Part 9

“That’s for you to say, Mr. Detective,” Sydney answered with unexpected fire. “But this is the second time today you have accused me of murder; and I should have thought, unless you can make your point better than you made it this morning, you might exercise a greater professional restraint.”

By a blazing light in Sydney’s transparent face it was clear things no longer mattered a tinker’s dam: life, death, love, hatred were all one to her, which was nothing. Belknap regarded her with merciless, puckered eyes, and turned again to her husband. He touched a light forefinger to the powder on Crawford’s corroded lips.

“Poison is my guess,” he said. “We’ll find out where it came from soon enough. You’ve run it too close, Miss Mdevani. I shall have to examine the remainder of that sleeping drug you so kindly offered. _If_ it’s still in your possession. Hmmm! No you don’t, lady—stand where you are.”

“I’m sorry to have frightened you,” Nadia drew back and spoke with slow venom. “I merely thought to assist you. You’ll find it in the middle compartment of my handbag.” With her eyes she indicated the bag on the dresser. “Are you—alone?” she added.

“Quite alone, Miss Mdevani. But not for long I assure you.” Belknap went to the telephone: (“Operator, give me 40. Thanks. Police Headquarters? Give me Sergeant Stebbins. Oh, that you, Stebbins? You’d better come up. Your catch has gone the way of all flesh—which, in this house, means he has been murdered. But I have a good substitute. So come along and help me. Right.”) He hung up.

“Where is Mr. Berry?” Nadia asked.

“Doing research work.”

“I should like to see him, if I may.”

“You should? Why? My opinion is that I make a better father confessor.”

“I’m sure of it. I prefer a layman that’s all—as safer in the long run.”

How he admired her Custer stand. He knew, if she didn’t, that she was literally at the end of her rope. He hadn’t a doubt in his mind that her bag contained the poison. This poisoning business was always such a risky affair. He felt convinced that in the excitement she had neglected to exchange the contents of the bottle. Yet she was boldly facing it out to the last ditch. It was proving a gallant fight, if a criminal’s fight can be called gallant. And, admiring her, he wanted her more than ever. His eyes absorbed her as she stood there slim and taut, outlined in the light that, being shielded from Crawford, fell directly upon her. She wore a clinging dress of bitter-sweet red. It shaped her narrow hips, her lovely forward drooping shoulders. There were slippers to match the dress; coral in her ears; a half dozen barbaric coral bracelets high on her arm; a large bloodstone ring on her index finger. She seemed not so much savage as heathen, a descendant of Attila. It was a thousand pities, Belknap thought, to have her broken in this sordid fashion: law courts, disgrace, and, short of death, a prison. How much more fun to break her himself, in a man’s way. But it was too late now. The cards were stacked against her, and he didn’t need her enough to follow her lead to Hell. He drew a breath and relinquished her.

“That’s quite possible. Safety is not a term you and I have conjured with.”

“Hardly. We have never pretended to be anything but dangerous to each other. And this was scarcely the moment to have drawn in our horns. But that shouldn’t destroy our relationship, should it? For I believe it was you who first made a claim to courage. You put it rather neatly, I remember, calling it the coin of our realm.”

Again her irony, and he flushed.

“I was flattered, my dear, when you challenged me to catch you at one murder.” (God, he thought to himself, what kind of a grip has this woman got on me that I should stand here arguing, with a corpse on the bed between us!) “I have ceased to be flattered. Four is far too simple a problem; particularly when you let yourself be tripped up in the fourth act.” Belknap was opening her bag. He held up the little red bottle for reflections. “Your stop-light,” he said with his cruel, side-wise smile.

“Your play on words, sir, is one of the most delightful things about you. I see it doesn’t fail you under trying circumstances.” Nadia’s color was up. She was positively enjoying this linguistic sword play. Belknap hated himself for having let himself be snared into it. She was playing for time. Exactly what good it would do her he failed to see. But the furtive half-eye she gave to the door, the furtive half-ear she gave to what might be happening outside, meant she was biding an opportunity. And something was at last happening outside. Suddenly the door of the lower hall was opened and closed repeatedly and vehemently. There were loud voices, and someone in a querulous rage was insistently keeping the upper hand. There was a scuffle on the stairs. Belknap went to the door, and paused with the key in his hand. He looked quickly at Sydney’s quiescent figure lying curled up at Crawford’s feet—she had fallen into a deep sleep, or perhaps a faint, at some moment of the conversation; how little attention had been paid her!—and then back at Nadia.

“Quick, dearest,” he whispered, “go by the window! Forgive me, it’s the best I can do.” He was surprised at his own words. But her shuddering tremor at the approach of the others had been the last straw. He couldn’t go with her but he could let her off.

“Thank you,” she answered gently. “I am not running away. I have never run even when guilty. Is it likely I should try it now?”

Without replying, and with an angry twist of his arm, he turned the key in the lock and flung the door wide.

“Come in, Stebbins. You too, Berry. I want one of you. And Miss Mdevani, I understand, wants the other.”

“I do, Mr. Berry.” Nadia stepped forward and stood near him. “I hereby place myself wholly in your charge. Whether I am guilty or innocent of all of which I am accused has yet to be determined. Until it is determined I am confident you will extend me fair play. Mr. Belknap, I regret to say, is now as assured of my guilt as he recently claimed to be of my innocence. Such variable winds cannot fail but be ill winds for one in my delicate position.”

“Cool and tricky!” thought Berry, putting the room to a quizzical scrutiny. “What a perfectly worded appeal. No male could resist it.” Aloud he said, “I promise you will receive every consideration justified by the circumstances.” And, to Belknap, “I see we _did_ leave them too long alone. The tally mounts! But I take it we have reached the end of the trail. My congratulations. I _thought_ you would come across, and I’m sincerely glad—”

The disturbance on the stairs had moved up and now suddenly intruded itself. Julian Prentice proved to be at its center—pale, disheveled, his tie twisted, his hair up-ended, Julian struggled feverishly with a veritable regiment of cops. His captors were so intent on their prize and on his retention that it would have taken a dozen murders to have shaken their concentration; such is the Force’s strength of character! In spite of everything, even his own nature, Belknap had to smile.

“Who’s this you’ve got? I figured the least you could be doing was bringing in Milton Dorn. What’s Prentice been at to so rouse your righteous wrath?”

“Tryin’ to escape, sir. Ran his car right off’n the premises. We did have a chase, sir! He was doin’ seventy in the fog. It was as good as suicide, sir.”

“A verdict of suicide would be a relief. Come, come, boys, hands off. Can’t you see you’re bothering him? Where were you heading, Prentice, for Times Square?”

Julian, standing free at last, shifted his gaze distractedly from the vibrant, defiant figure of Nadia Mdevani, to Silas Berry standing like an off-stage critic, to Ordway Belknap who looked a general with the puppets at his disposal, to Sydney Crawford lying crumpled and desperately pathetic across the feet of the still form on the bed, and suddenly he trembled uncontrollably from head to foot.

“Where is Joel?” he cried in a high, piercing voice that froze the room.

XXII

From this moment Thorngate, house and grounds, was pandemonium let loose.

It was clear that the first thing to be done, when it became certain that Joel Lacey was really among the missing, and had last been seen sleeping on the library couch, was to institute a searching party. Because of the numberless recruits, three groups were formed—two taking the great outdoors and one the sliding panels and the secret attics. The way the police, Belknap groaned, came scurrying out of corners, like the Hamlin rats to the piper’s pipe, at news of a safe and sane hunt, when there was never one of them underfoot when he was needed to block a murder, made one positively ill. Not that the hunt wasn’t important. But the bare chances of _finding_ Joel Lacey, much less finding her alive, seemed so slight in view of the thoroughness of the earlier crimes.

In the midst of it all, behind and before, to right and to left, came Julian. Julian joined first one searching party, then another, urging, beseeching, cursing, cajoling, diving into a closet or under a bush as the case might be. Julian was every which way. Julian was at sixes and sevens. Julian had gone berserk. Losing Joel, Julian seemed to have lost whatever of value he had recently possessed: his boyish philosophy, such as it was; his sense of humor, which hadn’t been bad; his kindly, inconsequential wit which had served rather to balance the household during the late unpleasantness. These had vanished in thin air. Instead here was a frantic, unreasonable, hysterical, bothersome young man who dogged everyone’s footsteps like a spoilt child, stubbornly refused to remain even passably steady, and flung wild and outrageous accusations about like so much confetti. No one escaped his fury or his suspicions. Even his idol Berry took a raking over the coals that under normal conditions would have been unpardonable. But when Julian burst into tears at the end of his peroration Berry let that be the end of it.

Julian said no one was _trying_ to find Joel; he said Nadia Mdevani had cremated Joel in the furnaces and they must sift the ashes for her bones; he said Milton Dorn was murdering her by unspeakable degrees in some god-forsaken hole-in-the-wall where her screams would never be heard; that Belknap, Berry, and Stebbins had whisked her off to some Inquisitorial chamber where their minions were torturing a statement from her. He said the whole investigation from A to Z had been stupidly handled (he said it very loud and clear, and embellished it with bad words); that a lot of helpless and innocent people had been kept in a house which had a chronic disposition to murder, where they had been nipped off one by one like sheep by wolves; that Thorngate was proving no better than an Island of Dr. Moreau, only worse, because it was human beings instead of rabbits being experimented with; he said—

But this was going one further than the harassed Belknap could quite tolerate. He thrust Julian gently but firmly from the East Room into the hall, saying, as he closed the door on him:

“Go along, Prentice. I’m sorry. We’re doing all we can, and the best possible. I have even got in touch with Headquarters again and have asked them to send an extra man or two. I admit things are pretty damn thick, but you aren’t thinning them out. So beat it.”

And Belknap turned back to continue, with Berry and Stebbins, the heated interrogation of Nadia Mdevani by which they hoped to run her to earth by her own admission, and so, clearing the decks of legal red-tape, hasten and simplify her path that led but to the grave as best you looked at it. For, admitted or not admitted, denial could no longer stand against a sealed order to kill Blake, a gun left lying on the scene of Whittaker’s murder, and a poisoned sleeping drug administered to Crawford. This last, in a brief preliminary test, Belknap had proved to be arsenous oxide; anyway arsenic in one of its forms.

They had of necessity quickly abandoned all attempts on Sydney Crawford. Not that she stood above suspicion, hardly that (Stebbins had even taken it upon himself to arrest her willy-nilly), but Sydney, passing from one phase of excessive shock to another, was now wandering the house like a modern Ophelia, modern in that nothing she said bore the least resemblance to her predecessor’s soliloquy. She said cruel, bitter, terrible things to the walls and the ceilings in a hard, glinting voice: “I’ll call up Victor and tell him his Daddy’s dead. He’ll remember it for life if he’s fetched out of bed to be told.” “The place to stab a man with a paper knife is between the fourth and fifth vertebræ, I mean ribs. I’ve found _that_ out.” “Well, Romany, if it’s true that the first two of a triangle to die make the couple in Heaven, _you_ should worry now. You’ve got him.” Until she changed her tune a little there was no use bothering with her, for questioning or pressure brought to bear might push her beyond this ragged edge of insanity.

No danger of insanity in Nadia Mdevani’s case! But apparently no danger either of obtaining any satisfaction from her. Wanting a confession from her was one thing—obtaining even a modicum of it was another. Nadia sat limply, almost unconcernedly, in a deep chair before the East Room fire, and, never lifting her eyes from a bemused contemplation of the flames, refused to yield a hair’s breadth of vantage to her tormentors. The ground they covered with her was the old ground covered in the morning, but, though her three examiners bore the same names that they had then born, they were three men of different attitude and temper. Each blaming himself secretly for an earlier male to female softness, that had perhaps been responsible for the extra hot water they were now in, was now out for blood in earnest, beauty or no beauty. It angered them that she seemed not to notice a difference. Quite as collected, equally as cool, as during the morning’s session on the stand, she shed their individual and concerted attacks.

Yes, she had received the order regarding Colonel Blake. No, she could not say when, or from whom. That was for them to find out—_if_ they could. Yes, she had taken it to Mr. Belknap. Why? She didn’t exactly know; an impulse. Perhaps a wily way to further the intimacy between them! Here she threw a little whimsical smile in Belknap’s direction. If he saw it he gave no sign. She said she intended telling him she had not obeyed orders—even though Blake lay dead at that moment on the library floor. She had intended asking his protection, such protection as a man of law and justice, power and respect, can give a woman of doubtful antecedents. The sarcasm, if there was any, was ever so slight.

What _had_ she been doing during the hours before consulting with Mr. Belknap? Oh-my-God, her weary tone of telling and retelling implied, what a twice and thrice told tale to repeat. She had gone to her room and been restless. Naturally; no one else had claimed to be anything _but_ restless last night, and she wouldn’t profess to be any exception to the rule. She had read a little, and then done a bit of reconnoitering— Oh well, _call_ it prowling. What difference did it make? She had been made aware, putting the two of his absence from his own room and the two of his voice in Romany’s together, that Bertrand Whittaker was paying a visit. And that couldn’t be said to have made her any the less upset. Not that she would have called him one of your story-book lovers; but this evening she needed him to be his own best friend with her in his own behalf. Her new distrust of him, a blend of anger, disrespect and fear, rising from his cat-and-mouse play with his Diary, was running her blood up close to killing heat. Romany was rather a last straw. She had returned to her room for her Colt, to find it had disappeared from the dresser; and had gone on down for a drink to restore her equilibrium. Again her smile. It was then she had remarked the gnawing of a rat in the wainscoting—a persistent rat, Mr. Belknap; a purposeful rat; one intent on going places. She had left him working his way through, and had gone for a long cooling-off stroll, down to the water and back. What a night! What a moon!

Stepping back over the low sills into the library, and crossing the dark room to the door dimly blocked in by the hall light, her foot had encountered something soft and humpy. By that seventh sense that comes to one’s aid at such moments she knew it for a body. She had her own pocket flash. Turning it up she discovered Blake. The message she had received was illumined in red letters. She was on the point of destroying it when Belknap occurred to her mischievous mind! It was Mrs. Crawford who had interrupted their exciting tête-à-tête.

Romany? The first she had seen of Romany last night was this morning when, with the others, she had seen her dead. No, it wasn’t Romany she would have killed under the spur of jealousy—if they wanted to name it jealousy—but Whittaker. _Another_ reason for killing Whittaker, whom she hadn’t killed. Not even in his case was she guilty, much as she had intended being. Someone had been ahead of her. Someone who had planted her gun with one shot fired from it—and in using another gun had had the misfortune to have to fire twice in order to get the victim cold.

The three men exchanged glances of unmistakable surprise and shock. This was new testimony on Nadia’s part, though not altogether fresh, and an entirely new explanation of it. But Nadia never showed by as much as a shifted finger that she realized the importance of what she had just let fall.

“Two shots!” Berry said.

“I said two shots.”

“You agree with Prentice?”

“I do.”

“Why haven’t you said so before?”

“I had my reasons.”

“You knew something?”

“If you care to put it that way.”

“You suspected and were afraid?”

“I suspected. I was not afraid.”

“Your explanation of the two shots—whether true or false—is amazingly clever.” Belknap was deeply respectful.

“Thank you.”

Stebbins interrupted angrily.

“And what about your amatol turning out to be arsenic. Got as clever a way out of that, lady?”

“I don’t need it—and wouldn’t take it if I did. It’s self-explanatory. Oh, you detectives!” Nadia threw back her head and laughed suddenly, weakly, brokenly. “If you want to send me to eternity for Crawford’s murder you are welcome to do it that I may have the last laugh on you with the Devil in Hell. He’d understand.”

She covered her face with her hands. It was impossible to be certain whether she was laughing still, or crying.

“Get out of here, you two,” Berry said quietly to Belknap and Stebbins. “I want a word with Miss Mdevani alone.” He herded them unceremoniously toward the door.

“We’ve got under her skin,” he added under his breath. “I think with an extra hint or two that I have the means to convey (remember she’s not new to me) we’ll have her where we want her in half a jiffy.”

He shut the door carefully and returned to Nadia.

XXIII

It was a defeated Nadia Mdevani who emerged from what proved to be a prolonged interview with Lieutenant Berry. If, before it, she looked worn and troubled, her will had at least remained indomitable. If her voice had flagged, her eyes lost their challenge, yet she had always managed to convey an impression of impregnable right shall be might. Now she had yielded everything, to all appearances, and came carrying her weapon by the blade and laid across her forearm for the victor to accept the hilt. Her face was haggard; her unquenchable color quenched; her feet scarcely lifted; she twisted her clasped hands together as though they were manacled. When she spoke it was in a voice not her own, a voice in which despair had even surpassed weariness.

“Very well, Mr. Berry,” she said. “I understand perfectly. I shall make no attempt to escape, I swear. I am not the kind. When I am beaten in fair play I am as willing to dance to the music as I am when I win and the tune is gayer. I only ask one favor before I go with you. May I have a few words with Mr. Belknap in private? That is, if he will condescend to have a few words with me. He may even put me to the indignity of a search for concealed firearms if he so desires.” There was a flicker of the old Nadia as she looked up at Belknap on the last words.

Belknap and Berry exchanged glances, and there was a faint nod of acquiescence on Berry’s part. It didn’t escape Nadia. She smiled dimly.

“Thank you, Mr. Berry. I will not transgress your orders, on my honor.” With a little characteristic shrug of a shoulder she motioned Belknap to follow her. She led him into the library, and, closing the door, leaned against it as though she had reached the farthermost limit of endurance. Her drooping figure, her shattered face, so pierced Belknap with their utter resignation that before he could trust himself to speech she had spoken.

“The Chamber of Horrors,” she murmured with a dim twitch at the corners of her sad mouth. “Do you object to seeing me here? It is here we truly met for the first time. Do you remember last night, the things we said, and the things we left unsaid? Don’t let’s leave anything unsaid tonight. Oh, I’m sorry to be so pathetic and so obvious.” She half lifted her eyes to him and let them fall away, but he had a glimpse of the pride in them struggling to master an emotion he dared not name.

“Don’t apologize,” he said roughly. “What did he do to you? I’ll kill the bastard.”

“Oh, my dear, what didn’t he do! But never mind that. I don’t have to tell you about it, you can see for yourself what I have come to. I am ashamed. I had so fully intended to go down, if I had to go down, with flags up—denying, denying, denying—and here I am, not only confessed to murders, but confessed to murders I never committed. What irony, what bitter irony!”

“You confessed?” he cried softly, and taking her two arms in his two hands he drew her unresistingly forward into the room. He drew her to the light where he could see her face. “Nadia, tell me that is not true.”

“It is true. There comes a time in these affairs when it is easier to admit than to deny, or rather, when one becomes careless and callous of the consequences of guilt. Will someone stop that damned youngster breaking his heart out there! I _can’t_ tell him where his girl-friend is because I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” she screamed; but the scream, from sheer exhaustion, scarcely rose above a whisper.

“Hush, dear! Don’t let him worry you. He has lost his head too dreadfully. And you mustn’t confess, you _mustn’t_, do you hear? Even if you killed the lot, don’t admit it—_ever_.”

“What else can I do? You have me on so many counts. There’s no use standing up against circumstantial evidence forever—even if it’s planted evidence, as this happens to be. I could never prove it. And the way I feel now the sooner things are over the better. I’m tired, tired out. I’m rapidly joining that Mrs. Crawford in her state of detachment and disenchantment. How beautifully she’s behaving now, not a trace of agony or hysteria; not because she’s thought it out, it isn’t philosophy with her, but because she’s died and remained alive. It leaves one with a jolly nonchalance. Well, short of one barb that persists in hurting me like Hell, I promise you I can go to the chair without a flicker.” His hands still held her and had unwittingly tightened on her arms. She looked down at them. “_You’re_ hurting me rather,” she said gently.

“I’m sorry.” He relaxed his hold but did not release her. “Tell me, what is the pain?” He knew, but he wanted to hear. They both trembled.

“I can’t say it.”