ON that Tuesday morning Gore was standing waiting for a bus at the upper end of the street when Mrs Arndale went by in a sporting little blue two-seater. She waved a hand to him as she passed, and pulled up a little way along the kerb, signalling him to approach. With the exception, perhaps, of Arndale himself, his wife was the last person on earth whom Gore wanted to talk to just then. But she had seen him standing there, obviously waiting for a bus, and no bus was in sight. He had no choice but to obey her imperious, smiling summons.
‘Haven’t they arrested you yet, then?’ she laughed. ‘We’re all simply thrilled to the kernel. Why didn’t you let us know you were to give evidence at the inquest? And why didn’t you tell the old coroner that you were on the very spot when the murder was committed? After all, you were only a few yards away. Just think what excitement it would have created in Linwood. As it is, my cook told me in confidence this morning that she believes you’ll turn out to be the “one as done it.”’
This was all extremely difficult and not a little puzzling. Gore’s smile was somewhat forced as he asked which of the newspapers had supplied the information that he had been ‘on the spot.’
‘Bertie saw you,’ Mrs Arndale laughed. ‘He was there, too. He was behind you all the way from Blackbrothers Hill across the Downs on Saturday evening.’
‘Really? I didn’t see him.’
‘He saw you. He makes out that the murder must have been just in full swing as he and you were going down Fountain Hill. Where do you want to go?’
‘Towards my lunch, really.’
‘Let me take you there. Or are you afraid Mrs Barrington will be jealous?’
As they threaded their way through the traffic she explained that her brother had been playing golf out at Penbury on Saturday afternoon, and had accepted a lift in as far as Blackbrothers Hill, where his friends had dropped him. From there he had walked home to Selkirk Place across the Downs and along the Promenade. Apparently he had been barely fifty yards behind Gore until, at the top of Linwood Park Road, their paths had separated.
‘Why didn’t he shout out,’ Gore asked, ‘if he was so close behind?’
Mrs Arndale made a little grimace.
‘Bertie doesn’t love you just at present, Wick, for some reason, I gather. He doesn’t love anyone just now. Perhaps he’s jealous of your devotion to someone— Though I rather think Master Bertie has cooled off a good deal … now that the glamour of an illicit passion—that’s the correct phrase, isn’t it? I’ve never had one, worse luck—may be expected to replace itself by the dullness of legal and respectable possession. I bet Bertie doesn’t marry her—though he keeps on saying that he’s going to—or rather because he keeps on saying so. He comes out nearly every afternoon now to tea to tell me so. If he doesn’t come to tea he comes to dinner. By the way, when do you intend to dine with us—or do you ever intend to dine with us? Please do it before they hang you, won’t you. I’ve asked you twice, and you’ve told me two most shocking whoppers. Oh, that reminds me. Didn’t the old Times and Courier simply spread itself over your career this morning? And what a topping photograph. I never realised, until I saw that photograph, what an absolutely criminal type of face yours was. I wish you’d give me one. I’m so tired of the faces of people who never do things.’
They were passing Prince Albert Square just then, and Mrs Arndale’s sprightly attention was distracted to the flaring posters of the big cinema theatre there.
‘You never go to picture-houses, I suppose?’ she smiled.
‘Sometimes.’
‘They had rather a topping picture on there last week—“Dust”—Emma Dugdale told me I mustn’t miss it. So I made poor old Cecil take me to the first house on Saturday. Poor old thing. I loved it—but it bored him absolutely stiff. He fell sound asleep as soon as the lights went down, and snored. Snored—I couldn’t make him stop. It was most embarrassing. Fancy falling asleep at half-past six in the evening … and snoring … publicly. Of course he never sleeps a wink at night now, poor old boy, until three or four o’clock in the morning. I’m really getting frightfully worried about him. I’m so afraid he’ll start taking drugs. I’ve a deadly horror of dopes … As it is, I know he’s drinking far more than is good for him.’
She sighed.
‘Some world … Rather a decent little bus this, isn’t she? Cecil’s latest birthday present.’
‘Very nice indeed,’ Gore said rather hurriedly, realising that she had turned to glance into his face curiously.
The first house at that cinema theatre began, he knew, a little after six o’clock and lasted until a little after eight. Was it possible that Roly-Poly was trying to ram an alibi down his throat? Or was it the actual astounding fact that at a quarter to seven on Saturday evening Arndale had been sitting beside her in the cinema theatre, dozing—snoring? She had said the first house …
‘You must have found the place very crowded on Saturday evening, didn’t you?’ he asked. ‘Though I suppose not so crowded for the first house—?’
‘It was pretty fuggy,’ she admitted, ‘but nothing to what it must have been during the second house. There were two enormous queues right round the fountain, waiting for the second house, when we came out. And we came away at least a quarter of an hour before the show was over … when the big picture finished.’
‘Did your husband stick it out as long as that?’
‘I had to pinch him to waken him. Oh … there’s Dr Melhuish … I wonder how Barbara is. Have you heard?’
‘Not since Saturday. I dined with Melhuish on Saturday evening. Mrs Melhuish was still in bed then, he told me.’
‘Poor dear. I must drop her a line. Wasn’t it perfectly dreadful about the Brooks? You didn’t know them, perhaps?’
The conversation concerned itself with the accident at the corner of Victoria Street and its fatal results, until they reached the front doors of the Riverside. There Gore undertook to dine with the Arndales on the following Monday.
‘No whoppers, mind,’ Mrs Arndale commanded—‘by telephone, telegram, post, or wireless. Swear.’
‘I swear. If I don’t turn up,’ he grinned, ‘you’ll know they’ve got me.’
She laughed as she released her brake.
‘I’ll come and see you in your cell. Don’t forget, I want a copy of that photograph. And don’t let Mrs Barrington know you’ve given me one. Monday, at eight—or never again. By-bye.’
She laughed again as the two-seater slid away and left him looking after her in the sunshine, beneath the interested gaze of Percival and the hall porter. Quite forced, that laugh of hers, he was inclined to think … artificial. Her whole manner had been forced, and … well, too sprightly. Not a good liar, little Roly-Poly. Poor little Roly-Poly … Did she know why she was to tell people that yarn about the picture-house? He hoped not. He had always been rather fond of little Roly-Poly. Nothing much in her, of course, but a thundering good little sort …
Rather annoying, though, if one was going to be bored with a lot of that sort of chaff …
So Master Bertie Challoner had cooled off, then. Feeling a bit silly about that unexpected meeting in Hatfield Place, of course. That probably accounted for his walking just behind for a mile and a half without hailing or trying to pick up …
Odd, though, that Challoner should have been the one to see him … suppose he had wanted a witness to prove where exactly he had been at that time. Quite odd.
And then … suddenly … it seemed to Gore perhaps not so odd …
A south-west gale howled and moaned and groaned in the creaking trees of the Green that night, and screamed and wailed about the flank of the Riverside, and rattled all the windows of its annexe most infernally, but none more infernally than those of a certain private sitting-room to which several references have been made already. In that sitting-room a tallish gentleman with a not unpleasing brown face—now clean-shaven—sat in extremely well-fitting evening clothes before his fire, hammering his excellent teeth with the stem of a long-extinct briar pipe of offensive odour. His forehead was creased by three large wrinkles; his eyes gazed into the heart of the fire as if the least distraction of their gaze might prove fatal. On a chair beside his own lay several sheets of manuscript pinned together, and a fountain-pen. And the last words on the last sheet of the manuscript were:
‘The whole thing began to seem to me dream-like—not real—exactly like a mixed-up nightmare. I had a sort of feeling that I should wake up and discover that it was the morning after that dinner at Melhuish’s, and that I’d had a bad night. The only clear, definite conclusion I had arrived at now was that, if Arndale hadn’t done it, Challoner had. Stevens fitted for Frensham, partially, but only partially. For Barrington, of course, he didn’t fit at all. I couldn’t get away from the belief that whoever had killed one had killed the other; and that excluded Stevens. However, it didn’t seem much use reasoning from any belief—’
And the fact is that a graph for Stevens was added to the collection in Colonel Gore’s suit-case before he retired to rest that night.