“After one?”
“Later.”
“How do you know that it was later?”
“I don’t know—because the sky was getting lighter, I suppose.”
“You mean that dawn was breaking?”
“I suppose so.”
“You are telling us that you drove about until dawn?”
“I am telling you that I don’t remember what I did; it was all a nightmare.”
“Mr. Bellamy, why didn’t you go home to see whether your wife had returned?”
For the first time the eyes fixed on the prosecutor wavered. “What?”
“You heard me, I believe.”
“You want to know why I didn’t go back to my house?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t know—because I was more or less out of my head, I suppose.”
“You were anxious to know what had become of her, weren’t you?”
“Anxious!” The stiff lips wrenched themselves into something dreadfully like a smile.
“Yet from eleven o’clock on you never went near your house to ascertain whether she had come home or been brought home?”
“No.”
“You didn’t call up the police?”
“I told you I’d already called them up.”
“Nor the hospital?”
“I’d called them too.”
“Where were they to notify you in case they had news to report?”
“At my house.”
“How were you to receive this information—this vital information—if you were roaming the country in an automobile?”
“I don’t know.”
“Weren’t you interested to know whether she was dead or alive?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you go home?”
“I have told you—I don’t know.”
“That’s your best answer?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s see whether I can’t help you to a better one. Isn’t the reason that you didn’t go home or call up the police or the hospital because you knew perfectly well that any information that anyone in the world could give you would be superfluous?”
Stephen Bellamy focused his weary eyes intently on the sardonic face only a few inches from his. “I’m sorry—I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Don’t you? I’ll try to make it clearer. Wasn’t the reason that you didn’t go home the perfectly simple one that you knew that your wife was lying three miles away in a deserted cottage, soaked in blood and dead as a doornail?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” At the low, despairing violence of that cry some in the courtroom winced and turned away their faces from the ugly triumph flushing the prosecutor’s cold face. “I don’t know, I tell you, I don’t know. I was half crazy; I wasn’t thinking of reasons, I wasn’t thinking of anything except that Mimi was gone.”
“Is that your best answer.”
“Yes.”
“At what time the next morning did you hear of the murder of your wife, Mr. Bellamy?”
Slowly, carefully, fighting inch by inch back to the narrow plank of self-control that lay between him and destruction, Stephen Bellamy lifted his tired voice, his tired eyes. “I believe that it was about eleven o’clock.”
“Who notified you?”
“A trooper, I think, from the police station.”
“Please tell us what he said.”
“He said that Mrs. Bellamy’s body had been found in an empty cottage on the old Thorne estate, and that while it had already been identified, headquarters thought I had better go over and confirm it. I said that I would come at once.”
“And did so?”
“Yes.”
“You saw the body?”
“Yes.”
“Identified it?”
“Yes.”
“It was clothed?”
“Yes.”
“In these garments, Mr. Bellamy?”
And there, incredibly, it was again, that streaked and stiffened gown with its once airy ruffles, dangling over the witness box in reach of Stephen Bellamy’s fine long-fingered hand. After the first convulsive movement he sat motionless, his eyes dilated strangely under his level brows. “Yes.”
“These shoes?”
Lightly as butterflies they settled on the dark rim of the box, so small, so gay, so preposterous, shining silver, shining buckles. The man in the box bent those strange eyes on them. After a moment, his hand moved forward, slowly, hesitantly; the fingers touched their rusted silver, light as a caress, and curved about them, a shelter and a defense.
“These shoes,” said Stephen Bellamy.
Somewhere in the back of the hall a woman sobbed loudly and hysterically, but he did not lift his eyes.
The prosecutor asked in a voice curiously gentle: “Mr. Bellamy, when you went into the room, was the body to the right or the left of the piano?”
“To the left.”
“You’re quite sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh, God!” whispered the reporter frantically. “Oh, God, they’ve got him!”
“It’s strange that you should be so sure, Mr. Bellamy,” said the prosecutor more gently still. “Because there was no piano in the room to which you were taken to see the body.”
“What?” The bent head jerked back as though a whip had flicked.
“There was no piano in the dining room to which they had removed the body, Mr. Bellamy. The piano was in the parlour across the hall, where the body was first discovered.”
“If that is so I must have seen it when I came in and confused it somehow.”
“You couldn’t very well have seen it when you came in, I’m afraid. The door to the parlour was closed and locked so that the contents of the room would not be disturbed.”
“Well, then—then I must remember it from some previous occasion.”
“A previous occasion? When you were never in the cottage before?”
“No, no, I never said that. I never said anything like that.” The desperate voice rose slightly in its intensity. “I couldn’t have; it isn’t true. I’ve been there often—years ago, when I used to go over to play with Doug Thorne when we were kids. There was a playhouse just a few hundred feet from the cottage, and we used to run over to the cottage and get bread and jam and cookies from the old German gardener. I remember it absolutely; that’s probably what twisted me.”
“But the old German gardener didn’t have any piano, Mr. Bellamy,” explained the prosecutor patiently. “Don’t you remember that Orsini particularly told us how the Italian gardener had just purchased it for his daughter before they went off on their vacation? It couldn’t have been the old German gardener.”
The redheaded girl was weeping noiselessly into a highly inadequate handkerchief. “Horrid, smirking, disgusting beast!” she intoned in a small fierce whisper. “Horrid—”
“No? Well, then,” said the dreadful, hunted voice, “probably Mimi told me about it. She—”
“Mrs. Bellamy?” There was the slightest inflection of reproach in
