Till Death Do Us Part

'But-'

'All I can be certain of,' Dick said with conviction, 'is that neither Price nor Middlesworth took it, because I remember watching them carry Sir Harvey away. Lesley or I certainly didn't; we were together. And there was nobody else there, until you arrived and said you'd take charge of the guns.'

Though Eamshaw kept on smiling, the expression round his eyes and mouth did not indicate amusement.

' If anybody took that rifle, it was Price himself.'

'Damn it, Bill, he didn't! You can't stick a rifle in your pocket or shove it under your coat.'

"That's exactly what I mean, old man. Nobody came near while I was in charge. I didn't do it, though Price pretends to think I did. Lift my own gun? It's absurd. I ask you! And I hope you don't suggest it was done by witchcraft?'

Dick was on the point of replying that it wouldn't surprise him. But he was sick of rifles, sick to death of everything in the anticipation of waiting for the arrival of Superintendent David Hadley. So he only muttered something conciliatory, propping the rifle back up against the wall by the fireplace.

Earnshaw laughed, to show no ill-feeling.

' I hope you're not thinking I'm making a mountain out of a molehill,' he suggested. 'But, if you'll excuse my mentioning it, I've got a certain standing to maintain. And this thing is going to have repercussions.'

'How?'

Earnshaw grew very quiet.

'That fellow never killed himself, Dick. You must guess it as well as I do.'

'Can you suggest how anybody could have killed him?'

'No. But it's a detective-yarn come to life. Corpse found in a locked and bolted room. On one side of him' - Earnshaw nodded -.'a hypodermic needle. On the other side' - Earnshaw nodded again - 'a box of drawing-pins.' He grew thoughtful. 'Of course, there's no special mystery about the drawing-pins. I mean, about their being here.

You'll probably find boxes of them all over the house. You didn't live here in Colonel Pope's time, did you?' ‘No.’

'Colonel Pope,' said Earnshaw, 'used to use them for the wasps.'

Dick felt that that he could not have heard properly.

'He used drawing-pins for the wasps?'

'Waspy place,' explained Earnshaw, nodding in the direction of the fruit-orchard. 'Colonel Pope said he couldn't keep the windows open in summer without being devilled half to death.'

'Well? What about it?'

'Somebody mentioned an American thing called "screens". We don't have 'em in England, but we ought to have. You know: wire-mesh things with sliding wooden frames. You prop 'em in the windows to keep out insects. Colonel Pope couldn't get any, but it gave him an idea. He used to take pieces of cloth netting, gauzy stuff, and fasten 'em round the edges of the window-frames with a lot of drawing-pins. He did that solemnly every day.'

Earnshaw pointed to the writing-table.

'You'll undoubtedly find more of the things in the drawer there,' he went on. 'But what they mean lying beside a dead man's hand ...'

Dick restrained an impulse to answer that the points of those drawing-pins would make just the same sort of puncture as a clumsily administered hypodermic. But this was only a meaningless fancy, of no value. An odour of prussic acid, still exhaling from the dead man's pores, tinged the thickening heat of the sitting-room. It was affecting Earnshaw too.

'Let's get out of here,' he said curtly.

They were in the garden again when Earnshaw added:

'Seen Lesley this morning?'

'Not yet' ('Here we go again,' Dick thought desperately; 'by God and His earth and altars, here we go again)') 'Why do you ask, Bill?'

'No reason at all. I mean,' laughed Earnshaw, 'she'll be glad to hear she didn't -' This time his nod indicated the sitting-room. 'Incidentally, Dick, I don't want you to think I pay any attention to gossip. No fear!' 'No, of course not!'

'But I can't help feeling, sometimes, that there is a bit of a mystery about Lesley.' 'What sort of mystery?'

'I remember,' Earnshaw said reflectively, 'the first time I ever saw her to speak to her. She's one of our clients, you know.'

' So are most of the rest of us. What's so very sinister about that?'

Earnshaw paid no attention to the question.

'What I am telling you is no secret, of course. She'd come to Six Ashes about a fortnight before and taken the Farnham house. She came to my office and asked whether I'd mind transferring her account from our Basinghall Street branch in London to the branch here. I said, naturally, that I'd be only too pleased.' Earnshaw looked complacent. 'Then she said, "Do you have safe-deposit boxes here?"'

Again Earnshaw laughed. Dick Markham took out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Earnshaw, who shook his head.

' I said no, if she meant the sort of thing we have at the bigger branches in London. But, I said, we always accommodated customers by keeping valuables for them in a sealed box in our strong-room. She gave me an oddish look, and said she hadn't anything valuable; but there were one or two things that would be better off in a safe place.'

‘Well?'

'Then she said, "Do you have to know what's in the box I give you?" I said, on the contrary, that we prefer not to know. The receipt we give is always marked, "contents unknown". Then, old man, I'm afraid I made a diplomatic howler. I said - meaning it as a joke - "Of course, if I became suspicious, it would be my duty to investigate." She never mentioned the matter again.'

'Contents unknown.'

Dick lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl up. He could picture that little office in the High Street: Earnshaw behind the desk, with his finger-tips together and his sleek head bent forward. And the eternal, torturing riddle of what was not valuable, yet had to be kept secret from all eyes; the riddle of Lesley herself; seemed to reach its final point.

' Hullo!' muttered Earnshaw.

The clanking noise of a motor-car, approaching eastwards along the lane, was followed by die appearance of Dr Middlesworth's dusty Hillman. It drew up outside the cottage. Middlesworth, a pipe in his mouth, climbed out from under the wheel and opened the back door of the car.

'Good Lord!' exclaimed Earnshaw. 'Isn't that ...?'

From the back of the car, like a very large genie out of a very small bottle, there slowly emerged an immensely tall and immensely stout figure wearing a box-pleated cape and a clerical shovel-hat It was a complicated business in which this figure clutched the hat to its head, kept firm a pair of eyeglasses on a broad black ribbon, manoeuvred itself with many wheezes through the restrictions of the door, and at the same time supported itself by leaning forward on a crutch-handled cane.

Then the figure upreared in the road, its cape and eyeglass-ribbon flying, to take a broad survey of the cottage. The face with its several chins and bandit's moustache was pinker from exertion. But its war-cry remained, making every chin quiver, when the stout gentleman cleared his throat.

'Yes,' said Dick, who had seen the Gargantuan presence many times in illustrated papers. 'That's Gideon Fell.'

And now he remembered the meaning of the reference to Hastings.

Middlesworth had said last night - during one of those odd little spurts of speech which punctuated Middlesworth's thoughtful silence - that Dr Fell was spending the summer at Hastings not far away. Middlesworth had driven over to fetch Dr Fell at a crazily early hour. Why?

It didn't matter. Dr Fell knew just as much about this business as Superintendent Hadley. Lesley's story would be out now; and in front of Bill Earnshaw. He was feeling even sicker when he saw Middlesworth exchange a word with Dr Fell, after which the Gargantuan doctor lumbered forward towards the cottage.

Dr Fell, in fact, seemed possessed of a subdued and savage wrath. He cut at the grass with his crutch-handled stick. Immense, like a sailing galleon in his cape, he towered a good head over any man there. He stopped in front of Dick Markham, wheezing heavily, and regarded Dick with an extraordinary air of concern.