“Neither do we,” Henry Pomfret put in. “If we know him at all. Of course you’re welcome to the suspense... if that’s part of the stunt...”
Fox smiled at him, a thin tight smile. “Why?” he inquired smoothly. “Is it getting a little too tough for you?”
Pomfret tried an answering smile, and his was a shade crooked. “Tough?”
Fox nodded. “The suspense, I mean. Naturally you’re curious — for instance, about what gave me my strong suspicion Tuesday night. I’ll relieve you on that. Four things — none very convincing by itself, but in combination quite an argument. First, a pomfret is a fish, a spiny-finned sooty-black fish; and piscus means fish. Second, in choosing an alias many people are irresistibly tempted to pick one with their own initials; and there was Harriet Piscus and Henry Pomfret. Third, the Wan Li black rectangular vase had somehow got to Miss Tusar’s apartment; and what if it hadn’t been stolen at all? Fourth and by far the best, Mr. Fish had taken incredibly elaborate precautions to keep the secret of his friendship with Miss Tusar, so it must have meant crushing disaster to him to have it disclosed. That pointed, I thought, in only one direction. I was correct, wasn’t I, Mrs. Pomfret? Wasn’t it wise of your husband to do his utmost to keep you from learning that Miss Tusar was his mistress?”
No one stirred; no one spoke; and Mrs. Pomfret, erect again with her fixed gaze shooting past Fox at the figure on his right, was a frozen image. Pomfret was sneering at Fox, sneering indignantly and successfully at the preposterous calumny; but, feeling that other gaze, feeling it bore through him and into him, he was inexorably impelled to abandon Fox and his sneer, and meet it. He did it well; he accepted the challenge and struck at it as he could.
“No, Irene,” he said huskily but not weakly. “No. I assure you. No!”
With the last “No” there was movement, but not by him. The mounting fury of Garda Tusar, too high now for words, resorted to sudden and impetuous action, and was like lightning. Her darting hand seized the neck of the violin, on the table between her and Beck, and before either Beck or Diego could move to stop her, the fragile and priceless instrument went hurtling through the air. Presumably she aimed it at Fox, but it flew high over his head, crashed against the sharp corner of a steel cabinet, and fell to the floor. Beck bounded out of his chair after it, but Fox was there first and got it.
“Great God above,” Diego said. He gripped Garda’s arm and pulled her down into her chair.
Fox held the violin in his hands. The beautiful belly was splintered into fragments, so that he could look inside, at the inside of the back; and that, oddly enough at that tense moment, was what he was doing. He did so for some seconds, disregarding Beck clutching at his sleeve, until Adolph Koch exclaimed:
“Damn it, are you waiting for a cue?”
Fox, ignoring him, sat down, placed the violin on the table before him and folded his arms on it, and looked at Henry Pomfret.
“This,” he said, “changes the situation entirely. I admitted that I had no proof. If Miss Tusar had sat tight I doubt if there would ever have been any. My idea was that by convincing her that you had killed her brother I could get the proof from her — enough to serve. But she has given it to me another way.”
He tapped the shattered belly of the violin. “It’s here. Inside here.”
Chapter 18
Pomfret showed his teeth. White was on his cheeks.
His wife extended a hand and said harshly, “Let me see it.”
Fox shook his head. “I’m going on a little,” he said grimly. “I’m going to have the satisfaction of cleaning it up in front of him.” He twisted in his seat to face Pomfret, but kept one arm across the violin. “I said a while ago that I learned something yesterday afternoon that made me sure it was you. What I learned was what I already suspected, that you broke your Ming five-color vase yourself. You did it purposely—”
“No,” a voice declared. It was Adolph Koch. “I don’t believe that. If you have proof that he’s a murderer, you have, but he never broke that Ming deliberately. He simply couldn’t.”
“He did.” Fox didn’t look away from Pomfret. “You broke it because you had to have a good and convincing excuse to stop collecting pottery. Your wife knew too much about pottery — not as much as you, I suppose, but too much. You wanted to start collecting coins. Because you could safely pretend that you had paid a couple of thousand for a Fatimid dinar, whereas it had cost only three or four hundred. And your wife furnished the money for your coin collecting, as she had for your pottery. In that way you could clear — I don’t know — say twenty thousand a year, anyway enough to serve your purpose. So you broke the Ming.”
“That’s a lie.” Pomfret wet his lips. He was steadily meeting Fox’s gaze, which must have been easier, at least, than meeting his wife’s. “It’s a damned lie.” He showed his teeth. “By God, you’ll pay for this! That transparent trick — proof—” He pointed at the violin, his finger nearly touching it. “Pretending there’s proof — when there can’t be—”
“I’ll come to that.” Fox fastened to his eyes. “First a few other things. You broke the Ming. You were seen standing in the yellow room with a piece of it in your hand more than half an hour before Perry Dunham discovered it.”
“Who saw me?”
“Lawrence Mowbray.”
“He is dead.”
“Yes, he’s dead. I suppose the vase episode made him suspicious. He may even have been clever enough to have guessed at the motive. Somehow, I don’t know how, he confirmed the suspicion and learned of your relations with Miss Tusar. Your wife was his dear and old friend. He warned you to give her a square deal and threatened to tell her if you didn’t. You went unobserved to his office and hit him on the head and pushed him out of a window.”
“You can prove that too.”
“No, I can’t. That’s mostly conjecture, but I wanted to say it to you and let Miss Mowbray hear it—”
“Dora!” Pomfret stretched a hand across the table. “You don’t believe?...”
She didn’t look at him. Her lips compressed, her fingers twisted tight, she was gazing at Fox.
“That,” Fox said, “was last winter. You felt safe. But in fact you’re an extraordinary combination of cleverness and stupidity. It is possible for a man to conceal, and keep forever concealed, some isolated action, but any activity continued indefinitely will sooner or later be discovered. Mowbray discovered your relations with Miss Tusar, and not long ago Jan Tusar did also. I don’t know just when or how; Miss Tusar will no doubt eventually fill that gap; before the day comes for you to face a judge and jury she will probably tell much more than that, to save herself from being tried as an accessory. It may even be that he saw the Wan Li vase in his sister’s apartment, as Diego did later — your vase that you had taken there yourself. Anyway, he learned about it; and he didn’t like you, and he was under great obligation to your wife. He confronted you with his knowledge and gave you an ultimatum: Break off your relations with his sister or he would inform your wife. You met the threat with the calculation of a devil and the cunning of a snake; a few hours before his big concert you poured varnish into his violin. You knew his character and temperament; you knew that, engulfed in despair, he might even kill himself; and he did.”
“No,” Henry Pomfret said. His voice was thick. “No!” Then he made an irremediable blunder. His head turned, and not toward his wife, but away from her. “Garda!” he entreated. “Garda, I didn’t!”