They shrank. They glanced at each other, and back at the inspector, and away. If the murderer was there, he had no reason to fear exposing himself by a unique reluctance, for reluctance and distaste were on all faces except that of Tecumseh Fox. He nodded at Damon:
“Good here. That’s sensible. Though probably futile.”
“It is an indignity,” Felix Beck growled.
Hebe said, “It’s horribly revolting.”
The door opened, and eyes went to it. A man entered and spoke across the room to Damon: “Craig wants you, Inspector,” and Damon nodded and tramped out. Everybody decided all at once that their muscles were cramped and shifted to new positions in their chairs or on their feet. Low-voiced mutterings started. Adolph Koch asked Fox if they could be legally compelled to submit to a search, and Fox said no, and Ted Gill said they might as well submit anyway. Beck folded his arms and paced up and down, and a policeman yawned. Schaeffer, who had served the bar, expounded something lengthily to his colleague in an undertone. Tecumseh Fox leaned far backwards and stared at the ceiling, and was still in that position five minutes later when the door opened again and the inspector entered. He walked across to the end of the big table, which was about the geographical center of the assemblage, and held up an object in his hand for all to see.
“Do any of you recognize this?”
“Certainly.” Henry Pomfret spoke up. “It’s my Ju Chou incense bowl. Please don’t drop it!”
“I won’t.” Damon’s big hand had an adequate grip on the beautiful little bowl of red and misty pearly green. “How long has it been kept on that stand in that room?”
“A long time. A couple of years.”
“Is it used to drop things into? Like an ash tray?”
“Not if I know it, it isn’t. Sometimes some ass drops a cigarette in it.”
“Well, this time it wasn’t a cigarette.” There was a note of grim satisfaction in the inspector’s voice. He put the bowl down on the table, and took from it, with his thumb and forefinger, a ball of crumpled paper; and displayed it as a prestidigitator displays a coin he has plucked from the air. “It was this. I’m not going to open it out. One of my men did, part way. It’s a piece of ordinary bond paper, and clinging to it are particles of white powder. He dampened a little of it, and it smells like cyanide. So I withdraw my request that you permit yourselves to be searched.”
There was a stir, a rustle, and dead silence. It was broken by Henry Pomfret.
“Christ,” he muttered incredulously. “In the incense bowl. Then...”
“Then what, Mr. Pomfret?”
“Nothing.” Pomfret shook his head as in disbelief. “Nothing.”
“Did the fact that this was found in the bowl suggest something to you?”
“No! Nothing!”
Damon gazed at him and persisted. “Did it perhaps remind you that you saw someone go to that bowl and drop something in it?”
“No! It didn’t remind me of anything! I was merely going to say that this makes it — that someone here did it. If I had seen anyone drop something in that bowl I’d have fished it out; I always do. Anyway, I wasn’t there, I was in here with Fox.”
“But you might,” Fox put it, “have seen it earlier in the afternoon.” He looked at the inspector. “I was going to suggest before that you may have got a wrong impression from what Schaeffer said. He told you that he served the bar when Mrs. Pomfret rang and told him to. When these people — most of them, he said — were already there. But that wasn’t when they left Pomfret and me here and went to the yellow room, it was before we came to this room at all. I arrived at a quarter past two and the bar was in there then, and everyone else was present.” He returned to Pomfret. “So you could have seen someone drop something into the bowl then, couldn’t you?”
“I suppose I could,” Pomfret admitted gruffly. “But I didn’t.”
“I did,” said a voice.
Swift glances darted to Garda Tusar.
“Who?” Damon barked.
Garda, ignoring him, left her chair over by the big screen, near Adolph Koch, and came around the end of the table. She intended, apparently, to face someone, and she did. It was Dora Mowbray. Garda’s black eyes blazed down, and Dora’s came up to meet them.
“You did it,” Garda said. “I saw you. You went over to the stand—”
There was simultaneous and universal movement; it was as if the nervous systems of those well-behaved people had been adjusted to absorb so much strain and no more. Felix Beck snarled, Hebe gasped, Diego arose so precipitately that he overturned his chair... but the chief performers were Ted Gill and Henry Pomfret. Ted sprang through space, seized Garda’s arm and violently whirled her around; she lost her balance, toppled against the table, and knocked the incense bowl off onto the floor; Pomfret yelled and leaped, grabbed for the bowl and missed, spun around, doubled his fist and crashed it against Ted’s jaw; the detective and policemen, rushing up, got their hands on Pomfret, on Ted, on Garda—
“Back off!” Damon commanded sharply. He glared at Pomfret. “What the hell was that for?”
“I’m sorry,” Pomfret said, but didn’t sound sorry. He was panting. He stooped to get the bowl, which was intact.
Ted’s eyes were glittering at Garda. “I would like,” he said through his teeth, “to pass that tap on to you with interest. I don’t know why you’ve got it in for Miss Mowbray, but you try any more of that raving—”
“Ted!” Dora was there, with a hand on his arm. “Please! She wasn’t raving. I did drop that paper into the bowl.”
Ted gawked at her. The inspector whirled:
“You did?”
“Yes.”
There was a stunned silence.
“By God,” Diego growled. “My little Dora—”
“No, Diego.” Dora shook her head at him. “Your little Dora didn’t put poison in Perry’s whisky.” Her lip trembled, then it curled in sudden anger and her face flared. “Look at you! All of you! Your faces! You believe — just because I— Oh, if my father was here! Everything has been hateful — ever since he died—”
“I’m here!” Ted sang at her.
Damon gazing at her, said dryly, “About dropping that paper in the bowl.”
“I did.” Dora’s eyes met his. “I said I did. It was in my bag.”
“Who put it there?”
“I don’t know. I found it there when we were leaving the yellow room to come in here.” She picked up a brown cloth handbag from her chair, held it up, and indicated an outside compartment made with an extra fold of the cloth. “It was in here. I saw the bulge and stuck my fingers in to see what it was. I had no idea where it came from. It looked like nothing but a crumpled piece of paper, and I dropped it in the bowl as I went by.”
“You are saying that someone put it in there while the bag was in your possession.”
“I am not. I didn’t say that. I left the bag lying on a sofa in the yellow room when Perry — when I went to the other end of the room with Mr. Dunham.”
“And it was when you got it again that you noticed the bulge in it?”
“Yes.”
“How long was the bag lying on the sofa?”