"Toulon? Tournai?"
"Neither." He turned to the back board of the album. "This had been prepared for certain members of the W.H.O. by a firm called Gucci Zanolette, Via XX Settembre, Genoa. The word that has been scratched out is Torino — the Italian, of course, for Turin."
Turin. Only a word, but he might as well have hit me with a sledge-hammer. It had about the same effect. Turin. I sat in a chair because all of a sudden I felt I had to sit, and after the first dazed shock started to wear off I managed to whip a few of the less lethargic brain cells out of their coma and started thinking again. It wasn't much in the way of thinking, not as thinking went, for with the beating and the soaking I had received, the lack of sleep and food, I was a fair way below my best insofar as anything resembling active cerebration was concerned. Slowly, laboriously, I assembled a few facts in the befogged recesses of my mind, and no matter how I reassembled them those facts formed the same mosaic every time. Two and two always came out to four.
I rose heavily to my feet and said to the General, "It's like the man says, sir. You speak more truly than you know."
"Are you all right, Cavell?" There was sharp anxiety in the voice.
"I'm falling to pieces. My mind, such as it is, is still on its hinges. Or I think so. We'll soon find out."
Torch in hand, I turned and left the room. The General and Hardanger hesitated, then followed. I suppose they were exchanging all sorts of apprehensive glances, but I was past caring.
I'd already been in the garage and shed, so those weren't the places to look. Somewhere in the shrubbery, I thought drearily — and it was still raining. In the hall I turned off into the kitchen and was about to make for the back door when I saw a flight of steps leading down to the cellar. I remembered vaguely that Sergeant Carlisle had made mention of this when he and his men had been searching the house that afternoon. I went down the flight of steps, opened the cellar door and switched on the overhead light. I stood aside to let the General and Hardanger into the cellar.
"It's as you said, sir," I murmured to the General. "MacDonald won't be troubling us any more."
Which was not quite accurate. MacDonald was going to give some trouble yet. To the police doctor, the undertaker and the man who would have to cut the rope by which he was suspended by the neck from the heavy iron ring in the overhead loading hatch. As he dangled there, feet just clear of the floor and brushing the legs of an overturned chair, he was the stuff that screaming nightmares are made of: eyes staring wide in the frenzied agony of death, bluish-purple face, swollen tongue protruding between blackened lips drawn far back in the snarling rictus of dissolution. No, not the stuff that dreams are made of.
"My good God!" The General's voice was a hushed whisper. "MacDonald." He gazed at the dangling figure then said slowly, "He must have known his time was running out."
I shook my head. "Someone else decided for him that his time had run out."
"Someone else—" Hardanger examined the dead man closely, his face giving nothing away. "His hands are free. His feet are free. He was conscious when he started to strangle. That chair was brought down from the kitchen. And yet you say—"
"He was murdered. Look at the streaks and marks in that coal dust a few feet from the chair, and that disturbed pile of coal with lumps kicked all over the cellar floor. Look at the weals and the blood on the inside of the thumbs."
"He could have changed his mind at the last minute," Hardanger rumbled. "Lots of them do. As soon as he started choking he probably grabbed the rope above his head and took the weight until he couldn't hang on any more. That would account for the marks on his thumbs."
"The marks on his thumbs were caused by twine or wire binding them together," I said. "He was marched down here, almost certainly at gun-point, and made to lie-down on the floor. He may have been blindfolded, I don't know. Probably. Whoever killed him passed a rope through the ring and had the loop round MacDonald's neck and had started hauling before MacDonald could do anything about it. That's what caused all that mess in the coal dust — MacDonald trying to scrabble madly to his feet as the pressure tightened round his neck. With his thumbs bound behind his back he made it with the assistance of his executioner, but it wouldn't have been easy. It only postponed death by seconds, the man on the end of the rope just kept on hauling. Can't you see MacDonald almost tearing his thumbs off in an effort to free them? By and by he would be on tiptoe — but a man can't stand on tiptoe for ever. When he was dead our pal on the heaving end got a chair and used it to help him lift MacDonald clear off the floor — MacDonald was a big heavy man. When he'd secured him there, he cut the twine on MacDonald's thumbs and kicked over the chair — to make it look like suicide. It's our old buy-time-at-any-price friend. If he could make us think that MacDonald did himself in because he thought the net was closing round him, then he hoped that we would believe that MacDonald was the king-pin in this business. But he wasn't sure."
"You're guessing," Hardanger said.
"No. Can you see a never-say-die character like MacDonald, not only a highly decorated officer who fought in a tank regiment for six years but also a nerveless espionage agent for many years after that, committing suicide when things started closing in on him? MacDonald thinking of giving up or giving in? He wouldn't have known how to go about it, most probably. MacDonald was well and truly murdered — which he no doubt richly deserved to be anyway. But the real point is that he wasn't murdered only so that our friend could cast more red herrings around and so buy more time: he had to die and our friend thought he might as well make it look like suicide while he was about it in the hope of stalling us further. I was. guessing, Hardanger, but not any more."
"MacDonald had to die?" Hardanger studied me through a long considering silence then said abruptly, "You seem fairly sure about all this."
"I'm certain. I know." I picked up the coal shovel and started heaving away some of the coal that was piled up against the back wall of the cellar. There must have been close on a couple of tons of the stuff reaching almost as high as the ceiling and I was in no condition for anything much more strenuous than brushing my teeth but I had to shift only a fraction of it: for every shovelful I scooped away from the base almost a hundred-weight of lumps came clattering down on to the floor.
"What do you expect to find under that lot?" Hardanger said with heavy sarcasm. "Another body?"
"Another body is exactly what I do expect to find. I expect to find the late Mrs. Turpin. The fact that she tipped off MacDonald about me and didn't bother preparing dinner because she knew MacDonald wouldn't be staying for dinner owing to the fact that he would be taking off for the high timber shows beyond all doubt that she was in cahoots with our pal here. What MacDonald knew, she knew. It would have been pointless to silence MacDonald if Mrs. Turpin had been left alive to squawk. So she was attended to."
But wherever she had been attended to, it hadn't been in the cellar. We went upstairs and while the General went to talk for quite a long time on the scrambler radio-phone in the police van that had followed us from Alfringham, Hardanger and I, with the assistance of two police drivers and a couple of torches, started to scour the grounds. It was no easy job, for the good doctor, who had done so well for himself in the way of furnishing his house, had also done himself pretty well in the way of buying himself privacy, for his policies, half garden, half parkland, extended to over four acres, the whole of it surrounded by an enormous beech hedge that would have stopped a tank.