“Or perhaps,” Mr. Falls suggested, “he was merely a passionate collector. There are men, you know, who, without any real appreciation for such things, become obsessed with a most imperative desire to acquire them. Scrupulous in other things they are entirely unscrupulous in that.”
“He was a pretty keen man of business,” Dikon said.
“I’ll say he was,” said Webley. “We’ve found blueprints for a new Wai-ata-tapu hotel and grounds that’d make Rotorua look like Shanty-town. Wonderful place he’d planned to make of it.”
He put Questing’s letter in a large envelope, made a note of its contents across the back, and asked Dikon and Falls to sign it. They went out and he locked the door after them.
“Well,” said Dikon as they walked along the verandah. “I never quite believed he was a spy.”
“It seems to leave the field wide-open again, doesn’t it?” Mr. Falls murmured.
“For an enemy agent who is also a murderer?”
“It is a strong presumption. Have you any objection, Webley, to our making this new development known to the rest of our party?”
Webley was close behind them. Mr. Falls stopped and turned to await his answer. It was a long time coming.
“Well, no,” said Webley at last. “There’s no objection to that. I can’t exactly stop you, can I, Mr. Falls?”
“I mean, with an enemy in our midst, isn’t it a wise policy to put everyone on the alert as it were? Will you go in, Bell?”
“After you,” said Dikon.
“Mr. Falls and I,” said Webley, “are going to wash our hands. Don’t wait for us, Mr. Bell.”
Upon this sufficiently broad hint, Dikon went in to lunch.
The rest of the party was already seated. Dikon joined his employer. Dr. Ackrington and the Claires, with the exception of Simon, were at the large family table. Simon sat apart with his friend Mr. Smith. Mr. Falls, when at last he and Webley came in, went to his own table close by.
“Do you mind if I join you, sir?” said Webley and did so.
“But I am honoured, Sergeant. As my guest, I hope?”
“No, no, sir, thanking you, all the same,” said Webley. “I see there’s a place laid, that’s all.”
He had made a mistake, it seemed. There was no second place laid at Mr. Falls’s table but Huia, still very woebegone, rectified this, and he sat down.
“Nice of you to join me, Dikon,” said Gaunt loudly. “I appear to be in disgrace.”
Barbara turned her head swiftly and as swiftly looked away again.
“I forgot to say,” Gaunt added, “that Questing asked fifty guineas for the adze. I shall always wonder if the price was excessive. I must ask the embarrassing old gentleman.”
Nobody answered this sally. Gaunt thrust out his chin and gave Dikon one of his hard bright glances.
Luncheon went forward in a silence that was only broken by Sergeant Webley’s conscientious attention to his food. At an early stage of this uncomfortable meal Dikon, who faced the windows, saw two of Webley’s men come round the shoulder of the hill carrying a covered stretcher between them. They disappeared behind the manuka hedge, taking the roundabout path to the cabins. This unmistakable incident killed what little appetite he had. In a minute or two the men, without their burden, appeared on the verandah. Here they were joined by a young man in grey flannel trousers and a sports coat whom Dikon had no difficulty in recognizing as a representative of the press. This new arrival, with an air of innocent detachment, stared in at the windows. Webley looked at him with lack-lustre eyes and shook his head. The two plain-clothes men hung about near the door. The pressman sat on the verandah step and lit his pipe. The party in the dining-room, though aware of these proceedings, paid no attention to them. “The resemblance to the monkey-house at feeding time grows more pronounced every second,” thought Dikon. Huia collected the plates and, when Mrs. Claire was not watching her, tipped uneaten pieces of cold meat onto one dish. As if by agreement, Mrs. Claire and Barbara went out together.
Smith sucked his teeth savagely, muttered “Excuse me” and slouched out to the verandah. The pressman looked up hopefully and spoke to him but evidently got an uncompromising answer. He let Smith move off, looking wistfully after him.
In heavy silence the remaining seven men finished their meal.
“One can hardly hear oneself speak for the buzz of gay inconsequent chatter,” said Gaunt. “I think I shall relax for half an hour.”
He pushed back his chair.
“There is, after all, sufficient reason for our silence,” said Mr. Falls.
Something in his attitude, though he had not risen, and some new quality in the tone of his voice, which was a deep one, brought a sudden stillness upon his hearers.
“When one is in danger of arrest,” said Mr. Falls, “one does not feel disposed for chatter. May I, however, claim the attention of the company for a moment? Sergeant Webley, will you indulge me?”
Webley, who had made a brusque movement when Gaunt’s chair scraped on the floor, leant the palms of his hands on the table and, looking attentively at Falls, said: “Go ahead, sir.”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Falls, “whether you are all devotees of detective fiction. I must confess that I am. It is argued, in respect of these tales, that they bear little or no relation to fact. Police investigation, we protest, is not a matter of equally balanced motives, tortuous elaborations, and a final revelation in the course of which the investigator’s threat hangs like an ignis fatuus over first one and then another of the artificially assembled suspects. It is rather the slow amassment of facts sufficient to justify the arrest of someone who has been more or less suspect from the moment that the crime was discovered. Sergeant Webley,” said Mr. Falls, “will correct me if I am wrong.”
Sergeant Webley cleared his throat sluggishly. One of the men outside the window looked over his shoulder into the room, turned away again, and moved out of sight.
“However that may be,” Falls continued, and they listened to him with confused attention as if he had, without warning, thrust an embarrassing ceremony upon them, “however that may be, I detect some resemblance in our present assembly to those arbitrary musters, and with the permission of Sergeant Webley I should like, before we break up, to clear the memory of Mr. Maurice Questing. Mr. Questing was not an enemy agent.”
Here Dr. Ackrington broke out with some violence and was not silenced until an account of Questing’s letter had, by a sort of forcible feeding, been rammed down the gullet of his understanding. He took it rather badly. The recovery of Questing’s skull had evidently been broken to him but this final blow to the very cornerstone of all his theories seemed literally to horrify him. He turned quite pale, his protestations ceased, and he waited in silence for Falls to go on.
“Not only was Questing innocent of espionage but, if we are to believe his letter, he actually recognized and accused the real culprit, who adopted a threatening attitude, and, by a species of blackmail, extracted an undertaking from Questing that he would not betray him. Questing suggests that when they parted they were mutually distrustful of one another, and I suggest that fright, rather than business, prompted his sudden decision to go to Australia. He felt himself to be in danger just as we now feel ourselves to be in danger, and, in a figure that he himself might have used, he passed the buck to Mr. Bell. I think he must have written that letter just before we left for the concert. I happened to pass his open door and saw him with his elbows squared on his table. As you know, some three hours later he was killed.”
“Will you excuse me,” said Gaunt. “I don’t want to be difficult but, as I’ve tried to point out before, I’ve been extremely upset by this unspeakably horrible affair and I’m afraid I just haven’t got the kind of mind that revels in post mortems. I’m sorry. I shall leave you to it.”