Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

CHAPTER IX

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WHY, THAT’S THE SWORD-STICK from the collection in the gallery,” said Marshall, as soon as he saw it. “It always hangs in a display pattern of curios on the wall there. The Cothercotts amassed quite a museum of these things. How could it have got into the river?” It was a silly question; he saw it as soon as he’d spoken, and wished it back again. Who knew better than the warden of Follymead where to find a killing weapon, if he wanted one?

The handsome, deadly thing lay between them on the desk, a bit of fashionable devilment from the eighteenth century, probably never meant to be used. The blade had been sheathed fully before it was thrown into the water, and its point was engraved with fine vertical grooves; it might very well preserve traces of haemoglobin still, if this was what had drawn that blood that was not Arundale’s blood. Another job for the laboratory.

“Was it in its place on Friday evening, when the party assembled and was shown round the house?” George asked.

“I can’t say I noticed particularly. Perhaps someone else may have done. I didn’t comment on it to my group, there are so many things to be seen.”

“And of course, no stranger would have the slightest idea what it was, unless he was told.”

“No, I suppose not.” That brought it still more closely home to the few who were not strangers, and did know what it was. Mr. Marshall went back to his duties a very unhappy man. He cared about this place, he cared about music, he cared passionately about the Cothercott collection of keyboard instruments. Who was going to maintain them properly, as living things for use and pleasure, if the college folded? For them a museum would be a coffin.

It was a quarter to twelve; still three quarters of an hour before the class would come bursting out from the yellow drawing-room, hungry and vociferous, heading for lunch. Better get this thing out of the house now, thought George, while everything was quiet, and let the lab. men worry about it, while he got on with some of the inevitable and tedious routine work that waited for him here in Arundale’s desk.

He rolled the sword-stick in soft paper, and took it down to Lockyer, who was smoking a cigarette in a quiet corner of the stableyard at the home farm, neatly screened from the house by a belt of trees. The tenant farmer was used to seeing overflow cars from the house parties parked here, and took no interest in them. Nor was it unusual for Midshire students, who knew the lie of the land, to go in and out by the back way, and so save themselves a mile or more on the way into Belwardine. Lockyer had his motorcycle tucked away under the stable arch. The sword-stick would be in headquarters at Comerbourne in twenty minutes.

George went back to the warden’s office, and began to turn out the drawers of the desk one by one. In all probability for nothing, but he wouldn’t be sure of that until he’d gone through everything. Extraordinary how one weapon too many could make nonsense of an otherwise perfectly sound theory. The thing could have happened exactly as Lockyer had outlined it, the wronged husband coming to confront his wife’s lover, the heavy instrument presented almost accidentally to his hand, and then the struggle in which the younger and more athletic man wrested the weapon away from him, and struck him with it; the appalled realisation that he had killed him, the disposal of the body and the latch in the river, the opportune recollection that the victim’s car was waiting and ready, and he was due to leave at this very hour, the subsequent flight to London, the abandonment of the car there, everything fitted in. Except this one grotesque thing, this Georgian whimsy that yet was not a toy, this fop’s gimmick that could kill. And this one thing threw everything out of gear.

He had still to find out whether it had been in its usual place on the wall on Friday evening; possibly Dominic could help, there. But whenever it had been taken from its place, one thing was certain, Lucien Galt had not taken it to the grotto. Felicity had been with him from the time he left the house until they parted by the riverside in exasperation and offence; if he had had any such bizarre thing with him then, she would certainly have mentioned it. Nor was there any suggestion that at that time he had been thinking in terms of danger or violence. No, it was not Lucien.

But if Arundale had taken it with him – and if he had, it was one more proof that he went with intent to kill, sanely if not calmly – then what did he want with a heavy iron latch? And if he did not take it from its place, who did? Lucien, to defend himself? Rather a clumsy defence against two and a half feet of steel, but better than nothing. But there were considerable objections to that theory. One weapon too many, and nothing fitted snugly any longer. Better, for the moment, concentrate on these personal papers. And nobody ever had them in more immaculate order.

The records of Follymead were here from its inception, press clippings, photographs, a full list of all its courses, concerts, recitals, lectures. And the total was impressive. Music is one of the fundamental beauties, consolations and inspirations of life, a world without it would be unthinkable. This crazy, perverse, slightly sinister house had never in its history served so useful and beneficent a purpose as now. And that was largely Arundale’s work, and it ought to be remembered to him. He had certainly loved it; the proof was here to be seen. For the first time George felt an impulse of personal warmth and pity for that elusive figure, now never to be better known.

He had adored his wife, too, that was to be seen everywhere. Perhaps with the possessive fervour of a husband who looked upon his wife as an extension of himself, but he wasn’t alone there, and the passion was no less real for that. The last drawer of the desk yielded a harvest of photographs of her. George worked backwards through them, and experienced the eerie phenomenon of watching Audrey grow younger and younger before his eyes, dwindling to the nervous young wife, the frozen bride, refrigerated among her trappings of ice, the blooming debutante, the schoolgirl… Here in his private drawer Edward had preserved the complete record, decently hidden from alien eyes, the entire history of a love affair, the passion of a man not given to passions.

Here she was in full evening splendour for some grand event, very beautiful, very austere. And here at some function at Bannerets, being gracious, adequate and charming with parents. Too handsome, perhaps, for a headmaster’s wife, but that air she had of being always at one remove from the world stood her in good stead. It was impossible to suppose that Audrey did not know she was considered beautiful; it was equally impossible to believe that she realised what that meant, what power it gave her, or should have given her. She looked out from her many photographs, a creature manipulated by circumstances, always filling her role well, always withdrawn from it in the spirit. And defenceless. Why should the camera be the eye to discover that quality? If ever there was a sad woman, here she walked, successful, influential, well-off, envied and admired; and always lost, anxious and alone.

He had worked his way back to her younger days now, the twenty-year-old with her new engagement ring discreetly displayed, the fiancée photograph posed specially for her distinguished in-laws. Then an even younger girl, with Arundale in some restaurant booth, the kind where souvenir pictures are taken. Somehow not quite typical of either of them. And then, almost abruptly, the school-girl. Three pictures tied together with a pink tape, the last of the collection, evidently taken during the first year of his acquaintance with her.

The first showed her in school uniform. How old? Sixteen? Surely no more, and already a beauty, indeed perhaps she had never been so beautiful since. No puppy-fat here, a slender, ethereal, glowing girl, not at all awkward or immature, indeed with a lustre upon her like a woman already admired and coveted and glad of her femininity. She must have been a thorn in the flesh of the others at that exclusive school to which her shopkeeper parents had sent her at such cost. On her, adolescence, so often a torment and an affront, hung like an apple blossom splendour, fragrant and joyous.

None of the subsequent pictures of her had this look.

George turned the half-plate portrait, and found the imprint of the photographer in blurred mauve type:

Castle Studios

E. McLeod, A.R.P.S.

Auchterarne 356.

Yes, of course. Nineteen-forty-two or thereabouts, this must have been, and Pleydells had been exiled into Scotland, like so many British institutions disseminated into the wilds to avoid bombing.

The second of the three pictures was of Audrey in tennis clothes, laughing, with her racket in her hands. The same imprint was on the back, the girl was approximately the same age. Probably all these Scottish pictures were taken within a few months. And the third…

The third was of Audrey in a white, virginal party-dress, impeccably suitable for a school festival, with small puff sleeves and the Pleydells version of a décolletage, pretty liberal for its time and circumstances. The same indefinable aura of bliss hung about her; it might have been merely youth and health, but it seemed to George to be more than that, a sort of radiant fulfilment rare enough at sixteen. Mr. McLeod had done well by her. A good photographer, not concerned with glossing the lines of a face and showing up in immaculate definition every detail of a costume, the focus faded at her sleeves and the neck of her dress, leaving the face brilliant and surely almost untouched as the centre of attention. So successfully that George had returned the picture to its fellows and was retying the pink tape before he realised what he had seen depending from the silver chain round her neck.

He uncovered it again in a hurry, and stared disbelievingly. The fading definition blurred the design, but that was probably what had nudged his memory. This had been taken twenty-four years ago; the armoured saint in the nutshell helmet had been sharper and newer then, the hazing of his outlines only brought him nearer to what he was to-day. The spread eagle on his shield was faint but recognisable. Saints have their hall-marks, exclusive for all time. Saint Wenceslas had his copyright in this princely armour and heraldry, and once noted, could not be mistaken for any other sanctity in the calendar. So Dominic had said, and the books bore him out.

There couldn’t be two of these things circulating among these few people. This was the same medal Lucien had worn. It was from Audrey he had got it!

There had been altogether too much and too conflicting evidence about that small disc of worn silver. Audrey swore that she had known Lucien only six weeks, Liri, on the other hand, testified that he had worn this medal round his neck ever since she had known him, which was a matter of two years. Lucien had said, according to Liri, that he had got it from his father. And now this picture said clearly that the thing had belonged to Audrey, and Audrey must have given it to him. So how many of them were lying?

Or, wondered George, the premonitory quiver of intuition chilling his flesh, or were none of them lying?

He had to hunt out a road atlas and gazetteer to find out where this Auchterarne place was. Stirlingshire. He’d never yet had any communication with the Stirling police, but they’d be the quickest way to what he wanted to know. Probably the school had been evacuated to one of those Gothic mansions that decorate the Scottish countryside, to remind one that while England is for ever England, Scotland is in many ways Europe. With upland wastes around it on all sides, and every kind of embattled refugee group deployed there, from Scandinavian timber-men to Polish pioneers. Maybe army, he thought, as he lifted the telephone and asked for a line to the police at Stirling; there were a lot of wild and mixed army units waiting their time up there. But more likely air force. That was where the young, the cultivated, the engaging, were, in those strange and wonderful days when life had an enormous simplicity and purpose, and everybody knew where he was going, even if the way there proved uncommonly short.

“I’m sorry,” said the operator, after a few minutes of waiting, “there’ll be a slight delay, but I’ll get you through as soon as I can. Can I call you back?”

“Please do. I’ll be right on hand.”

He heard the students emerge from their session, and the gong pealed for lunch. Marshall had taken to sending him in a tray as soon as the party were all accounted for and busy. Not long to go now; this evening they would disperse, he hoped with only pleasant memories of this extraordinary week-end at Follymead, and then the survivors could look round without secrecy, and see what could be salvaged.

George propped up before him the photograph of Audrey in her party-dress, and sat waiting, eye to eye with all that youth and innocence and happiness. He wondered if she’d ever looked like that for Edward Arundale.

Ten minutes later the telephone shrilled, and he reached for it eagerly, expecting his Scottish connection. But the voice that grated amiably in his ears was that of Superintendent Duckett, in high feather.

“George? We made it in time, after all. You can relax. They picked up Lucien Galt at London Airport half an hour ago.”

“Nothing to it,” Duckett was elaborating happily a minute later. “Came in by taxi and checked in as if nothing had happened. Best thing he could do, of course, only he didn’t do it quickly enough. Yesterday morning he could have flown out like a V. I. P. and no questions asked.”

“Why in the world didn’t he?” George wondered. “Inexperience?”

“Money. It takes a little time to knock together about three thousand pounds in notes.”

“That’s what he had on him?”

“In his case. As much as he could turn into cash in the time, obviously. He had a ticket for Buenos Aires. They’re holding him at the airport for us, and I’ve started Price and Rapier off to fetch him back. On the car charge, of course – taking away without owner’s permission. And even for a holding charge that must be the understatement of the year.”

“How did he react when they invited him to step aside and talk things over?” asked George. He’d seen that moment walk up behind so many men and tap them on the shoulder, and he had a pretty clear picture of this young man he’d never yet seen, proud to arrogance, impetuous, used to respect and adulation, even if he thought he despised it.

“Quietly. From what I hear, he looked round smartly for a way out, and might have tried to make a break for it if he could, but he sized things up at once, and went along without any fuss. He hadn’t a chance, and I fancy he’d hate to make an unsuccessful scene. Now the question is, how do we handle him. It’s your case, George, you know the people and the set-up there, you’re up with all the new developments, if there are any since you fished up that queer affair the boys are working on. You suggest, I’ll consider.”

So now it was up to George, and he had to make up his mind a shade too early, before he really had anything but a hunch to go on. It was a gamble, and he was no gambler, and yet all his instincts told him to trust the conviction in his blood.

“All right, I’ll tell you what I’d like done. Have him brought straight back here to me, to Follymead. I’ll be waiting for him, and I’ll be responsible for him.”

Duckett digested that in hard silence for a moment, and then said: “Right, I’ll do that.” Duckett was an admirable chief even in his acts, George found himself thinking, but better still in his abstentions. Not everybody could leave a subordinate alone to do a thing his own way. “How do you want the boys to handle him meantime? Press him, let him alone, what?”

“Don’t discourage him, don’t press him. Just let him stew, and if he wants to talk, caution him, but then let him talk. It might be very interesting.”

“You think he will talk, don’t you?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Just a minute, George… hang on, here’s Phillips in from the lab…”

“Yes?”

“There’s a positive reaction on the blade of that sword-stick affair. It seems to be A, the same as your specimens from the ground.”

“Good, thanks! No prints, of course?”

“Not a ghost of one. What did you expect, after being in the water all that time? In any case that knob’s so finely chased it breaks up all the lines,” said Duckett philosophically, “and nobody’s going to hold a sword by the blade… not while he’s using it.”

The second time the telephone rang George pounced on it like a hunting leopard, assured that it must be Stirling this time. But it was Scott, reporting from London at last.

“Well, about time,” said George, round a mouthful of chicken sandwich. “What’s been keeping you?”

“Mobile people, mostly,” said Scott crisply, the light tenor voice buoyant and detached. “I struck unlucky at that children’s home of yours. The old house-parents – Stewart and his wife – they retired just about a month ago. There’s a couple named Smith in possession now, brand new. Naturally they know some of the past kids as names, but no other way. The only people about the place who know young Galt know him only from his visits since he left. Nobody there knows a thing about this medal of his.”

“Did you follow up the Stewarts? They must have retired somewhere around London. Londoners don’t go far away.”

“I did. They’ve got a little house in Esher, all very nice and accessible. But they’ve got time on their hands, too, for the first time in years, and they’ve gone off to Italy for an early holiday. Can’t say I blame ’em. They’ll be back next week, but next week doesn’t help us now. Well, that took a fair amount of time without much result, I grant you. So I took off for that garage and service station where the kid started work. Purley and Sons, Highbury. Quite a nice chap, Purley, old-fashioned paternal style. Good little business, and still personal. Garages can be, even in London.”

“And they remember him?”

“They remember him. Give him quite a good name as a worker. Didn’t mind how mucky he got, and loved cars nearly as much as guitars. And you know he was only a kid when he started with them? Well, this is the one pearl I’ve got for you with all this diving, George. Purley took a real interest in the kids he employed, and was a stickler for the regulations. And you know the birth certificate juveniles have to produce when they start work?”

“Of course, what about it?”

“Just that in his case it wasn’t a birth certificate. It was an adoption certificate.”

So he had known, of course, he had known all along. It is, in any case, the modern policy to ensure that they know, and so avoid future shocks. He had always known; and this was the one fact he had always refrained from mentioning, if not suppressed. He talked freely to interviewers about his upbringing in public care, he went back to his old home regularly as a visitor. No sore places there.

But never, never did he tell anyone, even Liri Palmer, that John James and Esther Galt were only his adoptive parents. That was a spot he was careful never to touch.

For fear of pain?

A quarter of an hour later the telephone rang for the third time, and this time it really was Stirling. By that time the inquiries he had to make there seemed almost unnecessary, but he set them in motion, all the same. It would take a little time to get hold of details from so far back, names, dates of death, and so on, but the services kept everlasting records. He would get what he wanted, though perhaps not in time to affect or simplify the issue.

And now there was nothing left to be done, except sit back and wait for Lucien Galt to come back to Follymead under escort.

In the back of the police car, purling steadily along the Ml at seventy, Lucien Galt sat closed into himself like a locked house, but like a locked house with someone peering through the curtains, and possibly a gun braced across the sill of a just-open window. He had said hardly anything since the large, civil men closed in on him at the airport, and wafted him smoothly aside into a private room. If he had seen the slightest hope of giving them the slip, then or afterwards, he would have risked it, but they didn’t take any chances, and they didn’t give him any. No use looking back now and cursing the mistakes he had made. He had a situation to deal with here. Nothing else mattered now.

He was horribly tired, that was the worst thing about it. He needed to think clearly and carefully, and he was in no condition to do it, but he had to try. This perfectly decent and pleasant person beside him, and the other one, driving, they were human, they had treated him throughout with slightly constrained civility and consideration. It was an extraordinary feeling, being wound about with chains of forbearance and watchfulness, like a mental case, like a psychopath under observation. But it did mean that they would listen to him and report on him with all the detachment of which they were capable.

“I’d like to tell you how it happened,” he said abruptly, breaking the silence which had been largely of his own making. At first he hadn’t known what to do, or how to conduct himself, and though he had despised the normal bluster and pretence with which the guilty cover up their guilt, it had seemed to him that a profession of non-understanding was the only course left to him, and after that, silence, and such dignity as he could find a way of keeping. I know nothing, I understand nothing, I am a citizen of substance and some importance, (am I?) but I am certainly not going to make a fuss in this public place. Since you apparently have a duty to do, by all means let’s go back and sort out this misunderstanding in private. All very well, but it made this blunt and exhausted opening now seem very crude. He shrank from the sound of it, and yet he was aware that it made a credible beginning. The guilty first protest (at least he had done that only once, and briefly), then sit back and think, and begin to worry, and break into a sweat of anxiety, and finally come to the conclusion that a half-admission may get them something. What he had said must have that ring to this solid, quiet person beside him, who looked like a merchant skipper on leave, brown-faced and far-sighted, and at ease anywhere.

The eyes had shortened their focus upon him, along a broad tweed shoulder. The good-natured teak face gave nothing away. “How you drove the car away, you mean?” asked Detective-Sergeant Rapier placidly.

“All right, I did drive the car away, if you want me to say so.”

“I don’t want you to say anything you don’t want to say. We’re not asking you for any statements.”

“I know that. I’m offering you one. If you want to take it down, you can. But even if you don’t want to, you can listen. I’m tired of running, anyhow, I want it straightened out.”

“If you want to talk,” said Rapier philosophically, “who’s to stop you? But I feel I ought to remind you that there are two witnesses present, whether there’s a record or not, and that anything you say may be used in evidence. Maybe you should take another long, quiet think – about as long as from here to Comerbourne. There’ll be time there to do all the talking you’ll need to do.”

“I have thought,” said Lucien bleakly. “I should have done better to think before I ran. What has it got me? I don’t suppose I ever had much chance of getting out, but what chance I had I seem to have muffed. Talking can’t make things worse now. It might even make them a shade better. Because I never meant to kill him, of course. If I hadn’t had the most hellish luck he’d be alive now.”

In the small, pregnant silence, shatteringly apparent even while Price continued to direct the car calmly at the same smooth speed, Lucien observed his two escorts exchanging in the mirror a speaking glance that was yet very careful not to say too much.

“I didn’t know,” said Rapier mildly, “that anybody’d mentioned a death.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Lucien in a spurt of nervous fury that left him trembling, “let’s pack in this pretence that you’re after me for running off with a car. People don’t try to skip out to South America for that, and you fellows don’t have the airports alerted to stop them. That’s not what all this is about. You know as well as I do that Mr. Arundale’s dead, and if you weren’t as good as certain I killed him, you wouldn’t be here taking me back with you to Comerbourne. So why put on this act with me!”

“Have we asked you any questions about Mr. Arundale’s death, sir? I don’t recollect that we have.”

“You don’t have to ask me, I’m telling you. I want to tell you. I’m sick of being the only one who knows.”

“It’s a free country,” allowed Rapier considerately. “But no charge has been made against you formally yet on any count. I shouldn’t be in any hurry to make statements, if I were you.”

“But if I do, you’ll keep a record of it? Not that I care, except that I’d rather get it over in one. I’m so damned tired.”

“Very well, sir, if that’s what you want. But you will bear in mind that I’ve cautioned you.” And with the minimum of movement and fuss, suddenly the sergeant had his notebook on his knee, and his ball-pen in his hand. Probably wise to the fact that I’m one of those contra-suggestible types, thought Lucien bitterly. If they seem to be heading in the direction you want them to go, push like the devil the other way, and they’ll persist. If you give them a hand, they’ll turn back.

“Oh, I give you full credit for that. But it’s all right, I want it finished now. It never should have begun. It was all unnecessary.”

He moistened his lips nervously. How much did they know? Better assume they knew most of it. How could Felicity keep her mouth shut for long, once she realised what she’d unleashed. And even if they hadn’t yet recovered everything the river was supposed to conceal, they soon would when the level went down. No, better leave out nothing that was there to be found.

“I was down by the river,” he said, and shivered as if he’d plunged into its coldness, “and the kid had followed me there, the warden’s niece, the Cope girl. She’d been round my neck ever since I’d got to Follymead, I couldn’t shake her. And I was in a miserable way because I’d quarrelled with my own girl, and she was around, too, and things were pretty bad with me. I wanted to get somewhere by myself, and think, and there was this silly little thing bleating about love, when she didn’t know she was born yet. I stood it a long time, and then I blew up. All I wanted was to get rid of her, and I wasn’t particular how I did it. I’m not proud of it now. I suppose it was about the cruellest thing I’ve ever done. I gave her a message to take to her aunt… to Mrs. Arundale… as if there was something between us. There wasn’t, of course, I only met the lady a couple of times before. It was just that Felicity was already mad jealous of her aunt, that’s why I made it her. It cut deeper. And it worked, too. She took offence and walked off and left me there, and that was all I wanted. I never thought she’d go and deliver the damned message, right out in front of both of them… or just to him, I don’t know… to him, anyhow, because he came. I’d said to tell Mrs. Arundale I was waiting for her there. But it was her husband who came.”

The sergeant’s hand seemed to do no more than idle over the paper, spraying shorthand symbols like rain. But he wasn’t missing anything. And he could still spare one eye, occasionally, for a quick glance at his prisoner’s face.

“Must have been a bit of a shock, when you expected Mrs. Arundale,” he said sympathetically.

“I didn’t expect anyone. I told you, all I meant to do was shoo the Cope girl away. I never thought she’d have the devilment – I don’t know, though, I asked for it! – or the guts, either.” Lucien shivered, a nervous compulsion that ran through his bones in a sharp contraction of cold. “He was there before I knew. I wasn’t paying any attention to anything. I was just glad to be alone, and then there he was coming out of the trees, with this thing in his hand…” A compulsive yawn followed the chill; he smothered it in his hands, and shook himself violently. He wasn’t through the wood yet, he had to keep his mind clear.

“This thing…?” said Rapier, patiently nudging.

“Maybe you don’t know it. It hangs in the gallery there, among a lot of other exotic junk, Victorian, maybe older. The Cope kid showed it to us when we went round the house, the first evening. It’s a black walking-stick with a silver handle, but really it’s a sword inside an ebony sheath. I knew it as soon as I saw it, but I never thought… He just drew it out and came at me. Never said a word, simply ran at me with the blade. I tried to talk to him, but there was no time at all, and anyhow I doubt if he could even hear. He looked quite mad… stone-cold mad. I couldn’t believe in it, I nearly let him get me because I couldn’t take it in. But then I knew he meant killing, and I just put the rocks between us in time, and ducked aside into the trees, hoping to beat him to the gate and get away. But he saw what I was about, and cut back there as fast as I did. I got my hand to the latch, and then he was on top of me, and I jumped round and put up my other arm to fend him off, and the tip of the blade ripped my fingers…” He flexed them painfully, and there indeed was the sliced cut, imperfectly healed, crossing all four fingers diagonally between second joints and knuckles. “And the latch had pulled half out of its place, so I knew it was free, and I pulled it out.”

He shut his face tightly between his palms, trying to suppress the sick yawns that were tearing at him now like bouts of pain. Queer the way you reacted when the time came, mentally calm but physically disrupted, a rash of nervous symptoms with a tensed and wary mind. This pause he prolonged in the hope of eliciting a question, anything that would make things easier for him, and give him a signpost, but Rapier waited politely with his ballpoint suggestively poised, and said not a word.

“But I had to spring away from the gate to get out of range. And then he was between me and it, and even if I had a weapon I couldn’t match his reach. He drove me down towards the water again, and all I could do was try to parry his strokes. But then it was no good backing any more, I should have been in the river, so I had to try and jump him. I’m no more good at that than he was, and I was in a state by men, and… I don’t even know exactly what happened. We were struggling together there, and I hit him… He went down. I didn’t know I’d hurt him badly, the only thing I thought about was to grab the sword, while he was stunned. But after a few minutes, when he still didn’t move, I got scared, and took a closer look at him. His head was like a ploughed field, and yet there was next to no blood. He wasn’t breathing, and with a head that shape he wasn’t going to breathe again. I knew I’d killed him. And all for nothing. I never wanted to, I hardly knew him… What was I supposed to do, with that on my hands?” he appealed passionately.

“The right thing,” said Rapier, accepting this literally, “in a case like that, would be to leave everything as it is, call the police, and tell them the whole story.”

“And how many ever do the right thing, when they get into a jam like that? Try it, some day, and see if you don’t do what I did – run. There wasn’t a thing I could do for him. He was dead. I pulled him to the edge of the river, and threw him as far out as I could, into the current, and I saw it take him downstream over the weir. I threw the sword-stick and the latch in the pool there. And I remembered that he was supposed to start for Birmingham, and his car was out in the yard ready. So I took it. Nobody’d look for him again until Sunday night. But you can’t get money out of banks or turn other assets into cash on a Sunday, I had to wait over until to-day. If it hadn’t been for that, you wouldn’t have caught up with me.”

“And how,” asked the sergeant mildly, “did you know that we were inquiring into this death, then? You say nobody’d be expecting him back until last night, and nobody’d panic at one extra night, would they? Or did somebody tip you off? Did you hear from somebody that his body’d been found?”

Lucien took his hands away from his drawn face, and stared him steadily in the eye. “No, how could I? I thought I was still ahead of you until they dropped on me at the airport. After that, I couldn’t help knowing you’d either found him, or found traces that were just as good. You wouldn’t have known about the car being stolen, otherwise. And what you didn’t know before,” he said wearily, “you know now. Have you got it all down?”

“Yes, Mr. Galt, I’ve got it all down.”

“Good! I should hate to go through all that again.”

“I’m sure you would, sir,” agreed Rapier serenely.

“I don’t want anybody else to be pestered,” said Lucien, leaning back in his corner with a drained sigh, “when nobody but me had anything to do with it. I didn’t have a thing against him, I hardly even knew him. But I killed him.”

“Yes, Mr. Galt,” agreed Rapier, accommodatingly, watching the stillness of the pure, dark profile against the streaming world outside, “yes, you’ve made that quite clear.”