Fox stopped at the sound of a tapping at the door, the pecking of a fingernail. Barely audible footsteps were heard without, on the carpet of the hall. After a moment the door opened wide enough for the insertion of Dan Pavey’s head, and his hoarse whisper came:
“A woman with a big nose and a squint! Went into a room!”
“Knudsen, Mrs. Pemberton’s maid,” Kester said.
“All right, shut the door,” said Fox, with his eyes steady at Jordan. He went on, “You strolled to the other side of the house and from behind a ring of shrubbery you heard voices — those of Colonel Brissenden and Ridley Thorpe. You wriggled into the shrubbery and saw them in the library through the open French windows. Your cover was perfect. You maneuvered into position and waited, with the scarf around your hand holding the gun. Kester was there too, or he was summoned by Thorpe, and then he went out with Brissenden. Thorpe was alone. When his back was turned you darted from your cover, shot him in the back, tossed the gun and scarf into the room, ran back through the shrubbery to a spot under a tree at the back of the house, and adopted the role of a man who had been sitting on the grass and had been suddenly startled by hearing the sound of a shot. A gardener appeared from somewhere and you followed him as he was guided by Kester’s yells in the direction of the library. You showed good presence of mind following the gardener through the shrubbery you had just used for your cover; that was the natural thing to do, but it took nerve, since it placed you on that side of the house.”
Fox stopped. Still gazing steadily at Jordan, he pulled at the lobe of his ear. No one spoke.
“Well,” Fox said, “those are the bald details.”
Jordan’s lips twisted. His palms were still cupped over his knees, gripping them, holding them down. “Come on, out with it,” he demanded.
“With what, Mr. Jordan? What more do you want?”
“I want you to put it in words. In front of these chaps. You must take me for a bloody idiot, if you think I won’t defend myself against a false charge of murder to keep it from coming out about Thorpe and my daughter. That dirty game won’t work.”
Fox shook his head. “It’s not a game. If I’ve given you the impression that it’s only a game, I apologize. I’m accusing you of the premeditated murder of Corey Arnold and the more briefly premeditated murder of Ridley Thorpe.”
“Bah. I thought you had better sense. Why would I want to kill Arnold? I had never seen him. I knew Thorpe had a man at that bungalow impersonating him, but I didn’t even know the man’s name.”
“Sure,” Fox agreed. “That was part of your immunity to suspicion. Absence of motive. I’ll take that last. First I’ll mention a couple of other points, both to my own discredit. When Derwin told me today that the gun that shot Arnold was found in Thorpe’s safe, I should have suspected you immediately. Where could it have come from? I won’t go through the process by which all other possibilities could have been demonstrated as highly improbable; it’s enough to say that the one place Thorpe had been where it was plausible to suppose he had got hold of that gun was on your boat. At least I should have suspected it and I was dumb not to. By the way, I doubt if you’re right in supposing that by killing Thorpe you destroyed the evidence of the gun. There must be someone who can recognize it as yours — for instance, that woman who is your next door neighbor — I’ll bet she can.”
Jordan wet his lips. “No,” he said huskily. He wet his lips again. “No, she can’t. Not the gun that killed Arnold. I had no motive.”
“I’ll take that last.” Fox’s gaze was relentless. “You see, you’re springing leaks. Another one is that letter you wrote. It was obvious it had been written by a Briton or someone with a British education and background. It said, ‘You will meet me on the pavement.’ An American would say, ‘You will meet me on the sidewalk,’ or ‘You will meet me on the street.’ But in England they never say sidewalk, they say pavement. No American ever does, in that sense. Also you mentioned your word of honor and you spelled honor with a u. No American does that; all Britons do. That was all there was to that sentence downstairs; it had the word honor in it. You were the only one who spelled it with a u.”
Luke Wheer was whispering to himself, “H, O, N, O...”
Kester, his colorless eyes leaving Jordan for Fox, muttered, “I’ll be damned.”
Fox nodded. “That’s all there was to that. It ought to be a pretty fair piece of evidence.”
Apparently Jordan’s lips were dry; he kept wetting them. The muscles of his hands, still cupped over his knees, were slowly and rhythmically tensing and relaxing; he said nothing.
“But I have an idea,” Fox resumed, “that the evidence that will clinch it is your motive for murdering Arnold. That’s another thing I’m not very proud of. Since traditional morality left its cradle thousands of years ago, so many outraged fathers have killed the men who were weekending with their daughters without benefit of clergy! That was the outstanding ostentatious fact of your connection with Thorpe: you were the father of his weekend companion. Such fathers have immemorially fallen into one of two categories: one is the enraged defender of the family honor who kills the man if he can; the other is the complacent sharer in the proceeds of his daughter’s degradation. Obviously you were not in the second category, since you refused even to accept any gift either from Thorpe or your daughter. Apparently you were not in the first category either, since your expressed attitude was that it was her life she was living; and even if you had been, that would have supplied no motive for your killing the man in the bungalow, since you knew it wasn’t Thorpe. Those considerations seemed to put you out of the running, but they shouldn’t have, since there was one other point to consider. Particularly I should have considered it, but like a fool I didn’t. Thorpe himself had told me that you were a comparatively poor man, that you lived on a little income from your savings and that the one thing in the world you wanted was a new boat of a certain design that would cost twenty thousand dollars.”
Jordan blurted, as if involuntarily, “He wanted to give me the money himself and I wouldn’t take it!”
Fox nodded. “I know. He told me about that. Your pride wouldn’t let you. You wouldn’t have been able to look yourself in the face if you had accepted money from Thorpe, but you wanted that boat and there wasn’t the remotest chance that you would ever be able to acquire it. So you made a plan and you carried it out. It’s a dismal commentary on the limitations of the human mind, at least of my mind, that I considered the likelihood that Arnold had been murdered by someone who wanted to buy Thorpe Control at 40 and sell it at 80 — I considered that possibility in connection with Kester and Thorpe himself and any number of unknown financiers, but not in connection with you. I was too grandiose. I thought of someone doing it to clean up a couple of million profit, but not of you doing it to get a boat. Of course I have no evidence of that, but it will be easy to get if it exists. If it is found that you recently turned your savings into cash, and that Thorpe Control was bought for you Monday on the drop, that will be conclusive.”
“I didn’t—” Jordan’s tongue was struggling heroically against the dizzy and horrible panic of his brain. His hands, still on his knees, no longer had a firm grip; they were flaccid, quivering, useless to hold anything down. His eyes, withdrawn under the jutting brows, were dark little slits of terror.
“Pull yourself together,” Fox told him in a hard, metallic voice. “You had a boat, didn’t you? If you were tough enough to kill a man to get a new boat, you can be tough enough to take what’s coming to you. You haven’t even got the excuse—”