The sky was rapidly darkening. A flash of lightning lit up the path; they saw Ellery reach the head of the terrace stairs and begin the descent.
Judge Macklin sighed. “We may as well go up to the house. It will rain soon, and he’ll come running back in a hurry.”
They drove on up to the house.
Mr. Ellery Queen slowly descended the terrace steps, paused on the gay flags for a moment, and then went to the round table at which John Marco had died and sat down. Buried between sheer walls of stone at a depth of more than forty feet, the terrace was a haven from the worst of the wind; and he relaxed comfortably in the chair, slumping on his spine in his favorite position for reflection, and staring out through the entrance to the Cove at the sea. Within the limits of his vision there was no craft to be seen; the storm had made them scurry for shelter. The sea boiled now in the Cove, raising a constant spume.
It faded before his eyes as he looked at more distant and immaterial things.
The terrace grew darker as he sat there; until finally, aroused by the blackness, he sighed and rose and went to the stairhead and switched on the overhead lamp. The umbrellas were swaying and fluttering. He sat down again and took up paper and pen and dipped the pen in the inkpot and began to write.
A gigantic drop, from the sound it made, plopped on one of the umbrellas. He stopped writing and twisted about. Then, with a speculative look in his eye, he rose and went to the enormous Spanish jar standing to the left of the lowest step and peered around it. After a moment he stepped behind it. Nodding, he came out and repeated the operation with the jar standing at the right of the stairs. Finally he returned to the table, sat down, and with his hair blowing about in the wind resumed his writing.
He wrote for a long time. The drops increased in size, ferocity, and frequency. One spattered on the sheet before him, blotting a word. He wrote more rapidly.
He finished with the first gust of solid rain. Stuffing the sheets in his pocket he jumped up, turned out the light, and hurried up the path toward the stone steps ascending to the plateau on which the house stood. By the time he had reached the shelter of the patio his shoulders were sopping.
The portly butler met him in the main corridor. “Dinner has been kept hot for you, sir. Mrs. Godfrey has ordered—”
“Thank you,” Ellery replied absently, and waved his hand. He hurried toward the alcove where the switchboard stood, dialed a number, and waited with a serene expression.
“Inspector Moley... Ah, Inspector, I thought I’d catch you in... Yes. Quite. In fact, if you’ll come down to Spanish Cape at once I think we can settle this sad business to your satisfaction tonight!”
The insular interior of the living-room glowed with isolated lights. Outside in the patio, on the roofs, rain hissed and roared. A furious wind battered the windows. Even above the splash of the rain they could hear the trumpeting surf as it lashed at the cliffs of the Cape. It was a good night to be indoors and they all glanced gratefully at the blaze in the fireplace.
“We’re all here,” said Ellery in a soft voice, “but Tiller. I especially want Tiller. If you don’t mind, Mr. Godfrey? He’s been the one bright spot in this case and he deserves a reward.”
Walter Godfrey shrugged; he was for the first time dressed in something like a decent costume, as if with the recovery of his wife he had also recovered his sense of social responsibility. He tugged a bell-rope, said something curtly to the butler, and sank back beside Stella Godfrey.
They were all there — the three Godfreys, the two Munns, and Earle Cort. Judge Macklin and Inspector Moley, curiously subdued, sat a little away from the others; and it was significant that, although nothing of the sort had been discussed, Moley’s chair was nearest the door. Of the nine the only one who looked happy was young Cort. There was an almost fatuous expression of contentment on his face as he squatted at the knees of Rosa Godfrey; and from the dreamy look in Rosa’s blue eyes it was evident that the shadow of John Marco had lifted from both of them. Munn was smoking a long brown cigar, tearing it with his teeth; and Mrs. Munn was deathly quiet. Stella Godfrey, calm but taut, twisted her handkerchief in her hands; and the little millionaire was watchful. The atmosphere was distinctly oppressive.
“You called for me, sir?” asked Tiller politely, from the door.
“Come in, come in, Tiller,” said Ellery. “Sit down; this is no time to stand on ceremony.” Tiller rather timidly sat down on the very edge of a chair, to the rear, glancing at Godfrey’s face; but the millionaire was gazing at Ellery with a cautious alertness.
Ellery stepped to the fireplace and set his back against it so that his face was in shadow and his figure a black unrelieved mass against the flames. The light fell eerily on their faces. He took the sheaf of papers from his pocket and placed them to one side on a taboret, where he could glance at them. Then he applied a match to a cigaret and began.
“In many ways,” he murmured, “this has been a very sad affair. On more than one occasion this evening I have been prompted to shut my mind to the facts and go away. John Marco was a scoundrel of the deepest dye. Apparently in his case there was no middle ground between mala mens and malus animus. Unquestionably he possessed the criminal mind — unembarrassed by the slightest restraint of conscience. To our circumscribed knowledge alone he endangered the happiness of one woman, planned the ruin of another, blasted the life of a third, and caused the death of a fourth. Undoubtedly his ledger, if we only had entree to it, shows many similar cases. In a word, a villain who richly deserved extermination. As you said the other day, Mr. Godfrey, whoever killed him was a benefactor of mankind.” He paused, puffing thoughtfully.
Godfrey said in a harsh tone: “Then why don’t you let well enough alone? Apparently you’ve arrived at a conclusion. The man needed killing; the world’s a better place without him. Instead of—”
“Because,” sighed Ellery, “my work is done with symbols, Mr. Godfrey, not with human beings. And I owe a duty to Inspector Moley, who has been kind enough to let me run wild in his bailiwick. I believe, when all the facts are known, that the murderer of Marco stands an excellent chance of gaining the sympathy of a jury. This was a deliberate crime, but it was a crime which — in a sense, as you imply — had to be done. I choose to close my mind to the human elements and treat it as a problem in mathematics. The fate of the murderer I leave to those who decide such things.”
A pall of hushed tension fell as he picked up the top sheet from the taboret, scanned it briefly in the flickering firelight, and set it down again. “I can’t tell you how confused and baffled I was until this very evening. There was something in the way of a lucid interpretation of the facts. I felt it, I knew it, and yet I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then, too, I had made one very glaring error in my previous calculations. Until the woman Pitts — who you now know is Mrs. Marco — revealed a certain fact, I was literally in a fog. But when she told me that the cape which Marco wore when he was found had been brought down to the terrace by her after Marco’s death — in other words, that the cape had not been on the scene of the crime at all during the murder — I saw daylight very clearly indeed, and the rest was merely a matter of time, application, and correlation.”
“What the devil can the cape have to do with it?” muttered Inspector Moley.
“Everything, Inspector, as you shall see. But now that we know Marco was not in possession of his cape at the time he was murdered, let us start from our knowledge of what he actually did possess. He was wearing a complete suit of clothes, with all the fixings. Now, we know that the murderer undressed Marco and took away the complete outfit — or almost complete: that is, coat, trousers, shoes, socks, underclothes, shirt, necktie, and whatever may have been in the pockets. The first problem that must be solved, then, is: Why did the murderer undress the dead man and take away his clothes? That there was a sane, an overwhelmingly sane, reason for this act of apparent insanity I knew; and that the whole solution depended upon its answer I felt instinctively.