restless and discontented — with his jerking mouth, his sharp-featured narrow face and red-rimmed eyes — he now looked ill with more than the physical illness of having swallowed half a grain of strychnine. The face was waxy, and you could see the ridges of the cheek-bones; so dead a face that the sandy hair, sharply parted, looked like a wig. He wore a big camel's-hair overcoat on which snow had turned to water, and he was twisting his cap round and round in his fingers. They heard his whistling, rather adenoidal breathing.
'Who — who's the boss here?' he asked, in a sort of croak.
Masters shoved out a chair for him, and H. M. bent forward.
'Easy there,' grunted the latter. 'Look here, son, what's the idea of crashing in here and shoutin' that candy- box business all over the place? Wanta get thrown in clink?'
'Only way the saps would let me in,' said Emery huskily. 'They thought I was a reporter. Might as well get pinched. What's the difference now anyway? Mind if I catch a drink?' He fumbled in his inside pocket.
H. M. studied him. 'Your little press-agent stunt with that chocolate box went pretty sour, didn't it?'
'Whoa there!' said Emery. His hand jerked. 'I didn't say '
'Well, now, you might as well have. Don't be a God-forsaken fathead. She'd forbidden you to tell the papers where she was, or let you splash out with any publicity yarn. That's what you were grousin' about. So you thought you'd provide a little news she couldn't help, without endangerin' her life. Or anybody else's, unless it was necessary. You were goin' to spot that poisoned box of chocolates, only Rainger got in ahead of you, Big story in the papers, `Attempt on Marcia Tait's Life.' Fine publicity, hey? Send the box to the chemist, find it was poisoned. Then John Bohun insisted on everybody there eatin' one of 'em, and you got a fit of heroic conscience. Bah.' H. M. peered at him sourly through the big spectacles. He puffed his cheeks and made bubbling noises; then he looked at Bennett. 'Are you beginnin' to understand now why I told you in my office yesterday that there was nothin' to be afraid of, and that Tait wasn't in any danger, hey? She wouldn't 'a' been — if we'd had only this feller Emery to deal with. But we didn't. We had somebody who really meant to kill her…'
'Ho ho,' said H. M. in hollow parody, and without mirth. 'Fine work. All a sedulous press-agent got for his ingenuity was a good stiff dose of strychnine, and not even the satisfaction of breakin' the story. Because our sensible friend Rainger pointed out somethin' he overlooked: that there'd be a police investigation, and they might not get Tait back to America in time to be within her contract. Very sensible feller, Rainger.'
Masters picked up his notebook and nodded grimly.
'There's still room,' he said, 'for a police investigation. We're not very fond of that sort of journalism over here. After all, when you send poison to somebody, that constitutes an act of attempted murder. I daresay you knew that, Mr. Emery?'
Emery's red-rimmed eyes were puzzled. He made a vague gesture as though he would whisk away a troublesome fly.
'Yes, but-oh, what the hell!' he said. 'It was a good story. It. what difference does that make anyway? There's something else now. I'll say there's something else!'
'You know somethin' about it?' inquired H. M. casually.
'Carl 'phoned me. He was cockeyed drunk. Can I — can I see her?'
He shuddered when he said that, and turned his hollowed eyes slowly towards H. M. 'He was cockeyed drunk. He said something about her being at a pavilion, didn't know what he was talking about or something, and in a marble casket. The-the poor softie was crying. Carl Rainger. I don't know about that, but we'll get her the best casket there is in London, unless we can take her across the ocean. He said they were going to arrest Bohun. They hang 'em over here, don't they? That's swell.'
The words rattled, but there was no force in his voice. He worked his fingers up and down the arms of the chair. Some thought tortured him, and, like the usual twist of his conscience, he could not rest until he had spoken it.
'I've got to come clean now. You'll know it sooner or later. If Bohun killed her, like Rainger said, it's my fault. Because I told Canifest..: Told him yesterday afternoon; sneaked out of the hospital to do it. Carl only found out two days ago, and he said it was the best way of stopping it. Yeah. I mean, he found out Canifest was their angel, so…' he gestured.
'Easy there, son. Take your drink,' said H. M., with a drowsy wave of his hand, 'and let's get this in order. You told Canifest what?'
'That she was married already.'
Masters interposed heavily: 'It's only fair to warn you, Mr. Emery, that you must be careful what you say. Of your own volition you've admitted something that makes you liable to a criminal charge, a wilful and malicious attempt to kill her'
'Kill her?' said Emery, in a sort of yelp. He jumped in the chair. 'My God, I'd never have hurt her! You've got a crazy lot of ideas about justice over here, but why do you have to keep harping on that? Listen, you poor sap, she was my wife.'
In the abrupt silence somebody whistled. Emery looked slowly round the group, and a kind of cynical despair came into his expression.
'Yeah. I know what you're thinking. Monkey-face Me. - Nobody. Not fit to get invited to swell houses. All right! Now I'll tell you something. I made Marcia Tait a star.' He spoke quietly, and with a sort of fierce triumph. 'Ask anybody who put her where she was. Ask 'em, and see what they tell you. I built her up when she was nobody. There's lots of good directors handling good actresses; but if you think that means anything you're nuts. That don't make 'em stars. You need Monkey-face — Me for things like that.
'I'd have done anything she wanted. I always did. One of her conditions was that nobody should know about the marriage, in case it'd hurt her career. Well, I suppose she was right. Fine thing to have it known she was tied up to me, uh? All I could do — now you're gonna think I'm the world's worst sap; I can't help it if you do, and you'll find it out anyway; but that's the way I felt all I could do was invent a wife of mine that I could talk about, and bring into the conversation when I meant Marcia. It was a sort of consolation. I called her `Margarette,' because I’d always liked that name…'
The husky voice trailed off. This last admission seemed to wrench him more with an uneasy sense of shame than anything else. He looked round defiantly. His hand, still in his breast pocket, produced an enormous flat silver flask, which he automatically made a feint of holding out to everybody before he tilted it up to drink. At the end of a long pull he released his breath in a shudder.
'Oh, what the hell?' said Tim Emery with sudden weariness, and sat back.
'You mean,' Masters boomed incredulously, 'that you allowed… Now, come!'
'Marriage new-style. Uh-huh. I begin to see,' said H. M. He blinked drowsily, the glasses sliding down on his nose; but he sat motionless as a great Buddha despite the tired cynicism of his mouth. 'Don't mind the feller who's talkin', son. That's Chief Inspector Masters, who's just about on the verge of apoplexy, and he's gettin' suspicious of you already. I know it's not easy to talk; but if you feel like goin' on — well, I've had too much experience with a crazy world to feel very much surprised at anything I hear. You'd still hit me in the eye if I called her a leech, wouldn't you?'
'So far as I'm concerned,' said Masters, 'and whatever I happen to think about that side of it, I've got only one duty. And that's to find out who killed Miss Tait. So I'll ask Mr. Emery whether he knew, as her husband, that Miss Tait and Mr. Joh — '
H. M.'s grunt drowned it out. 'You know what he's goin' to say, son. You got brains enough to answer unspoken questions. And it always makes everybody feel better to pretend that not callin' a spade a spade makes it invisible. Well?'
'Oh, cut it, will you?' said Emery, without opening his eyes. His body shook. 'Yes, I knew it. Does that satisfy you? I knew it from the beginning. She told me long ago.'
'I see,' growled Masters. 'And you didn't-?'
'If it made her any happier,' said Emery dully, 'it was all right with me. Now for the lova Judas will you, let me alone?' His voice rose. H. M., whose eyes were fixed on him, raised a hand sharply for Masters to be silent. H. M. seemed to know that Emery would go on unprompted…
'I wanted her to go on,' he added abruptly, 'and be Great. Great: that's what I mean. To tell you the honest truth, I honestly didn't care so much whether she went back to the States or put on this play over here; I'd have backed her up whatever she did. It's hard to realize that she's dead, that's all… There's only one thing that hurts like poison. I want to get out of this country. I never realized what people must think of me. It was the way that old
