“I think there’s something in this house,” he said. “Duncan Stevens had it and he was murdered. I think Mr. Williams found it and he is murdered too.”
His neck was getting stiff. He kept rubbing it and wishing she would go away.
“There is nothing here,” she said, and turned and walked to the steps. They creaked under her weight like an old man’s bones.
Sands closed the door and the creaking stopped and the room was very quiet. He walked around it, his eyes moving restlessly. He saw the gun then, buried in one of the pockets of the billiard table.
It looked like a woman’s gun. It was very small and dainty and the handle was inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He wrapped it in his handkerchief and went upstairs. Half an hour later several quiet young men filed into the basement and began their work.
In the sitting room on the first floor Sergeant Bannister was telling the stenographer the troubles of a policeman’s life. You just got through taking statements about one murder and then you got another murder. Wasn’t that life, though?
The stenographer rubbed the carbon stains from her fingers with a handkerchief and agreed that that was life but anyway you got paid for it.
Sure you did, the sergeant said, but the pay wasn’t worth it.
The stenographer said maybe his pay would be raised if he didn’t stand around yapping so much. Why wasn’t he down looking at the corpse?
The sergeant said he was bloody sick of corpses, he wanted to buy a chicken farm, you get a better class of company.
They were still arguing when Prye came in.
Prye said, “May I see some of the statements you’ve taken, Sergeant?”
“Sure, chicken farming pays,” the sergeant said to the stenographer. “Chickens lay eggs, don’t they?”
“The better type of chicken,” Prye said. “May I read the statements?”
“And at forty-seven cents a dozen,” said the sergeant. “Boy, that’s real money. I can even ship a few to Britain.”
Prye went over and picked up a sheaf of papers from the table.
The statement on top was Hilda’s. Her full name was Hilda Ruth Perrin and she had been employed as general maid for over a year by Mrs. Shane. There were many erasures in Hilda’s statement, as if Hilda had said a number of things she didn’t care to sign her name to.
The only part of her statement which Prye found interesting was the following: “I helped Miss Stevens dress for the wedding on Saturday morning. She acted funny, all muddled up. Twice I had to get her a drink of water. She said she was afraid she was getting the flu, and that’s how she looked, feverish. She took two aspirin tablets out of a green bottle.”
Prye put down the statement and let out a stifled groan. The stenographer looked over at him curiously and Bannister interrupted a fifty-thousand-dollar egg deal with China to ask, “What’s the matter with you?”
Prye smiled. “Too many bodies, I guess.”
“They don’t bother me,” the stenographer confided. “I don’t have to look at them. When I think of all the times I’ve written ‘Deceased’ in my life and never got a squint at one of them— Life sure is funny.”
Upstairs someone began to scream shrilly. A door slammed. The screaming stopped abruptly, as if a hand had been clapped over a mouth.
Prye mounted the steps three at a time. Nora was in the upstairs hall pounding on the door of Dinah’s room.
“Dinah,” she cried. “Dinah, are you all right?”
From the other side of the door a muffled voice said, “Go away. Yes. Go away.”
Nora turned to Prye. “Shall I–I mean, that was a terrible scream.”
“Try the door,” Prye said.
Nora opened the door. George Revel was standing a yard away from her, smiling at her crookedly.
“Surprise,” he said. “It’s perfectly all right.”
Dinah was lying across the foot of the bed, her head buried in her arms. She was very quiet.
“You’d better go, George,” Nora said to Revel. “I’ll stay with Dinah. I don’t know what you’ve been saying to her, George—”
“I’ve been saving her life,” Revel said quietly. “She was going to kill herself because of that oily-haired little pimp Williams.”
Dinah’s body jerked convulsively.
“Go away, George,” Nora said. “You’ve got a lousy temper.”
Revel hesitated, then swung round and strode out of the door. Prye caught up with him at the head of the stairs.
“I don’t suppose you were exaggerating, Revel?” he said.
Revel turned round to face him. “She intended to kill herself. I walked in and she began to scream.”
“Weapon?”
“She had a knife, a paper knife.” He took a short, thin silver knife from his coat pocket and handed it to Prye. Prye felt the edge of it with his fingers.
“A weapon of sorts,” he said, handing it back. He looked down and saw that Inspector Sands was standing at the bottom of the steps watching them.
“I’ll take that,” Sands said.
Revel gave a short laugh and started down the steps holding the paper knife rather contemptuously between two fingers. He held it out to the inspector.
“There it is, Inspector, for what it’s worth.”
“Thanks,” Sands said, glancing at the handle. “D.O.R. is Dinah O’Shaughnessy Revel, I gather?”
Revel nodded. “Yes. I took it out of her room. It seems she was strongly attached to Williams and I didn’t want anything to happen.”
“She and Williams were engaged,” Sands said.
Revel let out a snort. “Don’t kid me. Williams was engaged to half-a-dozen women and Dinah isn’t one of them.”
“She thought she was.”
Revel was staring at him incredulously. “Listen,” he said. “Dinah may have thought she was in love with Williams but she didn’t think he’d marry her. My God, Dinah’s too smart for that.”
“The smart girls are no harder to fool than the rest of them,” Sands said. “We’ll skip that for now. I am requesting everyone to go into the drawing room to answer some questions. You might go there now, Revel, and start cooking up the story you want me to swallow.”
“What story?” Revel said.
Sands was going up the stairs. He said something over his shoulder that sounded like “Knaves or fools.”
It was nearly seven o’clock by the time the members of the household took their places in the drawing room.
There had been no protests except from Mrs. Hogan, the cook. Most of them realized that Sands had been as lenient as he could be under the circumstances.
Even Mrs. Hogan’s protests were halfhearted and concerned with the fact that dinner would be late and three stuffed chickens languished in the warming oven. Besides, as Mrs. Hogan explained carefully to Sands, if a body minded her own business and tended to her job properly, she had no time to go around shooting at people.
“I’m sorry,” Sands said mildly. “I don’t think you did shoot anyone, but my unsupported opinion doesn’t weigh with my superiors.”
Mrs. Hogan, who had occasionally attended the Communist meetings in Queen’s Park before the war, was vaguely comforted by the fact that even the inspector had a boss.
“Go ahead,” Mrs. Hogan said tersely. “I’ll answer any questions that don’t infringe on me rights as an individual.”
“Thank you,” Sands said. “When you are preparing meals in the kitchen, do you keep the kitchen doors closed?”
“Yes sir.”
“What were you doing between six and six-thirty o’clock this evening?”
“Working.”
“Anyone with you in the kitchen?”
Mrs. Hogan nodded her head toward Hilda, who was standing beside the door. “Her, some of the time. She was getting in the way as usual.”