The husky voice trailed off. This last admission seemed to wrench him more with an uneasy sense of shame than anything else. He looked round defiantly. His hand, still in his breast pocket, produced an enormous flat silver flask, which he automatically made a feint of holding out to everybody before he tilted it up to drink. At the end of a long pull he released his breath in a shudder.
"Oh, what the hell?" said Tim Emery with sudden weariness, and sat back.
"You mean," Masters boomed incredulously, "that you allowed… Now, come!"
"Marriage new-style. Uh-huh. I begin to see," said H. M. He blinked drowsily, the glasses sliding down on his nose; but he sat motionless as a great Buddha despite the tired cynicism of his mouth. "Don't mind the feller who's talkin', son. That's Chief Inspector Masters, who's just about on the verge of apoplexy, and he's gettin' suspicious of you already. I know it's not easy to talk; but if you feel like goin' on — well, I've had too much experience with a crazy world to feel very much surprised at anything I hear. You'd still hit me in the eye if I called her a leech, wouldn't you?"
"So far as I'm concerned," said Masters, "and whatever I happen to think about that side of it, I've got only one duty. And that's to find out who killed Miss Tait. So I'll ask Mr. Emery whether he knew, as her husband, that Miss Tait and Mr. Joh — "
H. M.'s grunt drowned it out. "You know what he's goin' to say, son. You got brains enough to answer unspoken questions. And it always makes everybody feel better to pretend that not callin' a spade a spade makes it invisible. Well?"
"Oh, cut it, will you?" said Emery, without opening his eyes. His body shook. "Yes, I knew it. Does that satisfy you? I knew it from the beginning. She told me long ago."
"I see," growled Masters. "And you didn't-?"
"If it made her any happier," said Emery dully, "it was all right with me. Now for the lova Judas will you, let me alone?" His voice rose. H. M., whose eyes were fixed on him, raised a hand sharply for Masters to be silent. H. M. seemed to know that Emery would go on unprompted…
"I wanted her to go on," he added abruptly, "and be Great. Great: that's what I mean. To tell you the honest truth, I honestly didn't care so much whether she went back to the States or put on this play over here; I'd have backed her up whatever she did. It's hard to realize that she's dead, that's all… There's only one thing that hurts like poison. I want to get out of this country. I never realized what people must think of me. It was the way that old guy, Canifest, looked at me when I told him I was married to her. As though I was a louse. What's the matter' with me? — Listen, I'll tell you what I've done already." Some eagerness returned to him. "I've hired the finest Rolls Royce in London; closed car with seats opening out into a bed inside, to take her back up to London in. Listen, I've got it here now, with a special chauffeur dressed in black. We'll fill the inside of the car with flowers, and she'll go up to London in a funeral procession that'll be the biggest thing this country has seen since-since-"
The man was absolutely serious. He was catching at the last tribute he could make, in his own way.
"Well, there'll be a few formalities to go through first," interposed H. M. Slowly and wheezingly he got to his feet. "Inspector Masters and I are goin' down to the pavilion to look it over. You can come along after a bit, if you like. You say you told all this to Canifest yesterday afternoon. Was it your own idea?"
"Yeah, partly — wait a minute; yeah, I think so. I don't remember. It just got started when Carl and I were talking. Carl came to see me at the hospital just before he started down for here." Emery tried to get his own ideas straight, and had recourse to the flask again. "He said it would be the thing to do. He said he was coming down here to butter up Bohun's brother, and promise him all kinds of crazy stuff to get into the house. God, it's funny! He was gonna offer old Bohun fifty thousand a year to act as technical adviser.
"Uh-huh. Serious proposition, was it?"
"Don't be a sap!"
H. M., whether intentionally or unintentionally, had raised his voice, and Emery had adopted the same tone without knowing it.
"Then Rainger knew you were married to Tait, hey?" "He guessed it. Anyhow, I admitted it when he said we had to work fast."
"Did John Bohun know it?"
"No."
"Now be careful, son: sure you got a grip on yourself? Take it easy. Didn't John Bohun know it?"
"She told me herself he didn't! She swore to me she'd never told him."
H. M. straightened up. "All right," he said in a colorless voice. "You might find your friend Rainger and see if you can sober him up. We're goin' down to the pavilion now. " He peered round, the corners of his mouth turning down. "Where's my nephew, hey? Where's James B. Bennett? Ah! Humph. You come along. I want to know just how she was lyin' on the floor when you found her. And some other things. Come on."
Bennett looked down at Katharine, who had not spoken or uttered a murmur since Emery's arrival. She did not even speak when she motioned him to go.
With H. M. lumbering ahead and Masters making swift scratches in his notebook, he followed them through the passages to the side-door, where Inspector Potter fought with the, Press. Bennett hurriedly picked up somebody's overcoat, not his own. "Stay behind," growled H. M. to Masters, "and give 'em a statement. Then come down. Nothing to say! Nothing to say!" He opened the door. "Get inside, boys, and talk to the Chief Inspector." He elbowed through the scramble, jealously and with sulphurous murmurs guarding an ancient rusty top-hat in the crook of his arm. Then the door slammed.
They stood for a time on the side-porch, breathing the bitter cold air. To their left the gravel driveway sloped and curved down, under the interlocking branches of the oaks, towards the highway some two hundred yards away. To their right the lawns sloped down again, and the sky was a moving flicker of snow. There was something insistent, something healing, about those silent flakes, that would efface all tracks in the world. They were a symbol and a portent, like one car in the driveway. Although the drive was now crowded with cars, the long Rolls with its drawn blinds stood black against the thickening snow: as though Death waited to take Marcia Tait away. Its presence was an absurdity, but it was not absurd. It looked all the more sombre by reason of Emery's gaudy yellow car, with CINEARTS STUDIO sprawled in shouting letters across it and the thin bronze stork above a smoking radiator: dwarfed by the black car, Life and Death waiting side by side. Bennett found himself thinking of symbols as clumsy as life, a stork or a sable canopy, and along mysterious roads the black car always overtaking the yellow. But most of all there rose in his mind the image of Marcia Tait.
He tried to shake it off as he tramped down the lawn beside H. M. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was nearly half-past one. At this time last night, also when the snow was falling.
"Yes, that's right," he heard H. M.'s voice. He glanced round to see the uncanny little eyes fixed on him. Dark in the mist of snow, with his unwieldy top-hat and moth-eaten fur collar, H. M. looked like a caricature of an old actor. "It was this time last night that the whole business started to happen. - What's this I hear about you and the girl?"
"I only met her this morning."
"Uh-huh. She looks like Marcia Tait. Is that the reason?"
'No. "
"Well, I got no objection. Only thing to make sure is that she's not a murderer, or," H. M. scratched his chin, "related to a murderer. Very uncomfortable in the first case, and a bit embarrassin' in the second. Can you look at it from that view-point? No, I don't suppose you can. You wouldn't be worth your salt if you could. Anyhow, you can set your mind at rest about one thing. She didn't come down here last night to interview La Tait. No, no, son. She was much too anxious to prove that Canifest's daughter didn't. She thinks Canifest's daughter did."