“That’s enough!” blurted Dan, who dared not look at Joyce. “You’ve made it clear. All right, stop there!”
“Oh, I had intended to stop. If you are such fools that you won’t help yourselves, I must help you. That’s all.”
It was Toby Curtis who strode forward.
“Dan, don’t let him bluff you!” Toby said. “In the first place, they can’t arrest anybody for this. You weren’t here. I know—”
“I’ve heard about it, Toby.”
“Look,” insisted Toby. “When the police finished measuring and photographing and taking casts of Brenda’s footprints, I did some measuring myself.”
Edmund Ireton smiled. “Are you attempting to solve this mystery, Mr. Curtis?”
“I didn’t say that.” Toby spoke coolly. “But I might have a question or two for you. Why have you had your knife into me all day?”
“Frankly, Mr. Curtis, because I envy you.”
“You... what?”
“So far as women are concerned, young man, I have not your advantages. I had no romantic boyhood on a veldt-farm in South Africa. I never learned to drive a span of oxen and flick a fly off the leader’s ear with my whip. I was never taught to be a spectacular horseman and rifle shot.”
“Oh, turn it up!”
“ ‘Turn it up?’ Ah, I see. And was that the sinister question you had for me?”
“No. Not yet. You’re too tricky.”
“My profoundest thanks.”
“Look, Dan,” Toby insisted. “You’ve seen that rock formation they call King Arthur’s Chair?”
“Toby, I’ve seen it fifty times,” Dan said. “But I still don’t understand—”
“And I don’t understand,” suddenly interrupted Joyce, without turning round, “why they made me sit there where Brenda had been sitting. It was horrible.”
“Oh, they were only reconstructing the crime,” Toby spoke rather grandly. “But the question, Dan, is how anybody came near that chair without leaving a footprint?”
“Quite.”
“Nobody could have,” Toby said just as grandly. “The murderer, for instance, couldn’t have come from the direction of the sea. Why? Because the highest point at high tide, where the water might have blotted out footprints, is more than twenty feet in front of the chair. More than twenty feet!”
“Er... one moment,” said Mr. Ireton, twitching up a finger. “Surely Inspector Tregellis said the murderer must have crept up and caught her from the back? Before she knew it?”
“That won’t do either. From the flagstones of the terrace to the back of the chair is at least twenty feet, too. Well, Dan? Do you see any way out of that one?”
Dan, not normally slow-witted, was so concentrating on Joyce that he could think of little else. She was cut off from him, drifting away from him, forever out of reach just when he had found her. But he tried to think.
“Well... could somebody have jumped there?”
“Ho!” scoffed Toby, who was himself a broad jumper and knew better. “That was the first thing they thought of.”
“And that’s out, too?”
“Definitely. An Olympic champion in good form might have done it, if he’d had any place for a running start and any place to land. But he hadn’t. There was no mark in the sand. He couldn’t have landed on the chair, strangled Brenda at his leisure, and then hopped back like a jumping bean. Now could he?”
“But somebody did it, Toby! It happened!”
“How?”
“I don’t know,”
“You seem rather proud of this, Mr. Curtis,” Edmund Ireton said smoothly.
“Proud?” exclaimed Toby, losing color again.
“These romantic boyhoods—”
Toby did not lose his temper. But he had declared war.
“All right, gaffer. I’ve been very grateful for your hospitality, at that bungalow of yours, when we’ve come down here for week-ends. All the same, you’ve been going on for hours about who I am and what I am. Who are you?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“For two or three years,” Toby said, “you’ve been hanging about with us. Especially with Brenda and Joyce. Who are you? What are you?”
“I am an observer of life,” Mr. Ireton answered tranquilly. “A student of human nature. And — shall I say? — a courtesy uncle to both young ladies.”
“Is that all you were? To either of them?”
“Toby!” exclaimed Joyce, shocked out of her fear.
She whirled round, her gaze going instinctively to Dan, then back to Toby.
“Don’t worry, old girl,” said Toby, waving his hand at her. “This is no reflection on you.” He kept looking steadily at Mr. Ireton.
“Continue,” Mr. Ireton said politely.
“You claim Joyce is in danger. She isn’t in any danger at all,” said Toby, “as long as the police don’t know how Brenda was strangled.”
“They will discover it, Mr. Curtis. Be sure they will discover it!”
“You’re trying to protect Joyce?”
“Naturally.”
“And that’s why you warned Dan not to say he was in love with her?”
“Of course. What else?”
Toby straightened up, his hand inside the bulky tweed jacket.
“Then why didn’t you take him outside, rain or no, and tell him on the quiet? Why did you shout out that Dan was in love with Joyce, and she was in love with him, and give ’em a motive for the whole house to hear?”
Edmund Ireton opened his mouth, and shut it again.
It was a blow under the guard, all the more unexpected because it came from Toby Curtis.
Mr. Ireton stood motionless under the painting of The Lovers. The expression of the pictured Brenda, elusive and mocking, no longer matched his own. Whereupon, while nerves were strained and still nobody spoke, Dan Fraser realized that there was a dead silence because the rain had stopped.
Small night-noises, the creak of woodwork or a drip of water from the eaves, intensified the stillness. Then they heard footsteps, as heavy as those of an elephant, slowly approaching behind another of the doors. The footfalls, heavy and slow and creaking, brought a note of doom.
Into the room, wheezing and leaning on a stick, lumbered a man so enormous that he had to maneuver himself sideways through the door.
His big mop of gray-streaked hair had tumbled over one ear. His eyeglasses, with a broad black ribbon, were stuck askew on his nose. His big face would ordinarily have been red and beaming, with chuckles animating several chins. Now it was only absent-minded, his bandit’s mustache outthrust.
“Aha!” he said in a rumbling voice. He blinked at Dan with an air of refreshed interest. “I think you must be Mr. Fraser, the last of this rather curious week-end party? H’m. Yes. Your obedient servant, sir. I am Gideon Fell.”
Dr. Fell wore a black cloak as big as a tent and carried a shovel-hat in his other hand. He tried to bow and make a flourish with his stick, endangering all the furniture near him.
The others stood very still. Fear was as palpable as the scent after rain.
“Yes, I’ve heard of you,” said Dan. His voice rose in spite of himself. “But you’re rather far from home, aren’t you? I suppose you had some... er... antiquarian interest in King Arthur’s Chair?”
Still Dr. Fell blinked at him. For a second it seemed that chuckles would jiggle his chins and waistcoat, but he only shook his head.
“Antiquarian interest? My dear sir!” Dr. Fell wheezed gently. “If there were any association with a semi-legendary King Arthur, it would be at Tintagel much farther south. No, I was here on holiday. This morning, Inspector Tregellis fascinated me with the story of a fantastic murder. I returned tonight for my own reasons.”