Dr. Blakie looked at Rob when she’d finished, and Rob returned the look.
“They were getting at that last night,” said Dr. Blakie. “It was—quite a session. At least you were out of it, Marcia.”
“That was queer,” said Rob thoughtfully. “What Wait said about the scissors. How did he look?”
“I don’t know. A little—” Marcia thought back and said suddenly, “He looked as if he were a little amused about something. Or as if he didn’t believe me.”
“Did he talk to you much of the affair last night? I mean, of your being locked in the sewing room at the time of the murder?” asked Dr. Blakie.
“No, not much.”
Again the two men carefully did not look at each other, and Marcia said quickly, “Why? Does he doubt that?”
Dr. Blakie left the desk and prowled lightly around the room, and Rob sat astride a straight chair and leaned his chin on his arms against the back of it.
“You’d better tell her, Rob,” said Dr. Blakie from the french windows.
Rob wriggled a little and said, “It’s nothing much, Marcia. Only he suggested—just suggested, you know; no need for you to be alarmed—that you had provided yourself with an alibi on purpose. Said doors could be locked from the inside. Said it was simple if you knew how.”
“But I don’t—I didn’t—”
“I know. I know. But he made a sort of point of it; tried to pin Gally and me down about unlocking the door. Who did it? Was the key in the lock? We said it was. He said it couldn’t have been on the floor. I said no. That I’d turned it myself in the lock. Gally got one of his honest spells and began to dither around, trying to remember. The truth was, we were both so excited we didn’t know what we were doing. I stuck to it that the key was in the lock and I myself turned it, and then Gally got the idea and backed me up. But I don’t know whether we did you good or harm, for I’m afraid he saw that we were trying to keep you out of it.”
“He has evidently seen a good deal,” said Dr. Blakie. “More than I thought. He’s—tricky. Leads you to think whatever serves his purpose at that time. According to what he said of motives to Marcia, he’s got the—situation between you two sized up pretty accurately. Is there any possible way in which he could know it? Up to the murder, that is?”
“No,” said Rob. “Unless he’s clairvoyant.”
“No maid who has guessed anything of it and whom he might question so adroitly that she didn’t know she was being pumped?”
Rob looked suddenly uncomfortable.
“No. Unless Stella—my mother’s housemaid. She—saw something once. But he has no proof. What were the things he said he wanted to know, Marcia?”
“Who was the man in the library,” repeated Marcia. “Was anything missing from the house. Who locked me in the sewing room. And if I knew anything about the broken cocktail glass. And, of course, he talked of the dandelion knife having been hidden in the cupboard.”
“That’s a point, you know,” observed Rob dubiously. “It certainly indicates that whoever murdered Ivan knew exactly where that knife was.”
“Beatrice knew,” said Marcia.
Dr. Blakie turned away from the window.
“Look here,” he said. “Has anybody besides Ancill mentioned this man in the library? Let’s have Ancill in here and ask him some questions ourselves. It seems to me,” said he slowly and very precisely, “that we’ve rather neglected Ancill.”
He came willingly enough. Came and stood there respectfully until Dr. Blakie told him to sit down, and then with an effect of reluctant obedience he sat on the very edge of a chair and even so maintained an air of impeccable respectfulness and dignity, which took, Rob said later, some doing.
And he was—or seemed—willing enough to talk.
Yes, the police had questioned him many times and in much detail, but he could tell them only what he knew. And that was that, shortly after he had taken Mr. Godden’s dinner to him—“for the last time,” said Ancill somberly—he had gone through the hall and had heard voices from the library. No, no one had rung, and he hadn’t let any visitor in. If he was let in the front door, someone else—he did not quite look at Marcia—had opened it.
“I did not,” said Marcia. “I know of no visitor at that time.”
Ancill bowed his head.
“And you recognized the voice?” said Dr. Blakie.
No, he hadn’t. At least, he hadn’t been sure. He had only thought it sounded like Mr. Copley. But perhaps, he added, looking into space, perhaps that was because he had assumed that the visitor had been let in the french doors and thus, naturally, was Mr. Copley. Mr. Copley usually came that way.
“What did you do then?”
He’d gone directly to the kitchen. Mr. Godden had said he would ring if he wanted anything and he did not ring. Ancill and cook had had their dinners and had been busy. He had not been called to the front of the house until Mrs. Godden had come downstairs and had found Mr. Godden murdered.
Miss Godden was already there when he entered the library.
“And you’re sure it was a man?”
“Oh, yes,” he replied with an oblique glance at Rob.
Dr. Blakie sat in silence for a moment, his face intent and thoughtful, and Rob took up the questioning.
“About this dandelion knife,” he began.
“Yes, sir,” said Ancill, shifting his glance from Rob at once.
“When did you bring it into the library?”
It was obviously a question he had answered many times.
“I brought it into this room on the day of March eighteenth in the morning. It had just arrived with some other things from the hardware store. It was wrapped in brown paper. Mrs. Godden and Mr. Godden were in the room, and I was under a definite impression that I interrupted them.” He paused to cough; as a gesture it was a masterpiece, for it indicated at once reluctance, politeness, and discretion. Thus that there was something going on which he did not wish to tell. Which was better left untold. It had probably been that cough, thought Marcia, which gave the detective his first hint of their quarrel. Ancill resumed: “I left the entire package there on the desk, seeing that Mr. Godden was engaged. I do not remember seeing the knife again—until the night of the murder. Delia says that when she dusted the room the morning after Mr. Godden was injured, she put the whole package together and carried it to the shelf in the garage where garden tools are kept. But she was excited—you’ll remember Mr. Godden was injured the afternoon of the eighteenth and our extreme anxiety during the next few days—and she did not look at the contents. Did not, that is,” he added with nice exactness, “note just what was there beyond a glance which showed her that the package contained garden supplies. That is all I know. I understood from recent questioning that Miss Beatrice saw the dandelion knife in that cupboard the afternoon of the murder. If it was there, I did not know it. Is that all, sir?”
Rob, looking a little overwhelmed at the efficient note attending Ancill’s flood of information which was no information, muttered, and Dr. Blakie said, “But you are perfectly certain there was a man talking to Mr. Godden?”
“Oh, yes, sir. There’s no doubt at all.”
“Do you know anything about this broken cocktail glass?” asked Rob, recovering.
He didn’t know that. And for an instant he seemed faintly perplexed.
“It’s like the nutmeg,” he said, looking toward Marcia. “I don’t understand it at all.”
“Nutmeg?” cried Rob.
“It’s nothing,” said Marcia hurriedly, because she had been visited by a flash of something like inspiration, and leaned forward. “Ancill,” she said, “did you tell the police about the goldfish in the pool?”
He looked at her then. Directly into her face for the first time in all those years. His eyes were a slate gray tinged with yellow and were baffling in expression. No more baffling, however, than what he said, for he looked straight at her and said politely, “What goldfish, madam?”
&
nbsp; Marcia did not believe her ears.
“The goldfish. Dead. You told me about them this morning.”
“Madam is mistaken. Is that all, sir?”
He spoke to Dr. Blakie, who, watching Marcia’s stunned face, nodded impatiently. Ancill slid to the door, and Marcia cried, as he reached it, “Wait,” but he did not—or pretended he did not—hear her.
“What on earth?” cried Rob. “What about the damn goldfish?”
“Arsenic,” said Marcia. “I know now. It was arsenic in the cupboard. That little package.” She was barely conscious of their regard as she sprang to her feet and across the room to the cupboard. That little package of thick paper, soft and heavy-looking as if it contained sugar! She flung open the door and it wasn’t there and she had known it would not be. When had it been removed? When had the police first searched that cupboard? She had seen the package the very night of Ivan’s murder. When she had stood there at that small cupboard searching for the thing she’d hidded there. Was that—she stood stock-still as one flash of queer prescience led irresistibly to another—was that why the murderer had returned? To take the arsenic—to pour it in the pool? To get rid of it then? And the goldfish had died. She stopped there. How much arsenic in how much water would suffice to kill how many goldfish? It was a nightmarish problem in algebra.
“What’s the matter?” cried Rob, again at her side.
“The arsenic,” said Marcia numbly, as if she were talking in her sleep, “was in this cupboard. It must have been that. And the—murderer—or somebody came back and took it. I don’t know why. I can’t prove it. Yes, I can. The clerk at the hardware store can give a description of the package. The water in the pool can be tested.” She turned to face them, and tuned to her own excitement, they understood in spite of the gaps.
“But why?” said Dr. Blakie. “Why?”
His question was not then answered. For the door opened and Gally came in.
“What’s happened?” he said at once. “What’s doing?” For an instant no one replied, and he came closer to them, surveying them inquisitively.
“You all look,” he said, “like the cat that swallowed the canary. Especially you, Rob. What goes on?”
It was curious, thought Marcia later, that a quick, unspoken decision seized all three of them. Nobody spoke and nobody exchanged looks, but there was immediately an agreement among them. A secret.
Dr. Blakie said dryly, “We’ve been talking of the man Ancill claims he heard talking to Ivan here in the library the night he was murdered.”
He closed the cupboard door, and Rob took out cigarettes, and Marcia walked back to the desk.
Gally looked suddenly very queer.
“Oh,” he said. “Well—” He didn’t move or say any more than that, but all at once they were looking at him, Dr. Blakie with his hand outstretched above the globe as if about to spin it, Rob with a match poised and burning.
“Well,” said Gally, moistening his lips, “I was that man. Hell, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER XVI
IT WAS EXACTLY LIKE Gally, thought Marcia incoherently. He had no sense of caution; never had had. Did not recognize the gravity of a risk. The possibility of its turning out wrong.
If he had murdered Ivan Godden, it would be like him to think, in his feckless way, that he could defy the police; it was audacity turned the wrong way. Then Gally sat down suddenly, looking very thin in Ivan’s big leather chair, and took out his handkerchief and wiped his glistening forehead, and Marcia saw that he wasn’t daring and audacious at all. He was afraid.
“And,” said Gally through the handkerchief, “I’m going to tell the police about that, too.”
It was a kind of rueful tribute to Gally’s passion for truth-telling that they accepted it, even in the first stunned moment of his revelation.
Marcia went to his side and cried, “Gally, you mustn’t do that,” and Rob said hurriedly, “For God’s sake, don’t do that. You’ve got an alibi for the time of Ivan’s murder,” and as Gally continued to wipe his forehead wretchedly Dr. Blakie sighed wearily and sat down facing him and said, “Suppose you tell us all about it.”
Gally tried to answer all three in the same breath and in a measure succeeded: “I think they’re onto me. Wait’s been asking me about the cocktail glass.”
Marcia saw it then as clearly as if she had seen it when it happened. The only mystery was that she hadn’t seen it before.
“Oh, Gally, Gally!”
He did look at her then over the handkerchief.
“Hell,” he said again miserably, “isn’t it?”
It was.
“I don’t know what you’re going to do. Are you sure they know?”
He nodded.
“They’ve been after my alibi. It wasn’t much, you know. I said the car had broken down away out about 59th and Harlem. It’s sort of deserted out there, not many filling stations and not many people along. But I’m damned—” he removed the handkerchief and looked at them petulantly and as if he’d been injured—“I’m damned if they haven’t unearthed somebody that actually was broken down out there that night, right at the time I said I was, and he says there wasn’t anybody along there for an hour except some trucks.” He sighed and added, “They’ve been getting pretty close to home with their questions—lots of repetitions, as if they expected to catch me up. But it wasn’t till this morning that Wait actually came out with this no-alibi business. I stalled,” sighed Gally. “But he knows I was stalling. The only thing for me to do is tell the truth.”
“What is the truth?” asked Dr. Blakie in a tone of faint exasperation. They were getting too much for him, thought Marcia fleetingly. Gally was putting away the handkerchief and getting cigarettes out of some pocket, which demanded struggling, and did not answer, and Marcia said:
“He was here to see Ivan about—something. Just before Ivan was killed. And he went into the dining room for something and—and the liquor cabinet was open. And—” She stopped and looked at Gally. “But why did you leave the nutmeg in the hall? And the glass in the street?”
“I was upset,” said Gally, still injured. “And who wouldn’t be? Talking to a man one minute and the next minute finding him dead. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Good God!” burst out Rob. “Can’t you tell anything so it’s intelligible!”
Gally drew himself up.
“I don’t like your tone, Copley,” he said with formality. “I didn’t kill Ivan.”
They couldn’t exactly believe him and they couldn’t refuse to believe him. They looked at him, reasoning one way and the other, and Gally said, “It’s like this: I was ’way early to your dinner party. I came round in the garden, and there was a light behind the french doors over there and Ivan was sitting here, with the table drawn up, eating. So I thought, ‘Here’s a chance to see him.’ I—I wanted to see him—”
“You wanted to ask him for some money,” said Marcia, too worried to say it less bluntly.
“Well—yes. If you must know.” He looked uncomfortable and continued, “He wasn’t any too pleasant. But Ivan never was. After a few minutes, he took up his dessert, and it was some sort of custardy stuff—”
“And he liked nutmeg on it and sent you for it,” said Marcia.
“How did you know?”
“Never mind. Go on.”
“He said there was some in the dining room; in the liquor cabinet,” said Gally rather sulkily. “So I was being as—well, I wanted—anyway, I said not to ring, I’d do and get it for him.” He stopped there and groaned.
“What time was all this?” said Rob tautly.
Gally brightened.
“It was just about exactly seven o’clock,” he said. “I was watching the time because I didn’t want to be late again for a dinner at your house, Rob. And, believe it or not, I didn’t get out of this house till after seven-thirty!” He gave a long squirm. “It was awful. … I don’t suppose there’s any chance of getting a drink?”
“None,” said Marcia with asperity. “Do go on, Gally. What happened? What did you see?”
“Don’t hurry me. A highball would help a lot. It’s not a pleasant story,” retorted Gally. He gave symptoms of resorting to the handkerchief again, and Rob said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” savagely.
“Well, off I trotted to the dining room, doing my good deed for the day. I opened the liquor cabinet and could hear the servants away off in the kitchen, so I knew pussyfoot Ancill wasn’t around, and right there before my eyes—And I needed a drink,” said Gally with a reminiscent look.
“How many did you have?” said Dr. Blakie.
“I don’t know exactly. There was a glass there, too. As if it was waiting for me. I kept thinking I ought to be getting back to the library, but something told me that this was the first and the last time I’d ever get anything out of Ivan Godden, so I kept taking another. Marvelous whisky,” he said, still with that reminiscent look. “Soda right there handy. After the first three I thought I’d better prolong it a bit. Well,” he sighed. “Finally I got myself together and got to thinking Ivan wasn’t such a bad fellow after all and I had better take him a drink. So I mixed one for him and put everything carefully away, feeling it was just as well for Ancill not to know what I’d been doing. I was a little mixed myself.” He grinned feebly, caught Marcia’s eye, and sobered. “Anyway, in I started to the library; but just as I opened the dining-room door I heard somebody on the stairs, and it sounded like Beatrice. I was mixed,” said Gally, “but not about Beatrice. So I went back into the dining room and shut the door and waited. I could hear her sail down the hall and close the front door as nobody but Beatrice could close it. But I waited quite a long time after that to be sure she was gone: ten minutes at least. She didn’t see me, because if she had she would have had something to say.”
“That,” said Rob, “according to Beatrice’s story, was exactly fifteen minutes after seven.”
“Probably,” said Gally. “Well, it was a sort of shock seeing Beatrice like that. But nothing—” he went rather green around the mouth suddenly and wriggled again— “nothing to the shock I got when I walked into the library with the nutmeg in one hand and the glass in the other and there was Ivan. Dead as a doornail. Right there on the rug.” He pointed and stopped and gulped. And quite suddenly the shadows in the room seemed to pick it up and whisper it! “Dead as a doornail … dead as a doornail …” And the heavy brown curtains hung thickly, and the white, blind head of Caesar looked down as if it were not blind, and the glasses along the bookshelves were busy reflecting their faces eerily, reflecting other things, reflecting what they’d seen and what they knew.
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