“Do you think your father committed suicide, Lord Purleigh?”
For a moment he only looked at me. Then, slowly, he nodded. “I do, yes. I spoke with him, you know. Yesterday morning, after the others had left for town. Before I saw you at breakfast. I accused him of accosting Miss Turner. He denied it, of course. I told him I intended to have him put away. An asylum. He believed me, I think.” He looked away. “I suspect that this is why he took his own life.” He looked back at us. “So, in a way, of course, I’m responsible. I expect that’s why I drank so much yesterday. Made such an idiot of myself.”
“Sooner or later,” I said, “you’ve got to talk to the police.”
Lord Bob sighed sadly. “Yes. Yes, I realize that.” He shook his head, looked off again. “May mean the end of everything.”
“Excuse me, Phil,” said the Great Man. “But do you think it is absolutely necessary that Lord Purleigh tell Inspector Marsh about the late Earl? Immediately, at any rate? Perhaps he should wait until-”
“After tea time? Too late, Harry. Marsh already knows,” I turned to Lord Bob. “He’s talked to Miss Turner. She figured everything out. She went exploring in your father’s room last night. She found the phony beard and the wig.”
“Ah,” he said, and he sighed once more. “She did strike me as an intelligent woman, Miss Turner.”
“I’ll talk to them,” I said. “The police. See if I can get them to keep things quiet.”
Lord Bob smiled sadly. “Thank you, Beaumont. I appreciate the thought. Well.” He raised his head. “We’ll see what happens, won’t we?”
“Things’ll work out,” I told him.
“Yes. Yes, of course.” He looked around the room and blinked, like someone who’d just awakened from a daydream. He turned back to me. “I wonder. Do you know where my wife is? I really ought to let her know what’s happened.”
“She’s in the drawing room,” I said.
“Thank you.” He stood up. He still look rumpled but now he looked worn and defeated and about ten years older. We stood up and he stepped forward, holding out his hand. “Houdini. Beaumont. Thank you for listening.”
“Tell me, Phil,” said the Great Man as we walked across the patio outside the conservatory. “You say that Inspector Marsh has talked with Miss Turner.”
“Yeah.”
“She told him-”
A voice interrupted him. “ ’Scuse me, gents.”
It was a policeman, stepping away from the trunk of the tree. I’d forgotten that Superintendent Honniwell had assigned two cops to guard Maplewhite. This one was tall and bulky in his dark uniform. and he needed a shave.
“Sorry, gents,” he said, “but I’m s’pose to watch all the comin’s and goin’s hereabouts. And who-”
“I am Harry Houdini,” announced the Great Man. “And this is Phil Beaumont, a Pinkerton man. And, as you see, we are going. You have no orders that prevent anyone from going, do you?”
“No sir,” said the policeman, backing away toward the tree. “Sorry, sir. Just doing me job, sir.”
“Thank you,” said the Great Man. “Idiot,” he said, when we’d walked another ten or twelve yards, out onto the sunny lawn. “Like he said, Harry. He’s just doing his job.”
“He does not even have a gun, Phil.”
“English cops don’t carry them.”
He looked at me. “But how do they shoot people?”
“They don’t.”
His forehead furrowed. “They never carry guns? None of them? Not even detective officers, like Marsh and Sergeant Meadows?” “Marsh could probably get issued a weapon. If he were going up against a band of anarchists. Bombmakers, maybe. But generally, no.”
“Amazing.” He cocked his head and stared down at the passing ground. “Amazing.”
“You wanted to know something about Miss Turner?”
He turned to me. “Yes. Miss Turner told Marsh about the knife in her bed this morning?”
“I told him.”
“And what was his response?”
“He didn’t give one, Harry. Not to me.”
“Do you believe that he thinks it significant?”
“I don’t know what he thinks.”
He nodded. “To whom has he spoken?
I told him about my morning with Marsh as we walked down the slope of bright green grass and then along the gravel walkway. It was another beautiful day, the second in a row. The squirrels couldn’t get over it. They ran up and down the trees like this would be their last chance.
“The Darleen woman,” said the Great Man. “The kitchen maid. She had been visiting with the Earl on a regular basis?”
“Yeah.”
“But why, then, would the Earl feel obliged to accost these other women, including Miss Turner?
“I don’t know. Maybe the visits from Darleen were what started him wandering the halls again. Maybe Darleen wasn’t enough for him.”
He made a face. He didn’t like that idea. “And why would he steal trinkets from everyone’s room?”
“No idea. He was crazy, Harry. Maybe we should ask Dr. Auerbach.”
He shook his head, looked off, looked back at me. “And to whom else did you speak?”
I told him.
When I finished, we were at the rear of Maplewhite, the huge gray house rising above the faraway trees. And what did you find out, Harry?” I asked him.
“Well, Phil,” he said. “I believe I have solved the mystery.”
“Which one?”
“All of them. Ah, here is the path Miss Turner mentioned. Come along, Phil.”
There was a narrow opening in the wall of trees and brambles. The Great Man plunged into it. I followed him.
“So what’s the solution?” I asked his back.
“All in good time, Phil,” he said over his shoulder.
It wasn’t much of a path. As it twisted down into the forest, branches grew across it, and vines and spiderwebs. After a while it came to a wide passageway that looked like it had been a roadway once. This led left and right, off through the towering trees. The Great Man turned left.
I caught up with him. “Where are we going, Harry?”
“I told you, Phil. The old mill. I suspect that there is another path that leads there, closer to the house, but this is the path Miss Turner took.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. On horseback.”
“When she saw the snake?”
The Great Man smiled. “She saw much more than a snake, Phil. She saw the murderers of the Earl.”
I looked at him. “What are you talking about, Harry?”
“All in good time.”
I remembered the Colt in my pocket and I thought about using it. I decided not to. We marched along the old road for two or three hundred yards.
“Ah,” he said. “The mill.”
It was an old mill, made of stone but in ruins now. Its big wooden wheel had tumbled into the narrow rusty-looking stream. The stream flowed from a pool surrounded by drooping cattails. The water was dark and still and the branches of a big willow tree were reflected as they dipped down into it.
“And there is the willow,” said the Great Man. He turned to me. “Shall we take a look inside the mill?”
“It’s your party, Harry,”
He padded through the grasses and jumped over the stream. I followed. The wooden door to the mill was hanging inward on its hinges. We stepped inside. The place smelled of mold and burnt wood.
“Someone has built a fire,” said the Great Man.
The building was cylindrical, about fifteen feet across. Against the far wall, on the uneven stone floor, was a huddle of ash and charred lumber, bits of planking, chunks of two-by-four and four-by-four.
“Hobos,” I said.
“Are there hobos in England?” He crossed the floor and stood over the small pile.
“Two million unemployed, Lord Bob said. Probably a few of them on the road.”
“Lord Purleigh,” he corrected me. He looked up. “Do you notice anything interesting about the floor, Phil?”
“No one’s swept it for a while.” Dust and ashes were scattered over the slabs of stone.