“Oiled hinges,” mused Inspector Headcorn with the mellow detachment of one whose mental hinges are becoming well lubricated. “I dare say, if the truth were known, the victim had amused herself at that eavesdropping game a time or two before anything came of it. Blundell shouldn’t have spirited away that oil bottle so late in the day. It might have meant nearly as bad a slip as neglecting to look to his locks and bolts before holding a board-meeting—eh, Bream?”
“I’m not the one to cast stones at him for that last bit of carelessness,” answered the agent ruefully, and as he spoke he laid a gingerly hand on his wounded thigh. “Considering the late hour and the fact that Miss Lake was supposed to be doped he’d better excuse than I had for my little slip.”
“Mightn’t these affairs have presented us with fewer dead-ends,” ventured Colin, refilling glasses, “if, shall we say, some rapprochement between the law and the freelance had been possible?”
Bream chuckled.
“The more we got together, the happier we should be. Is that your idea, Inspector?”
Headcorn coughed austerely, then relaxed into a smile as he replied that their one infringement of professional etiquette had been singularly ill-starred.
“So it was,” agreed Bream. “And I doubt if the soundest united front could have led us beyond the hypothetical motive each of us could image while sitting in his own arm-chair. Uncovering the Penge fraud wouldn’t have proved Blundell guilty of murder—and how long would it have taken us to uncover it? If Blundell ever purchased a foot of land in his own name I’ve not been able to locate it. He had his men of straw acting for him, and he was protected at all points. No, a non-professional deserves all the kudos in this case.” Gallantly he raised his fourth dose of the Ladbroke prescription towards the girl in the bed. “I take pleasure in saying it—and I beg leave to drink to her good health and future happiness!”
“And so say all of us,” grunted the Inspector, tilting his glass. “My congratulations, Miss Lake.”
Diana blushed warmly and avoided Adrian’s eyes—a needless proceeding, as it happened.
“And how much health or future anything should I have had but for you others?” she retorted. “Meddling’s not clever. I had a luckier break than my predecessor had, but that’s the most you can say.”
“One thing’s always puzzled me,” remarked Colin, measuring more gin into the shaker. “Why didn’t Blundell have Mrs. Somervell’s body cremated?”
“I’ll answer that one,” said Diana promptly. “She wanted to be buried in that Berkshire churchyard, under a particular willow-tree. She had her mind set on a pink marble tombstone, with a list of her famous parts inscribed on it. It wouldn’t have looked well, would it, to disregard her known wishes?”
“Besides,” put in Adrian quietly, “once that rather fuzzy-headed diagnosis was given he’d no reason to suppose the death would be queried.”
The others looked at him. It was his first contribution, and he still sat, constrained and with a faint suggestion of aloofness, elbows on knees, eyes for the most part directed at the floor. One would have said that during his time of solitary confinement he had lost the habit of speech.
“What you say brings up another small point,” said Colin. “Do you suppose Blundell timed the thing to occur while Mrs. Somervell’s own doctor was out of town?”
Adrian had no idea; but Bream gave a knowing nod.
“With no wish to be quoted,” confided the latter, “this much I’ll tell you. Cross, the partner they called in, is Blundell’s G.P.—and when I talked to him, and again at the Old Bailey, I got a very strong impression that in some ways he’s indebted to his patient. Now, then, would a man in that position, hoping for further benefits, be anxious to cause inconvenience? Remember, he knew these two were on fairly intimate terms, and he didn’t know anything about the disposition of property. My notion is he’d sign a comfortable death certificate and sit tight on any private views he might happen to hold.”
Colin whistled.
“Not another one! Blundell seems to have made this a hobby.” He turned to Diana. “Didn’t you mention something of the kind?”
“But of course,” replied Diana calmly. “It was his life policy. He took pains to describe to me exactly how he managed people and got them on his side. As an exhibition of self-conceit it was simply revolting, but it told me much more than he imagined. To my mind it all traces back to the crushing sense of inferiority he’s always suffered from—for he has, you know, in spite of his bombast. It’s been a life-long handicap. Without it, there’d have been no Penge plan—and no murders.”
Colin understood, but as two of his guests looked slightly befogged, he bade Diana repeat the details of the long, self-revelatory harangue she had been forced to endure. Her eyes darkened and her colour came and went as she recalled it.
“He wanted me to know. You see, I was one of the stiff, English snobs who’d always looked down my nose at him.” She laughed a little, and continued: “Every one did that, it seems, when he first reached London, years ago, and saw himself regarded as a rough, Colonial outsider. He laid a definite campaign to beat down prejudice. He said the great lesson he’d learned was that every human being had his price—that you had only to discover what his particular weakness was and cater to it in order to disarm him and make him your slave. Money, he declared, would buy whatever a man wanted—respect, position, popularity. It might mean you had to juggle accounts in order to spend, but so long as you spent wisely you’d get it all back with interest.”
“So that’s it!” exclaimed Bream, remembering his conversation with the head clerk in Fetter Lane. “If he helped a lame dog over a stile it was because that dog would fawn on him afterwards, maybe bite the hand that attacked him. It was a system, then, his placing every one round him under some sort of obligation. Well, I can quite see it paid. The secretary, to be sure, turned out a bad investment, but you can hardly blame him for not foreseeing the complication in her case.”
“Of course it paid. He had a whole army of devoted allies; but the great thing was it made him feel himself a super-man, holding the strings, making people dance to his tune, and despising them for it. He told me Lord Limpsfield himself was under his thumb. Sir Norbury Penge was just an attractive lay figure, boosted into the limelight, but controlled from behind scenes. Why, even Sir Kingsley Baxter he regarded as his to command! It’s a kind of madness with him. What’s the word for it—megalomania?”
“I imagine he guaranteed counsel’s fees so he could prevent any newspaper from publishing Doctor Somervell’s story,” said the agent reflectively.
“Exactly, but wasn’t it simply a large edition of the good turn that bought the friendship of Dame Charlotte Moon? Look at that for a stroke of genius! Dame Charlotte’s respectability acts like a hypnotic spell.”
“Speaking of spells,” broke in Colin, “how many of us taxpayers ever thought to inquire who’d created this new Ministry, or the man to fill it? For that matter, wasn’t it sheer hypnotism that made the man in the street accept unquestioningly these thousand and one unwanted highways?”
“Hear, hear!” rumbled the Inspector. “The scheme could only have been worked with the press behind it. There’s power for you! You’ve only to print a thing to have half the public believing it. Print it often enough and with big headlines, and the whole population will be willing to bleed and die for its faith.”
“Limpsfield, I take it, means to fight to a finish?”
“We’ll be grey beards before he gives in,” declared Headcorn with conviction. “You’ll see, there won’t be one scrap of paper brought into court. A blessing for us we’d a spot-charge to prefer against Blundell. Otherwise this young lady’s account wouldn’t have commanded such immediate respect.” With a deeply regretful sigh he stretched and rose from his chair. “Oh, well, I suppose my duties are calling me! Coming my way, Mr. Bream?” When the two detectives had set off together in touching harmony, Colin asked his remaining guest whether, on the fatal Sunday, he had indulged in any of Blundell’s tobacco.
“One cigar,” answered Adrian. “He pressed it on me after lunch; but I’m never very strong on cigars. I chucked half of it away in the entrance to this building.”
“Did it make you sleepy?”
“As hell. I thought it was the food.”
“And you weren’t wearing an overcoat, were you? That settles it. He planted the stuff on you in the car.”
Colin reached the depleted shaker, and tipped a small dividend into Adrian’s empty glass. “What told you it was Blundell and not one of the others?” he inquired.
“I don’t quite know.” Adrian sat as before, but considered the question. “Even now it’s a hard thing to analyse the feeling I had about him. He was too friendly, too officious. I kept wanting to shove him off.”
“Whole races have been hated for less,” commented Colin. “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes puts it rather neatly, I fancy; but did the will business strike you as phoney?”
“What if it did? I couldn’t find anything wrong about it. No one could. She was sane, the thing was properly vouched for. It didn’t make sense for Blundell to be forcing her money on me, even assuming he could have managed it—which there was no proving. There wasn’t a darned thing I could say. So I saved my breath.”
He finished with a chary gesture. The silence which fell was singularly awkward for all three.
“Do you know,” said Diana hesitatingly, “I got another quite unintentional revelation from him. It showed me his feeling for her. It was a real feeling, you understand. Or don’t you?”
Both men looked at her. It was the first time Adrian had done so openly, and his level, steady gaze embarrassed her strangely.
“I’m sure I’m right,” she hurried on with an effort. “You see, with all her beastly little faults—maybe because of them—he worshipped her. To him she was and always had been his idea of what Woman should be, far above him, unattainable—for I can still swear she never gave him anything. He didn’t expect it; but all those years of unselfish devotion, when he was making himself just a door-mat for her to walk on, he was pathetically hoping to win from her some—some genuine regard. At last he believed he had won it. It might be because she was getting old and receiving less attention, but that didn’t spoil his triumph. He believed he had got the one thing his money couldn’t buy.”
She paused and drew a deep breath.
“And then, with one brutal stroke, she disillusioned him. In the library that night she showed him that all, all she cared about was what he could do for her in a material way. It put him back at the foot of the ladder. He saw himself as just crude, good-natured Nick Blundell, the solicitor she’d found a convenience—and it broke him. After that he took delight in planning to kill her. Killing for its own sake became a joy. I saw it in his eyes while he sat there making ready the chloroform pad that was going to finish off his last victim—me.”
Colin saw Adrian remove his spectacles and polish them carefully on his handkerchief. The moment had come, he decided, to relieve this diffident couple of his presence.
“Well, well!” he said, rising. “Fascinating though this is, it’s just occurred to me I may have some forty odd patients waiting for me to look in on them. Will you two carry on while I make my rounds?”
As he reached the door Adrian got up and followed him out. Gone—and without a word? With a hard lump in her throat Diana told herself that he could not face being alone with her, and that it was entirely her fault. Yet even so, how preposterous, how unthinkable for him to . . .
The door reopened, and screened by the largest mass of early daffodils she had ever seen in one person’s grasp Adrian appeared. He deposited his burden on the bed. The cool blooms covered her like a golden fleece. She gasped and buried her face in them.
“Adrian! How like you! And with me here thinking—thinking—”
She laughed, sobbed, and could not go on.
“Thinking,” he repeated woodenly, “that a Godforsaken chump like me would do well to clear out for good and all. Was that your idea?”
She looked up at him, and fear took her again.
“What are you trying to say to me, Adrian?” she faltered. “Whatever it is, get it over. I shan’t—mind.”
He hesitated.
“You’re realising, then, that this darned money may not be mine after all. As it wasn’t a voluntary will, I don’t suppose the courts will uphold it, if it’s contested by the next of kin.”
Was that all? He couldn’t be so stupid!
“I have thought of it,” she answered tentatively. “But why bring it up now?”
“Why? Because it means just this—that I’m in rather a worse hole than I was before all this happened. I tried to set you free when I saw what you’d been let in for. There’s a better reason now. I’ve nothing to offer you. You understand that, don’t you?”
She had grown very white. It was his way of telling her what she had long ago guessed.
“Of course, dear,” she replied after a moment. “I understood that evening at the hospital; but please don’t imagine I blame you; we can’t help these things. Better go now.”
He did not move.
“Wait a minute. I don’t get this.” He frowned down on her. “How do you mean, you understood that evening? Understood what?”
She shook her head mutely. Oh, why wouldn’t he leave her?
“Actually,” she heard him mutter, “things aren’t quite hopeless with me. I got a cable this morning about a Baltimore post I can walk straight into; but it’s only a start, and after what you’ve gone through, can I ask you to face any more trials? Not possibly.”
Light shone on her. With the corners of her mouth faintly twitching, she answered steadily:
“Perhaps it will be better to call it off. I’ve agreed, haven’t I? Now kiss me good-bye.”
Their eyes met, hers inscrutable, his mystified, troubled. Awkwardly he leant over. His lips touched hers, withdrew. A queer spasm of question crossed his face. He kissed her again—and this time the crushed daffodils slithered to the floor as his arms closed roughly round her body.
“But, Adrian,” she whispered, “if you don’t want me, why—”
“Oh, what the hell?” he silenced her. “We can talk any time . . .”
T H E E N D