Till Death Do Us Part

Till Death Do Us Part

JOHN DICKSON CARR

CHAPTER I

THINKING the matter over afterwards, Dick Markham might have seen omens or portents in the summer thunderstorm, in the fortune-teller's tent, in the shooting-range, in half a dozen other things at that bazaar.

But the fact remains that he hardly even noticed the weather. He was much too happy.

Ahead, as he and Lesley turned in at the open gates with their stone pillars topped by the heraldic design of griffin and ash-tree, stretched the grounds of Ashe Hall. The smooth lawns were gaudy with booths and striped tents. For a background they had oak-trees, and the long, low, red-brick line of the Halt

It was a scene which, four or five years later, would come back to Dick Markham with a nostalgia like anguish. A lush, green, burning England; an England of white flannels and lazy afternoons; an England which, please God, we shall never lose for any nonsense about a better world. There it lay in opulence, a year or so before the beginning of Hitler's war, though 'opulent' was hardly a word that could be applied to the estate of George Converse, last Baron Ashe. Yet Dick Markham, a tall young man with rather too much imagination, hardly looked at it,

Lesley said,' We're horribly late, you know,' in the breathless, half-laughing voice of a girl who does not really care.

Both of them had been walking rather fast. Both of them now stopped short.

A gust of wind, cool against that hot afternoon, raked with sudden violence across the lawns. It caught at Lesley's hat, a picture-hat with a transparent floppy brim, and made her put up her hands quickly to it The sky had grown as dark as twilight, with smoky slow-moving clouds.

' Look here!' Dick said. ‘ What time is it ?'

‘It must be past three, anyway.'

He nodded ahead, where the shadow of the storm gave everything a nightmarish and unreal quality like sunlight through smoked glass. Nothing stirred on the lawns. Tents and booths, touched to uneasy life by the wind, seemed deserted. 'But... where is everybody ?'

'They're probably at the cricket match, Dick. We'd better hurry. Lady Ashe and Mrs Price will be furious.'

' Does that matter ?'

' No,' smiled Lesley.' Of course not.'

He looked at her - laughing and breathless, with her hands at the brim of her hat. He saw the desperate seriousness of her eyes, despite the smiling mouth. All her thoughts and emotions seemed concentrated in those eyes, brown eyes, telling him what she had told him last night.

He saw the unconscious grace of the raised arms, the white frock moulded against her body by that whipping wind. She was so infernally, disturbingly attractive that even the quiver of her mouth, the turn of her eyes, were recorded in his brain as though he saw her in a thousand different pictures.

It had never occurred to Dick Markham - outwardly at least a stickler for the conventions - that at the entrance’ to Lord Ashe's sedate park, on the afternoon of a starched garden-party, with Lady Ashe's phantom eye upon them, he would put his arms round Lesley Grant and kiss her without particularly caring who might be looking on.

But this is what happened, with the wind sweeping across the park and the sky darkening still more. Their conversation (let nobody mock at it) was a trifle chaotic.

'Do you love me?'

'You know I do. Do you love me?'

Ever since last night these same words had been repeated, over and over, with no sense of repetition. On the contrary, it seemed each time a new discovery: an increasing dazzle to the wits at the realization. Dick Markham, with some vague recollection of their whereabouts, at length disengaged his arms and swore at the universe.

'I suppose,' he said, 'we've got to go to this damned cricket match?'

Lesley hesitated. The intense concentration of emotion faded out of her eyes, and she glanced at the sky.

'It's going to pour with rain in a minute,' she answered. ' I doubt if there'll be a cricket match. And...'

'And what?'

' I wanted to see the fortune-teller,' said Lesley.

Dick could not have said why he threw back his head and roared with laughter. It was partly her naive air, her utter seriousness; and partly that he would have roared at anything as a groping expression of how he felt.

' Mrs Price says he's awfully good,' the girl assured him quickly. 'That's why I've been so curious. She says he can tell you absolutely everything about yourself.'

' But you know that already, don't you ?'

' Couldn't we see the fortune-teller ?'

A faint stir of thunder muttered from the east Taking Lesley's arm firmly, he led her at a rapid pace up the gravel drive towards the clutter of stalls on the lawn. No effort had been made to arrange the booths in regular or even in systematic order. From the coconut-shy to the so-called 'pond' where you fished for bottles, the proprietor of each exhibit had placed it according to his or her artistic taste. And there could be no mistaking the fortune-teller's tent

It stood apart from the others, nearer to Ashe Hall. In shape the tent was like an overgrown telephone-box, though flaring out at the bottom and peaked at the top. Its dingy canvas had vertical stripes of white and red. Over the tent-flap hung a neat sign which read,

'THE GREAT SWAMI,

PALMIST AND

CRYSTAL-GAZER:

SEES ALL,

KNOWS ALL',

together with a big cardboard chart of a human hand pierced by explanatory arrows.

The sky had now grown so dark that Dick could discern a light inside the fortune-teller's lair, which must have been hot to suffocation all afternoon. A heavier gust of wind ran among the tents, thrumming and rattling at canvas, and making the tents sway up like half-inflated balloons. The sign of the human hand was agitated, grotesquely as though it were beckoning to them or waving them away. And a voice said: 'Hoy!'.

Major Horace Price, behind the 'counter' of the minature shooting-gallery, had made a trumpet of his hands and was addressing them in a parade-ground voice. Most of the other stalls were deserted, their proprietors having; evidently gone off to the cricket match. Major Price doughtily remained. Catching their attention, he ducked under the counter and hurried towards them.

' I imagine - he's heard ?' asked Lesley.

'I expect everybody's heard’ said Dick, conscious at once of acute embarrassment and bursting pride. 'You don't mind?'

' Mind!' cried Lesley.' Mind?'

' My dear chap!' said the major, clutching his tweed cap more firmly to his head and skidding a little on the smooth grass.' My dear girl! I've been looking everywhere for you all afternoon’ So has my wife! Is this true ?'

Dick tried to look casual, though he could manage to look no more casual than a wind-whipped tent. ‘ ‘ Is what true, major?'

'This marriage!' emphasized Major Price, in almost a tone of agony. He pointed at them. 'Are you going to get married?'

'Yes. It's true enough.'

'My dear chap!'said the major.

He lowered his voice to a solemnity more suited to a funeral than to a wedding. Major Price had, on great occasions, a sentimentality which could be acutely embarrassing. He reached out and wrung the hand of each in turn.

'I'm delighted!' he declared, with an honest sympathy which warmed Dick Markham's heart. 'It couldn't be more suitable! Couldn't! I think so, and so does my wife When's it to be?'

' We haven't quite decided yet,' said Dick.' Sorry to be sc late for the garden-party. But we were...'

'Occupied!' said the major. 'Occupied! I know! Say nothing more about it!'

Though not strictly entitled to be called major, since he had never been a Regular Army man and only gained this rank in the last war, the term so suited Horace Price that he was addressed by no other.

Actually he was a solicitor, and a shrewd one. The village of Six Ashes, to say nothing of half the countryside round, came to snarl itself in litigations at his office in the High Street. But his bearing, his thick-set figure, his cropped sandy moustache, speckled round-jowled face and light blue eye, no less than a knowledge exhaustive and sometimes exhausting about all things military or sporting, made him Major Price even to magistrates.

He stood beaming on them now, teetering back and forth on his heels, and rubbing his hands together.

'We must celebrate this, you know,' he announced. 'Everybody'll want to congratulate you. My wife, and Lady Ashe, and Mrs Middlesworth, and everybody! In the meantime...'

'In the meantime,' suggested Lesley, 'hadn't we better get to shelter?’

Major Price blinked at her.

·Shelter?'

A discarded paper bag, blown on that vast wind, sailed past overhead. The oak-trees round Ashe Hall were distorted, and the flapping of loose canvas now resembled a hurricane of cracking flags.

'The storm's going to break,' said Dick. 'I hope these tents are pegged down securely. They'll be all over the next county if they're not'

'Oh, they'll be all right,' the major assured him. 'And the storm doesn't matter now. This show's nearly over.'

' Has business been good at your stall ?'

'Business,' said the major, 'has been excellent.' Impressed enthusiasm lightened his pale-blue eyes. 'Some of these people, you know, turned out to be devilish good shots. Cynthia Drew, for instance -'

Major Price stopped abruptly. His colour came up abruptly too, as though he had made a diplomatic error. Dick hoped with a sort of weary anger that they weren't going to start throwing Cynthia Drew in his teeth again.

'Lesley,' he said loudly, 'is very anxious to see this famous fortune-teller. That is, if he's still at his post. And, if you'll excuse us, I think we'd better hurry along.'

' Oh, no, you don't!' said the major with decision.

'Don't what?'

Major Price reached out and took Lesley firmly by the wrist.

'See the fortune-teller, by all means. He's still there. But first of all,' grinned the major, 'you're going to patronize my show.'

' Guns ?' cried Lesley.

'Absolutely!' said the major.

' No! Please! I'd rather not!'

Dick turned round. The urgency of Lesley's voice surprised him. But Major Price, with a massive and smothering benevolence, paid no attention.

As a drop of rain stung Dick's forehead, the major impelled both of them towards the miniature shooting-range. This was a narrow shed with wooden walls and a canvas roof, backed by a black-painted sheet of steel. Half a dozen small cardboard targets, run on pulleys so that they could be drawn back to the counter after you fired, were suspended against this back wall.

Ducking under the counter, Major Price touched a switch. A small electric light, on an ingenious arrangement of dry-cell batteries, glowed out over each target. On the counter lay a large collection of light rifles, chiefly .22's, which the major had been borrowing all over Six Ashes.

'You're first, young lady!' he said, and pointed sternly to a well-filled money bowl on the table. 'Six shots for half a crown. I know it's an outrageous price, but this is a charity do. Try it!'

' Honestly,' said Lesley,' I'd rather not!'

'Nonsense!' said the major, picking up a small rifle and running his hand lovingly along the top.' Now here's a neat little model: Winchester 61 hammerless. Very suitable for polishing off your husband after marriage.' He chuckled uproariously.' Try it!'

Dick, who had put half a crown into the money bowl and was turning to urge her as well, stopped short.

Lesley Grant's eyes were shining with an expression he could not quite read: except that there was pleading in it, and fear too. She had removed her picture hat; her rich brown hair, worn in a long bob that curled outwards at the shoulders, was a little more ruffled by the wind. She had never been prettier than at that moment of intensity. She looked about eighteen years old, in contrast to the twenty-eight she admitted.

' I know it's silly,' she said breathlessly. Her slim fingers crushed the .picture hat. 'But I'm frightened of guns. Anything to do with death, or the thought of death...!'

Major Price's sandy eyebrows went up.

'Damme, young woman,' he expostulated, 'we're not really asking you to kill anybody. Just take the rifle and blaze away at one of those targets. Try it!'

' Look here,' said Dick,' if she'd rather not do it...'

Evidently with the idea of being a sport, Lesley fastened her teeth in her lower lip and took the rifle from Major Price. First she tried holding it at arm's length, and saw that this would not do. She looked round, hesitating; then she put her cheek to the stock and fired blindly.

The lash of the rifle-shot, less a report than a spitting noise, was drowned out by thunder. No bullet-pock appeared on the target. And the thunder seemed to complete Lesley's demoralization. She put down the rifle quietly enough on the counter. But Dick saw with sudden consternation that her body was trembling, and that she was almost crying.

' I'm sorry,' she said.' I can't do it.'

'Of all the clumsy oxen in the world,' snapped Dick Markham, ‘I must be the worst, I didn't realize...'

He touched her shoulders. The sense of her nearness was so strong and disturbing that he would have put his arms round her again if it had not been for the presence of Major Price. Lesley was now trying to laugh, and nearly succeeding.

'It's quite all right,' she assured him with sincerity. 'I know I oughtn't to be so foolish. It's just that -!' She made a fierce gesture, finding no words. - Then she took up her picture hat from the counter. 'Couldn't we go and see the fortune-teller now!'

' Of course. I'll go with you.'

'He won't admit more than one at a time,' said Lesley. 'They never will. You stay here and finish the round. But - you won't go away?'

'My going away,' Dick said grimly, 'is just about the unlikeliest thing you can think of.'

They looked at each other for a moment before she left him. How badly Dick Markham had got it may be deduced from the fact that, though she was merely going to a tent some dozen yards away, it had all the effect of a separation. For upsetting Lesley in this matter of the rifle, he now stood and swore at himself with such comprehensiveness that even Major Price, listening in guilty silence, seemed disturbed.

The major cleared his throat

' Women 1' he said, shaking his head with gloomy profundity.

'Yes. But, hang it all, I ought to have known better!'

'Women!' repeated the major. He handed the rifle to Dick, who took it automatically. Then he spoke rather enviously. 'You're a lucky young fellow, my lad.'

' My God, don't I know it?'

'That girl,' observed the major, 'is a kind of witch. She comes here six months ago. She turns the heads of half the males in this vicinity. Money, too. And -' Here he hesitated. 'I say!'

‘Yes, Major Price?'

' Have you seen Cynthia Drew to-day ?'

Dick glanced at him sharply. The major, who would not meet his eye, was looking very bard at the line of rifles on the counter.

'Look here,' said Dick. 'There never has been anything between Cynthia and me. I want you to understand that.'

'I know it, my dear fellow!' said the other hastily, though with every appearance of casualness. 'I'm perfectly sure of it! All the same, in a way, the women...'

'What women?'

'My wife. Lady Ashe. Mrs Middlesworth. Mrs Earnshaw.'

Again Dick glanced at his companion's elaborate unconcern. Major Price was leaning one elbow on the counter, a thick-set silhouette against the little lights over the targets. Again wind whooped among the tents, scattering dust and lifting canvas; but neither of them noticed it

'A minute ago,' Dick pointed out, 'you were saying they wanted to congratulate us. You intimated they were practically roaring round the country in search of us, just to pour out congratulations.'

'Exactly, my dear chap! That's quite true!'

‘Well?'

'But they do feel — mind, I only wanted to warn you! - they do feel, in a way, that poor old Cynthia,..' '"Poor old Cynthia?'" 'In away. Yes.'

Motioning Major Price to one side, Dick raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired. The lash of the shot was like a comment, while he noted in an absent-minded way that he had scored a hit on the middle target a little off bull's-eye. Both he and the major spoke in that guarded, conspiratorial tone which men employ to discuss dangerous domestic matters.

But he was conscious of tugging forces, the closing net of the spoken word, moving behind this tiny life at Six Ashes.

'For over two years,’ he said bitterly, 'this whole village has been trying to get Cynthia and me together, whether we like it or not'

' I understand, my dear chap. I quite understand!' Dick fired again.

'There's nothing to it, I tell you! I've never paid any attentions, any serious attentions, to Cynthia. And Cynthia knows that, She can't have misinterpreted it, whatever the others have done.'

' My dear chap,' said the major, regarding him shrewdly, 'you can never pay any attentions to a gal without her wondering whether that might not be behind it. Not that I don't understand your point of view, mind 1'

Dick fired again.

'And, as for getting married just to please the community, I don't see that. I'm in love with Lesley. I've been in love with her ever since she came here. That's all there is to it Though what she can possibly see in me...!'

Major Price chuckled.

'Oh well!', he said deprecatingly, looking Dick up and down, and dismissing this with a wave of his hand. 'After all, you're our local celebrity.'

Dick grunted.

'Or I should say,' amended the major, 'that you're now one of our two local celebrities. Has anybody told you about the fortune-teller?'

'No. Who is the fortune-teller? I mean, it can't be anyone from hereabouts, or everybody would know him and know the whole thing was a fake. But they all seem to think he's outstandingly good. Who is the fortune-teller?'

There was an open box of cartridges on the counter. Major Price picked up a handful idly, letting them run through his fingers back into the box. He hesitated, as though amused at a memory.

'Remind me,' he said, 'to tell you of a devilish good joke I played on Earnshaw this afternon. Earnshaw-'

'Hang it, major, don't evade! Who is the fortuneteller?'

Major Price glanced round cautiously. 'I'll tell you,' he confided, 'if you don't let it get any farther for the moment, because he wants it kept quiet.

He's probably one of the greatest living authorities on crime.'

CHAPTER 2

'AUTHORITY on crime?' repeated Dick.

'Yes. Sir Harvey Gilman.'

'You don't mean the Home Office Pathologist?'

'That's the chap,' agreed Major Price complacently.

As startled as he was impressed, Dick swung round to stare at the red-and-white striped tent, beside whose door the ghostly cardboard hand writhed and beckoned in the wind.

And he saw a weird shadow-play.

It was now so tumultuously dark that he could barely make out the sign which read,

'THE GREAT SWAMI,

PALMIST AND CRYSTAL-GAZER:

SEES ALL, KNOWS ALL',

adorning this gaudy structure. But there was a light inside, an overhead light. Against the darkness it threw on the tent-wall discernible shadows of the two persons inside.

They were smudgy shadows, wavering as the tent belled uneasily. Nevertheless Dick could make out the silhouette of a woman at one side; and on the other side, with some sort of table between, a squat shadow with a curiously bulbous head, which seemed to be waving its hands.

' Sir Harvey Gilman!' Dick muttered.

'Sitting in there,' explained the major, 'with a turban round his head, telling people all about themselves. He's been the hit of the show all day.'

'Does he know anything about palmistry or crystal-gazing?'

Major Price spoke dryly.

'No, my lad. But he knows a lot about human nature. That's the whole secret of fortune-telling, anyway.'

'But what's Sir Harvey Gilman doing here?'

'He's taken Pope's cottage for the summer. You know - in Gallows Lane, not very far from your place.' Again

the major chuckled. 'The Chief Constable introduced him to me, and I got an inspiration.' 'Inspiration?'

' That's right. I thought it'd be an excellent idea if we asked him to play fortune-teller, and not reveal his identity until later. What's more, I think the old boy's enjoying himself.'

'What’s he like, actually ?’

'Little dry old chap, with a glittering eye. But, as I say, I think he's enjoying himself no end. The Ashes know ' about it - he nearly made Lady Ashe faint, last night - and Dr Middlesworth and one or two others.' .

Here Major Price broke off, with another parade-ground hail past Dick's ear. For one of the persons he had just mentioned was hurrying up through the clutter of tents towards Ashe Hall.

Dr Hugh Middlesworth, bare-headed and with a bag of golf-clubs slung over his shoulder, moved at long strides to get ahead of the rain. He had been in charge of the golf hazard at the garden-party: that is, you tried various short shots from an improvised tee, and received nominal prizes in relation to the fewest strokes it took to reach the cup. He shook his head violently at Major Price's hail; but the major became so insistent that he reluctantly came over to the shooting-gallery.

Hugh Middlesworth was both a good doctor and a very popular man.

The reasons for his popularity might be difficult to determine. He was not a talkative person. He was also the mildest-mannered of men, -having a devoted if sharp-tongued wife and a rather large family.

Lean and fortyish, his thin-spun brown hair going thin on top, Dr Middlesworth wore as a rule a vaguely harassed look. There were lines round his eyes and his mouth, with its narrow brown line of moustache. There were hollows in his cheek-bones and temples. But he had, in place of conversation, an understanding smile which suddenly lighted up his whole face. It was unconscious; it was his only bed-side mannerism; yet it worked wonders.

Tramping over towards them now, slinging the golf-bag from one shoulder to the other, he surveyed Major Price in astonishment.

'Aren't you at the cricket match ?' he demanded.

'No,' said the major, both question and answer being a little superfluous.' I thought I'd hang on here, and - well! keep an eye on the fortune-teller. I've just been telling Dick about Sir Harvey Gilman.'

' Oh,' said Dr Middlesworth.

He opened his mouth as though to add something, but changed his mind and closed it again.

'As a matter of fact,' pursued the major, 'Lesley Grant is in there having her fortune told now. If he tells her she's met a fair man and will go on a journey, that's absolutely right' He pointed to Dick. 'Those two are going to make a match of it, you know.'

Dr Middlesworth did not comment He merely smiled and extended his hand, with a grip of strong capable fingers. But Dick knew it was sincere.

'I'd heard something about it,' he confessed. 'From my wife.' His vaguely harassed look returned, and he hesitated. 'As for Sir Harvey...'

'In this lad's profession,' continued the major, tapping Dick impressively on the shoulder, 'he ought to be invaluable. Eh?'

'Invaluable,' Dick said with some fervour, 'isn't the word for it. That man has given expert evidence in every murder case, celebrated or obscure, for the past thirty years. A friend of mine used to live near him in Bayswater; and said he'd come home, as often as not, with somebody's insides in an open glass jar. Ralph says the old boy's a walking encyclopedia about murders, if you can only persuade him to talk. And...'

This was the point at which all three of them jumped.

It was partly the brief glare of lightning, illuminating the whole grounds with a deathly pallor, and followed by a shock of thunder striking close. Lightning picked out every detail as though in the flash of a photograph.

It caught, in the background, the dull red-brick shape of Ashe Hall, with thin chimneys and mullioned windows now moonlit: venerable and yet shabby, like their owner. It caught the writhe of seething trees. It caught the thin careworn face of Dr Middlesworth, and the fat comfortable countenance of Major Price, now turned towards the fortune-teller's tent. When darkness came again, with the crash of thunder dying to a rattle, it directed their attention towards another thing.

There was something wrong inside the fortune-teller's tent.

The shadow of Lesley Grant had jumped to its feet. The shadow of the man was also standing, pointing a finger at her across the table. And the weirdness of that shadow-play, wavering on a lighted wall, could not disguise its urgency.

'Here!' cried Dick Markham, hardly knowing what he protested at.

Yet the agitation of those figures he could feel as clearly as though they were there. The shadow of Lesley Grant turned round, and Lesley herself bolted out of the tent.

Aimlessly, still carrying the rifle under his arm, Dick ran towards her. He saw her stop short - a white figure in the gloom - and she seemed to be bracing herself.

' Lesley! What's wrong ?'

'Wrong?' echoed Lesley. Her voice was cool and gentle, hardly raised above its usual key. ' What was he saying to you ?'

Dick felt rather than saw the brown eyes, with their ' strongly luminous whites and very thin eyebrows, searching his face.

'He wasn't saying anything to me!' Lesley protested. 'I didn't think he was very good, really. Just the usual thing about a happy life; and a little illness, but nothing serious; and a letter arriving with some pleasant news.'

' Then why were you so frightened ?'

' I wasn't frightened!'

'I'm sorry, darling. But I saw your shadow on the wall of the tent.' More and more oppressively disturbed, Dick came to a decision. Hardly realizing what he was doing, he thrust the rifle into Lesley's hands. 'Here, hold this for a minute 1'

' Dick! Where are you going?'

' I want to see this bloke myself.'

' But you mustn't !'

'Why not?'

The rain answered for her. Two or three large drops spattered down, and then ran across the lawn as though the hissing of all these trees were gathering together to let the skies open like a tank.

Glancing round, Dick could see that the hitherto almost deserted lawn was now being invaded by people hurrying back from the cricket match at the other side of the grounds. Major Price was hastily gathering up an armful of rifles. Beckoning to him, and pointing at Lesley, Dick touched her arm.

' Go on up to the house,' he said.' I'll not be long.' Then he pushed open the tent-flap and ducked inside.

A voice, pitched in a sing-song deliberately guttural and assumed, struck at him sharply from the close, stuffy confines of the tent.

'I regret!' it said. 'You find me fatigued. That was the last sitting. I can oblige no more ladies or gentlemen to-day.'

'That's all right, Sir Harvey,' said Dick. 'I didn't come to get my fortune told.'

Then they looked at each other. Dick Markham could not understand why his own voice stuck in his throat.

In an enclosure barely six feet square, a shaded electric light hung from the roof. It shone down across a gleaming crystal ball, against the plum-coloured velvet cover of the little table, and added a hypnosis to this stuffy place.

Behind the table sat the fortune-teller, a lean dry shortish man of fifty-odd, in a white linen suit and with a coloured turban wound round his head. Out of the turban peered an intellectual face, a sharp-nosed face, with a straight mouth, a bump of a chin, and an ugly worried forehead. His rather arresting eyes were pitted with wrinkles at the outer corners.

'So you know me,' he said in his normal voice - a dry voice, like a schoolmaster's. He cleared his throat, and coughed several times to find the right level.

‘That’s right, sir.'

' Then what do you want, young man ?' Rain-drops struck the roof of the tent with a drum-like noise.

'I want to know,' returned Dick, 'what you were saying to Miss Grant' 'Miss who?'

'Miss Grant The young lady who was just in here. Myfiancée’

' Fiancée, eh?'

The wrinkled eyelids moved briefly. Major Price had said that Sir Harvey Gilman was enjoying himself at his job. It would require a sardonic humour, Dick reflected, to sit here all day in the airless heat, speaking with a fake accent and enjoying the dissection of those who sat opposite him. But there was no hint of any enjoyment now.

·Tell me, Mr...?'

' My name is Markham. Richard Markham.'

'Markham.' The Great Swami's eyes seemed to turn inwards. 'Markham. Don't I periodically see, in London, plays written by a certain Richard Markham? Plays of a sort that are called, I believe,' he hesitated,' psychological thrillers?'

'That's right, sir.'

'Analysing, if I recall correctly, the minds and motives of those who commit crimes. You write them ?'

'I do the best I can with the material,' said Dick, suddenly feeling on the defensive before that eye.

Yes, he thought, the old boy was pleased. Sir Harvey uttered a sound which might have been laughter if he had opened his mouth a little more. Yet the ugly forehead remained.

'No doubt, Mr Markham. This lady's name, you said, was...?'

'Grant. Lesley Grant.' He uttered the words just as the storm broke and the rain tore down. It struck the roof of the tent with such a hollow, heavy drumming that Dick had to raise his voice above it. 'What's all this mystery ?'

'Tell me, Mr Markham. Has she lived here in Six Ashes for very long ?'

' Np. Only about six months. Why ?'

'How long have you been engaged to her? Believe me, I have a reason for asking that.'

' We only got engaged last night. But -'

'Only last night,' repeated the other without inflexion.

The hanging lamp in the tent swung a little, sending smooth bright reflexions slipping across that crystal ball. The drumming drive of rain deepened to a roar, making canvas walk vibrate. Behind the crystal ball, regarding his visitor with those curious eyes, Sir Harvey Gilman upturned the palm of his hand and knocked with the finger-joints, lightly and leisurely, on the velvet-covered table.

'One other thing, young man,' he remarked in an interested way. 'Where do you get the material for your plays?'

At any other time Dick would have been only too glad to tell him. He would have been flattered, even tongue-tied. He realized that he was probably offending the sharp-nosed old pathologist, even making an enemy of him. But he had reached a point of desperation.

' For God's sake, man, what is it ?'

'I have been wondering how to break it to you,' said Sir Harvey, showing for the first time a gleam of humanity. He looked up. 'Do you know who this so-called "Lesley Grant" really is?'

' Who she really is ?'

' I suppose,' said Sir Harvey,' I had better tell you.'

Drawing a deep breath, he got up from his chair behind the table. And it was at this point that Dick heard the crack of the rifle-shot

After that, the world dissolved in nightmare.

Though the noise was not loud, Dick's thoughts were so entwined already with rifles and shooting-ranges that he had almost a pre-vision of it.

He saw the small bullet-hole jump up black in the side wall of the tent, now growing greyish where the wet crawled down. He saw Sir Harvey flung forward as by the blow of a fist - striking just beside and under the left shoulder-blade. He saw, in one momentary flash, the inscrutability of the pathologist's face cracked open by a look of sheer terror.

Table and man pitched forward almost into Dick's arms. But there was not even time to stretch out a hand before the whole clutter landed round him. Sir Harvey's own hand was twitching convulsively; he dragged the table-cover with him; and the crystal ball dropped with a thud on flat-trodden grass. Then, as Dick saw the ghost of a blood-stain take form and deepen on the side of the white linen suit, he heard a clear voice raised outside.

' Major Price, I couldn't help it!'

It was Lesley's voice.

'I'm terribly sorry, but I couldn't help it! Dick shouldn't have given me this rifle to hold! Somebody touched my arm, and my hand was on the trigger, and the rifle seemed to fire itself by accident!' The voice came from a little distance away, of anguished sweetness and sincerity against the tumult of rain.' I -I do hope I haven't hit anything!'

CHAPTER 3

AT half-past nine that night, when June twilight was deepening outside the windows, Dick Markham paced endlessly up and down the study of his cottage just outside Sue Ashes.

'If I could stop thinking,' he told himself, 'I should be all right But I can't stop thinking. 'The fact remains that Sir Harvey Gilman's shadow was clearly outlined against the wall of that tent, a perfect target if anybody had wanted to shoot at it

' But what you're thinking is impossible!

'This whole affair,' he further told himself, 'will prove to have a perfectly simple explanation if you don't get into a fever about it. The main thing is to get rid of these cobwebs of suspicion, these ugly clinging strands that wind into the brain and nerves until you feel the spider stir at the end of every one of them. You're in love with Lesley. Anything else is of no consideration whatever.

'Liar!

'Major Price believes this shooting was an accident. So does Dr Middlesworth. So does Earnshaw, the bank manager, who turned up so unexpectedly after Sir Harvey Gilman tumbled over with a bullet in him. You alone...'

Dick stopped his pacing to look slowly round the study where he had done so much work, good and bad.

There were the fat-bowled lamps on the table, throwing golden light across its comfortable untidiness, and reflected back from the little line of diamond-paned windows. There was the dark brick fireplace with its white overmantel. The walls were hung with framed theatrical photographs, and garish playbills - from the Comedy Theatre, the Apollo Theatre, the St Martin's Theatre -announcing plays by Richard Markham.

Poisoner's Mistake was proclaimed from one wall, Panic in the Family from another. Each an attempt to get inside the criminal's mind: to see life through his eyes, to feel with his feelings. They occupied such wall-space as was not taken up by stuffed shelves of books dealing with morbid and criminal psychology.

There was the desk with its typewriter, cover now on. There was the revolving bookcase of reference-works. There were the overstuffed chairs, and the standing ashtrays. There were the bright chintz curtains, and the bright rag rugs underfoot It was Dick Markham's ivory tower, as remote from the great world as this village of Six Ashes itself.

Even the name of the lane in which he lived...

He lit another cigarette, inhaling very deeply in a curious perverse effort to make his own head swim. He was taking still another deep draw when the telephone rang.

Dick snatched up the receiver with such haste that he almost knocked the phone off the desk.

' Hello,' said the guarded voice of Dr Middlesworth.

Clearing his throat, Dick put the cigarette down on the edge of the desk so as to grip the phone with both hands.

' How's Sir Harvey ? Is he alive ?'

There was a slight pause.

' Oh, yes. He's alive.'

' Is he going to - be all right?'

‘Oh, yes. He'll live.'

A dizzy wave of relief, as though loosening something in his chest, brought the sweat to Dick's forehead. He picked up the cigarette, mechanically took two puffs at it, and then flung it at the fireplace.

'The fact is,' pursued Dr Middlesworth, 'he wants to see you. Could you come over here to his cottage now? It's only a few hundred yards away, and I thought perhaps...?'

Dick stared at the phone.

' Is he allowed to see anybody ?'

'Yes. Can you come straight away ?'

'I'll come,' said Dick, 'just as soon as I've phoned Lesley and told her it's all right She's been ringing here all evening, and she's nearly frantic'

'I know. She's been phoning here too. But' - there was more than a shade of hesitation in the doctor's manner -' he says he'd rather you didn't.'

'Didn't what?'

'Didn't phone Lesley. Not just yet He'll explain what he means. In the meantime' - again the doctor hesitated - 'don't let anybody come with you, and don't tell anybody what I've just said. Do you promise that ?' 'Allright, all right!’

‘ On your word of honour, do you promise ?'

‘Yes.’

Slowly, staring at the phone as though he hoped it might give back a secret, Dick replaced the receiver. His eyes wandered towards the diamond-paned windows. The storm had cleared away long ago: a fine night of stars showed outside, and there was a drowsy scent of wet grass and flowers to soothe bedevilled wits.

Then he swung round, with an animal-like sense of another presence, and saw Cynthia Drew looking at him from the doorway of the study.

'Hello, Dick,' smiled Cynthia.

Dick Markham had sworn to himself, had sworn a mighty oath, that he wouldn't feel uncomfortable the next time he saw this girl; that he wouldn't avoid her eye; that he wouldn't experience this exasperating sense of having done something low. But he did.

' I knocked at the front door,' she explained, 'and couldn't seem to make anyone hear. And the door was open, so I came in. You don't mind ?'

' No, of course not!'

Cynthia avoided his eye too. Conversation seemed to drop away, a dried-up gulf between them, until she decided to speak her mind.

Cynthia was one of those healthy, straightforward girls who laugh a good deal and yet sometimes seem more complex than their flightier sisters. There could be no denying her prettiness: fair hair, blue eyes, with a fine complexion and fine teeth. She stood twisting the knob of the study door, and then - click! - you saw her make up her mind.

It was no better for guessing not only what she would say, but exactly how she would say it. Cynthia looked straight at him. She drew a deep breath, her figure being set off by a pinkish-coloured jumper and a brown skirt above tan stockings and shoes. She walked forward, with a sort of calculated impulsiveness, and extended her hand.

'I've heard about you and Lesley, Dick. I'm glad, and I hope you'll both be terribly happy.'

At the same time her eyes were saying:

'I didn't think you could do this. It doesn't really matter, of course; and you see what a good sport I'm being about it; but I hope you realize you are rather low ?'

(Oh, hell!)

'Thanks, Cynthia,' he answered aloud. 'We're rather happy about it ourselves.'

Cynthia began to laugh; and immediately, as though conscious of the impropriety, checked herself.

'What I really came about,' she went on, her colour going up in spite of herself, 'is this dreadful business about Sir Harvey Gilman.'

'Yes.'

'It is Sir Harvey Gilman, isn't it?' She nodded towards the windows, and continued to speak rapidly. If Cynthia had not been such a solid girl, you would have said that there was about her a flounce and brightness.' I mean, the man who moved into Colonel Pope's old cottage a few days ago, and kept so mysteriously in the background so he could play fortune-teller. It is Sir Harvey Gilman?'

'Yes. That's right.'

' Dick, what happened this afternoon ?'

'Weren't you there?'

'No. But they say he's dying.'

On the point of speaking, Dick checked himself.

'They say there was an accident,' Cynthia continued. 'And Sir Harvey was shot near the heart. And Major Price and Dr Middlesworth picked him up and got him into a car and drove him down here. Poor Dick!'

' Why are you pitying me?'

Cynthia pressed her hands together.

'Lesley's a dear girl' - she spoke with such obvious and earnest sincerity that he could not doubt her - 'but- you shouldn't have given her that rifle. Really you shouldn't 1 She doesn't know how to deal with practical things. Major Price says Sir Harvey's in a coma and dying. Have you heard anything more from the doctor ?'

'Well-no.'

·Everybody is dreadfully upset Mrs Middlesworth says it only goes to show we shouldn't have had a shooting-range. Mrs Price took her up rather sharply, especially as the major was in charge of it. But it does seem a pity: the padre says we collected well over a hundred pounds from the whole bazaar. And people are starting the most absurd rumours.'

Cynthia was standing by the typewriter-desk, picking up scattered books only to put them down again, and talking breathlessly. She meant so well, Dick thought; she was so infernally straightforward and friendly and likeable. Yet one problem, the problem of Sir Harvey Gilman, scratched at his nerves as Cynthia's voice was beginning to scratch.

'Look here, Cynthia. I'm sorry, but I've got to go out’

'Nobody has seen Lord Ashe to ask him'what he thinks. But then we so seldom do see him, do we? By the way, why does Lord Ashe always look so oddly at poor Lesley, on the few occasions when he has seen her? Lady Ashe ...' Cynthia broke off, waking up. ‘ What did you say, Dick ?'

‘I've got to go out now.' 'To see Lesley? Of course!'

'No. To see what's happening down at the other cottage. The doctor wants to speak to me.'

Cynthia was instantly helpful. 'I'll go with you, Dick. Anything at all I can do to help -' .

' I tellyou, Cynthia. I've got to go alone!'

It was as though he had hit her in the face.

A complete swine, now. Well, let it go.

After a brief silence Cynthia laughed: the same deprecating laugh, slurring things over, he had heard her give on a tennis-court when somebody lost his temper and flung down a racket with intent to break it. She regarded him soberly, the blue eyes concerned.

' You're so temperamental, Dick,' she said fondly.

‘I'm not temperamental, curse it! It's only...'

'All writers are, I suppose. One expects it.' She dismissed the idiosyncrasy as a matter she did not understand.

' But - funny, isn't it? - one doesn't associate it with a person like you. I mean, an outdoor person, and a fine cricketer, and all that. I mean - oh, dear! There I go again! I must be pushing off.' She looked at him steadily. With colour under the blue eyes, her placid face became almost beautiful.

'But you can count on me, old boy,' she added.

Then she was gone.

It was too late to apologize now. The villain of the piece waited until she had time to get well away towards the village. Then he left the house himself.

In front of his cottage a broad country lane ran east and west, curving among trees and open fields. On one side of the lane ran the low stone wall which bounded the park of Ashe Hall; on the opposite side, set something over a hundred yards apart, were three cottages.

The first was Dick Markham's. The second stood untenanted. The third, farthest east, had been rented furnished by their enigmatic newcomer. They were intriguing to visitors, these cottages in Gallows Lane. Each stood well back from the road, and made up in picturesqueness for its shilling-in-the slot electric meter and lack of main drainage.

As Dick emerged into the lane, he could faintly hear the church clock to the west striking ten. The lane swam in dusky light, though it seemed less dark than the print of bright stars overhead, which you saw as though from a well. Night-scents and night-noises took on a peculiar -distinctness here. By the time Dick reached the last cottage, he was running blindly.

Dark.

Or almost dark.

Across the road from the Pope cottage, a thick coppice of birch-trees pressed up close inside the boundary wall of the park. Close beside the cottage itself, bounding the lane for some distance eastward, stretched a fruit-orchard. It was a dusky place even by day, damp and wasp-haunted. By night Dick, could see nothing of the cottage except chinks of light showing through imperfectly drawn curtains on two windows facing the road.

He must have been heard or seen stumbling across the front garden. Dr Middlesworth opened the front door and admitted him into a modern-looking hall.

'Listen,' the doctor began without preamble. He spoke in his customary mild tone, but he meant it. 'I can't go on with this pretence. It's not fair asking me to.'

' What pretence ? How badly is the old boy hurt ?'

' That's just the point. He's not hurt at all.'

Dick closed the front door with a soft bang, and whirled round. '

' He fainted from shock,' Dr Middlesworth went on to explain, 'so of course everybody thought he was dying or dead. I couldn't be sure myself until I'd got him here and used the probe. But, unless you get a direct head or heart wound, a bullet from a .22 target-rifle isn't usually very dangerous.'

A faint twinkle of amusement showed in the mild eyes under the lined forehead. Dr Middlesworth put up a hand and rubbed his forehead.

'When I extracted the bullet, he woke up and yelled bloody murder. That rather surprised Major Price. The major insisted on tagging along, though I tried to keep him away.'

'Well?'

'All Sir Harvey's got is a flesh-wound. He didn't even lose much blood. His back will be sore for a few days; but, barring that, he's as fit as he ever was.'

Dick took some moments to assimilate this.

'Do you know,' he said, 'that Lesley Grant's nearly out of her mind ? She thinks she's killed him ?'

All the amusement died out of Middlesworth's face.

'Yes. I know.'

' Then what's the big idea ?'

'When Major Price left here,' replied the doctor, evading a direct answer, ‘ Sir Harvey made him promise not to say anything. Sir Harvey intimated it would be best to circulate a report that he was in a coma and couldn't last long. Knowing the major, I rather doubt whether the secret will be kept for any length of time.'

Some emotion had startled Hugh Middlesworth almost to volubility.

'Anyway,' he complained, ' I can't keep it. I warned him of that. It's unprofessional. It's unethical. Besides...'

Again, as once before that day, the doctor opened his mouth to say or suggest something, and thought better of it.

'But I keep asking you, Doctor! Why?'

'He wouldn't tell the major. He wouldn't tell me. Maybe he'll tell you. Come along.'

Abruptly Middlesworth stretched out his hand and turned the knob of a door on the left-hand side of the hall, motioning Dick to precede him. It opened into a sitting-room, large though rather low of ceiling, with two front windows facing the lane. In the exact centre of the room was a big writing-table, lighted by a hanging lamp just over it. And, in an arm-chair beside this table, his back out from it so as not to touch the back of the chair, sat the fortune-teller now divested of his raiment.

Sir Harvey Gilman's face was so grim that it swallowed up other impressions. Dick noticed that he wore pyjamas and a dressing-gown. His head, shorn of the turban, was now revealed as bald, above the sceptical eyes and sharp-pointed nose and hard sardonic mouth. He looked Dick up and down.

'Annoyed, Mr Markham ?'

Dick made no reply.

'I rather imagine,' said Sir Harvey, 'that I'm the one to be annoyed.' He arched his back, winced, and shut his lips hard before opening them to continue.

'I've proposed a little experiment. The doctor there doesn't seem to approve. But I imagine you'll approve, when you hear my reasons. No, Doctor, you may remain in the room.'

There was a half-smoked cigar on the edge of an ashtray on the writing-table. Sir Harvey picked it up.

'Understand me!' he pursued. 'I don't give a rap for abstract justice. I should not go a step out of my way to inform against anybody. But I am intellectually curious.

I should like, before I die, to know the answer to one of the few problems that ever defeated my friend Gideon Fell.

' If you agree to help me, we may be able to set a trap. If not -' He waved the cigar, put it into his mouth, and found it dead. There was more than a little vindictiveness in his manner. 'Now about this woman, the so-called "Lesley Grant".'

Dick found his voice.

'Let's have it, sir. What were you starting to tell me before this thing happened ?'

'About this woman,' pursued the other in his leisurely way. 'You're in love with her, I suppose? Or think you are?'

' I know I am.'

'That's rather unfortunate,' said Sir Harvey dryly. 'Still, it has happened before.' He turned his head round to the desk-calendar on the writing-table, which registered the date as Thursday, June tenth. 'Tell me. Has she by any chance invited you to dinner at her house, one day this week or next, as a sort of celebration ?'

'As a matter of fact, she has. Tomorrow night. But -'

Sir Harvey looked startled.

' Tomorrow night, eh ?'

What rose most clearly in Dick's mind was the image of Lesley herself, against the background of her house on the other side of Six Ashes. Lesley, with her good temper. Lesley, with her impracticality. Lesley, with her fastidiousness. Lesley, who hated ostentation in any form, and never wore lipstick or jewellery or conspicuous clothes. Yet these retiring qualities were caught together by an intensity of nature which, when she fell in love, seemed to make her utterly reckless in anything she said or did.

All this flashed through his mind as her face rose in front of him, moulded into an image of passion and gentleness that obsessed his mind. Inexplicably, he found himself shouting.

'I can't stand any more of this!' he said. 'What is all this nonsense? What accusation are you making? Are you trying to tell me her name isn't Lesley Grant at all?'

'I am,' answered Sir Harvey. He lifted his eyes. 'Her real name is Jordan. She's a poisoner.'

CHAPTER 4

FOR a space while you might have counted ten, nobody spoke. When Dick did reply, it was as though the meaning of the words had failed to register with him. He spoke without anger, even with a certain casualness.

'That's absurd.'

'Why is it absurd?'

'That little girl?'

' That little girl, as you call her, is forty-one years old.'

There was a chair at Dick's elbow. He sat down in the chair. Colonel Pope, the owner of this cottage, had turned the sitting-room into a place of shabby and slippered comfort. Pipe-smoke had tinged grey the white-plaster walls, and seasoned the oak beams. Round the walls ran a single line of military prints from the early and middle nineteenth century, their colours of battle and uniform softened by time yet still vivid. Dick looked at these pictures, and the colours grew blurred.

'You don't believe me,’ said Sir Harvey calmly. 'I didn't expect you to. But I've phoned London. There'll be a man down from Scotland Yard to-morrow who knows her well. There'll also be photographs and fingerprints.'

'Wait a minute 1 Please 1'

' Yes, young fellow ?'

'What, according to you, is Lesley supposed to have done?'

'She poisoned three men. Two of them were her husbands; that's where she gets her money. The third...' 'What husbands?'

'Does it shock your romantic soul?' inquired Sir Harvey. 'Her first husband was an American corporation lawyer named Burton Foster. Her second was a Liverpool cotton-broker called Davies; I forget his first name. Both were wealthy men. But the third victim, as I was saying...'

Dick Markham pressed his hands to his temples.

'God!' he said. And out of that monosyllable suddenly burst all the incredulousness, all the protest, all the dazed bewilderment which welled up. inside him. He wanted not to have heard; he wanted to blot the last thirty seconds out of his life.

Sir Harvey had the grace to look a little fussed, and to turn his eye away.

' I'm sorry, young fellow' - he flung his dead cigar into the ashtray - 'but there it is.' Then he eyed Dick keenly. 'And if you're thinking...'

'Go on! What was I thinking?'

The other's mouth grew still more sardonic.

'You write psychological tosh about the minds of murderers. I enjoy the stuff; I don't mind admitting it. And among my colleagues I am supposed to have rather a peculiar sense of humour. If you think I am inventing things and playing an elaborate joke on you, by way of poetic justice, get the idea out of your head. My purpose, believe me, is not a joke.'

And, as Dick found out only too soon, it wasn't.

'This woman,' said Sir Harvey clearly, 'is a thoroughgoing bad hat. The sooner you get used to that idea the sooner you'll get over it. And the safer you'll be.'

'Safer?'

'That's what I said.' The ugly stamp appeared again on Sir Harvey's forehead. He twisted his body in the chair, to get a more comfortable position; then, stung with pain, he subsided angrily.

'But that's the trouble,' he went on.' In my estimation, this woman isn't even particularly clever. Yet she goes on, and on, and on, and gets away with it! She's devised a method of murder that beats Gideon Fell as much as it beats me.'

This was the first time that the flat word 'murder' had been applied to Lesley. It opened new chasms and new doors into evil rooms. Dick was still groping blindly.

'Stop a bit!' he insisted. 'A minute ago you said something about fingerprints. You mean she's been on trial ?'

'No. The fingerprints were obtained unofficially. She's never been on trial.'

' Oh ? Then how do you know she's guilty ?'

Exasperation sharpened the other's countenance.

' Won't you believe me, Mr Markham, until our friend arrives from Scotland Yard ?'

'I didn't say that. I ask why you state it as a fact. If Lesley was guilty, why didn't the police arrest her ?'

'Because they couldn't prove it. Three occasions, mind you! And still they couldn't prove it.'

Once more the Home Office pathologist thoughtlessly tried to move his position. Once more pain burnt him. But he was absorbed now. He hardly noticed it. His fingers lifted up and down on the padded arms of the chair. His monkey-bright eyes, fixed on Dick Markham, held so richly sardonic an expression that it might have been one of admiration.

'The police,' he went on, 'will supply exact dates and details. I can only tell you what I know from personal observation. Kindly don't interrupt me more than is necessary.'

'Well?'

'I first met this lady thirteen years ago. Our so-called Government had not yet awarded me a knighthood. I was not yet Chief Pathologist to the Home Office. I often served in the capacity of police-surgeon as well as pathologist One morning in winter - the police, I repeat, can supply dates - we learned that an American named Foster had been found dead in his dressing-room, adjoining the bedroom, of his home in Hyde Park Gardens. I went out there with Chief Inspector Hadley, now Superintendent Hadley.

' It seemed to us a clear case of suicide. The deceased's wife had been away from home for the night. The deceased was found half-sitting, half-lying on a sofa beside a little table in the dressing-room. The cause of death was hydrocyanic acid, injected into the left forearm by means of a hypodermic syringe found on the floor beside him.' Sir Harvey paused.

A rather cruel smile pinched in the wrinkled flesh round his mouth.

'Your studies, Mr Markham' - he spread out his fingers '- your studies, I say, will have taught you about hydrocyanic, or prussic, acid. Swallowed, it is agonizing but rapid. Injected into the blood-stream, it is agonizing but even more rapid.

'In Foster's case, suicide seemed plain. No man in his senses allows a murderer to inject him, neatly in a vein, with a hypodermic smelling of bitter almonds from ten feet away. The windows of the dressing-room were locked on the inside. The door was not only bolted on the inside, but had an immensely heavy chest of drawers drawn across it The servants had great difficulty in breaking in.

'We reassured the stricken widow, who had just returned home in prostration and floods of tears. Her grief, delicate creature as she was,' became quite touching.'

Dick Markham tried to hold hard to reason.

'And this widow,' he said,' was - ?'

'It was the woman who called herself Lesley Grant. Yes.'

Again there was a silence.

'We now come to one of those coincidences mistakenly supposed to be more common in fiction than in real life. Five years later, some time in the spring, I happened to be in Liverpool, giving testimony at the Assizes. Hadley was also there, on a completely different matter. We ran into each other at the sessions-house, where we met the local Superintendent of Police. In passing the time of day, the Superintendent said...'

Here Sir Harvey cast up his eyes.

'He said, "Rather queer suicide out Prince's Park way. Man killed himself with prussic add in a hypodermic. Elderly chap, but plenty of money; good health; no troubles. Still, there's no doubt about it. The inquest's just over now." He nodded along the hall. And we saw somebody, in black coming along that dirty hall, amid a group of sympathizers. I'm pretty tough, young man. I'm not easily impressed. But I've never forgotten the look on Hadley's face when he turned round and said, "By God, it's the same woman"’

The words were bald enough. Yet they had an intolerable vividness.

Quietly, as Sir Harvey Gilman musingly ceased to speak, Dr Middlesworth crossed the room, circled round the big writing-table, and sat down in a creaky basket-chair near the windows.

Dick started a little. He had completely forgotten the doctor. Even now Middlesworth did not comment or obtrude into the conversation. He merely crossed his long legs, propping a bony elbow on the arm of the chair and his chin in his hand, and stared with thoughtful eyes at the tan-shaded lamp over the writing-table.

'You're telling me,' snarled Dick Markham, 'or trying to tell me, it was Lesley again ? My Lesley ?'

'Your Lesley. Yes. Slightly second-hand.'

Dick started to get up from his chair, but sat down again.

His host had no notion of being offensive. You could guess that he was merely trying, like a surgeon, to cut out of Dick Markham's body, with a sharp knife, what he considered a malignant growth.

' Then,' he added,' the police did start an investigation.'

'With what result?'

'With the same result as before.' .

'They proved she couldn't have done it ?'

'Excuse me. They proved that they couldn't prove it. As in Foster's case, the wife had been away from home that night...'

'Alibi?'

'No provable alibi, no. But it wasn't necessary.' ' Go on, Sir Harvey.'

'Mr Davies, the Liverpool broker,' continued the other, 'had been found lying across the desk in his so-called

"den". And once more the room was locked up on the inside.'

Dick pressed a hand across his forehead. 'Securely?' he demanded.

'The windows were not only locked, but had wooden-barred shutters as well. The door had two bolts - new, tight-fitting bolts which couldn't be tampered with - one at the top, and one at the bottom. It was a big, florid, old-fashioned house; that room could be sealed up inside like a fortress. Nor was that all.

'Davies, they showed, had begun life as a dispensing chemist. He was well acquainted with the odour of prussic acid. He couldn't have injected the stuff into his own arm by accident, or by somebody's telling him it was a harmless concoction. If this wasn't suicide, it was murder. Yet there had been no struggle and no drugging. Davies was a gross old man, but he was still a big man: he wouldn't have submitted tamely to a needle redolent of hydrocyanic acid. And the room remained locked up on the inside.'

Sir Harvey pursed up his lips, cocking his head on one side the better to admire this.

'The very simplicity of the thing, gentlemen, drove the police mad. They felt certain; yet they couldn't prove.'

'What,' asked Dick, fighting black things in his own mind, 'what did Les ... I mean, what did the wife say to this?'

'She denied it was murder, of course.' 'Yes; but what did she say?’

'She was simply wide-eyed and horrified. She said she couldn't understand it She admitted she was the girl who had married Burton Foster, but said the whole thing was a dreadful coincidence or mistake. What could the police answer to that?'

'Did they do anything else?'

'Investigated her, naturally. What little could be found out' 'Well?'

'They tried to get her on my charge,' said Sir Harvey.

'And they couldn't. No poison could be traced to her. She'd married Davies under a false name; but that's not illegal unless there's a question of bigamy or fraud. There was no such question. Full-stop.' 'And then?'

The pathologist lifted his shoulders, and winced again. His wound, or the emotion caused by it, had begun to madden him.

'The final step in her progress I can tell you very briefly. I didn't see it happen. Neither did Hadley. The pretty widow, now with quite a sizeable fortune, simply disappeared. I more or less forgot her. It was three years ago that a friend of mine living in Paris, to whom I'd once told the lady's story as a classic example, sent me a cutting from a French newspaper.

'The press-cutting reported an unfortunate suicide in the Avenue George V. The victim was M. Martin Belford, a young Englishman, who had a flat there. It appeared that he had just become engaged to be married to a certain Mademoiselle Lesley Somebody - the name escapes me now - whose house was in the Avenue Foch.

'Four days later he dined with this lady at her home, as a sort of celebration of the engagement. He left the house at eleven o'clock that night, apparently in the best of health and spirits. He went home. Next morning he was found dead in his bedroom. Do I need to tell you under what circumstances?'

'The same?'

'Exactly the same. Room locked up, in the comprehensive French style. Intravenous poisoning by hydrocyanic acid.'

'And then?.'

Sir Harvey stared at the past.

' I sent the cutting to Hadley, who got in touch with the French police. Even those realists wouldn't hear of anything but suicide. The newspaper reporters, who are allowed a broader style than they are here, spoke in tones of tragedy and sadness' about mademoiselle."Cette belle anglaise, très chic, très distinguée." They suggested that there had been a lovers' tiff, which mademoiselle didn't like to admit; and in a fit of despair the man had gone home and killed himself.'

In the creaky basket-chair across the room, Dr Middlesworth took out a pipe and blew down the stem.

It gave him something to do; it eased, Dick knew, his acute discomfort. And it was the doctor's presence, representing Six Ashes and normality, which made the whole affair so grotesque. The faces of Mrs Middlesworth, of Mrs Price, of Lady Ashe, of Cynthia Drew, floated in front of his mind.

'Look here,' Dick burst out 'This whole thing is impossible.'

' Of course,' agreed Sir Harvey. 'But it happened.'

' I mean, they must have been suicides after all!'

'Perhaps they were.' The other's tone remained polite. ' Or perhaps not. But, come, now, Mr Markham 1 Let's face it! Whatever your interpretation of the facts, don't you find this situation just a little suspicious ? Just a little unsavoury ?'

Dick was silent for a moment.

' Don't you, Mr Markham ?'

'All right. I do. But I don't agree that the circumstances are always the same. This man in Paris ... what was his name?'

'Belford?'

'Belford, yes. You say she didn't marry him ?'

'Always thinking of the personal, eh?' inquired Sir Harvey, eyeing him with a sort of clinical interest and pleasure. 'Not thinking of death or poison at all. Merely thinking of this woman in some other man's arms.'

This was so true that it made Dick Markham rage. But he tried to put a dignified face on it.

' She didn't marry the fellow,' he persisted. 'Did she stand to gain anything by his death ?'

'No. Not a penny.'

"Then where's your motive?’

'Damn it all, man!' said Sir Harvey. 'Don't you see that by this time the girl can't help herself?'

With considerable awkwardness, holding himself gingerly, he put his hands on the arms of the chair and propelled himself to his feet Dr Middlesworth started to rise in protest, but their host waved him away. He took a few little steps up and down the shabby carpet

' Tou know that, young man. Or at least you profess to know it. The poisoner never does stop. The poisoner can't stop. It becomes a psychic disease, the source of a perverted thrill stronger - more violently exciting I - than, any in psychology. Poison 1 The power over life and death 1 Are you aware of that, or aren't you ?'

'Yes. I'm aware of it'

'Good! Then consider my side of it'

He reached round to touch his back, gingerly.

'I come down here for a summer holiday. I'm tired. I need a rest I ask them as a great favour if they won't keep my identity a secret, because every fool wants to jaw to me about criminal trials I'm already sick of.'

' Lesley -1' Dick was beginning.

'Don't interrupt me. They say they'll consider keeping it a secret, if I consent to playing fortune-teller at their bazaar. Very well. I didn't mind that. In fact, I rather liked it It was an opportunity to read human nature and surprise fools.’

He pointed his finger, compelling silence.

'But what happens? Into my tent walks a murderess whom I haven't seen since that Liverpool affair. And not looking a day older, mind you, than when I first saw her! I improve the opportunity (as who wouldn't?) to put the fear of God into her.

'Whereupon, as quick as winking, she tries to kill me with a rifle. This wasn't her usual suicide-in-the-locked-room technique. A bullet-hole in the wall doesn't give you any such opportunity. No; the lady lost her head. And why? I was beginning to see it even before she fired at my shadow. Because she's arranging a little poisoning-party for someone else. In other words' - he nodded at Dick -'you’

Again there was a silence.

'Now don't tell me it hadn't occurred to you!' said Sir Harvey, with broad scepticism and a fishy shake of his head. 'Don't say the idea never even crossed your mind 1'

'Oh, no. It's crossed my mind all right.'

' Do you believe the story I've been telling you ?'

' I believe the story, yes. But if there's been some mistake ... if it isn't Lesley at all...!'

' Would you credit the evidence of finger-prints ?'

'Yes. I'd be bound to.'

'But, even granting that, you still don't believe she would try to poison you?' 'No, I don't'

'Why not? Do you think she would make an exception in your case?' No reply.

'Do you think she's really fallen in love at long last?' No reply.

' Even supposing she has, do you still want to marry her ?'

Dick got up from his chair. He wanted to lash out with his fist at the air; to shut away from his ears the voice that was crowding him into a corner, making him face facts, cutting away each alternative as he seized at it.

'You can adopt,' pursued the other, 'one of two courses. The first, I see, has already suggested itself to you. You want to have this thing out with her, don't you?'

'Naturally!'

'Very well. There's a telephone out in the hall. Ring her up, ask her if its true, and pray she'll deny it. Of course she will deny it. Your common sense, if you have any left, must tell you that. Which leaves you exactly where you were in the first place.'

'What's the other course?.'

Sir Harvey Gilman paused in his tentative pacing behind the easy-chair. His scrawny neck seemed to emerge, like a turtle's, from the collar of the ancient dressing-gown and pyjamas. He tapped his forefinger on the back of the chair.

'You can set a trap,' he answered simply.'You can discover for yourself what sort of person she is. And I can discover just how the devil she manages to commit these murders.'

CHAPTER 5

DICK sat down again. He had more than a vague idea of the trend this conversation was taking now.

' What sort of trap ?' he demanded.

'To-morrow night,' said Sir Harvey, 'you are having dinner with the lady at her house. Is that correct?'

'Yes.'

'As a sort of celebration of your engagement? Just as Martin Belford had dinner with her a few hours before he died?'

A sensation of physical coldness crept into Dick's stomach. It was not fear: fear was too absurd an emotion to consider in relation to Lesley. But it wouldn't go away.

'Look here, sir! You don't think I'm going to go home afterwards, and lock myself up in a room, and be found dead next morning of prussic-acid poisoning ? ‘

'Yes, young man. I do.'

'You expect me to kill myself?'

'That, at least, will be the effect.'

'But why? Because of something that will be said or done or suggested at this dinner?'

'Very probably. Yes.'

' What, for instance?'

'I don't know,' returned Sir Harvey, spreading out his hands. 'That's why I want to be there and see for myself.'

He was silent for a moment, pondering courses.

'Please observe,' he went on, 'that for the first time we're in a position to see for ourselves. Deductions will get us nowhere; Gideon Fell found that out; we must use our eyes. And there's just one other thing we can use our eyes on. Now tell me something you must have discovered about "Lesley Grant".' Again Sir Harvey pointed his finger. 'She doesn't like jewellery, does she?'

Dick reflected.

‘Yes, that's true.’

‘And doesn't own any? And, furthermore, never keeps large sums of money in die house?' 'No. Never.'

'We now come to something which didn't emerge fully until the death of the third victim. When she married Foster, the American lawyer, somebody installed in their bedroom a small but very efficient wall-safe. When she married Davies, the Liverpool broker, a wall-safe was installed in their house too. In each case she explained it was her husband's idea, to use for business papers. There seemed nothing suspicious about that.

'But,' added Sir Harvey with extraordinary intensity, 'when she was living alone, on her own, in the Avenue Foch in Paris, a similar type of safe turned up there too.'

'Meaning what?'

'She doesn't own jewellery. She doesn't keep money in the house. Then what does she want with a burglar-proof little safe? What does she keep in this safe, which is never examined until after the murder?'

Cloudy guesses, all unformed but all unpleasant, drifted through Dick Markham's mind.

'What do you suggest, sir?'

He tried to keep his face straight, he tried to avoid Sir Harvey's very sharp eye. Yet, as usual, this dry old devil fastened on his thoughts rather than his spoken words.

'There's a safe like that in her house now, young man. Isn't there?'

'Yes, there is. I happen to know, because the maid commented on it.' Dick hesitated.' Lesley only laughed, and said that was where she kept her diary.'

He paused, his mind stumbling over what seemed the ugliest implication of them all.

' Her diary,' he repeated.' But that's -!'

'Will you please face the fact,' said Sir Harvey, 'that this girl isn't normal? That the poisoner has got to confide in someone or something, and that it usually is a diary? All the same, I should expect to find something besides that.

No poison, you recall, was ever traced to her. Not even a hypodermic syringe. It may be that. Or it may be...' ·Well?'

'Something even more unpleasant,' replied Sir Harvey, and his mouth had an odd expression as he stared into vacancy. 'Yes. Something even more unpleasant. Gideon Fell once said -'

There was an interruption.

'I heard at the pub to-day,' suddenly observed Dr Middlesworth, taking the still-empty pipe out of his mouth, 'that Dr Fell is spending the summer at Hastings. He's got a cottage there.'

It was as though a piece of furniture had spoken. Sir Harvey, ruffled, glanced round in some irritation. Middlesworth, continuing to draw at the empty pipe, kept meditative eyes fixed on the lamp.

'Gideon Fell near here?' said Sir Harvey, with a mood changing to one of lively satisfaction. 'Then we must have him in. Because Hadley consulted him after the Davies case, and these locked rooms utterly beat him. Whereas we, you see, shall proceed to unlock the room...'

' With my help ?' Dick asked bitterly.

'Yes. With your help.'

'And what if I won't do it ? ‘

'I think you'll do it Miss Lesley Grant, so-called, thinks I'm in a coma and dying. So I can't have betrayed her. Don't you begin to follow the scheme?'

'Oh, yes. I follow if

'She's being a fool, of course. But she must play with this bright shiny wonderful toy called murder by poison. It's got her. She's obsessed. That's why she took the risk of shooting at me, and trusting to innocent eyes and general gullibility to have it called an accident. All her preparations are made for somebody's death. And she won't be cheated of the thrill.'

Sir Harvey tapped one finger on the edge of the writing-table.

'You, Mr. Markham, will go to this dinner. You will do whatever she tells you, and accept whatever she tells you. I shall be in the next room, listening. With your assistance, we shall find out what she keeps in this famous hiding-place. And, when we do discover how a not-very clever lady has managed to beat the police of two nations ...'

'Excuse me' interrupted Dr Middlesworth again.

Both the others jumped a little.

But Dr Middlesworth remained casual. Getting up from the basket-chair, he walked to the nearer of the two windows.

Both were curtained in some heavy rough flowered material, now faded as well as darkened with age and tobacco-smoke. The curtains had not been quite drawn together on either window, and the nearer window was wide open. Middlesworth threw the curtains apart, so that lamplight streamed out into the front garden. Putting his head out of the window, he glanced left and right. Then he lowered the window, and stared at it for a moment - a long moment - before closing the curtains.

·Well?' demanded Sir Harvey. 'What is it?'

'Nothing,' said the doctor, and returned to his chair.

Sir Harvey studied him. 'You, Doctor,' he observed dryly,' haven't said a great deal so far.'

'No,' agreed Middlesworth.

'Whatdo you think about the whole thing?'

'Well!' said the doctor, in acute discomfort He looked at the pipe, at his time-worn shoes, and then across at Dick. 'This thing is rotten for you. You hate thrashing it out in front of me, in front of an outsider, and I don't blame you.'

"That's all right,' said Dick. He liked the doctor, and he felt a certain reliance on that mild, intelligent judgement ' What do you say ?'

' Frankly, I don't know what to say. You can't go on with a murderess, Dick. That's only common sense. But...'

Middlesworth hesitated and tried a new tack.

'This trap of Sir Harvey's may be worth trying. I think it is. Though the girl must be really insane if she tries any funny business against you only forty-eight hours after this business with the rifle. What's more, it's going to queer the whole pitch if any news leaks out that Sir Harvey isn't badly hurt. Major Price already knows, for instance.'

Brooding, Middlesworth chewed at the stem of the pipe. Then he rose at Dick with a kind of gentle roar of reassurance.

'This whole thing may be a mistake, even though Sir Harvey and all the police in Christendom swear it isn't There's just that possibility. But the point is, Dick... confound it, one way or the other, you've got to know.'

'Yes. I see that'

Dick leaned back in the chair. He felt bruised and deflated; but he was not feeling the worst yet, for the shock had not passed off. This placid sitting-room, with its military prints and its dark oak beams and its Benares brass ornaments on the mantelpiece, seemed as unreal as the history of Lesley. He pressed his hands over his eyes, wondering how the world would look in proper focus. Sir Harvey eyed him paternally.

'Then shall we say - to-morrow evening?'

'All right. I suppose so.'

'You shall have your final instructions,' their host said with meaning, ' to-morrow morning. I have your word, I hope, that you will drop no word or hint of this to our nimble friend?'

'But suppose she is guilty?' said Dick, suddenly taking his hands away from his eyes and almost shouting out the words. 'Suppose by any chance she is guilty, and this trick of yours proves it. What happens then?'

'Frankly, I don't much care.'

' They're not going to arrest her. I warn you of that, even if I have to perjure myself.'

Sir Harvey raised one eyebrow. 'You would prefer to see her continue her merry course of poisoning?'

' I don't give a damn what she's done!'

'Suppose we leave that,' suggested the pathologist, 'until you see how you feel after the experiment? Believe me, you may have a considerable revulsion of feeling by this time to-morrow night. You may find yourself not quite as infatuated as you thought. Have I your word not to upset the apple-cart by saying anything to our friend?'

'Yes. I'll do it. In the meantime..."

'In the meantime,' interposed Dr Middlesworth, 'you're going home, and try to get some sleep. You,' he turned to Sir Harvey, 'are going to lie down. You tell me you've got some luminal with you; and you can take a quarter-grain if that back starts to hurt. I'll look in in the morning to change the dressing. For the moment, will you please sit down?'

Sir Harvey obeyed, lowering himself gingerly into the easy-chair. He also looked a little exhausted, and wiped the sleeve of his dressing-gown across his forehead.

'I shall not sleep,' he complained. 'Whatever I take, I shall not sleep. To find out the game at last... to discover how she can poison husbands and lovers, but nobody eke...!'

Dick Markham, who had got up heavily and was turning towards the door, swung round again.

'Nobody else?' he repeated. 'What exactly do you mean by that?'

' My dear fellow! Why do you think you were chosen ?' ' I still don't understand.'

'Please note,' retorted Sir Harvey, 'that each victim was a man in love with or at least violently infatuated with her. Blind. Uncritical. Unreasoning. I'm theorizing now, I confess. But you surely don't think the choice was accident or coincidence? The victim had to be in that state of mind.'

'Why so?'

' To do what she asked him. Naturally.'

'Haifa moment,' protested a harassed Dr Middlesworth. He had picked up his hat and medicine-case from a side table, and was trying to shove Dick out through the door into the hall; but even he turned round now.

'Let's be sensible about this, Sir Harvey,' he suggested. 'You can't be thinking this girl would say, "Look, here's a hypodermic full of prussic acid. Go home and inject it into your arm, will you, just to oblige me "?'

'Not quite as crudely as that, no.'

'Then how?'

'We propose to find out. But if we have any clue to these sealed-room affairs, my guess is that there's the clue. It would work with an addle-headed man in a duped and bedazed state of mind. It would not work for a second with anybody else,'

' It wouldn't work, for instance, with you or me?'

'Hardly,' replied their host with dry ponderousness. ' Good night, gentlemen. Many thanks!'

And they saw him smile, his eyes now less hypnotic as at a task well accomplished, when they went out into the hall.

Some distance away over the fields to the west, the church clock at Six Ashes was striking eleven. Its notes brushed across the veil of stillness, a tangible stillness, when Dick and Dr Middlesworth left the house. Heavy constraint held them both dumb. Going ahead with an electric torch, Middlesworth indicated his car in the lane.

' Climb in,' he said.' I'll drop you off at your place.'

The same rigidity of silence obsessed them, their eyes straight ahead on the windscreen, during that very brief ride. The wheels of the car jolted in an uneven lane; Middlesworth kept on revving the motor with unnecessary violence, and he drew up outside Dick's cottage with a squeal of brakes. While the engine breathed with a carbonized, rattle, Middlesworth glanced sideways and spoke above it

'All right?'

'Quite all right,' said Dick, opening the car-door.

'You're in for a bad night. Like a sleeping-tablet?'

'No, thanks. I've got plenty of whisky.'

'Don't get drunk.' Middlesworth's hands tightened on the steering-wheel. 'For God's sake don't get drunk.' He hesitated. 'Look here. About Lesley. I was just thinking -'

' Good night, Doctor.'

'Good night, old man.'

The car slid into gear and moved away westwards. While its tail-light disappeared between a curve of the hedgerow on one side, and the low stone boundary wall of Ashe Hall park on the other, Dick Markham stood by the gate in the fence round his own front garden. He stood there motionless for several minutes. A sheer blackness of spirits, a blackness like an extinguisher-cap, descended on him as the noise of that motor-car faded away.

Sir Harvey Gilman, he thought, had read his mind with profound clearness.

As a first consideration, he wasn't thinking about murder at all. He wasn't thinking about the men Lesley was supposed to have killed. He was thinking about the men she professed to have loved before they died.

Scattered words and phrases, sometimes whole sentences, returned to him and jostled through his head with audible vividness, as though he could hear them all at the same time.

'That little girl, as you call her, is forty-one years old.' 'Prostration and floods of tears.' 'Slightly second-hand.' 'A gross old man.' 'Their bedroom.' 'A dreadful coincidence or mistake.' 'Don't you find this situation just a little suspicious ? Just a little unsavoury ?'

Infantile. No doubt! Puerile. No doubt 1

He tried to tell himself so. But this is how a person in love really does feel; and he loved Lesley, and therefore he raged. If those words had been deliberately chosen, each as a tiny knife to nick against the same nerve, they could not have had more of an effect.

He found himself trying to create mental pictures of these men. Burton Foster, the American lawyer, he pictured as a swaggering good-natured sort of chap with a suspicious manner which could be the more easily hoodwinked. It was not difficult to imagine Mr Davies, the 'gross old man', against the background of his 'big, florid, old-fashioned house'.

Martin Belford, the last of the three, remained more shadowy yet for some reason less disliked. Young, it appeared. Probably careless and genial. Belford didn't seem to matter so much.

If you regarded it with half an eye of reason, to stand here disliking dead men, torturing yourself with the images of persons you had never met and now never could meet, was the height of absurdity. What should matter, what did matter, what had seemed to matter most in every criminal record, was the blatant fact of a hypodermic full of poison.

'She can't help herself.' 'A psychic disease.' 'This girl isn't normal.' 'She won't be cheated of the thrill.' These were the words which should have come back to him first; and, with them, a vision of a stealthy flushed face beside a wall-safe.

Facts? Oh, yes.

He had mouthed a lot of fine words about a mistake. But in his heart of hearts Dick Markham didn't believe in a mistake. Scotland Yard didn't make mistakes like that. And yet, even so, it was the first set of Sir Harvey's phrases rather than the second which returned to jar and pierce and inflame him. If only she hadn't told him all those lies about her past life...

But she hadn't told him any lies. She hadn't told him anything at all.

Oh, Christ, why was everything so complicated I Dick struck his hand on the top of the gate-post. The lights of his cottage were shining up there behind him, making the dew gleam on the grass under the windows, and illuminating the crazy-paved path to the front door. Even as he started to walk towards it, he was conscious of a sense of loneliness - intense, unpleasant loneliness - as though something had been cut away from him. It startled him, because he had thought he liked loneliness. And now he was afraid of it. The cottage seemed a hollow shell, booming as he closed the front door behind him. He walked down the passage to the study, opened the door, and stopped short. On the sofa in the study sat Lesley.

CHAPTER 6

SHE had been absentmindedly turning over the pages of a magazine, and looked up quickly as the door opened.

A fat-bowled lamp on the table behind the sofa brought out the smoothness of Lesley's clear skin as she raised her eyes. It shone on the soft brown hair, curling outwards at the shoulders. She had changed her white frock for one of dark green, with winking buttons.'Cette belle anglaise, très chic très distinguée’ Not a line showed in the smooth flesh of the neck. Her wide-open, innocent brown eyes looked frightened.

Neither of them spoke for a moment Perhaps Lesley noticed the expression on his face.

She threw aside the magazine, got up, and ran towards him.

He kissed her - after a fashion.

'Dick,' Lesley said quietly. 'What's wrong?'

'Wrong?'

‘She stood back at arm's length to study him. The candid eyes went over his face searchingly.

'You've - gone away,' she said, and shook him by the arms. 'You're not there any longer. What is it?' Then, quickly:' Is it this fortune-teller? Sir - Sir Harvey Gilman ? How is he?'

'He's as well as can be expected.'

'That means he's going to die, doesn't it?' asked Lesley. Enlightenment seemed to come to her. 'Dick, listen! Is that why you're looking and acting like this?' Then she regarded him with horror. 'You don't think I did that deliberately, do you?'

' No, of course not!'

'So help me,' he swore to himself, 'I will not drop a single hint! No incautious word, no blurted question that would give the show away' The whole thing was full of pitfalls. His own voice sounded hollow and hypocritical and false, at least to his own ears. Patting her arm, he raised his eyes to the wall beside the fireplace; and the first thing he saw was the yellow broadsheet of one of his own plays, called Poisoner's Mistake.) ' Do you ?' persisted Lesley.

'My dear girl! Shoot at him deliberately? You'd never even met the old boy before, had you?'

'Never!' A film of tears came over her eyes.' I -1 didn't so much as hear his name, until afterwards. Somebody told me.'

He attempted a laugh.

'Then there's nothing to worry about, surely? Just forget it. By the way, what had he been saying to you ?'

Dick hadn't meant to ask this. He had sworn an oath to himself; he could have yelled with exasperation when the words slipped out. Some uncontrollable impulse pushed him and seized him and swept him along in spite of himself.

'But I told you!' replied Lesley. 'The usual thing about a happy life, and a little illness, and a letter arriving with some pleasant news - You do believe me ?'

'Of course.'

She moved back towards the sofa, and he followed. He would have liked to sit opposite her, to study her under the light, to get away from the disturbing nearness of her physical presence. But her eyes expected him to sit down beside her, and he did so.

Lesley stared at the carpet. Her hair fell a little forward, hiding the line of her cheek.

' If he does die, Dick, what will they do to me?'

' Nothing at all. It was an accident'

' I mean... will the police come and see me, or anything like that?'

The room was absolutely silent.

Dick stretched out his hand for the cigarette-box on the table behind the sofa. A puke shook in his arm, and he wondered if he could keep the hand from shaking. They seemed poised in an unreal void, of books and pictures and lamplight

"There'll have to be an inquest, I'm afraid.'

'You mean it'll be in the papers? Shall I have to give my name?'

' It's only a formality, Lesley - And why not ?'

'No reason! Only...' She peered round at him; evidently frightened, yet with a smile of wry wistfulness. 'Only, you see, all I know about such things is what you've taught me.'

' What I've taught you ?'

She nodded towards the ranks of books, riddled with their curious criminal histories like worms in apples, and at the garish pictures and playbills which had seemed such excellent fun when you dealt with crime on paper.

'You're awfully interested in such things.' She smiled. 'I hate death, but I think I'm interested too. It is fascinating, in a way. Hundreds of people, all with funny thoughts locked up inside them ...' Then Lesley said a surprising thing. ' I want to be respectable! ‘ she cried out suddenly. ' I do so want to be respectable!'

He essayed a light tone.

'And can't you manage to be respectable?'

'Darling, please don't joke! And then I get involved in this dreadful mess, through no fault of my own.' Again she turned round, with such a yearning of appeal that it destroyed his power to reason. 'But it won't spoil our celebration, will it?'

'You mean - to-morrow night?'

'Yes. Our dinner together.'

'Nothing could keep me away. Will there be any other guests?'

She stared at him.

' You don't want any other guests, do you ? - Dick, what's wrong? Why are you going away from me? In another minute, you know, I shall be getting funny ideas myself.'

' There's nothing wrong! I only ...'

' I want everything to be perfect for us! Everything! And especially, am I being sentimental?) I want everything to be perfect to-morrow. Because I've got something to tell you. And I've got something to show you.'

' Oh ? What have you got to tell me ? ‘

He had taken a cigarette from the box and lighted it And, as he asked this question, the knocker out on the front door began to rap sharply. Lesley uttered an exclamation and sat back.

Dick hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry for the interruption. Probably glad, since the emotional temperature was going up again and for the life of him he could not look away from Lesley's eyes. He could relax, for a moment at least, the fever of concentration on giving nothing away. So he hurried out to the front door, opened it, and blinked in surprise at the visitor who was shifting from one foot to the other on the doormat.

'Er - good evening,' said the visitor. 'Sorry to trouble you at this time of night'

' Not at all, sir. Come in.'

Down by the gate stood a dilapidated Ford, its engine throbbing. The visitor made a sign with his hand to someone inside the Ford, who switched off the motor. Then he entered with an air of some diffidence.

George Converse, Baron Ashe, was the only peer of the realm in Dick's acquaintance. Having frequently met such persons in fiction, however - where they are always haughtily aristocratic, or languidly epigrammatic, or dodderingly futile - Dick found Lord Ashe something of a surprise.

He was a middle-sized wiry man in his early sixties, with iron-grey hair and a pinkish complexion, but a scholarly preoccupied face. You seldom saw him. He was supposed to be compiling an interminable history of his family. His clothes had always a vaguely shabby look, not surprising when you considered his taxes and his chronic state of being hard up. But he could be good company when he chose, or when he did not seem to run down like a clock.

And, as he followed Dick down the passage, Dick was thinking of certain words which Cynthia Drew had used in that very cottage earlier this evening. 'Why does Lord Ashe always look so oddly at poor Lesley, on the few occasions when he has seen her?'

For Lord Ashe stopped abruptly on the threshold of the study, and he was looking oddly at Lesley now. Lesley jumped to her feet,

'H'm, yes,' muttered the visitor. 'Yes, yes, yes!' Then he roused himself, with a courteous bow and smile. 'Miss Grant, isn't it? I - er - thought...' Evidently at a loss, he turned to Dick.' My dear boy, there's the very devil to pay.'

'About what ?' cried Lesley.

'It's perfectly all right, Miss Grant!' Lord Ashe assured her soothingly. 'On my word of honour, there is nothing to worry about But I am rather glad to find you. I - er -didn't expect to find you here.'

'I -1 only dropped in!'

'Yes, yes. Of course.' Again he turned to Dick. 'I've just been down to -' He nodded towards the other cottage. 'I thought it was my duty to go.' Lord Ashe did not seem to relish this duty. 'But the place is all dark, and nobody answered when I knocked.'

·That's all right Sir Harvey's settled in for the night’

Lord Ashe looked surprised.

' But isn't the doctor there ? Or a trained nurse ?'

' No. Dr Middlesworth didn't think it was necessary.'

'But, my dear boy! Is that wise? Still, I suppose Middlesworth knows his business. How is the patient? I -er - I suppose everybody's been bothering you with that question all evening, but I felt I ought to come in and ask.'

. 'The patient,' said Dick, 'is as well as can be expected. What's this about there being the devil to pay?' 'Somebody's stolen a rifle,' answered Lord Ashe. There was a silence.

An evil silence, suggesting a design completed. Taking a spectacle-case from the pocket of his loose tweed coat, Lord Ashe extracted a rimless pince-nez and fitted the pince-nez into place on his nose.

' Please tell me, Miss - er - Grant. After the regrettable accident this afternoon, when the rifle went off by accident, do you happen to remember what you did with that rifle?'

Lesley regarded him wide-eyed.

' I gave it back to Major Price. Anyone can tell you that'

'Yes. Exactly. So everyone agrees. But you don't by any chance recall what happened to the rifle after you gave it to Major Price?'

Lesley shook her head and shivered.

'Major Price,' she replied, 'was collecting up the guns when the storm broke. He had them all in a line on the counter of the shooting-range. After that ghastly thing happened, I -I just threw the rifle at him. I think he put it with the others on the counter. But I'm not sure. I was horribly upset. I asked Dick here to take me home.'

'H'm, yes. Do you happen to remember, my boy?'

Dick tried to focus his mind on that scene of rain and confusion and blowing tents, which seemed so long ago as to be part of another age.

'Yes, that's what happened,' he agreed. 'When Sir Harvey collapsed, I stuck my head out of the tent and called to Major Price and Dr Middlesworth.'

'And then?'

'Bill Earnshaw - that's the bank-manager, you know,' Dick explained, with a hazy notion that Lord Ashe lived so remote from village-life as not to recognize this name -'Bill Earnshaw had just come up. Major Price asked Bill to mind the rifles while the major and Dr Middlesworth carried Sir Harvey to the doctor's car. That's all I can tell you.'

' Exactly,' said Lord Ashe.

'Then what's wrong, sir?' 'Major Price, you see, says that nobody abstracted a rifle while he was there. Mr Earnshaw declares that nobody abstracted a rifle while he was there. Yet the rifle is gone.'

Lesley hesitated.' It wasn't the same rifle as I... ?' 'Yes.'

On the third finger of Lord Ashe's left hand was a small seal ring, dullish and unobtrusive. Dick noticed it as the other lifted a hand to his pince-nez. So did Lesley, who seemed to have grown more flustered than ever since their visitor's entrance. Lord Ashe now played his celebrated trick of running down and trailing off like a gramophone.

' Er - I daresay it's of no importance,' he said at length. The needle had caught its groove; the record revolved again. 'But Major Price and Mr Earnshaw were rather heated about it. I believe the major played some stupid joke on Mr Earnshaw at the shooting-range this afternoon, and suspected Mr Earnshaw of trying - as they say - to get level.

'But it's extraordinary. Most extraordinary! Especially when you consider all the rumours that are going about.'

'What rumours?' asked Lesley. She clenched her hands. ' Please tell me! Are they saying things about me ?'

'My dear young lady! Good heavens! No! But I have even heard, for instance, that Sir Harvey Gilman is not seriously hurt. Let us hope so. My grand-uncle Stephen, in the South African War, received a very dangerous bullet-wound and yet survived. He was alive then, of course. That is to say, the incident occurred during his lifetime. My dear boy, I shall not intrude on you any longer. Er - have you transportation, Miss Grant?'

' Transportation ?'

'To go home,' explained Lord Ashe.

'No. I - I walked.'

'Then may I offer you a lift? I have the Ford outside, and Perkins is a careful driver.'

'Thank you, Lord Ashe. I suppose I'd better go.'

Her eyes begged Dick Markham to suggest an excuse for her to stay and talk a little longer. There was almost a hysteria in her manner, silently asking for that word. And he would not give the word.

If she stayed for five minutes longer, he knew, he would blurt out the whole story. Under the sanity and placidness of Lord Ashe's presence, values were shifting and sinking back to normal. For a second he had forgotten, or nearly forgotten, the situation as it existed. Then, with a shock, it was back again. He realized very clearly that he loved

Lesley, and would continue to love her. He was fed up; he couldn't stand any more.

So they left him, and it tore at his heart to watch Lesley's face. They were no sooner outside than he wanted to call out,' Come back! This isn't true 1 Let me tell you about it!'

But the Ford moved away.

His cigarette had gone out. He threw it away into the damp grass of the front garden, standing at the door under the high incurious stars. Then he turned back into the cottage.

He went into the little dining-room, from which he fetched a glass, a syphon, and a bottle of whisky. He took these into the study, and put them down on the typewriter-desk. But his head swam inexplicably. He was tired, dizzily tired, so that it seemed an exertion out of all proportion to remove a metal, bottle-cap or press the handle of a soda-syphon.

So he went over and lay down on his back on the sofa.

'I'll just close my eyes for a moment,' he said. 'The lights being on will keep me awake. Anyway, I don't want to sleep. I'll just close my eyes for a moment. Then I'll get up and pour myself a drink.'

The calm lamplight lay on his eyes. The diamond-paned windows, looking out over the side-garden to the east, had been set open like little doors; their catches rattled to a night-wind that made a frothing of leaves outside. Presently the distant church-clock struck midnight, but he did not hear it.

If anybody had peered in through the window - and it is now certain that, in the thin dwindling hours, a certain face did peer in - this person would have seen a light-haired young man, with a strong jaw but far too much imaginative development in the forehead, lying on a rucked-up sofa in grey flannels and an untidy sports-coat, and muttering white-faced in his sleep.

His dreams were horrible. He does not now remember what they were: perhaps because of the sequel. To Dick Markham those hours, when he did not 'go' to sleep but was knocked out by it, remain only as a blank black severance from the real world until something pierced through it. Something clamoured and called with an intensity of shrillness...

Dick started to half-wakefulness, rolled, and saved himself from tumbling off to the floor. He had it now. The telephone was ringing.

Dazed-eyed, cramped about the back and waist, he struggled to sit upright. His first thought was that he had wormed out of a very unpleasant dream, something about Lesley Grant poisoning husbands; but, thank God, that was all over now. His next thought was surprise to find himself here on the sofa; and the lights burning; and the eastern windows tinged a pinkish-blue colour - ethereal, making the glass luminous - from the rising sun.

All this time the telephone kept ringing. He got up, on cramped leg-muscles, and stumbled across to the typewriter-desk. Though he was still only half awake when he picked up the receiver, the whispering voice which breathed out of the phone recalled him with its urgency.

'Colonel Pope's cottage,' said that thin voice.'Come at once. If you don't come at once, you'll be too late’

The line went dead.

And Dick Markham remembered everything.

CHAPTER 7

'WHO'S speaking?' he said. 'Who's...?'

But there was no response. It had been a mere whisper of a voice, unidentifiable.

Putting down the receiver, Dick pressed his hands against his eyes and shook his head violently to clear it. The ghostly light outside the windows, its bluish tinge fading, washed this room with indeterminate colour. His wrist-watch had stopped, but the time must be past five o'clock.

There was not even time to think, now. He hurried out of the cottage, feeling grimy and unshaven as he emerged into the hush and dimness of morning, and ran eastwards along the lane as hard as he could run.

All sounds acquired a new sharpness in this dead world. The twitter of a bird, a rustle in the grass, the thud of his own running footfalls in a dirt lane, rose as clearly to the ear as the clean freshness of dew rose to the nostrils. He had passed the untenanted house, and was just within sight of Sir Harvey Gilman's cottage beyond, when he saw that something was happening there.

A light went on in the sitting-room.

Ahead of him it was still dusky. On his left, parallel with the lane, began the thick coppice of birches which pressed up along the stone boundary wall. On his right, some hundred odd yards ahead, stood the cottage. There was no obstruction in front of it: he could dimly see the whitewashed stone, and the black beams, and the low-pitched shingled roof, set back from the road in its front garden.

But beside and beyond it, also eastwards and parallel with the lane, stretched the thick orchard of fruit-trees which formed a kind of tunnel with the birch-copse opposite. That tunnel was the narrow lane. Through it poured narrowly the pinkish light, now tinged with watery yellow, of the rising sun.

It penetrated only there, leaving the sides of the road in shadow. Glints of it were caught and held in thick foliage. But it paled the glow of thin electric light which had been switched on inside two windows - ground-floor windows, now uncurtained - of Sir Harvey Gilman's cottage.

The sitting-room, not a doubt of it

The sitting-room, where he had been talking to the old boy last night, with its windows facing the lane.

Dick Markham stopped short, his heart thudding and the queasiness of an empty stomach taking hold at early morning.

He did not quite know he was running so hard, or what he expected to find. Apparently Sir Harvey was up early, since he had already drawn back the curtains and switched on the light. Dick walked forward slowly in that eerie dusk, facing the tunnel of sunlight which fell at his feet, and repeated to himself that he did not know. But, when he was less than thirty yards from the cottage, at last he knew.

A slight rasping noise, as of metal against stone, made him turn his eyes to the left, along the boundary wall of Ashe Hall Park.

Somebody, hidden from sight behind that low stone wall, was running out a rifle. Somebody was steadying the barrel of the rifle on top of the wall; somebody was aiming, with carefully drawn sights, at one of the lighted windows in the cottage opposite.

' Hey!’ yelled Dick Markham.

But it went unheard when somebody fired a shot.

The report of the rifle cracked out with inhuman loudness, sending birds whirring up from the trees. Dick's long eyesight caught the star of the bullet-hole in window-glass. Then the rifle vanished. Somebody was running, thrashing, perhaps even laughing, in the birch-coppice among the dense twilight trees. Echoes settled back to disturbed chirpings; the marksman had gone.

For perhaps ten seconds Dick stood there motionless.

He did not run now, since he believed with horrible certainty that he knew what had happened. To chase any marksman in that dense coppice - even if you wanted to chase the marksman - would be hopeless.

The edge of the sun showed itself, a tip of fiery white-gold behind the dark screen of trees, with only the little lane between. The light, shone straight along that lane into Dick's eyes. Some third person, who must also have heard the shot, appeared in the lane from the easterly direction.

Though the sunlight was still not bright, that figure remained for a few moments a silhouette, hurrying towards Dick.

·What is it? Who's there?' the figure called. He recognized the voice of Cynthia Drew, and he ran forward even as she ran to meet him. They met just outside the front garden of Sir Harvey's cottage. Cynthia, wearing the same pinkish-coloured jumper and brown skirt she had worn the night before, stopped short and stared at him in astonishment.

'Dick! What is it?'

' 'It's trouble, I'm afraid.'

'But what on earth are you doing here?'

'If it comes to that, Cynthia, what are you doing here?'

She made a gesture. 'I couldn't sleep. I went for a walk.' Cynthia, slim yet very sturdy, should have been the last girl in the world to be called fanciful or imaginative. But she saw his expression, and her hands moved up and pressed against her breast. The sun behind her turned the edges of her hair to clear gold. 'Dick! Was what we heard...?'

'Yes. I think so.'

Until this moment, until he had come fully in front of the cottage, he would not turn fully round to the right and look at it. But he did so now, seeing what he expected to see.

Set some thirty feet back from the road in an unkempt front garden, the cottage had a longish frontage. But it was a little low doll's house of a place, with little dormer windows projecting from the slope of the dark-shingled roof to form an upper floor. Its whitewashed stone front and crooked black beams lay shadowed by the fruit-orchard eastwards. On the ground floor, the two illuminated windows - just to the left of the front door - showed what was inside.

Last night, Dick remembered, Sir Harvey Gilman had been sitting in an easy-chair beside the big writing-table in the middle of the room. Now the easy-chair had been moved round to face the table, as though someone were sitting there to write. Someone was sitting there; even the dwarfed view through the window showed it to be Sir Harvey; but he was not writing.

The hanging lamp in its tan-coloured shade shed light down across the pathologist's bald head. His chin was sunk forward on his chest. His arms lay quietly along the arms of the chair. You might have thought him dozing, a figure of peace, if you bad not noticed the light on the whitish-edged, clean-drilled bullet-hole through window-glass -and seen that this bullet-hole was just in line with the bald skull.

Dick felt a physical sickness rising in his throat. But he conquered this. Cynthia, very steady and composed, followed the direction of his glance; her teeth fastened in her lower lip.

'That's the second time,' Dick said. 'Yesterday I saw the bullet-hole jump up in the wall of the tent. To-day I saw it jump up in the window. But it doesn't get any easier. I think .. .Just a minute!'

He swung round to look at the stone boundary wall, opposite those windows, with the screen of birch-trees rising dark above it. In three strides he crossed the strip of coarse grass separating the wall from the lane, and peered into the semi-gloom beyond the wall. Something had been thrown down under the trees there, left behind when the marksman fled.

Vaulting over the wall, completely disregarding any question of fingerprints, Dick picked up this object It was a .22 calibre slide-action repeating rifle: a Winchester 61. He could not doubt it was the same one he expected to find.

After Lesley Grant had given back this rifle to Major Price yesterday afternoon, the rifle had been stolen from the shooting-gallery. That was what Lord Ashe had said.

' Don't!' cried Cynthia Drew.

'Don't what?'

'Don't look like that!'

But Dick's expression was not consternation. It was one of crazy triumph. For, whoever might have stolen that rifle, it could not possibly have been Lesley Grant

He, Dick Markham, had been with her all the time after the 'accident'; he had taken her home; he had remained with her for several hours. And she had not taken the rifle. Not only was he prepared to swear to this: he knew it to be the simple truth.

Dropping the rifle on the ground again, Dick vaulted back over the wall. Lesley, at least, couldn't have donethis’ He hardly saw or heard Cynthia, who was saying something he did not afterwards remember. Instead he set off at a run towards Sir Harvey's cottage.

No fence enclosed the front garden. Unkempt grass dragged at your shoes like wires as you crossed it. It was going to be a hot day, too; the earth breathed up moist warmth, dissolving dew-cobwebs; a wasp circled up out of the fruit-orchard; the front of the cottage itself exhaled an odour of old wood and stone. Dick approached the window with the bullet-hole - it was the right-hand one as you faced the house - and flattened his face against the grimy glass.

Then, cupping his hands round his eyes, he stared again.

Under dusty lamplight, contrasting with broadening day, the figure of the little pathologist sat motionless in front of the big table. You saw his face in profile, its chin-muscles sagging and the eyes partly open. That he was looking at a dead man Dick Markham did not doubt. But there was something wrong here, something very wrong ...

'Dick,' breathed Cynthia's voice at his elbow. ' That bullet didn't hit him.'

It was true.

In the back wall of the room, facing them as they looked through the window, was the brick fireplace with its overmantel ornaments of Benares brass. Above this hung a big coloured print depicting some phase of the battle of Waterloo. The rifle-bullet had drilled through the window, passed close to the top of Sir Harvey's head, and shattered the lower edge of the picture - which now hung askew -before burying itself in the wall. But it had not touched him.

There had been urgency in Cynthia's voice, and bewilderment, and something like relief. Dick turned to stare at her. 'Then what the devil's the matter with the fellow?' 'I don't know.'

' Sir Harvey!' yelled Dick, putting his mouth close against the window.' Sir Harvey Gilman!'

There was no reply.

Dick glanced from one window to the other. He inspected the first, then the second. Since the cottage was built rather low against the ground, the lower sills of the windows were not much above the level of his waist. They were ordinary sash-windows, fastening with metal catches on the inside. By putting one knee on the outer sill, and hauling himself up with a hand on the frame at each side, Dick was able to see through the glass that both windows were locked on the inside.

A very ugly notion began to creep through his mind now.

'Wait here a minute,' he said to Cynthia.

Hurrying to the front door, he found it unlocked and only partly on the latch above two stone steps. He threw it open, and found himself in the small modern-looking hall he remembered from last night.

On his left, he also remembered, was the door leading into the sitting-room. If he opened this door now, it would bring him into the sitting-room at a point behind the back of the motionless figure seated at the table. But he was not able to open this door, though he wrenched with violent hands at the knob. It was fastened on the inside.

He tore out into the front garden again, where Cynthia was still staring through the window.

'You know,' she declared, 'there's something awfully queer about him. His face seems a funny colour. Bluish? Or is that the effect of the light? And there's something about his mouth: is it froth? And ... Dick! what on earth are you doing?'

With a hazy idea that the bullet-hole might be required as evidence, Dick did not touch that right-hand window. Instead he went to the other window. From the unkempt grass of the garden he picked up half a brick, and flung it at the window with a crash that brought glass rattling down in shards.

From that stuffy room, very distinct in morning air, stirred a breath which drifted out of the window with a small but perceptible odour of bitter almonds. It came at their faces in a wave. Cynthia, beside him, put a hand on his arm.

'It - it smells like finger-nail varnish,' she said. 'What is it?'

'Prussic acid.'

Reaching inside the shattered window, Dick put up his hand, unlocked the catch of the window, and pushed it up. Then he hauled himself up across the sill and dropped into the room amid crunching glass.

The bitter-almonds odour was more distinct now. It required some effort to go close and touch that body, but Dick did it. The man he knew as Sir Harvey Gilman had been dead for only a few minutes, since the body was still almost at blood-heat. It was still dressed in pyjamas and dressing-gown; the velour-covered easy-chair supported it upright except for the lolling head, and gave an appearance of ease to the arms along the arms of the chair. But the cyanosis and froth of prussic-acid poisoning, the half-open eye, showed with hideous plainness when you went closer.

Dick glanced across at the door leading to the hall.

Frantically he went over and inspected it. The key was turned in the lock, and a small tight-fitting bolt was solidly pushed fast on the inside.

Of the two windows which constituted the only other entrance, one window now had its lower glass shattered, and the other bore a bullet-stamp a few inches below the joining of the sashes. But there could be no doubt - Dick himself could swear, however much the police might disbelieve him - that both windows had been locked on the inside too.

'So,' Dick remarked aloud, 'he said it couldn't possibly happen to him?'

It was only then that he noticed something else.

The light of the hanging lamp caught a faint gleam near the floor beside the easy-chair: a smallish hypodermic syringe, with slender glass barrel and nickelled plunger. It had dropped beside the chair, sticking point upwards in the carpet, as though it had fallen there from the dead man's relaxing fingers. It set the seal of finality on this wicked scene, while the odour of hydrocyanic acid seemed to grow even more overpowering in a stuffy room, and daylight broadened fully outside the windows. Another suicide.

CHAPTER 8

DICK was still standing by the door, trying to arrange thoughts that would not cohere, when he heard a scraping noise at the window. Cynthia with supple agility had swung herself through, and landed on her feet lightly, like a cat, amid broken glass.

Her face was composed but concerned - concerned, you would have said, more for Dick Markham than for the shrivelled figure in the chair.

' This is dreadful!' she said, and then, as though conscious of the weakness of these words, added, 'Simply dreadful!' in a flat positive tone before going on: 'You said prussic acid, Dick. Prussic acid's a poison; isn't it?'

'Yes. Very much so.'

Cynthia cast a glance of repulsion at the chair.

'But what on earth happened to the poor man?'

'Come here,' requested Dick. 'Er - are you all. right?'

'Oh, dear, yes. Perfectly all right.’ It would take more than this to upset Cynthia. She went on with vehemence: 'But it is horrible and ghastly and everything else! You mean someone gave him some poison?'

'No. Look here!'

As she circled round the writing-table, he pointed to the hypodermic needle stuck point upright in the floor. Then - which required more steeling of the nerves - he leaned across the body and lifted the left arm from the elbow. Its loose dressing-gown and pyjama sleeves fell away, exposing a thin hickory-like arm streaked with blue congested veins. The injection with the hypodermic had been clumsily made: you could see the tiny fleck of dried blood against the forearm.

'Dick! Wait! Ought you to be doing that?' ‘Doing what?'

'Breaking windows, and touching things, and all the rest of it? In those books you've loaned me ... heaven knows some of them are difficult to understand; nasty people!... but they always say you must leave everything as it is. Isn't that right ?'

'Oh, yes,' he said grimly. 'I'm going to catch the devil for doing this. But we've got to know!'

The blue eyes studied him.

'Dick Markham, you look absolutely frightful. Didn't you go to bed at all last night ?' 'Never mind that now!'

'But I do mind it. You never get any proper rest, especially when you're working. And there's something on your mind that's worrying you. I could tell that last night.'

' Cynthia, will you please look at this ?'

'I am looking at it,' answered Cynthia, though she looked away instead, and clenched her hands.

"This is suicide,' he explained, impressing it on her by fashioning the words with careful violence. 'He took a hypodermic full of hydrocyanic acid - there it is! - and injected it into his left arm. You yourself can testify,' he swept his arm round, 'that this room is locked up on the inside? So that proves (don't you see) that nobody tried to kill him?'

'But, Dick! Somebody did try to kill him! Somebody shot at him with a rifle!'

'The bullet didn't hit him, did it?'

'No,' returned Cynthia, 'but that jolly well wasn't for want of trying!' Her breast rose and fell. She added: 'Is it about Lesley?'

Dick swung round.

'Is what about Lesley?'

'This thing that's worrying you,' said Cynthia with simple feminine directness. ' Why should you think it's about Lesley ?' 'What else could it be?' inquired Cynthia. She did not stop to explain the logic of this remark, but went on: 'That horrid little man,' and .she pointed to the figure in the chair, 'has been upsetting everything and everybody at Six Ashes. First there was the accident with the rifle yesterday afternoon. Of course it was an accident' - briefly, the blue eyes seemed to ponder - 'but it does seem queer that somebody deliberately tried to shoot him this morning. And, on top of that, you say he poisoned himself with what's-its-name acid'

'There's your evidence, Cynthia.'

She spoke abruptly. 'Dick, it just isn't good enough.'

'How do you mean, isn't good enough?'

' I don't know I That's just the point. But - did you hear about the row between Major Price and Mr Earnshaw, late last night? Over somebody stealing the rifle?'

'Yes. Lord Ashe told me.'

Again Cynthia pointed to the figure in the chair.

'Dick, what did he tell you about Lesley?'

'Nothing! Why in God's name do you think he said anything about Lesley?'

'He was reading things in the crystal about everybody else. I bet he read something about Lesley, and that's what's worrying you.'

Hitherto Dick had always considered Cynthia as a good fellow but not exactly as a model of intelligence. To avert this danger-point now, he laughed until it seemed to him that the military prints round the walls rattled in their frames.

'If there is anything,' insisted Cynthia, with a sort of coaxing motherliness, 'tell me. Do tell me!'

'Look here! You don't think Lesley had anything to do with this?'

'But why ever should I think that?' asked Cynthia, with her eye on a corner of the carpet. Faint colour tinged her face. 'Only ... it's all so queer! Hadn't we better report this to the police? Or do something about it?'

'Yes. I suppose so. What time is it?'

Cynthia consulted a wrist watch.

'Twenty minutes past five. Why?'

Dick walked round, to the front of the desk. The motionless figure,, one eye partly open, surveyed him with so sardonically lifelike an expression that this dead man might have been laughing in hell.

'I've got to phone Bert Miller, of course.'

Miller was the local constable, and it should take him no great time to get here. Though Gallows Lane technically ended in open fields a few hundred yards eastwards - a gallows had stood there in the eighteenth century; Dick's stomach turned over at the thought - still there was a path over the fields to Goblin Wood. Bert Miller lived near there.

'But the person I must get on to,' he insisted, 'is Dr Middlesworth.' ‘Why Dr Middlesworth?'

'Because he's heard about the other cases. And we've got to decide -' ‘What other cases, Dick?'

As near a slip, as near a betrayal, as made no difference! Dick pulled himself together.

·I mean, criminal cases in general!'

'But you said this wasn't a criminal case,' pointed out Cynthia, who was watching him fixedly and seemed to be breathing faster. 'You said he killed himself. Why do you say something different now ?'

That he did not answer this question was due less to being concerned than to the fact that his attention was caught by something else, which added a touch of the grotesque to the dead man's expression. Again he went forward to inspect the body, this time from the opposite side.

On the carpet at the side of the chair, this time as though fallen from die victim's left hand, lay a spilled box of drawing-pins.

A little cardboard box, with drawing-pins or thumbtacks spilled on the carpet. Hypodermic syringe near the right hand, drawing-pins near the left It made the wits whirl even more, with its neat arrangement. Dick picked up one of the drawing-pins, pressing its sharp point against his thumb and noting in an idle sort of way that it would have made much the same sort of puncture in a human arm as (say) a clumsily administered hypodermic ...

'Dick!'cried Cynthia.

He scrambled hastily up off his knees.

'Telephone,' he said, to forestall the torrent of questions he saw in her eyes. 'Excuse me.'

The telephone, he remembered, was out in the hall. He unlocked and unbolted the door, observing both the weight of the lock and the small tight-fitting closeness of the bolt.

Talking to Middlesworth, he thought, was going to be infernally difficult with Cynthia in the next room. The ringing-tone buzzed interminably, before it was answered by the unmistakable bedside voice of a woman just roused from sleep.

'Sorry to trouble you at this hour, Mrs Middlesworth! But -’

'The doctor's not in,' said the voice, controlling itself. 'He's up at the Hall.' 'At the Hall?'

'At Ashe Hall. One of the maids was taken badly in the night, and Lady Ashe was worried. Isn't that Mr Markham speaking?'

'Yes, Mrs Middlesworth.'

' Can I take a message, Mr Markham ? Are you ill?'

'No, no! Nothing like that! But it's rather urgent'

' Indeed. I am sorry he's not here,' murmured the voice, with restrained suspicious pleasantness. A G.P.'s wife learns how to manage this.' If it's urgent you could ring him there. Or walk across the park and see him. Good-bye.'

Walk across the park and see him.

That would be better yet, Dick decided. If he cut through the coppice and'up over South Field, he could reach Ashe Hall in two minutes. He hurried back to the sitting-room, where he found Cynthia biting uncertainly at her pink under-lip. He took her hands, though she seemed reluctant to extend them, and pressed them firmly.

'Listen, Cynthia. I've got to go up to the Hall; Middlesworth is there now. I don't mean to be gone longer than ten minutes. In the meantime, will you ring Bert Miller and then stand guard? Just-tell Bert that Sir Harvey Gilman has committed suicide, and that he needn't hurry in getting here.'

'But-!'

'The old boy did commit suicide, you know.' 'Are you going to trust me, Dick? Tell me about it later, I mean?' 'Yes, Cynthia. I will.'

It was good to have somebody he could trust, to have Cynthia's straightforwardness and practicality in the mists of nightmare. He pressed her hands again, though she would not look at him. Afterwards - when he left the house - crossed the lane, made his way through the dark birch-coppice and up over the green slope of South Field to Ashe Hall - the image of a very different girl went with him.

Let's face the ugly fact, now. If Lesley had done this ...

'But surely,' argued his common sense, 'Lesley wouldn't have killed Sir Harvey Gilman just to keep him from betraying her identity to the people of Six Ashes?'

'Why not?' inquired a horned and devilish doubt.

'Because,' said common sense, 'it will only bring in the police, and betray her identity in any case.'

'Not necessarily,' returned the doubt, 'if it is handled by the local authorities and treated as a featureless suicide.'

'But Sir Harvey Gilman fa a well-known figure,' common sense insisted. 'This will be in the papers. It will probably meet the attention of someone at Scotland Yard.'

The doubt took on a kind of evil laughter.

'You yourself,' it said, 'are a rather well-known young playwright. Your suicide would be in the papers. Yet Sir Harvey himself never doubted that this angel-faced lady might well be arranging to poison you!'

Here the doubt fastened deeply: it took on claws, tight-holding, as it grew in Dick Markham's imagination.

'Sir Harvey,' it said, 'obviously hated Lesley Grant. He was pursuing her if any man ever pursued her. He nearly betrayed her yesterday afternoon, when she did try to shoot him. Her attitude towards him would hardly have been one of sweetness and light. If a poisoner's character does hide in that pretty body, she would have been just in the mood to strike back at him - with an undetectable method of poisoning.'

But that was where you came up with a bump against the final bewilderment. Sir Harvey Gilman certainly hadn't killed himself; and, the one man of all men to be on his guard, he couldn't have been gulled by any trick into injecting a hypodermic into his own arm. This you could swear to. Yet, on the other hand, it was absolutely impossible for anybody to have murdered him.

Dick walked blindly up the slopes of South Field.

Ahead of him now he could see the south wing of Ashe Hall, its ancient bricks showing dark in the polished morning air. Though no smoke went up yet from its kitchen chimneys, all the visible doors stood wide open.

And the first person Dick saw was Lord Ashe, coming round the side of the house - in his usual corduroys and ancient coat, wearing gardening gloves and with a pair of rose-tree shears in his right hand. He stopped short as he caught sight of Dick, waiting for him to come up.

'Er - good morning,' said Lord Ashe in a puzzled tone.

'Good morning, sir. You're up early.'

' I'm always up at this time,' said Lord Ashe.

Dick's gaze strayed along the south wing of the Hall.

'Don't you ever lock any doors or windows here, sir?'

Lord Ashe laughed.

'My dear boy,' he answered, making a slight gesture with the shears and pressing the pince-nez more firmly on his nose, 'there's nothing to steal. The pictures are all copies. My elder brother Frank presented the family jewels to a celebrated - er - lady of easy virtue years ago. There's the plate, of course, what there is left of it; but you'd want a lorry to take that away.'

Here he pondered, setting his pince-nez more firmly and looking curiously at his companion.

'If you'll excuse my mentioning it, Mr Markham, you have rather a wild and tousled look. Is anything wrong?'

Dick let him have it straight. He wanted the reaction of this solid man, with his soft voice and his ruddy complexion and his iron-grey hair, to a situation that would presently have Sue Ashes by the ears.

'Sir Harvey Gilman has committed suicide.'

Lord Ashe stared back at him.

'Good God!'

'Exactly!'

'But this' - Lord Ashe looked round for a place to put down the shears, and, finding none, kept them in his hands, ' - this is fantastic!'

‘I know.'

'Come to think of it,' muttered Lord Ashe, 'I did fancy I heard a shot in the middle of the night. Or was it later? Was it -?' He stared at memory.

'Sir Harvey didn't shoot himself. He took a hypodermic, " apparently containing prussic acid, and injected it into his arm. Cynthia Drew and I found him not half an hour ago.'

'Prussic acid,' repeated Lord Ashe. 'We used to use a derivative of that for fruit-tree spray. I dare say Sir Harvey would have access to some. But why, my dear boy? Why?'

'We don't know.'

'He seemed in the best of health and spirits, except for that unfortunate acci -' Lord Ashe rubbed his forehead with the hand that held the shears, endangering pince-nez and eyes. 'Could he have been depressed, or anything of that sort? I've seldom seen a man with more - what shall I say? - zest for life. He reminded me of a chap who was once here selling Bibles. And ... er ... may I ask why you come here?'

' I've got to see Dr Middlesworth. His wife said he was at the Hall.'

'Oh. Yes. Middlesworth was here. Cicely, that's one of the maids, had a bad turn in the night. Appendicitis. Middlesworth found it wasn't necessary to operate. He thinks he can do what they call "freeze it". But he's not here now. He left some time ago. Said he had to run over to Hastings.'

It was Dick's turn to stare.

'To Hastings? At half-past five in the morning? Why?' Lord Ashe looked puzzled.

' I can't say, my dear fellow. Middlesworth was rather mysterious about it.'

The sweet-scented grass, the glare of green lawns in broadening sunlight, caused a feeling of light-hcadedness. Dick was badly prepared for the next bombshell. Suddenly, with an odd sensation of imminent danger, he found Lord Ashe studying him with an intent expression, a close long look, which had in it a knife-edge of shrewdness before the other's face smoothed itself out

'What's this I hear,' Lord Ashe asked .in his soft voice, 'about Lesley Grant being a murderess?'

CHAPTER g

Miss LESLEY GRANT - to give her that name - awoke at a quarter past eight in the morning.

Her house, the old Farnham house towards the southern end of the High Street at Six Ashes, faced east towards the front grounds of Ashe Hall. It was pleasant and tree-shaded, with a deep front garden. From the upstairs bedroom windows you could look diagonally left across the High Street towards the heraldic griffin and ash-tree carved on the stone pillars of the entrance-gates. And, brilliant sunshine was pouring through these windows when Lesley awoke.

For a moment she lay as still as death, staring at the ceiling with wide-open eyes. A clock ticked on the bedside table, the only noise there.

Lesley's eyes moved sideways, apparently noting the time, before quickly resinning their stare at the ceiling.

She did not look as though she had slept well; or, in fact, slept very long. There were faint shadows under the naive-looking brown eyes, the brown hair seemed tumbled on the pillow, and there was a curious expression round her mouth. Her bare arms, outside the coverlet, were stretched out straight on either side. For minutes she lay motionless, listening to the tick of the clock, while her eyes now roved.

It was a comfortable room she saw, furnished with the same shrinking fastidiousness of good taste. It contained only one picture: a framed black-and-white drawing, of somewhat grotesque design, hanging between the two front windows. When her gaze encountered this, Lesley's teeth fastened in her lower lip.

' It's silly!' she said aloud.

Anybody who saw her then - fortunately or unfortunately, nobody did see her - would have been a little disquieted by the stealth of her movements. Slipping out of bed, in-a white silk nightgown trimmed with lace, she ran across to the picture and lifted it down from the wall.

Underneath showed the front of a small circular wall-safe, dull steel, of a pattern imported from the United States. It had no key: it opened with a letter-lock whose combination was known only to its manufacturers and to the so-called Lesley Grant.

Lesley's breathing grew shallower; her breast hardly seemed to rise and fall under the silk nightgown. She touched the dial of the safe, and had given its knob two partial turns when a heavy tread on the staircase outside in the passage, with the rattle of crockery on a tray, warned her that Mrs Rackley was on the way with morning tea.

She replaced the picture and flew back to bed. She was sitting up in bed, the pillows propped behind her - shaking back her hair, with scarcely a heightened colour or quicker breathing - when Mrs Rackley opened the bedroom door.

'Awake, miss?' inquired Mrs Rackley, with her usual formula. 'Lovely morning! Here's a nice cup of tea.'

Mrs Rackley, as a sort of maid-cook-housekeeper, was invaluable to any woman who did not mind her smothering protectiveness. After glancing round the room, noting with approval its tidiness and its open window, she creaked across to asthmatic accompaniments and set the tea-tray in Lesley's lap. Afterwards she stood back, her hands on her hips, and surveyed her charge.

'You don't,' stated Mrs Rackley, 'look well.'

'I'm perfecdy all right, Mrs Rackley!'

'You don't,' Mrs Rackley repeated more firmly, 'look well.' Her voice grew coaxing. 'Why not have a nice lie-up and let me bring you breakfast in bed?'

'No, no! I'm getting up in a minute!'

'It's no trouble,' insinuated the tempter.

'But I don't want breakfast in bed, Mrs Rackley.'

Mrs Rackley pursed her lips and apparently took the darkest possible view of this. Shaking her head, she glanced round the room again. Her eye halted at a chair over whose back lay, neady folded, a black skirt and white knitted jumper, with slip, stockings, and a suspender-belt on the seat of the chair.

'Now, then!' said Mrs Rackley, in a voice rather suggestive of a Metropolitan police-constable. She added in a more casual tone: 'Was you out last night, miss?'

Lesley, who had poured out the tea and was raising the cup to her lips, looked up quickly.

'Out?'she echoed.

'Was you out,' explained Mrs Rackley, 'after 'is Lordship drove you home from Mr Markham's last night?' ' Good heavens, no I'

'When you come home from Mr Markham's,' stated Mrs Rackley, 'you was-wearing the dark green frock. I distinctly remember thinking how well you looked in it. And now -'

She pointed to the back of the chair, indicating the black skirt and the white jumper. Her voice grew reproachful.

'You're delicate, miss. As delicate as my youngest ever was. You hadn't ought to do them sorts of thing.'

'What sort of thing?'

'Going out,' said Mrs Rackley, vaguely but stubbornly.

'But I didn't go out!' protested Lesley. Her elbow jerked so that she almost upset the tea-cup. An odd expression flashed through her eyes and was gone, but it sent the colour up in her cheeks. 'I didn't go out, do you hear? If anybody says I did, it's a wicked lie!'

Mrs Rackley was taken aback. That she did not reply, however, was due to the fact that she noticed something even more compelling. Mrs Rackley was now peering out of the window with such curiosity that Lesley crawled out of bed, setting down the tea-tray with a thump, and ran to join her.

Out by the front gate, some distance away, Major Horace Price was standing in the strong sunshine and talking to Mr William Earnshaw the bank-manager.

Major Price's bulky thick-set form contrasted with the erect trimness of the bank-manager. Earnshaw had removed his hat, showing a head of jet-black hair, very carefully brushed and parted, which gleamed under the sun. Though they were too far away for the watchers to hear anything, bad feeling certainly existed between these two. Both had drawn themselves up; you imagined that the . major's colour was a little higher. But this was not what attracted the attention of the watchers.

Along the High Street, from the southerly direction where Gallows Lane turned at right angles, came the local / police-constable on his bicycle.

But Bert Miller was pedalling at a speed he had seldom in his life achieved before. Both the major and Earnshaw whirled round to look. When Major Price hailed him, he pulled up so abruptly as almost to land in the ditch.

Then ensued an evil little pantomime, with the constable speaking very fast. It seemed to impress his listeners a good deal. Once Major Price turned round to look at Lesley's house. You could see his speckled face, the round large face with its jowls under the soft hat he wore during legal-business days, and his mouth partly open.

The conference broke up. And Major Price, as though coming to a decision, opened the front gate and came up the path towards the house.

‘In your nightgown, tool’ Mrs Rackley was insisting. 'He'll see you! Go back to bed, miss. And - and I'll draw your bath.'

'Never mind my bath now,' said Lesley, as Mrs Rackley evidendy expected. Lesley's voice was not altogether steady. 'Go down and find out what's happened. Tell Major Price I'll be downstairs in half a minute.'

It was, as a matter of fact, less than ten minutes before she ran downstairs: fully dressed in a costume which was neither of the disputed ones of last night. There was no sign of Mrs Rackley, who had evidendy been dismissed with some sharp words from the major. She found Major Price standing in the lower hall, turning his hat round in his hands. He cleared his throat.

' My dear girl,' the major began,' I've just been talking to Bert Miller.'

'Yes, I know. Well?'

' I'm afraid, my dear girl, I've got some rather serious news. Sir Harvey Gilman is dead.'

It was a big cool hall, dusky despite its fanlight. At the back of it a grandfather clock dcked with- a noise like a metronome.

' I didn't do it deliberately,' cried Lesley. ' I didn't shoot him deliberately! It was an accident yesterday! I swear it was!'

‘S—h! My dear girl! Please!' 'I'm s-sorry! But -'

'And it isn't a question of his being shot,' continued Major Price, moving a thick neck inside his soft collar. ' It seems the poor old chap poisoned himself last night. But... can we go somewhere and talk ?'

Wordlessly Lesley indicated a door, which led them into a long cool sitting-room with green-painted walls and a fireplace of rough cobble-stones. Lesley, who seemed too stunned to speak, allowed Major Price to lead her to a chair. He sat down opposite her, putting his hat carefully on the floor and spreading out his fingers on one thick knee before bending forward with a sort of confidential heartiness. Major Price lowered his voice.

'Now you're not to be alarmed,' he assured her sooth’ ingly. 'But, as your legal adviser - and I hope you still do consider me as your legal adviser -'

'Naturally!'

'Good girl!' He leaned across to pat her arm. 'As your legal adviser, there are one or two small points, nothing important,' his gesture dismissed them, ' I think we ought to clear up. Eh?'

'Poisoned himself, you said?' repeated Lesley. Shaking her head violently, she seemed to be fighting a cloud in her mind; and tears rose in a thin film to her eyes. 'I simply don't understand! Why ever should the poor man have done that?'

'Well,' admitted the major, 'it's one of the small but rather sticky points connected with this whole affair. His body was found very early this morning by Dick Markham.'

Lesley sat up straight.

'By Dick?'

' 'Yes. So Miller says. It appears somebody rang Dick up on the telephone...' 'Who rang him up?'

'He can't tell. Just a kind of "whispering voice", apparently. It intimated, as far as I can gather from Miller' - Major Price frowned - 'that something pretty rough might happen unless he cut along to Pope's old cottage straight away.'

'Yes?'

'Down he went in a hurry,' continued the major. 'Just after he'd come in sight of the cottage, somebody turned on the light in the sitting-room.'

Major Price paused for a moment, obviously envisaging this. His sandy eyebrows drew together, and the breath whistled thinly in his nostrils.

·Very shortly after that, somebody stuck a rifle over the park boundary-wall and fired through the sitting-room window. No, wait! It's not what you're thinking! Dick ran to the place in a hurry, and Cynthia Drew with him ...'

'Cynthia Drew? What was she doing there with him?'

Major Price dismissed this.

' Out for an early walk, or something of that sort. Anyway, they rushed up to the cottage, only to find that the bullet hadn't hit Sir Harvey after all. They discovered the chap in a chair in front of the writing-table. He'd locked himself in, it seems, and taken prussic acid with a hypodermic injection.

'Damned queer show,' added the major, shaking his head dubiously. 'Damned queer show altogether. Because, d'ye see, somebody fired that bullet at him at just about the same time - more or less the same time, certainly -when he was injecting the poison into his own arm!'

There was a long silence.

Lesley did not comment. She started to say something, but merely made instead a gesture of hopelessness and nerve-strung bewilderment.

As for Major Price, he was clearly ill at ease. He cleared his throat. He eyed the bowl of red roses on the centre-table, the roses which added a splash of colour to this sombre, tasteful room with its grand piano and its old silver. He looked up and down. Finally he plunged into it.

'Now look here, my dear. I don't want you to misunderstand me. But -'

'But what?'

'As a matter of fact,' said the major, 'I'd intended having a little talk with you to-day, anyway. You've been good enough to let me handle your financial affairs since you came here. You don't understand such things. That's very proper; not fitting you should.' He nodded approvingly. 'But, now you're going to get married -'

Lesley looked even more hopelessly confused.

'What on earth are you talking about?'

'Well!' said the old-fashioned Major Price. 'Your husband will expect an accounting, won't he? Expect me to turn things over to him? Natural! Only business!'

'Good heavens, not' exclaimed Lesley. 'Dick's almost as bad as I am about business. He lets his literary agent handle all that; he never knows how much money he is making.'

The major was fidgeting.

'But in any case,' he said, still evading the real point, 'in any case, I want you to look at all these things as an outsider might look at them. For instance ... have you got any living relatives?'

Lesley sat up.

'Why do you ask that?' she demanded.

' I know so little about you, you see. And, since I want to help you in any way I can -'

'Please, Major Price! I'd much rather you stopped beating about the bush! Won't you explain just what you're getting at?'

'Well!' said the major, dropping his hands on his knees. ' I want you to tell me just exactly what the " fortune-teller" did say to you yesterday afternoon.'

And now the room was so quiet that you could distinctly hear the metronome-ticking of the grandfather clock outside in the hall.

'Now look here,' urged the major, forestalling her. 'Don't. say it was the usual thing you get from fortune-tellers. It wasn't. Hang it, my dear, I was there. I saw you.

' I want you to look at these things as an outsider might look at them. My wife, for instance. Or - or anyone. The fortune-teller says something that badly upsets you. Dick Markham dashes in to find out what it is. A rifle goes off - by accident, of course! - and the old chap's knocked over. Fortunately, he isn't badly hurt....'

' Isn't badly hurt ?' cried Lesley.

'Well... no.' The major looked discomfited.

Again Lesley's eyes roved round the room in that curiously stealthy way. She appeared to be sorting thoughts as swiftly as a conjurer handling cards. Her Hps were half

parted; there was a fixed, wondering expression on her lace.

'Dick knew that?' she cried. 'Dick knew that? And didn't tell me?' The major shook his head. 'Oh, no. The boy didn't know.' 'Are you sure of that?'

'Middlesworth and I, if you remember, carried Sir Harvey home. The old chap swore us to secrecy about his only getting a flesh-wound. He said it would be in the interests of justice. And the Home Office pathologist ... hang it, my dear girl, what could I do? I can't say what they may have told Dick Markham afterwards, but he certainly didn't know about Sir Harvey being all right at the time J left.

'But just look at what happens. The old chap has a great secret which seems to concern you. Right! Somebody pinches a rifle, the very same rifle, and shoots at him through the window. At the same time he's apparently poisoned himself. Tut, tut, now! Come!'

Lesley moistened her lips.

'You said "apparently". Is there any doubt?'

' In my own mind, absolutely none!' The Major chuckled a little, raising sandy eyebrows over guileless light-blue eyes. 'And you couldn't very well have got in and out of a lockcd-up room, now could you?' Then he lowered his voice. 'But if you have got anything to tell me, don't you think you'd better tell me now?'

Lesley's fingers fastened on the arms of the chair, as though she would raise herself towards him from sheer fervour of earnestness.

'I haven't got any tiling to tell you. Please believe that!'

'Not even what the fortune-teller said? Eh?'

' Major Price, I never saw the man before in all my life!'

'And that's all you have to tell me?'

'It's all I con tell you!'

'Well...' muttered her visitor.

Drawing a deep breath, he blinked round him. He

picked up his hat He seemed to meditate, as he got up, making some remark about the weather. In the midst of a strained uncomfortable silence Lesley followed him out into the hall.

'I shall be at my office,' said Major Price, 'if you want me.'

When he had gone Lesley stood for a time in the middle of the hall, her arms crossed on her breast and the fingers of each hand tightly pressing the opposite shoulder. It was a dumb-show of perplexity and even agony.

'Not' she said aloud. 'No, no, no!'

The ticking of the big clock seemed to creep into her mind. She noticed the time, which was a few minutes to nine o'clock. The smell of frying bacon, heartening enough at most times, drifted through faintly from the kitchen. Mrs Rackley, crammed with questions, could not be far off.

Lesley hurried upstairs. She went blindly into her own bedroom, closed the door behind her, twisted the key in the lock, and rested her hot face against the door panel until - with a back-flash of something half seen but not registering - she whirled round.

The black-and-white drawing was no longer hanging before that wall-safe. The drawing rested face-downwards on the floor.

In front of the safe, her fingers on the combination-knob of the dial, stood Cynthia Drew.

For a space while you might have counted ten, the two girls stood and looked at each other. Summer, with its heavy scents and murmurs, washed in through the open windows and breathed across them in moving sunlight The solid girl with the yellow hair and blue eyes, the more fragile girl with the brown hair and brown eyes, regarded each other with a sudden heightening of emotion which was very near hysteria.

Cynthia's voice struck against the rigidity of silence.

'I want to know what's in this safe,'.she said. 'And I mean to find out before I leave here, or I think I'll kill you.'

CHAPTER 10

AT about the same time that morning - nine o'clock -Dick Markham sat alone on the top of the two stone steps leading to the front door of Sir Harvey Gilman's cottage.

'Well,' he was thinking, 'that's that!'

The real trouble would now have to be faced. He remembered his interview with Lord Ashe. He remembered the arrival of the local constable - who, having been up undl three in the morning because of a drunken man causing trouble at Newton Farm, showed annoyance at being dragged out - and the endless time of questioning while Bert Miller wrote down everything in longhand.

He remembered a hasty breakfast, taken off the kitchen-table at his own cottage, with Cynthia Drew sitting across from him and begging him to tell her what was on his mind.

He remembered, as the hours crawled on, Bert Miller's getting through on the phone to the police-superintendent at Hawkstone; and Bert's departure to fetch a car which should meet at Loitring Halt a Scodand Yard official who was coming down from London by rail.

Superintendent Hadley was coming.

That tore it.

Dick hadn't told Cynthia anything, in spite of her persistent questions and reminders of his promise. He couldn't face telling her about Lesley.

Even Lord Ashe, it developed, knew nothing definite. After the noble lord's bombshell with those words, 'What's this I hear about Lesley Grant being a murderess?' it turned out that this had reference merely to certain innuendoes dropped by village-ladies. 'That accident with the rifle: wasn't it rather curious ?'

Gossip, gossip, gossip! You couldn't trace it or pin it down. It gathered and darkened, assuming a hostile tinge towards Lesley ever since news of his engagement to her had got out. And yet, on the other hand, there was more to Lord Ashe's remark than this. Dick could have sworn that Lord Ashe was definitely trying to tell him something, trying to convey something, trying to hint at something. But what?

And so here he sat, on the front doorstep of the cottage, with even Cynthia departed on some mysterious errand of her own. Here he sat on guard over a dead body, until Bert Miller should return.

He hadn't told Cynthia anything about the facts in the life of Lesley Grant. But would it have mattered a damn if he had?

No, it would not.

It would not have mattered if he broadcast it to the whole village. Superintendent Hadley would be here soon, and the story would come out in all its unpleasant detail. Gossip should chew on a lasting mouthful; gossip should have enough at last. In the meantime ...

' Hello there!' called a voice from the lane.

It was very warm now. A wasp droned from the direction of the fruit-orchard. Bill Earnshaw, his footsteps swishing in the grass, cut across the garden towards the cottage.

'I shall be late at the bank,' Earnshaw said. 'But I thought I'd better turn back here and...' His voice trailed away in a kind of inflectionary shrug. He stared at the house. 'Bad business, isn't it?'

Dick agreed that it was.

'Where,' he asked, 'did you hear about it?'

Earnshaw nodded back over his shoulder.

'I was standing' outside Lesley's house, having a word with that - that ass Hprace Price.' His forehead darkened, for this was not bank-managerial language. 'Bert Miller came past on his bike, and told us all about it, See here!'

Earnshaw hesitated. His was a well-tailored, erect figure which just escaped being dapper. His sallow face, not unhandsome, showed a man in the middle forties but looking younger. His collar was starched, and he fanned himself with an Anthony Eden hat. His black, shining hair had a knife-like white parting; his cheek gleamed from close-, shaving.

A great social enthusiast was Earnshaw. He laughed a good deal, and prided himself on his sense of humour. He was a good business-man, a keen bridge and squash player, a Territorial officer with some pretensions to excellence in pistol and rifle shooting, though his behaviour as a rule remained humorous and retiring. But you could easily guess his approach to this.

'I was just thinking, Dick,' he said. "This rifle ...'

'Damn the rifle 1' Dick burst out, with such unnecessary violence that Earnshaw looked at him in surprise. It was sheer nerves. 'I mean,' Dick corrected himself, 'that the fellow wasn't shot. He was ...'

' I know, I know. But look here.' Earnshaw's dark eyes travelled along the front of the cottage. His lips outlined a soundless whistling. 'Hasn't it occurred to you - I may be wrong, of course - that whoever did fire the rifle is the most important figure in the whole business?'

Dick blinked at him.

'No, it certainly hadn't occurred to me. How so?'

'Well, suppose there's something queer about this thing? Suppose they suspect Sir Harvey didn't commit suicide after all?'

'He did commit suicide! Look at the evidence! Don't you believe that?'

'Frankly, old man,' smiled Earnshaw, and continued to fan himself idly with his hat, 'so many peculiar things have been happening that I don't know what to believe.' (The whole voice of Six Ashes was in that.) 'By the way,' Earnshaw added, with his eyes on the ground, 'I haven't yet congratulated you on your engagement to Lesley. Good luck and long life!'

'Thanks.'

Something had got into Dick's chest, and was hurting like hell. He felt it as a physical pain, at which you tried not to cry out. Earnshaw seemed slightly embarrassed.

'But - er - about what I was telling you!'

‘Yes?'

Earnshaw nodded towards the sitting-room windows. 'Mind if I take a look in there?' 'Not at all. I'm not the police.'

Walking on tiptoe evidently with some vague idea of respect for the dead, Earnshaw approached the right-hand window and peered in. Shading his eyes with his hat, he studied the exhibit. Then he turned round with a mouth of genteel distaste but a frowning certainty of suspicions confirmed. -

'A would-be murderer,' he argued, pointing to the boundary wall across the lane,' is hiding behind that wall to take a pot-shot. Somebody turns on a light in this sitting-room. All right! Then the whole point is that the person with the rifle could see who was in this room.'

Earnshaw paused.

Dick Markham got slowly to his feet.

"This person,' continued Earnshaw, 'is a witness. On the one hand he can say, "Yes; Sir Harvey was alone. I couldn't know he was giving himself a dose of prussic acid, so I whanged away with a bullet." On the other hand this witness can say, "Sir Harvey wasn't alone; there was somebody with him." In either case, it would settle the matter. Don't you agree?'

There are certain things so obvious that'the mind does not immediately grasp them. Dick nodded, in a rage at not having seen this for himself.

Earnshaw's innate caution manifested itself.

'Mind, I don't say this is so.' He laughed awkwardly. 'And I'm not setting up in business as a detective, thanks. All I say is that's what I should do if I were this detective Miller says is coming down from London. Ask the witness to come forward ...'

'But the witness wouldn't come forward! He'd be accused of attempted murder if he did.'

'Couldn't the police promise him immunity?'

'And compound a felony?'

Earnshaw put on his Anthony Eden hat, adjusting it not rakishly but with a certain cavalier slant. He dusted his hands together.

‘I don't understand these legal terms,' he declared, and muscles worked along his lean jaws. 'You must ask,' slight hesitation,' Major Price about that. It's none of my business, anyway.' Then he looked squarely at Dick, with bright dark determined eyes. 'But I have got a special interest in that rifle, if it's the one everybody seems to think it is. Where's the rifle now?'

' In the sitting-room. Miller had a look at it.'

'May I see it?'

' Certainly. Any special reason for asking?'

'In the first place,' returned Earnshaw, 'it's my rifle. You remember, Price went round borrowing guns from everybody for his shooting-gallery?'

'Yes.'

'In the second place, having a certain standing in this community -' Earnshaw gave his amiable diplomatic laugh, not very convincingly. 'Never mind. Let's go in.'

The echo of that laugh, which - you heard so often from the manager's office of the City and Provincial Bank at Six Ashes, became even less convincing when they entered the sitting-room.

The hanging lamp over the writing-table had long ago been switched off, so that the dead man sat amid shadow and dazzle from the sun. Though Earnshaw was nerving himself to a polite indifference, he could not help a wince of some emotion when he skirted gingerly round the table and caught sight of the dead man's sardonic half-open eye. He turned round with some quickness, eager to get away from it, when Dick produced the rifle.

'Don't be afraid to handle it, Bill. I've already messed up any possible finger prints. Is it your gun?'

'Yes, it is,' answered Earnshaw. 'Now look here!'

'Wait a minute,' Dick urged wearily. 'If you're going to ask me who stole the rifle yesterday afternoon, I've already told Lord Ashe that I don't know!'

'But-'

'All I can be certain of,' Dick said with conviction, 'is that neither Price nor Middlesworth took it, because I remember watching them carry Sir Harvey away. Lesley or I certainly didn't; we were together. And there was nobody else there, until you arrived and said you'd take charge of the guns.'

Though Eamshaw kept on smiling, the expression round his eyes and mouth did not indicate amusement.

' If anybody took that rifle, it was Price himself.'

'Damn it, Bill, he didn't! You can't stick a rifle in your pocket or shove it under your coat.'

"That's exactly what I mean, old man. Nobody came near while I was in charge. I didn't do it, though Price pretends to think I did. Lift my own gun? It's absurd. I ask you! And I hope you don't suggest it was done by witchcraft?'

Dick was on the point of replying that it wouldn't surprise him. But he was sick of rifles, sick to death of everything in the anticipation of waiting for the arrival of Superintendent David Hadley. So he only muttered something conciliatory, propping the rifle back up against the wall by the fireplace.

Earnshaw laughed, to show no ill-feeling.

' I hope you're not thinking I'm making a mountain out of a molehill,' he suggested. 'But, if you'll excuse my mentioning it, I've got a certain standing to maintain. And this thing is going to have repercussions.'

'How?'

Earnshaw grew very quiet.

'That fellow never killed himself, Dick. You must guess it as well as I do.'

'Can you suggest how anybody could have killed him?'

'No. But it's a detective-yarn come to life. Corpse found in a locked and bolted room. On one side of him' - Earnshaw nodded -.'a hypodermic needle. On the other side' - Earnshaw nodded again - 'a box of drawing-pins.' He grew thoughtful. 'Of course, there's no special mystery about the drawing-pins. I mean, about their being here.