Stephen glanced at his mother and said:
"You'd better come in and join the prayer meeting, Mr. Proctor. Public confessions are said to be good for the soul. Actually you've timed your entrance rather well. You are, I assume, interested in hearing who killed your niece?"
"No!" said Hearne suddenly and violently. "Don't be a fool, Maxie. Keep him out of it."
His voice recalled Proctor to a sense of his surroundings. He focused his attention on Felix and seemed to dislike what he saw. "So I'm not to stay! Suppose I choose to stay. I've a right to know what's going on." He glared round at the watchful, unwelcoming faces. "You'd like it to be me, wouldn't you? All of you.
Don't think I don't know. You'd like to pin it on me all right if you could. I'd have been in queer street if she'd been poisoned or knocked on the head. Pity one of you couldn't keep your hands off her, wasn't it? But there's one thing you can't pin on me and that's a strangling.
And why? That's why!"
He gave a sudden convulsive movement, there was a click and a moment of sheer unbelievable comedy as his artificial right hand fell with a thud on the desk in front of Dalgleish. They gazed at it fascinated f0f\ while it lay like some obscene relic, its rubber fingers curved in impotent supplication. Breathing heavily, Proctor hitched a chair beneath himself with a deft twist of his left hand and sat there triumphantly, while Catherine turned her pale eyes on him reproachfully as if he were a difficult patient who had behaved with more than customary petulance.
Dalgleish picked up the hand.
"We knew about this, of course, although I'm glad to say that my own attention was first brought to it less spectacularly. Mr. Proctor lost his right hand in a bombing incident. This ingenious substitute is made of moulded linen and glue. It's light and strong and has three articulated fingers with knuckle joints like a real hand. By flexing his left shoulder and slightly moving his arm away from his body, the wearer can tighten a control cord which runs from the shoulder to the thumb. This opens the thumb against the pressure of a spring. Once the tension on the shoulder is released the spring automatically closes the thumb against the firm fixed index finger. It is, as you can see, a clever contraption, and Mr. Proctor can do a great deal with it.
He can get through his work, ride a bicycle and present an almost normal appearance to the world. But there's one thing he can't do, and that is to kill by manual strangulation.' ' "He could be left-handed."
"He could be, Miss Bowers, but he isn't, and the evidence shows that, Sally was killed by a strong righthanded grip." He turned the hand over and pushed it across the table to Proctor.
"This of course, was the hand which a certain small boy saw opening the trapdoor of Bocock's stables. There could only be one person connected with this case who would be wearing leather gloves on a hot summer day and at a garden fete.
This was one clue to his identity and there were others. Miss Bowers is quite right.
Mr. Proctor was in Martingale that afternoon."
"What if I was? Sally asked me to come. She was my niece, wasn't she?"
"Oh, come now, Proctor," said Felix. "You aren't going to tell us that this zoi was a dutiful social call, that you were just dropping in to inquire after the baby's health! How much was she asking?"
"Thirty pounds," said Proctor. "Thirty pounds she was after and much good they would do her now."
"And being in need of thirty pounds," went on Felix remorselessly, "she naturally turned to her next of kin who might be expected to help. It's a touching story."
Before Proctor could answer Dalgleish broke in:
"She was asking for thirty pounds because she wanted to have some money ready for the return of her husband. It had been arranged that she should go on working and save what she could. Sally meant to keep that bargain to the last pound, baby or no baby. She intended to get this money from her uncle by a not uncommon method. She told him that she was shortly to get married, she didn't say to whom, and that she and her husband would make his treatment of her public unless he bought her silence. She threatened to expose him to his employers and the respectable neighbours of Canningbury. She talked about being done out of her rights. On the other hand, if he chose to pay up, neither she nor her husband would ever see or worry the Proctors again."
"But that was blackmail," cried Catherine. "He should have told her to go ahead and say what she liked. No one would have believed her. She wouldn't have got a penny out of me!" Proctor sat silent. The others seemed to have forgotten his presence. Dalgleish continued. ‹I think Mr. Proctor would have been very willing to take your advice, Miss Bowers, if his niece hadn't made use of one particular phrase. She talked about being done out of her rights. She probably meant no more than that a difference was made in the treatment of herself and her cousin, although Mrs. Proctor would deny that this was so. She may have known more than we realize. But for reasons which we needn't discuss here that phrase struck uncomfortably on her uncle's ear. His reaction must have been interesting and Sally was intelligent enough to take the clue. Mr. Proctor is no actor. He tried to find out how much his niece knew and the more he probed the more he gave away. By the time they parted Sally knew that those thirty pounds, and perhaps more, were well within her grasp."
Proctor's grating voice broke in: ‹I said I'd want a receipt from her, mind you. I knew what she was up to. I said I was willing to help her this once as she was getting married and there was bound to be expense. But that would be the end. If she tried it on again I'd go to the police, and I'd have the receipt to prove it."
"She wouldn't have tried it on again," said Deborah quietly. The men's eyes swung round to her. "Not Sally. She was only playing with you, pulling the strings for the fun of watching you dance. If she could get thirty pounds as well as her fun so much the better, but the real attraction was seeing you sweat. But she wouldn't have bothered to go on with it.
The entertainment palled after a time. Sally liked to eat her victims fresh."
"Oh no, no." Eleanor Maxie opened her hands in a little gesture of protest.
"She wasn't really like that. We never really knew her." Proctor ignored her and suddenly and surprisingly smiled across at Deborah as if accepting an ally.
'That's true enough. You knew what she was like. I was on a string all right.
She had it all worked out. I was to get the thirty pounds that night and bring it to her.
She made me follow her into the house and up to her room. That was bad enough, the sneaking in and out. That's when I met you on the stairs. She showed me the back door and said that she would open it for me at midnight. I was to stay in the trees at the back of the lawn until she switched her bedroom light on and off. That was to be the signal."
Felix gave a shout of laughter.
"Poor Sally. What an exhibitionist! She had to have drama if it killed her."
"In the end it did," said Dalgleish. "If she hadn't played with people Sally would be alive today."
"She was in a funny mood that day," remembered Deborah. "There was a kind of madness about her. I don't only mean copying my dress or pretending to accept Stephen. She was as full of mischief as a child. I suppose it could have been her kind of happiness."
"She went to bed happy," said Stephen.
And suddenly they were all quiet, remembering. Somewhere a clock struck sweetly and clearly but there was no other sound except the thin rasp of paper as Dalgleish turned over a page. Outside, rising into coolness and silence, was the staircase up which Sally had carried that last bedtime drink. As they listened it was almost possible to imagine the sound of a soft footfall, the brush of wool against the stairs, the echo of a laugh. Outside in the darkness the edge of the lawn was a faint blur and the desk light reflected above it like a row of Chinese lanterns hung in the scented night. Was there the suspicion of a white dress floating between them, a swirl of hair? Somewhere above them was the nursery, empty now, white and aseptic as a morgue. Could any of them face that staircase and open that nursery door without the fear that the bed might not be empty? Deborah shivered and spoke for them all. "Please," she said. "Please tell us what happened!"