Part 6

It was a figure eight in the form of two overlapping holes bored in the paneling of the wall at the height of a man’s head. Freshly cut: there was a faint salting of sawdust on the hardwood floor beneath.

It took Joel to break the stillness in the room. With a face like a death-mask she gazed at the dark spot on the wall.

“I know now,” she said. “I know who killed Colonel Blake and Romany and Uncle Bertrand. But it can’t be true. It can’t be true that—” Julian didn’t let her finish. He crushed his hand over her mouth as Belknap came in from the butler’s pantry, with the sergeant and Berry.

“Hush! you little fool. Don’t go saying things. Don’t _you_ be responsible for hanging somebody. Let Mr. Belknap take care of that.” He shook her desperately. “Whatever you know or think, keep it to yourself, do you hear? _Do_ you? Don’t let ’em get it out of you.”

But Belknap had heard enough.

“What’s this you know, Miss Joel?” he said. “Come now, out with it. No, don’t cry like that. I’m sorry. What’s the trouble, Miss Mdevani?” He turned to Nadia as Joel collapsed.

“You should have been barred from detective work on account of your eyes,” Nadia said. “Look.”

“Aha-a-a? So that’s the way the wind blows? We’ll investigate directly. We have another matter to deal with right now. All right, Sergeant, there’s your man.” He indicated Crawford.

Stebbins went to Crawford and touched his arm.

“I place you under arrest, Mr. Crawford, charged with instigating the murder of Judge Whittaker. Your hired accomplices have confessed.”

Crawford looked dazed. Then he swung on Stebbins.

“They have _not_ confessed,” he said. “For they did not kill Whittaker. If this is what is meant by third degree, you can do your damnedest. They are as innocent of this crime as you are. You can do your worst to me; but not to them.”

“The worst has been done to them I’m afraid,” Berry said quietly. “They are both dead. They told us to tell you the account is squared. Whatever that may mean. So I guess you have to go along with us. That gives us _one_ of our men, Sergeant. Now what’s this hole-in-the-wall business, Belknap? Neat work on your part, Crawford? You had things ready for business, I see.”

“There must be some entrance to the space between the wall and the tapestry of the library,” Belknap said. “We’d better call John.”

John came. He showed them a thin door within a door—a long, narrow, hinged panel that formed a door jamb in the dining-room-library doorway. Belknap went through it. No one spoke. When he returned he carried a Colt twenty-two in his handkerchief. He went directly to Nadia.

“I would offer you this back,” he said in a low voice, “but we shall need it. I’m truly sorry.”

“Don’t worry in the least.” She looked him straight in the eyes. “It is mine, yes. I missed it when _I_ needed it last night.”

XIV

Late in the afternoon a ‘London’ fog had crept up from the Sound, and smothered in its furry, suffocating waves, Thorngate was sinking into depth below depth of depression. Julian asked weren’t there seven levels of Purgatory because if so they must be about six down at five o’clock and rapidly approaching the bottom. It was the total lack of headway made by the investigators, and the apparent helplessness of the law, that tripled and quadrupled the early gloom of the second night. Hours upon hours of questioning and cross-questioning by Stebbins, Belknap and Berry in turn had gathered no really tangible results. Yet the steady, unremittent grilling went on—and on and on and on, as Julian said, like the tail of Christopher Robin’s mouse.

Julian was unquenchable. During his own brief appearance in the witness box—an uncomfortable, straight-backed chair at one side of the dining-room table, the dining-room being the temporary seat of legal authority—he had played a combination of clown and dunce, to the rage of Stebbins, the scorn of Belknap, and the amusement of Berry. For Julian had at last made up his mind to throw in his lot, and his clues, with Berry’s, as soon as he could isolate Berry. And it was for this he was managing to keep his own counsel. He wasn’t casting bread on the troubled waters for that Savonarola Belknap, or Stebbins, to pick up and grow fat upon. But he _did_ feel that he perhaps shouldn’t rate a whole investigation to himself, seeing it was his first. It would be positively presumptuous to suppose he had a chance to make a coup (not that he didn’t suppose it just the same) against such a field of stars. Belknap might even be called a first magnitude.

So when Stebbins was severe with him, chronically severe, he took refuge in an india-rubber persiflage.

“Miss Mdevani saw you on the stairs at 4:30 A.M. What did you say you were doing about that time?”

“I swear I was doing nothing whatever about it. Time is one of those things you save time by leaving to its own devices.”

Stebbins huffed and he puffed; Belknap cleared his throat; Berry smiled.

“I said what were you doing in the hall at 4:30 A.M.?” Stebbins’ voice did all the things Stebbins would have enjoyed doing.

“I had put my shoes out at 11 P.M., and I thought they might be back by four.” Julian was examining the end of his tie.

“Contempt of court, Julian,” Belknap said. “Come now, boy—”

“You leave him to me,” Stebbins thundered. “I’m talking to him, Mr. Belknap. Now, Mr. Prentice, will you repeat that again about you and Miss Lacey?”

“The others must be tired of hearing it; but if you want it, I’m never tired of saying it.” Julian struck a sentimental attitude. “I love her.”

Stebbins blushed.

“I’m asking you what went on in your room—I mean what was Miss Lacey doing in your—I mean— Oh, get to Hell out of here. I’ll call you again when I need you. Bring in Crawford.”

‘Bring in Crawford!’ All afternoon the word had periodically come out: ‘Bring in Crawford,’ and at each call Crawford, more shattered, more bewildered, more desperately ill with weariness and anguish, was led in, only to come out again to a stark and tragic Sydney who, between rounds as it were, tried mechanically to warm his hands with her colder hands.

Stebbins decidedly had it in for Crawford. Naturally he was prejudiced by a nasty little battle that had left him two badly wounded men.

“What was Judge Whittaker’s Diary to you? You needn’t answer. I know. And we’ll get you for that anyway. Where is the Diary now?”

“I don’t know.”

“_Answer_ me.”

“I don’t know.”

“When you killed Blake to get it what did you do with it?”

“I didn’t kill Blake.”

“What were you doing at 3 A.M.?”

“I was down at the Turnpike.”

“After killing Blake.”

“I told you I didn’t kill Blake;” with infinite weariness.

“Were you in Miss Video’s room at 2:30?”

“No. She was with someone else.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I heard voices and didn’t knock.”

“What _did_ you do?”

“Saw to the basement door for admitting my men.”

“Taking time to dispose of Blake.”

“I didn’t kill Blake.”

“Does your wife know of your relationship with Miss Video?”

“She does.”

“Since when?”

“A few days ago.”

“Did you quarrel?”

“Not exactly.”

“Did you suggest putting Miss Video out of the way?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Did you say, ‘It’s Bertrand Whittaker’s life or mine’?”

“I did. I have not denied my intention to kill Whittaker.”

“When did you admit your men to the house?”

“They were never in the house.”

“Are these the gloves with which you filched Miss Mdevani’s pistol and handled the paper knife against Blake?”

“I didn’t kill Blake.”

And so on, over and over, with Crawford’s voice dull and monotonous. But driven and hounded as he was he never yielded a point beyond his admission of an old murder and an intended one. But, as Stebbins said to Berry, it was merely a matter of time before they had a full confession from Crawford: he was the kind that eventually succumbs to third degree methods. And Stebbins was the one man sure of the way the wind blew!

He treated Nadia on the other hand with due respect, as they did all three. Stebbins obviously feared her. Berry sat gazing at her, spellbound. Belknap looked anywhere but at her, paced the floor, threw spokes in the wheels of Stebbins’ questionnaire, and put up defences that, in his blindness to them, he apparently thought were as invisible to others.

“Your handkerchief, Miss Mdevani?” Stebbins produced the handkerchief found by Belknap.

“Mine.”

“That handkerchief,” Belknap interposed impatiently, “was on the library floor when I helped Whittaker to his room at 11:30.”

“This is the first we have heard of it,” Stebbins snapped.

“I haven’t the least idea when I dropped it,” Nadia went on, ignoring the interruption. “Possibly it was when I found Blake, about 4:30.”

“_You found Blake?_” Stebbins pounced on her.

“I did.”

“And why didn’t you notify someone immediately?”

“There was scarcely time. Mrs. Crawford did it for me.”

“Where were you when Mrs. Crawford screamed?”

“In Mr. Belknap’s room.”

“You had gone to tell him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Had you heard anything on _your_ rounds? The way trails _didn’t_ cross last night beats everything.”

“I heard that rat in the library walls—you recall my mentioning him, Mr. Belknap? His teeth turn out to have been a tool called a gimlet.”

“Is this your pistol?”

“It is.”

“When did you have it last?”

“It was on my dresser when I came down to dinner.”

“Have you a permit?”

“I have. I have carried a weapon for years. A lone lady, you know,” she smiled.

“Why did you leave it on your dresser?”

“I had taken it from my handbag when I was fishing for my lipstick. I neglected to return it.”

Belknap stood directly in front of her, his hands thrust deep in his pockets.

“I saw it there myself not later than one-thirty, or two. Your window was open to the balcony. It was when I went to close it that I saw the figure on the terrace which I am willing to swear was that of Dorn.”

“You are forever ringing your Milton Dorn in on this, Belknap. For God’s sake produce him.”

“My scouts are out,” Belknap said with suave contempt. “The report comes that he never has returned to town. So far, so good. I think if you would dwell a moment on this phase of the case you would find the house bore me out in saying Dorn left here last night in a strange state of perturbation. He looked like a man about to lose sane control of himself.”

“I think you make a good point, Belknap,” Berry spoke. “In many ways the whole campaign has the earmarks of the inspired scheme of a maniac, conceived and executed with that type of brilliance. We must at least leave no stone unturned in the hunt for Dorn. That’s enough of you for the present, Miss Mdevani. Now let’s have a crack at Miss Lacey, Sergeant. In a moment—time out for drinks.”

It was a terrified and incoherent Joel that faced her three interlocutors—more terrified than seemed quite called for under the circumstances, bad as the circumstances were. Horror was to be expected, and fear of a sort perhaps, but not stark terror. But Joel was the victim of a terror that alternated moments of intense shivering with a rigid paralysis of movement. She bravely tried to control herself, and sat sipping the brandy Belknap had poured for her and smiling mechanically. Berry was extremely kind.

“Will you tell us, Miss Lacey, as clearly and consecutively as possible, the story of your night last night? There is no slightest wish on our part to hurry or confuse you. We need your help in settling an affair that _has_ been tragic and is likely to be more so unless we do something about it. Will you describe to us the way you spent your time between 10:30 last night, when I understand you retired, until 4:30 this morning when Colonel Blake’s murder was discovered?”

Joel, in broken snatches, told them of how she had gone to her room in a perturbed state of mind—puzzled by her uncle, bewildered at the startling rapidity with which a dangerous situation had fallen out of the blue, and inwardly shaken by a tale of murder that had struck home to one of their own number.

“Did the fact that your uncle read a passage of this Diary relative to a crime actually committed by Mr. Crawford mean that he might equally well have touched on crimes of others present? Or do you think he was choosing this way to cruelly pay off a score against Crawford?”

Joel drew a deep breath and looked quickly at Belknap.

“I think it must have been a personal question between my uncle and Mr. Crawford,” she said firmly.

Belknap appeared deaf to question and answer. Joel shuddered a little and dropped her eyes.

“Thank you, Miss Lacey. There seems to be mutual agreement on that point. You went to your room, you say. What next?”

She had prepared for bed slowly, for there was no hope of sleep and she wished to fill the time. She had stood at the window, walked the floor, sat by the fire. She thought, and thought; about shoes and ships and sealing wax, but about sin in particular, and finally about sin in the abstract.

“That’ll do,” said Stebbins curtly. He had been bothered by the way all his witnesses were inclined to wander off the beaten track into philosophizing and psychologizing. “Go on with the story.”

Then the idea of going directly to her uncle had occurred to her. At least she might find out why he was in this cold, bleak, inhuman mood. It might be he was facing a dilemma that was slowly but surely cornering him. Put in a corner for badness Bertrand Whittaker always went from bad to worse. This was worse.

She had crept out and along the hall—last night’s atmosphere had called for creeping—and was about to tap on her uncle’s door when she heard voices within: her uncle’s and Romany’s. Joel turned swiftly and slipped into a darkened doorway; and Romany had made her exit with a last dramatic fling over her shoulder. “All right, Bertrand, I’ll match you revelation for revelation if that’s your game. There are several of you due for a fall if I let so-and-so out of the bag. And I’m going to let her out.” Joel had caught so-and-so’s name and promptly lost it again in the frightful medley of subsequent events. She hoped it would come back. It was troubling her with a feeling of its vague familiarity.

Romany had disappeared, and no longer wanting a scene with her uncle, Joel had returned to her room and knocked on Julian’s door to ask for comfort and sympathy. She and Julian had discussed pros and cons, thises and thats, until Julian felt it was his turn to try to pour oil on Whittaker. He had left her sitting alone and desolate—promising a quick return; but he had never come back.

And very late, feeling badly in need of a bracer, she had summoned the courage to venture down to the tray of liquors in the library.

Here Joel paused in her slow, hesitant narration and trembled uncontrollably from head to foot like a spent runner.

“What’s troubling you, Miss Lacey?” Berry asked gently. “Did something happen in the library? Come now, what was it?”

“No, nothing happened exactly. I’m easily frightened I guess.”

“You were frightened?”

She seemed unable to answer, and turned an appealing glance toward Belknap.

“I came in from the dining room when Miss Lacey was there,” Belknap said in a low voice, holding Joel steady with his eyes. “She was hysterical and overwrought, but it hardly seemed surprising considering the general tension of the household. It appears I was wrong. Can’t you tell us what upset you, Joel dear?”

“You—came in from the dining-room,” she whispered, her face colorless. “I was tired and nervous, that’s all. You startled me dreadfully. Nothing more.”

“You are sure, Miss Lacey?”

“Absolutely sure. Of course. Mr. Belknap was so kind as to see me to my room. I was doing my best to fall asleep when Mrs. Crawford screamed.”

This was the most they could win from her—even when Stebbins insisted on a turn of the screw. She became stony and expressionless under pressure and they dared not urge her for the time being, though they felt she was decidedly withholding something of real importance.

“You had better go and try once more for a little sleep, Miss Lacey,” Berry said. “We all need it,” he added with a weary sigh. “What do you say we call it a day, boys? Can I have a word with you, Belknap? _What_ a fog!”

Belknap had been unable to guess which way the cat was jumping as far as Berry was concerned. He had not shown his hand in the least; and as for his face it was the perfect detective face, charming but expressionless, bland and open, but with as much depth as a plaster cast. It was only, as Julian remarked to Joel outside, when you took the trouble to meet his eyes squarely that you positively jumped, as if you had caught the eyes of your ancestral great-great-great somebody-or-other rolling at you from the wall. A secret chamber, and holes where the canvas should be! In Berry’s case that must mean something—if nothing more than that he was seeing more than he let on. It was certainly one of the first reasons why Julian was intending to take matters up with him alone.

Berry had so far only shown an interest in funny little irrelevant, or seemingly irrelevant, details. His total contribution to the afternoon’s entertainment had been sudden pesky interruptions, at inopportune moments, when he insisted upon shelving the important point at issue for the sake of what was a minor matter to Belknap and a very, very minor one to Stebbins. Stebbins saw things in black and white. Belknap was more willing to consider the shadings, but he had had to admit that a great many of Berry’s nuances escaped him. Berry’s “pardon-me” was a vague murmur about an Achilles heel—that one never knew in what out of the way spot the weakness might turn up. Best to probe them all with your spear thrust.

For instance, there was the sprinkling of the few dried carnation petals fallen across Romany’s rumpled hair and pillow—Stebbins had them now in a cup at his elbow, somehow pathetic, as if they had been her ashes. Romany, as she was discovered by Lily, and later examined by Berry and Stebbins, was a little heap of pink maribou dressing gown on her bed—her face ivory white under her amber hair—theatrical and unreal: “Call it _La Mort du Cygne_, or, better still, _She Who Gets Slapped_,” Julian had said, standing in the doorway of her room that morning. She had apparently been unexpectedly seized and held firmly, there was little sign of struggle, by two hands, with the thumbs pressing deeply at the base of the throat where there was a faint congestion and discoloration. There was only the one material clue: the carnation petals. And that seemed immaterial, since there was a bowl of carnations on the bedside table, which made it more than likely she had been holding one for its scent. Or was it possible the murderer had his sentimental moments!

But Berry made harpstrings of those petals and played on them in and out of season. Had anyone worn a lapel flower the evening before? Everyone was agreed that Dorn was wearing one—but they were equally agreed it was a gardenia. Belknap himself was positive on this point, although some of the others lost their certainty. Belknap also said _he_ might have been wearing one himself; he exchanged glances with Nadia.

“Next time you offer me a flower for my buttonhole, Miss Mdevani,” he said in a gently bantering tone, “don’t let anyone’s presence deter you. I should be charmed to have one from your fair hand.”

“It will be freshly plucked,” she answered him, her eyes very bright, high color on her face.

“No innuendoes!” Berry had cried. “You two need a moor and a moon. Remember this is a court of law.”

“I am not likely to forget it,” she said. “But, dangerous as it is to me, the moor and the moon would be more so,” and she tilted her chin at Belknap.

This had been a temporary fade-out of Berry’s interest in the carnation. But he had returned to it often, as he had to other apparently illogical and tiresomely remote incidents. It had the effect, however, of whetting Belknap’s appetite for enlightenment: had Berry a theory, or no theory; was he throwing dust to cover what he considered the crux of the whole business, or was he merely floundering in a waste of motives, unable to take the bull by the horns? Certainly it was time the two of them went into a huddle and exchanged views, even if the views were limited.

So it was with great expectations that Belknap answered Berry’s proposal.

“Yes, let’s go into retreat. I have a little to say myself.”

XV

“Nadia!”

“Mr. Belknap! God rest you merry gentleman!” Belknap had approached Nadia where she stood alone, in an alcove of the great East Room. She had been trying to concentrate on a specimen of modern French art. The fog pressed a whited face against the windows near her.

“Your mood is a difficult one, Nadia. I want to talk to you.”

“Let nothing you dismay.”

Belknap threw out his hands in a helpless gesture.

“You’re not kind,” he said. “Shall we go outside?”

“No, _thank_ you. Remember your Mr. Dorn.” Her dim smile, secretive, came and went.

“Come now, what would you have had me do? Tell them about the code—or have you conveniently forgotten the message? By the way, did I give it back to you? I haven’t been able to find it.”

She whirled on him.

“Didn’t you destroy it?”

“Perhaps. I can’t remember. Mrs. Crawford rather upset our tête-à-tête.”

Nadia looked him critically, menacingly, up and down from chin to brow and brow to chin. Her nostrils quivered; her cheeks sucked in; her eyes narrowed to shining cracks.

“There are moments when I suspect you of double dealing, Detective. You may be out to get me after all, and are finding the back-handed method the cleverest. (_Damn_ the O’Neill reiteration of that fog horn!)”

In a flash he saw the single frayed thread by which she held her nerve.

“That is not true, Nadia, and you know it.” Belknap returned her look with one as piercing and equally cruel in its way. “Guilty or not, it’s all one to me. But I _am_ out to get you. Yes, I want you.”

Her look was filmed with another, a softer one.

“You—want me. What does that mean? Is ‘want’ the word you intend?”

He admired her frankness; though he hated the woman of it, that must always have the facts sugar-coated. He was hard to her.

“That is the word I meant. Want. Are you suggesting that overnight it should or could be anything else?”

She gave an odd little sigh.

“That’s that,” she said with a faint shrug of her lovely shoulders. “Only there is so much want and so little—of the other.”

“Possibly. My impression is we wouldn’t need much of the other.”

Because he didn’t touch her, they were both being hurt by the desire to touch. She flinched a little before the brutal magnetism of his eyes. She felt gutted by them as by a fire; and shuddered her whole body to shake herself free, as a dog shudders rain.

“We won’t talk of it now,” she said restlessly.

“We must take advantage of the time that remains to us.”

“Meaning by that that my hours are numbered?” She threw him a quick sidewise glance under a curve of her lashes. “Don’t you _truly_ think your studied lack of interest in me will get me off? Really, that’s altogether too modest!”

“You are unfair, my dear. I am doing my best for you.”

“Go on. Say it: ‘without belief.’”

“Belief! Belief in what? Your innocence? God in His heaven, you didn’t imagine your love potion as strong as all that, did you? Let’s be honest. We can afford to be, you and I. It takes courage, but courage is the coin of our particular realm.”

“Who is to be honest?”

“Both of us, beautiful.”

“You begin.”

“Ladies first.”

“What you crave, I suppose, is a full confession, brief and to the point, omitting details. Mr. Belknap, I could almost think you are making love to me (oh, using the word lightly, don’t be alarmed!) to acquire information to be used against me. It may be you are regretting your gestures in my favor. Are you worrying about the reputation of Detective Ordway Belknap?”