to the Home Office for authority to exhume Mrs. Marsh's body and hold a post-mortem.'
'All right! What about it? How does it affect Celia? If our theory is correct—'
Dr. Fell lifted his hand.
'Celia's fingerprints, and Celia's alone,' he said, 'have been found on that poison bottle.'
After a pause he added;
'There is no doubt, even in my own mind, that she deliberately put it there for us to find.'
CHAPTER XV
As you say,' observed Holden, depositing his cigarette in the grate with a steady hand, 'we are rational men discussing rational evidence. But this has gone beyond the rational. Celia put that poison bottle in the tomb?'
'Yes.'
Both of them kept their voices studiously level.
'Celia also, I suppose, managed to get in and out of a sealed vault? And hurled coffins about the place as though they were tennis balls?'
'No,' returned Dr. Fell, rounding the syllable, 'She had nothing to do with that. It is what I wish to emphasize. She had nothing to do with that. Yet she was expecting it'
'Expecting it?'
'I will go further, sir. She was gambling on it.'
Dr. Fell threw up the big gold ring, and caught it against his palm. And Holden remembered. He remembered the elusive memory he had been trying to place last night, of the expression on Celia's face as the tomb was being opened, and of what it reminded him.
Mainz am Rhein! Early in '44!
He and a certain Swiss woman had been standing by a dark window, in an ill-smelling city, just as the siren squalled an alert against British bombers. The woman was opening a little packet; it would contain, she thought, certain information which would gain her a reward from the British and get her smuggled oat of Germany to safety forever. She wasn't sure, but she thought so. She couldn't swear to it, but she was gambling on it .
As the air-raid siren squalled, a distant ack-ack battery cut loose prematurely. Pale-white light lifting in the sky, followed in a few seconds by the hollow shock of the guns, touched the Swiss woman's face. Her whole expression—the shallow breathing, the distended nostrils, the fixed and half-closed eyes—had been Celia's expression as Celia waited for the opening of the tomb.
Holden drew his thoughts back to the present to Dr. Fell throwing up and catching the big gold ring.
'If Celia put the bottle in the tomb,' Holden asked, 'when did she put it there?'
'Before the tomb was sealed.'
'Oh?'
'Before the tomb was sealed,' insisted Dr. Fell, 'at a time when Celia and I, and only Celia and I, were present That niche was empty when we went in; I can swear to it I didn't see her do it I wasn't expecting anything of the sort But there were a dozen opportunities, in a semi dark place, while the sand was being put down. She was the only one who could have done it'
Holden swallowed. 'And afterward ...' he began.
'Go on!' said Dr. Fell.
'Afterward,' said Holden, 'after the vault had been sealed, Celia expected somebody or something to get in there and do what was done?'
'Yes.'
'Are yon plumping for a supernatural explanation?'' 'Oh, no,' said Dr. Fell.
'But look here! The utter impossibility of explaining how anybody got in and out of a sealed vault...'
'Oh, that?' exclaimed Dr. Fell in astonishment He sat up. He made a gesture of distressed contempt 'My dear sir,
Holden stared at him. Dr. Fell, with vast snorb'ngs and head shakings and a movement that made the whole chair creak and crack, was genuinely puzzled and concerned that this little point should have worried anyone.
'Fortunately for us, however,' Dr. Fell added, 'what we will call the Poltergeist Horror in the tomb has got Madden, Crawford, and Company completely floored. They think the poison bottle was put there at the same time as the coffins were disrupted, apparently by malignant ghosts. And they can't see how it happened.
'The trouble is, they won't stay floored. If s too simple. In a day or two at most, they'll see through it. Then the fat will be in the fire. And their case against Celia Devereux wfll be as follows:
'Celia poisoned her sister, using a drug whose principal ingredient was morphine—' 'Morphine, eh?' said Holden.
'Yes. Which is virtually painless. Celia arranged the crime to look like suicide. For, mark you! Another strong reason for the suicide, which she believed Margot wished for, was to expose Thorley Marsh to the world as a sadistic villain. To show him up! To give him what he deserved!
'And that didn't happen.
'The family doctor said this was a natural death. Celia, crying out that it was suicide and that Mr. Marsh had driven his wife to it, was hastily shushed. Having disposed of the poison bottle, Celia couldn't produce it in any place it should have been: that is, within reach of Margot Marsh.
'So (we are still stating the police case) she determined to go further. Out of a half-crazed imagination she invented this tale of ghosts walking in the Long Gallery, crying against Margot Marsh as a suicide. 'Cast her out!' was what they cried. Cast her out, from sleep among the just or honest dead!
'Nobody would believe that. But she would force them to believe it. So Celia, with my unconscious connivance, slipped the poison bottle into the niche. She gambled—for certain reasons of her own—that there would be poltergeist disturbances there. Then the tomb would be opened. And it would seem, among flung coffins and the poison bottle, that the very dead had cried out against Margot and Thorley Marsh.'
Dr. Fell paused, wheezing.
His color had been coming up in spite of himself. He put the sea] ring on his own finger and scowled at it. 'But—oh, Bacchus!' he added. 'You see what follows?' 'I'm afraid I do.'
'The police, once they've tumbled to the explanation of the intruder who throws coffins without leaving a footprint, will hardly view the matter as a supernatural occurrence. No, by thunder! Because . ..'
'Because?'
Dr. Fell checked off the points.
'Who could have killed Mrs. Marsh, except the sister who had the poison bottle? Its very label was printed on a toy press,' he pointed, 'which you'll find in the wardrobe over there. Celia's fingerprints are on the bottle. She alone could have put it in the niche where it was found.
'And, heaven help me,' added Dr. Fell 'I shall have to testify as much.'
There was a long silence.
Holden pushed back his chair and got up. His legs felt light and shaky; heat pressed as oppressively as a cap on the brain. He began to walk about the room: blindly, not seeing it It was all very well for Dr. Fell to talk about keeping your head, but this was bad. This was about as bad as it could be. It fitted in too well with so many things Celia had said and done.
'I do not ask,' Dr. Fell observed politely, 'what you think of the case against Celia. But you at least perceive we have got a case to answer?'
'My God, yes!—Can you answer it?'
Dr. Fell clenched his fist and scowled at the seal ring on his finger.
'I can answer it,' he retorted. 'Oh, ah! I can answer it in the sense of replying, 'Sir, thus and thus I believe to be true.' Especially since I put the cards on the table with Celia last night.'
'That was what upset her so much?'
'It did, rather. But after you had left us, and Inspector Crawford so very obviously got a set of her fingerprints by handing her a silver cigarette case, it seemed better to warn her of the danger.'
'What did Celia say?'
'Very little, confound it! Enough to make me sure I was right All the same . . .' Dr. Fell hammered his fist on the chair arm. 'No!' he added. 'No, no, no! We are not going to mess about by trying to prove a negative. We establish a positive or die in the attempt.'
