Monsieur and Madame Lambert, their niece, their daughter-in-law, and four younger children aged from nine to fourteen.
“Like true French picnickers, they had refused to let the weather put them off an appointed day. The land was private, of course. But private property means less in France than it does in England. Knowing that Mr. Brooke was supposed o be crotchety about trespassers, they had hung back until they had seen the departure first of Fay Seton and then of Harry and myself. They would assume the coast was clear. The children erupted into the open space, while Monsieur and Madame Lambert sat them down against a chestnut-tree to open the picnic- basket.
“It was the two youngest children who went to explore the tower. As Harry and I rushed out of the wood, I can see yet that little girl standing in the doorway of the tower, pointing upwards. I hear her voice, shrill and raw.
“That was what she said.
“Myself, I cannot say what the others said or did at that moment. Yet I remember the children turning faces of consternation towards their parents, and a blue-and-white rubber ball rolling across the grass to splash into the river. I walked towards that tower, not quite running. I climbed the spiral stair. A strange, wild, fanciful thought occurred to me as I went: that it was very inconsiderate to ask Miss Fay Seton, with her weak heart, to climb up all these steps.
“Then got out on to the roof, where the wind blew freshly.
“Mr. Howard Brooke?still alive, still twitching?lay flat on his face in the middle. The back of his raincoat was soaked and sodden with blood, showing a half-inch rent where he had been stabbed through the back just under the left shoulder-blade.
“I have not yet mentioned that his own cane, the cane he always carried, was really a sword-stick. It now lay in two halves on either side of him. The handle-part, with its long thin pointed blade stained with blood, was lying near his right foot. The wooden sheath had rolled away to rest against the inside of the parapet opposite. But the briefcase containing two thousand pounds had disappeared.
“All this I saw in a kind of daze, while the family of Lambert screamed below. The time was exactly six minutes past four o’clock: I noted this not from any police sense, but because I wondered whether Fay Seton had kept her appointment.
“I ran over to Mr. Brooke, and raised him up to a sitting position. He smiled at me and tried to speak, but all he could get out was, ‘Bad show.’ Harry joined me among the smears of blood, though Harry was not much help. He said, ‘Dad, who did this?’ but the old man was past articulation. He died in his son’s arms a few minutes later, clinging to Harry as though he himself were the child.”
Here Professor Rigaud paused in his narrative.
Looking rather guilty, he lowered his head and glowered down at the dinner-table, his thick hands spread out on either side of it. There was along silence until he shook himself, impatiently.
With extraordinary intensity he added:
“Remark well, please, what I tell you now!
“We know that Mr. Howard Brooke was unhurt, in the best of health, when I left him alone on top of the tower at ten minutes to four o’clock.
“Following that, the person who murdered him must have visited him on top of the tower. This person, when his back was turned, must have drawn the sword-cane from its sheath and run him through the body. Indeed, the police discovered that several fragments of crumbling rock had been detached from one of the broken battlements on the river-side, as though someone’s fingers had torn them loose in climbing up there. And this must have occurred between ten minutes to four and five minutes past four, when the two children discovered him in a dying condition.
“Good! Excellent! Established!”
Professor Rigaud hitched his chair forward.
“yet the evidence shows conclusively,” he said, “that during this time not a living soul came near him.”
Chapter IV
You hear what I say?” insisted Rigaud, snapping his fingers rapidly in the air to attract attention.
Whereupon Miles Hammond woke up.
To any person of imagination, he thought, this narrative of the stout little professor?its sounds and scents and rounded visual detail?had the reality of the living present. Momentarily Miles forgot that he was sitting in an upper room at Beltring’s Restaurant, beside candles burning low and windows opening on Romilly Street. Momentarily he
He found himself emotionally stirred up, worrying and fretting and taking sides. He liked this Mr. Howard Brooke, liked him and respected him and sympathized with him, as though the man had been a personal friend. Whoever had killed the old boy . . .
And all this time, even more disturbingly, the enigmatic eyes of Fay Seton were looking back at him from the tinted photograph now lying on the table.
“I beg you pardon,” said Miles, rousing himself with a start at the snapping of Professor Rigaud’s fingers. “Er?would you mind repeating that last sentence?”
Professor Rigaud uttered his sardonic chuckle.
“With pleasure,” he replied politely. “I said that the evidence showed not a living soul had come near Mr. Brooke during those fatal fifteen minutes.”
“Had come near him?”
“Or could have come near him. He was utterly alone on top of the tower.”
Miles sat up straight.
“Let’s get this clear!” he said. “The man was stabbed?”
“He was stabbed,” assented Professor Rigaud. “I am in the proud position of being able to show you, now, the weapon with which the crime was committed.”
With modest deprecation he reached out to touch the thick cane, of light yellowish wood, which throughout the dinner had never left his side and which was now propped against the edge of the table.
“That,” cried Barbara Morell, “is??”
“Yes. This belonged to Mr. Brook. I think I intimated to mademoiselle that I am a collector of such relics. It is a beauty, eh?”
With a dramatic gesture, picking up the cane in both hands, Professor Rigaud unscrewed the curved handle. He drew out the long, thin, pointed steel blade, wickedly caught by candlelight and he laid it with some reverence on the table. Yet the blade had little life or gleam; it had not been cleaned or polished in some years; and Miles could see, as it lay there across the edge of Fay Seton’s photograph, the darkish rust-colored stains that had dried along it.
“A beauty, eh?” Professor Rigaud repeated. “There are also blood-stains inside the scabbard, if you care to hold it up to the eye.”
Abruptly Barbara Morell pushed back her chair, got to her feet, and backed away.
“Why on earth,” she cried, “must you bring such things here? And positively gloat over them?”
The good professor’s eyebrows went up in astonishment.
“Mademoiselle does not like it?”
“No. Please put it way. It’s?it’s ghoulish!”
“But mademoiselle must like such things, surely? Or else she would not be a guest of the Murder Club?”
“Yes. Yes, of course!” she corrected herself hastily. “Only . . .”
“Only what?” prompted Professor Rigaud in a soft, interested voice.
Miles, himself wondering not a little, watched her as she stood grasping the back of the chair.
Once or twice he had been conscious of her eyes fixed on him across the table. But for the most part she had looked steadily at Professor Rigaud. She must have been smoking cigarettes furiously throughout the narrative: for the first time Miles noticed at least half a dozen stubs in the saucer of her coffee-cup. At one point, during the description of Jules Fresnac’s tirade against Fay Seton, she had bent down as though to pick up
