“Now I wish to impress on you―very clearly!―the last thing we saw as we went downstairs.
“Mr. Brook was standing by the parapet, his back uncompromisingly turned. On one side of him his cane, of light yellowish-colored wood, was propped upright against the parapet. On the other side of him, also resting against the parapet, was the bulging brief-case. Round the tower-top this battlemented parapet ran breast-high; its stone broken, crumbling, and scored with whitish hieroglyphics where people had cut their initials.
“That is clear? Good!
“I took Harry downstairs. I led him across the open space of grass, into the shelter of the big wood of chestnut trees stretching westwards and northwards. For the rain was beginning to sprinkle pretty heavily now, and we had no cover. Under the hissing and pattering leaves, where it was almost dark, my curiosity reached a point of mania. I begged Harry, as his friend and in a sense his tutor, to tell me the meaning of these suggestions against Fay Seton.
“At first he would hardly listen to me. He kept opening and shutting his hands, this handsome mentally unformed young man, and replied that it was all too ridiculous to be talked about.
“’Harry,’ said Uncle Rigaud, lifting an impressive forefinger like this. ‘Harry, I have spoken to you much of French literature. I have spoken to you of crime and the occult. I have covered a broad field of human experience. And I tell you that the things which cause the most trouble in this world are the things which are too ridiculous to talk about.’
“He regarded me quickly, with a strange, sullen, shining eye.
“’Have you,’ he asked, ‘have you heard about Jules Fresnac, the market gardener?’
“’Your mother mentioned him,’ I said, ‘but I have yet to hear what is wrong with Jules Fresnac.’
“’Jules Fresnac,’ said Harry, ‘has a son aged sixteen.’
“’Well?’
“That was the point where―in the twilight woods, out of sight of the tower―we heard a child screaming.
“Yes: a child screaming.
“I tell you,it scared me until I felt my scalp crawl. A drop of rain filtered through the thick leaves overhead, and landed on my bald head, and I jumped throughout every muscle in my body. For I had been congratulating myself that trouble was averted: that Howard Brooke and Harry Brooke and Fay Seton were for the moment separated, and that these three elements were not dangerous unless they came together all at once. And now . . .
“The screaming came from the direction of the tower. Harry and I ran out of the woods, and emerged into the open grassy space with the tower and the curve of the riverbank in front of us. That whole open space now seemed to be full o people.
“What had happened we learned soon enough.
“Inside the fringe of the wood there had been, for some half an hour, a picnic-party composed of a Monsieur and Madame Lambert, their niece, their daughter-in-law, and four younger children aged from nine to fourteen.
“Like true French picnickers, they had refused to let the weather put them off an appointed day. The land was private, of course. But private property means less in France than it does in England. Knowing that Mr. Brooke was supposed o be crotchety about trespassers, they had hung back until they had seen the departure first of Fay Seton and then of Harry and myself. They would assume the coast was clear. The children erupted into the open space, while Monsieur and Madame Lambert sat them down against a chestnut-tree to open the picnic-basket.
“It was the two youngest children who went to explore the tower. As Harry and I rushed out of the wood, I can see yet that little girl standing in the doorway of the tower, pointing upwards. I hear her voice, shrill and raw.
“’Papa! Papa! Papa! There’s a man up there all covered with blood!”
“That was what she said.
“Myself, I cannot say what the others said or did at that moment. Yet I remember the children turning faces of consternation towards their parents, and a blue-and-white rubber ball rolling across the grass to splash into the river. I walked towards that tower, not quite running. I climbed the spiral stair. A strange, wild, fanciful thought occurred to me as I went: that it was very inconsiderate to ask Miss Fay Seton, with her weak heart, to climb up all these steps.
“Then got out on to the roof, where the wind blew freshly.
“Mr. Howard Brooke―still alive, still twitching―lay flat on his face in the middle. The back of his raincoat was soaked and sodden with blood, showing a half-inch rent where he had been stabbed through the back just under the left shoulder-blade.
“I have not yet mentioned that his own cane, the cane he always carried, was really a sword-stick. It now lay in two halves on either side of him. The handle-part, with its long thin pointed blade stained with blood, was lying near his right foot. The wooden sheath had rolled away to rest against the inside of the parapet opposite. But the briefcase containing two thousand pounds had disappeared.
“All this I saw in a kind of daze, while the family of Lambert screamed below. The time was exactly six minutes past four o’clock: I noted this not from any police sense, but because I wondered whether Fay Seton had kept her appointment.
“I ran over to Mr. Brooke, and raised him up to a sitting position. He smiled at me and tried to speak, but all he could get out was, ‘Bad show.’ Harry joined me among the smears of blood, though Harry was not much help. He said, ‘Dad, who did this?’ but the old man was past articulation. He died in his son’s arms a few minutes later, clinging to Harry as though he himself were the child.”
Here Professor Rigaud paused in his narrative.
Looking rather guilty, he lowered his head and glowered down at the dinner-table, his thick hands spread out on either side of it. There was along silence until he shook himself, impatiently.
With extraordinary intensity he added:
“Remark well, please, what I tell you now!
“We know that Mr. Howard Brooke was unhurt, in the best of health, when I left him alone on top of the tower at ten minutes to four o’clock.
“Following that, the person who murdered him must have visited him on top of the tower. This person, when his back was turned, must have drawn the sword-cane from its sheath and run him through the body. Indeed, the police discovered that several fragments of crumbling rock had been detached from one of the broken battlements on the river-side, as though someone’s fingers had torn them loose in climbing up there. And this must have occurred between ten minutes to four and five minutes past four, when the two children discovered him in a dying condition.
“Good! Excellent! Established!”
Professor Rigaud hitched his chair forward.
“yet the evidence shows conclusively,” he said, “that during this time not a living soul came near him.”
Chapter IV
You hear what I say?” insisted Rigaud, snapping his fingers rapidly in the air to attract attention.
Whereupon Miles Hammond woke up.
To any person of imagination, he thought, this narrative of the stout little professor―its sounds and scents and rounded visual detail―had the reality of the living present. Momentarily Miles forgot that he was sitting in an upper room at Beltring’s Restaurant, beside candles burning low and windows opening on Romilly Street. Momentarily he lived the sounds and scents and visual outlines in that story, so that the whisper of the rain in Romilly Street became the rain over Henri Quatre’s tower.
He found himself emotionally stirred up, worrying and fretting and taking sides. He liked this Mr. Howard Brooke, liked him and respected him and sympathized with him, as though the man had been a personal friend. Whoever had killed the old boy . . .