“Yes. Inspector White said Mr. Little had gone.”
“Besides Mr. Little.”
“No— I— Who was it?”
“Miss Alfonse is missing,” Prye said, watching him closely.
Smith’s only reaction seemed one of relief.
“Nobody I know,” he said.
“She was Miss Bonner’s nurse.”
“I’ve seen her once or twice,” Smith said. “I didn’t know her.”
“What were you doing at nine o’clock last night, Mr. Smith?”
“I’ve told Inspector White all that. I was reading.”
“Reading what?”
Mr. Smith blushed. “A detective story. I’ve been reading a lot of them to find out about disguises and things. I thought perhaps I could disguise myself. But it seems you have to be a very good actor to disguise yourself.”
Prye glanced at him coldly. “You did all right on Tuesday pretending you were drunk.”
“Oh that. Well, you see, alcohol has a very peculiar effect on me. It goes right to my head and wears off almost instantly. So I really was drunk. More or less.”
“Less,” Prye said.
“I’m sorry I did that. I guess it makes me look very suspicious.”
“I guess.”
“But you don’t actually suspect me, do you?”
“To me you are white like snow,” Prye said.
They had both forgotten the revolver and Horace seized his chance. He pranced around the room holding it between his teeth.
It took quite a long time to persuade Horace to relinquish it and still longer to placate Inspector White when he saw the marks of Horace’s teeth. It was one o’clock by the time Prye got into bed.
He pulled the night table up to his bed and lit a cigarette.
Mr. Smith was temporarily erased from the list of suspects. Although his pier had probably been the scene of Tom Little’s murder, Smith had no connection with the other members of the community. If his story about hiding from his ex-wife was true — and it could easily be checked — Mr. Smith would have been too engrossed in his own affairs to bother about those of complete strangers.
Miss Alfonse’s name, too, was written off. Technically she could have been the murderer and arranged for her escape in such a way as to suggest that she herself was murdered. But this possibility seemed remote. Even though Alfonse might have considered getting rid of Joan so that she could marry Ralph herself, she had no motive for killing Tom Little. Besides, all her actions were explicable when one assumed that she was guilty only of having knowledge of the real murderer.
It was Little’s murder, in fact, that was difficult to fit in. It was practically impossible that Tom was killed because he knew the identity of the murderer — he was not shrewd enough to have guessed, and he could not have been an eyewitness to Joan’s murder. Jennie Harris was no friend of Tom’s, and if she said that he sat sleeping in a chair all Monday evening, there he must have sat. Nor was his death a question of money: his life had not been insured and his wallet and the large gold signet ring on his hand had remained untouched.
But Tom Little had been killed, and no one kills without a reason.
Prye’s mind kept returning to the theme of justice.
“I do not kill without reason,” the murderer had written. Had he meant a moral reason?
Prye stubbed his cigarette impatiently.
“The whole thing may be a blind,” he said aloud. “There may be some good earthly reasons behind these murders. The murderer may be leading us astray, perhaps for the sake of amusement. We are not amused.”
The sardonic smile of Professor Frost rose before his eyes. Yes, he thought, it would move Frost to hilarity to watch me chasing my tail and running up blind alleys, and climbing stepladders to search for someone who was already at the bottom of the lake.
But unless Frost’s exterior was a complete fraud what Nora had said of him was true: he wouldn’t care enough to murder anyone. He was an intellectual turtle. He would not attack even in self-defense, but would tuck his head back under his shell and read a book.
Who would kill for moral reasons?
“Practically any psychotic,” Prye said to himself. “Those with a severe psychosis might kill in response to their auditory or visual hallucinations. But even so apparently harmless a creature as an idealist will kill to preserve his ideals. He might toss a bomb into a capitalist’s lap and save the working classes. Or if his ideal has already been shattered he might kill for revenge. And that spells Ralph Bonner to me.”
Yes, Ralph was a queer boy. Living under the thumb of a querulous, wealthy old woman had retarded his emotional and mental development, so that at twenty-three he was as unsophisticated and helpless as a boy of sixteen. And what do unsophisticated boys of sixteen do when they are confronted with the fact that this is not the best of all possible worlds? Do they run for a handkerchief or a bag of stones?
It was two o’clock, so Prye called Ralph an uncharitable name and turned over and went to sleep.
In the room next to his, Inspector White was emitting a series of gargantuan snores, and across the hall Nora was dreaming of bloody axes and floating bodies. Professor Frost was still searching for humor in Thucydides. The policeman on duty was yawning and waiting for sunrise.
Of them all Miss Alfonse was the only one at peace, and that was something.
Chapter Fifteen
Early on Thursday morning Sergeant Workman and Corporal Hollis of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were reconnoitering the shores of Lake Rosseau, searching for traces of a Harvard Bomber and four crewmen from Camp Borden. The plane had not returned to its base after it took off on Tuesday afternoon and it was considered lost in one of the Muskoka lakes.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen did not find the plane but they did find something almost as interesting. It was lying face down in the shallow water by the shore, cold and bloated and blue.
Miss Alfonse spoiled Corporal Hollis’s dinner and his new brown boots. She had been dead for some time and the water had swollen her body so that her black bathing suit had split down the back, revealing several inches of dirty pink satin.
Sergeant Workman bent over the body and examined the pink strip of satin.
“A girdle,” he said to Corporal Hollis, snorting with disapproval. “Silly women wear tight girdles and tight bathing suits to stop their circulation and then they wonder why they drown. Go and get Jakes. This is his corpse.”
Corporal Hollis was glad to get away. Sergeant Workman, on the other hand, was glad of a rest, even in his present company. He sat down on a pile of pine needles and rested his head against a tree. But he couldn’t help thinking of the pink girdle. He wasn’t interested in girdles usually. They were scarcely fascinating to a man with a wife and three grown daughters, all of them forcibly compressed by Lastex.
“I’m getting senile,” Sergeant Workman growled, but he got up and went over to the corpse and turned it on its back. He noticed the wide strip of adhesive tape in the crook of the left arm.
It wasn’t the thing to do but Sergeant Workman did it. He unhooked Miss Alfonse’s pink girdle and found something which surprised him a great deaclass="underline" in a rubber cosmetic bag next to Miss Alfonse’s skin there were fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. They were soaked with water.
At ten o’clock the residents of Clayton and the surrounding countryside were gathered in the small district courthouse for the inquest on the body of Joan Frost. The coroner’s jury had been chosen and were sitting in their places looking stern and dignified to conceal their nervousness.
Of the witnesses only Professor Frost and Susan had arrived. Susan’s eyes, almost hidden by a black lace handkerchief, were darting about the room. Her father made no pretense of grief. He was staring around him with obvious enjoyment, nodding to people he knew: the postal clerk and the florist and a little man who sold fish. They nodded back at him, but stiffly, as if they might lose caste. This delighted Professor Frost. He thought: “By Zeus, I’m like Thucydides watching the battle from the mountain.”