"Yes, sir?"
"You have the search warrant?' "Yes, sir."
"Send the rest of your men down to search the rectory, and come with us."
Saunders moved slightly. His eyes were reddish round the lids, and had an expression like marbles. He still wore his steady smile.
"Move over," Dr. Fell ordered, composedly. "I'll sit beside you. Oh, and by the way! — I shouldn't keep fiddling with that handkerchief, if I were you. Your constant use of a handkerchief is too well known. We found one of 'em in the hiding-place in the well, and I rather imagined the initials stood for Thomas Saunders instead of Timothy Starberth. The last word old Timothy said before he died was `handkerchief.' He saw to it ' that a clue was left behind, even beside that manuscript."
Saunders, moving over to make room, calmly spread the handkerchief out on his knee so that it was in full view. Dr. Fell chuckled.
"You don't still insist your name is Thomas Saunders, do you?" he enquired. A motion of his cane indicated Sir Benjamin coming towards them with the tall brown man carrying the large valise. Piercing across the open space, a high and querulous voice was complaining:
"— about what the devil this means. I had some friends to visit, and I wrote Tom not to meet me until Thursday; then he cabled me to the boat to come down here directly, on a matter of life or death, and specified trains, and―"
"I sent the cable," said Dr. Fell. "It's a good thing I did. Our friend would have disappeared by Thursday. He had already persuaded Sir Benjamin to urge him to disappear.
The tall man stopped short, pushing back his hat.
"Listen," he said, with a sort of wild patience. "Is everybody stark, raving mad? First Ben won't talk sense, and now — who are you?"
"No, no. That's not the question," Dr. Fell corrected: "The question is, who is this?" He touched Saunders' arm. "Is it your nephew?"
"Oh, hell!" said Mr. Robert Saunders.
"Get into the car, then. Better sit up beside the driver, and he'll tell you."
In went the inspector on the other side of Saunders.
Rampole and Dorothy sat on the small seats, and Robert Saunders up with Sir Benjamin. The rector only remarked:
"A mistake can be proved, of course. But such a mistake is very different from a murder charge. You can prove no murder charge, you know."
He had got rather white. Sitting with his knee almost touching the rector's, Rampole felt a little quiver of repulsion and almost of fear. The bulbous blue eyes were still wide open, the mouth hung somewhat loose. You could hear his breathing. A deadly quiet hung in the tonneau. Dusk bad come on rapidly, and the wheels sang with the word "killer."
Then Rampole saw that the inspector had unobtrusively folded his pistol under one arm, and that its barrel was against the rector's side.
Down the lane to Yew Cottage, wild bumping, and Sir Benjamin was still talking in the front seat… They had just stopped before the house when Robert Saunders sprang out. His long arm reached into the tonneau.
He said: "You dirty swine, where is he? What did you do to Tom?"
The inspector seized his wrist. "Steady, sir. Steady. No violence."
"He claims to be Tom Saunders? He's a damned liar. He- I'll kill him. I―"
Without haste, Inspector Jennings pushed him away from the car door as it was opened. They were all around the rector now. With his tonsure and fluff of yellow hair, he looked like a decaying saint; he kept trying to smile. They escorted him into the house, where Dr. Fell was lighting lamps in the study. Sir Benjamin pushed the rector down into a chair.
"Now, then―" he began.
"Inspector," said Dr. Fell, gesturing with the lamp, "you'd better search him. I think he's wearing a moneybelt."
"Keep away-!" Saunders said. His voice was growing high. "You can't prove anything. You'd better keep away!"
His eyes were opened wide. Dr. Fell put the lamp down beside him, so that it shone on his sweating face.
"Never mind, then," the doctor said, indifferently. "No
good searching him, Inspector…. Saunders, do you want to make a statement?"
"No. You can't prove anything."
As though he were reaching after a piece of paper to take down a statement, Dr. Fell drew open the drawer of his study table. Rampole followed the movement of his hand. The others did not see it, because they were looking at Saunders; but the rector was hungrily following every gesture the doctor made.
There was paper in the drawer. There was also the doctor's old-fashioned derringer pistol. It had been broken open, so that the chambers lay exposed; and as the lamp, light gleamed on it, Rampole saw that there was just one cartridge in the breech. Then the drawer closed.
Death had come into the room now.
"Sit down, gentlemen," urged Dr. Fell. Saunders' blank eyes were still on the closed drawer. The doctor glanced over at Robert Saunders, who was standing with a stupid expression on his brown face and his fists clenched. "Sit down, gentlemen. I must tell you how he did these murders, if he refuses to tell, himself. It isn't a pretty story. If you, Miss Starberth, would care to withdraw…?"
"Please go," said Rampole, in a low voice. "I'll go along."
"No!" she cried, and he knew that she was fighting down hysteria. "I've stood it so far. I won't go. You can't make me. If he did it, I want to know.."
The rector had recovered himself, though his voice was husky.
"By all means stay, Miss Starberth," he boomed. "You are the one with a right to hear this madman's story. He can't tell you — he, or anybody else, can't tell you how I could be sitting with him in this very house — and still throw your brother off the balcony of the Governor's Room."
Dr. Fell spoke loudly and sharply. He said:
"I didn't say you threw him from the balcony. He was never thrown from the balcony at all."
There was a silence. Dr. Fell leaned against the mantelpiece, one arm stretched along it and his eyes half shut. He went on, thoughtfully:
"There are several reasons why he wasn't. When you found him, he was lying on his right side. And his right hip was broken. But his watch, in the watch-pocket of his trousers, was not only unbroken, but still kept ticking without a flaw. A drop of fifty feet — it can't be done, you know. We will come back to that watch in a moment.
"Now, on the night of the murder it rained heavily. It rained, to be exact, from just before eleven o'clock until precisely one. The next morning, when we went up to the Governor's Room, we found the iron door to the balcony standing open. You remember? Martin Starberth was, presumably, murdered about ten minutes to twelve. The door, presumably also, was open then, and remained open. An hour's heavy rain, we must assume, drove in at that door. Certainly it drove against the window — a much smaller space, and choked with ivy. The next morning there were large rain-water pools under the window. But not a drop of rain had come in at the door; the floor around it was dry, gritty, and even dusty.
"In other words, gentlemen," the doctor said, calmly, "the door had not been opened until after one o'clock, after the rain had stopped. It didn't blow open; it is so heavy that you can barely wrench it out. Somebody opened it afterwards, in the middle of the night, to set his stage."
Another pause. The rector sat stiffly upright. The lamplight showed a twitching nerve beside his cheekbone.
"Martin Starberth was a very heavy smoker," continued Dr. Fell. "He was frightened, and nervous, and he had been smoking steadily all that day. In a vigil of the sort he had to undergo it is not too far fetched to believe that he would have smoked even more heavily during his wait…. A full cigarette-case and matches were found on his body. There was not one single cigarette-stub on the floor of the Governor's Room."