Lenox murmured, “It must have been difficult, murdering a girl you had known—perhaps even liked.”
“Liked?” said Claude sourly, turning quickly back to Lenox. “I liked her, it’s true.… Do you remember seeing me dine alone, in the upstairs of the Jumpers? I think that moment was when I really saw what had happened. When I woke up. I saw what an insidious, awful person my cousin was—truly was—for the first time. I felt such sorrow, then. It’s no excuse, none; but it’s the truth.”
“What do you mean, you woke up?”
“You see, when I killed Prue, I didn’t really understand it. Eustace gave me some poison or other; he had cadged it from our uncle, plus a bottle of dummy poison that was in the housekeeper’s room.” Lenox nodded to himself. “He’s the one who knows botany—said he used it on plants. I would never have known. I barely scraped a third at Oxford. She had overheard us talking about Soames, I guess. And she trusted me enough, poor Prue, to confront me.” He stubbed out his second cigarette and accepted another from Lenox. “It didn’t seem real, the poison. I didn’t really connect it with Prue’s death, as strange as that sounds. It was just a little bottle that looked like medicine.”
“You had fought, hadn’t you?”
“Fought?”
“And then you had to keep her quiet long enough to poison her after the fight.” Seeing that Claude meant to protest, Lenox said, a little more sharply, “Come now, the struggle where you were burned.”
“You do know it all, I see. We did fight. In whispers, so as not to be overheard—but she was awfully angry. I did get burned. But in the end I convinced her to stay quiet until I could persuade Eustace to give it up. I said it was just talk.”
“So you tricked her?”
There was a long silence; Lenox knew this was the moment when Claude would either try to flee or break down. Slowly, without moving quickly, he pulled a dusty bottle of rye and two glasses from the hideous wardrobe some aunt or other had left to him. Claude wasn’t the first suspect he had brought into the back room. He poured the rye slowly into two glasses and offered the young man one of them. Claude looked at it, paused for a fraction of a second, then took it and had a sip. With a crack in his voice, he went on.
“It tortured me to do it. I drank heavily that morning. But that wasn’t the real reason I went through with it. That only helped. I was jealous, you see. The thing was that I really liked—nearly loved—that maid.” He laughed, with such incredulity on his face that it almost seemed he was speaking of someone else, some other set of events. Lenox thought of Deck and James, their different reactions. It was obvious that Prue had some quality that all three of these men had more than loved—they had been obsessed.
No longer needing Lenox’s frequent prompting, Claude went on. “And Eustace—oh, he was clever—he told me that morning about the man from the tavern sneaking into her room. Deck. I don’t know how he figured it out, but I was filled with anger. It ate me up. I went downstairs… I put the poison in her glass of water… lurked in the hallway. Watched her drink it with something like happiness, you know. Then I replaced the candle, put the note there, and left some other bottle I was to leave. And that was it.”
“And once you had done that, you had to help with Soames.”
Claude looked at Lenox with something almost like surprise, as if he had been talking to himself. “It’s true,” he said. “I didn’t have an alibi for the time when Prue died, so I needed the alibi for the second murder. I was contrite but I didn’t want jail, you know, or the gallows.”
Lenox sat back in the chair. It was snowing hard now. Claude was still at the window, and now, with neither of them speaking, there was a deep silence in the night.
“The gallows… no, I suspect not. It occurred to me for a moment that you might be trying to trick me—that really it was you who led Eustace on. But that’s not right, I see. It was essential that
As if smacked back into reality, Claude said, “Thirty years?” He looked shocked.
Lenox nodded. “It’s time to wake up truly now, Claude. It wasn’t all a joke.”
After just a second, Claude made his move. Lenox had been half expecting it, but was still caught off guard. Claude pushed him out of the way and bolted toward the door. There was no time to make the call; Lenox only gasped out “Edmund!” as loudly as he could. Then he roused himself from the floor (there was still a hint of ache in his body from the beating he had taken) and ran for the door. On the other side of it, Claude was struggling in Edmund’s arms, which were wrapped firmly around him.
Chapter 46
McConnell had arrived and heard the entire story from Lady Jane. Graham had a note from Exeter saying he was on an excellent trail and had no time to come over. The four friends spoke quietly in the library about Claude, who was now more calmly sitting in the back drawing room, locked in by the door and the windows.
“You had better let him sleep in one of the bedrooms,” said Lady Jane, “and then take him in tomorrow. There’s a blizzard.”
Lenox hesitated at first and asked if he would do the same if Bartholomew Deck had murdered Prue Smith and Jack Soames. But gradually the other three convinced him to do the generous thing. It was the last night Claude would spend comfortably for some years.
So Lenox relented and allowed the young man his hot water bottle and soft bed, locking the guest room door from the outside, and the next morning, though he refused to eat with the lad, had breakfast sent to him upstairs. He could only imagine his guest, sitting in an armchair in the luxurious bedroom, eating the last truly good meal of his early life.
Exeter’s hot trail had gone cold and he finally came over, where he heard the story, promptly said he thought it was something “very much of the sort,” bemoaned the lax morals (perhaps correctly) of the young “aristos, who never had to earn a pound,” and took Claude into custody. Claude had pressed his suit himself and neatly tied his tie. He looked very somber, but also somehow relieved.
The next matter was to find Eustace. He was not at Barnard’s house, where McConnell and Lenox first looked. Nor was he at any of the several clubs he belonged to. They went back to Barnard’s, then, and asked to be let into Eustace’s room. It still seemed occupied, but the possessions in the room had thinned out since Lenox last looked there, and finally the ever-charming Miss Harrison reluctantly told them that Mr. Bramwell had left with a trunk, saying he was on a trip home for a few days to check on his mother.
Lenox and McConnell stood for a moment in the entryway of the house, talking, after hearing this news and walking downstairs. They thanked the housekeeper and stepped outside onto the freshly coated sidewalk.
“I suppose we shall have to follow him up there,” said Lenox.
“Yes,” said McConnell. “He can’t know anybody’s after him.”
Lenox paused at this and then cried out, as fast as he could, “Come with me, come with me—there’s no time to lose!”
Without asking for an explanation, McConnell leaped into his carriage, which had four horses at Toto’s insistence, and beckoned Lenox to follow him.
“Where?” he said, when they were both in.
“The head of the river!” shouted Lenox, “and fast as can be!”
“A ship?” said McConnell, as they rattled quickly along the cobblestones.
“Yes, yes, a ship!” said Lenox. “Oh, how stupid I’ve been! How stupid, all through the case! To underestimate such an intelligent man! Oh, I shall never forgive myself, Thomas!”
“But how do you know that he’s on a ship?”
“A full trunk? To visit the North for a few days? No, no, no. And the trains out of England leave too irregularly and too slowly, but there is a ship every day, and we could scarcely hope to catch a ship as we could a train! Everything indicates it, Thomas. He must have followed Claude to my house and realized the game was up.”
They arrived at the dock very quickly and ran through the small building where people bought tickets, waited,
