"By the way," he said. "Chief Inspector Masters wants to see you."
Dr. Laurier looked frankly puzzled,
"Chief… ah, yes! He and some other man came to my home last night before I joined you here. They asked some questions, completely mysterious to me, about a clock formerly owned by my father."
"That's not on his mind now. He wants to know," Martin cleared his throat "whether what we found on that dagger was human blood."
Dr. Laurier remained silent for a brief time.
"I regret to say," he answered, "that it was human blood.’’
Martin climbed the treacherous stairs. Would the lid bang on memory this time? Not quite, perhaps; but enough. Oh, to the devil with it anyway! In a very short time, any minute now, Jenny would be here. And he emerged on the roof.
Jenny was right The roof-top lay just a few feet above the mist. In every direction it swam and hovered, so that only a few tree-tops showed green like islands. Far over across the way, the front of the Dragon's Rest lay submerged well above its gable-windows, the three gables rising to steep peaks with plaster faces and window-curtains drawn close.
The sky was clear and warm; no sun, but the hint of a sun. Dead stillness here, and it seemed as lonely as Pentecost
As Martin took a few experimental steps to see how they sounded on concrete in this mist-world, the thought of Pentecost made him glance round.
Pentecost Prison — the observation occurred to him quite gravely — had not-moved. Though it was a very long distance away, he could see the mist lapping nearly to the top of its circular wall. He could pick out no details, and wished he could.
By the way, oughtn't Stannard to be showing up soon? As Dr. Laurier had asked, where was Stannard?
Martin made a complete circuit of the roof, studying the short chimneys and the plentitude of garden furniture. A flick of disquiet touched him when he thought of Stannard. But the man had distinctly said he was all right; he must have lost his way in the mist
Hold on! What's wrong with this roof-top?
Nothing wrong, exactly. Yet…
Martin was now standing towards the front but turning slowly round to study it eastwards. There stood the orange-and-chromium chairs, settees, and tables, vivid against brownish concrete and a pale sky. When he had come up to the roof yesterday evening to see H.M. and Masters, he had taken no particular account of the furniture. Yet it seemed to him now that it was now arranged — especially the folding beach-chairs — in a different pattern.
Nonsense! The furniture didn't get up, sportively, and rearrange itself overnight Such furniture, which suggested cocktail glasses and a portable gramophone, could hold no suggestion of the sinister. Then why was he having this damnable feeling of being watched?
Watched from where?
This was only reaction from last night. That exhilarated mood couldn't have lasted anyway. A number of people were peacefully sleeping underneath him.
"But I've seen the other kind of murderer too," he could remember Stannard saying, at a time which now seemed weeks instead of days ago. "That's why I don't scoff at spiritual evil."
Very well. Yet, whatever constitutes spiritual evil, it is confined to the dark and the unseen way. It has no strength, it is even ludicrous, in the calm early hours of a Sunday morning, on a commonplace roof-top where the furniture suggests a place for a party.
Martin strolled towards the northern side — careful of that ledge, now! — near the front Again he looked towards Pentecost Prison, wondering about Stannard. As he did so, two sentences went through his head.
"I regret to say that it is human blood."
And, recurring from another time, another he had remembered before:
"If you should hear the alarm-bell. In the night, it will mean we are in serious trouble."
He would like to see that alarm-bell. It would show the exact position of the condemned cell, where its rope hung. But, at such a distance, this was impossible. Idly he had noticed beside him a square table with a glassy-looking orange top. It might do for the tea-tray when Jenny arrived. On the table, he now suddenly observed, lay a pair of field-glasses.
Martin laughed aloud. This was like making a wish and having it answered by a flick of the lamp. They were very old glasses of antiquated pattern: the leather scuffed and peeling, the leather strap worn thin. But they might as a matter of curiosity, find the bell on top of the prison. He picked up the field-glasses.
"Jenny, where's that tea?" he called aloud.
Easy! Mustn't go bawling ‘where's that tea' when people are trying to sleep on a lethargic morning with all the windows open. He had said it only because again he felt that someone, with steady and shining eyes, was watching him. Never mind! He turned back to the field-glasses.
It is later than you think.
What made him hesitate, and inspect the glasses more closely, was not the motto on the sundial. It was an idea. He was not well posted on the facts of the Fleet case; H.M. and Masters had said little or nothing. But he did know, from two persons' accounts, that Sir George Fleet had come up to the roof with a pair of field-glasses.
Martin's first idea, characteristically, was a recollection of that grisly ghost-story by M. R. James, in which such glasses contain a fluid brewed from dead men's bones. Then, with a hot-and-cold sensation, he wondered if he might have solved the Fleet mystery while still knowing only a part of the facts.
You could, they said, play strange tricks with optical illusions.
As for the technical side — curse the technical side: he had no knowledge — that could only be guesswork.
"But suppose," Martin said aloud to the mist-world about him, "there's something wrong with the lenses that make distances wrong. He walks towards the front of the roof. He thinks he's farther from that six-inch parapet than he really is. He comes nearly to the edge, starts to take another step, stumbles as though he'd been pushed…"
It could be tried. Martin, facing towards Pentecost Prison and well back from the edge, lifted the field-glasses to his eyes. The lenses were polished, in focus for about a hundred yards, and very clear. Yet such is the power of suggestion, in such fashion can it poison, that he could not keep the glasses at his eyes for more than a brief look. He rattled them down on the glassy-looking table.
This infuriated him. Were those glasses left here, so very obviously, either to entrap or hoax him? Nonsense; it was all nerves.
Very deliberately, to show himself it was so, he turned round. He sauntered to the front of the roof at the middle, and stood just inside the little ledge. Deliberately he looked out over a countryside submerged in mist: left, right, and across to the gables of the Dragon's Rest
Then two things happened.
A distant sound — on its first tremor faint and creaky, but gathering volume, gathering voice — shook out with a creak-and-clang, creak-and-clang, metallic bell-notes banging across a hush of morning, clang-and-call, clang-and-call, so that Martin stood rigid with realization of what it was. The alarm-bell at Pentecost was ringing.
He did not turn round. He had not time to turn round.
A pair of human hands, just behind him, lunged out and gave him a violent shove in the middle of the back.
Martin had just that flash-hundredth of a second, with the bell-note in his ears, to understand he had been pitched forward — head foremost, but a little sideways — pitched forward over the ledge into a sea of mist After that he felt no pain; he felt nothing at all.
Chapter 13
From the right came a faint, steady ticking, just outside the circle of a shaded light The ticking grew stronger (it was a watch on a table) just as did reality. Consciousness looked out through almost-closed eyelids.