“Yes,” said Craig, “Maud would be. But all you had to do was to refuse to take the money.”
“Well, naturally I did,” said Peter. “But she kept insisting. I was sorry I had ever mentioned the thing to her. And it was so-well, gosh, so completely absurd I sort of was embarrassed about it. Wished I hadn’t made such a good story.”
“Is that all?” said Nugent.
“Yes,” said Peter. “Except I think she’s still got it in her head.”
“Well, all you have to do is to keep on refusing,” said Craig wearily, and looked at the clock and then at Nugent. There was a wordless and rather desperate appeal in his eyes. Nugent got up. “We ought to hear from Miss Cable soon,” he said. “I’m convinced that she left voluntarily. Try to be patient, Brent.” His voice was kind-too kind. I thought of all the things that could have happened and then tried not to think of them as I had tried not to think so many times that day.
And I might say now that I had succeeded rather too well but not in the direction I intended. I didn’t want to think of why Drue had gone, or why she stayed away without telephoning or letting us know anything of her whereabouts, but I didn’t intend to let something important, a small thing but terribly important, go straight past my ears quite as if I hadn’t heard it. That was carrying the ostrich act too far. Nugent went toward the door but Craig stopped him.
“Have you got the details of my father’s-death, pretty well established?” he asked.
“The general set-up, yes,” said Nugent. “There are two alternatives. One is that whoever killed him could have poisoned the brandy with digitalis taken from the medicine box which was then-oh, thrown away, I suppose. We’ve searched for it and not found it; we were in the hope of getting some fingerprints.”
My hand went to my pocket. But I waited-somewhat nervously, I might add. Nugent went on crisply, “In that case, your father could have taken the poisoned brandy shortly before his interview with Miss Cable…”
“Then you don’t think Drue killed him!” cried Craig, his whole face suddenly alight and eager.
“I didn’t say that,” said Nugent, but still in a kind and quiet voice which again seemed to me too kind, as if he felt sorry for Craig, below his mask of officialdom. And that meant that Nugent feared, too, for Drue. And if he feared for her, that was why he had begun to believe that she was not guilty of murder. It completed a disastrous and terrifying little circle of logic. Nugent went on, “I said there were two alternatives. The other, of course, is that Miss Cable killed him deliberately with a hypodermic syringe containing too large a dose of digitalis. But let me finish my first hypothesis. If then, your father drank the poisoned brandy and then collapsed just as Miss Cable was talking to him, she could have been-I say could have been-under the impression that he was having a heart attack, or he could have asked her to help him, according to her story. At which she gave him merely a medicinal amount of digitalis, and he died from the effects of the other.”
“There was no poisoned brandy in the decanter,” said Craig slowly. “But…”
“Exactly. The noise made by the falling vase, as it was probably intended to do, drew attention away from the study for a long enough time to permit the murderer to re-enter the room, pour the poisoned brandy down the drain of the little washroom adjoining the study, refill it quickly from a decanter brought from the dining room, return both decanters to their original position and leave the room again unobserved. I say that could have happened. But it still means that someone else had to pick up the fragments of the vase and the twine and conceal them in the trash barrel. That indicates a conspirator. Yet it is difficult to believe that a murderer would take anybody in the world into his confidence to that dangerous degree. And there’s another thing that seems to hook up somehow and yet that obscures the issue; that’s the mysterious telephone call to the police. Who called it murder before anyone else even thought of murder-except the murderer? What woman went to the telephone and called the police? If I knew that,” he said slowly, “and if I knew why Drue Cable left the house without her shoes…”
The light and eagerness vanished from Craig’s face. He looked at the clock again, and it marked only a few moments further along its inexorable course, but every moment, now, counted. All of us knew it.
But especially Craig. For Nugent went away almost immediately and after he’d gone Craig, staring at the clock again, told Peter and me the thing Claud Chivery had told him.
It was, he believed and said he believed, the motive for Claud’s murder. The trouble was that he didn’t dare tell the police because it might prove to be a boomerang.
Claud had said “she” in talking; he had named no names, he had used only the pronoun and it was a dangerously inclusive pronoun for Claud might have meant Drue.
Craig made me shut the door before he told us.
“I don’t know what it is,” said Craig. “It’s only what Claud told me. And the way he looked. He wouldn’t tell the police and he made me promise not to; after he was murdered I would have told them but-but I don’t know what the paper is that he found there. You see?”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Go on,” said Peter. “Maybe we can find it. What do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Craig, “that I don’t know what is written on it, and I don’t know who Claud suspected because of it, but I do know it was a woman. He said she.”
“Oh! If it should be Drue…”
“Yes,” said Craig bleakly. “We’ve got to be sure it isn’t Drue before we tell the police.”
He told us then, briefly. Claud Chivery had told Craig that someone had been looking up digitalis in one of his books. The book had been put back in the wrong place on the shelves and Claud, a stickler for a kind of finicky order, had seen it at once. Then (he’d told Craig) he found a paper, marking the place where the information about digitalis began.
And when Craig asked him what paper, and if he could tell who’d been looking up that particular subject, Claud had frozen up, looked scared and terribly worried, referred to the person (and without realizing it, Craig thought) as “she” and had told Craig he had to think it all over and come to a conclusion about it before telling the police or letting Craig tell them. He’d been afraid of setting them on the wrong person.