uttered some bubbling absurdity…'
'Little Kate-' said Bohun, 'Gad, I never thought! I don't seem to be able to think of anything. I stayed in London, I didn't come down here after I'd been away for months. I haven't even seen little Kate-'
Willard snorted.
'Little Kate, he said, 'be damned. Look here, John, do you know anything about her? Do you ever think of anything except your own dreams? She's twenty-one, she runs this house for you, she's rather a beauty, and she's never been farther afield than London in her life. Between you and Maurice, this whole house is run on dreams and shadows. Of course you haven't seen her. You've never even looked at her.'
'You were saying?' Bohun prompted politely.
Willard seemed to debate something in his mind.
'This. That you don't even know what Marcia was like, or why anybody should want to kill her. And you may not feel the devilishness in this house. She inspired devilishness wherever she went. If you didn't love her, she was just as willing to have you-or anybody else hate her.' He struck the arm of the chair. Momentarily his queer yellow- brown eyes were gleaming. 'Oh, yes. I know. She would help it along; she would touch and prod and crack the whip. And as for us, we poor striped brutes went through the paper hoops and climbed up on the perches, and usually she had only to fire a blank cartridge when we got unruly. I say usually.
'Now I'm going to tell you what happened after dinner, and why I wasn't surprised at murder.
'Marcia insisted on a tour of the house by moonlight; with only Maurice carrying a candle, and explaining the romance of the White Priory. Of course Maurice was delighted. The rest of us went along. Rainger was too jocose, too attentive to the Honorable Louise; Katharine was with me. And Marcia had a word for all of us. Oh, she was vivid enough. She would sometimes take the candle from Maurice to show her eyes and her smile when she dazzled Maurice; she even got a spark out of Rainger, who was stolid enough, but he snatched up a silver cape of hers when it nearly touched the floor. The girls she treated with a kind of motherly sarcasm. I suppose I was down in the dumps — I don't know why. She chaffed me about what a poor Charles the Second I would make. This mind you, when I was suddenly beginning to realize for the first time just how the part should be played. In those dark rooms, when you had that uncanny sense that people had just stepped out of them: I got it, I got the feel of a role such as I've never had since I played Peter Ibbetson! I had even begun to imagine the crashing success with the audience.’
'Then we came to the Charles-the-Second Room.' Willard seemed to feel his audience even then. He turned to Bennett.
'This will be gibberish to you, I fear. The Charles-the-Second Room is the one our friend Bohun here occupies now. It is kept much as it was. The feature of the place is a staircase in the wall, between the inner and outer walls, which goes down to a door opening on what is now a modern side porch-the porch by which we came into the house. The door (it's not a secret door, of course) is at the rear end of the porch. It was built so that Charles could go out and down the lawns to the pavilion without being observed leaving by any main entrance.'
'Yes, of course,' said Bohun impatiently. 'Well?'
'Maurice,' Willard continued, 'was showing us the secret staircase. I had seen it before, of course. But Marcia dragged me out on the little stone landing when the others crowded out there. It was draughty, and there was only the light of the candle Maurice was holding up. It is a very steep, narrow, and long flight of steps. I remember thinking it looked dangerously like a precipice. Then I don't know, nobody knows, whether it was a draught that blew out the candle, or whether somebody jogged Maurice's arm, or what happened. But the candle went out. I heard somebody giggle in the dark. Not laugh, but giggle, and that was worse. Then I felt somebody pitch against me. I caught Marcia just as she had tripped headlong down those stairs.'
'She was,' said Bohun rather hoarse, 'she was-?'
'Pushed? Yes. Hurled, rather.'
Willard got up. He lit his pipe, inhaled a deep gust of smoke, and pointed with the pipe-stem. 'What is more, she knew it. But when a light was struck again, she turned round with one of her slowest, most radiant smiles and said — oh, I can't mimic her, but I remember her exact words — 'But what an accident! I should have killed myself.' And she would have, John. Yet she enjoyed it; she enjoyed the violence that would admit her power enough to kill her.'
Bohun began to pace up and down the hearth-rug. His cigarette had smoldered down to his lip, and he burnt his hand as he knocked the stump into the fire. 'You don't,' he said, 'you don't know who?'
'No idea. We concluded our tour after that: it was about a quarter past eleven.'
'And then?'
Willard hesitated. 'Then was when she seemed to grow worried. Oh, I don't mean nervous about what had happened; but impatient and abstracted, as though she were expecting something.' A curious film had come over his eyes. He added softly: 'You, perhaps?'
'Possibly. I wasn't feeling like returning. Do you realize,' Bohun demanded, 'what I'd just heard from Canifest? Ruin of all our plans. I was drinking, if you want to know the truth. And driving the streets, wondering what in God's name I should say when I got home.' He beat his hands together. 'Well? What happened then?'
'I should have thought,' Willard remarked musingly, 'her attitude was. never mind. At midnight she insisted on going to bed; a little early for Marcia. I didn't want her to go there — Maurice offered to let one of the housemaids sleep there and act as maid — but she wouldn't. We went out there with her. The night had gone clouded; that was when it started to snow, and there was a sharp wind. When we came back to the house after we had,' he snapped the word out, 'installed her, Maurice dragged Rainger off to the library to discuss motion pictures. Maurice had completely forgotten about, the play. Rainger gave me a very strange, almost leering good-night when I said I was going to my room.' He blew a film of ash off the bowl of his pipe. 'As a matter of fact, I walked back to the pavilion.'
'Oh.'
'I was there,' Willard answered, very quietly, 'exactly ten minutes. That was as long as she allowed me to stay. She seemed surprised when I knocked at the door, surprised and annoyed, as though she had been expecting somebody else. Twice while we were talking — it was in the bedroom she went out and looked through the front windows of the drawing-room. And she seemed to be growing more nervous and upset. We drank a glass of port and smoked a cigarette. But the more I pointed out that there was somebody in very cool earnest, who had made two attempts to kill her, the more amused she grew. She said, `You don't understand the chocolates; and, as for the other, I'm certainly not afraid of..’
'Who?'
'I don't know. She only stretched her arms up above her head (you know that gesture of hers?) As though she were breathing-life, and breathing it in a kind of glutted satisfaction. She was not acting then. In ten minutes she walked to the outer door with me. She was still wearing the silver gown, and the snow was growing thicker outside. That was the last I saw of her.'
The snow. Bennett leaned across in the firelight. His muddled brain still kept returning to that question of the snow.
'Do you remember,' he said, 'exactly what time the snow began, Mr. Willard?'
'Why yes.. Yes, if it matters. It was when we took Marcia out to the pavilion, about ten minutes past twelve.' `But I don't suppose you'd know what time it stopped?'
The actor wheeled round. He seemed about to answer irritably, when he saw Bennett's expression, and then looked with a quick speculative glance at Bohun.
'As it happens, I do. For reasons I'll explain, I spent a very wakeful night. First there was the dog barking. I was up and at the window any number of times, although — although my room isn't at the rear of the house and I couldn't see towards the pavilion. But I noticed how very heavy a fall of snow it was to last for so brief a time. It lasted just about two hours, roughly from a little past twelve to a little past two. The number of times I looked at my watch last night' He hesitated. 'Why?'
A knocking at the door echoed hollowly across the room. Wind was rising across the Downs and rumbling in the chimney. Out of the corner of his eye Bennett saw Thompson come in.
'Excuse me, sir,' said Thompson's voice. 'Dr. Wynne has just arrived, and the inspector of police you sent for. There's, a definite
So Marcia Tait must have been killed before two o'clock, probably some time before two o'clock, for all footprints of the murderer to have been effaced. Why, Bennett wondered, should it bother him? He almost started
