“I am sure of this. If Joyce Whipple is alive now, she will not die by violence.”
Robin Webster drew in a breath as though he drank courage from the words.
“You believe that!” he cried. “You—oh, you have found her!” He seized upon that notion, was convinced by it and stared at Hanaud with parted lips and shining eyes.
“No! I have found some footsteps—nothing more. She ran across the lawn last night. Of where she is, monsieur, I know no more than you.”
“Yet you declare that she is safe.”
“Safe? No! I do declare that now murder dare not be done, if murder was ever planned. Once more—oh, for the hundred thousandth time in the long history of violence, it has been proved that the dead victim can hardly be destroyed. There is a fate in it. There is justice in it. Those who killed Evelyn Devenish, dare not kill again.”
“You are clear then that the murder of Evelyn Devenish and the disappearance of Joyce Whipple are part of the same crime?”
“Look about you!” Hanaud returned. “This scattered neighbourhood! The few inhabitants! Is it possible that on the same night, in the same house, these two abominations were committed independently? No! Let us be reasonable! The only alternative is that Joyce Whipple was an accomplice”; and on the bench beside him Diana Tasborough started.
Hanaud swung round towards her on the instant. She was sitting with the strangest look of fear upon her face.
“You believe that possible, mademoiselle?” Hanaud asked.
Diana shook her head violently.
“Of course not. Joyce is my friend. I had never thought of it. Only your words reminded me that there seemed always to be—” Diana was at a loss how to put what she meant to say into words which would do no hurt.
“Yes?” Hanaud insisted gently, bending down to the girl.
“Well, there seemed always to be some curious ill-will between Joyce and Evelyn,” she said reluctantly.
Hanaud drew himself up in surprise.
“Is that so?” he said slowly and in a musing voice. But Diana hurriedly interposed. She would not have him dwell upon that revelation or give any weight to it in his thoughts.
“It wasn’t of any importance,” she urged eagerly. “They didn’t hit it off quite. That’s all there was to it—I am sure. They were just naturally a little hostile to one another. Oh, I was a fool to mention it to you at all. I shouldn’t have, unless you had suggested it.”
Hanaud was at once anxious to lift from her any sense of self-reproach.
“Mademoiselle, it is much better, believe me, that you should have told me this frankly and simply as you have done, than that I should have discovered it later on for myself. It is a little detail to which I might have given greater weight, if I had thought that you had concealed it from me.”
Mr. Ricardo was mystified. Hanaud’s reasoning was no doubt very sound; but there was no need for it. Diana Tasborough had revealed nothing when she admitted the hostility between Evelyn Devenish and Joyce Whipple. He himself only this morning had told the story of the Cave of the Mummies, and had added to it this afternoon his account of Joyce’s odd little outburst at the dinner-table. Hanaud already knew all that it was necessary to know upon that point. He was wantonly wasting valuable time in eliciting it a second time from Diana.
“He is losing himself in the byways of this case,” Mr. Ricardo reasoned. “I must bring him back to the main road.”
He had begun to make a little twittering noise as a preface to his expostulation when an unkindly cold glare in Hanaud’s eyes changed his mind for him.
“Mr. Ricardo, I think, is about to observe very justly that we are making too much of a very small detail.”
All eyes at once were turned upon Ricardo, who suddenly felt nervous and hopped from one foot on to the other.
“That is so,” he said. “I was on the point of making that observation.”
All eyes, to his relief, were once more turned away from him, but he had even in his relief a biting thought that he was being neglected as a futility. Robin Webster brought the discussion back to the graver problem with which it had begun.
“You are very confident, Monsieur Hanaud, that if no second murder has been committed, it will not be. For my part, I wish that I could believe that. But those who killed Evelyn Devenish will be desperate people. They must go on. They are committed—whatever the risk they must go on, as I see their position. They will take their precautions.”
“Did they take no precautions with Evelyn Devenish?” Hanaud interrupted. “They know that precautions fail.”
Even so, Robin Webster was not satisfied. He stood with a white face twitching and eyes that sought and fled from the detective’s. He had some fear in his mind which he could hardly bring himself to utter. In the end he launched a dreadful word in a low and toneless voice.
“Burial,” he said.
It was a question. Wasn’t that the precaution which this time would not fail? And Mr. Ricardo in a flight of imagination kindled by that word of terror, ranged over the vineyards and the forests and found the mound of a small new grave hidden under leaves, and slowly sinking to the level of the ground about it with the passage of the seasons. Hanaud’s answer to the question rolled out like thunder.
“It has been tried in England and it has failed. It has been tried in France and it has failed. Monsieur, if like”—he hesitated and corrected himself—“like someone whom I know, I wished for a good conviction at the Assizes rather than the saving of a life, I should say ‘A burial! Nothing could be better!’ ”
With that grim and rather shocking conclusion he turned again to Diana
