“No chance of an error on that?”
“Not a chance.”
“No possibility of its being in the possession of Mrs. Ives at any time that evening?”
“Not a possibility.”
“Mr. Ives, where were you that evening at nine-thirty o’clock?”
The careless gaiety departed abruptly from Patrick Ives’s face. For a long moment he sat staring at Lambert, coolly and speculatively. His eyes, still speculating, shifted briefly to the hundreds of eager countenances straining toward his, and at the sight of their frantic attention his mouth twisted somewhat mirthlessly. “Unkind, isn’t it,” mocked his eyes, “to keep you waiting!”
“I was at home,” said Patrick Ives.
“What were you doing?”
“Smoking a pipe and looking through a magazine, I think, though I shouldn’t like to swear to the exact time. I wasn’t using a stop watch.”
“In what room?”
“Well, I’m afraid that I can’t help you there much either. I moved about from one room to another, you see. I did a little more work on the boat, smoked, read—I didn’t follow any set programme. I wasn’t aware at the time that it would have been judicious to do so.”
“You are aware now, however, that Melanie Cordier said that you were not in any of the lower rooms when she made her rounds at ten?”
“Then I must have been in one of the upper rooms,” said Patrick Ives gently.
“You are also aware that Mrs. Daniel Ives has told us that you didn’t bring her her fruit that night because you were not in the house?”
“Well,” said Pat Ives gently still, “this is probably the first time in her life that she was ever mistaken. I was in the house.”
“What caused you to change your mind as to attending the poker party, Mr. Ives?”
“Circumstances arose that made it impossible.” The inscrutability of Mr. Ives’s countenance suggested that he would be a formidable addition to any poker party.
“What circumstances?”
“Circumstances,” said Mr. Ives, “that I shouldn’t dream of discussing either here or elsewhere. I am able to assure you, however, that they were not even remotely connected with the murder.”
“What circumstances?” repeated Mr. Lambert, with passionate insistence.
“Now, what,” asked Mr. Farr with languid pathos, “I again inquire, is my distinguished adversary leaving for a mere prosecutor to do?”
“Mr. Lambert,” said Judge Carver austerely, “it strikes the Court that you are most certainly pressing the witness unduly in view of the fact that this is direct examination, and you are therefore bound to abide by his answer. The Court—”
“He has refused to give me an answer,” replied Mr. Lambert, with some degree of justice and a larger degree of heat. “I may state to Your Honour that I regard the witness’s manner as distinctly hostile and—”
“The Court fails to see wherein he has proved hostile,” remarked Judge Carver critically, “and it therefore requests you to bear in mind henceforth that you are dealing with your own witness. You may proceed with the examination.”
Mr. Lambert turned his richly suffused countenance back to his own witness, avoiding Sue Ives’s eye, which for the last half hour had not once wavered from the look of passionate indignation that she had directed toward him at the outset of his manoeuvres.
“Mr. Ives,” said Mr. Lambert, “you heard Miss Roberts testify that she believed that it was your voice that she heard as she tried the door to the day nursery, did you not?”
“Yes, I heard her testify to that effect.”
“Was she mistaken?”
“No,” said Patrick Ives, spacing his words with cool deliberation, “she was not mistaken.”
“Was she mistaken in believing that the door was locked?”
“No, she was not mistaken.”
“Which of you locked the door, Mr. Ives?”
“If you will tell me what that has to do with the murder of Mimi Bellamy,” said Mr. Ives with even greater deliberation, “I will tell you who locked the door.”
“You refuse to answer my question?”
“Most assuredly I refuse to answer your question.”
“Your Honour—” choked the frenzied Lambert.
“The Court also fails to see what the question has to do with the case,” said Judge Carver, in a tone by no means propitiatory. “It is excluded. Proceed.”
“It is being made practically impossible for me to proceed in any direction,” remarked Lambert, in a voice unsteady with indignation. “Impossible! Mr. Ives, all that any occupant of that room had to do in order to get out of the house was to unlock that door and go, wasn’t it?”
“Absolutely all,” acquiesced the hostile witness cordially.
“No one would have been likely to see either one or the other or both depart, would they?”
“I think it highly unlikely.”
“No one saw either you or Miss Page in the house between nine and ten, did they?”
“Not a soul—not a single solitary soul,” said Mr. Ives, and his voice was almost blithe.
“How long would it take to get from your house to the cottage at Orchards?”
“On foot?”
“On foot, yes.”
“Oh, ten-fifteen minutes, perhaps. There’s a shortcut across the fields behind the house that comes out close to there.”
“The one that Miss Page used to take the children to the playhouse?”
“That’s the one, yes.”
“She knew of this path?”
“Well, obviously.” The grim smile flashed for a moment to open mockery.
“And you knew of it?”
“And I knew of it.”
“How?”
“My mother had told me that Miss Page was taking the children there, and I’d requested her not to do so as I knew Sue’s feeling about the place.”
“Mr. Ives, were your relations with your wife happy?”
For a moment Patrick Ives sat perfectly still, fighting back the surge of crimson that flooded his pale mockery. When he spoke, his voice, for all its clearness, sounded as though it had travelled back from a great distance.
“Yes,” he said, “they were happy.”
“In so far as you know, she was unaware that you had ceased to care for her?”
“She could hardly have been aware of it,” said Patrick Ives. “From the moment that I first saw her I have loved her passionately—and devotedly—and entirely.”
After a long, astounded silence, Lambert’s voice asked heavily,
