“So you looked in the book, did you? And there was no note, was there?”
“Right both times,” said Mr. Ives.
“Now that’s very interesting,” beamed Mr. Lambert—“very interesting, indeed. But if there had been a note in that book, you’d have found it, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, not being a blithering idiot, that’s a fairly safe proposition.”
“And if you had found it, you would have gone to the rendezvous, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d certainly have made every effort to.”
“Cancelling your poker engagement?”
“Presumably.”
“Taking the shortcut across the fields?”
“I don’t know how I’d have gone. It’s slightly academic, isn’t it?”
“And in that gardener’s cottage you would have found waiting for you the unfortunate girl with those letters that it was so vitally necessary for you to obtain?”
“Why don’t you ask him whether he would still have had the knife in his pocket?” inquired Mr. Farr gently. “And why don’t you ask him what he would have done with it? You don’t want to leave anything like that out.”
Lambert, thus rudely checked in his exultant career, turned bulging eyes and a howl of outraged protest in the direction of Judge Carver’s unresponsive countenance.
“Your Honour, in a somewhat protracted career at the bar, I have yet to encounter as flagrant a breach—”
Judge Carver cut sharply across these strident objurgations: “And in a somewhat protracted career at the bar, Mr. Lambert, this Court has yet to encounter as extraordinary a conduct of an examination as you have permitted yourself, and as the Court, in the absence of protests from either the witness or the prosecution, has permitted you. Mr. Farr’s objection was not put in a proper form, but is otherwise quite legitimate. The questions that you are putting to the witness involve a purely supposititious case, and as such, the witness is entirely at liberty to refuse to answer them. You may proceed.”
“I’ll answer it,” said Pat Ives. “If I’d found the note, I’d have gone to the cottage, given Mimi the money, got the letters, and none of us would have spent these last weeks thinking what a nice pleasant place hell would be for a change. I wish to God I’d found it. Is that what you wanted to know?”
It was very far indeed from what Mr. Lambert wanted to know. However, he turned a wary eye on the jury, who were contemplating soberly and not too sympathetically the bitter, insolent face of the young gentleman in the witness box. Flippancy was obviously an evil stench in their nostrils. Mr. Lambert rattled the letters still clenched in his hand reminiscently.
“There are two or three things in these letters that I’d like to have you reconcile with the statement that they were written in . First, what does it mean, Mr. Ives, when you say: ‘I keep telling myself that we’re mad—that there’s black trouble ahead of us—that I haven’t any right in the world to let you do this’—do what, Mr. Ives?”
“Carry on the highly indiscreet affair that we were indulging in,” said Pat Ives, his white face a shade whiter. “We’d both completely lost our heads. She wasn’t willing to marry me because she was afraid that I hadn’t it in me to make good. There was a lot of ugly gossip going on, and it had upset her.”
“Quite so,” smiled Mr. Lambert dreadfully; “oh, quite so. Now in the one that begins: ‘Mimi darling, darling, darling, it’s after four o’clock and—’ ”
“Are you going through those letters again?” inquired Patrick Ives, his hands clenched on the edge of the box.
“Just one or two little things that I’d like cleared up, and I’m sure that these gentlemen would too. It goes on: ‘Dawn—I always thought that was the worst word in the English language and here I am on my knees waiting for it, and ranting like—’
“You needn’t go on,” said Patrick Ives, “if what you’re really after is when they were written. The sun that rose at 4:30 would have kept me waiting exactly one hour and six minutes longer in . You and Mimi and I had forgotten just one thing, Mr. Lambert—we’d forgotten that in 1916 there was no such thing as daylight saving.”
And through the staggered silence that invaded some three hundred-odd people who had forgotten precisely the same thing, there rose a little laugh—a gay, excited, triumphant little laugh, as though somewhere a small girl had suddenly received a beautiful and unexpected present. It came from just behind Mr. Lambert’s sagging shoulders—it came from—The startled eyes of those in the courtroom jerked in that direction, staring unbelievingly at the quiet figure, so quiet, so cool, so gravely aloof. But the redheaded girl felt idiotic tears sting swiftly beneath her lids. Under the lowered barrier of Sue Ives’s lashes there still danced the echo of that joyous truant, shameless and unafraid. It was she who had laughed, after all.
Mr. Lambert was not laughing. “You are a little late in recalling this,” he remarked heavily.
“Oh, a good deal late,” agreed Patrick Ives. “But, you see, I hadn’t been going in for watching the sun rise for some time previous to the murder. Since then I have. And when I heard that letter read in court the other day, something clicked in my head. Not five o’clock, and the sun was up! Something wrong there. I went back to New York and looked it up in the public library. On , the sun rose at four twenty-two a.m. On Wednesday, , the sun rose at five twenty-eight. So that’s that.”
“Have you a certified statement to that effect?” inquired Lambert, forlornly pompous.
“No,” said Mr. Ives. “But I can lend you a World Almanac.”
“You seem to find a trial for murder a very amusing affair,” remarked Lambert heavily, his eyes once more on the jury.
“You’re wrong,” said Patrick Ives briefly. “I don’t.”
“I do not believe that your attitude makes farther examination desirable,” commented Lambert judicially.
