“Undoubtedly. A report would have been heard. But that doesn’t explain—” The detective got up from his chair. “See. You stand there. I here. Now how would it be possible, with any kind of a gun, for me to fire that needle at you so it would enter your breast pointing upwards?”
“If you were on the ground, and a little closer—” the Doctor suggested.
“But I’m not. Remember, concealment was out of the question. There was no place for it.”
“It might have been deflected by something — a button on his shirt, for instance.”
“A bullet, yes. But hardly a thin sharp needle like this. The deuce of it is, we can’t know the exact moment it happened. It’s evident that the Colonel didn’t feel the thing at all when it struck him. You say it would take from five to fifteen minutes for the poison to work. Then it might have been anywhere from the fourth green to where he took his second on the fifth. What I can’t understand is how it could possibly have been done without one of those men seeing it — or one of the other two, if one of the three is the murderer.”
Again the detective thoughtfully turned the needle over in his fingers, as though he would extract the stubborn secret somehow from the slender piece of steel. There was a long silence. Doctor Wortley, wandering to the closed fireplace, found himself regarding the Colonel’s golf bag, left standing there by Harry Adams on their arrival at Greenlawn. The Doctor took out the driver and passed his hand slowly up and down the shaft. “Poor old Carson, he’s had his last drive,” he breathed. At that moment the dinner bell rang.
At the table the subject of Fred’s visit to the Mortons was brought into the conversation by a remark of Harry’s and the elder of the two young men defended himself by explaining that he had had an engagement to play tennis with Dora Morton that afternoon, and had driven over merely to break it. Furthermore, he announced his intention of remaining away from her for a time, out of respect for his uncle’s memory. Fraser Mawson and Doctor Wortley signified their approval of this. Nobody ate much, and the conversation was by fits and starts. Fred, grave and thoughtful, seemed a different person from the young man who had so gaily chaffed his two elders only that morning; Harry seemed to be irritable and nervous, to an extent that caused the old doctor to turn a solicitous eye on him. At the end, over the coffee, the Doctor announced that in accordance with the boys’ request he had made the preliminary arrangements over the telephone for the funeral to be held on Monday morning; the services were to be military. The young men acquiesced with silent nods.
Afterwards — and it was quite dark when the meal was finished, for they had not sat down till late — Rankin and the Doctor went to the piazza with their cigars, while Mawson, observing that he wanted to have everything straightened out that night, returned to his books and papers in the little office at the end of the hall.
Half an hour later the detective, having left the Doctor below on the piazza, made his way upstairs to the room at the front of the house where the blinds had been closed since early in the afternoon. The door was shut. He turned the knob softly and entered; then, as he heard the sound of smothered sobbing from the further side of the room, where a dim light burned above the motionless form on the bed, he would have turned back. But already he had been seen: the young man who was kneeling there had lifted his tearstained face to gaze at the intruder. It was Fred Adams.
“I’m sorry,” Rankin apologized. “I didn’t know you were here.”
“It’s all right, sir. It doesn’t matter.” The young man barely managed to control his voice.
Rankin moved across to the bed and stood there looking down at the face to Colonel Phillips, set in death. The other remained on his knees beside him.
“I haven’t prayed for ten years,” said the young man presently, in a voice now almost calm. “And I can’t now. I don’t know what to pray for. I suppose you think I’m a baby, Mr. Rankin, but you don’t know... Only yesterday I had a quarrel with him... I said things... I’d give anything in the world to have those words back. And he was so good. He let me have my way. It was about Dora — Miss Morton. He was going with me to see her tomorrow.”
Rankin looked at him, and nodded. “Then it’s no wonder you feel badly, my boy. Your uncle was a noble and good man. Tears for him are nothing to be ashamed of.”
“No, sir. I know how good he was. He was father and mother to Harry and me. Better than we deserved. And we didn’t — we treated him—”
The voice broke again, and silence followed. Rankin felt vaguely uncomfortable, and after a minute he turned and tiptoed silently out of the room.
He left the house by a side door and strolled into the garden. The night was cool, with a fresh breeze from the east, and the light of a full moon shed its silvery radiance everywhere. The fragrance of the blossoms, stirred by the breeze, filled the air; the soft music of the fountain came from the terraces at the other end. Rankin, lighting a cigar, wandered about the gravel paths for a time, and finally sat down on a bench in the dark shadow of a great spreading laca bush.
His thoughts were for the most part confused. Try as he might, he could fasten on no theory that would fit the circumstances of Colonel Phillips’s mysterious death; he could not even evolve a satisfactory explanation of the manner in which the crime had been committed. For the twentieth time he pictured to himself the scene on the golf links that morning, trying to discover some possible combination of events that would answer to the known facts. He, himself, had seen the foursome drive off from the first tee. He went over again the answers of the Colonel’s caddie to his questions. He tried to deduce the solution from what was known; he tried to arrive at it by elimination; he tried to visualize it. Without success. His brain whirled. Finally he rose to his feet with a sigh, pulling out his watch, and was surprised to see that it was past eleven o’clock. Probably the others had gone to bed, with the exception of Doctor Wortley, who was to sit up with the dead. He had been in the garden over two hours. A glance showed him that all the windows on that side were dark.
He turned toward the house, but before he had taken two steps he saw something that caused him to draw back hastily into the shadow of the laca bush. Someone was moving on the piazza, and this someone suddenly leaped over the rail onto the driveway and stood there in the moonlight glancing furtively about him in every direction. It was the furtiveness in that look that caused the detective to draw back.
Suddenly the man turned and moved swiftly down the driveway. Rankin thought it looked like one of the Adams boys. He waited till there was a hundred yards between them, then followed, being careful to keep on the soft turf at the edge of the drive. The man ahead moved so swiftly that he was forced to trot to keep up. Down the length of the driveway he was led, until finally the great entrance gate was reached; there the man turned to the right without hesitation and continued on down the road. A moment later Rankin emerged from the gateway and, seeking the shadow of the trees along the opposite side, followed warily. The man ahead kept to the center of the road, full in the moonlight, pounding along at a rapid walk.
They had gone perhaps two hundred yards from the gate when the detective, happening to glance back over his shoulder, saw the figure of still another man emerge from the entrance of Greenlawn and turn up the road toward him.
He, too, was being followed!
Chapter IV
As Rankin turned he saw the man in the rear dodge hastily into the shadow of a tree. With a mental shrug of the shoulders the detective turned again and strode on. His chief concern was with the man in front; if the other came along, so much the better.