case he attempts any violence, I shall give the old call.” This was a bird call they used to have when they were children. It could mean “Look!” or “Here I am!” or “Help!”
“Yes, of course,” said Edmund. “Of course.”
“I would ask you to sit in, but he may be volatile.”
“All the more reason, Charles.”
“No. I absolutely forbid it, if you’ll allow me.”
Edmund shrugged. Within minutes, Lenox had entered the back parlor and Edmund was stationed by the door.
Lenox paused for a moment when he went in. It was a small room, rarely used, filled with mistakes: a poorly designed chair, an uncomfortable desk, a mediocre painting. Its only saving grace was a small window, looking out onto the small garden by the house. That was where Claude stood, smoking a cigarette, his hands in his jacket pockets.
He looked sorrowful—and leaner by a noticeable measure even in the last two or three days. He didn’t hear Lenox enter, and for a moment Lenox watched, saddened. He felt very little pity, to be sure, but all the young man’s charm had become melancholy.
“Mr. Barnard?” Lenox said at last.
Claude turned. “Oh, hello, Mr. Lenox. Cold day, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” There was a silence. “Would you like to sit?”
Claude nodded, and the two men sat in ugly horsehair armchairs facing each other.
“I’m afraid I can’t compliment your taste, Mr. Lenox.”
“I rarely come into this room.”
“Ah—yes.”
“How may I help you, Mr. Barnard?”
Claude laughed bitterly. “Help me. Well, well.”
“Shall I put it another way? What would you like to say to me?”
“I feel as if I live in a dream, Mr. Lenox. Everything has gone so—so wrong.”
“Yes, it has,” said Lenox.
Claude looked up sharply. “I’m not certain that you know.”
“On the contrary, I know it all.”
Now the young man’s look changed to astonishment. “All of it? Surely not.”
“Yes, I assure you.”
“Will you tell me?”
“You and your cousin Eustace murdered Prudence Smith and Jack Soames in order to realize the benefit of your shares in the Pacific Trust.”
Claude shook his head. “Yes, I see you do.” He sighed. “My last solace was to come to you of my own will, and now I don’t even have that.”
“On the contrary,” said Mr. Lenox. “You did. You might easily be across the channel. But that is by no means an exoneration.”
“Exoneration? I tell you—” He broke off and lit another cigarette. After a moment, he spoke again. “Yes: I come to you of my own free will. I’ve no doubt I’ll hang. Anything but living a moment longer in this nightmare.”
“Eustace was the instigator.”
“Eustace… Eustace. You wouldn’t think it, Mr. Lenox, but behind those tedious opinions and miserable manners he can be the most persuasive fellow in the world.”
“You had better begin at the beginning,” said Lenox.
He took a puff of his cigarette. “If you know it all, I don’t see why I should humiliate myself in recounting it.”
Lenox heard the edge of stubbornness in Claude’s voice, and instead of lecturing him, said softly, almost shrewdly, “It starts with your uncle, doesn’t it.”
Startled, Claude looked up. “Yes,” he said slowly, “I suppose that’s true. Uncle George.” Suddenly, as if spurred on by the possibility of a sympathetic audience, he spoke in a torrent. “You wouldn’t believe it. He’s—he’s positively cruel to the rest of the family, for one thing. Gave us money to save himself from embarrassment, you know, but then he lorded it over all of us, played us against each other. Made our parents enemies. That was the reason Eustace and I first became close. We hated him.”
“Go on,” said Lenox.
“I suppose, objectively, he was good to us—gave us pocket money, paid for university, let us live as we pleased with him. But I can’t explain his constant references, alone or in company, to our indebtedness. It was horrible.”
“And then he gave you money, didn’t he?”
As if realizing he had let on too much, Claude slowed to a sullen pace. “Yes, he gave us a bit of money.”
“And what did you do with it?”
“You know that already, I suppose.”
“You can explain your feelings, though. All I know are the facts.”
Again drawn out, Claude said, “He gave us ten thousand pounds each. When he did that, Eustace came to me.”
“He went to you?”
“We were united in our dislike of our uncle, but I still didn’t like my cousin. Still, he was irresistible. Said he had found a way for us be rich, both of us, and we both knew he was rather brilliant about things of that sort. I think he managed his own family’s budget from the age of six or seven, saved them from that awful cycle of wealth and poverty I went through. Our uncle only sent remittances erratically, you see.” A shadow of childish anger passed over Claude’s face.
Lenox, again subtly urging the lad on, said, “He painted you a picture, then?”
“He convinced me. He said we would never have to work in our lives! And of course he was right. Even if we had accepted the board’s decision and managed well, we could have survived on what we had, not to mention the stock’s growth. But he had filled my head, you see, with these visions of absolute opulence”—Claude stubbed out his cigarette on the open windowsill and ran his hand through his hair—“until ten thousand pounds didn’t cut it anymore.”
“There were debts, I gather.” Lenox offered Claude another cigarette as he said this.
“Why fight it,” Claude said bitterly. “You know already. I had been drinking too much, you see, and I owed for cards, and had bills outstanding that would have forced me to live very stringently. From the ten thousand I would have had, perhaps three or four thousand left. A large sum of money, to be sure, but by no means enough to live on as I wanted to live. Or no—as I wanted to show Uncle Barnard I could live.” Again that shadow of anger across his face. “Even living very cheaply, I would have run through it in five years.”
This was the moment, Lenox knew. Had to be handled carefully. “And Eustace had a solution.…”
Claude paused but then nodded. “At last he convinced me. He said if we got Soames off the board, we would be rich: all of my worries, my family’s worries, all of Uncle Barnard’s snide comments—gone. One hundred thousand quid apiece at one go.”
“It wasn’t murder at first, was it?”
“No, not at first. To begin with, we merely spread it about that Soames was a drunk and had no money left. We thought perhaps he would be put off the board on the strength of public opinion. I fear we made his life miserable, poor sot.” He looked at Lenox almost defiantly when he said this, but the detective’s face remained impassive. Claude went on in a burst. “It didn’t work—and gradually, you see, Eustace convinced me that our very lives depended on it. As I told you, it was like a dream. I ask you, to murder somebody? I had money enough, all the friends in the world, a rich uncle if an autocratic one—how could I have been brought round? The insanity of it! It only dawned on me after Prue died… and then my life depended on it. I couldn’t go backwards, Eustace kept saying.”
“Go on.”
“No. I’ve said too much. I don’t even know what protection you can give me.” He stood by the window, still smoking.
