She lifted her shoulders. She glanced down at the sofa, showing the fine line of neck and the dark brown hair.
"Older years," she said, "tell me that what I did was foolish and even cruel. King David knew that all is vanity. But I would do it again.
"I won't bore you with the middle years. I had to get work, but not in public, that is, where anyone could see my face. They wouldn't have my face. So it had to be in private: laundering, sewing, dressmaking; I was rather good at that. I took up my hobby of painting. After a long time—and I was very lucky, at that—I had a little success.
"Well!" smiled Irene Stanley, getting up from the sofa like a hostess at a cocktail party. "There's not much else, is there?"
"There's a great deal else," said Crystal. "But, please! Don't upset yourself!"
Her mother, a little taller, looked at Crystal steadily.
"I came to New York three years ago. A few of my paintings 'took' at the galleries. But I was (and am) a commercial artist; though I didn't dare ask for work at an agency because:.." She touched her left cheek. Her self-control began to shake again.
"Anyway," she added, "I'm a commercial artist. That's why I can rent this studio here. Do you like it?"
Seeing an opportunity to change the subject, they all jumped at it. They knew it could be for only a moment; they knew the devil was there, but they tried to screen him away with loud talk.
This studio, Cy reflected, might be bare white ribs and concrete underneath. But from ceiling to floor—except for two high and broad windows set very high up—the grey-velvet draperies swept down and round the windows on every side. The carpet was soft and dark. One wall of curtains swayed a little, suggesting that it made a partition with another room.
There were painting materials for both oils and water colour. Cy saw a number of canvases stacked along two walls. He saw the model's throne near the easel, and a commercial artist’s photographic equipment. Here you were in the middle of New York, with a faint white shimmer beyond the windows; yet it seemed as remote as some valley in the stars.
"I mean," Bob was asking, "do you actually live here?"
Irene Stanley laughed.
"Technically, no. For heaven's sake don't try to get an apartment here. They don't exist. But"— she nodded towards the unsteady wall of curtains—"I have a bed behind there, and a telephone in the name of Stanley Studio, and some primitive arrangements for a bathroom. If I want to sleep here, nobody bothers."
"But what about eating?"
"Oh, I'm not allowed to cook. That's against all the laws. But in the first months here..."
"Yes?" prompted Crystal.
"It was wonderfully lonely. Beautifully lonely! You could slip downstairs for a meal in a lunchroom, with some kind of odd veil across your cheek as though you meant it to be there. If s a great, thundery, hurrying city. Nobody noticed."
"But didn't you ever think of plastic surgery before?" cried Jean.
"Of course! In the old days I couldn't afford it Later—I thought the scars had been there too long to be treated."
Then Jean, the well-meaning, blurted out the one tactless question of all.
"While you were away from us, did you ever miss...?"
Jean stopped abruptly.
Irene Stanley, Cy always remembered afterwards, was just picking up one of the canvases against the left-hand wall—the picture a bright Venetian scene out of the sixteenth century. Irene Stanley, graceful and supple in her plum-coloured dress, straightened up against the grey drapery.
"Yes!" she said in a strange voice. "Yes, I did!"
The canvas dropped with a faint wooden rattle.
"Sometimes I could forget him, and you too, of course," she added hastily, "for six or seven months on end. Once it was nearly a year. And then something, the least little thing, would remind me. And I was in agony, sheer agony, as though I were doubled up with pain."
"Wait! Stop! I didn't mean ..."
"And shall I tell you," the woman went on, "what happened here, in this studio, when I met Fred—again? I didn't know his private-detective people had traced me. I was sitting here, cleaning some brushes, with the scarred side of my face to the door. And the door opened, and Fred walked in.
"He didn't hurt me worse by pretending not to notice what was there. He just said, 'Is this all that’s been troubling you, Betty? We'll have that gone in a week or two.' And I—I started to cry."
If heretofore there had been any anger in the voice of Irene Stanley, or Elizabeth Manning, it was gone now. She spoke simply, as of small matters.
"That was months ago. From then I began to live. Awhile ago, Sir Henry, you mentioned Richter of Vienna."
H.M., piled into the chair with his chin in his fist, merely nodded.
"Fred," she explained, "had him flown over here in a special plane. He"—she touched her left cheek-"did this."
"I was still thinkin', ma'am, that only two men in the world could have done it"
"As for Fred..." She stopped. Quickly she brought out, from behind the stacked canvases, one carefully hidden. It was a head-and-shoulders portrait of Manning, as vivid and alive as the man himself had been.
"He hadn't seemed to have grown a day older," said the woman, whipping the empty canvas off the easel and substituting Manning's portrait, "except that his hair was prematurely grey. His arms and shoulders and torso were like those of a man twenty years younger. He had grown up, but he was still as wildly romantic and—and foolish"—she smiled—"as when I new him last."
Slowly she looked round the group.
"You know, I think," she said, "what we intended to do. We were going away for a second honeymoon. We had all our plans made."
And then the devil jumped in, and would not be kept out.
"Y'see, that's just it," interposed the heavy voice of Sir Henry Merrivale. "We've got to hear all those plans before the coppers do. Will you tell me about 'em?"
Cy held his breath. Irene Stanley gave him a strange look. She moved over to the sofa again, and sat down and clasped her hands.
"It won't matter," she told H.M.
"Won't matter?"
"No. Tonight, Sir Henry, you came up here at not much later than half-past ten. You told me— with delicacy, I thank you—what had happened. Before that, I had seen the afternoon and evening papers, and only smiled at Fred's vanishing trick. Now you told me that someone had tried to kill him, with two stab wounds in his side. You asked me to wait for the children, and I did."
"All right, ma'am. Why do you say 'it won't matter?"
The dark blue eyes remained inscrutable. "If s gone on too long," she said simply. "If Fred dies, I die."
A suppressed cry, Cy could not tell from whom, rose up and was instantly stopped. H.M. stood up.
"Are you goin' to stop talkin' tommyrot?" demanded H.M.
"You wouldn't call it that"—she raised her eyes briefly—"if you knew my life."
"But this person who tried to kill him: don't you want that person caught and punished?"
"That person," she replied, "will never be caught or punished."
A cold chill seemed to settle in the studio, as though the grey draperies resembled the colour of Frederick Manning's face. Manning's portrait, with the amused eyes and the grey hair worn long but cropped up short under the ears, seemed to regard them in a different way.
"When you left here tonight, Sir Henry, I was frantic." Irene Stanley clasped her fingers more tightly. "I had to phone and find out how he was. I knew the servants wouldn't believe I was his wife. Then I thought of Stuffy. Stuffy's been there for twenty-one years: did he tell you?"
‘Yes," Cy Norton muttered inaudibly.