It was too close to the truth for comfort.
'Yes, they do seek my advice regularly. They dare not make a move without me.'
He had the grace to apologize. 'I'm sorry. I wrenched my shoulder ducking the first shot. Afterward I had a long couple of nights.'
Men who had been at the Front often ducked when a motorcar backfired or there was some other loud noise. It was a reflex action, learned to save their lives and not as easily unlearned in a peaceful setting like one's uncle's garden.
'And you never saw anyone. Or heard anything except for the shots?'
'You sound just like Constable Tilmer,' he told me sourly. 'If I'd seen who it was, I could have named him to the police. Or lacking that, described him.'
'What makes you so certain it was a man?' I asked.
That gave him pause.
'I just assumed it was,' he said after a moment.
'And why would someone shoot at you?'
'I don't know. Unless someone believes I learned something in London that made me a threat.'
'Such as?'
He surprised me with his answer. 'If someone learned that I went to Scotland Yard. He-she-could believe I went there to pass on information.'
'Then why kill you now? If the Yard already knows what you've learned.'
'I haven't worked that out yet.'
'Are you sure you heard shots? I mean, as opposed to something that sounded very much like shots.'
'I've spent two years in France. Do you think I'd confuse a farmer scaring crows with a shotgun for a pistol shot?'
'No.'
I walked a little way toward the church, then turned again and walked back to where he was standing. 'How did two shots miss you? Both of them?'
'Think what you like,' he snapped and strode away.
I shook my head at his attitude, then hurried after him.
'Michael. Be sensible! Listen to me.'
He stopped and turned a stony face toward me, already rejecting what I had to say.
'If whoever it was missed you both times, then it tells me the person aiming at you wasn't used to firearms and was either out of range or couldn't hold the weapon steady.'
'I wouldn't put it past Victoria,' he answered bitterly.
But I thought it was more likely to be Serena. She'd talked to Inspector Herbert. And so had Michael. For all I knew, she had seen him leaving the Yard.
If it was Serena, this could be the second time she'd fired at a human being. And the first time she had hit her mark, which would have frightened her if she hadn't intended murder.
'I remember the first time I fired a revolver. I missed the target and nearly hit a troop of monkeys in a tree. It was six weeks before they ventured that near again.'
He was smiling at the story about the monkeys, but his mind wasn't on what I was saying.
'Did the police at least search for the spent bullets?'
'A cursory search. I went back later to look on my own. But it's a garden, for God's sake, and finding anything would be a miracle.'
'Let's have a look together.'
He was about to refuse me, but I stood there waiting, and finally he said disagreeably, 'All right, then.'
I wanted very much to tell him that handsome is as handsome does. But that would be sinking to the same childish level.
Still, I was tempted.
And what would Alicia think when she came back to find I'd gone off with Michael Hart? That her stratagem had worked?
We walked in silence to the house where he was staying with his aunt and uncle. The grassy path branched about three-quarters of the way to the door, and stepping-stones led to a gate in a well-trimmed hedge. Through that I found myself in a very pretty formal garden. Small boxwoods lined the paths in a geometric pattern, dividing the beds. Along the far side of the garden, matching the hedge at the front gate, was a bank of lilacs, which must have been beautiful in the spring, their fragrance wafting to the chairs set out on a narrow stone terrace, rising above two shallow steps.
'What's behind the lilacs?'
'The carriage drive to the stables. Beyond that a small orchard.'
'So someone could have come as far as the lilacs without being seen.'
'Yes. That was what the police suggested as well.'
'And where were you standing?'
'I was in the center, by the little sundial, my back to the lilacs. The house had felt stuffy, and I'd come out here. But I couldn't sit still, so I walked as far as the sundial, stood there for several minutes, and was just turning back to the terrace when I heard the shots.'
He was right. Finding the spent bullet amongst the beds of roses, peonies, larkspur, and other flowers in full bloom, much less the loamy earth they were set in, would be a miracle.
But I looked anyway. If only to satisfy my own ambivalence about whether or not there were any shots at all. I asked him to stand where he had been at the time, and then I cast about, looking under leaves, in the earth, even in the blossoms themselves. After ten minutes, he said impatiently, 'I can't stand here much longer. You aren't going to find anything anyway. Let's sit on the terrace before I fall down.' He did look rather gray in the face.
I am stubborn. Just ask the Colonel Sahib.
'Go ahead and sit. I'll look a little longer.'
And five minutes later, my fingers, scything gently through the soil around a rosebush in the next bed over, came up with something hard. I picked it up, brushed it off, and looked at it.
It was a readily identifiable.45 bullet.
Triumphant, I carried it to Michael and dropped it into the palm of his hand.
'Persistence,' I said simply.
He grinned at me. 'And your fingers are filthy.'
I regarded them wryly. 'So they are.'
'Now perhaps someone will believe me!'
But there still remained a shadow of a doubt. Michael Hart possessed his service revolver, and he could just as easily have fired that shot into the rosebushes himself, in the hope that the police would believe his story.
I sighed. 'I must go back to Somerset. I'm here on sufferance anyway. My family is convinced that you're a blackguard and I'm in danger of being shot in your company.'
The grin deepened. 'It's a lie. Your mother adored me. Stay, and I'll take you to dinner somewhere.'
I shook my head. 'Thank you, but I must go.' I rose to leave, and then said, 'Michael. What if we never discover who killed Marjorie? If the police can't do it, it's not likely that anyone else will succeed where they failed. And they keep jumping about, first this and then that likelihood. They won't keep searching forever.'
'I'll keep looking if it takes me the rest of my life,' he told me grimly. 'I won't desert her as everyone else has.'
I said good-bye and left. Alicia was watching for me, and smiled. 'I saw you walking with Michael Hart to his aunt's garden. Beautiful, isn't it?'
I agreed and then told her I must return to Somerset.
She said, 'You two didn't quarrel, did you?'
Several times, I answered silently, then told her, 'He's not at his best today.'
'Don't let that discourage you. I think he rather likes you.'
I smiled and said, with heavy irony, 'Thank you, Alicia. You send me away happier than when I arrived.'
'Did he tell you,' she went on, 'that Victoria, Marjorie Evanson's sister, had a very public quarrel with him, just this morning. I don't know what precipitated it. He was walking toward the church when she stopped him and
