you out of your agony at once, Mr. Sheringham. I've overwhelming evidence that the bet was made.'
'You have?' said Roger, disconcerted.
'Certainly. It was a point you really should have verified yourself, you know,' chided Miss Dammers gently, 'considering its importance to your case. Well, I have two witnesses. Mrs. Bendix mentioned the bet to her maid when she went up to her bedroom to lie down, actually saying (like yourself, Mr. Sheringham) that the violent indigestion from which she thought herself to be suffering was a judgment on her for having made it. The second witness is a friend of my own, who knows the Bendixes. She saw Mrs. Bendix sitting alone in her box during the second interval, and went in to speak to her. In the course of the conversation Mrs. Bendix remarked that she and her husband had a bet on the identity of the villain, mentioning the character in the play whom she herself fancied. But (and this completely confirms my own deduction) Mrs. Bendix did not tell my friend that she had seen the play before.'
'Oh!' said Roger, now quite crestfallen.
Miss Dammers dealt with him as tenderly as possible. 'There were only those two deductions to be made from that bet, and by bad luck you chose the wrong one.'
'But how did you know,' said Roger, coming to the surface for the third time, 'that Mrs. Bendix had seen the play before? I only found that out myself a couple of days ago, and by the merest accident.'
'Oh, I've known that from the beginning,' said Miss Dammers carelessly. ' I suppose Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer told you? I don't know her personally, but I know people who do. I didn't interrupt you last night when you were talking about the amazing chance of this piece of knowledge reaching you. If I had, I should have pointed out that the agency by which anything known to Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer (as I see her) might become known to her friends too, isn't chance at all, but certainty.'
'I see,' said Roger, and sank for the third, and final, time. But as he did so he remembered one piece of information which Mrs. Verreker - le - Mesurer had succeeded, not wholly as it seemed but very nearly so, in withholding from her friends; and catching Mr. Bradley's ribald eye knew that his thought was shared. So even Miss Dammers was not quite infallible in her psychology.
'We then,' resumed that lady, somewhat didactically, 'have Mr. Bendix displaced from his temporary role of villain and back again in his old part of second victim. She paused for a moment.
'But without Sir Eustace returning to the cast in his original star part of intended victim of the piece,' amplified Mr. Bradley.
Miss Dammers rightly ignored him. 'Now here, I think, Mr. Sheringham will find my case as interesting as I found his last night, for though we differ so vitally in some essentials we agree remarkably in others. And one of the points on which we agree is that the intended victim certainly was killed.'
'What, Alicia?' exclaimed Mrs. Fielder - Flemming. 'You think too that the plot was directed against Mrs. Bendix from the beginning? '
'I have no doubt of it. But to prove my contention I must demolish yet another of Mr. Sheringham's conclusions.
'You made the point, Mr. Sheringham, that half - past ten in the morning was a most unusual time for Mr. Bendix to arrive at his club and therefore highly significant. That is perfectly true. Unfortunately you attached the wrong significance to it. His arrival at that hour doesn't necessarily argue a guilty intention, as you assumed. It escaped you (as in fairness I must say it seems to have escaped every one else) that if Mrs. Bendix was the intended victim and Mr. Bendix himself not her murderer, his presence at the club at that convenient time might have been secured by the real murderer. In any case I think Mr. Sheringham might have given Mr. Bendix the benefit of the doubt in so far as to ask him if he had any explanation of his own to offer. As I did.'
'You asked Bendix himself how it had happened that he arrived at the club at half - past ten that morning?' Mr. Chitterwick said in awed tones. This was certainly the way real detecting should be done. Unfortunately his own diffidence seemed to have prevented Mr. Chitterwick from doing any real detecting at all.
'Certainly,' agreed Miss Dammers briskly. 'I rang him up, and put the point to him. From what I gathered, not even the police had thought to put it before. And though he answered it in a way I quite expected, it was clear that he saw no significance in his own answer. Mr. Bendix told me that he had gone there to receive a telephone message. But why not have had the message telephoned to his home? you will ask. Exactly. So did I. The reason was that it was not the sort of message one cares about receiving at home. I must admit that I pressed Mr. Bendix about this message, and as he had no idea of the importance of my questions he must have considered my taste more than questionable. However, I couldn't help that.
'In the end I got him to admit that on the previous afternoon he had been rung up at his office by a Miss Vera Delorme, who plays a small part in Heels Up! at the Regency Theatre. He had only met her once or twice, but was not averse from doing so again. She asked him if he were doing anything important the next morning, to which he replied that he was not. Could he take her out to a quiet little lunch somewhere? He would be delighted. But she was not quite sure yet whether she was free. She would ring him up the next morning between ten - thirty and eleven o'clock at the Rainbow Club.'
Five pairs of brows were knitted. 'I don't see any significance in that either,' finally plunged Mrs. Fielder - Flemming.
'No?' said Miss Dammers. 'But if Miss Delorme straightly denies having ever rung Mr. Bendix up at all?'
Five pairs of brows unravelled themselves. 'Oh!' said Mrs. Fielder - Flemming. 'Of course that was the first thing I verified,' said Miss Dammers coolly. Mr. Chitterwick sighed. Yes, undoubtedly this was real detecting.
'Then your murderer had an accomplice, Miss Dammers?' Sir Charles suggested.
'He had two,' retorted Miss Dammers. 'Both unwitting.'
'Ah, yes. You mean Bendix. And the woman who telephoned?'
'Well - !' Miss Dammers looked in her unexcited way round the circle of faces. 'Isn't it obvious?'
Apparently it was not at all obvious.
'At any rate it must be obvious why Miss Delorme was chosen as the telephonist: because Mr. Bendix hardly knew her, and would certainly not be able to recognise her voice on the telephone. And as for the real speaker . . . Well, really!' Miss Dammers looked her opinion of such obtuseness.
'Mrs. Bendix!' squeaked Mrs. Fielder - Flemming catching sight of a triangle.
'Of course. Mrs. Bendix, carefully primed by somebody about her husband's minor misdemeanours.'
'The somebody being the murderer of course,' nodded Mrs. Fielder - Flemming. 'A friend of Mrs. Bendix's then. At least,' amended Mrs. Fielder - Flemming in some confusion, remembering that real friends seldom murder each other, 'she thought of him as a friend. Dear me, this is getting very interesting, Alicia.'
Miss Dammers gave a small, ironical smile. 'Yes, it's a very intimate little affair after all, this murder. Tightly closed, in fact, Mr. Bradley.
'But I'm getting on rather too fast. I had better complete the destruction of Mr. Sheringham's case before I build up my own.' Roger groaned faintly and looked up at the hard, white ceiling. It reminded him of Miss Dammers, and he looked down again.
'Really, Mr. Sheringham, your faith in human nature is altogether too great, you know,' Miss Dammers mocked him without mercy. 'Whatever anybody chooses to tell you, you believe. A confirmatory witness never seems necessary to you. I'm sure that if some one had come to your rooms and told you he'd seen the Shah of Persia injecting the nitrobenzene into those chocolates you would have believed him unhesitatingly.'
'Are you hinting that somebody hasn't told me the truth?' groaned the unhappy Roger.
'I'll do more than hint it; I'll prove it. When you told us last night that the man in the typewriter shop had positively identified Mr. Bendix as the purchaser of a second - hand No. 4 Hamilton I was astounded. I took a note of the shop's address. This morning, first thing, I went there. I taxed the man roundly with having told you a lie. He admitted it, grinning.
'So far as he could make out, all you wanted was a good Hamilton No. 4, and he had a good Hamilton No. 4 to sell. He saw nothing wrong in leading you to suppose that his was the shop where your friend had bought his own good Hamilton No. 4, because he had quite as good a one as any other shop could have. And if it eased your mind that he should recognise your friend from his photograph - well,' said Miss Dammers drily, 'he was quite prepared to ease it as many times as you had photographs to produce.'
'I see,' said Roger, and his thoughts dwelt on the eight pounds he had handed over to that sympathetic, mind - easing shopman in return for a Hamilton No. 4 he didn't want.
'As for the girl in Webster's,' continued Miss Dammers implacably, 'she was just as ready to admit that
