‘Get on with your breakfast: I don’t want you,’ Stephen said.
‘I don’t care a damn what you want!’ she said. ‘I’m your sister, aren’t I?’
He took her by the shoulders, and thrust her into her chair again. ‘Get this, and get it good!’ he said roughly. ‘You’re to keep out of this!’
‘There’s no more reason for him to suspect you than me! Uncle accused me of wanting to murder him, not you!’
‘You keep your misguided trap shut,’ said Stephen. ‘You’re a good kid, but boneheaded.’ His sardonic gaze flickered over the other members of the house-party, taking in Joseph’s look of misery, Mathilda’s white rigidity, the thinly-veiled satisfaction in Mottisfont’s eyes, the relief in Roydon’s. He gave a short laugh, and went out.
The Inspector was looking out of the window when Stephen entered the room, but he turned at the sound of the opening door, and said: ‘Good-morning, sir. Looks like the thaw has set in properly.’
Stephen eyed him in some surprise. ‘How true!’ he said. ‘Shall we cut the cackle?’
‘Just as you like, sir,’ Hemingway replied, ‘What I came for was to give you back your cigarette-case.’
He held it out as he spoke, and had the satisfaction of seeing that he had succeeded in startling this uncomfortably brusque young man.
‘What the hell!’ Stephen demanded, his eyes lifting from the case to Hemingway’s face. ‘What kind of a damned silly joke do you imagine you’re playing?’
‘Oh, I’m not playing any joke!’ responded Hemingway.
Stephen took the case, and stood holding it, ‘I thought this was your most valuable piece of evidence?’
‘Yes, so did I,’ agreed Hemingway. ‘And I don’t mind admitting that it’s very disappointing for me to have to give it up. But there it is! A detective’s life is one long disappointment.’
Stephen smiled, in spite of himself. ‘Would you like to explain a little? Why do I get my case back? I thought you had me booked for the County gaol.’
‘I don’t deny that’s about what I thought too,’ Hemingway admitted. ‘And if only you’d left a finger-print or two on that case of yours, I daresay I’d have had the handcuffs on you by now.’
‘Didn’t I?’ said Stephen, frowning in a little perplexity.
‘Not one!’ said Hemingway cheerfully.
Stephen glanced down at the case, turning it over in his hand. ‘I don’t seem to be very bright this morning. Am I to infer that my finger-prints had been wiped off ?’
‘That’s about the size of it, sir.’
He encountered a very hard, direct look. ‘Mind telling me if there were any finger-prints on it at all?’
‘No,’ said Hemingway; ‘I’m not one to make a lot of mystery. There weren’t any.’
‘Oh!’ said Stephen. Again he looked at the case, his frown deepening. ‘A plant, in fact!’
The Inspector fixed him with a bright, enquiring gaze. ‘Got any ideas about that, sir?’
Stephen slipped the case into his pocket. After a moment’s hesitation, he said: ‘No. Not immediately. When I do get an idea –’
‘Now, you don’t want to go taking the law into your own hands, sir!’ interrupted the Inspector. ‘What do you think I’m here for? If you know anything, you tell me, and don’t start any rough-houses on your own, because though I can’t say I’d blame you, I’d have to take you up for disturbing the peace, which, properly speaking, isn’t my line of business at all.’
Stephen laughed. ‘What would you do if you found that someone had tried to do the dirty on you to this tune, Inspector?’
The Inspector coughed. ‘Report it to the proper quarters,’ he said firmly.
‘Well, I’d rather rub his damned nose in it!’ said Stephen.
‘As long as you don’t go farther than that, I’ve no objection,’ said Hemingway, with the utmost cordiality. ‘And if you want a bit of advice, don’t go leaving any more of your things about! It puts highly unsuitable ideas into people’s heads, besides setting the police off on wild-goose chases, which is a very reprehensible thing to do, let me tell you!’
‘Sorry!’ Stephen said. ‘Very annoying for you: you must now be back exactly where you started.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that!’ Hemingway replied.
‘No, I don’t suppose you would: not to me, at any rate. If it’s all the same to you, I’d now like to go back and finish my breakfast.’
The Inspector signifying that it was quite the same to him, Stephen returned to the dining-room, where the rest of the party was still seated at the table. Every face turned towards him as he entered, some asking a mute, anxious question, some avidly curious. He sat down in his place, and told Sturry, who had found an excuse to come back into the room, to bring him some fresh coffee.
‘Gosh, I quite thought you’d be under arrest by now!’ said Valerie, putting into words what everyone else had been thinking.
‘I know you did, my pretty one,’ Stephen answered.
‘What happened, Stephen?’ Mathilda asked him, in a low voice.
He favoured her with one of his twisted smiles, and took out his cigarette-case, and opened it, and selected a cigarette. As he tapped it on the case, every eye became riveted on it. Mathilda looked quickly up at him, but saw that he was not paying any heed to her, but rather letting his challenging gaze wander round the table, dwelling for a moment on Roydon’s face, travelling on to Mottisfont’s, and resting there for a moment.
Again it was Valerie who found her voice first. ‘Why, that’s your cigarette-case! The one the police took!’
‘As you say.’
‘Do you mean they’ve given it back to you?’ asked Roydon, in bewildered accents.
‘Yes,’ said Stephen. ‘They’ve given it back to me.’
‘I never heard of such a thing!’ exclaimed Mottisfont. ‘It can’t be the same case! You’re trying to pull our legs, for some reason best known to yourself ! The police would never have relinquished the real case!’
‘I’d give it to you to look at, only that the Inspector warned me to be more careful with my property in future,’ said Stephen. ‘When I leave my things about, they have an odd way of transporting themselves – isn’t that nicely put? – into quite different parts of the house.’
‘What the devil do you mean by that?’ demanded Mottisfont, half-rising from his chair.
‘Do you believe in poltergeists?’ asked Stephen, still smiling, but not very pleasantly.
‘Stephen!’ Joseph said, his voice trembling with emotion. ‘Stephen, my boy! Does it mean that they don’t suspect you after all?’
‘Oh, I gather that I am wholly cleared!’ Stephen replied.
It was not to be expected that Joseph would greet such news as this in a restrained manner. He bounced up out of his chair, and came round the table to clasp his nephew’s hands. ‘I knew it all along!’ he said. ‘Thank God, thank God! Stephen, old boy, you don’t know what a weight it is off my mind! If – if the worst had happened, it would have been my fault! Oh yes, it would! I know that. My dear, dear boy, if it were not for that one great sorrow hanging over us, this would be a red-letter day indeed!’
‘But I don’t understand!’ Paula said. ‘Why are you in the clear? Are you sure it isn’t some kind of a trick?’
‘No, there’s no trick about it,’ he answered.
‘Why should there be a trick?’ Joseph said. ‘Can it be that you doubted Stephen’s innocence? Your own brother!’
‘How did it come to be in Uncle’s room?’ Paula asked, disregarding Joseph. ‘You may as well tell us, Stephen! We must all have guessed!’
‘Clever, aren’t you? I’m a child in these matters myself, but I gathered from the Inspector that in his opinion it was planted there.’
Paula flashed a look round the table. ‘Yes! That has always stood out a mile!’ she declared.
‘I don’t believe it!’ Mottisfont said, reddening angrily. ‘That’s what you chose to hint fr
om the outset, but I consider it a monstrous suggestion! Are you daring to imply that one of us murdered Nat, and tried to fasten the crime onto you?’
‘It’s so obvious, isn’t it?’ Stephen said.
Joseph, who had been looking from one to the other, with an expression of almost pathetic bewilderment on his face, was so shocked that his voice sank quite three tones. ‘It couldn’t be true!’ he uttered. ‘It’s too infamous! too terrible for words! It was Nat himself who took your case up! It must have been! Good God, Stephen, you couldn’t believe a thing like that of anyone here – staying with us – invited here to – No, I tell you! It’s too horrible!’
At any other time Mathilda could have laughed to see Joseph’s roseate illusions so grotesquely shattered. As it was, the situation confronting them seemed to her to be too grim to admit of laughter. She said in a studiedly cool voice: ‘What gave the Inspector this idea?’
‘The absence of any finger-prints on the case,’ answered Stephen.
It took a minute or two for the company to assimilate the meaning of this, nor did it seem from Maud’s blank face, or from Joseph’s puzzled frown, that its full import had been universally realised. But Roydon had realised it, and he said: ‘It’s the meanest thing I ever heard of ! I hope you don’t imagine that any of us would stoop so low?’
‘I don’t know at all,’ said Stephen. ‘I shall leave it to the Inspector to find out.’
‘That’s all very well!’ struck in Paula. ‘But if there were no finger-prints on the case, how is he to find out?’
‘He seems quite optimistic about it,’ Stephen replied.
It now seemed good to Valerie to declare in agitated tones that she could see what they were all getting at, but if anyone thought she had killed Mr Herriard they were wrong, and she wished that she had never been born.
Mrs Dean, whom Stephen’s announcement had cast into a mood of bitter reflection, was forced to wrench herself from her thoughts to frustrate an attempt on her daughter’s part to break into strong hysterics. Valerie cast herself on the scented bosom in a storm of noisy tears, saying that everyone had been beastly to her ever since she had set foot in this beastly house; and, with the exception of Joseph, who fussed about in an agitated and useless manner, the rest of the party lost no time in dispersing.
Maud told Mathilda, on her placid way to the morning-room, that she thought it was a good thing Stephen was not going to marry Valerie, since she seemed an uncontrolled girl, not at all likely to make him comfortable. She seemed to have no comment to make on the new and lurid light thrown on to Nathaniel’s murder, and Mathilda was unable to resist the impulse to ask her if she had grasped the meaning of what Stephen had told them.
‘Oh yes!’ Maud said. ‘I always thought something like that must have happened.’
Mathilda fairly gasped. ‘You thought it? You never said so!’
‘No, dear. I make a point of not interfering,’ Maud explained.
‘I must confess it hadn’t occurred to me that any of us could be quite so base!’ Mathilda said.
Maud’s face was quite inscrutable. ‘Hadn’t it?’ she said, uninterested and unsurprised.
Valerie, meanwhile, had been led upstairs, gustily sobbing, by her mother, who vented her own annoyance at having so precipitately jettisoned Stephen on Joseph, telling him that although she was never one to make trouble she felt bound to say that her girlie had been treated at Lexham with a total lack of consideration.
Poor Joseph was stricken to incoherence by the injustice of this accusation, and could only gaze after the matron in shocked bewilderment. He was recalled to a sense of his surroundings by the entrance of the servants, to clear the table, and went away to look for someone with whom he could discuss the latest developments of the case.
He was fortunate enough to find Mathilda, and at once took her by the arm and led her off to the library. ‘I’m getting old, Tilda – too old for this kind of thing!’ he told her. ‘Yesterday I thought that if only the cloud could be lifted from Stephen, nothing else would matter. Today I find myself with a possibility so horrible – Tilda, who, I ask of you, could bear such a grudge against Stephen?’
‘It might not be so much a question of a grudge as an instinct of pure sauve qui peut,’ she pointed out.
‘No one but a snake in the grass could do such a thing!’
She said dryly: ‘Anyone capable of stabbing his host in the back would surely be quite capable of throwing the blame on to someone else.’
‘Mottisfont?’ he said. ‘Roydon? Paula? How can you think such a thing of any one of them?’
‘I envy you your touching faith in human nature, Joe.’
She was sorry, however, that she had said that, for Joseph took it as a cue, and said in a very noble way that he thanked God he had got faith in human nature. While she did not doubt that his trusting disposition had sustained a severe shock, and could even be sorry for his distress, she was in no mood to tolerate play-acting, and soon shook him off. Between his relief at knowing Stephen to be exonerated and his dread of discovering that his beloved niece, or his old friend Mottisfont, or poor young Roydon was the guilty party, he was so spiritually torn that the optimism of a lifetime seemed to be in danger of deserting him.
Of the three people now, presumably, equally suspected of having murdered Nathaniel, Paula showed the most coolness. She discussed, with a cold-bloodedness worthy of Stephen, the chances of Roydon’s having done the deed, and said that, speaking from an artistic point of view, she hoped that he hadn’t, since he had a Future before him.
‘I imagine I must be out of the running,’ she said, walking about the room in her usual restless way. ‘No one could suspect me of trying to throw the blame on to my own brother! If there had been any bequests to them in Uncle’s will, I should have said that one of the servants had done it, probably Ford; but as it is they none of them had the slightest motive.’ She turned her brilliant gaze upon Mathilda, adding impulsively: ‘If one wasn’t a suspect oneself, wouldn’t it be interesting, Mathilda? I think I could actually enjoy it!’
‘Neither Joe nor I are suspects, and I can assure you we aren’t enjoying it!’ said Mathilda.
‘Oh, Joe! He’s an escapist,’ said Paula scornfully. ‘But you! You ought to be able to appreciate a situation that shows us all up in the raw!’
‘I don’t think,’ said Mathilda, ‘that I care for seeing my friends in the raw.’
‘I believe that this experience will be very valuable to me as an artist,’ said Paula.
But Mathilda had never felt less inclined to listen to a dissertation on the benefits of experience to an actress, and she very rudely told Paula to try it on the dog.
It was now nearly eleven o’clock, and all the discomforts of a morning spent in a country house with nothing to do were being suffered by Lexham’s unwilling guests. Outside, a grey sky and melting snow offered little inducement to would-be walkers; inside, a general hush brooded over the house; and everyone was uneasily aware of Scotland Yard’s presence. While suspicion had centred upon Stephen, everyone else had been ready to discuss the murder in all its aspects; now that Stephen had apparently been exonerated, and the field was left open for his successor, an uneasy shrinking from all mention of the crime was visible in everyone except Paula. Even Mrs Dean did not speak of it. She joined Maud in the morning-room presently, and, without receiving the slightest encouragement, favoured her with the story of her life, not omitting a list of her unsuccessful suitors, the personal idiosyncrasies of the late Mr Dean, and all the more repulsive details of two confinements and a miscarriage.
Roydon, who had mumbled something about getting a breath of fresh air, had gone up to his room, on leaving the breakfast-table, thus making an enemy of the second housemaid, who had only just made his bed, and wanted to bring in the vacuum-cleaner. Being a well-trained servant, she withdrew, and went off to complain bitterly to the headhousemaid about visitors who knew no better than to come up before they were wan
ted, putting one all behind with one’s work. The head-housemaid said it was funny, him coming up to his room at this hour; and on these meagre grounds a rumour spread rapidly through the servants’ quarters that that Mr Roydon was looking ever so queer, and behaving so strange that no one wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it was him all the time who had done in the master.
All this made a very agreeable subject for conversation at the eleven-o’clock gathering for tea in the kitchen and the hall; and when one of the under-gardeners joined the kitchen- party with a trug of vegetables for the cook, he was able to enliven the discussion by recounting that it was a funny thing, them speaking of young Roydon like they were, for he had himself just seen him going off for a walk on his own. He had come upon him down by the potting-sheds and the manure-heap, and he had somehow thought it was queer, finding him there, and Roydon hadn’t half started when he had seen him coming round the corner of the shed. Adjured by two housemaids, one tweeny, and the kitchenmaid, all with their eyes popping out of their heads, to continue this exciting narrative, he said that it was his belief young Roydon had been burning something in the incinerator, because he had been standing close to it, for one thing, and for another he’d take his oath he’d heard someone putting the lid on it.