‘I wouldn’t worry,’ he advised the young man after a few minutes. ‘She has a trick of fainting like that. You will know more about her after a while – when she is Mrs Knight.’
****
From somewhere upstairs came a scream and Knight started nervously. It was a shrill, penetrating cry that tore straight through him. Mr Oliver took it phlegmatically, even smiled at his nervousness.
‘That’s my wife fainting,’ he explained. ‘She always does it that way. You know,’ he added confidentially, ‘my wife and two daughters are so exhausted with this everlasting social game that they go off like that at any minute. I’ve talked to them about it but they won’t listen.’
Heedless of the idle, even heartless, comments of the father Knight stopped in the hall and stood at the foot of the stairs looking up. After a minute a man came down; it was Dr Brander, one of the two physicians who had been called. On his face was an expression of troubled perplexity.
‘How is she?’ demanded Knight abruptly.
‘Where is Mr Oliver?’ asked Dr Brander.
‘In the smoking room,’ replied the young man. ‘What’s the matter?’
Without answering the physician went on to the father. Mr Oliver looked up.
‘Bring her around all right?’ he asked.
‘She’s dead,’ replied the physician.
‘Dead?’ gasped Knight.
Mr Oliver rose suddenly and gripped the physician fiercely by a shoulder. For an instant he gazed and then his face grew deathly pale. With a distinct effort he recovered himself.
‘Her heart?’ he asked at last.
‘No. She was stabbed.’
Dr Brander looked from one to the other of the two white faces with troubled lines about his eyes.
‘Why it can’t be,’ burst out Knight suddenly. ‘Where is she? I’ll go to her.’
Dr Brander laid a detaining hand on his shoulder.
‘You can do no good,’ he said quietly.
For a time Mr Oliver was dumb and the physician curiously watched the struggle in his face. The hand that clung to his shoulder was trembling horribly. At last the father found voice.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘She was stabbed,’ said Dr Brander again. ‘When we examined her we found the knife – a long, keen, short-handled stiletto. It was driven in with great force directly under her left arm and penetrated the heart. She must have been dead when she was lifted from the box at the opera. The stiletto remained in the wound and prevented any flow of blood while its position and the short handle caused it to be overlooked when she was lifted into the carriage. We did not find the knife for several minutes after we arrived. It was covered by her arm.’
‘Did you tell my wife?’ asked Mr Oliver quickly.
‘She was present,’ the physician went on. ‘She screamed and fainted. Dr Seaver is attending her. Her condition is – is not very good. Where is your ’phone? I must notify the police.’
Mr Oliver started to ask something else, paused and dropped back in his chair only to rise instantly and rush up the stairs. Knight into whose face there had come a deadly calm stood stone-like while Dr Brander used the telephone. At last the physician finished.
‘The calling of the police means that Eleanor did not kill herself?’ asked the young man.
‘It was murder,’ was the positive reply. ‘She could not have stabbed herself. The knife went straight in, entering here,’ and he indicated a spot about four inches below his left arm. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘it took a very long blade to penetrate the heart.’
There was dull despair in Knight’s eyes. He dropped down at a table with his head on his arms and sat motionless for a long time. He looked up once and asked a question.
‘Where is the knife?’
‘I have it,’ replied Dr Brander. ‘I shall turn it over to the authorities.’
****
‘Now,’ began The Thinking Machine in his small, irritated voice as Hutchinson Hatch, reporter, stopped talking and leaned back to listen, ‘all problems are merely sums in addition, when reduced to their primary parts. Therefore this one is simply a matter of putting facts together in order to prove that two and two do not sometimes but always make four.’
Professor Augustus SFX Van Dusen, scientist and logician, paused to adjust his head comfortably on the cushion in the big chair, then resumed:
‘Your statement of the case, Mr Hatch, gives me these absolute facts: Eleanor Oliver is dead; she died of a stab wound; a stiletto made this wound; it was in such a position that she could hardly have inflicted it herself; and Sylvester Knight, her fiancé, is under arrest. That’s all we know isn’t it?’
‘You forget that she was stabbed while in a box at the opera,’ the reporter put in, ‘in the hearing of three or four thousand persons.’
‘I forget nothing,’ snapped the scientist. ‘It does not appear at all that she was stabbed while in that box. It appears merely that she was ill and might have fainted. She might have been stabbed while in the carriage, or even after she was in her room.’
Hatch’s eyes opened wide at the bare mention of these possibilities.
‘The presumption is of course,’ The Thinking Machine went on a little less aggressively, ‘that she was stabbed while in the box, but we can’t put that down as an absolute fact to work on until we know it. Remember, the stiletto was not found until she was in her room.’
This gave the reporter something new to think about and he was silent as he considered it. He saw that either of the possibilities suggested by the scientist was tenable, but on the other hand – on the other hand, and there his mind
