stammering man. But be could not speak. Grotesquely, two tears rolled from under his closed eyelids across his cheeks.
All the friendship Holden had ever felt for him—the memory of good nature, the memory of a hundred acts of disinterested kindliness—returned in a series of small lighted pictures with the haunting power of auld lang syne. If Thorley had tried to harm Celia . . . well, even so, you can't dislike a man when he's hurt and broken and crying.
For Thorley was badly hurt. How badly, Holden could not tell; but he didn't like the beat of the pulse. That big crystal, used as a bludgeon, would have made a murderous weapon.
Wait a minute! Telephone!
Dr. Fell had said there was a phone here, still connected. Rolling Thorley on his side, Holden swung round and surveyed the room.
It looked, he thought, like the quite genuine inner shrine of a fashionable seer. It was unrelieved black— black carpet, black wall curtains, black curtain over the skylight—except for a tall Jacobean chair, padded in scarlet damask, behind a carved desk in the middle. That would be the fortune-teller's chair; the client's chair stood opposite.
The dim little desk lamp showed ornaments disarranged on it, as though there had been a struggle there. Against one wall stood a carved cabinet, key in lock. But no telephone.
With a collapsing rattle, a gush of oily smoke, the last shreds in the fireplace tumbled down. They were simmering, fire edged; they might once have been sticks supporting bits of burned cloth, with broken lengths of varnished wood underneath them. Holden, yanking up the fire tongs and using his hands as well, raked it all out on the hearth.
But he was too late. He was too late! Whoever bad been here, whoever had battered Thorley's head with the crystal, must have slipped away from here long ago.
On the divan, Thorley moaned. Telephone!
Another door in the front walk Holden discovered, opened into a front room overlooking New Bond Street. The window curtains were not quite drawn. It was a waiting room: very much like the waiting room of a fashionable doctor, though overlaid with a more exotic tinge. There, on a little table against the wall, he found what he sought.
The only thing to do, he said to himself, is to dial 999 and call for an ambulance. That'll mean informing the police as well; it may wreck Dr. Fell's plans; but it can't be helped. Unless . . . wait; Better idea!
His right hand, which he had burned in raking out that fireplace, throbbed and flamed as he dialed another number. The buzz of the ringing tone seemed to go on interminably.
'War Office?' His voice sounded loud in that grotesque waiting room. 'Extension 841, please.'
Another pause, while a vibration of traffic shook against the windows.
'Extension 841? I want to speak to Colonel Warrender.'
'Sorry, sir. Colonel Warrender is out.'
'He's not out, damn you!' Holden could feel the startled A.T.S. girl shy away from the phone. 'I can hear him rattling tea cups on his desk. Tell him Major Holden wants to speak to him on a matter of vital importance.—Hello! Frank?'
'Yes?'
In the adjoining room, Thorley Marsh began to laugh. It was a thin, vacant sound which crawled along the nerves; it was the laugh of delirium; it might be the laugh of the dying.
'Frank, I haven't got time to explain. But can you pull strings to get me, immediately, an ambulance from a discreet private nursing home to deal with somebody who's been badly hurt: probably concussion? Can you?'
'That’s absolutely impos—' Warrender began automatically. Then he stopped. 'Look here. Does this concern the girl you were in such a flap about?'
'In a way, yes.'
'Cripes! Have you been chucking her downstairs already?' 'Frank, I'm not jokingl'
Warrendef s voice changed. 'There's nothing phony about this? You give me your word nobody’ll get into trouble?' 'I give you my word.'
'Right!' said Warrender. 'What’s the address?' Holden gave it 'Your ambulance will be there in ten minutes, and no questions asked. Tell me about it later.'
And he rang off.
Holden sat back in the chair by the little table. His hand throbbed like fire. The sick taste of failure was in his mouth, of being too late and missing the murderer. What murderer? Never mind. He had been told to search; and, by the six horns of Satan, he would search.
He went back to the black-draped room whose small glimmer of desk light only weighted the shadows. There was nothing he could do for Thorley, who lay in a stupor, breathing stertorously. Beyond the desk loomed the scarlet damask of the tall chair. He inspected the desk.
Its disarranged black covering, he now saw with repulsion, was antique funeral pall. It breathed of more than mere hocus-pocus; it hinted at the abnormal. Crumpled back as though in a struggle, it was stained with one or two spots of drying blood.
Aside from the crystal holder, it bore only two other objects. One was an ibis head of green jade, rolled almost to the edge of the desk. The other was a flat bronze plaque, engraved with a design and a few lines of. . .
Familiar?
Yes! The design on that plaque was the same as the design on the lower part of the gold ring with which Dr. Fell had sealed the tomb. Holden bent closer to read what was underneath.
Disregarding this mysticism, Holden went swiftly through the drawers of the desk. All were unlocked and empty. Nothing: not so much as a coin or a discarded newspaper. He measured for secret compartments, but there were none.
The carved cabinet, then? The cabinet, with the key in its lock, against the wall opposite the fireplace?
Thorley moaned, and cried out in stupor, as Holden opened the cabinet Inside he discovered a small but very modern steel filing cabinet, whose drawers rolled smoothly open. There were only blank index cards, but many gaps, and traces of cardboard adhering to the central rod where other index cards had been torn out. Those cardboard traces felt dry and harsh to the touch; they had not, he thought, been torn out today or even recently.
Gone were the names of Madame Vanya's fortune-telling clients; destroyed some time ago. Nothing here either. And yet...
He studied the outer wooden cabinet.
It was authentic Florentine Renaissance, scrolled with arms and saints. It might have come from Caswall. Whistling softly, he snapped on the flame of his pocket lighter and examined the lower part. To blot out from his own ears the noise of Thorley's breathing, now grown harsh and rattling like a man gasping for life, Holden spoke aloud.
'Now when an Italian craftsman of the great age makes his baseboard half an inch too high for proportion, it's interesting. When he decorates it with rosettes, and one of them has a center slightly larger than the others . . . Thorley, for God's sake be quiet!'
The unconscious man laughed.
'Be quiet, Thorley! I can't help you! The ambulance wfll be here in a minute!'
Holden had forgotten his burned hand now. The blood beat in his ears. He knelt down by the lower edge of that carved cabinet, and prodded at the rosette whose center was larger than the others.
There was a faint click. Feeling for the undermost edge, he drew out a very shallow drawer nearly filled with large sheets of gray note paper in Margot Devereux's rapid, clear, unmistakable handwriting.
Love letters written by Margot the topmost one dated, Afternoon, December 22nd. He hadn't failed, after all.
