"Oh, no," he said. "Better stay just where you are. I'll answer that 'phone."
Maurice stiffened. He murmured: "If Lord Canifest, inspector, had expressed the slightest desire to speak with
You — “
"I said," repeated Masters without inflection, "I'll answer that telephone." He pushed Maurice with an easy motion which almost threw Maurice across the gallery; then Bennett found his own arm seized, and Masters was hurrying him along the hall as though in an arrest. "What I wanted to tell you… come along, Thompson; we'll see Sir Henry. what I wanted to tell you about H. M.," Masters continued in a low heavy voice, "was this. You sent him a telegram."
"I sent him a telegram?"
"Now, now; there's no time for argument. It's this way. He was off today for the Christmas holidays. If I'd tried to get in touch with him, he'd only have roared — really roared; not his usual kind that don't mean anything — and refused to have anything to do with it. But he's sentimental about a lot of things, though he'd murder you if you accused him of it; and one thing is Families. You're his nephew. If you were in trouble, he'd be here. Here's how it was. He'd phoned about you last night. When this case broke this morning, I knew it would be the biggest thing that ever happened to me, and the first under my direction after I was promoted. I've got to make a go of it, and it's not my kind of case. So first I came up here to — to see what sort of a young fellow you were." Masters was breathing hard. He was trying to keep his dignity, not very successfully. "You looked like the sort who'd back me up — umwell! If I stretched the truth in the interests of justice. That's it. Justice. So, when you went upstairs after I first saw you… Eh?" prompted Masters, with a pantomime leer.
Bennett whistled. He said: "I begin to see- You sent him a telegram signed with my name, saying I was in trouble? What kind of trouble am I supposed to be in? Good God, you didn't tell him I was accused of murder, did you?"
"Ah! No; I couldn't say that, now, could I? Or he'd have found out as soon as he got here. I didn't specify the trouble. At the time I couldn't think of anything. But afterwards, excuse me," Masters peered round, "I saw you looking at Miss Bohun… Well, now! Eh? So I've got somewhat of an explanation; that is, provided.."
An explanation, then, of the chief inspector's affability towards a stranger; his willingness, beyond all rules, to talk to the stranger about the case; his discretion towards Katharine, and his —.
"Provided you'll say you want to help her out, that she's worried about all this, and wants help. Eh? Will you back me up?"
They had reached the top of the broad, low, heavily balustraded stairs. Thompson had gone on ahead down to the landing, where the stairs turned at right angles into the lower hall, and he was holding the receiver of a telephone. From the lower hall ascended now the heavy growl of H. M.'s voice.
"You don't know, hey?" boomed H. M. "Well, why don't you know? Stand away, there, and gimme a look at him. Ahhh. Um. Yes…"
"And may I ask, sir," squeaked Dr. Wynne, "who the devil you are and what you mean by this? Do you happen to be a doctor?"
"H'm. I like the color of that blood. No froth and — no — ahh. Edges. Lemme see, now." A pause. "All right, son, you can take him on. Bullet missed every vital spot. I'll tell you that gratis. You look sharp and you'll bring him round without a mite of trouble. Good thing it wasn't soft-nose. Look for it high up. Humph. What kind of, a house is this, hey? You walk in the door and a goddam stretcher comes downstairs… "
There was a bitter exchange of remarks, which H. M. shouted down by bellowing, "Phooeyl" Masters grasped Bennett's arm inquiringly.
"Well?" he insisted.
"Certainly I'll back you up," said the other. "But you've got to go down and do the pacifying. I'll follow when you've explained everything. He sounds as though he's on the warpath. Look here, Masters is the old boy really so-so-"
"Valuable at police work?" supplied Masters. "Watch him!"
Masters hurried down to the landing to take the telephone. receiver. Bennett leaned over the banisters and tried to make out Masters' end of the conversation with Lord Canifest. A Lord Canifest, evidently, who was very much alive. But Masters had the newspaperman's trick of talking almost at a mumble into the side of the telephone, and the listener was no wiser. Hearing footsteps in the gallery behind him, Bennett pulled back and turned with a guilty start. Jervis Willard and Maurice Bohun were looking at him.
"It would seem," Maurice observed, "that my guests are as strange as my telephone-calls. It is an unexpected honor to receive a visit from Sir Henry Merrivale. It is an even more signal honor to receive a telephone call from a dead man… Exactly what is the latest news in this affair, may I inquire?" Maurice's thin features were impassive, but his voice shook.
"Good news, sir. I think you may call it pretty certain that your brother will recover."
"Thank God for that," said Willard. "Why did he do it, Maurice? Why should he?"
For a second there was almost a deformity of rage in Maurice's face, a pale and rather hideous kind of flame. "My brother has a very curious sort of conscience. I-ah-suppose I may be permitted to see visitors in my own house? Thank you so much. I will go downstairs."
He twisted his shoulder when he walked. His stick bumped against the balustrade on the way down.
"What happened?" Bennett asked the actor in a low voice. "I mean about Bohun? Did he just come up here, walk to his room, and.?"
"So far as I can gather, yes." Willard rubbed his eyes. "I don't exactly know what did happen. The last time I saw him he said he was going to breakfast. I came upstairs, and met Kate Bohun. She asked me whether I'd sit with Miss Carewe in her room while she went down after some coffee. She went somewhere else to dress, and that's the last I saw of her until-well, you all came upstairs. Come over here a minute."
Peering round, he drew Bennett down an angle of the gallery: a side-passage that led to a big oriel window. Willard was no longer the easy, faintly amused figure with the assured bearing. He looked old. Again his hand fumbled with his eyes as though he should have glasses.
"Tell me," he said, "did you summon-assistance Higher Up?"
"No! I swear I didn't. I only seem to be a kind of dummy they're using for their own purposes… "
"This Merrivale is your uncle, I understand? Do you know him well?"
"I met him yesterday for the first time in my life. Why?"
"Do you think," asked Willard quietly, "a man could lie to him and get away with it?… I'll tell you why I ask. I've been sitting at Louise Carewe's bedside. She's been babbling about murdering Marcia Tait."
Bennett whirled round. Something strange in Willard's expression caught him like a hypnosis. He tried to think of what that expression reminded him. And then a cloudy memory returned to him, of words that Willard had spoken that morning; words echoing and clanging with dull cynicism. "We poor striped brutes went through the paper hoops and climbed up on the perches, and usually she had only to fire a blank cartridge when we got unruly." Then he knew what it was, at last, that those queer yellow-brown eyes of Willard's reminded him of. It was of something prowling inside a cage.
"You don't mean," Bennett heard himself saying, "she admitted she-?"
"I don't know. It was a kind of delirium. I thought, and later found, she'd taken an overdose of some kind of sleeping drug-but I'll tell you about that in a moment. I was sitting there wondering when Dr. Wynne came in. He said you'd mentioned something about her being ill. While he was looking at her I came close to the bed, and my foot kicked something under it: a hunting-crop with a heavy silver end, loaded with lead and shaped like a dog's head…"
"That's nonsense! It wasn't her room; it was-"