The big blue policeman, a scarlet pillar box, and on the right of the road the outlines of a white house.
“Red, white, and blue,” said Tommy. “It’s damned pictorial. Come on, Tuppence, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
For, as he had already seen, the policeman was a real policeman. And, moreover, he was not nearly so gigantic as he had at first seemed looming up out of the mist.
But as they started forward, footsteps came from behind them. A man passed them, hurrying along. He turned in at the gate of the white house, ascended the steps, and beat a deafening tattoo upon the knocker. He was admitted just as they reached the spot where the policeman was standing staring after him.
“There’s a gentleman seems to be in a hurry,” commented the policeman.
He spoke in a slow reflective voice, as one whose thoughts took some time to mature.
“He’s the sort of gentleman always would be in a hurry,” remarked Tommy.
The policeman’s stare, slow and rather suspicious, came round to rest on his face.
“Friend of yours?” he demanded, and there was distinct suspicion now in his voice.
“No,” said Tommy. “He’s not a friend of mine, but I happen to know who he is. Name of Reilly.”
“Ah!” said the policeman. “Well, I’d better be getting along.”
“Can you tell me where the White House is?” asked Tommy.
The constable jerked his head sideways.
“This is it. Mrs. Honeycott’s.” He paused, and added, evidently with the idea of giving them valuable information, “Nervous party. Always suspecting burglars is around. Always asking me to have a look around the place. Middle-aged women get like that.”
“Middle-aged, eh?” said Tommy. “Do you happen to know if there’s a young lady staying there?”
“A young lady,” said the policeman, ruminating. “A young lady. No, I can’t say I know anything about that.”
“She mayn’t be staying here, Tommy,” said Tuppence. “And anyway, she mayn’t be here yet. She could only have started just before we did.”
“Ah!” said the policeman suddenly. “Now that I call it to mind, a young lady did go in at this gate. I saw her as I was coming up the road. About three or four minutes ago it might be.”
“With ermine furs on?” asked Tuppence eagerly.
“She had some kind of white rabbit round her throat,” admitted the policeman.
Tuppence smiled. The policeman went on in the direction from which they had just come, and they prepared to enter the gate of the White House.
Suddenly, a faint, muffled cry sounded from inside the house, and almost immediately afterwards the front door opened and James Reilly came rushing down the steps. His face was white and twisted, and his eyes glared in front of him unseeingly. He staggered like a drunken man.
He passed Tommy and Tuppence as though he did not see them, muttering to himself with a kind of dreadful repetition.
“My God! My God! Oh, my God!”
He clutched at the gatepost, as though to steady himself, and then, as though animated by sudden panic, he raced off down the road as hard as he could go in the opposite direction from that taken by the policeman.
II
Tommy and Tuppence stared at each other in bewilderment.
“Well,” said Tommy, “something’s happened in that house to scare our friend Reilly pretty badly.”
Tuppence drew her finger absently across the gatepost.
“He must have put his hand on some wet red paint somewhere,” she said idly.
“H’m,” said Tommy. “I think we’d better go inside rather quickly. I don’t understand this business.”
In the doorway of the house a white-capped maidservant was standing, almost speechless with indignation.
“Did you ever see the likes of that now, Father,” she burst out, as Tommy ascended the steps. “That fellow comes here, asks for the young lady, rushes upstairs without how or by your leave. She lets out a screech like a wild cat—and what wonder, poor pretty dear, and straightaway he comes rushing down again, with the white face on him, like one who’s seen a ghost. What will be the meaning of it all?”
“Who are you talking with at the front door, Ellen?” demanded a sharp voice from the interior of the hall.
“Here’s Missus,” said Ellen, somewhat unnecessarily.
She drew back, and Tommy found himself confronting a grey-haired, middle-aged woman, with frosty blue eyes imperfectly concealed by pince-nez, and a spare figure clad in black with bugle trimming.
“Mrs. Honeycott?” said Tommy. “I came here to see Miss Glen.”
“Mrs. Honeycott gave him a sharp glance, then went on to Tuppence and took in every detail of her appearance.
“Oh, you did, did you?” she said. “Well, you’d better come inside.”
She led the way into the hall and along it into a room at the back of the house, facing on the garden. It was a fair-sized room, but looked smaller than it was, owing to the large amount of chairs and tables crowded into it. A big fire burned in the grate, and a chintz-covered sofa stood at one side of it. The wallpaper was a small grey stripe with a festoon of roses round the top. Quantities of engravings and oil paintings covered the walls.
It was a room almost impossible to associate with the expensive personality of Miss Gilda Glen.
“Sit down,” said Mrs. Honeycott. “To begin with, you’ll excuse me if I say I don’t hold with the Roman Catholic religion. Never did I think to see a Roman Catholic priest in my house. But if Gilda’s gone over to the Scarlet Woman, it’s only what’s to be expected in a life like hers—and I dare say it might be worse. She mightn’t have any religion at all. I should think more of Roman Catholics if their priests were married—I always speak my mind. And to think of those convents—quantities of beautiful young girls shut up there, and no one knowing what becomes of them—well, it won’t bear thinking about.”
Mrs. Honeycott came to a full stop, and drew a deep breath.
Without entering upon a defence of the celibacy of the priesthood or the other controversial points touched upon, Tommy went straight to the point.
“I understand, Mrs. Honeycott, that Miss Glen is in this house.”
“She is. Mind you, I don’t approve. Marriage is marriage and your husband’s your husband. As you make your bed, so you must lie on it.”
“I don’t quite understand—” began Tommy, bewildered.
“I thought as much. That’s the reason I brought you in here. You can go up to Gilda after I’ve spoken my mind. She came to me—after all these years, think of it!—and asked me to help her. Wanted me to see this man and persuade him to agree to a divorce. I told her straight out I’d have nothing whatever to do with it. Divorce is sinful. But I couldn’t refuse my own sister shelter in my house, could I now?”
“Your sister?” exclaimed Tommy.
“Yes, Gilda’s my sister. Didn’t she tell you?”
Tommy stared at her openmouthed. The thing seemed fantastically impossible. Then he remembered that the angelic beauty of Gilda Glen had been in evidence for many years. He had been taken to see her act as quite a small boy. Yes, it was possible after all. But what a piquant contrast. So it was from this lower middle-class respectability that Gilda Glen had sprung. How well she had guarded her secret!
“I am not yet quite clear,” he said. “Your sister is married?”
“Ran away to be married as a girl of seventeen,” said Mrs. Honeycott succinctly. “Some common fellow far below her in station. And our father a reverend. It was a disgrace. Then she left her husband and went on the stage. Playacting! I’ve never been inside a theatre in my life. I hold no truck with wickedness. Now, after all these years, she wants to divorce the man. Means to marry some big wig, I suppose. But her husband’s standing firm—not to be bullied and not to be bribed—I admire him for it.”
“What is his name?” asked Tommy suddenly.
“That’s an extraordinary
thing now, but I can’t remember! It’s nearly twenty years ago, you know, since I heard it. My father forbade it to be mentioned. And I’ve refused to discuss the matter with Gilda. She knows what I think, and that’s enough for her.”
“It wasn’t Reilly, was it?”
“Might have been. I really can’t say. It’s gone clean out of my head.”
“The man I mean was here just now.”
“That man! I thought he was an escaped lunatic. I’d been in the kitchen giving orders to Ellen. I’d just got back into this room, and was wondering whether Gilda had come in yet (she has a latchkey), when I heard her. She hesitated a minute or two in the hall and then went straight upstairs. About three minutes later all this tremendous rat-tatting began. I went out into the hall, and just saw a man rushing upstairs. Then there was a sort of cry upstairs, and presently down he came again and rushed out like a madman. Pretty goings on.”
Tommy rose.
“Mrs. Honeycott, let us go upstairs at once. I am afraid—”
“What of?”
“Afraid that you have no red wet paint in the house.”
Mrs. Honeycott stared at him.
“Of course I haven’t.”
“That is what I feared,” said Tommy gravely. “Please let us go to your sister’s room at once.”
Momentarily silenced, Mrs. Honeycott led the way. They caught a glimpse of Ellen in the hall, backing hastily into one of the rooms.
Mrs. Honeycott opened the first door at the top of the stairs. Tommy and Tuppence entered close behind her.
Suddenly she gave a gasp and fell back.
A motionless figure in black and ermine lay stretched on the sofa. The face was untouched, a beautiful soulless face like a mature child asleep. The wound was on the side of the head, a heavy blow with some blunt instrument had crushed in the skull. Blood was dripping slowly on to the floor, but the wound itself had long ceased to bleed. . . .
Tommy examined the prostrate figure, his face very white.
“So,” he said at last, “he didn’t strangle her after all.”
“What do you mean? Who?” cried Mrs. Honeycott. “Is she dead?”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Honeycott, she’s dead. Murdered. The question is—by whom? Not that it is much of a question. Funny—for all his ranting words, I didn’t think the fellow had got it in him.”
He paused a minute, then turned to Tuppence with decision.
“Will you go out and get a policeman, or ring up the police station from somewhere?”
Tuppence nodded. She too, was very white. Tommy led Mrs. Honeycott downstairs again.
“I don’t want there to be any mistake about this,” he said. “Do you know exactly what time it was when your sister came in?”
“Yes, I do,” said Mrs. Honeycott. “Because I was just setting the clock on five minutes as I have to do every evening. It loses just five minutes a day. It was exactly eight minutes past six by my watch, and that never loses or gains a second.”
Tommy nodded. That agreed perfectly with the policeman’s story. He had seen the woman with the white furs go in at the gate, probably three minutes had elapsed before he and Tuppence had reached the same spot. He had glanced at his own watch then and had noted that it was just one minute after the time of their appointment.
There was just the faint chance that someone might have been waiting for Gilda Glen in the room upstairs. But if so, he must still be hiding in the house. No one but James Reilly had left it.
He ran upstairs and made a quick but efficient search of the premises. But there was no one concealed anywhere.
Then he spoke to Ellen. After breaking the news to her, and waiting for her first lamentations and invocations to the saints to have exhausted themselves, he asked a few questions.
Had any one else come to the house that afternoon asking for Miss Glen? No one whatsoever. Had she herself been upstairs at all that evening? Yes she’d gone up at six o’clock as usual to draw the curtains—or it might have been a few minutes after six. Anyway it was just before that wild fellow came breaking the knocker down. She’d run downstairs to answer the door. And him a black-hearted murderer all the time.
Tommy let it go at that. But he still felt a curious pity for Reilly, and unwillingness to believe the worst of him. And yet there was no one else who could have murdered Gilda Glen. Mrs. Honeycott and Ellen had been the only two people in the house.
He heard voices in the hall, and went out to find Tuppence and the policeman from the beat outside. The latter had produced a notebook, and a rather blunt pencil, which he licked surreptitiously. He went upstairs and surveyed the victim stolidly, merely remarking that if he was to touch anything the Inspector would give him beans. He listened to all Mrs. Honeycott’s hysterical outbursts and confused explanations, and occasionally he wrote something down. His presence was calming and soothing.
Tommy finally got him alone for a minute or two on the steps outside ere he departed to telephone headquarters.
“Look here,” said Tommy, “you saw the deceased turning in at the gate, you say. Are you sure she was alone?”
“Oh! she was alone all right. Nobody with her.”
“And between that time and when you met us, nobody came out of the gate?”
“Not a soul.”
“You’d have seen them if they had?”
“Of course I should. Nobody come out till that wild chap did.”
The majesty of the law moved portentously down the steps and paused by the white gatepost, which bore the imprint of a hand in red.
“Kind of amateur he must have been,” he said pityingly. “To leave a thing like that.”
Then he swung out into the road.
III
It was the day after the crime. Tommy and Tuppence were still at the Grand Hotel, but Tommy had thought it prudent to discard his clerical disguise.
James Reilly had been apprehended, and was in custody. His solicitor, Mr. Marvell, had just finished a lengthy conversation with Tommy on the subject of the crime.
“I never would have believed it of James Reilly,” he said simply. “He’s always been a man of violent speech, but that’s all.”
Tommy nodded.
“If you disperse energy in speech, it doesn’t leave you too much over for action. What I realise is that I shall be one of the principal witnesses against him. That conversation he had with me just before the crime was particularly damning. And, in spite of everything, I like the man, and if there was anyone else to suspect, I should believe him to be innocent. What’s his own story?”
The solicitor pursed up his lips.
“He declares that he found her lying there dead. But that’s impossible, of course. He’s using the first lie that comes into his head.”
“Because, if he happened to be speaking the truth, it would mean that the garrulous Mrs. Honeycott committed the crime—and that is fantastic. Yes, he must have done it.”
“The maid heard her cry out, remember.”
“The maid—yes—”
Tommy was silent a moment. Then he said thoughtfully.
“What credulous creatures we are, really. We believe evidence as though it were gospel truth. And what is it really? Only the impression conveyed to the mind by the senses—and suppose they’re the wrong impressions?”
The lawyer shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh! we all know that there are unreliable witnesses, witnesses who remember more and more as time goes on, with no real intention to deceive.”
“I don’t mean only that. I mean all of us—we say things that aren’t really so, and never know that we’ve done so. For instance, both you and I, without doubt, have said some time or other, ‘There’s the post,’ when what we really meant was that we’d heard a double knock and the rattle of the letter-box. Nine times out of ten we’d be right, and it would be the post, but just possibly the tenth time it might be only a little urchin playing a joke on us. See what I mean?”
“Ye-es,” said Mr.
Marvell slowly. “But I don’t see what you’re driving at?”
“Don’t you? I’m not so sure that I do myself. But I’m beginning to see. It’s like the stick, Tuppence. You remember? One end of it pointed one way—but the other end always points the opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of it by the right end. Doors open—but they also shut. People go upstairs, but they also go downstairs. Boxes shut, but they also open.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Tuppence.
“It’s so ridiculously easy, really,” said Tommy. “And yet it’s only just come to me. How do you know when a person’s come into the house. You hear the door open and bang to, and if you’re expecting any one to come in, you will be quite sure it is them. But it might just as easily be someone going out.”
“But Miss Glen didn’t go out?”
“No, I know she didn’t. But some one else did—the murderer.”
“But how did she get in, then?”
“She came in whilst Mrs. Honeycott was in the kitchen talking to Ellen. They didn’t hear her. Mrs. Honeycott went back to the drawing room, wondered if her sister had come in and began to put the clock right, and then, as she thought, she heard her come in and go upstairs.”
“Well, what about that? The footsteps going upstairs?”
“That was Ellen, going up to draw the curtains. You remember, Mrs. Honeycott said her sister paused before going up. That pause was just the time needed for Ellen to come out from the kitchen into the hall. She just missed seeing the murderer.”
“But, Tommy,” cried Tuppence. “The cry she gave?”
“That was James Reilly. Didn’t you notice what a high-pitched voice he has? In moments of great emotion, men often squeal just like a woman.”
“But the murderer? We’d have seen him?”
“We did see him. We even stood talking to him. Do you remember the sudden way that policeman appeared? That was because he stepped out of the gate, just after the mist cleared from the road. It made us jump, don’t you remember? After all, though we never think of them as that, policemen are men just like any other men. They love and they hate. They marry. . . .