"Damn it, he was in here with the door locked!" Stephen said. "He can't have been stabbed!"
"Look!" Joseph said, averting his face. "You must forgive me, but I can't. Stupid of me, but I can't. Not again!"
"The brandy's on the table," Stephen said, turning Nathaniel's body on to its face. "My God, you're right!"
Joseph rose from his knees, tottered to the table, and sank into a chair by it, dropping his head in his hands, and groaning. Nathaniel's coat, over the lower lumbar region, was sticky with congealing blood. There was a slit in the material, clotted round the edges with blood. Stephen said curtly: "He must have bled internally. Hardly any outside. Now we are in a mess!"
"It doesn't seem possible! I can't believe it! Nat, of all people!"
"Here, have some brandy!" Stephen said, fetching his glass from the mantelpiece.
Joseph gulped down the neat spirit, and achieved a wan smile. "Yes, yes, we must be calm! We must try to think. This is a terrible business, Stephen. One's brain seems to be numb. Those young people downstairs, making merry in their innocence, while here, in this room, you and I confront -"
"Can it!" said Stephen brutally. "Merriment is not the predominant note of this sanguinary party, and you know it! And as for innocence - I wonder who the devil did this?"
This reflection seemed to pull Joseph together. He sat up, and gave a gasp. "One had not thought of that! I suppose the shock of it - Stephen, this is appalling! Who could have done so terrible a thing?"
Stephen walked over to the windows, and twitched the curtains apart. After a brief inspection, he turned, and said: "Do you realise that the door was locked, and every window shut?"
Joseph, who was wandering about the room in a distracted way, blinked at him. "The bathroom! That's how the murderer must have got in!"
Stephen's eyes went swiftly to the door leading into the bathroom. It stood ajar, and a light showed beyond it. He walked into the room. A bath had been prepared for Nathaniel; his towels were laid over the hot rail; the bathmat had been spread on the floor. The door was locked, and only the ventilator above the casement window was open.
"That door's locked too," Stephen said, returning to the bedroom. "Work that out, if you can!"
"The door locked?"Joseph said blankly. "Are you sure, Stephen?"
"Of course I'm sure!"
Ford came back into the room. "The doctor will be round immediately, sir. And Miss Paula's coming up, sir. I couldn't stop her. Well, I didn't rightly know what to say, Mr. Joseph."
"Stephen, this is no sight for a woman!" Joseph exclaimed. "She mustn't come in!"
Stephen threw him a contemptuous glance, and made no movement to intercept his sister's entrance.
Paula came in in her usual tempestuous way, saying: "What is it? Why don't you come down? What is all the mystery?"
"That will be a puzzle for the police," replied Stephen.
She saw Nathaniel's body, and her eyes narrowed. She stood staring down at it for a moment, growing a little pale, and then asked in a tight voice: "Is he dead?"
"Oh yes!" Stephen answered. "What killed him?"
"You have the wrong word. Not what: who."
She looked at him, something hard and anxious in her eyes. "Was he murdered, then?"
"Stabbed in the back."
She shuddered. "How horrible! How horrible!"
There was a silence. Joseph broke it. "You oughtn't to be here, Paula," he said feebly.
"Why not?"
"Dewy girlhood," Stephen explained.
"Oh!" She hunched a scornful shoulder. "What are we to do?"
"I suppose we ought to notify the police. In fact, I may as well do so at once," Stephen said, moving to the door.
"On Christmas Eve!" Joseph groaned, as though he found this an added torture. "Oh, Paula, Paula!"
She flashed round upon him. "Why do you say that? Do you suppose I had anything to do with this?"
"Oh, my dear, no!" he said, shocked. "Of course you didn't!"
"Who did? Have you any idea?"
"I can't think, my dear. It's too hideous! I try to realise it, to pull myself together -"
"This house! This wicked, horrible house!" She burst out, looking wildly round. "You laughed at me when I told you it was evil!"
"My dear, you're overwrought!" he said, looking somewhat taken aback. "The house can't have killed poor Nat!"
"Its influence! Acting on us all, impelling one of us -"
"Hush, Paula, hush!" he said. "That's nonsense! There, my poor child, there! Come away! It isn't fit for you to be here." He put his arm round her, and felt how tense she was, yet trembling a little.
"It wasn't one of us," she said, speaking with difficulty. "It couldn't have been. Someone through the window - robbery, perhaps. The door was locked!"
"Paula dear, did Ford tell you that?"
"I knew it! I tried to get in, before I went downstairs! He wouldn't answer when I knocked."
"Oh, Paula, why didn't you tell us?" he exclaimed.
"I didn't think anything of it. Only that he was sulking. We'd had a row. You know what he was! Besides, I did tell you, when you asked me to go up and call him."
"Too late!" he said tragically.
"It must always have been. I suppose he was dead when I knocked on the door."
He winced. "Paula dear, not that hard voice!"
There was a look of Stephen in her face as she answered: "It's no use expecting me to sentimentalise. I'm honest, anyway. I didn't like him. I don't even care that he's dead. He was mean and tyrannical."
This was very shocking to Joseph. He looked really pained, and rather anxious too, and said: "We mustn't let ourselves become hysterical, Paula. You don't mean that. No, no, your old uncle knows you better than that!"
She shrugged. "I hate being idealised."
He took one of her thin hands, and fondled it. "Gently, my dear, gently! We must keep our heads, you know."
She understood this to mean that she must keep hers, and said: "You mean that the police will think I did this, because of my quarrel with him? All right! Let them!"
"No, my dear, they could never suspect a girl of your age, I feel sure. But don't talk unkindly of poor Nat! And, Paula! try to make Stephen guard his tongue too! We know how little that manner of his means, but others don't, and some of the things he says - only for effect, the silly fellow! but I dread his doing it before the police! Oh dear, I never thought when I planned this party that it would end like this. I meant it all to be so jolly and happy!"
"We'd better go downstairs," she said abruptly.
He heaved a sigh. "I suppose it's foolish of me, but I don't like to leave him here alone."
It was plain from her expression that she thought this very foolish, so after looking down at Nathaniel's body for a moment he accompanied her out of the room, saying in a melancholy tone: "My last leave-taking! Perhaps it will not be for so long, after all."
Ford was standing at the head of the stairs, conversing in whispers with one of the housemaids. The girl, after the manner of her kind, was torn between excitement and a conventional impulse to burst into tears. She scuttled away when she saw Joseph. Paula flushed, and said through her teeth: "Gossip already! That's what we shall have to face!"
Joseph pressed her arm admonishingly, told the valet to mount guard over Nathaniel's bedroom, and escorted his niece downstairs. "Stephen will have broken the terrible news to them by now," he said.
Stephen had indeed performed this office. Having notified the local police-station, five miles distant, he had walked into the drawing-room, where the rest of the party was still assembled, in varying degrees of impatience and uneasiness, and had said at his most sardonic: "No use waiting for Uncle Nat. As you've no doubt guessed, he's dead."
"Dead?" Mathilda exclaimed, after a moment's stupefied silence. "Are you joking?"