Nicholas didn’t do it because at some time after he left the smoking-room, the wireless was switched on. This must have been done by William or conceivably by his murderer. We didn’t see him, although the door was open. The screen hid him. But someone did cross the room and turn on the wireless.
Lady Hersey went in with the drink and of course, theoretically, could have killed William, and then come and called Jonathan. No motive.
Hart came out of the “boudoir,” and was seen by Thomas as he brought the drinks. When Thomas reappeared, a few seconds later, Hart was on the stairs. No time to go back and kill William in the interim. He didn’t return before the news because Thomas remained in the hall until then and because William turned on “Boomps-a-Daisy” after Hart had gone. If Hart killed William it was after Thomas left the hall. Could he have done it in the time and still have avoided meeting Jonathan?
Jonathan himself left the library after the news began and returned before Hersey took in the drink. He says he crossed the hall to and from the cloak-room, and saw nobody. Could Hart have dodged him? Possible.
This seems to be the only explanation.
Here the summary came abruptly to an end. Mandrake sat very still for perhaps a minute. Then he took out his cigarette case, put it down unopened, and reached again for his pen. He added six words to his summary —
Could Hart have set another booby-trap?
When he lifted his hand he saw that he had left a small red stain on the paper. He had washed his hands as soon as he came upstairs but his mind jumped, with a spasm of nausea, to the memory of the red star that had fallen from William’s mouth. Then he remembered that when he took out his cigarette case he had felt a prick and there, sure enough, on the tip of his middle finger, was a little red globule. He felt again in his pocket and found the drawing-pin that had penetrated the sole of his shoe. He put it on the paper before him. Across the back of the drawing-pin was a dry white ridge.
He heard William’s voice speaking gravely in the drawing-room: “Very thick oil paint.”
He put the drawing-pin in a match-box and locked the box in his attaché-case, together with the Charter form which he had got from Jonathan.
Then he went to bed.
It was some time before he slept. Several times he came to the borderland where conscious thought mingles fantastically with the images of the subconscious. At these moments he saw a Maori mere, like Damocles’ sword, suspended above his head by a hair which was fixed to the ceiling by an old drawing-pin. “It might hold,” said William, speaking indistinctly because his mouth was full of blood. “It might hold, you know. I use very thick oil paint.” He couldn’t move because the folds of the Tyrolese cape were wrapped round his limbs. A rubber bird, wearing a god-like leer, bobbed its scarlet beak at him.
“It’s snowing harder than ever,” said the bird, and at that precise moment Hart cut the hair with a scalpel. “Down she comes, by Jupiter,” they all shouted; but Chloris, with excellent intentions, kicked him between the shoulder-blades and he fell with a sickening jolt back into his bed and woke again to hear the rain driving against the window-pane.
At last, however, he fell into a true sleep — and was among the first of the seven living guests to do so. Dr. Hart was the very first. Long before the others came upstairs to bed, Dr. Hart’s dose of proprietary soporific had restored his interrupted oblivion; and now his mouth was open, his breathing deep and stertorous.
His wife was not so fortunate. She heard them all come upstairs, she heard them wish each other goodnight, she heard door after door close softly and imagined key after key turning with a click as each door was shut. Sitting upright in bed in her fine nightgown, she listened to the rain and made plans for her own security.
Hersey Amblington, too, was wakeful. She kept her bedside lamp alight and absent-mindedly slapped “Hersey’s Skin Food” into her face with a patent celluloid patter. As she did this, she tried distractedly to order her thoughts away from the memory of a figure in an armchair, from a head that was broken like an egg, and from a wireless cabinet that screamed “Boomps-a-Daisy.” She thought of herself twenty years ago, afraid to tell her cousin Jonathan that she would marry him. She thought of her business rival and wondered quite shamelessly if, with the arrest of Hart, Madame Lisse would carry her piratical trade elsewhere. Finally, hoping to set up a sort of counter-irritant in horror, she thought about her own age. But the figure in the chair was persistent and Hersey was afraid to go to sleep.
Chloris was not much afraid. She had not seen William. But she was extremely bewildered over several discoveries that she had made about herself. The most upsetting of these was the discovery that she now felt nothing but a vague pity for Nicholas and an acute pity for William. She had never pretended to herself that she was madly in love with William, but she had believed herself to be very fond of him. It was Nicholas who had held her in the grip of a helpless attraction; it was from this bondage that she had torn herself on a climax of misery. She believed that when Nicholas had become aware of his brother’s determined courtship he had set himself to cut William out. Having succeeded very easily in this project, he had tired of her; and, in the meantime, he had met Elise Lisse. She thought of the letter in which she had broken off her engagement to Nicholas and, with shame, of the new engagement to his brother; of how every look, every word that was exchanged between them, for her held only one significance, its effect upon Nicholas; of the miserable satisfaction she had known when Nicholas showed his resentment, of the exultation she had felt when again, he began to show off his paces before her. And now it was all over. She had cried a little out of pity for William and from the shock to her nerves, and she had seen Nicholas once and for all as a silly fellow and a bit of a coward. A phrase came into her thoughts: “So that’s all about the Complines.” With an extraordinary lightening of her spirits she now allowed herself to think of Aubrey Mandrake. “Of Mr. Stanley Footling,” she corrected herself. “It ought to be funny. Poor Mr. Stanley Footling turning as white as paper and letting me in on the ground floor. It isn’t funny. I can’t make a good story of it. It’s infinitely touching and it doesn’t matter to me, only to him.” And she thought: “Did I take the right line about it?”
She had gone to her room determined to break Dr. Hart’s alibi, but a whole hour had passed and not once had she thought of Dr. Hart.
Jonathan Royal clasped his hot-water bag to his midriff and stared before him into the darkness. If the top strata of his thoughts had been written down they would have read something like this: “It’s an infernal bore about Thomas but there must be some way out of it. Aubrey is going to be tiresome, I can see. He’s half inclined to believe Hart. Damn Thomas. There must be some way. An ingenious turn, now. My thoughts are going round in circles. I must concentrate. What will Aubrey write in his notes? I must read them carefully. Can’t be too careful. This fellow Alleyn. What will he make of it? Why, there’s motive, the two attempts, our alibis — he can’t come to any other conclusion. Damn Thomas.”
Nicholas tossed and turned in the bed his brother had offered to take. He was unaccustomed to consecutive or ordered thinking, and across his mind drifted an endless procession of dissociated images and ideas. He saw himself and William as children. He saw William going back to school at the end of his holidays — Nicholas and his tutor had gone in the car to the station. There was Bill’s face, pressed against the window-pane as the train went out. He heard Bill’s adolescent voice breaking comically into falsetto: “She’d like it to be you at Penfelton and me anywhere else. But I’m the eldest. You can’t alter that. Mother will never forgive me for it.” He saw Chloris the first time she came to Penfelton as William’s guest for a house-party. “Mother, will you ask Chloris Wynne? She’s my girl, Nick. No poaching.” And lastly he saw Elise Lisse, and heard his own voice: “I never knew it could be like this. I never knew.”