“There isn’t anything to tell. But you’ve succeeded in humiliating me in front of my mother and my sister. So I might as well get the rest of it off my chest.
“All right: I did it. Just as you said. I went up there just after I’d talked to Eve. The rest of the house was all quiet. I had the imitation necklace in the pocket of my dressing gown. I opened the door. Then I saw that the desk lamp was burning, and that the poor old governor was sitting there with his back to me.
“That’s all I did see. I’m near-sighted too, you know. Like mother. You may have noticed it from the way I,”—again he made one of those characteristic gestures, his hand shading his eyes, and blinked,—“never mind! I ought to wear glasses. I always do, at the bank. So I couldn’t tell he was dead, either.
“First I started to close the door and duck out in a hell of a hurry. Then I thought: why not? Do you know how it is? You plan something. Then you put it off, and put it off. And at last it seems that if you don’t get on and do it, you’ll go scatty.
“That’s why I thought: why not? The old governor’s partly deaf, and he’s all absorbed in that snuffbox. The curio cabinet’s just by the door of the study. All I needed to do was reach in and change the necklaces, and who’s the wiser? Then I could get some sleep and forget that little devil in the rue de la Harpe. So I reached out. The cabinet door hasn’t got any lock or catch. It opens without a sound. I picked up the necklace. And then…”
Toby paused.
The white searchlight beam wheeled across the room, but none of the rest of them noticed it. The urgency of Toby’s manner forced attention with painful intensity.
“I knocked that music box off the glass shelf,” he added.
Again he searched for words.
“It’s a big, heavy music box, made out of wood and tin, and it’s got little wheels. It stands on the glass shelf beside the necklace. My hand struck it. It fell off on the floor with a crash fit to wake the dead. The poor old governor was rather deaf, but he wasn’t deaf enough not to hear that crash.
“And that’s not all. The music box no sooner hit the floor than it started to whir, and twist as though it were alive, and then it commenced to play John Brown’s Body. It tinkled as loud as twenty music boxes in the middle of the night, while I stood there with the necklace in my hand.
“I looked round. But the poor old governor still didn’t move.”
Again Toby swallowed hard.
“That was how I came to go closer, and look at him. You know what I found. I turned on the ceiling lights to make sure, but there wasn’t any doubt about it. I was still holding the necklace. That must have been when I got some blood on the necklace, though I didn’t get any blood on my gloves. The governor was as peaceful as sleep, except for his battered head. And all this time the music box was still playing John Brown’s Body.
“I had to shut it up. I ran back, and picked it up, and shoved it back in the cabinet. What’s more, I realized I couldn’t change the necklaces now. This was something for the police. I thought a burglar’d done it. But if I gave Prue a necklace worth a hundred thousand francs, and the police heard about it, and then discovered an imitation in the cabinet….
“I lost my head. Who the devil wouldn’t have? I looked over, and there was a poker hanging as calm as you please among the fire irons. I went over and picked it up. There was blood and hair on it. I put it back. That finished me. All I could think of was getting out of there. I started to put the necklace back in the curio cabinet, but it slipped on the plush background (which slants upright, remember?), and fell down under the cabinet, and I let it stay there. But I had sense enough to switch off the central lights before I left. That seemed only decent, somehow.”
His voice trailed away.
The examining magistrate’s office was full of evil images.
Dermot Kinross, sitting on the edge of M. Vautour’s desk, studied Toby with an expression in which it was hard to separate the cynicism from the admiration.
“You never mentioned this to anybody?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I—it might have been misunderstood. People mightn’t have understood my motives.”
“I see. Any more than they understood Eve Neill’s motives, when she told her story? Then can you, in fairness, ask us to believe in yours?”
“Stop it!” begged Toby. “How was I to know anybody saw anything from that blasted window across the street?” He glanced at Eve. “First off, Eve herself swore she hadn’t seen anything. I appeal to all of you if that’s not so! I never heard anything about these ‘brown gloves’ until last night.”
“Yet you never told about this escapade of yours, even though it must have done so much to show your fiancée was innocent?”
Toby looked dazed. “I don’t follow that!”
“No? Look here. Immediately after you telephoned to her at one o’clock, you went upstairs and found your father dead?”
“Yes.”
“Therefore, if she killed him, she did it before one o’clock? At one o’clock—her work finished—she is back in her bedroom talking to you?”
“Yes.”
“Her work is finished and she is back home by one o’clock. Then how is it that she goes out of the house again, and doesn’t come back until one-thirty, with fresh blood on her?”
Toby opened his mouth, and shut it again.
“It won’t do, you know,” Dermot objected with deceptive mildness. “Twice is too much. This whole scene described by Yvette, of the terrified murderess creeping back from her crime at half-past one, unlocking the front door, ‘much tousled,’ and hastening to wash the blood from herself: no. It’s too much of a good thing. You don’t suggest she went out and committed another murder, after Sir Maurice Lawes had been dead for half an hour? Because, being back home following the death of her first victim, she must surely have tidied herself up before going out again?”
Dermot, his arms folded, lounged idly on the edge of the desk.
“You agree, M. Vautour?” he inquired.
Helena Lawes shook herself free from her brother’s restraining grasp.
“I can’t understand these subtleties,” Helena said. “All I’m interested in is my son.”
“Well, I’m not,” interposed Janice unexpectedly. “If Toby’s been carrying on with that girl in the rue de la Harpe, and Toby did what he admits he did, I say we’ve been treating Eve in a filthy way.”
“Be quiet, Janice. If Toby did that, as you say…”
“Mother, he admits it!”
“Then I daresay he had a good reason. With all due respect to Eve, and I’m only too glad if she can get out of this, that’s not what I’m concerned with. Dr. Kinross, is Toby telling the truth?”
“Oh, yes,” said Dermot.
“He didn’t kill poor Maurice?”
“Certainly not.”
“But somebody did,” Uncle Ben pointed out. Uncle Ben’s eyes shifted.
“Yes. Somebody did,” acknowledged Dermot. “We were coming to that.”
Throughout this, the only person who had not spoken was Eve herself. While the white light swung, flinging distorted shadows of these people on the walls—a moving procession like a shadow show—Eve had sat staring at the tips of her shoes. Only once, at a certain part of the recital, did she hold tightly to the arms of her chair as though recalling something. There were faint shadows under her eyes, and the white mark of her teeth in her lower lip. She nodded to herself. Now she looked up, meeting Dermot’s eye.
“I think I’ve remembered,” she told him, clearing her throat, “what you wanted me to remember.”
“I owe you an explanation. Also an apology.”
“No!” said Eve. “No, no, no! I understand now why I got into trouble when I told my story today.”
“Well, if you’ll let me speak without shushing me,” protested Janice, “I don’t understand it. What’s the answer?”
“The answer,” replied
Dermot, “is the name of the murderer.”
“Ah!” murmured M. Goron.
Eve contemplated the Emperor’s snuff-box, glowing with all its colors on the desk beside Dermot’s hand.
“I’ve been nine days in a nightmare,” she went on. “A nightmare of brown gloves. I couldn’t think of anything else. And then they turn out to be only Toby.”
“Thanks,” muttered the gentleman in question.
“I wasn’t being sarcastic. I mean it. If you’re so concentrated on a thing like that, you don’t consciously remember other things. Also, you’re ready to swear something is true which really isn’t true. You think it is, but it isn’t. It’s only sometimes, when you’re so exhausted that your conscious brain doesn’t work, you remember the truth.”
Helena Lawes’s voice had gone high.
“Really, my dear,” she cried, “this may be all very psychological and Freudian and what not, but will you please tell us what in the name of heaven you’re talking about?”
“That snuff-box,” answered Eve.
“What about it?”
“It was smashed by one of the murderer’s blows. Just afterwards, the police gathered up all the fragments and took them away to fit them together. Do you know, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever set eyes on it.”
“But —!” began Janice in evident bewilderment.
Dermot Kinross pointed.
“Look at the snuff-box,” he suggested. “It’s not large. Two and a quarter inches across, according to the measurements Sir Maurice wrote down. And what does it look like, even seen close at hand? It looks exactly like a watch. In fact, when Sir Maurice first showed it to his family, they thought it was a watch. Is that right?”
“Yes,” admitted Uncle Ben. “But…”
“It certainly doesn’t suggest a snuff-box in any way?”
“No.”
“It was never, at any time previous to the murder, shown to Eve Neill or described to her?”
“Apparently not.”
“Then how, when she declares she saw it from a distance of fifty feet away, could she have known it was a snuff-box?”
Eve closed her eyes.
M. Goron and the examining magistrate exchanged glances.
“That’s the whole answer,” continued Dermot. “That, and the power of suggestion.”
“Power of suggestion?” screamed Helena.
“The murder in this case has been very clever. A damnably brilliant plot, with Eve Neill as its second victim, was constructed to provide the criminal with a cast-iron alibi for the murder of Sir Maurice Lawes. And he very nearly got away with it. Would you like to know who the murderer is?” Dermot slid off the edge of the desk. He walked to the door giving on the hall, and flung the door open as the white beam from the searchlight circled again.
“In fact, he’s been egomaniac enough to insist on coming here, in spite of our efforts to prevent him, and testify for himself. Come in, my friend. You’re very welcome.”
Clear in the bluish-white glare, they saw just outside the white, staring face of Ned Atwood.
XX
IN LATE AFTERNOON OF a fine day just a week later, Janice Lawes voiced her views.
“Then the blameless witness of the crime, whose lips were sealed because he couldn’t compromise a lady’s reputation,” Janice said, “was actually the man who committed the crime? Isn’t that something new?”
“Ned Atwood thought it was,” Dermot admitted. “He took the case of Lord William Russell, at London in 1840, and he put a reverse twist on it.
“His object, as I told you, was to provide himself with an alibi for the murder of Sir Maurice. Eve was to be his alibi and his witness: all the more convincing because she would be an unwilling witness, do you see?”
Eve shivered.
“That was the original scheme, which I’ll explain to you. Ned couldn’t know that Toby Lawes would walk smack into the middle of it, wearing a pair of brown gloves: thus providing him with a victim as well as a witness. When Atwood saw that, he must have shouted and thought it was too good to be true. On the other hand, he couldn’t have foreseen that he would fall downstairs and get concussion of the brain: thus, as it eventually happened, ruining his whole plan. So the honors of chance are even on both sides.”
“Come on,” Eve said abruptly. “Let’s hear about it, please. All about it.”
A slight tension gathered round them. Eve, Dermot, Janice, and Uncle Ben were sitting after tea in the back garden of Eve’s villa, in the shade of the high walls and chestnut trees. The table had been set out under a tree, whose leaves were now touched with faint traces of yellow.
(The autumn is coming, thought Dermot Kinross, and I go back to London tomorrow).
“Yes,” he said. “I want to tell you about it. Vautour and Goron and I have been gathering up the threads all week.”
Looking at Eve’s anxious face, he bitterly hated what he had to tell.
“You’ve been infernally close-mouthed,” grumbled Uncle Ben. After an uneasy whir in the throat, he burst out: “What still beats me is the fellow’s motive for killing Maurice!”
“And me,” said Eve. “What was it? He didn’t even know Papa Lawes, did he?”
“Not consciously,” answered Dermot.
“What do you mean, not consciously?”
Dermot leaned back in the wicker-chair, crossing his knees. When he lit one of his Maryland cigarettes, the concentration of his expression—an angry concentration—made more lines appear in the face than were customarily there. But he tried not to show this when he smiled at Eve.
“I want you to think back over several matters we’ve discovered. When you were still married to Atwood, and living here in the old days,”—he saw her flinch,—“you weren’t yet acquainted with the Lawes family, were you?”
“No.”
“But you several times noticed the old man?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And, whenever he saw you and Atwood together, he looked very hard at you two, as though perplexed? Yes. He was trying to remember where he had seen Ned Atwood before.”
Eve sat up. A sudden premonition, an inspired guess, flashed through her mind. But Dermot was not guessing.
“And once,” he went on, “after you were engaged to Toby Lawes, Sir Maurice started to question you about Atwood in a veiled way; but hemm’d and haw’d, and gave you an odd look and said nothing else? Yes. Now, you married Atwood. But what do you know about him, even now? What did you ever learn about him: his previous history, background, anything?”
Eve moistened her lips.
“Nothing at all! Oddly enough, I was throwing that at him on the very night of—the murder.”
Dermot next looked at Janice, who had also opened her mouth with an expression of startled and dawning comprehension.
“You told me, my girl that your father had a very bad memory for faces. But, every once in a while, something would remind him with a bang and he’d remember where he had seen a certain person before. Well, he had seen many faces, naturally, in the course of his prison work. We’re not likely to learn just when he remembered where he’d seen Atwood before. What he did remember was that ‘Atwood,’ a model convict, had escaped from prison while serving a five years’ sentence at Wandsworth for bigamy.”
“Bigamy?” cried Eve.
But she did not contradict. In imagination she saw Ned stepping across the twilight grass, as clearly as though she could see him in the flesh, and watch his grin.
“A Patrick-Mahon sort of fellow,” Dermot went on. “Very attractive to women. A Continental drifter, keeping away from England. Picking up money here and there on a business deal, but also borrowing from —” Dermot checked himself.
“Anyhow, you can see the shape of events take form.
“You and Atwood were divorced. I can’t exactly say that: legally, you were never married. And his name, by the way, isn’t Atwood. You must have a look at his record one day. After the so-
called divorce, Atwood went to the United States. He said he was going to get you back, and he meant to do so. But, in the meantime, you became engaged to Toby Lawes.
“Sir Maurice was well satisfied. In fact, he was delighted. He meant to let nothing, nothing, stand in the way of this match. I know Janice and Mr. Phillips will understand what I mean when I say…”
There was a silence.
“Yes,” grunted Uncle Ben, chewing at his pipe. He added fiercely: “Always been on Eve’s side myself.”
Janice looked at Eve.
“I treated you rottenly,” she burst out, “because I didn’t understand what a selfish swine Toby is. Yes, I say that: even if he is my brother! But, as far as you were concerned, I never really thought…”
“Not even,” smiled Dermot, “when you suggested she might have been in prison?”
Janice put out her tongue at him.
“But you gave us the clue,” Dermot went on. “In essentials, you gave us the whole story in that parable about the man called Finisterre or McConklin. For notice what happened! History repeated itself. You can’t be blamed if you had it the wrong way round. Now, I think it was well known all over the place that Ned Atwood had returned to La Bandelette, and was putting up at the Donjon.
“Sir Maurice went out for his afternoon walk. Where did he go? To the back bar of the Donjon Hotel. And who, as we’ve known all along, was in that bar? Ned Atwood, loudly boasting he was going to get his wife back, no matter what he had to tell people about her.
“You, Janice, even suggested once that Atwood met your father, and talked to him. That’s exactly what happened. Your father said, ‘Will you come outside and have a word with me, sir?’ Atwood didn’t know what was up. But he went. And he learned—with what sick rage we can imagine—that the old man was very well posted about his history.
“They walked in the Zoological Gardens. Sir Maurice, trembling a good deal, said exactly what he once said to Finisterre. Do you remember?”
Janice nodded.
“‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours to make yourself scarce,’” Janice quoted. “‘At the end of that time, whether you’ve done it or not, a full account of you in your new life—where you’re to be found—your new name—everything about you—goes to Scotland Yard.’”
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