Cy poured out another cup of coffee. He had forgotten what Crystal said, but it brought back with vividness the picture of that baseball field on Tuesday evening.
"Yes!" he admitted. "Half-past seven was the time, according to what your father told your mother, he had his appointment in the cenotaph. As you say, who did it? Who had the appointment?"
Crystal, dead tired but unwilling to admit it, looked at the coffee urn.
"It's no use rushing round and asking everybody: 'Where were you at half-past seven, or a little later, or maybe a little later than that?" Cy insisted.
"Why not?"
"Because everybody was milling round the field when H.M. made his triumphal entrance and began murdering the ball. You could get out to that cenotaph and back in a matter of minutes. Because, remember, the outfield fence extends only between the two outfield foul lines. You can walk around the fence and get there through a screen of trees. Just as H.M. said your father did when he left the pool for the cenotaph."
Then somebody could have been away from the field without being noticed?"
"That's it, I'm afraid."
"It can't be any of the family!" Crystal insisted. "It simply can't be!"
"That's what I think too. But your mother..."
"I can't get used to that 'mother,'" Crystal told him, her distress hunching up her shoulders. "When you've always thought of somebody as being a kind of shadowy presence, a—well, a ministering angel, and then you see her turn up so attractive she makes you look silly, just as you said...."
"I didn't say that'"
"You did! Don't deny it!" Crystal was pale, the Victorian style of her hair accentuating the pallor.
"If I did, I didn't mean it!"
"What’s more," Crystal went on, with intensity, "you saw how she treated my—my various marriages. I was just trying that because... oh, what the devil! It seemed it might be fun, and there was nothing else to do."
"Crystal, who started that crazy story about your mother being a bubble dancer or a fan dancer? H.M. seems to think it was your father."
"It was! He—he told me. I thought it was funny. Like a fool, I passed it on to Jean. She nearly fainted." Crystal flung away the subject. "My mother thinks there can't be any great love except her own. But there is! I know it, and I said so! Cy, listen. If you love me even as much as you say you do..."
Crystal rose to her feet So did Cy.
"Oh, not marriage!" Crystal spoke almost with repulsion. "The vows you take, which are real and true; and you only pretend to take them seriously! But if we went to Bermuda for a few months, and tried to find out if we did love each other...".
"Do you mean that?"
"Darling, yes!"
"If you're goin' to Bermuda for a couple of months," interrupted the dour voice of Sir Henry, who lumbered into the kitchen and glared at them, "then you'd better pay attention to what's happening now."
H.M. drawing up a chair to the table, staggered them by calmly producing a .38 police-positive revolver, which he had stuck into the waistband of his trousers like a pirate, and put it on the table.
"Do you know how to use one of these, son?" he asked Cy.
"I know how to use it, and I can handle it," returned Cy. "But I'm a rotten bad shot"
"Then you don't get one," said H.M., malevolently replacing the weapon in the waistband of his trousers. "But you'd better come along.
There's goin' to be a bit of shooting..." (his eyes wandered to the white electric clock on the wall, which pointed to a quarter to seven) "in about twenty minutes. No, no, not in the house!" His glare silenced Crystal, who had backed away. "Also, there'll be a bit of explaining about how Manning got out of the swimming pool."
"Look here," said Cy, and drank a cup of cold coffee. "Why in blazes can't you just tell us? ... Yes, yes, I know!" he added hastily, as H.M. began to draw himself up, "you're the old man! We understand that All the same, can't you give us an idea?"
"I told you last night," H.M. pointed out, "that Manning's trick was based on the same principle I used myself when I hocussed the subway turnstiles."
"And that tells me a hell of a lot, doesn't it?"
"No more can come out" H.M. said impressively, "than went in. You want to hear about that subway trick?"
"Yes!"
H.M., with a gleam of evil behind his spectacles, looked carefully round the kitchen before he went on.
"Well, now!" he resumed in a low rumble. "Imagine you're in any subway. For the sake of convenience, imagine that one at the shuttle: eight turnstiles with a good space in front of 'em. Hey?"
"I've got the picture, thanks. I was there."
"Ah!" said the old ogre. "But the whole trick is done before you work it, like a lot of good tricks.
"Now follow me. Before you're noticed, before you call attention to yourself, you just mosey along in front of eight turnstiles and drop a dime into (say) an assorted four of 'em, not using the turnstiles. One dime in each of four.
"Again listen close! People are using the turnstiles all the time. They keep clackin' and clatterin' all the time, before and after you do that. But there's always one extra dime in each of four turnstiles, no matter how many people me it Whatever its position is, the dime stays there for an extra fare.
"So you just call attention to yourself, by whoppin' down a big Gladstone bag on the floor and sitting on it. You wait like..."
"Like a spider," gritted Cy, remembering Jean's image. "Like a so-and-so lowdown spider!"
"Well—now!" said H.M., again deprecatingly modest. "Then you get your victim. You tell him you'd got 'em voo-doo'd, and bang you go through first one turnstile, then another."
"Wait a minute!" interrupted Cy, remembering back. "Officer O'Casey tried to charge after you, on the second one; and it held him. You said he had to utter the incantation. He did, and went through like Moses into heaven."
"That's right," agreed H.M. "But didn't you notice what I did just before then?"
"Just before then?"
"Sure. I said to good old O'Casey. 'That feller in the money-changing booth is just about having high blood pressure, ain't he?' And I pointed. The booth was behind him. Quite naturally he turned round and looked, and I dropped another dime in the turnstile while his head was turned. That’s all.
"Take it easy, now!" added H.M.
Whatever might have been due to him in the way of kicks or curses, H.M.'s expression had changed to one of grimness.
"You swat the old man," he said, "but take that lesson very seriously, my fatheads. That's the principle of misdirection. That's why so much of the evidence was shown bang in front of our eyes. And, up to a point, we never saw it."
Then he rose laborously to his feet
"Time's gettin' on, son," he told Cy. "Come along to a little party."
"What's going to happen?" Crystal's voice stuck in her throat. "You're going, Cy?"
"This is the showdown, my wench," said H.M. "I think hell go."
Cy went.
As they emerged first from the kitchen door and then from the screen door, they stepped into a white, clear dawn; but into a stillness so absolute that the screen door, banging behind them, sounded like a four-point-nine in an ack-ack battery.
The terrace, the lawn round the swimming pool, wore a shimmer of dew as clear as frost in midsumer. As they circled to the left of the swimming pool, they could hear their own footsteps in a dead world. On top of the rhododendron bushes far to the right Cy saw grotesquely the white shape of a water-polo ball.
Cy started to speak, but H.M. anticipated him as they passed the bathing huts towards the woods.
"No, son," H.M. assured him. "I told you before, that ball's got nothin' to do with it Somebody just slung it there, at one time or another, and it's been there ever since.''