Behind him loomed up the blaze of an electric torch. Above it showed the malignant countenance of Sir Henry Merrivale. Next, cowering away in one side of the maze’s center, Jenny switched on her own torch.
Both beams converged on the man who lay on his back in the center of the maze. His eyes were closed; he breathed stertorously; sluggish blood flowed from a cut in his cheek.
Jenny’s face grew so white, and she turned her head away so abruptly, that Tom thought she was going to be sick.
But his own feelings were swallowed up in incredulity.
“This is impossible!” he said, pointing to the man on the ground. “That’s Steve Lamoreux, the reporter!”
“Oh, no, it’s not,” said Sir Henry Merrivale. “That’s Armand de Senneville himself.”
“Explanations?” demanded H.M., in a tone of dismal surprise. “You don’t mean to tell me you need explanations?”
Jenny and Tom, both seated beside the desk in H.M.’s office at the end of the following day, instantly and vehemently said they did need explanations.
H.M. sighed.
“Y’know, my dolly,” he said, “you ought to have seen through your fiancé, Armand de Senneville, sooner than you did. He tried to prevent your trip to England. He couldn’t prevent it — his father’s word was law. But he knew how much you’d been repressed and kept under the thumb in France. He knew, as he casually warned Aunt Hester, you’d probably fall bang for the first presentable, easy-going Englishman who made you laugh and didn’t think correct behavior was everything in life. Which is what you did.”
“I did not!” Jenny cried indignantly. “I have fall bang for Tom, yes. But that is a different thing!” Tom hastily intervened in order to evade the devastating question, “How is it different?”
“Then de Senneville,” he said, “had only to crop his hair, have it dyed brown, wear very loud clothes, and pose as a French Canadian reporter from one of his own papers?”
“But Armand,” insisted Jenny, “speaks no English!”
“No?” said H.M. “That’s what he told you, my dolly. But as I explained to Tom here, the bloke was attached for four years to the American Army as a liaison officer. So surely he could speak English. In fact, his ear was perfect; his American was perfect. But he had to play the part of a French Canadian to explain how he spoke both languages.”
“And yet,” exclaimed Jenny, her eyes clouding, “I still do not understand this Armand! If he wished to keep men away from me, why did he not say he spoke English and go with the whole party of us?”
“You don’t understand that, my dolly? Though it’s the key to his whole character?”
“No! Why is it the key?”
“Because he was too proud,” said H.M., “and he was far too conceited. He wouldn’t demean himself in public by showin’ he was concerned. He wouldn’t admit that any man alive could take you away from the great Armand.
“Listen, my dolly, he never wanted to kill you! Neither did Aunt Hester. All they wanted to do was scare you so much that you’d run straight back to France. Don’t you remember what you said yourself, in this office? I asked, ‘Do you still want to stay at your Aunt Hester’s?’ And you cried out, ‘No, but what else can I do except return to Paris?’ — Got it now?”
“Then,” Jenny blurted out, “just to get my dowry, this Armand has...”
“Oh, he wanted your money,” said H.M. somberly. “But, towards the end, I don’t think that was all. That murderous fight in the maze wasn’t done altogether for money. I expect, in his own queer way, he was a little bit in love with you.”
Again, since Jenny’s eyes were clouding worse than ever, Tom intervened.
“But the locked room!” he said. “Where the gas-tap was turned on even while windows and door were both locked on the inside!”
“Well... now,” H.M. sighed wearily. “I’d better tell you about it, because that locked room told me the whole ruddy truth before I even knew who was behind it.
“On the famous Night of Terrors,” he added, pointing at Jenny, “you found, in your napkin at dinner, a note readin’, ‘You will die tonight, Jennifer.’ Eh?”
“But who wrote the note?” interrupted Tom.
“Aunt Hester wrote it,” snapped H.M. “There’s never been much mystery about her. Her words and actions were too plain. She was the dominatin’ character of her family, the only one, as I more than hinted, whom de Senneville bribed and prompted.
“After dinner,” H.M. continued, still pointing at Jenny, “you went to your room at a little past eleven o’clock. One of the long windows, which you’d left closed, was now wide open. Correct?”
“Yes,” said Jenny, and shuddered.
“You closed and locked the window again. You didn’t need to touch or go near the gas fire. At shortly past twelve you went to bed, and soon fell asleep. The next thing you knew, Margot was bangin’ on the door at six o’clock. A mysterious ‘American’ voice is asking what’s wrong. They ran round to the window, pickin’ up Uncle Fred on the way. Uncle Fred smashes the window. The mysterious ‘American,’ whom you can’t see because you’re too far gone, rushes over to the gas fire. He says, ‘So-and-so, but it’s turned full on!’ And, apparently, he turns it off. Correct again?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Not to me it isn’t,” said H.M., shaking his head. “Whoever this mysterious American was, he was the joker behind the trick. He told a flat lie. That gas couldn’t have been turned full on.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’d have been dead,” H.M. said simply. “Let’s suppose somebody, in the middle of the night, sneaks in and turns on the gas full-strength. Never mind what time it was. Let’s even say it was as late, as impossibly late, as five o’clock in the morning. But there’s no person in the world, breathing full-strength gas in an unventilated room, who can breathe it for an hour and still live. So I asked you a question to prove it.”
“What question?”
“Oh, my dolly! You could describe every small noise you heard even when you were only half conscious. But you didn’t hear any noise of a gas fire turned on full, which would have roared like a tornado. That’s all.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Jenny, caught up with a jolt. “Then...?”
“Yes! Just before you retired to your room, Armand de Senneville — alias Steve Lamoreux — sneaked in and turned on the gas heater a tiny thread — only a tiny thread, not noticeable at all. He went out, leavin’ the window wide open for good ventilation.
“You came in and closed the window. Well! What does happen, in very big rooms like that one, with such a tiny leak of gas? You can’t hear it, you can’t even smell it, for well over an hour. The bed is too far away. And it’s caused tragedy before this. Meanwhile, for nearly six hours, the room is very slowly fillin’ up with gas. When they found you, you were in just the condition I’d have expected.
“That’s pretty much everything, my dolly. Armand de Senneville was lurkin’ close outside, of course. You bet he was! He’d calculated his times, as he always does, but he was damned near too late to bust in himself, as he intended.
“He had to meet Margot — he couldn’t help it. But that gal’s a silly kind of wench, so excited she never wondered what he was doin’ there. Uncle Fred barely noticed him. Later, it was easy for Aunt Hester to look ’em straight in the eye and tell ’em both they’d been dreaming. She was the only one who knew our Armand by sight. But, as for the ‘miracle’ of the locked room...”
“And that is all?” cried Jenny.
“Sure. What else did you expect?”