“No. Perhaps you, Mr. Wilde?”
“I?” said Wilde. “Well, I’m getting a bit stiff in the joints for that sort of exercise, Inspector.”
“Still, I understand you have accomplished it before, so if you don’t mind—”
“Very well,” agreed Wilde and Nigel felt that Alleyn was letting him off a piece of pantomime he had been so loath to perform.
“Now,” Alleyn continued, “I shall get the constable who assisted me before to impersonate Mr. Rankin, as that, perhaps, would be too painful an obligation to put upon any of his friends. Are you there, Bunce?” he said loudly. That officer emerged from the study.
“Just stand as you did before, will you,” said Alleyn. The constable moved to the cocktail tray, picked up the shaker and bent over with his back to the stairs.
“Thank you,” said Alleyn, “that will do. Now, Mr. Wilde. It is my theory that the murderer slid down the bannister rail, took the knife from the leather strip on the wall there with his right hand, leant across and drove it home. Will you mimic his movements along those lines?”
“It seems a bit fantastic,” said Wilde dubiously.
“Doesn’t it? Let us begin.”
Another silence and then Wilde slowly climbed the stairs. Two men had appeared in the hall, standing unobtrusively in the dining-room and drawing-room doorways. A third could be seen darkly through the glass door into the entrance lobby.
The lights, with the exception of the wall bracket above the cocktail tray, had all been switched off.
“What exactly is the procedure?” Wilde’s voice sounded plaintively from the shadowy stair head. Alleyn repeated his description.
“I’m not a star performer at this,” murmured the voice.
“Never mind — do your best”
The slight figure could scarcely be seen straddling the bannister. It began to move towards them very slowly, its spectacles gleaming a little in the dark.
“I can’t stand it!” screamed a woman’s voice suddenly. It was Mrs. Wilde. Nigel, resting his hands against Rosamund Grant’s chair, could feel it shaking.
“Faster!” said Alleyn urgently.
Wilde, leaning back and gripping the rail with his knees, shot downwards into the light.
“Now — now the knife,” cried Alleyn.
“I — don’t — quite — understand.”
“Yes, you do. With your right hand. Reach out to the leather strip. Lean over — further. Now — you have seized the knife. Lean over the other way. Watch him, watch carefully. Lean over the other way, man — but quick — quick as lightning. Now — strike down at him. Do as I tell you!”
The straddling figure moved its arm. Bunce fell forward. The great voice of the gong sounded again— ominous and intolerable. Through it the detective’s voice rose excitedly.
“There — there! That’s how it was. Turn all the lights on. Don’t move, Mr. Wilde. You are fully dressed now, you know. Lights, Bathgate!”
Nigel switched on the central candelabra. The hall was flooded with a hard white light.
Wilde still sat astride the bannister. His face, contorted into a horrible grimace, shone clammily. One corner of his mouth twitched. Alleyn moved swiftly towards him.
“Excellent,” he said, “only you should have been quicker — and you had forgotten something. Look here!” He suddenly thrust a yellow dogskin glove in front of Wilde’s face.
“That yours?” he said.
“God rot your bloody soul,” said Arthur Wilde.
“Arrest him,” said Alleyn.
Nigel stared out of his carriage window at a rapidly diminishing group of winter trees through whose ghostly branches glowed the warmth of old brick. A blue spiral of threadbare smoke rose from one of the chimneys, wavering uncertainly and spreading like a wraith of the tree-shapes beneath it. A little figure moved across the home field where Nigel had walked with Handesley. Already it was growing dark and a fragile mist skirted the woods.
“Good-bye, Frantock,” said Alleyn. The train roared into a cutting and the picture was turned into a dream.
“For you, Bathgate, au revoir, I suppose?”
“Who knows?” murmured Nigel and the detective did not answer.
For a long time neither of them spoke. Alleyn wrote in his little note-book. Nigel thought confusedly of his strange adventures and of Angela. At last, with his eyes on the fast-darkening windowpane he asked his question: “When were you first positive of him?”
Alleyn pressed a wisp of tobacco down into the bowl of his pipe.
“I don’t know,” he said at last “Do you realize that it was you who, from the very beginning, led me up the garden path?”
“I? What do you mean?”
“Can’t you see — can’t you see? You swore over and over again that during that fatal five minutes you were talking continuously to Arthur Wilde. So did his goat of a wife, poor little devil. She didn’t suspect him— she was terrified for herself. Oh, I know you said so in all good faith. You thought he had been talking all the time. Of course you did. You had an unconscious mental picture of Arthur Wilde lying in his tub and washing behind his ears. You heard all the suitable noises— splashy, soapy noises, running taps, and so on. If you could have seen!”
“Seen?”
“Seen through the wall. If only the wall had been like a transparency on the stage! If you could have seen Wilde come into the bathroom, wearing those silly little underpants Rankin had laughed at, as you told me, I remember, that very afternoon! You would have watched him lean over the bath, turn on the taps, splash about with his hands and move his lips as he spoke to you. You would have watched the inglorious little figure wipe his hands carefully, run into his wife’s dressing-room and come back with one glove on. He had a nerve-racking hunt for the left-hand glove but he had scuffled it over the back of the drawer in his hurry and it had fallen down through a gap in the old casing. How you would have gaped when he opened the door and (perhaps calling out to you first) peeped on to the landing and then, just as Ethel the housemaid entered your room, slipped out. Eight seconds later the gong sounded and the bathroom was blotted out in darkness so that you would not have seen the figure return, pull off its clothes and tumble into the bath. Still he talked to you while he washed and washed in case any of Rankin’s blood had splashed his body. It must have been awful waiting for the lights to show him if the glove was stained. I expect he pushed it into his pocket to wait until later when Mrs. Wilde was having hysterics in the drawing-room and you others were all clustered round her. That was his chance, I dare say, to run into the hall and thrust his wife’s dogskin glove into the fire and heap coal over it. The press button would have gone with the rest if it hadn’t dropped down between the bars into the tray beneath. That, with the left-hand glove, was my one exhibit. He kept his head pretty well. Even remembered to say ‘You are the corpse’ to someone on the landing. This was bound to come out with the rest of the evidence and it made a very good impression.”
“Why did he do it?” Nigel asked.
“Ah, the motive — or motives rather. Primarily, money. Wilde’s wife owes a thousand to various dressmakers. He is dunned by his landlord, and is deeply involved otherwise, and he lost heavily on his last book. He knew Rankin was leaving him three thousand pounds. Secondarily, we have two very interesting reasons why Wilde should have cause to welcome, if not to compass, Rankin’s death. He hated your cousin. I have gone extensively into their past relationship. Rankin bullied and goaded Wilde when they were at Eton. He showed a sort of contemptuous disregard for him in their later relations. I have learned from the waiters at night clubs, from a dismissed lady’s maid, and from you in your unsuspecting account of the ragging on Sunday, that Rankin flirted openly with Mrs. Wilde under the very nose of her supposedly good-natured, mild, and absent-minded husband. He had read Rankin’s letters. Here I had a stroke of luck. The packet of letters Miss Angela produced last night I examined and tested for finger-prints this morning. Mrs. Wilde had not touched them for some time, but he had quite recently. He must have spied upon her methodically and industriously, and of course there would be no difficulty in finding a key to the Tunbridge box. Possibly she had some inkling of this when she wrote to her old sewing maid and confidante asking her to burn the letters. More likely she was terrified of their being found and in some way incriminating her. I should say her husband was a bitterly jealous man.