Alleyn took a jeweller’s lens from his pocket. “Ah!” muttered Colonel Brammington, staring at him with a bulging and raffish eye. “He peers. He screws a glass into his orb and with enlarged vision feeds his brain.”
“We always feel rather self-conscious about these things,” said Alleyn, “but they have their uses. Here, I think, are three, no four small pieces of glass that might be different from — well, let’s weigh them.” He put them in the scales.
“Thirty-one grains. That, Harper, leaves a margin of eleven grains for the bits you missed. Any good?”
“Do you think these bits are a different class of stuff, Mr. Alleyn?” asked Harper.
“I think so. There’s a difference in colour and if you look closely you can see they’re a bit thicker.”
“He has written a monograph on broken tumblers,” cried Colonel Brammington delightedly. “Let me look through your lens.”
He crouched over the table.
“They are different,” he said. “You are quite right, my dear Alleyn. What can it mean? The iodine bottle? No, it was found unbroken beneath the settle.”
“What did you discover at Woolworth’s, Fox?” asked Alleyn.
“Nothing much, Mr. Alleyn. I tried all the other places as well. They haven’t sold any and they say there’s very little shop-lifting in Illington.”
“Veil upon veil will lift,” remarked Colonel Brammington, “but there will be veil upon veil behind. What is this talk of shop-lifting?”
“I’ll explain, sir,” began Alleyn.
“On second thoughts, pray don’t. I prefer, Alleyn, to be your Watson. You dine with me to-night? Very good. Give me the evidence, and let me brood.”
“But don’t you wish to hear Mr. Alleyn’s case, sir?” asked Harper in a scandalized voice. “Your position—”
“I do not. I prefer to listen to voices in the upper air nor lose my simple faith in mysteries. I prefer to take the advice of the admirable Tupper and will let not the conceit of intellect hinder me from worshipping mystery. But nevertheless, give me your plain plump facts. I will sing, with Ovid, of facts.”
“You will not have Ovid’s privilege of inventing them,” rejoined Alleyn. “I have brought a copy of my report on the case. It’s up-to-date.”
Colonel Brammington took the file and seemed to become the victim of an intolerable restlessness. He rose, hitched up his shapeless trousers and said rapidly in a high voice: “Well, good-bye, Shaw. Come to dinner tonight.”
“Oh, thank you very much, sir,” said Dr. Shaw. “I’d like to. Black tie?”
“As the fancy takes you. I shall make some gesture. Broadcloth and boiled line. You come, Harper?”
“Thank you, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve got to—”
“All right. I see. Three then. You, Alleyn; Shaw, and — ah—”
“Ah yes. Splendid. Well au revoir.”
“Fox,” said Alleyn.
“Ah yes. Splendid. Well, au revoir.”
“I was going to ask you, sir—” began Harper.
“Oh God! What?”
“It doesn’t matter, sir, if you’re in a hurry,” Harper opened the door with emphasized politeness. “Good afternoon, sir.”
“Oh, good-bye to you, Harper, good-bye,” said Colonel Brammington, impatiently, and plunged out.
“If that,” said Harper sourly, “is the modern idea of a Chief Constable it’s not mine. You wouldn’t credit it, would you, that when the gentleman’s brother dies, he’ll be a Lord. A lord, mind you! Bawling hurricane. Where’s he get the things he says, Doctor? Out of his head or out of books?”
“Not having his brains, his memory, or his library I can’t tell you,” said Dr. Shaw.
iii
Alleyn, Fox, and Harper went to the police station. Here they had a long reiterative conversation. They compared Alleyn’s casts with the shoes Watchman wore on the day of his death, and found that they tallied exactly. They went over the case step by step. Alleyn expounded, the others listened. They laid their collection of oddments on Harper’s table; the brandy-bottle, the broken glass, the iodine bottle, the stained newspaper, the small china vessel from the rat-hole, and the bottle of Scheele’s acid. Harper gave Alleyn a stoppered bottle.
“Ah,” said Alleyn, “that’s the stuff out of the rat-hole jar? I want you to get it analyzed. Perhaps Dr. Mordant would do it. No, I suppose that would be too unofficial. It had better go to London.”
“You think our murderer got the stuff from the garage?” asked Harper.
“I do.”
“But the thing was full.”
“Because it was full,” said Alleyn.
“You reckon that was water,” asked Harper slowly.
“Yes, Nick.”
“I see,” said Harper.
“The poison-party,” said Alleyn, “was attended by Abel, who put the prussic acid in the china pot and stopped the hole; by Will, by Miss Moore, by Legge, who only looked in for a moment, and by a couple of fishermen who were on their way to the public bar and who don’t come into the picture. Subsequently Abel warned everybody in the place about what he had done, so that the actual attendance at the poison-party may not give us our answer. On the other hand it is possible that one of them lagged behind and pinched the poison. They all profess to have forgotten in what order they left. Now prussic acid in Mr. Noggins’ fifty-per-cent solution is a highly volatile liquid. Judging by the stench, its fumes have accounted for at least one rat, so probably it was not removed immediately. On the other hand, it seems it would evaporate considerably in something under an hour. I’m not sure on this point. We’ll experiment. The experts say, in their report, under an hour. Very good. My contention is that the murderer must have nipped into the garage, within an hour after Abel left it, and taken the poison, which would be kept in a tightly corked bottle until it was needed.”
“But how the hell would he get it? The jar had Abel’s prints. It hadn’t been touched.”
“Do you remember—”
“By God!” shouted Harper. “Don’t tell me! I’ve got it.”
He broke into a stream of oaths through which his enlightenment struggled for expression.
“That’s it,” said Alleyn. “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“Looks like it!” ejaculated Harper. “It blasted well shrieks of it. I’m a hell of a detective I am! Look at me! I missed the point about that evaporation business! Took Abel in to look at the pot and he said it was just the amount he’d poured in. Well, the damn thing was full. I never thought it might be water. I took photographs and sealed the place up just as it was. I did pour off this stuff and keep it. I’ll say that for myself. I made sure the poison had come out of the bottle in the cupboard. Blast it!”
“Abel’s prints,” Alleyn said, “were still on the key of the cupboard and on the knob. You can’t open the door without turning the key and the knob. Dr. Shaw saw that, when he looked at the cupboard and waited until it had been tested for prints. If anyone else had been to the cupboard they would either have left their own prints, used gloves and smeared Abel’s prints, or else wiped them off entirely. Nobody could have been to the cupboard.”
“I knew that, but all the same… Well, I suppose I thought they might have got at the bottle while — oh hell!”
“Anybody might have missed it, Mr. Harper,” said Fox. “I didn’t pick it till Mr. Alleyn pointed it out.”
“And I was lucky,” said Alleyn. “I’d read Taylor on the cyanides, during our trip down.”
“Well,” said Harper, “the coroner and Dr. Shaw missed the point. Oates gave evidence of discovery of the stuff in the rat-hole. Old Pomeroy deposed it was the same amount he’d poured in. Nobody said anything about evaporation.”