“What did you see?”
Fay moistened her lips.
“I saw Miss Hammond lying half in bed, holding a gun. I saw a man named Professor Rigaud—I'd known him before—standing on the far side of the bed. I saw,” she hesitated, “Mr. Miles Hammond. I heard Professor Rigaud say this was shock, and that Miss Hammond wasn't dead.”
“But you didn't go in? Or call out to them?”
“No!”
“What happened then?”
“I heard someone who sounded awfully heavy and clumsy start to walk up the front stairs at the other end of the hall,” answered Fay. “I know now it must have been Dr. Fell on his way to the bedroom. I turned out the lamp I was carrying, and ran down the back stairs. He didn't see me.”
“What was it that upset you, Miss Seton?”
“Upset me?”
“When you looked into that room,” Hadley told her with careful slowness, “You saw something that upset you. What was it?”
“I don't understand!”
“Miss Seton,” explained Hadley, putting away the notebook he had taken out of his inside breast pocket, “I've had to make all these elaborate inquiries to ask you just one question. You saw something, and it upset you so much that later you apologized to Mr. Hammond in Dr. Fell's presence for making what you called a disgraceful exhibition of yourself. You weren't frightened; the feeling wasn't in the least connected with fear. What upset you?”
Fay whirled round towards Miles. “Did you tell Dr. Fell?”
And Miles stared at her. “Tell him what?”
“What I said to you last night,” Fay retorted, her fingers twitching together, “when we were there in the kitchen and twitching together, “when we were there in the kitchen and I—I wasn't quite myself.”
“I didn't tell Dr. Fell anything,” Miles snapped, with a violence he could not understand. “And in any case what difference does it make?”
Miles took a step or two away from her. He bumped into Barbara, who also moved back. For a fraction of a second, as Barbara's head turned, he surprised on Barbara's face a look which completed his demoralization. Barbara's eyes had been fixed steadily on Fay for some time. In her eyes, slowly growing, was an expression of wonder; and of something else which was not dislike, but very near dislike.
If Barbara turns against her too, Miles thought, we might as well throw up the brief for the defense and retire. But Barbara of all people couldn't be turning against Fay! And Miles still fought back.
“I shouldn't answer any questions,” he said. “If Superintendent Hadley isn't here officially, he's got no blasted right to come barging in and hint that there'll be sinister consequences if you don't answer. Upset! Anybody would have been upset after what happened last night.” He looked at Fay again. “In any case, all you said to me was that you'd just seen something you hadn't noticed before, and . . .”
“Ah!” breathed Hadley, and rapped his bowler hat against the palm of his left hand. “Miss Seton had just seen something she hadn't noticed before! That's what we thought.”
Fay let out a cry.
“Why not tell us, Miss Seton?” suggested Hadley, in a tone of great persuasiveness. “Why not make the full confession you intended to make? If it comes to that, why not hand over the brief-case”--casually he pointed in the direction of it--”and the two thousand pounds and the other things as well? Why not . . .”
That was the point at which the light over the chest-of-drawers went out.
Nobody was prepared for danger. Nobody was alert. Everything was concentrated in that little space where Fay Seton faced Hadley and Miles and Barbara.
And, though nobody had touched the electric switch by the door, the light went out. With heavy black-out curtains drawn on the little windows, a weight of darkness descended on them like a hood over the face, blotting out rational thoughts as it blotted out images. There
Fay Seton screamed.
They heard the noise of it go piercing up. They heard a cry like, “Don't, don't, don't!” and a crashing sound as of someone falling over the big tin box in the middle of the floor. In a few seconds when Miles had forgotten a certain malignant influence, that influence had caught up with them. He lunged out in the darkness, and felt somebody's shoulder slip past him. The door to the passage banged. Somewhere there were running footsteps. Miles heard a rattle of rings as someone —it was Barbara—drew back the curtain of one window.
Grey rain-filtered light entered from Bolsover Place, along with the light from the moving teeth across the way. Superintendent Hadley ran to the window, flung it up, and blew a police-whistle.
Fay Seton, unhurt, had been thrown back against the bed. She clutched at the counterpane to save herself from falling, and dragged it with her as she sank to her knees.
“Fay! Are you all right?”
Fay hardly heard him. She whipped round, her eyes going instinctively towards the top of the chest-of- drawers.
“It's gone,” said Fay in a choked voice. “It's gone. It's gone.”
For the brief-case was no longer there. Ahead of anyone else, ahead of either Miles or Hadley, Fay jumped over the heavy tin box and ran towards the door. She ran with a headlong madness and an agility which carried her half-way down the passage, in the direction of the stairs, before Miles went racing after her.
And even the brief-case could not stop that crazy flight.
For Miles found the brief-case lying discarded on the floor of the passage, dimly seen in the light of the opening and shutting teeth. Fay must have run straight across it; she could not even have noticed it. Miles shouted to her as she gained the top of the steep stairs leading down to the ground floor. He snatched up the brief-case holding it upside down as though to gain her ye by pantomime. From inside the gaping leather there fell out three packets of bank-notes like the other in the bedroom. These landed on the floor, along with a pouring of some dry gritty substance like mortar-dust. There was nothing else in the brief-case.
Miles flung himself at the head of the stairs.
“It's here, I tell you! It's not gone! It's been dropped ! It's here!”
Did she hear him? He could not be sure. But, at least briefly, she paused and looked up.
Fay was about half-way down the stairs, steep stairs covered with ragged linoleum. Th front door of the house stood wide open, so that light from the window across the street filtered weirdly up the staircase.
Miles, leaning perilously over the balustrade along the passage and holding up the brief-case, was looking down into her face as she raised it.
“Don't you understand? He shouted. “There's no need to run like that! Here
Now he could have sworn she hadn't heard. Fay's left hand rested lightly on the stair-rail. Her neck was arched, the red hair thrown back as she looked up. On her face was a faintly wondering look. Her heightened colours, even the glitter of her eyes, seemed to fade into a deathly bluish pallor which put a gentle expression on her mouth and then took away all expression at all.
Fay's legs gave way at the knees. Softly, like a dress falling from a hook, so bonelessly that it could not even have caused a bruise, she fell sideways and rolled over and over to the floor of the stairs. Yet the crash of the fall, in contrast to that terrifying limpness . . .
Miles Hammond stood still.
The stifling, mildewy air of the passage had got into his lungs like the sudden suspicion in his mind. He seemed to have been breathing that air for a very long time, with the blood-stained banknotes in his pockets and the cracked brief-case in his hand.
Out of the corner of his eye Miles saw Barbara come up beside him and look down over the railing. Superintendent Hadley, muttering something under his breath, bounded past them and went downstairs with long strides which shook and thumped on every tread. He jumped over the figure lying at the foot of the stairs with its cheek against the dirt of the floor. Hadley went down on one knee to examine that figure. Presently he raised his
