"Ruth, my dear," he began, and hesitated. He was again sedate and grave. "If any foolishness of mine ever gives you the slightest concern," he said, "it will have been worth it."
And, to conceal the horror growing in him, he blundered back to the sofa and sat down in his old place. Hastily he picked up the cigar and clipped its end with a cutter; Martin passed across a pocket-lighter.
"There's little more to tell," Stannard drew in smoke deeply, "though it was perhaps — no matter. I told you I couldn't get out. There was, of course, a door at the bottom of the shaft"
"A door?" said Martin.
"Yes. Logical deduction, as I sat in my corner, convinced me that there must be one. You know the facts: you should be able to see why the door was there, its purpose, and where it led. But the door," Stannard said thoughtfully, "was locked. I found it after groping round the walls in the dark. Locked!
That, Inspector, should give you a clue to the mystery of the girl's death. As for my plight when daylight came…"
"Martin," Ruth cried, "only opened the iron door, and threw the key inside!"
"One moment," Stannard intervened. "It was not Drake's fault Tell me, my dear fellow: when you fell from the roof this morning, was your wrist-watch smashed?"
The villain of the piece shook his head.
''No. It was the first thing I heard when I woke up. Ticking on my bedside table. I'm wearing it now."'
"Tell me the time, will you?"
"It's… ten minutes past eleven."
"No," contradicted Stannard. He smiled and coughed out of cigar-smoke. "I examined your watch today. It's something over ten minutes fast Now do you see why I was so badly caught?"
Martin, reconstructing last night, saw himself hauling down a heavy paper-bale to sit on: that was just after the vigil began. He remembered looking at the luminous figures of his watch, and thinking Stannard's own watch must be fast because it was well past twelve. But — Stannard was right — his watch must have been fast
"Stan, you mustn't keep thinking about it!" urged Ruth.
"But I was never more controlled!" said Stannard. "Would you believe, Inspector, that in my brick corner I alternately dozed and woke up, and dozed and woke up? In darkness the — the poor girl beside me seemed to my imagination worse than she had looked in light The quiet, the damned quiet! And the influences of people who'd dropped there!
"Presently I waked from my doze. My lamp had gone out on the floor above me; but there was a dim kind of grey from the two little windows up above. I kept my eyes on my wrist-watch; it said thirteen minutes to four. Before going down there I had opened the door of the execution shed a little way — you remember?"
"Yes. I remember," Martin said grimly.
"So that Drake would be sure to hear. Thirteen minutes to go. Then…
"Then Drake's voice cried, 'Stannard! Stannard! Are you all right?' Bracing myself for those last extra minutes, I was completely off balance. I managed to croak out 'I'm here. I'm—' Whereupon he said the time was up, and he was opening the iron door. I heard the door open, and the key clatter inside. Then he said something about entertaining evening, and he was free and so was I’
1 was paralyzed. I could not utter a word. Such is the nature of an unexpected voice. Then, since he seemed to be going away…"
"Damn it," protested Martin, whose guilty conscience troubled him, "how could I have known you were down there?"
"You couldn't have. It was my own — call it what you like. I did find my voice, and start to call after you. You heard that?"
"Faintly. When I was on my way out"
"So I knew myself in a trap for heaven knew how long. I was there with what remained of Enid Puckston, and the other things. The only possibility was to break down the door I spoke of, the door at the front of the shaft
"Inspector, have you ever tried this? On many, many occasions in fiction I have read, Twice he hurled himself at the door, and on the third attempt the lock splintered.' Well, try it. If this had been a proper prison door, I shouldn't have had a chance. But it wasn't’
"It became an endless series of kicks with a heavy country boot Once or twice I stumbled over — Enid Puckston. I think it took half an hour. The last frantic kick, which wrenched my ankle and made me think I was done, tore the lock out of the door.
"I had my pocket-lighter, which I had not used except for a cigar or two. In front of me was a short brick passage running straight Can you guess what it was?"
Masters, who long ago had swung his chair round again, spoke in an expressionless voice.
"No need to guess, sir. I know what it was."
"Oh?"
"It was the way the prison doctor and governor and the rest came down to certify death after an execution. Also the way they carried the body up again, so the prisoners wouldn't get a look at it from windows."
"Ah! So I reasoned! The passage must lead to—"
'To the prison mortuary on the ground floor of Wing B," Masters said slowly. "Along a little passage, turn left to another passage, up a flight of steps into the mortuary. Mr. Drake was sitting all night with his back to one wall of the mortuary."
"I was?"
"Oh, ah. The door's a little way down from where you were sitting, in the wall between the aisle and the paper-bales. Listen, Mr. Stannard!"
Masters held up a pencil and studied its point
"We know how you got up into the mortuary, pretty well done in," said Masters, "and with a bad ankle. You managed to get to the condemned cell, and rang the alarm-bell till the rope broke. The constable found you there afterwards. Now could you give me some answers?'
"What the devil do you think I've been doing?"
"Now, now! No call to get excited!’
Stannard’s cigar had burnt down raggedly. He dropped it into an ashtray beside the sofa. With some fervency Martin wished that the Chief Inspector, who could at times be as yielding yet as smothering and stifling as a feather bed, would end a questioning which was having such bad effect on — Ruth, for one.
"You smashed the locked door to the underground passage. Oh, ah! You had a pocket-lighter? Oh, ah! Was there a key in this lock on the other side?"
"No."
"Though you'd been told no doors were locked at the prison except the main gates?"
"It was the only locked door." Stannard, his black eyebrows raised, leaned forward and again seemed to throw back the words through half-closed teeth. "The hinges of the front gates were oiled, though I didn't oil them. The lock and hinges of that door were oiled, though I didn't oil them. Are your wits beginning to wake up?"
"Maybe, sir! Maybe! Were there blood-spots in that underground passage?"
Ruth tried to, and only just succeeded in, stifling a gasp.
"Yes," Stannard said briefly. "I didn't tread in them."
"And blood-spots in the other passage? Where it turned left, I mean?"
"Yes."
"And blood-spots on the stairs up to the mortuary?" "A few."
"What was Miss Puckston's body lying on, sir? On the floor, or on anything else, like?"
"She was lying," Stannard pressed his hands over his eyes, "on a fairly large travelling-robe or lap-robe, plaid in colour, with each corner rather twisted up. As though…"
"Ah! As though somebody'd twisted the ends together like a parcel, and carried her there?"
"I can't be expected to answer that"
"Just so. Still—!" Honey flowed in Masters's heavy voice. "Didn't you investigate any blood-spots in the mortuary?"
Stannard stared straight ahead.
There was a door in the mortuary," he replied, "which led out into a big fan-shaped garden, with a prison wing on each side and a spiked wall at the end. It was on the side of the condemned cell. There was a white moving mist. The garden had gone to ruin, but it was overrun with flowers. Red, blue, yellow; I don't know their names.