She met his eyes squarely. “I am.” Her voice was perfectly controlled. “I don’t say they’re lying. I don’t know. I only know if it was someone imitating Arthur Tingley’s voice, I’ve never heard anything to equal it.”
“You still think it was him.”
“I do.”
“Why did you tell me — on Wednesday, there in the sauce room — why did you tell me that when you got home Tuesday evening you stood your umbrella in the bathtub to drain?”
“Because I—”
She stopped, and it was easy to tell from her face what happened. An alarm had sounded. Some nerve band had carried the lightning message: “Look out!” Any eye might have seen it, and to a trained eye it was so patent that Inspector Damon emitted a little growl and involuntarily straightened his shoulders. All were looking at her.
“Why,” she asked, her soprano voice a shade thinner than it had been, but quite composed, “did I say that? I don’t remember it.”
“I do,” Fox declared. “The reason I bring it up, you also told me you left here at a quarter past six and went straight home, which is only a five-minute walk. It didn’t start raining that evening until three minutes to seven, so I wondered why your umbrella needed draining at 6:20.”
“Then why didn’t you ask me?”
“A darned good question,” Fox conceded. “First, ignorance. At that time I didn’t know when the rain had started. Second, poverty of intellect. When I found out, accidentally, what time the rain started, I couldn’t remember why it should have started earlier.”
“But you remember it now? That I said that? I don’t.”
“Well, I do.” Fox wouldn’t let her eyes away from him. “There are, of course, two possible explanations. One, that your umbrella got wet without any rain, say from a fire hose. Two, that you left here to go home, not at 6:15 as you said you did, but considerably later. May I tell you why I like the second explanation best?”
Miss Yates snorted. She looked at Damon. “Inspector, you say this is an official inquiry. It sounds to me more like this man showing off and making a poor job of it. What he remembers, what I said to him that I didn’t say...”
“Don’t answer him if you don’t want to,” Damon said dryly.
“But this is a place of business and I have something better to do—”
“I won’t keep you much longer,” Fox assured her, “and I have no more questions to ask. I just want to tell you that I like the second explanation best because it fits so well into the only satisfactory theory of the murder of Arthur Tingley. If you had gone home at 6:15, as you said, you couldn’t very well have been here to knock Miss Duncan on the head when she arrived at ten minutes past seven. Of course you could have gone and returned here, that’s possible though unlikely, and it wouldn’t change things any.”
Miss Yates said nothing, but she smiled. It was the first time Fox had seen her smile. He shot a glance at Damon, Damon made a quick gesture to the man who stood by the safe, and the man moved to within an arm’s length of Miss Yates’s chair.
“The theory starts back a few weeks,” Fox resumed. “As you remarked to me on Wednesday, this business and this place were everything to you; you had no life except here. When P. and B. made an offer to buy the business you became alarmed, and upon reflection you were convinced that sooner or later Tingley would sell. This old place would of course be abandoned. That was intolerable to you. You considered ways of preventing it, and what you hit on was adulterating the product, damaging its reputation sufficiently so that P. and B. wouldn’t want it. You chose what seemed to you the lesser of two evils. Doubtless you thought that the reputation could be gradually reestablished.”
Sol Fry, who, like the others, had been dividing his attention, deliberately turned half around in his chair and stared at Miss Yates incredulously. She was unaware of it, for she wasn’t looking at him.
“It seemed probable,” Fox conceded, “that it would work. The only trouble was, you were overconfident. You were in your own mind so completely identified with the success and very existence of this place and what went on here, that you never dreamed that Tingley would arrange with your subordinates to check on you secretly. Tuesday afternoon you learned about it when Fry caught Miss Murphy in the act. And you had no time to consider the situation, to do anything about it, for almost immediately afterward — at a quarter to six, just after he phoned his niece to come and help him with his adopted son — Tingley called you into his office and accused you.”
“You were behind the desk and heard him,” said Miss Yates sarcastically.
“No, I wasn’t. But I’ll finish with the theory. Tingley not only accused you, he told you that he had proof. He had got from Carrie Murphy a jar containing a sample of one of your mixes, and it had quinine in it. Knowing his temper, I suspect that he not only fired you but announced that he was going to prosecute, but that isn’t essential to the theory, for I know he told you he was going to sell the business. At least he phoned to Leonard Cliff, undoubtedly in your presence, and made an appointment to see him the next morning, and there could have been only one reason for that. I suppose you implored him, pleaded with him, and were still pleading with him, from behind, while he was stooping over the basin behind the screen to wash his hands. He didn’t know you had got the two-pound weight from his desk, and never did know it. It knocked him out. You went and got a knife and finished the job, there where he lay on the floor, and you were searching the room, looking for the sample jar which he had got from Carrie Murphy, when you heard footsteps.”
Only the man standing near Miss Yates’s chair could see the rhythmic contortions of her fingers in her lap.
“Naturally that alarmed you,” Fox continued. “But the steps were of only one person, and that a woman. So you stood behind the screen with the weight in your hand, hoping that whoever it was she would come straight to that room and enter it, and she did. She even obligingly stopped, became motionless, just at the spot where you could hit her without first taking a step. You dragged her behind the screen, as a precaution in the event of the arrival of another unexpected caller, and you got an idea upon which you immediately acted by pressing her fingers around the knife handle, from which of course your own prints had been wiped—”
A stifled gasp interrupted him — from Amy Duncan, who was staring at Miss Yates in horrified disbelief.
Fox answered it without moving his eyes from Miss Yates. “I doubt if you intended to incriminate Miss Duncan. You probably calculated — and for an impromptu and rapid calcuation it was a good one — that when it was found that the weight had been wiped and the knife handle had not, the inference would be, not that Miss Duncan had killed Tingley, but that the murderer had clumsily tried to pin it on her. That tended to divert suspicion from you, for it was known that you had been on friendly terms with her and bore her no grudge. It was a very pretty calculation for a hasty one. Hasty, because now you were in a hurry, and you hadn’t found the jar. You were so hasty that when Tingley’s coat slipped off its hanger while you were searching the pockets you left it lying on the floor. I suppose you had previously found that the safe door was open and had looked in there, but now you tried it again. No jar was visible, but a locked metal box was there on a shelf, and you picked it up and shook it.”
Damon muttered involuntarily, “I’ll be damned.”
“You shook it,” Fox repeated, “and it sounded as if the jar was in it. Not exactly, perhaps, but near enough to you as you were then. You were getting panicky. Amy’s arrival had unnerved you. If she could appear unexpectedly, anyone could, a regiment could. The box was locked. To go to the factory again and get something to pry it open with — no. Enough. Besides, the jar was in no other likely place, so that must be it. Your nerves couldn’t take any more. You took the box and went, leaving by the stairs in the rear and the delivery entrance. You may even have been startled into a precipitate exit by the sound of more footsteps on those old stairs, for Guthrie Judd arrived only ten minutes after Miss Duncan did. You hurried home through the rain, for it was certainly raining then, and had just got your umbrella stood in the tub to drain and your things off when Carrie Murphy arrived.”