro. Youngish, it seems – somewhere in the late twenties, I should say, though no one seems to have any clear idea about her age. Her husband died in a flying accident during the war, when they hadn’t been married more than six months. A much older man, I understand, and very well-off … Would you like to see the body? It’s still on the spot, though we shall have to move it soon.’
‘Right. You lead the way.’
They left the study and crossed the hall to the door of the vestibule which led into the long gallery, and which was guarded by a constable. The drawing-room door was ajar, and from it could be heard a subdued hum of conversation.
‘Such a hell of a lot of them,’ Wyndham commented gloomily. If I know anything about it, we shall be here half the night.’
The constable saluted. They entered the long gallery. A man who had been bending over Louise Munro’s body came to meet them. He was young and neatly dressed, with a long, earnest face and a Roman nose.
‘Well, doctor?’ said Wyndham.
‘Thank God I don’t see that sort of thing very often,’ said the doctor. ‘The cause of death was strangulation, I fancy – though that won’t be certain until I get a look at the internal organs. She may simply have died of loss of blood.’
‘H’m,’ said Wyndham dubiously. ‘Well, I don’t suppose it matters very much.’
‘The slashing must have been done when she was still alive,’ the doctor went on. ‘Otherwise she’d hardly have bled so much.’
‘H’m,’ said Wyndham again. He turned to Fen. ‘Look at that, sir. I suppose the killer thought she was dead when he started his butchering.’
The body of Louise Munro lay on its back. She had been a tall, dark-haired, slender girl; and a dispassionate consideration of her face, even in death, might have seen there signs of weakness and indecision. The features were distorted to a hideous mask; the eyes were bulging; the flesh was cyanosed and swollen; and there were traces of bloodstained froth at the nose and mouth.
Wyndham bent and turned the body over. The black evening gown had left her back naked to the waist, and the soft white skin was now scarred with a dozen long deep cuts, on which the blood was clotted and black. Indeed, there seemed to be blood everywhere on the body and on the floor round it.
‘Yes,’ said Fen, almost to himself, ‘someone disliked that young woman very much … This is one of those occasions when the thought of judicial hanging gives me a positive pleasure. Is there anything else I ought to see?’
‘The gloves,’ Wyndham replied, ‘and the knife. They’re over here. He crossed to the mantelpiece and Fen followed him. ‘Both smothered in blood, as you’d expect. They were on the floor by the body. It seems that the knife comes from the kitchen. There are no prints on it. And no name in the gloves, which seem to be quite ordinary.’
Fen nodded. He had cast no more than a cursory glance at the exhibits. ‘She was throttled?’ he enquired.
‘I think so. What’s your opinion, doctor?’
‘Almost certainly,’ said the doctor. ‘The bruising’s distinctive.’
‘Well, sir,’ said Wyndham, ‘if there’s nothing else, I think we might have her taken away. Has the ambulance arrived, doctor?’
‘It’s just come, I think,’ said the doctor, who was peering between the curtains. ‘But there’s a beastly little red sports car in the way of it.’
‘Beastly?’ said Fen indignantly. ‘There’s nothing beastly about Lily Christine. Still, I suppose I’d better go and move her.’
When he returned to the house, Wyndham was talking to a police sergeant in the hall.
‘First of all, find out who has alibis for that game of hide-and-seek and who hasn’t,’ he was saying. ‘And then when you’ve brought me the list you’d better go and search the girl’s bedroom … Oh, and send’ – he pulled out a notebook and consulted it – ‘Noel Carter and Janice Mond to me in the study.’
As they returned there: ‘Hide-and-seek?’ said Fen interrogatively.
‘It happened during a game,’ Wyndham explained, ‘which of course means a general lack of alibi … The girl wasn’t dead when they found her, you know.’
‘Not dead?’ Fen was startled. ‘Oh, my dear paws. Was she conscious?’
‘Yes, and said a few words. Nothing very revealing, though.’ They had reached the study, and Wyndham lowered his considerable bulk with obvious relief into a chair. ‘I’ll get this fellow Carter to run over it for you.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Just one of the guests – a young man. He has an unassuming air and a good deal of basic conceit. Also he’s rather more fussy and old-maidish than suits his years, but I think he’s all right, and he appears to have a definite alibi.’
‘And the girl – Janice somebody?’
‘She was with him all through the game. They were canoodling in a summer-house.’
‘Good God.’ Fen was shocked. ‘In this weather?’
‘I know. Still, there are the Esquimaux, of course. I often wonder how they manage.’
‘Igloos are very warm, I believe,’ said Fen, interested.
‘Yes.’ Wyndham abandoned this topic with evident reluctance. ‘Anyway, she’s a forward little minx. And got her hooks in him. The more I see of women looking for husbands,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘the more I’m convinced of the total unscrupulousness of the sex.’
There was a knock at the door, and Noel and Janice came in. Fen noted with interest that the girl was considerably more at ease than the man, though both were a little pale. Wyndham motioned them to sit down.
‘I’m sorry we have to trouble you again,’ he said. ‘But Professor Fen is interested in this business, and I think it would be a good thing if he heard your part of it in your own words.’
Noel shrugged. ‘That’s perfectly all right by me. You know, we’ve tried and tried, but neither of us has the least idea who that man was we saw. It can’t have been someone from outside, I suppose?’
Wyndham shook his head grimly. ‘We’ve checked on wheel-marks and foot-prints in the snow, Mr Carter. The only wheel-marks are those of Mr Hadow’s car, the only foot-prints are yours and Miss Mond’s, to and from the summer-house.’
‘So that’s that,’ said Janice, absently twisting a sapphire ring on her finger. ‘Our old friend the Closed Circle.’ Unexpectedly, she shivered. ‘Thank God Noel and I are out of it. You don’t suspect us of collusion, do you, Inspector?’
‘I don’t suspect anyone of anything at the moment, Miss Mond,’ Wyndham answered evasively. ‘Now, Mr Carter: you and Miss Mond were recalled from the summer-house by a pre-arranged signal – the ringing of the gong. That was at 10.40, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. It was five minutes earlier than we expected. Hadow arrived, and Duncan – that’s MacAdam – brought the game to a premature stop.’
‘And you heard Mr Hadow drive up to the door?’
‘Yes.’
‘This isn’t the detective novelist, is it?’ Fen interrupted.
‘Apparently, sir, yes.’
‘Admirable,’ Fen murmured. ‘I’ve always wanted to meet him. The King of the Groves is almost as frightening a book as The Burning Court, and I can’t say better than that … Sorry. Go on.’
Wyndham said:
‘Then you must have arrived outside the windows of the long gallery at about 10:41?’
‘I suppose so.’ Noel frowned, without apparent reason. ‘And were confronted with the spectacle of the murderer kissing the murderee under the mistletoe …’
‘Noel,’ said Janice with sudden urgency, ‘I’ve only just thought … She must have been … That is, he must have started by then … I remember saying she looked very languid. Oh, God,’ Janice concluded in a small voice.
‘I don’t see,’ Noel protested, ‘why it shouldn’t have happened after we went away … Were we the last to get back to the drawing-room? It would seem to depend on that.’
‘I’ll check on it, sir,’ said the inspector. ‘It may narrow down the times a little. Or again it may not. That kiss you saw could have been a perfectly innocent affair, with the girl alive and well. There’s no reason, on the evidence, why the murder shouldn’t have been committed afterwards.’
‘But who by? We were all in the draw— Oh, hell. No, we weren’t, though.’
Wyndham looked at him sharply, and tapped his pencil on the arm of his chair. ‘Can you remember who was not in the drawing-room, Mr Carter – between the end of the hide-and-seek game and the discovery of the body?’
‘Yes. I think I can, that is. Patricia – that’s Patricia Davenant – had broken a shoulder-strap, and went up to her room to change. Then four of the older people got up a bridge game in the library – old Murchison and his wife, and Mr and Mrs Joyce. I imagine, though, that they must have been together all the time. And Duncan went to show Peter Hadow his room. But damn it all, it would have been abnormally risky at that time. And what would Louise have been doing, alone in the long gallery?’
‘Waiting for someone, perhaps,’ Janice suggested. ‘And I suppose the assumption is that if the kiss we saw was a genuine innocuous affair, the man concerned is afraid to come forward after what’s happened.’
Wyndham nodded. ‘That’s it, more or less. But I agree that the other notion’s more plausible – namely, that the murderer heard you coming in the middle of his – activities, and snatched the girl up and kissed her – kissed her: my God, what a nerve – to put you off the scent. There’s only one door to the long gallery, isn’t there? – the one that leads through the vestibule into the hall? Well, then, if he’d just left her, and made for that, he would have been approaching the light and there would have been every chance of your recognizing him …’
‘Hey!’ Fen howled. There was an astonished silence. ‘You seem to forget,’ he went on waspishly, ‘that I know nothing whatever about all this. You daze me, with your alternative hypotheses. Let me get the set-up clear. When you looked into the long gallery, the lights were on?’
‘A light was on,’ said Noel. ‘A small standard lamp at the end by the door. The other end, of course, where the couple was standing, was almost dark.’
‘And all the curtains were open?’
‘Yes.’
Fen muttered something unintelligible, and lit a cigarette. Then he went on:
‘Doesn’t it strike you as extraordinary that a murderer should go about his business in a lighted room – even a dimly-lighted room – with the curtains wide; and the rest of the party pottering about anywhere and everywhere in and out of the house?’
‘I don’t think he can have expected anyone to be outside,’ said Noel.
‘And then, you see, the lights were all turned off for the game,’ said Janice.
‘At the main,’ said Noel.
‘And then when they were all turned on again—’
‘Five minutes earlier than anyone expected.’
‘– it must have taken him completely by surprise.’
‘And he can’t have missed hearing us coming.’
‘The lights went on just as we rounded the corner of the house.’
‘So you see—’
‘Yes, just a minute, please,’ said Fen, eyeing them somewhat askance. ‘I think I’ve managed to grasp all that. Can’t you say anything definite about the man?’
Noel sneezed, and gazed reproachfully at Janice, who refused to look at him. Through the folds of his handkerchief he mumbled:
‘Well, he was wearing a dinner-jacket; but so was every other male in the party.’
‘His waist-line certainly wasn’t more than average,’ Janice added, ‘which cuts out one or two people. I don’t know about the height. Average, I should say.’
‘Yes,’ said Noel. ‘And his head was in shadow, so he might have been dark or fair.’
Fen asked:
‘Could it have been a woman dressed as a man?’
They stared at him. ‘I suppose so,’ said Janice. ‘But then there would have been no time to change back again. All the women in the party were present and correct when we got back to the drawing-room – as far as I know, anyway.’
Fen turned to Wyndham. ‘What about the servants?’
‘They’re out of it,’ said Wyndham definitely. ‘They went off duty at ten o’clock, and held a Christmas Eve celebration in their own sitting-room. They were all together during the whole of the relevant time. Thank God one can narrow down the field that far.’
‘Ah,’ said Fen gnomically. He resumed his questions. ‘When you left the window of the long gallery, you presumably didn’t go straight back into the drawing-room? If you had, you would have arrived before, or simultaneously with, the person who was with Mrs Munro.’
‘No, we didn’t go straight back,’ said Noel.
‘Noel insisted on kissing me outside the front door,’ Janice explained with maidenly prevarication.
‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Noel, and sneezed again.
‘Very proper,’ Fen commented, beaming at them like some sentimental old aunt. ‘And you saw no one in the hall when at last you did get inside?’
‘No one.’
‘What makes you so sure that the girl you saw in the long gallery was Louise Munro?’
‘Now I come to think of it, said Noel blankly, ‘I’m not at all sure. In fact, it was Janice who said—’
‘She was wearing Louise’s jade bracelet, anyway,’ Janice interrupted. ‘It caught the light. So obviously, I assumed it was Louise.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck half-past midnight, in tiny, fluid chimes.
‘All right,’ said Fen with a sigh. ‘Now, about finding the unfortunate girl. What time would that be?’
‘About five past eleven, I believe,’ Noel replied. He lit a cigarette and sucked at it dispiritedly. ‘Five of us went across to the long gallery. We were in that deplorably jocose condition which always seems to be induced by playing children’s games.’
‘Who were the five?’
‘Janice, myself, Duncan, Richard Neame and Simon Moore.’
‘Who are Richard Neame and Simon Moore?’
‘Richard’s a master at some derelict boys’ school or other. Very stodgy and earnest about Education. Also, he’s quite insanely in love with that little b-i-t-c-h Patricia Davenant, and engaged to marry her. Simon Moore’s middle-aged, very hail-fellow-well-met, and a professional week-ender. He wanted to marry Louise, but only for her money, I fancy.’
‘It’s a funny thing,’ said Fen reminiscently. ‘I always intended to marry some rich woman or other. But I never came across one,’ he concluded with pathos. ‘Well, well … Anyway, you were all together when you found Louise Munro.’
‘Yes.’ Noel absently stubbed out his cigarette, which he had hardly started to smoke, and lit another one. ‘Janice let out a shriek like a startled gull—’
‘Oh, don’t be an idiot, Noel,’ said Janice with exaggerated weariness.
‘– and Duncan lifted Louise’s head; she was lying on her back. He said: ‘She’s still alive’, and then she opened her eyes and looked at us, and Duncan asked her who – who was responsible. I don’t think I shall ever forget the sounds she made when she tried to speak, and what she finally said.’ Noel paused, soberly.
‘Well?’
‘She said: “Patricia … in danger … help her.” And then she stopped, and Richard looked round like a startled rabbit, and scuttled off with Simon Moore to Patricia’s bedroom. MacAdam said: “Tell us who did this,” and Louise muttered – poor girl, she must have been in horrible pain: “Mustn’t be destroyed … I’ll tell you … who …”
‘And then she died.’
Noel put out the second cigarette. For a moment there was a silence. Fen broke it by asking:
‘And what about this other girl – Patricia?’
‘She was all right, but—’ Noel turned to Wyndham. ‘You know more about this part than I do.’
Wyndham stirred uneasily in his chair. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It seems that Miss Davenant is in the habit of taking a tonic every night.’ He paused, and added heavily: ‘We found a large quantity of strychnine in it.’
Sergeant Stokes came in, and deposited a sheet of paper in front of the inspector. He was a ruddy, amiable young man.
‘It’s easier than we thought,’ he announced. ‘Only three men and one woman unaccounted for during the whole of the game. It would appear’ – the Sergeant grinned unprofessionally – ‘that people hid, for the most part, in couples. Mr MacAdam and an old gentleman named Mr Murchison have partial alibis. They met about five minutes after the game started, and drank whisky by candle-light until Mr Hadow arrived. No one admits to having gone into the long gallery: they say it was too near and obvious a hiding-place.’
Wyndham uttered a faint grunt. ‘The body’s been taken away?’
‘Yes.’
‘In that case you can transfer Scott from the door of the long gallery to me here. I shall want to interview some of these people. You’d better go now and search Mrs Munro’s room.’
The Sergeant vaguely parodied a salute, and departed. Wyndham read aloud from the paper on his knees.
‘Patricia Davenant. Richard Neame. Simon Moore. Edgar Nathan. It seems they’ve none of them got alibis. Who’s Edgar Nathan?’
‘A ghostly man,’ Noel explained obliquely. ‘High church. Arty. Blue in the jowl.’
‘And wearing a dinner-jacket?’ Fen put in.
‘No. Clerical black … Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, from behind, and in a dim light, it would look like a dinner-jacket.’
The constable who had been guarding the door of the long gallery came in.
‘Sit down, Scott,’ said Wyndham. ‘I’ll have something for you to do in a moment … Mr Carter, I suppose there’s no doubt that Mrs Munro was all right immediately before the game of hide-and-seek?’
‘No doubt whatever. I saw her myself.’
‘Then there are two possibilities: either she was killed during the game, or she was killed in the interval between the end of the game and the time when she was found. Now: those without alibis for one or both of those periods are Patricia Davenant, Richard Neame, Simon Moore, Edgar Nathan, Duncan MacAdam and Peter Hadow. I include the last two on the assumption that MacAdam didn’t stay with Hadow once he’d shown him up to his room. The bridge-party I should think we could rule out. Is it impossible that either Neame, Moore or Nathan could have been the man you saw in the long gallery with Mrs Munro?’
‘No,’ said Noel immediately. ‘It might have been any of them.’
‘Was Mrs Munro the sort of person to allow virtually anyone to kiss her? I ask on the assumption that she was killed after the episode you witnessed.’
Janice had the grace to look uncomfortable. ‘Yes, she was,’ she said. ‘Louise was quite promiscuous. I’m sorry if that sounds catty, but it happens to be true.’
Wyndham sighed. ‘Thank you very much. Is there anything else you want to ask, Professor Fen?’
Fen, who had been fidgeting with a musical-box and had succeeded in inducing it to perform The Bluebells of Scotland, said:
‘Yes, I’ve got two questions. First, are you sure Louise Munro wasn’t raving when she said those few words after you found her?’
Noel hesitated, thinking back. ‘No, I’m certain she wasn’t,’ he answered at last. ‘I think she had something clear and definite and sane to say to us. Anyway, she was right about Patricia.’
‘I quite agree,’ said Janice with decision.
‘And second,’ said Fen, attempting to stop The Bluebells of Scotland and failing, ‘how long did you two stay kissing outside the front door?’
‘Not more than two minutes,’ Janice replied primly. ‘I wouldn’t allow it.’
Noel made an incoherent noise, and sneezed a third time.
‘Well, I must drive you away,’ said Wyndham. ‘But I’d better have one or two details for my report before you go. Age, Mr Carter?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
‘Occupation?’
‘Assyriology.
‘Scarcely very funny, is that, Mr Carter?’
‘Independent means, then. But my hobby’s Assyriology.’ (‘Cripes,’ said Janice.)
‘Age, Miss Mond?’
‘Twenty.’
‘Occupation?’
‘Bright Young Person.’ Janice grinned. ‘Schoolgirl emeritus. Prospectively, Mrs Noel Carter.’
‘Like hell!’ said Noel, startled. They went out, arguing.
‘Well, there we are,’ said Wyndham with some satisfaction. ‘That clears things up a little.’
With a savage rending of clockwork, The Bluebells of Scotland came to an end. Fen hastily replaced the instrument on its table. ‘Tell me about the strychnine,’ he said.
‘It’s only an assumption as yet. But what ought to be an ordinary, watery tonic now tastes very bitter and unpleasant. Of course I shall have it analysed.’
‘Strychnine.’ Fen was thoughtful. ‘Rather a silly poison to use: it can be detected so easily … How did you come to find out about it?’
‘It was that fellow Neame. He’s daft about the girl Patricia. As far as I can make out, he spent about half-an-hour searching her room for spring-guns and what not, forbade her leave his sight, and eventually thought of poisons and tasted this tonic. I could scarcely get a look at Mrs Munro for the fuss he was making about it when I arrived.’
Fen snorted. ‘Well, he didn’t try to poison her, that’s certain. What do you propose doing now?’
‘See these people without alibis, I should think. How about having MacAdam first?’
‘Yes,’ said Fen; and added hopefully: ‘Since this house belongs to him, he might give us some whisky.’
This, in fact, was what MacAdam did; and Fen, restored to his normal good humour, punctuated the interview which followed with an unearthly rendering of I saw three kings go sailing by. ‘I know there’s something obscurely wrong about the words,’ he admitted when remonstrated with. ‘But the tune has always seemed to me a very nice one.’
Macadam was undoubtedly worried; the lines of his plump, mobile face were as if graven into it. He held an unlighted cigar between his fingers, and his greying hair was slightly dishevelled. The duties of hospitality performed, he sat down as though exhausted, and said:
‘Well?’
‘A few gaps to fill in, Mr MacAdam,’ said Wyndham cheerfully. ‘I won’t keep you longer than I can help.’
MacAdam gestured vaguely. ‘That’s all right. I should have been up most of the night, anyway. So would the others. Fire away.’
‘In this game of hide-and-seek, you were – what’s the technical term?’
‘“He”. I didn’t do much looking, though,’
‘Apparently not. Did the people concerned expect you to do any looking?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. The fact is, Inspector, that there are quite a number of young people in the party, and they’d got to the stage when they were looking amorously at one another and wondering how in God’s name they could find an excuse to get away and spoon in a dark corner. So I gave them the excuse. I’m sure no one regarded the hiding-and-seeking very seriously.’
‘The game began when?’
‘At ten twenty-five. I set a strict time-limit of twenty minutes – though in the event it was only fifteen.’
‘You yourself turned off the lights?’
‘Yes, from the main switch in the hall. I’d warned the servants about it, and provided them with candles. I’d also provided myself with a candle, I may say, as I didn’t propose to sit about in darkness the whole time.’
‘Where were you all when the game started?’
‘Outside in the hall. When I said “Go” and turned the lights off, there were the inevitable whispers and giggles and shrieks and people bumping into one another.
‘Then in a minute or two they all made off, tant bien que mal, and I could hear old Murchison cursing like a trooper as he tried to find the whisky on the drawing-room sideboard. I lit my candle and chatted to him until Peter Hadow arrived. Poor fellow, he must have had a nasty turn when I opened the door for him; he probably thought that it was his last hour, and that they’d come for him with a coffin and tapers. Anyway, I set Murchison to belabour the gong, and then turned on the lights.’
‘And people came back more or less at once?’
‘Yes. I think that as the gong was early they must have thought there’d been some kind of accident.’
‘You didn’t see anyone emerge from the vestibule which leads into the long gallery?’
‘No. I went straight back into the drawing-room, as a matter of fact.’
‘Can you remember in what order people returned?’
‘Absolutely impossible, I’m afraid. I believe Simon Moore was among the first – I remember getting him a drink. And certainly Noel Carter and Janice Mond were last, because just before they arrived I’d been checking up to make sure everybody was there. But beyond that, I really can’t say; obviously one wasn’t paying much attention.’
‘Thank you. And what then?’
‘I introduced Janice and Noel to Peter Hadow. Patricia Davenant disappeared upstairs to fix her dress. And I took Peter to his room.’
‘Did you stay with him?’
‘No. I told him to come down when he was ready, and left him to it.’
‘You returned to the drawing-room immediately, then?’
‘No again. I’d got somewhat grubby during the course of the evening, so I went to my own room for a wash.’
‘That took you how long?’
‘Oh … say ten minutes. Perhaps a little more.’
Wyndham paused for a moment to consider. Then said: ‘As regards that knife that was used: I suppose unobserved access to the kitchen would be easy enough, wouldn’t it?’
‘After dinner was over and cleared away, yes. The servants have been having some sort of party in their own sitting-room.’
‘I see.’ Wyndham began drawing mermaids on a blank page of his notebook. Fen hummed furtively. MacAdam lay back limply in his chair; the cigar which he held was still unlighted.
‘How long have you known Mrs Munro?’ Wyndham asked.
‘About four years, on and off. I met her at a first night in town, just before she was married. We continued to run across one another, but this is the first time she’s been down here. As a matter of fact, I really only invited her because Peter Hadow wanted a chance to meet her.’
‘Why was that, sir?’
‘It seems she was somehow connected with the Forrest murder case, just before the war.
‘What?’ Fen sat up with such suddenness that he nearly knocked over the glass of whisky which was balanced precariously on the arm of his chair. He rescued it in time, however, and clasped it tenderly between his hands. ‘What was her maiden name?’
‘Benest, I think.’
‘Oh, my fur and whiskers,’ Fen exclaimed. He generally had recourse to the White Rabbit in moments of high excitement. ‘Sorry. Go on.’
MacAdam looked curiously at him. ‘I can’t go on, I’m afraid. I don’t take any interest in these things, and I only know the case by name. Peter’s the man to ask. He’s got it all at his finger-tips.’
Wyndham blew his nose. It was evident that his recollection of the trial in question was of the vaguest, and equally evident that he was not going to admit this in front of MacAdam. A premonitory rumbling in his throat suggested that some kind of evasive manoeuvre was in prospect, but whatever it was, Fen forestalled it.
‘Can I make use of your constable for a moment?’ he asked; and on Wyndham’s assenting, hastily scribbled some names on a piece of paper, went to the door, opened it, and fetched in Scott, who was hovering about in the hall and was manifestly glad to be given something to do.
Fen handed him the paper and said: ‘Will you go into the drawing-room, please, and ask the guests collectively if any of them either knew or had heard of any of the people on this list before August, 1939? You’d better read out the names one by one, and make a note of whatever response there may be in each case.’ He turned to Wyndham. ‘Is that all right as far as you’re concerned, Inspector?’
Wyndham nodded. ‘But what are the names?’ he enquired when Scott had gone.
‘Simply your list of suspects,’ said Fen, grinning. ‘Sorry to interrupt you.’
‘I haven’t much more to ask,’ Wyndham admitted. ‘Mrs Munro was well-off, wasn’t she, Mr MacAdam?’
‘I believe so.’
‘Do you happen to know who was her heir?’
‘I don’t at all.’
‘Well, I do,’ Fen interposed complacently. ‘Or at all events, I have a shrewd idea. But more of that when we’ve heard what Hadow has to say. I’ve got a question, too. There must have been some kind of attack on Patricia Davenant previous to this evening’s business, mustn’t there?’
Wyndham glanced at him sharply. ‘Had you been told about that?’
‘No,’ Fen countered with some indignation. ‘I deduced it. What’s the good of a detective if he doesn’t deduce anything? But what exactly happened?’
MacAdam shrugged. ‘Well, we’ve only her account of it. She came down two evenings ago looking a bit bruised and dishevelled, and said someone – she didn’t know who, or whether it was a man or a woman – had been robbing her room, and had stolen her private diary. It seems that she went into her room to fetch something, and was tripped up and tumbled on to the floor before she had time to as much as put the light on. Apparently some kind of brief wrestling-match ensued, but Patricia banged her head against the chest of drawers, and the other person was out of the room and away before she had a chance to recover.’
‘Where were the other guests at this time?’
‘They were unpacking in their rooms. That’s really the trouble. There was only Murchison and his wife and myself downstairs.’
‘So it could have been any of them?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘What did you do about it?’
‘What could I do about it?’ MacAdam spread his hands in a gesture of humorous resignation. ‘As far as was possible, I simply ignored the whole affair. Patricia wasn’t really upset. She’s far from being a hysterical type, and when she came to tell us about it, she was much more astonished than frightened. There wasn’t any kind of clue …’
‘Nothing besides the diary was taken?’
‘No … Oh, but there was one odd thing. Patricia’s typewriter had been opened, and I imagine used. Of course, poor old Richard was in a state of complete panic. He’s utterly devoted to that girl.’
‘And yet,’ said Fen, ‘they weren’t together during the game of hide-and-seek.’
MacAdam smiled; he looked tired. ‘That was due to a ridiculous quarrel earlier in the evening. Nothing important, of course – Richard, who is sérieux, raised some portentous objection to playing children’s games, Patricia said he was pompous, and so it went on. Naturally, Richard became vastly repentant almost immediately afterwards, but Patricia snubbed him, in her own placid way, and he’s been running about all evening looking like a whipped dog.’ MacAdam chuckled.
‘Just one more thing. Had Louise Munro been behaving in any way oddly since she arrived?’
‘Oh, yes.’ MacAdam was looking at them from narrowed eyes. ‘I think – in fact, I’m certain – that she was frightened of something. Or someone.’
As he went out, MacAdam almost collided with P.C. Scott in the doorway. He left with instructions that all except Janice and Noel, himself, and the remainder of the suspects, might now go to bed or otherwise disperse in whatever manner they pleased.
‘Get ivy and hull, woman,’ Fen sang as the door closed behind him, ‘deck up this house, and take this same pot for to seethe and to souse. I like the peremptory, patriarchal air of that carol,’ he commented.
‘Well, Scott, what results?’ Wyndham asked.
‘A blank, sir,’ said the constable, swelling visibly with the consciousness of duty well performed. ‘A complete blank. None of the guests knew or had heard of any of these persons’ – he tapped the paper with the nail of his forefinger – ‘prior to August, 1939.’
‘Which is unhelpful,’ Fen remarked. ‘Well, never mind.’
‘What exactly was the point of the question, sir?’ Wyndham demanded.
‘It concerns the Forrest case. Hadow will be able to tell you more about it than I can, but I suggest that we leave him until last.’
The clock on the mantelpiece struck one.
‘Well, sir,’ said Wyndham, eyeing it sleepily, who do you think we should see now?’
‘It hardly matters, really. What about this priest – Nathan?’
‘Very good, sir. Scott, ask Mr Nathan to step in here for a minute. By the way,’ Wyndham added when the constable was gone, ‘isn’t it odd that none of these guests should have heard of Hadow – he being a writer – before 1939?’
‘He didn’t start publishing until the war,’ Fen explained absently; he seemed to be thinking of something else. ‘Have you made any attempt to trace these gloves?’
‘Not yet, sir. There hasn’t been time.’
‘Well, I suggest you show them to each of these people we interview. As they were left by the body, they’re not likely to lead us anywhere. But we can try.’
In fact, the gloves proved to be Nathan’s. He identified them without hesitation. He had left them, he said, in the pocket of his coat, and presumably anyone could have removed them. Obviously (he added rather uncertainly), if he had committed this appalling crime, he would not have used his own gloves; though on the other hand (here he grew noticeably depressed), he might have done, on the assumption that the police would suspect him the less for leaving so obvious a clue. It depended on the degree of sophistication one postulated in the criminal mind.
He had a light, quick, tenor voice, with a tendency to gabble; and Noel’s description of him – ‘High church, arty, blue in the jowl’ – had certainly covered his most salient characteristics. In addition, he was noticeably thin – though broad-shouldered – and possessed remarkably penetrating brown eyes. His general appearance was untidy, and his coat was speckled with dandruff on the shoulders, collar and lapels.
‘Jesus natus hodie,’ Fen chanted. ‘Nowell, nowell—’
‘Just a minute, please, sir,’ Wyndham interrupted. This persistent carolling was evidently fraying his nerves. ‘Now, Mr Nathan, you were alone, I understand, during the game of hide-and-seek?’
Nathan was sitting forward in his chair, his bony hands clasped together on his knee.
‘Yes, precisely,’ he said. ‘In point of fact I went to my own room. I’m sorry to say that on the whole I’m rather deficient in the party spirit. I was relieved when the gong was sounded five minutes earlier than had been anticipated.’
‘Were you one of the earliest to return to the drawing-room?’
‘I don’t think so. Nor, for that matter, one of the latest. Several people were crossing the hall as I came down the stairs.’
‘I see. Did you know Mrs Munro well?’
‘Hardly at all. I met her for the first time when I arrived the day before yesterday. To me she was just one of a number of hardly differentiated “other guests”.’
‘And after you returned to the drawing-room?’
‘I remained there until the crime was discovered. I think that quite a number of people can testify to my presence.’
In the hall outside, there was a low murmur of conversation as people went up to bed, and once they heard the front door open and shut, to allow the departure of an elderly couple who felt unable to stay in the house after what had happened. They apologized at length to MacAdam, who responded with suitable comprehension and penitence.
‘And can you throw any light at all, sir,’ said Wyndham, ‘on either the attack on Miss Davenant or the murder of Mrs Munro?’
‘As regards the former, no. I was unpacking in my room when it occurred. As regards the latter—’ Nathan hesitated.
‘Well, sir?’
Nathan gave the inspector a quick and rather chilly smile. ‘A small point, and probably it means nothing. As I returned to the drawing-room after the game, I saw someone emerge from the vestibule which leads into the long gallery.’
‘Oh?’ said Wyndham quickly. ‘And who was that, sir?’
‘His name is Simon Moore.’
Moore replaced Nathan, who returned to the others. He was scrupulously dressed, but offered a faint, unanalysable impression of shabbiness. There was a sort of generalized weariness about him, too: the weariness of a man who has spent his life striving for something which in his inmost heart he knows is not worth while – and has even then failed to obtain it.
He might have been forty years of age, with a tendency to plumpness and the dispiriting, automatic smile of the professional bon homme perpetually lingering on his lips. His black hair was remarkably thick and fine, and he wore rimless octagonal spectacles, which gave him a slightly transatlantic appearance. His manner throughout the interview, though superficially straightforward and agreeable, struck both Fen and Wyndham as being taut and strained. And there might be some justification for this, since his position had, obviously, its dangers.
He made no attempt to deny Nathan’s assertion.
‘Yes, I was in the vestibule,’ he agreed in a soft, low-pitched voice. ‘It’s quite a comfortable little room, and I knew as well as anyone else did that the game wasn’t going to be taken very seriously.
‘Did you enter the long gallery at all, sir?’
‘No. Not at any time.’
‘Did you see anyone else do so?’
‘Yes,’ said Moore unexpectedly. ‘That’s to say I didn’t see them – it was pitch dark. But, I heard them.’
‘Them?’
‘Him, then,’ said Moore with a touch of impatience. ‘Or her – I don’t know which. It was only one person, anyway. I’d just finished groping about for a chair when this person came in from the hall. For some reason or other I sat quite still and said nothing – I think I imagined that after all Duncan was going about looking for people. At all events, I don’t think that whoever it was can have known that I was there. I noticed’ – he paused for a moment – ‘I noticed that he or she was breathing rather quickly and loudly, as though excited. But in the circumstances, that didn’t surprise me much.’
‘And you heard no one else go through into the long gallery?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure you can’t say whether it was a man or a woman, sir? You see what I’m getting at, I’ve no doubt. Both Mrs Munro and someone else were in that gallery during the game of hide-and-seek.’
‘Yes, I understand, but I can’t help you. It was perfectly possible for anyone to enter the long gallery before I went into the vestibule. After the lights had gone out, I stayed put in the hall until most of the people had cleared off.’
‘I see. Now, sir, did you hear any sounds from the long gallery while you were in the vestibule?’
‘I heard sounds from all over the house,’ Moore answered drily. ‘Bumps and shrieks and giggles and whispers. You can’t let a gang of people loose in the darkness, in a house which most of them don’t properly know, without that happening. Mostly it was in the early stages, though, before everyone got settled. Where it all came from, I honestly can’t say. One’s sense of direction seems to go to pot in the darkness.’
‘You mentioned whispers. If you heard whispering, it must surely have come from near by?’
Moore took off his glasses to polish them. His weak sight made him look oddly defenceless.
‘I suppose so,’ he said, ‘but it might equally well have come from the hall as from the long gallery. Of course, I couldn’t distinguish any words.’
‘And when the gong was sounded—’
‘I went out almost immediately. In fact, I was one of the first to get to the drawing-room. After that, I stayed there until – until I heard the news.’
‘I’m afraid this is a personal question, but it must be asked. Were you in love with Mrs Munro?’
‘No.’ Moore flushed. ‘But no doubt you’ve heard that I wanted to marry her.’
‘Ah.’ Wyndham evaded the slightly aggressive invitation to probe Moore’s motives in the matter. ‘You had asked her to marry you?’
‘Yes. I asked her yesterday – that is, on the 24th. She refused.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Wyndham with a bizarre and palpably insincere sympathy. ‘Were you upset by her refusal?’
‘Hardly. I intended to ask her again as soon as the opportunity offered.’
‘Can you tell us why she refused you, sir?’
‘She suggested that I only wanted to marry her for her money,’ Moore replied coolly. ‘That was her ostensible reason. Actually, of course, she was a minx. She got a great deal of fun out of having men tagging after her.’
‘Was she particularly attached to anyone other than yourself?’
‘She wasn’t particularly attached to me, I can assure you … Anyway, the answer is no. She was prepared to allow almost any man to make love to her – up to a point – but apart from myself she had no regular devotees.’ Moore paused, and as Wyndham said nothing, went on: ‘I’m sorry to say that I didn’t think her a very agreeable woman. She was what I should call a chaste wanton – suggestive of positively Turkish carnalities, but in practice as forbidding as a block of ice.’
Wyndham appeared to be considering the possible characteristics of Turkish carnality.
‘As far as I knew,’ Moore concluded, ‘there was only one person to whom she was wholeheartedly and unselfishly devoted – her brother. And it seems that he’s in prison.’
‘Ah,’ said Fen significantly. For some time he had been maintaining a gruesome and unnatural silence. ‘You interest me enormously.’ When Moore had gone, and P.C. Scott had been dispatched to fetch Ronald Neame, he drank some whisky and added: ‘I suppose the point of your last questions was to discover if Louise Munro was likely to have made an assignation with anyone in the long gallery. Evidently it wasn’t only likely, but virtually certain. Everyone seems to agree that she was as promiscuous as a rabbit.’
‘As a rabbit,’ Wyndham repeated, nodding mournfully. ‘Though as to Turkish carnalities, I should have said rabbits were rather addicted to them.’
Richard Neame appeared promptly. He was a stolid man of thirty to thirty-five with a defensive air which Fen concluded was due less to present circumstances than to his avocation. Most schoolmasters acquire it, in one form or another; it is almost a necessity in dealing with the ghastly perspicuity of the young. With it went an authoritativeness which was vaguely offensive. It was evident moreover, that he was far more concerned with the potential fate of Patricia Davenant than with the actual immolation of Louise Munro – regarding which, indeed, he displayed considerable indifference.
He announced, rather surprisingly, that during the game of hide-and-seek he had locked himself in a lavatory. He had wished, he explained stiffly, to be with Miss Davenant, but a slight disagreement earlier in the evening had made that undesirable. He had, found the game trying, and thought it on the whole unnecessary. When it was over, he had returned immediately to the drawing-room.
‘And what impelled you, sir, to join in the search for Mrs Munro?’
Neame appeared taken aback. He stammered a little. ‘I simply – I simply felt that it was my duty to assist.’
‘Quite so. And will you tell us what Mrs Munro said before she died?’
‘All I heard was that Patricia was in danger.’ Neame had lost some of his stiffness and spoke more vigorously. ‘That was enough for me. If you’d seen the ghastly state that wretched woman was in …’ His self-consciousness abruptly returned. ‘Naturally, I left, and made straight for Patricia’s – Miss Davenant’s – room. Simon Moore went with me. She’d just finished changing when we arrived, and thank God, she was all right. We looked about the room a bit, and at last it occurred to me to make sure that her medicines and so forth were all right. I put a little of the tonic in my mouth, and asked her what it normally tasted like …’ He gestured angrily. ‘The rest you know.’
‘Exactly sir,’ Wyndham’s tones were soothing. ‘And you can throw no light on the previous attack on Miss Davenant?’
‘I wish I could. I should like to get my hands on whoever was responsible.’
Fen regarded him thoughtfully. He had heard sufficient of Neame’s infatuation with Patricia Davenant to make him suspicious of its sincerity. But that the man was infatuated he had now not the smallest doubt.
‘Had you known Mrs Munro long?’ he asked.
‘Didn’t meet her till I came here,’ said Neame shortly. The subject of Louise Munro seemed almost to irritate him. And apparently he had some suspicion that heartlessness might be imputed to him, for he mumbled conventionally: ‘Very tragic affair.’
He departed uttering various admonitions about the future safety of Patricia Davenant, the responsibility for which, he stated, rested entirely on the police.
‘He didn’t try to kill her, anyway,’ said Fen after the door had closed behind him. ‘Although at Yule it bloweth cool,’ he burst out suddenly, ‘and frost doth grip the fingers …’
He was cut short by the arrival of Sergeant Stokes, in a state of high excitement.
‘I’ve been through Mrs Munro’s room,’ the sergeant announced, ‘and made two discoveries that I think’ll prove to be important.’ He beamed expectantly at his superior.
‘Well, don’t stand there,’ said Wyndham, justifiably annoyed, ‘with that oafish smirk on your face. What have you found?’
‘First of all,’ said the sergeant dramatically, ‘a letter which shows that Mrs Munro was blackmailing someone.’ He handed Wyndham a plain white envelope with the flap tucked in. ‘And second, what I’m pretty certain is Miss Davenant’s diary.’
A stasis occurred while the provenance of the diary was checked and Patricia Davenant’s finger-prints were taken. In the end it proved that the only prints on the diary were those of Patricia herself and of Louise Munro.
‘So Mrs Munro took it,’ said Wyndham blankly. ‘And I suppose it was she who attacked Miss Davenant. But in God’s name, why …?’
He flicked over the pages of the little green-bound book. ‘Surely there’s nothing in this she could possibly want to see. It’s little more than a list of engagements, and as far as I can see, there’s no one in this party, barring Neame and MacAdam, who’s as much as mentioned in it. And there’s not a single damaging secret that I can make out. What do you think about it, sir?’
‘I think,’ said Fen from the depths of his armchair, ‘that Louise Munro was as disappointed as you are; that she was expecting damaging secrets, too, and likewise failed to find them.’
‘Is it possible that she was responsible for the strychnine?’
‘And had a fit of death-bed repentance? It’s possible,’ Fen admitted grudgingly, ‘but on the whole I don’t think so. That would leave Louise Munro’s murder out of account, and I’m certain these things are all bound up together. Believe me, there’s only one murderer running around loose – and just as well, too,’ he ended somewhat peevishly, ‘or we should all be in our graves in a winking.’
‘Well, now, sir – this letter.’ Wyndham unfolded it to read it again. It was typewritten on a plain sheet of white paper, and ran: ‘I am tired of blackmail. You may expect a visit from me soon.’ Wyndham flicked the edge of the paper with his forefinger. ‘It would seem as though Louise Munro’s blackmail victim had got sick of whatever extortions were going on and decided to put a stop to them once and for all. That sort of thing’s been done often enough before.’
‘It seems so,’ Fen agreed, ‘though I think there’s an alternative explanation … The letter was found in that plain envelope?’
‘Yes. Apparently it wasn’t posted.’
‘Ah,’ Fen murmured absently. ‘I rather think it must have been put in Louise Munro’s room the evening everyone arrived – probably a short time before the diary was stolen … Yes …’
He fell silent. Wyndham saw that he was concentrating on some problem or other, and respected his absorption. But when Fen spoke again, it was only to say:
‘What orders have you given Scott about this gang of suspects in the drawing-room?’
‘Orders?’
‘I mean, are you allowing them to move about the house at their own sweet will?’
‘Lord, no. They’ve been in the drawing-room ever since we arrived, and there they stay until we’ve finished with them.’
‘Of course, the evidence may have vanished before you got here,’ Fen murmured obscurely. ‘In that case, I’m not sure that an arrest would be justified … MacAdam’s the man to ask …’ He shook himself irritably out of his day-dream. ‘Anyway, Inspector, that precaution may save our bacon … Shall we see Patricia Davenant now?’
The clock struck a quarter to two as Patricia Davenant came in, but despite the lateness of the hour she looked fresh and untired. She was wearing a plain brown coat and skirt which set off the magnificent lines of her figure, and Fen observed that her make-up was so well applied as to suggest a professional interest in the matter. Unquestionably she was beautiful; but the chief impression one received was of an unthinking tranquillity, combined with a sort of naïvety such as one often sees in actresses, ballet dancers and other women whose job it is to display themselves publicly. She sat down, crossed her legs, and looked expectantly and unselfconsciously at the two men.
‘What is your occupation, Miss Davenant?’ Wyndham asked.
‘I’m a model,’ she replied directly. ‘You know – magazine covers, advertisements, and so on.’
‘Your age?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘And you’re engaged to be married to Mr Neame?’
She glanced at the diamond ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. ‘Yes. I’ve only known him a few months, but I’m very, very fond of him.’
‘You had a quarrel earlier this evening?’
‘We’ve made it up now. It was nothing.’
‘Still, it was enough to make you refuse to go with him during the game of hide-and-seek.’
Patricia regarded the inspector wonderingly. ‘I thought if I was stand-offish it would do him good,’ she said; and added ingenuously: ‘Some men who’ve made love to me say I’m not enough of a coquette.’
‘Where did you go, during the game?’
‘I? I hid in the cloak-room. You know – by the front door. I thought as it was near the starting-place Duncan wouldn’t be likely to look there.’
‘Didn’t you understand that – well, that the game was more or less an excuse to enable’ – Wyndham reddened, and becoming annoyed at this, reddened still more – ‘to enable people to get away together?’ he concluded obliquely.
‘Was it? I didn’t realize.’
(And as a matter of fact, Fen reflected, it wouldn’t occur to this girl that any excuse was needed for leaving a party in order to make love.)
Wyndham returned to the attack. ‘I gather some accident happened to your dress?’ he said.
‘Oh, such a damned nuisance,’ Patricia answered petulantly. ‘In the darkness I got caught up on a hook or something, and my shoulder-strap broke. It wasn’t a man or anything,’ she added rather vaguely.
‘So when the game was over, you went upstairs to change?’
‘Yes. That’s why I’m wearing these things. I didn’t bring another evening frock.’
‘And then?’
‘Well, the first I knew of anything being wrong was when Richard and Simon came panting in to say I was in danger. Even then it took me ages to get anything coherent out of Richard.’
‘What happened after that?’
‘Happened?’ Patricia felt in her handbag, brought out a tiny cambric handkerchief, and pinched the end of her nose with it in that delicate parody of blowing which women affect. ‘Nothing really happened. Richard flapped about for a minute or two until Duncan came up to tell us about Louise dying, and trying to give the name of the murderer and so on, and then Richard flapped about again, and by the time he’d discovered the stuff in the medicine the police had arrived and we were all marched down to the drawing-room.’
‘Do you know if you have any enemies, Miss Davenant?’
‘I’m sure I haven’t,’ said Patricia. ‘I think most people like me … Oh, well, I suppose someone doesn’t, if my tonic really was poisoned, but I can’t think who it could be.’ She hesitated. ‘Who was it stole my diary?’
‘We think it was Mrs Munro.’
‘Louise?’ Patricia was almost indignant. ‘But how silly! Why should anyone want to steal it at all?’
‘We were hoping you could help us over that.’
‘Well, there’s absolutely nothing in it. It’s really only an engagement book.’
‘Nothing that could – ah – compromise you?’
‘Of course not.’ Obviously Patricia did not in the least resent this question, but her blue eyes were wide with astonishment.
‘Had you known Mrs Munro for long?’
‘No, I only met her two days ago. I remember she arrived almost at the same moment as Richard and me, and Duncan introduced us in the hall.’
‘You came here with Mr Neame?’
‘Yes, we stayed together in a hotel in Thame last night. In separate rooms, of course,’ Patricia explained gravely. ‘Richard’s very particular about that sort of thing.’
Wyndham, mindful of the traditions of the Force, suppressed a grin.
‘But I still can’t see why Louise should steal my diary,’ said Patricia, sincerely puzzled. ‘I liked her, though of course she was terribly nervy.’
Fen asked a question. ‘I believe your typewriter was used at the same time the diary was stolen?’
‘Yes. Anyway, I found it open on the desk in my room.’ Patricia frowned earnestly. ‘Or course that might have been done before the diary was taken. I was one of the first to arrive, you see, and didn’t bother to unpack much, and changed very quickly downstairs. And then later I found I’d forgotten a handkerchief, and went back, and it all happened. But anyway, it isn’t my typewriter.’
Fen displayed interest. ‘Whose is it, then?’
‘I borrowed it about a month ago,’ said Patricia. ‘Someone told me I ought to write a book about my experiences, but I found I couldn’t manage it. So I brought the typewriter here to give back. It belongs to Peter Hadow.’
‘Well, Hadow is the last,’ said Wyndham with a sigh of relief, when Patricia had been sent back to the drawing-room.
‘And in some ways the most important, I suspect,’ Fen rejoined thoughtfully. ‘If I’m not much mistaken, he’ll supply us with the motive – which at present is the most obscure feature of the whole affair.’
The novelist arrived yawning prodigiously. He had driven up that day from Torquay, he explained, and although some form of revelry might have kept him awake until this late hour, the effort of sitting about in the drawing-room had been almost too much for him. Wyndham apologized for this in his own dulcet way, and introduced Hadow to Fen. They settled down to the consumption of MacAdam’s whisky, an oddly contrasted trio: Wyndham’s bulky form fitting immovable into his chair, Fen tall, lanky and restless, and Hadow sprawled back, his dark hair tousled, his pince-nez clutched in his right hand, his mouth opening and shutting regularly, and his small, weak blue eyes drowsy and inattentive.
‘Let me answer your questions before you ask them,’ he said mildly. ‘My name is Peter Hadow, my age thirty-four, my occupation the writing of detective novels. I arrived at this house about 10.37 this evening to find it as black and ghastly as the tomb, and was met at the front door by Duncan MacAdam, bearing a naked and tremulous light. While I was trying to discover the reason for all this, he ordered an aged man, whom I at first took to be the butler, to beat upon a gong, and when this unaccountable rite was over, went and switched on some lights. I was divested of my hat and coat, and taken into the drawing-room for a drink. People began to appear in numbers. I saw one whom I knew – namely Patricia Davenant – and was introduced to her betrothed, Richard Neame, with whom I’ve just been carrying on a turgid dialogue regarding the Sociological Significance of the Detective Novel. Of course detective novels have no more sociological significance than any other kind of novel, but he’s not the sort of person who could ever be made to realize that. Poor dear, he has some fancy about the detective novel being connected with the rise of Nazism.’
Hadow paused to grin at Wyndham, who was eyeing him warily. It was apparent that Hadow was by no means entirely sober.
‘Forgive the pseudo-literary chatter,’ he went on. ‘For some reason whisky always has this effect on me. Le style, c’est l’alcoöl … Where was I? Ah, yes.
‘In addition to Richard Neame, I was introduced to an exceedingly pretty and forward wench named Janice, and to her predestined victim, a canny but none the less fated young man who tells me he’s interested in Assyriology, though I hardly know whether to believe that. At about 10.45 or 10.50 Duncan took me up to my room and left me there, so that I’m not accounted for until I went downstairs ten minutes or so later. As a matter of fact I washed my hands and felt the bed and made a feeble attempt to unpack and peered into the wardrobe and did all the other things one does on arriving in a strange house … Anyway, I eventually returned downstairs – as I said. And the next thing was that just as I’d thought up an admirable word for a charade, we were all in the thick of it, with the girl I came here to meet desperately dead.’
Wyndham, who had been surveying the point of his pencil during this monologue, looked up. ‘You came here to meet Mrs Munro?’
‘I think of her as Louise Benest,’ said Hadow a trifle inconsequently. ‘Yes. I wanted to talk to her.’ He glanced at Fen. ‘You remember the Forrest case, just before the war?’
‘The outlines,’ Fen replied slowly. ‘It was put rather out of one’s head by the invasion of Poland. Would you mind running over it for our benefit? I gather you’re more or less an expert on the subject.’
Hadow by now was observably less somnolent. ‘It did take my fancy,’ he admitted, ‘to the extent that I decided to write a novel round it. Of course it wasn’t for the sake of the novel that I went into the details of the affair. Crime as actually practised has little or nothing to do with the detective novel, which is a conventional-unreal genre, as purely imaginative as an inter-planetary tale or a mediaeval cosmology. Naturally it has to be concerned with what’s possible, but what’s probable is practically outside its sphere …’ Hadow stopped abruptly. ‘What was I talking about?’ he demanded.
‘The Forrest case,’ Wyndham reminded him severely.
‘Oh, yes. Well, the thing got to interest me for its own sake, and I went on delving into it long after my book was finished.’ Hadow paused to light a cigarette. ‘It had one or two curious features, you see: the – third man, and the missing dagger …’
‘You know it all occurred in Shrewsbury. I went there during the second year of the war, put up at the “Lion”, and had a good look round. It’s a pleasant town, not too large, with the Severn running round it in a kind of horse-shoe; at the centre of the horse-shoe is the toll-bridge leading over to Kingsland and the Schools.
‘The actual scene of the crime was the office of a solicitor in Pride Hill, which is, I suppose, the main shopping street. The office is a flat, really, about half-way down on the English Bridge side. You get to it by a flight of uncarpeted stairs leading up an alley-way. The window of the main office overlooks a courtyard at the back, also reached from the alley-way. There’s your setting. It hasn’t any importance in itself; what happened there might just as well have happened at a dozen other places in the town.
‘The protagonists are a night-watchman called Webb; P.C. Knight, of the Shropshire Constabulary; Edward Forrest; Louise Benest; her brother Charles; and a man who may or may not have been Andrew, Edward Forrest’s brother.’
Hadow relit his cigarette, which had gone out. ‘I don’t know if all this is too detailed for you?’ he enquired.
‘No,’ said Fen briefly. His manner was intent. ‘Go on.’
‘Louise and Charles Benest were living together at that time, in a house up on Kingsland. They had enough money of their own to avoid doing anything, and Charles had not, for medical reasons, been called up. He was about twenty-five, straightforward, ordinary, moderately intelligent; and he was devoted, to his sister, as she was to him. Louise – Louise Munro to you – seems to have been a more unstable character than her brother, prone to fits of depression, and with another definite psychological kink which I’ll tell you about in a moment. Of course at that time she wasn’t very much more than a schoolgirl. Both the parents, by the way, were dead.
‘In the last week of August, 1939, Edward Forrest arrived to stay with them for a week or two. Charles had met him at Oxford, and had apparently been fascinated by him to the extent of wholly overlooking the fact that Forrest had a basically childish mind – though superficially he was worldly, witty in a sixth-formish kind of way, and charming. Probably his motive in accepting the invitation had to do with Louise, but one doesn’t know about that – nor does it matter much, now that he’s occupying a plot of earth in a prison cemetery.
‘He had only one relation, a brother who had been living for some years abroad. Note that word “abroad”. Nothing more definite ever emerged on the subject. Moreover – and this is the important point – it’s tolerably certain that the brother had changed his name and become a national of some other country. Ten years previously he had become involved in some trivial swindle, and had somehow contrived to leave England – after which no trace of him was ever found. That may sound fantastic, but there are two points to be borne in mind: (a) that he had not had a photograph taken since he was a child: and (b) that although in that Utopia to which we’re all so eagerly looking forward everyone’s movements will doubtless be recorded from font to coffin, there were plenty of loop-holes in those days.’
Hadow was absorbed in his narrative; all signs of tiredness had vanished.
‘You see what I’m getting at,’ he continued. ‘The extraordinary shadowiness of this figure. Even his age remains uncertain. Unless he’s changed very much, there are presumably still people in this country – landladies and so on – who could identify him, but after the lapse of years it would be a shaky business. One imagines that he himself was of that opinion otherwise he’d scarcely have returned.
‘Edward Forrest referred to his brother, when he spoke of him to Charles and Louise Benest, as “Andrew”, and that seems to have been his right name. The parents – poor folk – died quite early, and Andrew was left to look after his younger brother Edward. We worked, and scraped, and saved (obviously he was devoted to Edward), and he can’t have been entirely without ability, because he managed to get together enough money to send Edward to Oxford – whereafter Edward got himself a job and became tolerably affluent. But in the meantime, Andrew had tried to hasten the process by the swindle aforesaid, and so vanished from the scene – until, perhaps, that evening of August, 1939.
‘I’m sorry to take so long in getting to the actual crime, but after the trial of Edward Forrest, the presence of Andrew in England began to make itself felt; and for that reason it’s important to understand how he came to be so exceedingly elusive. One thing is certain, I think – namely that Andrew didn’t return to England with a passport. If you have some kind of boat, it’s not at all difficult to get unobserved into any maritime country in the world. Two days after the affair in Shrewsbury, a small motor-launch was found abandoned in a cove near Brixham. Perhaps that was what he used – who knows?
‘Naturally, all these facts about Andrew weren’t known to Louise and Charles Benest – or at least not until the time of the trial, and then only partially. Andrew Forrest was a somewhat remote and improbable figure, and counsel didn’t have much to say about him. Edward merely told the Benests that his brother was arriving by the late train on August 17th, 1939. Evidently they had kept in touch.’
Hadow paused. ‘Well, it’s pretty certain that he did arrive. A taxi-man remembers driving someone to the house on Kingsland. But it seems that the nearest he got to his brother was to hear the shot with which Edward Forrest murdered Webb the night-watchman in the office on Pride Hill.’
‘That evening – August 17th, 1939 – Charles Bennest, Louise Benest and Edward Forrest got drunk together. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that only Edward Forrest got seriously drunk. They did a round of the pubs and then returned to the house and went on drinking there. And they argued about crime.
‘The discussion followed one of its familiar courses. It ended with Forrest’s maintaining that to commit a successful crime, and get away with it, was the easiest thing in the world; and he offered to prove it, there and then, by committing a robbery.
‘It’s obvious that the others tried to dissuade him, but people when drunk are not easily dissuaded, and probably they felt obliged to go with him (since he persisted), in the hope of stopping him when it came to the point. As you’ll hear, they didn’t succeed.
‘The victim Edward Forrest selected was a solicitor with whom Charles and Louise had had dealings in some matter of property-dealings which were unsatisfactory to them. They had mentioned his name to Edward Forrest earlier on the same day, and now nothing would satisfy him but that this unfortunate man’s office should be the scene of the experiment; the drunk often develop an exaggerated sense of retribution.
‘The walk from Kingsland to Pride Hill takes about a quarter of an hour, and it must have sobered Forrest to some extent – though not enough, unfortunately, to divert him from his purpose. He had left a hastily scribbled note for Andrew, indicating where they had gone, and why; and presumably Andrew’s taxi passed them soon after they had set out.
‘Well, they got to the office. It was one o’clock in the morning of the 18th. The streets were deserted and the street lamps out, but there was a half-moon which gave them sufficient light to be able to see what they were doing. One needn’t expand this part of the story unduly. It’s quite easy to imagine the efforts which the Benests made to stop Forrest’s idiot scheme. The door in the alley-way, which gave on the stairs leading up to the flat, had a Yale lock; but it also had a glass panel at the top, and by breaking this Forrest was able to get in. The other two followed him up to the outer office; there they made a last attempt to prevent the whole silly business. But Forrest would have none of it; it wasn’t a crime, he said; whatever he took, he’d return next morning by post; he merely intended to show that the thing could be done.
‘So they left him there.
‘Even so, they didn’t go right away; it would have been better for them if they had. They lingered down below, and Louise went round to the courtyard at the back. There she saw the light go on in the main office, and Forrest drunkenly rummaging through the drawers of the desk. The fates had chosen to leave a loaded revolver in one of them. Louise deposed at the trial that he examined it carefully, opening and closing the chambers several times.
‘The first outsider to arrive at the scene was Webb. It was his job to keep an eye on a whole block of houses up that side of Pride Hill, and he had heard the noise of breaking glass. One doesn’t know whether he saw either of the Benests. Anyway, he went straight up the stairs to the office, and there Forrest was foolish enough to try and hold him up with his revolver.
‘Louise saw the whole thing happen, and it was over very quickly. Webb realized at once that he had a drunk to deal with, and moved forward a step or two to reason with him; at which Forrest deliberately shot the man in the stomach. He died very quickly from internal haemorrhage.
‘We come now to P.C. Knight, patrolling Pride Hill from the Kingsland direction, and with a belated wayfarer hurrying up behind him. It’s one hypothesis, of course, that this wayfarer was brother Andrew. Knight caught only a glimpse of him, and that totally insufficient for identification purposes. The weak moonlight was to blame, and the sudden report of the pistol, which distracted Knight’s attention. For a moment both men stopped dead. Then the constable ran forward to the alley-way. What became of brother Andrew – if it was brother Andrew – no one knows; he wasn’t seen again, and presumably he cleared off as quickly as possible. In his position he could hardly wish to get mixed up with anything involving the police – whatever his affection for Edward.
‘Knight, as I’ve said, ran for the alley-way, and entered the door at the bottom of the staircase leading to the office. But before he could get further someone overtook him and struck at him from behind with a knife. The wounds in themselves were not serious, but Knight overbalanced and struck his head on the hand-rail. He was unconscious for two minutes or so. Edward Forrest, panic-stricken, performed the insane action of flinging down the revolver (with his finger-prints all over it), and then fled; and Charles and Louise went back to Kingsland. But there had been sufficient noise to raise an alarm; the police were interviewing Charles and Louise half an hour later; and Edward Forrest was arrested next morning in Bristol.’
Hadow paused, lit a fresh cigarette, and swallowed his whisky at a gulp.
‘Charles and Louise,’ he resumed, ‘being tolerably sensible people, made a clean breast of the whole affair, and Charles admitted to the attack on Knight; he had done it, he said, on a momentary impulse which he now recognized to have been insane, in the hope of keeping Louise out of the affair; and to anyone acquainted with the mutual affection of brother and sister, this seemed a perfectly plausible explanation. The weapon, it appeared, was a sharpish dagger of Indian design which was used in the outer office as a paper-knife. Charles said that he had picked it up with some vague idea of intimidating Edward Forrest, and had kept it in his hand when he left the flat; he added, moreover, that he had flung it down immediately after using it. But when the police looked for it, it had gone, and no trace of it has ever been found from that day to this.
‘In parenthesis, I had a notion at one time that it might have been Andrew who attacked Knight, in the hope of getting his brother Edward out of the mess. But it soon became obvious that that theory wasn’t tenable. For one thing, there was no earthly reason why Charles Benest should protect Andrew to get access to the dagger in time – and it certainly looks as though that was the weapon used, since it disappeared so completely. I only mention the fallacies in this notion of mine in case the same idea has occurred to you.
‘Forrest came up for trial at the Shrewsbury Assizes in the autumn of 1939. In those days, if you remember, we were all in hourly expectation of annihilating German air-raids, so the case wasn’t much noticed in the press. But I was already interested in some features of the case, and I managed to attend the trial.
‘It lasted only a couple of days, and from the first the issue was in considerable doubt. There was no question, of course, as to whether Edward Forrest had actually shot Webb or not – the finger-prints on the gun disposed finally and effectively of that problem; but the defence maintained that the thing had been wholly an accident, and in addition that Forrest’s drunkenness was evidence that no guilty state of mind existed. So the crux of the trial was Louise’s assertion, which the defence wasn’t able to shake, that Forrest had carefully examined the revolver on first discovering it. He, of course, denied this, and the trial really boiled down to his word against hers – in fact, to a matter of personalities, and the impression they made on the jury. Louise won hands down. The war had got people into a state of moral fervour, and the sheer inexcusable wantonness or Forrest’s actions that night told heavily against him. He was brought in guilty and condemned to death.
‘There were appeals for mitigation of sentence. They failed. Edward Forrest was hanged in January, 1940, and to all intents and purposes it was Louise Benest who hanged him.
‘In some ways, Charles Benest was almost as unlucky as Forrest. His case came up later in the same Assizes, and of course under the same judge. There had been some question of indicting both him and Louise as principals in the second degree in the murder of Webb, but that was dropped, and Charles was charged with causing grievous bodily harm to prevent an arrest. In view of the fact that he pleaded guilty, there was considerable astonishment when he got the maximum sentence of fourteen years. That means that up to now he’s done about half of it. Louise, of course, escaped altogether.’
Hadow smiled, a little grimly. ‘We’re coming now to the crux of the matter, in so far as it concerns what’s been happening here. You’ll guess that it has to do with brother Andrew. Evidently he regarded Louise as solely responsible for Edward’s hanging, and in a sense he was quite right. On the day the execution was carried out, Louise was attacked in her own drawing-room, and an attempt made to strangle her. She didn’t see the attacker, and the arrival of a servant drove him away before he could finish the job. There was no doubt that it was brother Andrew – she had had typewritten letters accusing her not only of his death, but also of instigating the crime for which he was condemned. Brother Andrew’s affection for Edward had driven him a little crazy, you see; he wanted vengeance. Perhaps slashing a woman’s bare back with a sharp knife would have satisfied him …
‘Louise took the letters to the police, and asked for protection – which she got. No more letters arrived, and there was no further untoward incident. She married Munro, a rich man, and shortly afterwards he was killed in a flying accident. Apparently brother Andrew had vanished into limbo – until, that is to say’ – with an expressive gesture – ‘tonight.’
Hadow stopped to refill his glass, and looked at them quizzically.
‘Well, it’s been a long story,’ he said. But it seems to me that if you’re looking for a motive, there it is, ready-made. Your problem now is to find out who, or what, is Andrew Forrest; and to that there just isn’t any clue. He might be MacAdam, or Neame, or Nathan, or Moore—’
‘Or, of course, yourself,’ said Fen in an oddly colourless voice.
Wyndham stirred himself. ‘There’s one more thing, sir. You mentioned that Louise Benest – or Louise Munro, as I prefer to call her – had some kind of psychological kink. What was that?’
‘Oh, yes, I forgot.’ Hadow smiled. ‘She suffered from genuine, bona fide, certifiable claustrophobia … What do you make of that?’
Hadow was conducted back to the drawing-room by P.C. Scott.
‘Heap on more wood, the wind is chill,’ Fen carolled gently. ‘But let it whistle as it will, we’ll keep our Christmas merry still … Well, Inspector?’
‘Well, sir: is that our motive?’
Fen nodded. ‘I think so. Oh yes, I think so.’
‘I’ve got to agree. But I scarcely see how the attempt to kill Miss Davenant comes into it – unless in some way she knows who the murderer is.’
‘Very unlikely,’ said Fen, and added provokingly: ‘It’s all perfectly natural, Inspector. It all fits.’
‘It doesn’t fit to me,’ said Wyndham staunchly. ‘I suppose now we shall have to go delving into the past history of all these five men … By the way, would Hadow have given us such a generous resumé of the case if he’d been Andrew Forrest?’
‘We were bound to find out pretty soon about Louise Munro’s connection with the Forrest case – in fact, as soon as I heard her maiden name I remembered the gist of the business. Besides, it was known that Hadow had come here specifically to talk to Louise Munro about it. That being so, he couldn’t very well pretend ignorance.’
‘Was his account correct?’
‘Oh, yes, I think so.’
‘But anyway’ – Wyndham reverted to the previous subject – ‘I don’t see how I can hold all of those five on suspicion while we rummage into their pasts.’ He stared blankly before him for a moment, and then said: ‘Lord, sir, I’m stuck. Advise me what to do.’
‘Just detain the one who’s guilty. You’ve got plenty of evidence for that. Once you have him in your hands, you’ve got plenty of time to get him identified, trace his movements, and so forth.’
Wyndham sighed. ‘If one only knew which …’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Gervase Fen blandly. ‘I was tolerably certain after that first interview with Noel and Janice, and everything since then has gone to confirm my suspicions.’
Wyndham stared at him. ‘You’re joking, sir.’
‘No, I’m not,’ said Fen testily. ‘I’m incapable of jokes at three o’clock in the morning.’
‘Who do you mean, then?’
Fen told him.
‘Well, I’m damned,’ Wyndham commented unemotionally. ‘I shouldn’t have imagined … But why do you think so?’
Fen made certain explanations. ‘Of course,’ he concluded, ‘it’s slightly psychological. But still …’
‘Psychological my foot!’ Wyndham exclaimed vehemently. ‘It’s plain, simple and obvious, and I can’t think how I was so stupid as not to see it. Oh, we’ll have that gentleman locked up in less than no time.’
‘I think we might try Patricia Davenant’s typewriter first,’ Fen suggested. ‘Also, there’s a question I want to ask MacAdam … Let’s get it all over and done with, and then we can go home. Have you got the letter? Good.’
They left the study and crossed the hall to the drawing-room. A dispirited little group was sitting round the fire.
‘Hello,’ said Fen. ‘You all look very wan … MacAdam, do you let people know, when you invite them to your parties, what other guests are going to be there?’
MacAdam stood up to answer. His plump face was drawn and tired, and his hair more dishevelled than ever. ‘Yes, always,’ he said shortly. ‘Any objections?’
‘None,’ said Fen mildly.
MacAdam was very near anger. ‘Inspector,’ he snapped, ‘Is it really necessary for us to sit here all night?’
‘In just five minutes, sir,’ said Wyndham mildly, ‘you’ll all be able to go to bed. I shall be back shortly … By the way, where are Mr Carter and Miss Mond?’
P.C. Scott came up, red in the face. ‘I’m afraid I’m responsible, sir. I allowed them to go into the library. They were very persistent, and I thought …’ He stammered himself into silence.
Wyndham glanced at Fen, who said: ‘They may as well make love while they can enjoy it. Not that it’s all that enjoyable, anyway,’ he added gloomily. ‘Let’s go upstairs.’
Patricia Davenant’s room was all white – curtains, carpets, and rugs. The bed, the wardrobe and the dressing-table were of highly polished Indian rosewood, and the light came from frosted globes sunk in the ceiling. Patricia’s clothes and belongings were scattered untidily about. A door on the right, which Fen investigated, led into a private bathroom. Fen pointed this out to Wyndham, who nodded.
‘That would provide the opportunity,’ he said. ‘But to make sure we can ask about it.’
They found the typewriter, which was a portable one, and Fen screwed a piece of blank paper into it.
‘How does it go?’ he asked.
‘Ah, yes … “I am tired of blackmail. You may expect a visit from me soon”.’
He tapped away inexpertly for some moments. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I’ve hurt my finger on the shift-lock.’
Wyndham compared the two sheets of paper. ‘Yes,’ he announced, ‘I think the letter was obviously typed on this machine. You can see, for one thing, that the m’s out of alignment. But I’ll get an expert to deal with it, for the purposes of the trial.’
Fen straightened himself, stretched, and yawned. ‘So that’s that,’ he remarked. ‘Oh, my dear paws, how sleepy I feel … You’ll search his belongings for the dagger, of course. And I should think there may be some prints taken from it, all duly and correctly attested – though of course a surface like that will keep prints for years, if it’s not mucked about.’
‘I’m very grateful to you, sir,’ said Wyndham hesitatingly. ‘If you hadn’t pointed out that one simple thing to me, he might have been able to get clear of the country.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Fen. ‘Besides, I’m grateful to you, too. This business got me away from a children’s party which descends on my house like a black cloud every Christmas Eve. And if there’s one thing more horrible than violent death, it’s the sight and sound of a large number of the young simultaneously enjoying themselves … Well, I suppose you’d better collect your man.’
‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ Wyndham murmured. ‘From almost every point of view, it’ll be a pleasure.’
Actually it was Janice who had persuaded P.C. Scott to let them go into the library. Noel was too tired to be anxious for anything but bed. There was a faint glow in the middle of the heap of white ashes in the fireplace, and Noel put a log on top of it; it burned feebly for about a minute, and then went out. They huddled over it seated together on a small sofa.
‘There,’ said Janice. ‘This is better, isn’t it?’
‘You seem to have no sense of cold whatever,’ Noel answered ungraciously. ‘You’re full of disgusting animal vitality.’
‘Are you really interested in Assyriology? How funny. Tell me how the Assyrians made love.’
‘They made love in exactly the same way that everybody else makes love. And the only thing I’m interested in at present is my health.’
‘Shall I sit on your knee?’
‘Oh the whole, no. I wonder when we’re going to be able to get to bed.’
‘Not until the parson has blessed us with bell and book, Noel.’
‘I have a bad cold.’
‘Don’t be so fussy, darling. Have you ever been in love?’
‘Never,’
‘Not with Patricia?’
‘Not with anyone.’
‘You may kiss me if you wish.’
‘I don’t wish.’
‘On the whole that’s just as well,’ said Janice judicially. ‘Because you’re not very competent at making love.’
‘Oh really?’ said Noel, nettled.
‘For example, if you’d never met me until this moment, how would you begin making love to me?’
‘No, Janice, I refuse to be caught that way.’
‘I’m not trying to catch you, idiot. Tell me what you’d do, and I’ll tell you whether it’s good technique or not.’
‘Well, I suppose I should say something like: “You’re really very beautiful …”’
‘Yes, that’s just the point, you see.’
‘What’s just the point, in God’s name?’
‘It’s purely imbecile to trot out all that mildewed stuff.’
‘One must say something first. A sort of warning. Like the red flag they put out before guns are going to go off.’
‘No. It’s quite superfluous.’
‘I can’t help that. It’s a habit.’
‘Very well. Go on.’
‘Then I should say something on the lines of: “Your eyes are an enchanting blue.”’
‘They’re brown.’
‘I wasn’t talking about your eyes. I was talking about the eyes of some hypothetical woman I’ve never met before.’
‘My mother’s eyes are brown, too. It runs in the family. Something to do with heredity.’
‘Heredity. There’s that limerick about …’
‘I know it. Will you put your arm round me?’
‘If you insist. But it’s very uncomfortable for the man.’
‘It’s very uncomfortable for the woman, too.’
‘Why do you allow it, then?’
‘I always thought men liked doing it. One must throw them an occasional crumb.
I think I’ll sit on your knee after all,’ said Janice, doing so. ‘There. Isn’t that nice?’
‘It helps to keep me warm,’ Noel admitted grudgingly.
‘Darling, why don’t you like me?’
‘Janice, you’re an intolerable little flirt. You should be spanked.’
‘You may spank me if you like, but not too hard.’
‘Don’t you realize that no man has any use for a woman who runs after him?’
‘Oh, no?’ said Janice softly.
Noel took her up in his arms and deposited her firmly and not particularly gently in a chair.
‘Understand this,’ he said, ‘once and for all: I have not the slightest intention of marrying you or anyone else. Now, is that perfectly clear?’
‘Yes, Noel,’ said Janice meekly.
After a week’s honeymoon in Scotland, Noel and Janice returned south to act as witnesses at the trial for murder of Andrew Forrest. They stopped for a night in Oxford, putting up at the ‘Mace and Sceptre’, and after dinner went to see Fen at his rooms in St Christopher’s. They found him biting a pencil and trying to write a detective novel; he was obviously relieved at having an excuse for neglecting it.
‘Well, well,’ he greeted them. ‘All congratulations. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get to the wedding. Have you had a good honeymoon?’
‘It’s been very satisfactory, thank you,’ said Janice demurely. Fen bustled about finding them drinks.
‘You must tell us what’s been happening,’ said Noel, when they were at last settled. ‘We’ve lost touch with everything.’
‘His identity’s been proved,’ Fen answered. ‘Which is most of the battle. And Crispin is proposing to write the case up. I suppose I shall have to get in touch with him about it – poor old chap, he gets terribly muddled …’
‘I still don’t understand now you knew,’ said Janice.
‘Ah,’ said Fen complacently. ‘Well, I shall now explain; and don’t try to stop me, because it’s a great and ancient tradition which must not be broken.’
‘Of course, the lynch-pin of the whole case lay in the words which Louise Munro spoke just before she died. I’ve no doubt you remember them – “Patricia … in danger … help her”. And a little later: “Mustn’t be destroyed … I’ll tell you … who …”
‘From the first, those words puzzled me, and I was careful to ask if you thought Louise was sane when she spoke them.
‘MacAdam asked her the name of her attacker. Why on earth, then, didn’t she immediately give it? Why, instead, did she trot out this stuff about Patricia being in danger? Because if Patricia was in danger, surely she could best be helped by Louise’s revealing the identity of the criminal.
‘Well, there seemed to me to be three possible solutions to this problem:
‘(i) The person endangering Patricia was not the same person who had attacked Louise. I thought, on the whole, that that wasn’t very likely, but it couldn’t be ruled out, and I kept it in mind.
‘(ii) It was Louise herself who endangered Patricia, and now she was repenting it. That again postulated two criminals in the party.
‘(iii) The remark was addressed to Richard Neame, who, as we know, was infatuated with Patricia, and would be certain, on hearing she was in danger, to go to her assistance. Even if he were disinclined for some reason to do so, someone, in view of Louise’s urgency, would have to go, and public opinion would unanimously expect that someone to be Richard Neame.
‘It was this last hypothesis which gave me most to think about. At the time, naturally, I’d no idea whether it was true or not, but I went on considering it, while still keeping an eye open for anything which might confirm either of the other two explanations.
‘The interesting thing about it, to me, was that I couldn’t for the moment see why Louise should want to send Richard Neame away at all. If it was he who had attacked her, there was no clear reason why she shouldn’t denounce him instantly, and in his presence; after all, there were three other men there who might be considered competent to handle him. I seemed to be up against a blank wall.
‘And then two things happened: I heard that Louise’s maiden name was Benest; and a blackmail letter was discovered in her room.
‘Immediately I remembered the main outlines of the Forrest case – the curious episode of the missing dagger. In the first place that gave me the motive, which so far had been missing: brother Andrew was taking his revenge for the execution of Edward Forrest – the knife slashes in themselves were evidence of definite hatred, and not of a crime committed, say, for the sake of money. And in the second place, Hadow, when he was narrating the Forrest case for the benefit of Wyndham and myself, let out one staggering, all-important fact.
‘Louise Munro suffered from claustrophobia; she could not endure to be shut up.
‘Now, cast your minds back to the Forrest case. Brother Andrew, and the missing dagger, weren’t the only oddities in it. There was in addition one psychological inconsistency which couldn’t be ignored. Charles Benest was a steady, unimaginative, reliable young man. Is it conceivable that such a person, even to protect his sister, would rush up behind a policeman and stab at him with what was practically a toy dagger? Of course not.
‘When he admitted to doing that, Charles certainly wasn’t shielding Edward or Andrew Forrest; obviously he was shielding Louise, who suffered from an affliction of such a nature that imprisonment would have driven her mad. Charles loved his sister so well that he was prepared to take the blame for what she had done, and so went to prison for fourteen years; and she, though she was devoted to him, dared not admit her guilt.
‘One could guess fairly accurately what actually happened (and incidentally, Charles Benest has confirmed it since). It was Louise who picked up the dagger in the outer office. Then, you remember, Louise and Charles left the building, though they remained down below, hiding when the night-watchman went in. Then Louise went round to the courtyard – alone, it seems, while Charles waited in the alley – and witnessed the finding of the revolver and the murder itself. Charles heard the shot. What, in the circumstances, would he do? Run away? Hardly; he wasn’t that kind of man. He would – and he did – go up to the office. And Louise, running round from the courtyard to tell him what had happened, saw him go – and was in time, too, to see the policeman who shortly afterwards followed him. Plainly she was terrified in case her beloved Charles should seem to be involved in the murder. So she attacked the policeman. As you know, she was a much more hysterical character than her brother.
‘No doubt she immediately threw aside the dagger, as Charles asserted that he did; and no doubt they were both very astonished when it wasn’t found. It wasn’t found, of course, because the “belated wayfarer” whom the constable saw had witnessed the entire business, and made off with it. And who could that belated wayfarer have been but brother Andrew?
‘It’s not easy at first sight to see why he took the dagger. But one’s got to remember, I think, that he was – and will be, until he’s hanged – a professional criminal. He saw the incident; he knew that the constable would not be able to identify the girl who attacked him; and consequently it was probable that the only evidence against her would be the dagger, with her prints on it, which she had so carelessly thrown away, and which would constitute, in his possession, a most agreeable weapon of blackmail. So he took it. He must have been considerably surprised when Charles confessed to the attack, but fortunately the value of the dagger was not thereby depreciated; he could still use it to blackmail Louise.
‘Then Edward Forrest was tried, and Louise’s evidence was instrumental in hanging him. For the moment Andrew Forrest forgot about blackmail; he wanted revenge. He wrote Louise threatening letters, and on the day of Edward Forrest’s execution he tried to kill her. She applied for police protection, and since he was cautious, and could afford to wait, he did nothing more for the moment. Time passed; Louise married a rich man; and it occurred to Andrew that before she was killed – and he still intended, with all his heart and soul, to kill her – she might as well be made, by his threatening to produce the dagger, to contribute to his private exchequer.’
Fen emptied his glass and re-filled it. ‘Most of that I was able to work out as soon as I heard of Louise Munro’s connection with the Forrest case. I remember that even at the time of the trial I was assailed by vague doubts as to whether Charles Benest actually had attacked the policeman. And as soon as the blackmail note turned up in Louise’s room, I was damned well certain that he hadn’t.
‘Wyndham, in the first instance, got the meaning of the note the wrong way round; he thought that it was from someone who was being blackmailed by Louise. But as it happened, the wording was quite ambiguous, and I’d no doubt what the proper interpretation was. “I am tired of blackmail. You may expect a visit from me soon.”
‘Andrew Forrest had got all the money he wanted out of Louise; now he proposed to have his long-deferred revenge. You see why MacAdam said that Louise was frightened.
‘So far, so good. And how did all this new evidence react on my three hypotheses regarding Louise’s last words? Obviously it explained just why she wanted to get Richard Neame out of the way. She was devoted to Charles, remember; only a pathological condition of mind – claustrophobia – induced her to let him go to prison in her place; and now she realized that she was dying, and her last thought was that the dagger must be preserved, her own guilt proved, and Charles released – his sentence, you know, had still seven more years to run. If she denounced Neame there and then, he would certainly not mention the dagger, and it might never come to light; if she spoke of it to the others in front of him, he might find a means of hiding or destroying it; it was possible, indeed, that he had provided against the contingency of arrest by arranging for some accomplice to do just exactly that – since he must have hated Charles Benest almost as much as he hated Louise. So she invented the tale about Patricia to get him away, relying on being able to tell the others about the existence of the dagger when he had gone. But she’d overestimated her strength. ‘It mustn’t be destroyed … I’ll tell you who …’ And then she died.’
‘But look here,’ Noel interrupted, ‘would he have believed such a tale?’
‘There are three things to remember,’ said Fen. ‘First, that the previous attack on Patricia gave some plausibility to Louise’s assertion; second, that Neame must have been absolutely staggered at finding his victim still alive, and have been incapable, for the moment, of lucid thought; and third, that in any case, he was glad of an excuse to get away. He must have expected to be denounced in the next few moments, and there might be a chance for him to make a dash for it in one of the cars. Of course,’ Fen added parenthetically, ‘Patricia was never in any danger at all.’
‘The strychnine, though,’ Janice interposed.
‘Oh, Janice, don’t you see?’ Noel expostulated with some impatience.
‘Be quiet, both of you,’ said Fen waspishly. ‘If you’re not going to attend, we’d better abandon the subject altogether.’
‘Oh, no, please,’ Janice pleaded.
‘Very well,’ said Fen with obvious relief, ‘I’ll go on. I think we only need a brief account of what happened before, during and after the murder – now that the processes of detection have been exposed,’ he added grandly.
‘Andrew Forrest took the name of Ronald Neame and got a job as a schoolmaster. While he was blackmailing Louise, he investigated, and insinuated himself into, her circle of acquaintances and friends. And the time came when MacAdam invited them both to the same house-party at Rydalls. Neame knew that Louise would be there, since MacAdam was in the habit of informing people of their prospective fellow-guests, and he came well-provided – among other things, with strychnine – for any emergency. On the previous evening, he had stayed at the same hotel as Patricia, and had typed his last note to Louise – the one we found – on the machine Patricia had borrowed from Peter Hadow.
‘Louise arrived at Rydalls at practically the same moment as Neame and Patricia, and she must have seen the typewriter among Patricia’s luggage. Shortly afterwards, Neame left his note in Louise’s room – or perhaps pushed it under the door. Louise must have been very frightened when she found it; but she remembered Patricia’s typewriter, and when Patricia had gone downstairs, Louise went to try it out. She found – as we found later – that the note had, in fact, been typed on that machine. What conclusions she drew, one doesn’t know, but evidently she was anxious to find out more about Patricia. She took the diary as being the most likely source of information, and Patricia surprised her just as she was leaving. There was a scuffle, and Louise got away.
‘Neame’s opportunity came when the game of hide-and-seek was proposed. The house would be in darkness, and he would be able (so he thought) to time things very comfortably. He arranged to meet Louise in the long gallery, possessed himself of Nathan’s gloves and a knife from the kitchen, and when the lights went out was ready for what he had to do. He can’t, of course, have been aware of the presence of Simon Moore in the vestibule when he went through to the long gallery. He throttled Louise, and when, as he imagined, she was dead, mutilated her back with the knife. It must have been just after he had done this, and was preparing to leave – to be found, at the end of the game, in some other quarter of the house – that the first disaster (from his point of view) occurred.
‘Hadow arrived; the gong was sounded prematurely; the lamp at the other end of the long gallery went on; and he heard you coming up on to the terrace.
‘So he picked up the body of the woman he thought was dead, and kissed her. And when you two had gone, he flung aside the knife and gloves, and went to join the other guests in the drawing-room. Since you stayed outside canoodling,’ said Fen severely, ‘he was able to get there well before you.
‘Well, the search was organized, and he got his second shock: Louise was still alive. She spun her tale about Patricia, and he, no doubt, accepted it as an excuse for clearing out. But unfortunately, Simon Moore elected to go with him, and in the circumstances he couldn’t give any excuse for leaving the house which wouldn’t have made Moore instantly suspicious. He must have had a nasty few minutes before MacAdam came up to say that Louise hadn’t, after all, named her assailant. In the meantime, of course, he’d seen through the purpose of Louise’s Patricia-fabrication. Louise’s connection with the Forrest trial would come out soon enough, and perhaps the business about the dagger. He was prepared for that in any event, and if Louise hadn’t had the chance to speak, there’d have been no more case against him than against anyone else without an alibi for the time of the murder. But she had spoken, and he thought he might divert suspicion from the real purpose of her words by giving the Patricia-fabrication some basis in fact. He went into the bathroom and fetched out Patricia’s bottle of tonic. He thought it had been poisoned, he said. And indeed, it had. He’d just that moment poisoned it himself …’
There was a long silence. Then: ‘Poor Patricia,’ said Janice quietly.
‘She’ll get over it.’ Noel spoke very definitely. ‘There never was such an extrovert as that girl. The moment she finds anyone or anything else to interest her, Richard Neame will be completely forgotten – probably is already. What’s happening about Charles Benest?’
‘The dagger was found, of course,’ said Fen. ‘And he’ll be released, after a lot of formalities. He’ll get no compensation for the seven years he was in prison, because he pleaded guilty. But after all, they were only seven years of war – not so much loss.’
‘I still can’t understand it being Richard,’ said Janice. ‘He seemed so dull and ordinary.’
‘I think he was a schizophrenic,’ Fen answered, ‘which means he didn’t have to act the dullness and ordinariness. One half of him was the earnest educationist, the man who toiled and saved to send his brother to the University, the devoted lover of Patricia Davenant; the other half was a blackmailer, a swindler, and a murderer. It’s a good thing that kind of person isn’t born very often …’
He poked inexpertly at the fire with the toe of his shoe. Depression was very perceptible on his normally cheerful features. ‘It was an ugly crime,’ he said. ‘I think he’ll hang – and from every point of view he deserves to … Ah, well’ – he reached for the whisky decanter – ‘ad laetiora vertamus.’