"Kate's? Yes, I know." Willard regarded him with a flash of curiosity. "But Louise had the thing with her when she screamed in the gallery last night, and I picked her up in a faint. This is what I didn't tell that detective. I — quite frankly — how can I express it, anyway?" He floundered among words, and made a gesture as though to clear them away.
"Quite frankly, I don't want to run my own neck into a halter. But Louise. she's so harmless, man! That's all. I don't want to mention it. When I picked her up, she was wearing a sort of long outdoor coat over a nightgown and dressing-gown, and that hunting-crop was stuffed into the pocket."
"And Kate knew this?" demanded Bennett. He was beginning to remember things. He remembered the girl's own slip of the tongue, instantly denied and retracted, that Marcia Tait had been killed with a hunting-crop. "She knew it?"
"Yes. I didn't see the coat when I went into the room this morning, but Kate seemed to regard me as a kind of fellow-conspirator. Anyway, I was telling you that my foot struck the hunting-crop under the bed. I didn't dare risk Wynne's attention-so I kicked it farther under the bed. But, while Wynne was there, Louise called out something to the effect that she had tried to shove Marcia downstairs last night:.. Yes, I know it looks bad. Whereupon Wynne never said a word, but went about giving her some kind of emetic. Afterwards, when she seemed to be resting easier, he said he'd got something to tell me. There was rather a strange look about him. He took me out in the hall. When we came out, by the way. " Willard frowned. He snapped his fingers as after an elusive memory. "Somebody's voice was talking a bit loudly on the telephone down on the stair-landing, now that I remember it. It kept saying, `At the pavilion, at the pavilion, I tell you.' I remember because he was making so much noise I intended to go and tell him to shut up. But Wynne said, `It's that so-and-so Rainger. I left him talking to the inspector in the library, and now I suppose he's got loose again. He's crazy drunk."'
"When was this?" demanded Bennett. "We left him lying on the couch in the library when we went to the dining-room. I'll swear he'd passed out cold."
"I don't know. Possibly fifteen minutes or so after Wynne had come up to look at Louise. Anyhow, Wynne said he had something important to tell me. They seem to regard me," said Willard, wrinkling his brow and staring out of the window "as the guardian and father-confessor of everybody. The voice on the telephone stopped then. Wynne took me round to where we're standing now. He had just begun to talk, and was in the preparatory stage of saying nothing in an acute medical way (or so it seemed to me) when we heard the shot…
"My God, man, that was a horrible feeling! I think we both had Louise on our minds. We looked at each other, and then we both ran to Louise's room. She was all right; she was sitting up in bed as though she'd recovered herself: shaking a bit, perhaps, but very quiet and apologetic as she always is. That fever of sorts she'd had seemed to have gone. She said, `What was that noise?' and then, `What am I doing in this room?' Then was when we heard the rest of you running up the stairs.
"You know the rest."
Willard sat down in the embrasure of the window. He seemed shaken, as though he had got through a story he was determined to tell; but he assumed unconsciously a stage gesture with one fist on his hip and his head lowered. Bennett heard his breathing.
"If," he added after a moment, "the police get suspicious of her — steady!"
He jerked his head round. Katharine Bohun was coming down the passage.
"I saw them," she said, "take John out in that — that thing they carry dead bodies in. And I heard them talking. They said, at least from what I could hear at the upstairs window, somebody had said definitely he wouldn't die. Is it true?"
Bennett took her hands, and saw the fear gradually die out of her eyes as he spoke with slow emphasis. She gave a little shudder, as of one who grows accustomed to warmth after coming in out of cold.
"It's a funny thing," she said meditatively, "but I'm rather glad of one thing about it. Glad he did it, in a way..:'
"Glad?" said Willard.
"Because he'll never try it again. Don't you see?" she demanded. "When he wakes up out of that stupor, he'll begin to realize things. He did it for — for her. And he'll suddenly realize that it wasn't worth it. I don't suppose I can explain what I mean, but just that act of," she struck her hands against her breast, wincing at the thought rather than the movement, "just that, do you see, will have done away with it for good."
Willard stared through the window at the austerity of the snow. He spoke absently, in a low voice that slowly gathered resonance: `-or cleanse the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.. " For a moment it rose with terrible power.
His hand dropped flatly to the window-seat. He turned, smiling.
"The cure is drastic, Kate. What about Louise? Is she better?"
"She is going downstairs presently. That is what I want to ask you both about." A pause. "I suppose I'd better tell her what the police think?"
"Yes, in any case. Has she told you anything?" "No!"
"But don't you think it's possible-"
She looked at Bennett. "Let's go downstairs again, and speak to Mr. Masters. I–I'd like you to be there. You were there when Thompson told about a woman leaving this house last night; and Mrs. Thompson is probably swearing to it now. I was a fool for not thinking of it before. I can prove it wasn't Louise. Will you come along?"
She bad turned without waiting for a reply. He felt a shock of fear that kept him there staring until she was out of sight; but he caught up with her at the head of the stairs. There was still a rank scent of powder-smoke in the dim gallery. It lent an even uglier suggestion to the oak and the frayed red carpet. He took hold of the newel-post and barred her way down. Then he asked quietly:
"It wasn't you, was it?"
He felt his own arm shaking with a pulse just behind the elbow. He had been staring at the bruises on her throat, only partly concealed by the scarf. She almost cried out the answer.
"Oh, suppose it had been? What difference would it make?" "None at all, except that we've got to do some high-class lying.."
"Lie to the police?"
"If necessary, lie to Je-" He checked himself from talking louder, checked the violence that made him want to shout. She tried to pass him, pulling at his arm on the newel-post. As he bent over to tighten his hold, he felt the soft cheek brush his face: a thing from which they both moved back as though they had been stung. And, as he saw the slight opening of the small full lips, he felt his heart pounding more heavily when he went on: "What the hell difference does it make what you did? All I'm trying to tell you, sensibly, is that we've got to invent a good story and stick to it."
"I don't mean that I killed her. But I might have!" She shuddered. "I envied her enough to wish somebody would kill her. And that's a nice thing to say, isn't it? That's almost as bad as though I'd done what I thought about. Let me go clown. It makes no difference what-"
"There's something I've got to tell you first. Downstairs Masters has got a man with him, an uncle of mine, who's got an unholy reputation of being able to see through a brick wall. Masters got him here through me. He used my name, and said it was because I was interested in you…"
"What are you talking about?"
"'Interested.' Is that the word they use over here? All right; take it as the word. Say I'm `interested' in you. Say anything you like. Just how `interested' I can't tell you now; because there's murder here, and the whole house is poisoned, and down there's the room where somebody you'd known all your life tried to kill himself in your own home not an hour ago. I can smell that smoke from the gun too, and neither of us would dare talk about Interests here. But the house won't stay poisoned, and then maybe by God you'll know why I think you're the loveliest thing I ever saw in the world! — so if somehow you've got yourself into any false position, and whatever it is you did that never mattered and never would matter, don't do any such fool thing as admitting it."