a few minutes, he may be conscious by the time this fellow gets there, he may even have gone. But what is there lost if he is? If he’s gone, that’s it. If he’s up off the floor and hugging his headache all you need do is fake concern, help him to his car, and go off and reassure Kitty. And if Armiger’s still lying where Kitty left him, and still dead to the world, well, there you are, a chance in a million.
“So he goes all right, he goes like a shot off a shovel, not to Kitty but to the barn. And sure enough, there’s Armiger still out cold, and the chance in a million has come off.”
“Go on,” said George quietly, studying the intent face that stared back at him across the table. However hotly they both denied it, there must be something in this likeness Bunty was always finding between them, especially when they annoyed her. It was like having a mirror held up to his own mind. Often enough before, when the same interest had preoccupied them both, he had found Dominic hard on his heels at every check, like an echo; but now he was no longer sure who was the echo and who the initiator. “Go on, let’s see what you can do with the details.”
“I can fit them in,” said Dominic. “All of them. This fellow’s all keyed up for action, but he hasn’t really believed in it until then. No weapon, you see, no real preparations. That would be like tempting providence. He’s wearing gloves simply because he’s been driving on a coldish night. Now he takes the chance that’s really been offered to him at last. The minute he comes in at the door and sees Armiger still lying there, he grabs at the nearest weapon he sees, the plaster statuette from the alcove just on the right of the door. I heard you say what they were like, and how surprisingly light and hollow they turned out to be. He snatches it up to brain Armiger with that, but heaves it away again in disgust on the spot because it’s such a silly, light thing it couldn’t brain a mouse. It smashes against the wall, and he rashes up the stairs and grabs the bottle instead, and lets fly with that again and again until it smashes, too. And then he comes to his senses with Armiger pretty obviously dead, and he’s got to get rid of the traces. Especially the gloves. And quickly, that’s the point. Within a few hundred yards of where he is he’s got to jettison those gloves. Because, you see, he’s got to go on to Kitty and get her off the scene as he promised, otherwise whoever doesn’t connect him with it when the murder comes out, she will. The whole beauty of the set- up is that nobody shall know. He can afford to let the police find their own way to Kitty. He can’t afford to leave her or her car where they are, and have her picked up in circumstances so tight that she’ll have to come out with the whole story, and say: ‘I called so-and-so to come and help me, and he swore he would, but he never came.’ Because even if that didn’t give her ideas, it would certainly give them to you people, wouldn’t it?”
“We shouldn’t be likely to miss the implications,” agreed George.
“He may not actually have planned on forcing Kitty to take the blame. If the chips fell that way, there she was. But probably he hadn’t anything against her, and rather preferred that she should get away with it, too, as long as he was all right, of course. Anyhow, he had to go through with the rescue part of it as though he’d rushed straight to her. This part in the barn can’t have taken many minutes, he wasn’t long delayed. So he’d got to get rid of the gloves. He’d got to meet Kitty, talk to her, handle the petrol can. He couldn’t afford to leave blood about in the wrong places, or let Kitty see it and take alarm. He daren’t put the gloves in his pocket or anywhere in his own car, they’d be certain to leave marks. So you see, what it boils down to is that he’d got to jettison them or hide them somewhere before he met Kitty.”
“You have thought it out, haven’t you?” said George. “Go on, how does he get rid of them?”
“There’s not too much scope and not too much time, is there? He hadn’t time to go far from the road, he had to stay out of sight of Kitty. He lets himself out of the barn carefully, closing the door with his left hand, because that glove wouldn’t be so saturated, it might only be splashed here and there. I don’t think he’d leave the gloves anywhere inside, even if there was a hiding-place, because of the door handle. Better smears of blood on it than fingerprints. Then he peels off the gloves, letting them turn inside-out as he pulls them off, and probably rolling the right one inside the left, to get the cleanest outer surface he can. I’ve been over the ground, there’s a drain grid close to the back of the barn, that’s tempting, but too obvious, because unless there was a strong flow of water going down, and there wasn’t, gloves would lodge under the grid, and anyhow it’s the first place the police would look, , , “
“The first place they did look. After the barn itself, of course. Go on.”
“Then there’s just the road, the hedge-banks and ditches, and the hanging wood opposite. Seems obvious, but I should think it takes an awful lot of men an awful long time to search the whole of a wood that size, or even just the strip alongside the road, because he hadn’t time to go very far inside. And all the ground there is so covered with generations of leaf-mould, they could hunt and hunt, and still might miss what they were looking for. Anyhow, that’s what I should have done, rushed up into the wood and shoved them somewhere down among the mould. And then he goes on to Kitty’s rescue, arriving all steamed up and concerned for her, dumps the petrol in her tank for her, and tells her to go home and not worry, she’s making a fuss about nothing, the old fool’s sure to be all right. And Kitty, you said she was wearing a dress with a wide skirt, she’s so relieved to see him she keeps close to him all the time they’re there together, and her skirt brushes against his trouser legs, where the blood’s splashed, and a drop falls from his sleeve on her shoe. In the dark there neither of them would know. And that’s it, all your evidence. Have I missed anything out?”
George had to own that he had not; he had accounted for everything.
“You’re quite sure he must have killed Armiger before he sent Kitty home, and not after?”
“Well, of course! He wouldn’t stay unconscious for ever. If this chap had gone first to Kitty I doubt if he’d ever have had the impetus or the nerve left to go back and look if opportunity was still waiting for him.”
He had seemed utterly sure of himself until he came to the end, but when George sat thoughtfully silent he couldn’t stand the strain. He’d poured out all his hopes into that exposition, and he was trembling when it was done. His eyes, covertly hanging upon George’s face, pleaded for a sign of encouragement, and the brief silence unnerved him. If he’d only known it, George was still staring into a mirror.
“Well, say something!” burst out Dominic, his voice quaking with tension. “Damn you, you just sit there! You don’t care if they send Kitty to prison for life, as long as you get a conviction. You don’t care whether she did it or not, that doesn’t matter. You’re not doing anything!”
George, coming out of his abstraction with a start, took his son by the scruff of the neck and shook him, gently enough to permit them both to pretend that the gesture was a playful one, hard enough to indicate that it wasn’t. The flow stopped with a gasp; in any case the onslaught had shocked Dominic a good deal more than it had George.
“That’s enough of that. You hold your horses, my boy.”
“Well, I know, I’m sorry! But you do just sit there! Aren’t you going to give me anything back for all that?”
“Yes, a thick ear,” said George, “if you start needling me. If you’d been anywhere near that wood of yours since noon to-day you’d have found it about as full of policemen as it’ll hold, all looking for your gloves, as they’ve been doing in various places, more or less intensively, ever since we were sure there must have been gloves involved. Maybe we’re not as sure as you that they’ll be in a logical place, but we’re just as keen as you are to find them. We even have open minds, believe it or not, on such minor points as whether a few small smears of blood on the hem
