The young man stared, helpless. Great tears rolled down his thin face, white now and haggard. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.” But to fight was better than to despair. “Anyway, what was the reason? My father had no reason to do it, so why should he?”
Inspector Block said steadily, “Mr. Photoze lived in the same group of flats as this lady did. You were ready enough to accuse him of an affair with her. But your father also lived in that same group of flats; and the lady is a very pretty lady. And then—”
“Oh, come now, darling!” protested Marguerite. “First a photographer — now a policeman as well. Have a heart! I wasn’t very fussy — but!”
“— along came Mr. Mysterioso,” went on Block, “and took her away from them both.”
“What a happy little threesome we seem to have been,” said Mr. Photoze.
“I don’t say you were a threesome — not in that sense. There may be many ways of caring for a woman, needing a woman — many reasons, at any rate, for resenting her being stolen from you.”
“But I wasn’t stolen from the policeman,” said Marguerite, half laughing. And she looked at the young man’s face and laughed no more. “Now, look, Inspector, this is absolutely not fair. I’ve told you about Mr. Photoze — we were both frank enough with you. So believe me when I say, when I swear to you on oath, that as for the policeman I never set eyes on the fellow in my life. Not till after the shooting; then we all saw one another in connection with the case. But that was all.”
“So there!” said the young man passionately. He added with a suddenly rather sweet simplicity, “Besides he was married to my mother.”
“And loved your mother?”
“Yes,” said the young man (loved her too much, to the exclusion of oneself — quarreled with her, yes, but that was because of the failure and the poverty brooding in the home, which in turn was because of the crime and subsequent unjust dismissal).
Inspector Block did not like what he had to say next. But he said it. “All right. He loved her. But Mr. Photoze lived with them, and perhaps in his own way he was devoted to her too — enough at any rate to enter into a plot to avenge her. Because—” It was not very nice, but it had to be said. “Because Mr. Mysterioso had been visiting those flats, hadn’t he? And one lady at a time wasn’t necessarily enough for the Grand Mysterioso.”
“You flatter me,” said Mysterioso; but nobody listened to him. For it was terrible — horrible — to see the young man. Before, it had been a young face, dark, pale as the emotions passed across it. Now it was a man’s face, a clown’s face, a mask of white patched clownishly with pink. That gesture again as though physical danger were coming close to him. He whimpered, “Oh, no! Oh, no!”
“We have to consider everything,” said Inspector Block, as though excusing what he did.
“It’s madness,” said Mysterioso. He hauled himself straighter in his chair but he too had gone pale. “By all I hold sacred, I never even saw her — not till after the inquiries started.” He looked with pity at the cowering young man. “I never touched your mother, boy, never so much as saw her.”
“You could have,” said the young man, sobbing. “You could have.” His body was bowed over till his forehead rested on his two fists clenched on the arm of the chair. “Everyone tells lies — you have to say you didn’t know her. But you could have, you may have—”
Marguerite got up from her place. She went and knelt beside him, lifted his head, pushing back the damp, soft, spiky young-boy hair from his forehead; caught at the writhing hands and held them steady in her own two hands, so white and well-cared for with their long, pink, manicured nails. “Hush, love, hush! Of course it isn’t true.” And she looked across the room at Mr. Mysterioso and said, “A secret — between us and these kind people here who’ll be too generous, I know, ever to give us away.” She glanced at the door.
“Nobody could be listening?”
“No,” said the Inspector.
“Between these four walls then?” She looked round at them, appealing, then back to Mysterioso. She said, “I think we must tell.”
An actress, “over the hill,” glad of the attentions of even a scruffy young press photographer using her as a sitter to practise his craft. Thankful beyond words for the advent of a new admirer and a rich, famous, and handsome one at that, “good to be seen about with” at the fashionable restaurants where theatrical agents and managers would be reminded of her. Entertaining him at home, not at all secretly; dropping naughty hints to anyone who would listen — my darling, he’s fantastic! Using it all to further her own ends, to bolster her tottering career.
And a man, larger than life size, not quite like other men. Big, handsome, with his mane of tawny hair, a man who looked like a lion and must live like a lion; a man with a reputation for affairs, in middle age still strutting in the pride of his well publicized virility. And all in an hour, in a moment… The accident that had left him a crippled thing, humiliatingly powerless, had left him powerless in other ways as well. “She was — kind,” he said, looking at Marguerite still kneeling by the young man’s chair. “She kept my secret a secret.” To the young man he said, “Even if I’d ever set eyes on her, my boy, your pretty young mother would have been safe from me.”
“It’s true,” said Marguerite. She looked down at her hands. “I know.”
Inspector Block helped her up from the floor and back to her chair. He said to them both, with something like humility in his cold voice, “Thank you.”
The Grand Mysterioso stirred and sighed and came back to the present with a jerk. “Well, now… My dear boy, I think you have no cause to complain. We’ve done what we came here to do — talked it all out, put it all before you, all the facts, the ifs and the ands, the probabilities and the just possibles — riddled out our very souls for you, so that you may save your own. So save it! Accept the judgment of this court — who also have heard it all — and get rid of this bug that has been obsessing your mind and spoiling your splendid young life. I’ll help you. I’ll be your friend — you can start all over again, grow up, be a man.
“So now — you two have been the accused, you and Mr. Photoze here. Go outside this room and wait; and we will arrive at a verdict in here, all of us, me and Inspector Block and this kind and lovely lady, Miss Devine, and these three kind people who have come here as witnesses, at no small trouble to themselves, to help you too. None of us with any ax to grind, remember that. So — whatever verdict we come to, will you accept it?” And he said kindly, “All we want, boy, in all honesty, is to arrive at the truth and set your mind to rest.”
“Suppose,” said the young man, “the truth doesn’t set my mind at rest.”
“Then we’ll tell it just the same,” said Block. He made a small-boy gesture, licking his thumb and crossing his heart with it. “I swear you shall hear the truth. I’ll tell you no lie.”
“Considering that I’m in the dock too,” said Mr. Photoze, getting up and going toward the door with his accompanying jingle, “and I’m ready to accept the verdict, I think you can too.” He opened the door. “Come along, the jury is about to retire.”
The door closed behind them. Mr. Mysterioso said, “Photoze will keep him safely out of earshot.” But he looked anxious. “Can you really swear to tell him the truth of it? For that matter — what is the truth of it?”