CHAPTER V

Unkindest Cuts

NEXT MORNING, AFTER breakfast, Nigel walked down to the Loudrons’ house. James Loudron had telephoned him last night, asking him to come. A Sunday quiet was over the town. In the park a few people walked, exercising their dogs: bits of paper blew about the road as Nigel came to the bottom of the hill, his mind at grips with the pathologist’s report, the gist of which the D.D.I. had passed on to him the previous evening. It was a report which made the death of Dr. Piers even more mysterious and bizarre than his disappearance.

Dr. James brought him into a room on the left of the hall—a square room, its panelled walls painted with graining and knots to resemble stripped wood, a large desk in the middle and bookshelves built into the alcoves on either side of the fireplace.

“This was my father’s study.”

Nigel commented on the panelling.

“Yes. My mother had it done for him. Not long before she died. As a present for his birthday.” James Loudron’s heavy face was bleak with some unhappy reminiscence. He paused, then jerked out, “He didn’t really like it at all.”

“No?”

“He could be very cutting. I suppose I oughtn’t to say that, but——”

“I can imagine,” ventured Nigel, “he was not altogether easy to live with.”

“My mother was a saint,” James blurted out; then, as if aware that along this line he might quickly go too far, twitched his ponderous shoulders and said, “We’re in rather a spot, you know.”

“The pathologist’s findings?”

“You’ve heard about that? Yes. I’ve not told the others yet. The fact is—I don’t quite know how to approach this——”

“You’d like me to help? Professionally?”

“That’s it.” James seemed absurdly relieved. “Sort of friend at court. You told us at dinner you sometimes took on this sort of thing.”

“Certainly. But I must make it quite clear that I don’t work against the police.”

James looked quite shocked. “Of course. I should be the last person to ask you to compound a felony, or whatever it’s called. Not,” he added hastily, “that there can be any question of a felony here. I mean, in the sense of——” He spluttered to a stop, like a car with a choked petrol-feed. Nigel tactfully helped him out, then asked if he could talk to all the members of the family together. James went out to collect them and ring up Harold.

Pompous, earnest, socially inept, humourless, single-minded: overshadowed by his father, but likely to blossom out now the shadow is removed, and become with greater self-confidence a more than adequate practitioner: devoted to his mother, and probably resented his father’s treatment of her: is appalled—as he and everyone else keep drumming into my head—by the possible effect of the tragedy upon his practice: but would this be sufficient to account for the terrible uneasiness which he so ineffectually tries to conceal? Uneasiness? Or bewilderment?

Dragging himself out of these sterile meditations, Nigel began to prowl about the room. The books told him little he did not know about Dr. Piers’s refined taste: there were two shelves of art books, an array of biography, a good selection of classics and modern novelists, little poetry. The medical text-books were kept, presumably, in the surgery. The drawers of the leather-topped desk were not locked: they had been left open, no doubt, after the search for the missing diary.

It was this diary which most exercised Nigel’s mind just now. Either Dr. Piers had started writing it, or for some unimaginable reason he had told a lie when he said he was keeping a diary. If there had been a diary, four possibilities arose: either Dr. Piers had destroyed it himself or hidden it, or someone else had destroyed it or was hiding it. It seemed unlikely that Dr. Piers could have hidden it so successfully as to elude a search by his own family. Did he destroy it, then? Surely he would only do so if it contained matter he did not wish to be made public after his death: which implied that, after his announcement at the dinner party, he somehow became aware that he was shortly going to be dead: which implied suicide. And suicide, as the pathologist’s report showed, was almost (but not quite) out of the question. Well then, had some member of the household destroyed it? A murderer, because it gave him away? Possibly, but the diary might also have been destroyed, after the doctor’s disappearance, by one of the family, either to protect a murderer or merely to get rid of something that would prove embarrassing to himself if it were exposed. The fourth alternative—that one of the household was concealing it—implied that the diary was dangerous or embarrassing to him at present, but later might become useful. Useful for blackmail? for self-defence? for the vindication of someone?

Nigel turned his mind to something less ambiguous. The physical diary itself. What would Dr. Piers be liable to write in? He was the kind of man who might well have bought a sumptuous, tooled-leather article. But also, Nigel’s intuition told him, the old man might equally well have started jotting down—how had he put it?—“not exactly for confession, but for the drawing-up of a balance-sheet”—on the first paper that came handy. And what would come handy for a doctor? A prescription-pad—too small for the purpose. A case-book? Yes, thought Nigel excitedly, and that could account for why the diary had not been found: a doctor’s case-books are top secret: even his own family would feel inhibited from prying into them—Rebecca, certainly, if it had been she who did the searching. Presumably the subsequent search by the police would have covered the surgery; but by that time the case-book, with its diary pages, might have been taken away and concealed. It should be simple enough to find out, from an inspection of Dr. Piers’s records, whether one of his case-books was missing.

A car drew up outside—a Jaguar—from which Harold Loudron emerged. Letting himself in at the front door, he called out for James, who ran downstairs and took Nigel and Harold up to the drawing-room. In the morning sunshine its white-panelled walls, the brilliant pictures and the exquisite blending of colours in carpet and hangings and upholstery, together with the figures of Rebecca, Graham and Walter Barn, who were sitting there like people in a painter’s conversation-piece—all made it resemble a distinguished salon. Even Walt Barn had, somewhat surprisingly, got himself into a Sunday suit. And it was not only the sunlit room itself, so gracious and airy, which gave Nigel the impression of a lightening—an atmosphere easier to breathe, as it were, than it had been that night after dinner when the presence of the patriarchal Dr. Loudron had overcast the assembly.

James, leaning his elbow on the mantelshelf and clumsily stuffing a pipe, told them he had asked for Nigel’s help, then with a brusque gesture handed over to him. After offering his condolences, Nigel turned to Rebecca.

“Your brother and I have heard the gist of the pathologist’s report. It won’t be very pleasant to listen to. If you’d rather——”

“No. Please tell us everything,” she said, with a lift of her chin and a steady look at Nigel. There was a new, unconscious dignity in her bearing, though her eyes were heavy with grief or sleeplessness. “I am a doctor’s daughter,” she added.

“Well then. The medical evidence is consistent with your father’s having died on the night he disappeared. But it does not rule out his dying up to two days later. The cause of death is not absolutely established.”

“But surely—wasn’t he drowned?” Graham Loudron’s expressionless eyes were fixed attentively upon Nigel’s.

“No. His body was found in the river, as you know. It had been badly mutilated by the screw of a steamer. But, fortunately for this investigation, it was his legs and not his arms which were cut off.”

Nigel paused, where he stood by one of the tall windows, closely scrutinising the five of them. They all looked—or managed to look—blankly puzzled.

“The inspector—he came twice yesterday—didn’t tell us that,” said Rebecca.

“He told me—in confidence,” said James.

“Why,” asked Graham, “is this fortunate for the investigation?”

“Because the arteries of both wrists were severed,” Nigel flatly replied.

“Then he did commit suicide,” said Harold, almost to himself.

Walter Barn cocked up his round head. “But that’s fantastic. D’you mean the old man walked down to the river, through that fog, in nothing but an overcoat, then cut his wrists and threw himself in—all in one motion, like?”

James coughed—in embarrassment or warningly.

“We don’t know for certain,” Rebecca put in, “that there wasn’t a suit missing, and underclothes.”

“He must have had a brainstorm,” Harold said. “That’s the only thing that would account for it.”

“Yes, but the clothes, the overcoat——” began Walter.

“The body was naked. But they could easily have been ripped off by the ship’s propeller and shredded. Or they may yet be found.” Nigel paused, and began to prowl along the length of the three windows. “How he got into the water, we simply don’t know. But he was certainly dead by then—the autopsy proves it. You agree?”

“Yes. No doubt at all,” said James, with a worried frown.

Nigel paused again, to see if anyone would take up the running. At last Harold Loudron hesitantly remarked:

“I don’t see it’s all that improbable. Couldn’t he have gone to the river—assuming some kind of brainstorm—and severed the arteries, and then fallen in in a faint, or—or decided to finish himself off by jumping in?”

Rebecca gave a little sob.

“The trouble with that theory,” said Nigel, “is that no bloodstains have been found, and the nature of the cuts.”

All but James, who was nodding sapiently, gazed at Nigel perplexed. He felt a tightening of tension in the room, but could not tell who was its source. Someone—or more than one—had keyed himself up at that “nature of the cuts.”

“Yes,” he went on. “You see, there are only two cuts, and they are of an equal depth.”

Graham Loudron rose abruptly to his feet, looked around for a cigarette box, took a cigarette and lit it and sat down again. At the mantelshelf Dr. James stood, stiff as a caryatid. Walter Barn was feverishly scratching his flaxen poll.

“Could you favour us,” asked Graham coldly, “with some explanation? We’re not all authorities on forensic medicine here.”

“Certainly. Suicides who—I’m sorry to have to go into all these details, Miss Loudron—who cut an artery generally go for the jugular. And they almost invariably make several tentative, exploratory cuts before they give the slash which kills them. Whether this is because they haven’t the nerve to do it decisively first time, or because they are ignorant of anatomy and searching for the exact place——”

“But you can hardly argue,” interrupted Graham, “that my father was ignorant of anatomy.”

“Indeed not. In the case of a doctor and a resolute man, the absence of exploratory cuts would mean a good deal less.”

“Well then——”

“It’s the depth that tells against suicide. Don’t you see? Was your father ambidextrous?”

“Not particularly. Why?”

“If you are normally right-handed, you would take the razor in your right hand to slash your left wrist. This cut would, partly at least, disable your left hand, so that—when you transferred the razor to it—you could not possibly make so deep a cut in the other wrist.”

“I see,” said Graham woodenly. There was a considerable silence, broken finally by Walter Barn.

“Must’ve been a gang.”

“Oh for God’s sake!” Harold wearily protested.

“No, I’m serious. Suppose he just took it into his head to go for a walk. Foggy night. Some ted bumps up against him: demands his wallet. Easy meat. But the old man resists. Puts up his hands, see? to ward off this ted. Who slashes at him, cuts both wrists, then dumps him in the river.”

“I never heard such a ridiculous notion,” drawled Harold. “Why on earth should Father go for a walk in the middle of a foggy night?”

“Maybe he went along after dinner to see you and your missus,” Walter answered, with an irresponsible grin.

“She wasn’t—— What the hell d’you mean, to see us!”

Harold exclaimed violently.

“Well, to see you, then. I heard him talking to you on the telephone before dinner that night. ‘No, it can’t be as urgent as that,’ he said. ‘We’ll discuss it to-morrow.’ Maybe he changed his mind and toddled along after all.”

Harold was quite white with anger. “Are you suggesting——?”

“Let’s drop this,” interposed James. “My father went to bed early that night.”

“People can get out of bed,” said Walter.

“But they usually don’t when they’ve taken a sedative,” said James.

“A sedative?” Rebecca’s eyes were opened wide.

“He told us he was feeling sleepy. Sodium amytol—12 grains of it—was found in the stomach,” said James. “They can’t be certain how big the actual dose was. But it would have been enough, at least, to make him sleep for several hours.”

Walt Barn bobbed up again. “Well, this beats everything! First someone tries to do him with a drug; then he’s——”

“This isn’t the time or the place for clowning,” James heavily rebuked him.

“Anyway, what were you doing here that night?” asked Harold. “It’s the first I’ve heard——”

Walter’s bead-bright eyes switched to him. “I just looked in to see Becky. Before dinner. Next question?”

Nigel intercepted a look which Rebecca gave the young painter at this point—a look of reproach, was it? or distrust? or apprehension? He decided to take a grip on the situation again.

“The police will have to investigate all your movements that night. Very thoroughly. So I suggest we do not go into them now. But since Dr. James has asked me to hold a watching brief for the family, let me impress on you how important it is to tell them the exact truth. Being evasive, or telling lies with the mistaken object of protecting someone else, would cause endless trouble and confusion.”

“Quite. Absolutely,” commented James in an authoritative manner.

“It looks as if you were going to earn your money pretty easily.” Graham’s small mouth had a cynical twist. “And why should the protection of someone else be a mistaken object?”

“Mr. Strangeways means that to suppose you can protect a person by telling lies to the police is a mistake,” said Rebecca severely, looking extraordinarily like her mother in the dining-room portrait.

“I stand corrected,” Graham murmured. “Perhaps our private and personal investigator can tell us what deduction he draws from the missing razor?”

“Missing razor?” Harold echoed.

“Yes,” said Nigel. “Your father stopped shaving years ago, of course. But he kept his case of cut-throat razors. According to the inspector, one is missing from the case, and cannot be found in this house.”

“And the deduction?” Graham persisted in his smooth, acid tone.

“Either Dr. Piers did leave the house, taking the razor, with the intention of using it on himself elsewhere——”

“Tactful, eh?” Walter outrageously muttered.

“. . . Or someone used it on him in this house, and disposed of it later, probably in the same way the body was disposed of.”

James Loudron broke the shocked silence. “But that would mean—would seem to imply that one of us—it’s inconceivable.”

“If I used a razor on anyone, I’d simply wipe it off and put it back in the case,” said Walter brightly.

“I can just imagine that,” remarked Harold.

“Nasty, nasty!”

Rebecca spoke up. “I think we ought to try and remember that it’s Father who is dead, and not be flippant about it all.”

Walter’s mouth sprang open, but he managed to hold back whatever unconscionable utterance he had been on the point of making.

“Your father kept case-books, I presume?” Nigel suddenly asked.

“Oh yes,” said James. “In the surgery. In a cupboard he kept locked.”

“Miss Loudron, when you searched for the diary, you didn’t think of looking in that cupboard?”

“Yes. I did. There was no diary there.”

“But you didn’t examine the case-books themselves?”

“Certainly not. They are absolutely confidential.”

“Then I think I’d better do so now.”

“Oh no.” Rebecca was flustered but exceedingly firm. “That is quite out of the question. And in any case I can’t see why——”

“Mr. Strangeways,” said Graham, looking at him with something nearer respect than he had yet shown, “has it in mind that Father might have used the empty pages of a case-book for his diary.”

“Exactly. And if you will not allow me to look through them, there would surely be no breach of professional etiquette in Dr. James doing so? in my presence, of course?” And it’s not hard to see why the intelligent Dr. Piers had a soft spot for Graham Loudron, thought Nigel, when he is evidently so much quicker in the uptake than the others.

“I can see no objection,” said James. He knocked out his pipe in the grate, and moved to go, but Graham made a slight gesture:

“Reverting to what you said just now, Strangeways, how can the police suppose that my father was killed in this house? Surely there’d be traces? And also traces of the body being taken away?”

“They were nosing about in Father’s car, and mine, yesterday afternoon,” said James grimly.

“They’ve been all over the house,” Rebecca added. “And I suppose they’ll be back again soon. I must say they’re very polite and give as little trouble as possible.”

“Like the bailiffs,” said Walter, grinning.

“I’m afraid I’m going to ask if I may do just the same. Perhaps you would show me round”— Nigel smiled at Rebecca—“after your brother and I have visited the surgery.”

James took Nigel down some back stairs and unlocked the door into the annexe. This contained a surgery, a dispensary and a waiting room. The surgery was a long, cream-washed room, with french windows at the far end opening on to the garden. While Dr. James unlocked a cupboard and took out a pile of foolscap-size manuscript books, Nigel surveyed the garden. On his left was a full-grown lime tree; in front a bed filled with rose-bushes heavily pruned; beyond that, a square of grass, and at the far end some terraced beds in which crocuses and snowdrops were showing, backed by the side wall of a house.

“These really ought to go to his old hospital,” said James. “They’re quite exceptional. He was a remarkable diagnostician, you know. It’s partly experience, of course; but that isn’t enough in itself—one needs intuition, instinct, I don’t know what to call it.” His voice tailed off, and he began to read at random with an absorbed professional interest.

“Are they dated? Each book, I mean?” Nigel gently asked.

“What? Oh yes.”

“Then try the most recent one first.”

Dr. James went through the pile, found the 1959 and 1960 volumes, began to glance rapidly through the pages.

“This is a bore for you,” he said over his shoulder. “Wouldn’t you rather go over the house while I’m doing this?”

“I’m sorry, but I must be present. Then no one could accuse you of destroying the evidence.” Nigel’s tone was light, but James frowned and twitched his shoulders as if there was a load on them.

“If I’d wanted to destroy evidence, I could have done it any time in the last ten days,” he said. “Besides, how do you know I’m going to tell you if I do come to the diary pages?”

“Of course you are: because the police will soon be examining those books, and it’d look bad if you missed out something and they found it.”

There was nothing in the recent volumes. James worked back, through the 1950’s and 1940’s. Three-quarters of an hour had passed. He came to the book for 1940, flipped his way through it. “Hallo! Look. There are some pages missing at the end.”

Nigel took the volume from his hands. There were indications that four pages had been roughly removed. “So perhaps somebody has destroyed the evidence.”

“My father could have torn them out himself, I suppose.”

“But he wasn’t in the habit of taking out pages. None of the books so far have any missing?”

“No.”

“Well, carry on. Work backwards. It may not mean anything.”

James finally put down the earliest volume. “Nothing more,” he said, sighing heavily. “No diary. No other pages missing.”

“Then I’ll take the 1940 book and give it to the police. There may be fingerprints. Have you some newspaper I can wrap it in? I’ll write you a receipt now. And please tell no one about what we’ve found.”

Presently Nigel walked out into the garden, the wrapped volume under his arm, to get some fresh air. Forsythia was blooming on the wall to the right of the rose-bed. Behind this wall, he discovered, lay a yard with tall wooden doors giving on to Burney Street, and the old coach-house which had been converted into a double garage. He strolled to the far end of the garden, and gazed unseeingly at the clumps of golden crocuses. “Now why,” he silently asked them, “why should Dr. Piers choose the 1940 book to keep his diary in, supposing those missing pages were a diary? Wouldn’t it have been more natural for him to have used the 1960 book, which has any number of blank pages?” The crocuses offered no reply. “What happened in 1940? The first blitzes. His finest hour? Twenty years ago. Does this mean anything, or is it just the alluring mouth of a blind alley?”

Nigel walked slowly back to the house. Rebecca Loudron was waiting for him in her father’s study. Her eyes at once turned to the parcel under his arm. “Did you find anything?” she asked.

“We didn’t find any diary pages, I’m afraid.”

Rebecca waited for him to enlarge upon this; but, since he did not, bit her lip in obvious chagrin and rose abruptly. “You want to see over the house now?”

“Yes, please. May we start at the top and work down?”

The top floor consisted of a box-room and two others. These two were used for spare-rooms, she told him: they used to have maids in them, but servants were difficult to get nowadays and foreign helps often unreliable: so they had been managing lately with a woman to clean and another who came in occasionally to do the cooking if Rebecca was ill or away.

“But you’re fond of cooking, yourself, or you wouldn’t be so good at it?”

“Oh, yes. But it is a tie.”

What a strange mixture she is, thought Nigel: so dull and conventional on the surface, and rather childlike—even now it’s as if she were playing at being the grown-up hostess; yet underneath there is real vitality, something long suppressed, ready to flower—or to explode?

“You’ll miss your father very much?” he tentatively inquired.

Her large, almost handsome face closed up. “I don’t know. I was used to him. At present I feel nothing. Just sort of dazed and empty.” She paused, struggling to make her thoughts articulate. “I suppose we all depended upon him too much. I don’t mean just for money.”

Rather brusquely, as if she had given herself away, Rebecca led him down to the next floor. “These used to be the nurseries. We turned them into bed-sitters. That’s a bathroom. James and I share it. And Graham uses it. This is James’s room. I’m afraid it’s rather untidy—the woman doesn’t come to-day, and I haven’t had time to do it yet.”

It was a pleasant, low-ceilinged room, its windows looking out on to the street. A smell of stale tobacco hung in the air. The bed-clothes were rumpled and wrinkled, as though James had spent a restless night. There was an electric fire, a comfortable arm-chair, shelves with medical works, detective novels and travel books meticulously segregated. A cabinet in one corner held a collection of botanical specimens.

Next, they entered Rebecca’s own room. Whatever Nigel might have fancied, he would never have guessed it would be like this. A large room, overlooking the garden, low-ceilinged like James’s, the nursery bars still on the windows, and crammed with old-fashioned furniture—a large four-poster, a frilled dressing-table, a round mahogany Victorian table, an array of futile knick-knacks on the mantelshelf, daguerreotypes and silhouettes and gloomy landscapes on the walls, two basket-chairs and a nursing chair, a thick Turkey carpet, occasional tables littered with photographs in silver frames, bowls of pot-pourri, nameless objects in poker-work—the eye was surfeited at one glance. Only one contemporary article could be descried amid the chaos: a magnificent radiogram.

“They’re all my mother’s,” said Rebecca, flushing. “Papa wanted to auction them after she died, but he finally let me keep some of her things.”

“How old were you then?”

“Eighteen. She died eight years ago.”

“So you won that battle, anyway.”

“Won—what do you mean?”

“Your father finally let you keep some of her things, you said.”

Rebecca looked a bit uncomfortable. “Well, yes, it was rather a struggle. Of course, I can understand now. He didn’t like them—mother had no taste, I suppose: like me: not his sort of taste anyway.”

“And you were shocked to think he wanted to get rid of every trace of her? One can get tremendously indignant at eighteen.”

“One can get tremendously indignant a good deal older than that,” she answered, with a sudden dryness which Nigel could imagine as inherited from her Scottish mother.

“Yes,” he said. “On one’s own behalf. But the passionate, quixotic loyalty which makes one fight for someone else’s memory—that’s a youthful thing. An admirable thing, too.”

Rebecca bowed her head, touched by the oblique praise.

“Is this your mother? May I look?”

“Yes. It was taken on their honeymoon. She looks very happy, doesn’t she?”

But the face Nigel was observing in the silver-framed, faded photograph was that of the man who stood beside Mrs. Loudron. Dr. Piers had been clean-shaven in those days, so the lines of his intelligent face, tapering down from broad brow to narrow chin, and the slightly mischievous pout of the little mouth, were unobscured.

“Funny,” he said, “your father reminds me of someone.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Who can it be? Does it remind you of anyone?”

She studied the photograph. “I don’t think so. Perhaps I know it too well,” Rebecca slowly answered.

Nigel did not press her. “That’s a noble bed. Though I don’t know how people didn’t get claustrophobia when they drew the bed-curtains.”

She gave him a fleeting, timid glance, then unexpectedly giggled.

“Papa said I was made on that bed, so I might as well lie on it.”

“What music do you like best?” Nigel asked, pointing to the radiogram and the disc-holders beside it.

“Mozart. He makes me feel young and—and bubbly. Don’t you think he’s marvellous?”

“I do. And does Walter like him?”

“I’m getting him to. In fact, we were playing the clarinet quintet and some piano concertos the night when——” Rebecca broke off abruptly. “Did you hear it?”

“The clarinet quintet?”

“I thought I heard the telephone.” She ran out to the head of the stairs and listened. “Perhaps someone has answered it. Well, we’d better be getting on.”

“I hope I’m not taking up too much of your time.”

“Oh, it’s all right. Graham said he’d cook the dinner today. He’s quite good at it. He cooked in the Seamen’s Hospital here for a bit, a year or two ago. Do you want to see his room?”

“Yes, please. It was your mother’s, I think you told me.”

“Yes. None of us felt much like using it after she died and Papa had built a suite over the annexe, so he put Graham into the room.”

They were walking down another flight of stairs. At the bottom, of it next to the drawing-room, a door was ajar. Rebecca led the way in, after knocking. The room was empty—in more senses than one, Nigel felt. Its occupant was not there: cooking, presumably. But, although it was well furnished, Graham’s room gave a curious impression of anonymity, or of transient occupancy, like a college room in the vacation at the end of an academic year. No photographs, no books, no clothes thrown on to chairs, a pad of clean blotting-paper on the desk.

“I say, it’s all very vacant, isn’t it?” remarked Nigel, cheerfully.

“Graham keeps everything in his cupboards and drawers. Locked up.”

“This is directly under your room, I take it. How long has Graham lived here?”

“Let me see. Seven years, it’d be.”

“It must have been strange for you at first—to have an adopted brother. But you all seem to get on pretty well now.”

“Graham was rather difficult at first—to get to know, I mean. Of course he was only thirteen, and he’d had rather a bad time apparently.”

“So you mothered him?” said Nigel, smiling at her.

“Well, I tried.” A frown came and went on Rebecca’s face. “Actually, we sort of split up quite soon. James and I taking after Mother, I suppose it was inevitable we should feel closest to each other. Harold is built more on Father’s lines. Of course he was nine years older than Graham, but Graham used to tail round after him a lot in the holidays. I’m afraid I’m putting it all rather badly.”

She has become so voluble, thought Nigel, because she wants to postpone going into her father’s room.

“Would you rather I finished the tour by myself?” he asked.

She looked momentarily puzzled: then her chin went up. “No. It’s all right, thank you.”

They went down eight stairs to a half-landing, turned right and then left along a short passage, at the end of which Rebecca opened a door. Dr. Piers’s bedroom had a large window in its left-hand wall, looking out on to the lime tree and the gardens of houses farther up the hill: it was luxuriously furnished: a big, built-in wardrobe contained at least two dozen suits, all on hangers, and many pairs of shoes with shoe-trees in them. Nigel noticed three Picasso drawings on the wall opposite the bed. On the bedside table stood a telephone, a charming converted oil-lamp and a copy of Albertine Disparue: the lower shelf of this table held a portable radio.

“And this is the bathroom?”

“Yes,” said Rebecca, who was still standing in the bedroom door. “Do go in if you want.”

The bathroom was equally luxurious in its way, but had nothing to say to Nigel. After glancing round it, he walked out again, and pointed to the bedroom window. “Was that shut when you and Graham came in, the morning of your father’s disappearance?”

“Yes. It had been a foggy night.”

“And the bedroom door was shut?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to try an experiment. What time did you start playing records that night?”

A flash of apprehension came and went in her eyes. “It must have been about nine o’clock.”

“And how long for?”

“Well, off and on, till eleven.”

“Will you go up to your room now and put on an L.P. record in three minutes’ time. Play it for a couple of minutes at the volume you were playing that night, then take it off. When you’ve taken it off, sit still and listen. I shall come up and ask you if you heard anything from below. Oh, and shut your window—I presume it was shut against the fog that night?”

“Yes. All right. But I don’t understand——”

As soon as she was gone, Nigel switched on at medium volume Dr. Piers’s bedside radio. A rather sepulchral voice came out of it: “. . . text is, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’”

A sermon. Couldn’t be better. Nigel ran upstairs into Graham Loudron’s room. With the window shut he could still just hear the radio preacher’s voice. Presently he caught the Mozart D minor piano concerto from Rebecca’s room above: it was faint, and he could hear in occasional intervals the preacher’s voice. After a few minutes the gramophone stopped. Nigel waited for another couple of minutes, then he started to walk about, talking to himself, opening the window, moving a chair. Finally he went down and switched off the radio, and then walked up to Rebecca’s room. His questions evidently puzzled her. She said she had heard nothing for a couple of minutes after she had stopped the gramophone, but then she thought she had heard someone talking and moving about on the floor below, though she wasn’t sure.

“Won’t you tell me what it’s all about?”

“I hardly know myself,” replied Nigel. “I’ve discovered that from Graham’s room you can hear someone talking in your father’s, but from your room you can’t. Also that from your room you can hear movements in Graham’s.”

“Well, I could have told you that.”

“Did you hear any, that night?”

Rebecca hesitated, flushing deeply. “I don’t remember. I couldn’t have, surely, with the gramophone on?”

Nigel did not pursue it. But he felt sure that Rebecca was not speaking the truth.