“I stepped out on to the lawn before the house and smoked a cigarette, pacing up and down. I was asking myself again and again where that thousand pounds was; whether it was in the drawing-room, and if so, why. Presently, as I passed one of the drawing-room windows, I noticed Mrs. Manderson’s shadow on the thin silk curtain. She was standing at her escritoire. The window was open, and as I passed I heard her say, ‘I have not quite thirty pounds here. Will that be enough?’ I did not hear the answer, but next moment Manderson’s shadow was mingled with hers, and I heard the chink of money. Then, as he stood by the window, and as I was moving away, these words of his came to my ears—and these at least I can repeat exactly, for astonishment stamped them on my memory—‘I’m going out now. Marlowe has persuaded me to go for a moonlight run in the car. He is very urgent about it. He says it will help me to sleep, and I guess he is right.’
“I have told you that in the course of four years I had never once heard Manderson utter a direct lie about anything, great or small. I believed that I understood the man’s queer, skin-deep morality, and I could have sworn that if he was firmly pressed with a question that could not be evaded he would either refuse to answer or tell the truth. But what had I just heard? No answer to any question. A voluntary statement, precise in terms, that was utterly false. The unimaginable had happened. It was almost as if someone I knew well, in a moment of closest sympathy, had suddenly struck me in the face. The blood rushed to my head, and I stood still on the grass. I stood there until I heard his step at the front door, and then I pulled myself together and stepped quickly to the car. He handed me a banker’s paper bag with gold and notes in it. ‘There’s more than you’ll want there,’ he said, and I pocketed it mechanically.
“For a minute or so I stood discussing with Manderson—it was by one of those tours de force of which one’s mind is capable under great excitement—points about the route of the long drive before me. I had made the run several times by day, and I believe I spoke quite calmly and naturally about it. But while I spoke my mind was seething in a flood of suddenly born suspicion and fear. I did not know what I feared. I simply felt fear, somehow—I did not know how—connected with Manderson. My soul once opened to it, fear rushed in like an assaulting army. I felt—I knew—that something was altogether wrong and sinister, and I felt myself to be the object of it. Yet Manderson was surely no enemy of mine. Then my thoughts reached out wildly for an answer to the question why he had told that lie. And all the time the blood hammered in my ears, ‘Where is that money?’ Reason struggled hard to set up the suggestion that the two things were not necessarily connected. The instinct of a man in danger would not listen to it. As we started, and the car took the curve into the road, it was merely the unconscious part of me that steered and controlled it, and that made occasional empty remarks as we slid along in the moonlight. Within me was a confusion and vague alarm that was far worse than any definite terror I ever felt.
“About a mile from the house, you remember, one passed on one’s left a gate, on the other side of which was the golf-course. There Manderson said he would get down, and I stopped the car. ‘You’ve got it all clear?’ he asked. With a sort of wrench I forced myself to remember and repeat the directions given me. ‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, then. Stay with that wallet.’ Those were the last words I heard him speak, as the car moved gently away from him.”
Marlowe rose from his chair and pressed his hands to his eyes. He was flushed with the excitement of his own narrative, and there was in his look a horror of recollection that held both the listeners silent. He shook himself with a movement like a dog’s, and then, his hands behind him, stood erect before the fire as he continued his tale.
“I expect you both know what the back-reflector of a motor car is.”
Trent nodded quickly, his face alive with anticipation; but Mr. Cupples, who cherished a mild but obstinate prejudice against motor cars, readily confessed to ignorance.
“It is a small round or more often rectangular mirror,” Marlowe explained, “rigged out from the right side of the screen in front of the driver, and adjusted in such a way that he can see, without turning round, if anything is coming up behind to pass him. It is quite an ordinary appliance, and there was one on this car. As the car moved on, and Manderson ceased speaking behind me, I saw in that mirror a thing that I wish I could forget.”
Marlowe was silent for a moment, staring at the wall before him.
“Manderson’s face,” he said in a low tone. “He was standing in the road, looking after me, only a few yards behind, and the moonlight was full on his face. The mirror happened to catch it for an instant.
“Physical habit is a wonderful thing. I did not shift hand or foot on the controlling mechanism of the car. Indeed, I dare say it steadied me against the
