I was hurt by her appeal. You may think that unimportant, but I was. It sounded as if a child were complaining of some injustice and asking for it to be explained to her; and explained by the one man who would never explain anything any more—not even to an assembly of shareholders in the Cannon Street Hotel who wanted to know where their dividends had gone to. Did I utter some sort of cry? I don’t know, but I felt that her face turned suddenly towards me. In a fluster I rattled the handle of the door.
“He has locked us in.”
As I spoke I heard the whirr of an engine starting. And a car turned to the left out of the courtyard and raced down to the Turnpike Road, the noise of the engine dwindling as it went.
“He has locked us all in together,” she said, and it seemed to me that a cruel, bitter little smile for a second on her lips. “There has been murder done. We must ring up the police.”
She was walking back towards the telephone on the long table close to the corner in which she had been sitting, when once more Preedy took charge.
“Wait, please, Mrs. Horbury!”
Olivia stopped and turned. “Why? There has been murder done.”
Again she looked straight at me. Did she know? Yes, but by nothing she had seen or heard. Perhaps her soul had claimed the truth from me and mine had been forced to answer. My secret was hers, too, I felt quite sure, and fortunately Preedy was there to stand between us.
“Murder, if you will,” he said clearly. “He has stolen one of our cars, Crottle’s or mine.” There was a look of bewilderment in Olivia s eyes “This man, Devisher, Bryan Devisher,” Preedy explained. “But he can’t get far. If you telephone now, he may very likely be caught within the hour. And then, of course, nothing could save him. He had suffered damnably—I am sorry to say it here and now—at Horbury’s hands. If ever a man had a motive to take the law into his hands, Bryan Devisher had.”
“Bryan Devisher?” she repeated thoughtfully.
“He has come straight from South America. I suppose that he had planned somehow to arrive a day before his time. He waits in the garden of a house he knew, no doubt well, in olden days, until he thinks the coast is clear. He uses a South American way of adjusting his wrongs and, as you said, locks us all in together and bolts.”
“Bryan Devisher?” Olivia repeated. When she used the name before she had been bewildered. Now she was realising how exactly he fitted the niche which was being built for him—Bryan Devisher, Murderer.
“Yes, no doubt he can be caught, tried, hanged. It is as you will.”
Olivia looked at Preedy. She transferred her thoughts to him. He was now the antagonist, not I.
“You see,” he went on, speaking reasonably, “Crottle and I are here. We are the witnesses. We saw Horbury in a panic. We saw Devisher come into the room with the moonlight behind him. We heard the swish of the knife, the struggle of George Crottle to arrest him, the slamming of the door, and the key turned in the lock.”
How could she fight all this evidence? But she stood where she was, giving no ground.
“But why were we here?” he resumed. “George Crottle and Preedy, his lawyer. What were we doing at White Barn on this night? We shall be asked. And we shall have to answer.”
“What will you answer?”
The question was stubborn and resentful. It matched her white, still face, the upright defiance of her stance.
“The truth,” answered Preedy. “We were blackmailed. The wickedest crime in the Calendar of Justice. Worse than murder, judges say. More cruel, more”—and his voice dropped a little out of consideration for her, but lost none of its determination—“more mean.”
Her head flashed up in revolt against the word and dropped again.
“If it’s not murder, then, what is it?” she asked.
“Suicide.”
It was a hard choice and Preedy left it so. The decision must be hers. She stood and shifted a foot, following the pattern of the carpet whilst she made it, She might accuse me, of course. I could see the thought in her mind as she lifted a rebellious face towards me. But, if I had planned murder, should I have brought my lawyer with me to see it done? Devisher was so much the more obvious criminal and usually the obvious criminal is the right criminal. Moreover, she wouldn’t want the wrong man to go to the scaffold and she wouldn’t want to listen to a true story of blackmail by Daniel and the judge’s comments upon it. She suddenly sat down upon a chair as though her knees failed her.
“He was very good to me,” she said in a whisper, her head bowed, her hands clasped together. And the battle was over.
“We must have the door unlocked,” said Preedy briskly. “Perhaps Mrs. Horbury will do it, since you have a key.”
Olivia looked blank until Preedy pointed out that she would have to go round by the garden and let herself in at the front door.
“Oh, yes.”
She fetched her handbag from the chair in the corm and took from it a bunch of keys. She thrust the curtain aside and the moonlit garden seemed to be waiting for her.
“There was once a tree spoiling all the prospect,” she said with a little break in her voice. “Oh, not a beech tree, but just a negligible Scotch fir, and I had it cut down, so that the eyes travel without fatigue across the lawn to a sunk fence and beyond that over the long meadow to the Turnpike Road. I had a curious sense of freedom when the tree had gone.”
She stood looking out and behind her the blood from Horbury’s throat which had splashed upon the table began again to slip from its polished surface. Again it fell slowly and horribly, one and one and one. The sound seemed to hush all the world so that it might be heard the better. Olivia’s face was twisted with pain. She turned and flung the words at Preedy.
“Do you hear? You with the quick ears? Doesn’t each drop cry aloud for vengeance?”
“I’m thinking of the cost of vengeance,” he replied, “to all of us. To you. And even to him.”
Olivia turned back to the window. I think that she saw Horbury alive and in the dock, sentenced. For she whispered, more to herself than to either of us: “Day after endless day. The vision—this—” and she reached out her hand towards the meadows and the trees, “narrowing with each year until it vanished.”
She spoke as if you could punish a dead body. Then she did the last thing I wanted her to do. She took the key of the door from the small ring of keys which she held. She offered it, shining in the palm of her hand, to Preedy.
“One of you. I stay with my man.”
There was a gleam of admiration of her in Preedy’s eyes, and when he bowed to her, as he did, it was, I think, as much to conceal a little smile of defeat as to acknowledge her words with respect.
“You, George,” he said to me, and Olivia turned her hand above an occasional table. As she walked away from it towards her dead husband’s side, the key tinkled on the mahogany surface.
I took it, went out by the garden door and round by a little path to the front of the house. I noticed that it was my small car, the one nearest to the front door, which Devisher had taken. Then I let myself in. But I didn’t immediately return to the garden-room. One Yale latch-key is like another, and I had in my pocket one which fitted the drawer of my desk. I compared the pair by the hall lamp, but it would not do to exchange them. Olivia’s key was marked by three scratches at intervals, mine had no clues to ownership at all. I put my own key back in my pocket. The cupboard door stood open. My hat hung on a peg next to Horbury’s coat. I took the sheath of the knife from my coat breast pocket and, after wiping it clean, put it into the pocket of Horbury’s coat. On unlocking the door of the garden-room I saw Preedy busily polishing the furniture frames and the tables.
“You sat at the corner of that divan all the time,” he said to me.
“Yes.”
He began to enumerate the places where fingerprints might have been found of others besides Horbury and Olivia—the garden-door and the door into the hall for instance.
“There’s the outside of the door into the hall,” he said. “Devisher will have left the palm of his hand upon the panels.”
“Yes.”
I had a picture of Devisher slamming the door and locking us in. I turned towards it, and Olivia said: “You will leave my key, please.”
I dropped her latchkey on the same table which she had used. Polishing the outer panels with the door half open, I saw her identify her key and replace it on its ring. I drew a breath of relief that I had not tried to substitute a key of my own for hers.
“There, I think that will do. Now it remains—a rather gruesome business, I am afraid—to make a tableau which the police can reconstruct in the morning.”
Olivia drew back with a shiver. “Oh, no!”
“Must!” cried Preedy, and for the first time roughly. “It’s getting late. We can’t go on advancing and retreating. We are not dancing the Lancers.”
He approached her impatiently, almost threateningly. I suppose that from the other side I closed in upon her. For she looked at me sharply and then back again at the set and quiet features of Preedy. Quiet they were, but there was now a menace in the room, a chill.
“There have been pacts, haven’t there? “said Preedy.
“Pacts?”
She was really bewildered.
“Don’t ask me to take you for a fool. You understand well enough. Pacts. The coroners’ courts are full of them.”
Her eyes opened wide. She looked at Preedy. She looked at me. I think that we must both by now have been standing quite close to her.
“Suicide pacts,” she said with a little falter in her voice. But she didn’t move, not a foot, not a hand. I don’t think it would have been lucky for her if she had. We were all three as motionless as effigies. All three might move as sedately or as violently as the plot demanded, but not one alone. No, indeed. But I believed, I still believe, that if she had been absolutely certain that I and not the innocent Devisher would be convicted of the murder, she would have taken her risks of us and let Horbury’s blackmailing be exposed. But she had no such certainty. Whatever she might say, the evidence pointed to Devisher and not to me.
“Then that’s settled,” said Preedy. “We all three have the same secret to hide. Will you bring the little table—yes, the one from which you took your key, and set it between the corner of the divan and—well, here?”
He pointed to Horbury.
“Now, please sit on the divan, your hand perhaps on the end so as to leave your prints.”
He then asked her where the champagne, the famous Pommery ’06, was kept. He left us together, and I can’t remember a period more embarrassing. But, in truth, he worked quickly. He came back with two goblets of thin glass which Horbury affected. One was half full, and that he placed on the occasional table by Olivia. The other he set on the table over which Horbury lay. There was just room for it. He had a cloth in his hand and he wiped away from the glasses all traces of his own handling of them.
“Will you touch that with your fingers and your lips,” he said, pointing to the half-filled glass in front of her. But she nodded to the glass on Horbury’s table.
“That one first.”
Preedy handed it to her and she drank it with a little nod and a small wistful smile towards the horror sprawled over the table. She drank it to the last drop, partly as a tribute to a good many pleasant hours spent with her ogre at White Barn, partly because she was as near exhaustion as a woman well could be. A little colour rose into her face as she handed back the empty glass to him. Preedy balanced it once more on the table, and then with a push toppled it off on to the ground, where the thin glass smashed into splinters.
“We were sitting here? “she asked. “Just the pair of us?”
“Yes. Then you left him and went up to bed.”
“And fell asleep?”
“Yes. You heard nothing until your servant screamed in the morning.”
“And I waked,” she said sardonically, and so paused and shivered, “to find the door unlocked?”
She thought upon the endless hours of darkness during which she must lie and listen, and perhaps hear that dead man struggling to rise from the table. Where she had shivered, she now shuddered so that her teeth rattled.
“’What if the vigil—for that it must be—persuaded no one?” she asked.
Preedy set out his argument. Men like Horbury had always troubles which were secret. He had weathered storms, no doubt, but men lose heart at the last. “And so, sitting up here alone at night, and, if things were well with him, perhaps thinking that he was, after all, doing his best for you, he sought this way out. There is one more thing to be done, alas!”
On the floor, amidst the congealing blood, lay the long, thin-bladed knife with its gay blue handle. Preedy knelt, took his handkerchief from his pocket, and stooped.
“No!”
The cry broke from Olivia Horbury passionately. Her eyes were ablaze, her arm stretched out with, a pointing finger as steady as justice itself. Preedy sat back on his heels.
“His fingers held that knife!”
That one fact swept all the arguments for our decision out of her mind.
“Yes,” answered Preedy.
“His fingers were the last to hold it.”
“Yes.”
“The murderer’s.”
Proof was there lying in that red pool—proof which would hang.
“Yes.”
I expostulated. Who knew but that some unlucky chance might send us a visitor who would know us again—a stranger asking his way, a motorist who had run short of petrol, a neighbour with sickness in the house whose telephone was under repair. Preedy waited with his eyes on Olivia.
“There must be other ways by which guilt comes home,” she said. “Let me, please, do what must be done.”
She knelt in Preedy’s place. He handed her a clean handkerchief and, taking up the heavy knife by its blade delicately from the congealing blood in which it lay, she wiped the handle. Then, lifting it to Horbury’s out-thrown hand, she placed it in his palm and closed his fingers about it. She opened them again. It needed now some effort, but she made it and, still holding it by the blade under the handkerchief, she replaced it exactly where it had lain.
“That is all?”
“Yes. We can go.”
“Wait!”
She rose to her feet and with such a look of horror upon her face as neither of us had ever seen. She tore the curtain aside from the glass door and passed into the garden. Heaven knows what her thoughts were, but they did not hold her long. Long enough, however, to give me the chance of which I had begun to despair. A steel chain ran from Horbury’s waist into his trouser pocket and the pocket gaped. At the end of the chain a ring of keys hung by a spring hook. I had the time to release the ring from the spring hook, replace the chain and thrust the keys into my pocket, when the garden door was slammed fast and locked. Olivia came back into the room and drew the curtains again so care fully that not a fold was disarranged, not a thread of light shone out upon the lawn.
I took up the ebony board with the chart pinned upon it. Preedy was looking about the room, touching a chair here and there with his handkerchief.
“We ought to have left the prints of the woman who cleans the room,” he said, “but we couldn’t.” He turned to me. “You turned on the lights.”
“Yes.”
He dusted the switch with the white handkerchief and I noticed that a faint blue stain had been left upon the cambric by the handle of the knife.
“You will leave the lights on, of course,” he said to Olivia who was following us. In the hall she latched the door and locked it. Preedy stopped at once.
“I am afraid not,” he said gently. “In the morning the door must be found unlocked.”
Olivia bowed her head and unlocked it. Then she held open the front door of the house. A small breath of wind was rustling amongst the boughs of the trees.
“There was much that was sordid—worse, if you will—in my husband’s life,” said Olivia. “You were right. I would not wish his story to be known to the world, just so that a man called Devisher might be hanged. No!” and she added, after a pause, “there would have to be a much better reason than that.” Though her voice was low, her eyes were fierce, her face quite haggard and all its beauty gone. “Yes, a much stronger reason.”
And upon the two men who listened to her a sense of new danger rolled like a tide.