On the opposite side of the pool, down the broad path which led between the rhododendrons to the bathing huts, Jean Manning trotted like a swimming professional as she adjusted her cap. She was laughing. She wore a scant two-piece suit of a colour that suggested pink tinged with purple, and set off the faint golden tan of her skin. Beside her trotted Davis, lean and athletic and Indian-brown except for his scarlet trunks. Jean and Davis looked like figures from a magazine cover.
Behind them, in a brown bathing suit somewhat less old-fashioned than H.M.'s, trotted Howard Betterton with a water-polo ball in his hands.
Jean stopped on the broad strip of grass between the bushes and the long side of the pool. Though there were deep shadows under her eyes, it was as though nothing at all had happened last night to upset her.
"Remember, Cy!" she called across the pool. "There's only fifteen minutes for this now. Then tennis. Then maybe more swimming."
"And you remember," Davis said to her, "I'm taking a day off work to please you."
They did not trouble with the diving board at the northern end. Round the whole pool, set flush with the grass, was a broad stone coping and, below this, a handrail raised just above water level.
Jean sprang to the edge of the coping. She looked at Davis with frank love and understanding.
"Criss!" she challenged. ,
"Cross!" retorted Davis happily.
They took off together in a beautiful standing dive which clove the water with only a faint rush and ripple—no splash. The water was dark and opaque, due to the pool's grey stone sides. They disappeared as though swallowed up.
"I am more cautious, gentlemen," called Betterton the lawyer.
He threw the water-polo ball into the pool, and stood contemplating on the edge.
"What’s the idea of bein' so ruddy energetic?" yelled H.M.
"I don't know," the lawyer confessed. "To be bright and fresh for work, I suppose. Work is all, or so they tell us."
Betterton grimaced and then smiled. Short and stocky and hairy, he blinked a good deal without his pince-nez. Gingerly he touched the water with one foot, finding it satisfactory. Since last night, Gy Norton had been given reason to admire his tact and poker face.
"Ah, well!" Betterton said. "Tennis in fifteen minutes! Excuse me!"
Whereupon, gravely holding his nose with no loss of dignity, he stepped forward and jumped into the pool with a heavy splash.
"H.M.!" Cy said fiercely.
"Hey?"
"Manning," said Cy. "When's he going to disappear? Where's he going to disappear?" Cy glanced at the pool, and a wild thought occurred to him. "You don't imagine...?"
"I dunno, son!" snapped H.M. The Old Maestro himself, it was clear, was badly worried. "About your idea, I'd say no. Not in broad daylight just after breakfast. For that sort of thing you want shadows and hootin' owls. Like the Bronze Lamp case."
On the grass some half a dozen feet behind them, a little more than midway down the length of the pool, was a long padded swing with orange upholstery and a sun canopy. Neither Sir Henry Merrivale nor Cy now wanted to sport like Tritons, though neither would admit it. They sat down in the swing, facing the pool.
"Get ready!" called Davis, amid splashings.
He lashed out his arm. The water-polo ball, gleaming white, skimmed across the water towards Jean who now hung by one hand onto the edge of the diving board. Betterton was sedately treading water, like a musing ecclesiastic.
Cy, since he had seen Jean Manning's figure in a bathing suit, was less troubled by her resemblance to someone else. Jean was less mature, less... anyway, though the image still troubled him, since last night he had found himself thinking of the last person who should have dominated his thoughts: the spoiled and selfish Crystal.
"I say, son." H.M.'s voice shattered absent thought. "Where's Fred Manning this morning? Have you seen him?"
"No. But Stuffy said he was trimming a hedge. As to what else he's doing..."
"As to what else I’m doing," interrupted the voice of Manning himself, "I can assure you its very little."
He had approached so soundlessly from the southern side, in cork-soled sandals like those of H.M. and Cy, that his appearance was as startling as a ghost
But Frederick Manning was a very solid ghost. He wore his usual loose Panama hat and loose white alpaca suit. A light silk scarf was knotted round his neck and thrust into the opening of the jacket, full country gentleman style. He also wore cotton gardener's gloves, and carried a large pair of pruning shears.
Manning snipped the shears in the air, as though to behead a fly.
"I assure you," he added, glancing at his wrist watch, "that it will be several hours before you have anything to fear. Meanwhile, aren't you going for a swim?"
"Aren't you?" demanded H.M.
"No. Now why," asked Manning, contemplating the shears, "should any sane man want to act like a demented merman, when he could sit quietly and read? Or get his skin burned so that it's torture to wear his shirt?"
There were more splashings from the pool. Past Manning, who stood with his back to it and faced H.M., Cy caught a glimpse of Jean's face. Jean no longer smiled. She seemed puzzled and almost horrified. Then she struck out in a crawl towards the water-polo ball.
"Tell me, son," rumbled H.M. "Last night, during dinner, you had a long telephone call from New York. When you came back to the table, you looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. Is it within the rule—grr! rules—to ask what it was?"
Manning regarded him quizzically.
"If it comes to that," he retorted, "you put through a telephone call to New York instead of receiving one. I was (forgive me) curious to see the number you scribbled on the pad. It was a Bronx telephone exchange."
H.M. wore an austere, stuffed, out-of-this-world look.
"That's got nothing to do with this business!" he said. "Honest it hasn't! I was tellin' young
Norton, yesterday..."
"Great Scott!" exclaimed Manning. "Look there!"
He was staring at the back of the house, and he had moved past the side of the swing to do so. The others crowded after him.
Manning might have been pointing at a chair on the shallow terrace behind, among other chairs. He might have been pointing to a chair which looked—the horrible but probably nonsensical fancy occurred to Cy—like the electric chair at Sing Sing.
But Manning was pointing, in fact, to a figure which had just emerged from the door of the screened sun porch. It was Crystal, wearing a very light beach robe over her bathing dress, and carrying a cap.
From behind them, water slopped and slapped from the pool. For some reason, to be in a swimming pool makes people shout like Frenchmen.
"One more dive, Mr. Betterton," said Jean. "Then out we go. Ready Dave?"
"Almost," puffed Davis.
Manning was still staring at Crystal, against the long, low, white-painted house with its green window framings, polished now by the morning sun.
"Not since she was a girl," he vowed, "did I ever know that young woman to get up before half-past eleven in the morning. There's something wrong, I assure you. What's the attraction down here?"
Then things began to happen—and happen fast
And, since in a chronicle of this kind it must be established that somebody is telling the truth, we must watch that scene through the trained eyes of Cy Norton.
First he heard the noise. It was far away, somewhere beyond the house and probably in Elm Road, which led up from the railway station. The noise was a faint wailing, as of children; then it churned, and grew to a banshee howl. It swept closer and stopped, evidently near the front door of the house.
Frederick Manning, with a startled face, had backed away until he was almost at the coping of the pool.