Perhaps the same thought occurred to Locke, for he lifted his eyes briefly before clasping his hands together with close, controlled emotion.
"Somehow," Locke continued, "we got into this. Somehow we must get out of it. The life of every single person connected with this affair has become involved in the web. It's no abstract problem. It's a violent personal issue. Yet it's a web we can't see; can't understand; can only feel. We're not even sure what the problem is. Until we solve that problem, we shall touch frantic states of mind and we shall not be able to sleep at night. But I can't solve the problem. Apparently you can't. In the name of heaven, who can solve it?"
It was Obey's voice which startled them then, 006/8 voice calling the announcement of someone's arrival from the steps to the Painted Room. What Obey bawled was:
"Dr. Gideon Fell."
CHAPTER IX
"Aha!" said Dr. Fell.
How a figure of such vast dimensions managed even to squeeze through the arch, let alone navigate the steps, was something of a mystery. But Dr. Fell managed it
Down he came rolling majestically, an enormous shape with a box-pleated cape round his shoulders, supporting himself on two canes. His shovel hat was clutched under a hand which held one of the canes. His shaggy mop of gray-streaked hair framed a beaming red face with three chins and a very small nose, on which was perched a pair of eyeglasses with a broad black ribbon. A bandit's moustache, uncombed for several days, curved round his mouth. And he beamed on them like a walking furnace.
Dr. Fell's dignity, it is true, was a little impaired by the fact that the ridges of his waistcoat were spattered with cigar ash, and in an upper waistcoat pocket was stuck a long folded envelope carefully inscribed with the words Don't forget this.
But the whole gallery shook to his tread. You might have imagined that the portraits, in which the last light picked out the red of an officer's uniform or the white of a wig, rattled in their frames as he advanced along the narrow strip of carpet.
Dr. Fell, after a vague glance at those portraits, seemed in danger of walking straight into them in order to examine them properly. But he remembered his purpose. Approaching the group by the middle window, he cleared his throat with a long challenging sound like a war cry.
"Mr. Thorley Marsh?"
Thorley, white-faced but stolidly himself again, nodded and stared. "Sir Danvers Locke?" Locke smiled and inclined his head. "Er—Miss Doris Locke?"
Doris, who was furtively wiping her eyes, uttered a kind of squeak at this apparition towering over her.
"Aha!" said Dr. Fell, pleased to have got that straight He wheeled round toward Holden. Whereupon, inexplicably, he began to laugh.
It started as a kind of chuckle deep in his stomach, and then spread upward like a minor earthquake. It made cigar ash rise in clouds from the ridges of his waistcoat, and blew wide the broad ribbon of his eyeglasses. It chortled and roared and thundered, turning Dr. Fell's face scarlet, bringing moisture to his eyes, and, with an outward whoop of the stomach, sending his eyeglasses flying. Its effect was rather like one of those laughing gramophone records: in which, if you are not careful, you will join without knowing why.
"Would you mind telling me," asked Holden, who like Doris and her father had been about to join in, "why I look as funny as all that?"
Dr. Fell stopped dead.
An expression of deep concern overspread his face as he got his breath back.
"Sir," he wheezed, in a voice of real distress, "I beg your pardon! I do really beg your pardon!"
It poured with a contrition out of all proportion to the offense. But he meant it. Everything about him was huger than life, including emotions. Putting down his shovel hat and one walking stick on the table beside Locke's, he groped down the ribbon of the eyeglasses and stuck them awry on his nose.
"You will—er—accept my apologies?" he demanded anxiously. "It was only, sir, that you unconsciously allowed me to accomplish something which (archons of Athens!) I had never believed possible. You see..."
"Look here,'' said Thorley. "What is all this?"
Dr. Fell slowly wheeled round again on one cane.
"Oh, ah! Yes! Sir, you must allow me to explain this unwarranted intrusion."
"No, no, glad to have you!" Thorley assured him, with a shade of Thorley's old hearty smile.
"You see," explained Dr. Fell, with his vague wandering round the gallery, "this is not the first time I have visited Caswall. At one time I had the honor to be a friend of the late Mrs. Andrew Devereux. The lady whom you called, I believe, Mammy Two."
"Mammy Two, eh?" murmured Thorley.
Through Holden's mind flashed certain cryptic words of Celia's on the night before. I don't see how I can back out now. That one man would have been safe enough, the old friend of Mammy Two. But—Could "that one man" refer to Dr. Fell? He had no time to consider this. Dr. Fell was speaking to him.
Dr. Fell, after diving into the pocket of his coat under the big box-pleated cape, had produced a sheet torn from a small notebook and was holding it out to him.
"Before we—harrumph—continue," wheezed Dr. Fell, with an odd flash out of those absent-looking eyes, "will you be good enough to glance over this and tell me whether its contents are correct?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Sir," said Dr. Fell rather testily, and shook the paper in the air, "will you please read this?"
Holden took the paper. It was now so dusky that little of expression could be discerned, but there had been a definite warning in Dr. Fell's eyes. Kneeling sideways on the window seat, Holden held the paper close to the glass to read it. In the night stillness around Caswall he could hear the ripple of the moat
Then the penciled words leaped out at him.
I cannot speak in front of anyone else. As soon as it is fully dark, will you be a witness when I unlock the vault in the churchyard, to see whether ghosts have really walked there? Say yes or no, and return this paper to me.
Twice Holden read it without lifting his eyes. When he did look up, after a glimpse of the dun-colored side of Caswall and a terra-cotta drainpipe beside the window, no muscle in his face moved. He handed the paper back to Dr. Fell.
"Yes," he assented "Thaf s perfectly correct."
Sir Danvers Locke spoke suavely; "You were saying, Dr. Fell?"
"I was saying," returned Dr. Fell, "that my previous visits to this house, except one, have been pleasant." He swayed back and forth a little, partly supporting his weight with both hands on the cane. "This visit, I regret to tell you, is official."
"Official," said Thorley. "Representing whom?"
"Representing Superintendent Madden of the Wiltshire County Constabulary. On instructions from the Metropolitan C. I. D. It refers, as you have probably guessed, to the death of Mrs. Marsh."
"I knew it!" Thorley whispered.
Quickly, with a cool and curt nod, Thorley strode to the north end of the gallery, where he touched three electric switches. It bathed the gallery with a soft glow of ceiling lamps, and of red-shaded table lamps in the window alcoves. Thorley returned to find Dr. Fell teetering back and forth on the crutch-handled stick, glowering down at his clasped hands.
Dr. Fell scowled still more.
"The matter was—harrumph—delicate," he said, without raising his head. "Hadley thought it might be less embarrassing if I, the old duffer, looked into it first In case, you see, it proved to be a mare's nest." "Ah!" said Thorley. "So you've found it’s a mare's nest" "No," answered Dr. Fell, with rounded and ominous distinctness.
"All right. Let's have it. What's the betting?"