"Thank you," said Mr. Bradley, "Then you actually read detective - stories, Miss Dammers?"
"Certainly," said Miss Dammers, crisply. "Why not?" She dismissed Mr. Bradley as abruptly as she had answered his challenge. "And the letter itself, Sir Charles? The typewriting. You don't attach any importance to that?"
"As a detail, of course it would have to be considered; I was only sketching out the broad lines of the case." Sir Charles was no longer bull - like. "I take it that the police would ferret out pieces of conclusive evidence of that nature."
"I think they might have some difficulty in connecting Pauline Pennefather with the machine that typed that letter," observed Mrs. Fielder - Flemming, not without tartness. The tide of feeling had obviously set in against Sir Charles.
"But the motive," he pleaded, now pathetically on the defensive. "You must admit that the motive is overwhelming."
"You don't know Pauline, Sir Charles - Lady Pennefather?" Miss Dammers suggested.
"I do not."
"Evidently," commented Miss Dammers.
"You don't agree with Sir Charles's theory, Miss Dammers?" ventured Mr. Chitterwick.
"I do not," said Miss Dammers with emphasis. "Might one enquire your reason?" ventured Mr. Chitterwick further.
"Certainly you may. It's a conclusive one, I'm afraid, Sir Charles. I was in Paris at the time of the murder, and just about the very hour when the parcel was being posted I was talking to Pauline Pennefather in the foyer of the Opera."
"What!" exclaimed the discomfited Sir Charles, the remnants of his beautiful theory crashing about his ears.
"I should apologise for not having given you this information before, I suppose," said Miss Dammers with the utmost calmness, "but I wanted to see what sort of a case you could put up against her. And I really do congratulate you. It was a remarkable piece of inductive reasoning. If I hadn't happened to know that it was built up on a complete fallacy you would have quite convinced me."
"But - but why the secrecy, and - and the impersonation by the maid, if her visit was an innocent one?" stammered Sir Charles, his mind revolving wildly round private aeroplanes and the time they would take from the Place de L'Opera to Trafalgar Square.
"Oh, I didn't say it was an innocent one," retorted Miss Dammers carelessly. "Sir Eustace isn't the only one who is waiting for the divorce to marry again. And in the interim Pauline, quite rightly, doesn't see why she should waste valuable time. After all, she isn't so young as she was. And there's always a strange creature called the King's Proctor, isn't there?"
Shortly after that the Chairman adjourned the meeting of the Circle. He did so because he did not wish one of the members to die of apoplexy on his hands.
CHAPTER VII
MRS. FIELDER - FLEMMING was nervous. Actually nervous.
She shuffled the pages of her notebook aimlessly, and seemed hardly able to sit through the few preliminaries which had to be settled before Roger asked her to give the solution which she had already affirmed, privately, to Alicia Dammers, to be indubitably the correct one of Mrs. Bendix's murder. With such a weighty piece of knowledge in her mind one would have thought that for once in her life Mrs. Fielder - Flemming had a really heaven - sent opportunity to be impressive, but for once in her life she made no use of it. If she had not been Mrs. Fielder - Flemming, one might have gone so far as to say that she dithered.
"Are you ready, Mrs. Fielder - Flemming?" Roger asked, gazing at this surprising manifestation.
Mrs. Fielder - Flemming adjusted her very unbecoming hat, rubbed her nose (being innocent of powder, it did not suffer under this habitual treatment; just shone a little more brightly in pink embarrassment), and shot a covert glance round the table. Roger continued to gaze in astonishment. Mrs. Fielder - Flemming was positively shrinking from the lime - light. For some occult reason she was approaching her task with real distaste, and a distaste at that quite out of comparison with the task's significance.
She cleared her throat nervously. "I have a very difficult duty to perform," she began in a low voice. "Last night I hardly slept. Anything more distasteful to a woman like myself it is impossible to imagine." She paused, moistening her lips.
"Oh, come, Mrs. Fielder - Flemming," Roger felt himself impelled to encourage her. "It's the same for all of us, you know. And I've heard you make a most excellent speech at one of your own first nights."
Mrs. Fielder - Flemming looked at him, not at all encouraged. "I was not referring to that aspect of it, Mr. Sheringham," she retorted, rather more tartly. "I was speaking of the burden which has been laid on me by the knowledge that has come into my possession, the terrible duty I have to perform in consequence of it."
"You mean you've solved the little problem?" enquired Mr. Bradley, without reverence.
Mrs. Fielder - Flemming regarded him sombrely. "With infinite regret," she said, in low, womanly tones, "I have." Mrs. Fielder - Flemming was recovering her poise.
She consulted her notes for a moment, and then began to speak in a firmer voice. "Criminology I have always regarded with something of a professional eye. Its main interest has always been for me its immense potentialities for drama. The inevitability of murder; the predestined victim, struggling unconsciously and vainly against fate; the predestined killer, moving first unconsciously too and then with full and relentless realisation, towards the accomplishment of his doom; the hidden causes, unknown perhaps to both victim and killer, which are all the time urging on the fulfilment of destiny.
"Apart from the action and the horror of the deed itself, I have always felt that there are more possibilities of real drama in the most ordinary or sordid of murders than in any other situation that can occur to man. Ibsenish in the inevitable working out of certain circumstances in juxtaposition that we call fate, no less than Edgar - Wallacish in the crises undergone by the emotions of the onlooker at their climax.
"It was perhaps natural then that I should regard not only this particular case from something of the standpoint of my calling (and certainly no more dramatic twist could well be invented), but the task of solving it too. Anyhow, natural or not, this is what I did; and the result has terribly justified me. I considered the case in the light of one of the oldest dramatic situations, and very soon everything became only too clear. I am referring to the situation which the gentlemen who pass among us in these days for dramatic critics, invariably call the Eternal Triangle.
"I had to begin of course with only one of the triangle's three members. Sir Eustace Pennefather. Of the two unknown one must be a woman, the other might be woman or man. So I fell back on another very old and very sound maxim, and proceeded to chercher la femme. And," said Mrs. Fielder - Flemming, very solemnly, "I found her."
So far, it must be admitted, her audience was not particularly impressed. Even the promising opening had not stirred them, for it was only to be expected that Mrs. Fielder - Flemming would feel it her duty to emphasise her feminine shrinkings from handing a criminal over to justice. Her somewhat laborious sentences too, obviously learned off by heart for the occasion, detracted if anything from the interest of what she had to convey.
But when she resumed, having waited in vain for a tributary gasp at her last momentous piece of information, the somewhat calculated tenseness of her style had given way to an unrehearsed earnestness which was very much more impressive.
"I wasn't expecting the triangle to be the hackneyed one," she said, with a slight dig at the deflated remains of Sir Charles. "Lady Pennefather I hardly considered for a moment. The subtlety of the crime, I felt sure, must be a reflection of an unusual situation. And after all a triangle need not necessarily include a husband and wife among its members; any three people, if the circumstances arrange them so, can form one. It is the circumstances, not the three protagonists, that make the triangle.