the bottle?'
(A strange sort of chill was creeping into Don Holden's heart. He could not understand why, or would have said he could not understand.)
'What sort of poison,' persisted the doctor in his bluff kindly voice, 'was in the bottle?'
'But I don't know! How could I?'
'Can you describe this bottle?'
'It was round and brownish colored, maybe two or three ounces, with a label that said Not to
'Was it a chemist's label? Anything else on it except those words?'
'N-no. At least I don't remember. The main thing, Dr. Shepton, is that it was new—if you understand what I mean —among old dusty bottles with withered-looking labels. I swear it had just been put there!'
'Go on, my dear.'
'The funny thing was,' continued Celia, reaching out to grasp Holden's hand, 'it didn't frighten me so much at first I mean, it seemed so open. If you were going to poison yourself, after trying once with strychnine as Margot did, you'd think you would hide the poison; and not put it there only partly hidden between a bottle of Optrex and a tin of talcum powder.
'I came out and gave the nail varnish to Margot. I watched her getting dressed. She was wearing a silver lame gown— please remember that, Don—a silver lame gown, and she looked stunning in it At last I said: 'Margot, about that bottle in the medicine cabinet' She turned round from the mirror and said: 'What bottle in the medicine cabinet?' But just then Thorley came in; and in a very cold voice he said we were half an hour late and would we please, please, please hurry?
'Thorley had been like that all evening: so white that Obey asked whether he was ill, and with furious dead- looking eyes. He was very polite, too. Margot was—excited. I don't know how else to describe it Quick breathing, as though she'd made a decision and meant to keep to it
'Neither of them spoke much, in the car on the way to the Lockes'. Derek Hurst-Gore kept laughing and telling jokes, but Thorley didn't say much even to him. At the Lockes', after dinner . . . Did Thorley tell you?'
'He said,' Holden answered, 'that you played games.'
'Games!' echoed Celia, and moved her shoulders convulsively. 'He didn't tell you about that ghastly one where we dressed up in masks? As executed murderers?'
'No.'
Despite himself Holden had to fight down a growing nervousness. This picture Celia painted, against a background of cold night and a few drifting snowflakes, was anything but a Christmas atmosphere. Dr. Shepton did not move or speak.
'You've seen Sir Danvers' collection of masks,' Celia went on. 'Hung all over the walls in so many rooms. Some impressionistic. Some modeled from real life. Some that even go over your head. Nearly all of them painted and lifelike, murderers' masks, as they looked after they'd been executed?'
'No.' Holden cleared his throat 'No. I didn't know it'
'Neither did we,' Celia confessed. 'Until he took us upstairs, with only the light of a candle to make it more effective, and unlocked the door of a little box room and showed us. Everybody had been drinking pretty freely, or I expect he wouldn't have done it.
'Besides ourselves and Sir Danvers, there was Lady Locke, and Doris looking perfectly exquisite (she is a nice child), and young Ronnie Merrick who's so mad about Doris. I don't think I shall ever forget people's expressions when Sir Danvers unlocked the door, and held up the candle, and we saw all those lifelike horrors looking at us without eyes.
'Sir Danvers explained that most of them were impressionistic. But three of four (he wouldn't say which) had been taken direct—first in wet paper, then in papier-mache—from real death masks preserved in the museums at Scotland Yard and Centre Street and the Surete in Paris. Afterward they'd been colored to the likeness of these people after death, after the pain of death; with real hair or beard attached; and, in some cases, with the mark of the rope still...' 'Celial For God's sake stop upsetting yourself!' Her hand, in Holden's, was cold and trembling. She drew it away as he cried out a protest Dr. Shepton remained uncannily motionless and silent And Celia went on.
'The idea, Sir Danvers said, was that we were to play an old-fashioned game of Murder. Only, this time, we were each to wear the mask of a famous murderer in real life. Afterward, when the 'murder' had been committed, we were each to answer questions as much as possible in the manner of the original.
'So he began handing out the masks at random, saying who each one was.
'Everybody was delighted with the idea, or pretended to be. And I daresay it's all very well if you're well read in crime, and can tell all about these people and play your part
'Thorley was Landru, the French Bluebeard, with a thin bald skull and a ginger beard; they guillotined him. Derek was George Joseph Smith, the brides-in-the-bath murderer. Those two I did know. Oh, and Margot. Margot said: ‘I won't be Old Mother Dyer; she's too awful looking; let me be Edith Thompson!' Doris Locke was Mrs. Pearcey, with front teeth sticking out a little. And Lady Locke—who's terribly sophisticated, like her husband—was big Kate Webster, with red hair. They all seemed pleased.
'But Ronnie Merrick, who was dithering, whispered to me:
'Just then Sir Danvers came up, very lean and elegant. He was to be the detective in the game; his mask was a relic, a metal one worn by a German executioner in the seventeenth century. It had a pointed chin, like a combination of a skull and a fox's mask; it was sort of greenish and rust colored. When he suddenly thrust it down into my face, I grabbed at Ronnie for support
'Yes; I think everybody had taken too much to drink.
'Because afterward, during the game . . .
'You know how, at parties, a sort of devil gets into people? And the blood rushes to their heads, and they go too
'Downstairs, where we played the game, it was all dark except for a big bowl of lighted spirits set burning in the hall: burning and wavering with a bluish flame. With the masks and hair, and eyes looking out through the eyeholes, nobody was real. They kept wandering up and down, up and down, past that bowl of bluish flame. The bald head of Landru, the projecting teeth of Mrs. Pearcey, the scrubby moustache of Dr. Buchanan. But they kept —of course it was only a joke—but they kept moaning, you know; and suddenly darting at each other before fading back into the dark again.
'I ... I dare say I looked worse than any of them. My Maria Manning mask was swollen, one eye open and the other partly shut, though it was die face of a woman who had been pretty. And all of a sudden I thought to myself: Suppose this thing against my face is one of the real masks, and I'm looking out through the eyes of a woman standing on the scaffold?
'Then someone 'screamed,' to show the crime had been committed.''
Celia drew a deep breath.
'Oddly enough,' she laughed nervously, 'oddly enough, the person who turned out to be 'murdered' was Margot
'It was better, of course, with the lights on. Sir Danvers started a tremendous cross-examination of everybody. Some of the parts, I admit, were very well played. Derek—Derek Hurst-Gore was awfully good as George Joseph Smith, who killed the brides in the bath.'
'I’ll bet he was,' said Holden.
'Because he's a lawyer, you see, and well up in the case. But,' and Celia clenched her hands, 'there was something wrong in all that questioning. I didn't understand it; I can't explain it; I could only feel it Perhaps it was only because we were warm and tired and a bit ashamed of ourselves. But Sir Danvers, standing under the mistletoe in the hall with our group of masked monstrosities around him, still couldn't find the murderer.
'It went on and on. Finally Lady Locke, who's usually the most self-possessed of mortals, cried out: 'Oh, let’s end this.. Who is guilty?' That's where (of all people, as a sort of anticlimax) young Doris Locke carefully lifted the mask off her hair. She said: ‘I’m Mrs. Pearcey; once I killed my rival, and cut up her body and wheeled her in a pram; and this time I've got away with it' And,' added Celia, 'everybody roared with laughter, and things were
