Till Death Do Us Part

have heard the shot, appeared in the lane from the easterly direction.

Though the sunlight was still not bright, that figure remained for a few moments a silhouette, hurrying towards Dick.

·What is it? Who's there?' the figure called. He recognized the voice of Cynthia Drew, and he ran forward even as she ran to meet him. They met just outside the front garden of Sir Harvey's cottage. Cynthia, wearing the same pinkish-coloured jumper and brown skirt she had worn the night before, stopped short and stared at him in astonishment.

'Dick! What is it?'

' 'It's trouble, I'm afraid.'

'But what on earth are you doing here?'

'If it comes to that, Cynthia, what are you doing here?'

She made a gesture. 'I couldn't sleep. I went for a walk.' Cynthia, slim yet very sturdy, should have been the last girl in the world to be called fanciful or imaginative. But she saw his expression, and her hands moved up and pressed against her breast. The sun behind her turned the edges of her hair to clear gold. 'Dick! Was what we heard...?'

'Yes. I think so.'

Until this moment, until he had come fully in front of the cottage, he would not turn fully round to the right and look at it. But he did so now, seeing what he expected to see.

Set some thirty feet back from the road in an unkempt front garden, the cottage had a longish frontage. But it was a little low doll's house of a place, with little dormer windows projecting from the slope of the dark-shingled roof to form an upper floor. Its whitewashed stone front and crooked black beams lay shadowed by the fruit- orchard eastwards. On the ground floor, the two illuminated windows - just to the left of the front door - showed what was inside.

Last night, Dick remembered, Sir Harvey Gilman had been sitting in an easy-chair beside the big writing- table in the middle of the room. Now the easy-chair had been moved round to face the table, as though someone were sitting there to write. Someone was sitting there; even the dwarfed view through the window showed it to be Sir Harvey; but he was not writing.

The hanging lamp in its tan-coloured shade shed light down across the pathologist's bald head. His chin was sunk forward on his chest. His arms lay quietly along the arms of the chair. You might have thought him dozing, a figure of peace, if you bad not noticed the light on the whitish-edged, clean-drilled bullet-hole through window- glass -and seen that this bullet-hole was just in line with the bald skull.

Dick felt a physical sickness rising in his throat. But he conquered this. Cynthia, very steady and composed, followed the direction of his glance; her teeth fastened in her lower lip.

'That's the second time,' Dick said. 'Yesterday I saw the bullet-hole jump up in the wall of the tent. To-day I saw it jump up in the window. But it doesn't get any easier. I think .. .Just a minute!'

He swung round to look at the stone boundary wall, opposite those windows, with the screen of birch-trees rising dark above it. In three strides he crossed the strip of coarse grass separating the wall from the lane, and peered into the semi-gloom beyond the wall. Something had been thrown down under the trees there, left behind when the marksman fled.

Vaulting over the wall, completely disregarding any question of fingerprints, Dick picked up this object It was a .22 calibre slide-action repeating rifle: a Winchester 61. He could not doubt it was the same one he expected to find.

After Lesley Grant had given back this rifle to Major Price yesterday afternoon, the rifle had been stolen from the shooting-gallery. That was what Lord Ashe had said.

' Don't!' cried Cynthia Drew.

'Don't what?'

'Don't look like that!'

But Dick's expression was not consternation. It was one of crazy triumph. For, whoever might have stolen that rifle, it could not possibly have been Lesley Grant

He, Dick Markham, had been with her all the time after the 'accident'; he had taken her home; he had remained with her for several hours. And she had not taken the rifle. Not only was he prepared to swear to this: he knew it to be the simple truth.

Dropping the rifle on the ground again, Dick vaulted back over the wall. Lesley, at least, couldn't have donethis’ He hardly saw or heard Cynthia, who was saying something he did not afterwards remember. Instead he set off at a run towards Sir Harvey's cottage.

No fence enclosed the front garden. Unkempt grass dragged at your shoes like wires as you crossed it. It was going to be a hot day, too; the earth breathed up moist warmth, dissolving dew-cobwebs; a wasp circled up out of the fruit-orchard; the front of the cottage itself exhaled an odour of old wood and stone. Dick approached the window with the bullet-hole - it was the right-hand one as you faced the house - and flattened his face against the grimy glass.

Then, cupping his hands round his eyes, he stared again.

Under dusty lamplight, contrasting with broadening day, the figure of the little pathologist sat motionless in front of the big table. You saw his face in profile, its chin-muscles sagging and the eyes partly open. That he was looking at a dead man Dick Markham did not doubt. But there was something wrong here, something very wrong ...

'Dick,' breathed Cynthia's voice at his elbow. ' That bullet didn't hit him.'

It was true.

In the back wall of the room, facing them as they looked through the window, was the brick fireplace with its overmantel ornaments of Benares brass. Above this hung a big coloured print depicting some phase of the battle of Waterloo. The rifle-bullet had drilled through the window, passed close to the top of Sir Harvey's head, and shattered the lower edge of the picture - which now hung askew -before burying itself in the wall. But it had not touched him.

There had been urgency in Cynthia's voice, and bewilderment, and something like relief. Dick turned to stare at her. 'Then what the devil's the matter with the fellow?' 'I don't know.'

' Sir Harvey!' yelled Dick, putting his mouth close against the window.' Sir Harvey Gilman!'

There was no reply.

Dick glanced from one window to the other. He inspected the first, then the second. Since the cottage was built rather low against the ground, the lower sills of the windows were not much above the level of his waist. They were ordinary sash-windows, fastening with metal catches on the inside. By putting one knee on the outer sill, and hauling himself up with a hand on the frame at each side, Dick was able to see through the glass that both windows were locked on the inside.

A very ugly notion began to creep through his mind now.

'Wait here a minute,' he said to Cynthia.

Hurrying to the front door, he found it unlocked and only partly on the latch above two stone steps. He threw it open, and found himself in the small modern-looking hall he remembered from last night.

On his left, he also remembered, was the door leading into the sitting-room. If he opened this door now, it would bring him into the sitting-room at a point behind the back of the motionless figure seated at the table. But he was not able to open this door, though he wrenched with violent hands at the knob. It was fastened on the inside.

He tore out into the front garden again, where Cynthia was still staring through the window.

'You know,' she declared, 'there's something awfully queer about him. His face seems a funny colour. Bluish? Or is that the effect of the light? And there's something about his mouth: is it froth? And ... Dick! what on earth are you doing?'

With a hazy idea that the bullet-hole might be required as evidence, Dick did not touch that right-hand window. Instead he went to the other window. From the unkempt grass of the garden he picked up half a brick, and flung it at the window with a crash that brought glass rattling down in shards.

From that stuffy room, very distinct in morning air, stirred a breath which drifted out of the window with a small but perceptible odour of bitter almonds. It came at their faces in a wave. Cynthia, beside him, put a hand on his arm.