Dick Markham, who had got up heavily and was turning towards the door, swung round again.
'Nobody else?' he repeated. 'What exactly do you mean by that?'
' My dear fellow! Why do you think you were chosen ?' ' I still don't understand.'
'Please note,' retorted Sir Harvey, 'that each victim was a man in love with or at least violently infatuated with her. Blind. Uncritical. Unreasoning. I'm theorizing now, I confess. But you surely don't think the choice was accident or coincidence? The victim had to be in that state of mind.'
'Why so?'
' To do what she asked him. Naturally.'
'Haifa moment,' protested a harassed Dr Middlesworth. He had picked up his hat and medicine-case from a side table, and was trying to shove Dick out through the door into the hall; but even he turned round now.
'Let's be sensible about this, Sir Harvey,' he suggested. 'You can't be thinking this girl would say, "Look, here's a hypodermic full of prussic acid. Go home and inject it into your arm, will you, just to oblige me "?'
'Not quite as crudely as that, no.'
'Then how?'
'We propose to find out. But if we have any clue to these sealed-room affairs, my guess is that there's the clue. It would work with an addle-headed man in a duped and bedazed state of mind. It would not work for a second with anybody else,'
' It wouldn't work, for instance, with you or me?'
'Hardly,' replied their host with dry ponderousness. ' Good night, gentlemen. Many thanks!'
And they saw him smile, his eyes now less hypnotic as at a task well accomplished, when they went out into the hall.
Some distance away over the fields to the west, the church clock at Six Ashes was striking eleven. Its notes brushed across the veil of stillness, a tangible stillness, when Dick and Dr Middlesworth left the house. Heavy constraint held them both dumb. Going ahead with an electric torch, Middlesworth indicated his car in the lane.
' Climb in,' he said.' I'll drop you off at your place.'
The same rigidity of silence obsessed them, their eyes straight ahead on the windscreen, during that very brief ride. The wheels of the car jolted in an uneven lane; Middlesworth kept on revving the motor with unnecessary violence, and he drew up outside Dick's cottage with a squeal of brakes. While the engine breathed with a carbonized, rattle, Middlesworth glanced sideways and spoke above it
'All right?'
'Quite all right,' said Dick, opening the car-door.
'You're in for a bad night. Like a sleeping-tablet?'
'No, thanks. I've got plenty of whisky.'
'Don't get drunk.' Middlesworth's hands tightened on the steering-wheel. 'For God's sake don't get drunk.' He hesitated. 'Look here. About Lesley. I was just thinking -'
' Good night, Doctor.'
'Good night, old man.'
The car slid into gear and moved away westwards. While its tail-light disappeared between a curve of the hedgerow on one side, and the low stone boundary wall of Ashe Hall park on the other, Dick Markham stood by the gate in the fence round his own front garden. He stood there motionless for several minutes. A sheer blackness of spirits, a blackness like an extinguisher-cap, descended on him as the noise of that motor-car faded away.
Sir Harvey Gilman, he thought, had read his mind with profound clearness.
As a first consideration, he wasn't thinking about murder at all. He wasn't thinking about the men Lesley was supposed to have killed. He was thinking about the men she professed to have loved before they died.
Scattered words and phrases, sometimes whole sentences, returned to him and jostled through his head with audible vividness, as though he could hear them all at the same time.
'That little girl, as you call her, is forty-one years old.' 'Prostration and floods of tears.' 'Slightly second-hand.' 'A gross old man.' 'Their bedroom.' 'A dreadful coincidence or mistake.' 'Don't you find this situation just a little suspicious ? Just a little unsavoury ?'
Infantile. No doubt! Puerile. No doubt 1
He tried to tell himself so. But this is how a person in love really does feel; and he loved Lesley, and therefore he raged. If those words had been deliberately chosen, each as a tiny knife to nick against the same nerve, they could not have had more of an effect.
He found himself trying to create mental pictures of these men. Burton Foster, the American lawyer, he pictured as a swaggering good-natured sort of chap with a suspicious manner which could be the more easily hoodwinked. It was not difficult to imagine Mr Davies, the 'gross old man', against the background of his 'big, florid, old-fashioned house'.
Martin Belford, the last of the three, remained more shadowy yet for some reason less disliked. Young, it appeared. Probably careless and genial. Belford didn't seem to matter so much.
If you regarded it with half an eye of reason, to stand here disliking dead men, torturing yourself with the images of persons you had never met and now never could meet, was the height of absurdity. What should matter, what did matter, what had seemed to matter most in every criminal record, was the blatant fact of a hypodermic full of poison.
'She can't help herself.' 'A psychic disease.' 'This girl isn't normal.' 'She won't be cheated of the thrill.' These were the words which should have come back to him first; and, with them, a vision of a stealthy flushed face beside a wall-safe.
Facts? Oh, yes.
He had mouthed a lot of fine words about a mistake. But in his heart of hearts Dick Markham didn't believe in a mistake. Scotland Yard didn't make mistakes like that. And yet, even so, it was the first set of Sir Harvey's phrases rather than the second which returned to jar and pierce and inflame him. If only she hadn't told him all those lies about her past life...
But she hadn't told him any lies. She hadn't told him anything at all.
Oh, Christ, why was everything so complicated I Dick struck his hand on the top of the gate-post. The lights of his cottage were shining up there behind him, making the dew gleam on the grass under the windows, and illuminating the crazy-paved path to the front door. Even as he started to walk towards it, he was conscious of a sense of loneliness - intense, unpleasant loneliness - as though something had been cut away from him. It startled him, because he had thought he liked loneliness. And now he was afraid of it. The cottage seemed a hollow shell, booming as he closed the front door behind him. He walked down the passage to the study, opened the door, and stopped short. On the sofa in the study sat Lesley.
CHAPTER 6
SHE had been absentmindedly turning over the pages of a magazine, and looked up quickly as the door opened.
A fat-bowled lamp on the table behind the sofa brought out the smoothness of Lesley's clear skin as she raised her eyes. It shone on the soft brown hair, curling outwards at the shoulders. She had changed her white frock for one of dark green, with winking buttons.'Cette belle anglaise, très chic très distinguée’ Not a line showed in the smooth flesh of the neck. Her wide-open, innocent brown eyes looked frightened.
Neither of them spoke for a moment Perhaps Lesley noticed the expression on his face.
She threw aside the magazine, got up, and ran towards him.
He kissed her - after a fashion.
'Dick,' Lesley said quietly. 'What's wrong?'
'Wrong?'
‘She stood back at arm's length to study him. The candid eyes went over his face searchingly.
'You've - gone away,' she said, and shook him by the arms. 'You're not there any longer. What is it?' Then, quickly:' Is it this fortune-teller? Sir - Sir Harvey Gilman ? How is he?'
'He's as well as can be expected.'
'That means he's going to die, doesn't it?' asked Lesley. Enlightenment seemed to come to her. 'Dick, listen! Is that why you're looking and acting like this?' Then she regarded him with horror. 'You don't think I did that deliberately, do you?'