And then, as she turned it in her hand, by one of those unforeseen chances something caught the light and her attention. The overhead light was bright above the table. She had excellent sight. What she saw was no more than a scratch just inside the metal rim. She turned the glass, and perceived that it was not one scratch but a series of scratches, and that these scratches formed initials. They were by no means new, and only by holding the magnifying-glass in one position could they be seen at all. If there had not been so strong a light overhead they might not have been noticed.
Miss Silver made out the initials to be Z.R. After gazing at them for some moments she dropped the magnifying-glass into her knitting-bag instead of replacing it upon the table.
CHAPTER XXV
When the two Inspectors had left Lila Dryden’s room Ray Fortescue waited long enough to let them get well away and then ran down into the hall. She wanted to telephone to Bill, and she wanted to find out how she could do it. There was a telephone in the study, but that wasn’t any good, because the policemen were there interviewing people. A house organized and improved by Herbert Whitall would probably be stiff with extensions, but she didn’t know where she should look for them. There would be one in Sir Herbert’s bedroom, but the idea of using it made her feel as if someone had dropped an icicle down her back.
She rang a bell, and Frederick came to answer it. She had seen him vaguely when she arrived, but she hadn’t really noticed what a tall, pale slip of a boy he was. He really was very pale indeed. Not so nice being in a house where there has been a murder and the police keep coming in and out as if the place belonged to them. She produced a friendly smile, and said that she wanted to telephone.
Frederick looked sideways like a startled colt. His lip twitched as he opined that the police would be in the study. Ray liked boys. She thought this one wouldn’t be more than seventeen. Her heart warmed to him. A year or two earlier he could have had a good cry, but you don’t cry if you can help it when you are six foot one. She thought he was having pretty hard work to help it.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I expect there’s an extension, isn’t there?’
‘Oh, yes-in the Blue Room. I don’t think there’s anyone there.’
He showed her the way and displayed a tendency to linger.
Ray said, ‘Thank you very much. I’m afraid I don’t know your name.’
‘ Frederick, Miss.’
‘Well, Frederick, do you think you could wait in the hall while I put through my call? Because I may have to go out for a little, and if I do, perhaps you would find Mary Good for me and ask her to come up and stay with Miss Lila.’
‘Oh, yes, Miss.’ He got as far as the open door, took hold of the handle, twisted it nervously, and said all in a rush, ‘she didn’t have anything to do with it, Miss-not Miss Lila, did she? I mean, there’s things you can believe and things you can’t, and that’s what I couldn’t believe, not if it was ever so.’
Ray gave him one of her best smiles.
‘Thank you, Frederick -that’s very nice of you.’
Frederick clung to the handle.
‘They won’t go and make out she did it, will they? Nor yet Mr. Waring. Ever such a nice gentleman, I thought he was. And a cruel shame not letting him see Miss Lila when he come all that way.’
What Marsham would have thought of this conversation, Ray did not care to speculate. She had a feeling herself that perhaps it had better stop. She said,
‘Thank you, Frederick. Now if you’ll just shut the door, I’ll get on with my call.’
She had never fully realized the beneficence of the telephone until just in a moment with a brief click it gave her Bill’s voice, speaking from the Boar.
‘Hullo!’
She said, ‘It’s Ray,’ and heard his tone warm as he answered her.
‘Ray! I wondered how I was going to get on to you. I thought it wouldn’t be considered exactly tactful if I rang up, but I was getting to the point where I was going to crash in and chance it.’
She thought, ‘He wants to know about Lila. I’m only a kind of extension of the telephone.’ Out loud she said,
‘Lila is quite all right. She had a good sleep this afternoon, and then she got up on the sofa and we had a tea-party in her room-Adrian Grey, and Miss Silver, and me.’
He didn’t seem tremendously interested in the tea-party.
‘Ray, I want to see you. Could you come out to the gate? We could sit and talk in the car. I don’t suppose I’d better come up to the house.’
‘No.’
‘Do you mean no, you can’t come, or no I’d better not come up to the house?’
‘I mean no, you’d better not come up to the house. I’ll come and meet you.’
‘All right-I’ll stop just this side of the gate.’
She left Mary Good with Lila and went down the drive in the dusk. When she turned out of the gate Bill was there, walking up and down on the grass verge of the country road. He put an arm round her shoulders.
‘Good girl! Punctual to the minute.’
‘Do we get into the car, or do we walk up and down?’
After being shut up in a warm house all the afternoon she thought it would feel good to walk with Bill in this cool, soft air.
‘Well, I don’t know. They may have put someone on to shadow me. I think we’d better sit in the car. I want to talk.’
When they were shut in together he came back to Lila, as of course she knew he would. But it wasn’t quite what she expected. He had turned round to face her, his back in the angle between the door and the driving-seat. From his voice she knew just the kind of frowning look he had.
‘What has Lila got to say about it now she has come round?’
She told him.
‘Do you mean to say she doesn’t remember anything at all?’
‘Nothing between going to sleep on the sofa in her room and waking up with Sir Herbert lying dead on the study floor.’
‘Do you think she is telling the truth?’
‘I’m quite sure of it.’
‘Then she really was walking in her sleep?’
‘Oh, yes. She does, you know, when she is worried or upset. She used to do it at school. Miriam St. Clair woke up with a cold hand on her face one night and screamed the place down.’
He said in a dogged voice,
‘Then she did it in her sleep.’
‘Bill! She didn’t do it at all!’
‘I don’t see how you can get away from it. She wasn’t responsible of course. But she had been holding that dagger-her hand was all red.’
‘Bill, you’re mad! Lila couldn’t kill anyone if she tried. And she wouldn’t try.’
‘You didn’t see her standing there like I did.’
‘I don’t care what you saw. If the police thought she had done it they would have arrested her. They came up and saw her after tea-the Scotland Yard man and the local one. I could see they didn’t think she had done it-not by the time they went away anyhow.’
Bill said gloomily, ‘I can’t think why.’
She let some real anger into her voice.
‘Because they’ve got eyes in their heads and some sense in their brains! And because Adrian Grey swears that he was just behind her all the way from her room, and there simply wasn’t time for her to kill Herbert Whitall. I mean, there would have been a scuffle and a pretty heavy fall. Adrian would have been bound to have heard it.’
‘My dear child, Adrian Grey would swear the moon was made of green cheese if he thought it would get Lila out of a mess.’
‘Oh!’
Bill went on in tones which reached a new depth of gloom.