spoonfuls.
Of course. For Kandersteg.
I found a towel and wiped my face. Then I went back into the office and knelt down beside Adams to get the door key out of his pocket. He had stopped snoring.
I rolled him over.
There isn't a pretty way of saying it. He was dead.
Small trickles of blood had seeped out of his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. I felt his head where I had hit him, and the dented bones moved under my fingers.
Aghast and shaking, I searched in his pockets and found the key. Then I stood up and went slowly over to the desk to telephone to the police.
The telephone had been knocked on to the floor, where it lay with the receiver off. I bent down and picked it up clumsily left handed, and my head swam with dizziness. I wished I didn't feel so ill.
Straightening up with an effort I put the telephone back on the desk.
Blood started trickling again past my eyebrow. I hadn't the energy to wash it off again.
Out in the yard one or two lights were on, including the one in Kandersteg's box. His door was wide open and the horse himself, tied up by the head, was lashing out furiously in a series of kicks. He didn't look in the least sedated.
I stopped with my fingers in the dial of the telephone, and felt myself go cold. My brain cleared with a click.
Kandersteg was not sedated. They wouldn't want his memory lulled. The opposite, in fact. Mickey had not been given any phenobarbitone until he was clearly deranged.
I didn't want to believe what my mind told me; that one or more teaspoonfuls of soluble phenobarbitone in a large gin and Campari would be almost certainly fatal.
Sharply I remembered the scene I had found in the office, the drinks, the anxiety on Humber's face, the enjoyment on Adams'. It matched the enjoyment I had seen there when he thought he was killing me. He enjoyed killing. He had thought from what she had said that Elinor had guessed the purpose of the whistle, and he had wasted no time in getting rid of her.
No wonder he had raised no objections to her leaving. She would drive back to college and die in her room miles away, a silly girl who had taken an overdose. No possible connection with Adams or Humber.
And no wonder he had been so determined to kill me: not only because of what I knew about his horses, or because I had fooled him, but because I had seen Elinor drink her gin.
It didn't need too much imagination to picture the scene before I had arrived. Adams was saying smoothly, 'So you came to see if Roke had used the whistle?'
'Yes.'
'And does your father know you're here? Does he know about the whistle?'
'Oh no, I only came on impulse. Of course he doesn't know.'
He must have thought her a fool, blundering in like that: but probably he was the sort of man who thought all women were fools anyway.
'You'd like some ice in your drink? I'll get some. No bother. Just next door. Here you are, my dear, a strong gin and phenobarbitone and a quick trip to heaven.'
He had taken the same reckless risk of killing Staple- ton, and it had worked. And who was to say that if I had been found in the next county over some precipice,
smashed up in the ruins of a motor-cycle, and Elinor died in her college, that he wouldn't have got away with two more murders?
If Elinor died.
My finger was still in the telephone dial. I turned it three times, nine, nine, nine. There was no answer. I rattled the button, and tried again. Nothing. It was dead, the whole telephone was dead. Everything was dead, Mickey was dead, Stapleton was dead, Adams was dead, Elinor stop it, stop it. I dragged my scattering wits together. If the telephone wouldn't work, someone would have to go to Elinor's college and prevent her dying.
My first thought was that I couldn't do it. But who else? If I were right, she needed a doctor urgently, and any time I wasted on bumbling about finding another telephone or another person to go in my stead was just diminishing her chances. I could reach her in less than twenty minutes. By telephoning in Posset I could hardly get help for her any quicker.
It took me three shots to get the key in the keyhole. I couldn't hold the key at all in my right hand, and the left one was shaking. I took a deep breath, unlocked the door, walked out, and shut it behind me.
No one noticed me as I went out of the yard the way I had come and went back to the motor-bike. But it didn't fire properly the first time I kicked the starter, and Cass came round the end of the row of boxes to investigate.
'Who's that?' he called.
'Is that you, Clan? What are you doing back here?' He began to come towards me.
I stamped on the starter fiercely. The engine spluttered, coughed, and roared. I squeezed the clutch and kicked the bike into gear.
'Come back,' yelled Cass. But I turned away from his hurrying figure, out of the gate and down the road to Posset, with gravel spurting under the tyres.
The throttle was incorporated into the hand grip of the right hand handle-bar. One merely twisted it towards one to accelerate and away to slow down. Twisting the hand grip was normally easy. It was not easy that evening because once I had managed to grip it hard enough to turn it the numbness disappeared from my arm with a vengeance. I damned nearly fell off before I was through the gate.
It was ten miles northeast to Durham. One and a half downhill to Posset, seven and a half across the moors on a fairly straight and unfrequented secondary road, one mile through the outskirts of the city. The last part, with turns and traffic and too much change of pace, would be the most difficult.
Only the knowledge that Elinor would probably die if I came off kept me on the motor-bike at all, and altogether it was a ride I would not care to repeat. I didn't know how many times I had been hit, but I didn't think a carpet had much to tell me. I tried to ignore it and concentrate on the matter in hand.
Elinor, if she had driven straight back to college,
could not have been there long before she began to feel sleepy. As far as I could remember, never having taken much notice, barbiturates took anything up to an hour to work. But barbiturate dissolved in alcohol was a different matter. Quicker. Twenty minutes to half an hour, perhaps. I didn't know. Twenty minutes from the time she left the yard was easily enough for her to drive back safely. Then what? She would go up to her room: feel tired: lie down: and go to sleep.
During the time I had been fighting with Adams and Humber she had been on her way to Durham. I wasn't sure how long I had wasted dithering about in the washroom in a daze, but she couldn't have been back to college much before I started after her. I wondered whether she would have felt ill enough to tell a friend, to ask for help: but even if she had, neither she nor anyone else would know what was the matter with her.
I reached Durham: made the turns: even stopped briefly for a red traffic light in a busy street: and fought down an inclination to go the last half mile at walking pace in order to avoid having to hold the throttle any more. But my ignorance of the time it would take for the poison to do irreparable damage added wings to my anxiety.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was getting dark when I swung into the college entrance, switched off the engine, and hurried up the steps to the door. There was no one at the porter's desk and the whole place was very quiet. I ran down the corridors, trying to remember the turns, found the stairs, went up two flights. And it was then that I got lost. I had suddenly no idea which way to turn to find Elinor's room.
A thin elderly woman with pince nez was walking towards me carrying a sheaf of papers and a thick book on her arm. One of the staff, I thought.
'Please,' I said, 'which is Miss Tarren's room? ' She came close to me and looked at me. She did not approve
