Prye said, “So that’s it,” and Sands nodded. They were both a little embarrassed at their own softness.
When Hilda came in her eyes were red with weeping. She refused to sit down but stood just inside the door, defiant and sullen.
“I don’t know anything,” she said.
“You look after the upstairs, Hilda?”
“That’s part of my job. I make the beds, change the linen twice a week, and tidy—”
“When do you change the linen, Hilda?”
Her gaze said plainly, I might have expected stupid questions like this. She said finally, “Mondays and Thursdays. You’re wasting my time. There’s been three murders done and you—”
“Yesterday morning, then, you changed the linen on all the beds?”
“Most of them.”
“What do you do with the soiled linen?”
“Put it down the laundry chute. It goes into a basket in the cellar.”
“Have you made the beds this morning?”
The scorn of the righteous was in her voice. “Naturally I have. It’s nearly lunch time. I’m just tidying up the bathrooms.”
“Notice anything unusual about any of the beds this morning?” Sands asked.
She looked faintly contemptuous. “Sure I did. I found Mrs. Revel in bed crying, and I found a hole in one of the blankets where Mr. Revel had burned it with a cigarette, if that’s what you mean by unusual.”
Sands regarded her coldly. “I’d like to go down to the cellar and see the laundry basket. I want you to come too.”
“Why?” she cried. “Why? I don’t want to go down there where... where Mr. Williams was— I want to go home!”
“You want your mother,” Sands said.
She began to cry. “I w-want my m-mother!”
Sands said, “You come down into the cellar with me and I’ll send you home to your mother.”
He took her by the arm and led her out. Prye followed them to the cellar. The laundry basket was beside the steps. Sands paused in front of it and said, “I want you to count the sheets, Hilda, and as you count, hand them to me.”
She started to pull out the sheets, still crying, but softly and happily.
“Sixteen,” Sands said, five minutes later. “Is that all?”
Hilda straightened up. “N-no, I don’t think so. Let me see. I didn’t change Mr. Revel’s bed, as he hasn’t been here very long, and I didn’t go into Mr. Stevens’ or Mr. Williams’ room. But all the other beds would make eighteen sheets. That means there are two missing.”
“So it does,” Sands said.
“What could that mean? Who’d want two dirty sheets?”
Sands told her she’d better go up to her room and pack if she still wanted to go home. She exhibited her first sign of willing co-operation by running up the steps two at a time. Sands and Prye faced each other across the laundry basket.
“The old boarding-school dodge,” Sands said, “seems to have worked. How it was worked is another question. If any of the guests came through the first- and second-floor halls carrying two soiled sheets Constable Clovis would remember. Sitting at the front door, he had a view of both halls. However, we’ll examine the rooms on the second floor.”
They were lucky. The second room they looked at was the bathroom beside Duncan’s room. There were unmistakable signs that someone had crawled through the window: the soot on the outside ledge was disturbed and several strands of lint were caught in the roughened wood.
“Nerve,” Sands said. “Or desperation. Or both. Where could the sheets have been tied to?”
Prye pointed. “The toilet. That would give the whole thing a nice homey touch.”
“Ridiculous, isn’t it? A grim and desperate murderer tying a sheet round a toilet, all done in perfect seriousness.” He looked out of the window again. “The tree there would prevent anyone from accidentally seeing the operation. The bathroom door would be locked — perfectly legitimate. And the sheets? Brought in under a bathrobe, I suppose, taken out the same way, thrown down the laundry chute, recovered later, and put in the furnace. Neat. Nothing incriminating. Baths are being taken all the time. Question is, did the policeman notice who went into this bathroom?”
The policeman, roused out of bed by the telephone, did not know. Everyone, he said, was going into bathrooms at that time. They were all retiring. Naturally he paid no attention.
“Naturally,” Sands repeated to Prye with a grimace. “Probably closed his eyes to avoid embarrassing the ladies.”
He left Prye standing in the hall and went outside by the back door. Two men were putting Sammy Twist on a stretcher and covering him. When the cover was over him Sammy didn’t look human at all. He was still curled up like a baby.
Sands said, “Wait!” and went over and lifted the cover from Sammy’s face.
“Can’t you — straighten him out a little?” he asked the men who were carrying the stretcher.
The men looked at him in surprise. One of them opened his mouth to speak hut Sands said coldly, “What I mean is, he looks a bit — messy. Oh well. Never mind. Go ahead.”
He walked off, shrugging his shoulders.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” one of the men said. “Looks messy, does he? It ain’t enough that the poor guy is murdered, he’s got to look cute. That Sands has no heart.”
“He ain’t human,” the other man agreed.
They had a profound discussion on Sands’ inhumanity all the way to the morgue.
Sands walked back to the house, thinking, I’ll have to be more careful. I’m getting soft. When he went into the hall he saw Dinah coming down the steps toward him. She was moving slowly and carefully, like a woman who has been ill for a long time. Sands noticed for the first time how thin she was, with the thinness and awkwardness of a schoolgirl.
He said, “I’m sorry you had such an unpleasant experience, Mrs. Revel.”
Her eyes looked at him blankly for a moment. “Yes, it was unpleasant. I don’t want to think about it.” She shivered. “He was cold... cold. Was that your Sammy Twist?”
Sands nodded.
“He was awfully young,” Dinah said, stroking the banister with her hand. Little whining cats, she thought, that rub up against your leg for sympathy. “I was never young. When I was born I looked like a little old man, I’m told, all wrinkled and gray.”
“Most babies are red,” Sands said.
“Yes, I know. I was gray. A little old man.” She came down the rest of the steps, stroking the banister as she moved, her face strange and dreamy like a cat’s. “Of course I should never have been born at all.”
“No,” Sands said, fascinated by the movement of her hand, soft and quick on the banister.
“My mother was shocked when she saw me. She thought she was going to have a baby and then she saw me, a little gray old man. Obscene, isn’t it?”
He wanted to escape from her. He wanted to tell her to keep her chin up or to go to hell, he didn’t care which.
Jackson came out of the kitchen, ringing the bell for lunch. Dinah walked away, without speaking, toward the dining room.
“Will you be having lunch, sir?” Jackson asked.
“No, thanks,” Sands said.
He shut himself up in the library before anyone else appeared.
Dinah stood by the buffet looking at herself in the mirror. I look crazy, she thought, like a crazy, white-faced witch. Nobody would be in love with me, certainly not George. Witch—
She knew it was George coming in by the sound of his step, but she didn’t turn around.
“Hello, Dinah,” Revel said. “I’ve been talking to Prye.”
“He has no right to talk about me to anyone,” she said without turning around.
“He wasn’t talking about you but about me. He thinks I’m a heel. I’m inclined to agree. I must be getting senile.”