‘O’Flaherty,’ Mostyn-Smith ventured in a whisper.
No movement.
‘O’Flaherty, old fellow!’ A voiced greeting, with a tap on the shoulder.
Complete absence of any reaction.
‘O’-Fla-her-ty!’ Four syllables mispronounced loudly six inches from the one visible ear.
The Stag was back from Dublin, and awake, but he refused to give any sign of it. Perhaps the voice would go away.
Jesus! What was that?
Mostyn-Smith had found a damp sponge and was squeez-ing it over the Irishman’s face. He jerked into a sitting posi-tion, grabbed Mostyn-Smith by the shoulders of his running-zephyr and yanked him off balance, so that he fell across the bed.
‘If you don’t bloody leave me alone, you little bugger, I’ll strangle you with these hands!’
Murder was exactly the matter Mostyn-Smith had come to discuss. But for the moment he was speechless, and sight-less, for his spectacles had been swept off his nose.
‘What is it this time?’ demanded O’Flaherty. He was an appalling sight, with bloodshot eyes bolting inside a frame of red hair and four days’ growth of beard. Fortunately per-haps, Mostyn-Smith was unable to see him. He groped fran-tically about the blankets for his glasses. The Irishman seriously began to suspect that Double-barrel was drunk. At last the glasses were found and planted on his face.
‘I should apologise-’ he began.
‘So you bloody well should!’
‘It is of the profoundest importance, I do assure you. You see, I had to speak with you before anyone else was awake.’ ‘You made sure of that. What’s the bloody time?’
‘Oh, it must be approaching a quarter to four. Now please listen to me. I am convinced that your life is in grave dan-ger, O’Flaherty.’
‘And what in God’s name makes you think that?’
Mostyn-Smith had recovered some of his poise with his glasses.
‘It is all a matter of deductive principles,’ he explained, but got no further.
‘Now hear this, Mister,’ growled O’Flaherty. ‘You’ve just destroyed a beautiful sleep, and, so help me, I’ve beaten men senseless for less. You come in here and tell me I’m going to be killed and then you blabber about principles. Father Almighty, if there’s killing to be done stay my hand now!’
‘I merely wanted-’
‘Just tell me, in simple words, why you won’t leave me alone.’ O’Flaherty’s mood was swinging from aggression to desperation. ‘I’m in danger, am I? Well tell me this. Have you seen a looney outside with a bloody sledge-hammer looking for me? If you haven’t I’m not interested.’
‘I’ll be brief,’ promised Mostyn-Smith. ‘Mr Darrell is dead, and Monk is dead. You must be the next.’
‘And why, in God’s name, should that be?’
‘Don’t you see? Somebody required Captain Chadwick to win the race. Therefore Darrell had to be stopped. They gave him poison hoping his death would appear to be due to tetanus. And when strychnine was found to be the cause they tried to make it appear that Monk had made a grievous error and then committed suicide. But the post-mortem examination proved that he, too, had been murdered.’
‘You said you’d be brief.’
‘And so I have been. Can’t you see that this homicidal ruf-fian, whoever he is, will not allow anyone to defeat Captain Chadwick? Your splendid efforts on the track have made you a serious contender, a rival to the Captain. You have become an unexpected obstacle to our murderer’s plan, and he will try to remove you, be sure of that.’
‘Thank you,’ said O’Flaherty, without much gratitude in the words. ‘So I’m next for the strychnine. And I’ll tell you something that might surprise you, Double-barrel. It’ll be a mercy to feel the spasms coming on-because I’ll know that in no time at all I’ll be free for ever from you and your bloody safety precautions! Now will you get out and leave me fifteen minutes’ rest before I go to the slaughter?’
Nodding appeasingly, Mostyn-Smith backed towards the door. The reception had not been exactly what he anticipated, but the Irishman was an irascible fellow, and might ponder the logic of the argument when he had controlled his temper. At least one could now return to one’s own endeavours with an unspotted conscience. None the less, he would keep a fatherly eye on the Irishman.
Sergeant Cribb arrived at the Hall early, conscious that there was much to do. Progress had been made, but it would have to be accelerated. Thackeray’s inquiries into the supplier of the poison might provide a lead, yet there was precious little time in which to follow it up. A false name was sure to have been used, and descriptions from shop-keepers were generally altogether too vague. The main pos-sibility of progress was still in the Hall itself. All the suspects except Cora Darrell were there, committed to remain in the Hall until 10.30 p.m. on Saturday.
He had examined the case by every orthodox procedure: sus-pects, means and opportunity, and possible motives. The tim-ing of the crimes, he knew, was fundamental, but it was complicated by the nature of Darrell’s death. The act of mur-der had been committed not when Darrell breathed his last, nor when he first collapsed, but at some time before he drank the ‘bracer’ at 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning. Monk had made up the potion at his lodgings and brought it to the Hall with the other provisions on Sunday night. Some time in the next twenty-four hours the murderer had got into the tent, found the bottle and added the strychnine. If Monk were eliminated, as he had to be now, the possibility of the murderer adding the poison to the drink while Darrell was in the tent was remote. So it was probably done some time during Mon-day, when Monk and Darrell were occupied with the race.
Who had reasons for going into the tent? Darrell, Monk, Herriott-as promoter, Jacobson-as manager, Chadwick (possibly) as a fellow-competitor concerned about mutual facilities and Harvey for a similar reason. Cora, he knew from the newspapers, had been in the tent when she visited the Hall on Monday afternoon, but that was with Monk. Could she and Monk have arranged her husband’s death between them; and would she later have battered Monk to fake the suicide? It was conceivable, for the trainer was already in a stu-por and it would not need a powerful blow from one of those metal struts to see that he remained that way.
So up to five people could have entered the tent without being challenged. And then Cribb remembered. He delved thumb and forefinger into his fob and took out a crumpled piece of newspaper, the account of Monday’s events in the Hall. His thumb-nail settled below a particular sentence.
‘The dressing and feeding accommodation of Chadwick and Darrell contains every appliance for their comfort and convenience; your columnist examined the latter’s commodious tent and consid-ered it worthy of housing a campaigning monarch on some foreign field of battle.’
Cribb winced. The entire sporting Press had to be added to the list of those who could have got into the tent. Abandoning the matter for the moment, he walked over to Chadwick’s tent.
‘Mr Harvey?’
The trainer looked up from a newspaper. He was having a late breakfast of kidneys refused by the Captain that morning. ‘My name’s Cribb-Sergeant Cribb. You’ve probably seen me about the Hall these last few days. You look after Mr Chadwick, don’t you?’
‘Captain Chadwick.’
‘That’s right. Point is, I need to interview him. Straighten out some facts, you know. When’s he coming off the track?’ Harvey was dubious. ‘He comes off at noon, for about twenty minutes, but he won’t welcome questions. He needs all the time for his lunch.’
‘I understand. Shan’t keep him long. I’ll be here at twelve, then. Oh, and er-Mr Harvey.’
‘Yes?’
‘Once you’ve dished up the tripe and onions, be a stout fellow and leave me alone with the guv’nor, will you? Confidential questions, you know.’
There was resentment in Harvey’s nod of acquiescence.
‘FACT IS, CAPTAIN Chadwick, I need your help.’
Cribb was sitting opposite the Champion, who was eating hungrily, averting the sergeant’s keen gaze.
‘I need your help,’ Cribb repeated. ‘Comes a point when you’ve tried every deuced line of inquiry you know, and nothing’s come out of it. So I ask myself what’s to be done. And the answer comes back: get some help. Now you’re a man of education and a military expert too. Strikes me that if anything untoward happened in this arena it
