to come out here, heart-attack or no heart-attack; and hung up while Canifest was still digestin' the gruesome result of publicity if he refused to play fair with the police.'
'That seems straightforward enough…'
H. M. grunted. 'Does it? Come on out to the pavilion.' As he waddled on he was slapping irritably at the trees with his gloved hand. 'Look here, didn't they say they'd left the body out here and used the dead-van to haul Bohun to the doctor's? H'm, yes. I was hopin' for that. Got a handkerchief? My glasses get all snowed up. What's botherin' you?'
'But, hang it all, sir, if there were no footprints whatever, and. here's a woman murdered 1'
'Oh, that? You're like Masters. Funny thing, but that's the easiest part of it. Mind, I'm not sayin' I know how the trick was worked before I even have a look at the pavilion. But I got a strong hunch; oh, a very strong hunch. And if I find what I expect to find out here…'
'You'll know the murderer?'
'NO!' said H. M. 'Burn me, that's just it. All I could tell you right now is the two or three people it isn't. And that's not accordin' to rule either. As a general rule, these sleight-of-hand tricks are a dead give-away to the murderer once you've tumbled to the means of workin' the illusion. A special sort of crime indicates a special set of circumstances, and those circumstances narrow down to fit one person like a hangman's cap when you know what they are. Well, this is the exception. Even if I'm right I may not be any closer, because…'
'Because?'
They had come out into the vast, dusky open space before the frozen lake, churned now with many lines of tracks. The pavilion was unlighted now; it looked darker against the spectral whiteness of snow. So quiet was this muffled world that they could hear the snowflakes ticking and rustling in the evergreen-branches.
'When I was raggin' Masters,' said H. M., 'I thought I'd be very neat and unanswerable. I asked, Was it by accident that the murderer went to and from the crime without leavin' a footprint? And I chuckled in my fatheaded way. But that's it, son; and it's the whole difficulty. That's exactly what happened.'
Bennett stared round. He was beginning to experience the same eerie sensation he had felt when he first came into this clearing at dawn: a feeling of being shut away into a twilight place where the present did not exist, and where Marcia Tait dead among the Stuart finery was no less alive than the beribboned ladies, with' their paint and their wired ringlets, who smiled over plumed fans at the card-tables of the merry monarch…
He glanced up sharply.
A light had appeared in the pavilion.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ashes at the Pavilion
Level slits of light showed yellow through the Venetian blinds in the windows of the room on the left hand side of the door: a lonely glow in the midst of the lake. H. M., who had put the dead pipe into his mouth, rattled it against his teeth.
'It might be one of Potter's men still there,' he said. 'Or it might not. Strike a match and see if there are any fresh tracks…'
'The snow's covering them,' Bennett answered, when he had wasted several matches; 'but they look like fresh ones. Big shoes. Shall we — I — '
H. M. lumbered ahead, as quietly as his own squeaky shoes would permit. The causeway was again muffled. in snow, but they need not have used any secrecy. The front door of the pavilion was opened just as they reached it.
'I rather imagined,' said Jervis Willard's voice, out of the gloom in the doorway, 'that I saw someone out there. I must make my deepest apologies if I came down here without permission. But the police had gone, and the door was open.'
He stood courteously, his head a little inclined, the glow from the drawing-room shining down one side of his handsome face where none of the wrinkles showed now. The light brought out rich hues and shadows; a brocade curtain behind his stiff black clothes, a shadow-trick whereby he seemed to be wearing a black periwig.
'You are Sir Henry Merrivale,' he stated. 'I'll go now. I hope I didn't intrude. She is still in the bedroom.'
If H. M. caught a curious undercurrent in the man's voice, he paid no attention. He only looked briefly at Willard, and stumped up the steps.
'Point of fact, you're the man I wanted to talk to,' he announced, with a sort of grudging absent-mindedness. 'Don't go. Come on in here. H'm. Yes. So this is it?' Pushing back the brocade curtain over the door to the drawing- room, he studied the room a moment before he lumbered in. 'Bahl' he added.
The electric candles were fluttering again over the blackand-white marble floor, the hammered brass vases on cabinets of Japanese lacquers, the whole stiff black and white and dull red color of that fading room. Willard, following Bennett into the room, stood quietly with his back to the fireplace.
H. M. said: 'I saw you in `The Bells.' You weren't Irving, but you were devilish good. And your Othello was the best thing you ever did. Mind tellin' me why you're playin' around in polite drawing-room comedy?'
'Thanks, probably,' Willard answered, and looked slowly round, 'because it's this sort of drawing-room, and had that sort of occupant.'
'I mean, I was only wonderin' if you were another of 'em who walked into her parlor.'
'Only into the parlor.'
'Uh-huh. That's what I thought. I want to get this right about last night, because you must 'a' been the last person to see her before the murderer got here. Now, when you and Bohun and Rainger came out here with her, where did you make yourselves comfortable? In here?'
'No. In the bedroom. But we didn't make ourselves comfortable; we didn't even sit down. We left after a very few minutes.'
'And when you came back here, as they tell me you did, where were you two?'
'Also in the bedroom. I drank a glass of port with her.'
'Right,' grunted H. M. absently. 'Got a match?'
There was a faint flicker of amusement in Willard's eyes. 'Sorry. I gave away my last box to Marcia last night, and I don't carry about that colored kind they supply at the house. Will a lighter do?'
'Just as well,' nodded H. M. The corners of his mouth turned down again. He advised gently: 'Don't ever get the notion that I'm tryin' to be clever. It's bad policy to advertise suspicion. Either on my part or yours. If I'd had any doubts, I'd have asked for a lighter to begin with. Point of fact, I wanted to look at that fireplace…'
Snapping on the lighter Willard handed him, he looked carefully at the fluffy gray wood-ashes and the few stumps of charred wood. He put his hand under the broad flue, and craned his neck to peer up under it.
'Pretty strong draught. Notice that? That chimney's as big as a house. H'm, yes. They got iron steps for the sweep. Still, I don't suppose. '
His dull eye wandered out over the hearth and the edge of the carpet.
'Other room now. I'll keep this lighter for a minute.'
Willard went ahead, reached to the left of the bedroom door, and switched on the lights. Although Bennett nerved himself to keep steady, the sight was less disturbing than he had feared. There was a businesslike look about the little room with the many mirrors and the high red-canopied bedstead. A stale reek of flashlight-powder still hung in the air; white grains from the fingerprint dust, clung to most surfaces where prints might have been found. Except for the fact that the body was now laid out on the bed and covered with a sheet, Potter's men had replaced the other objects just as they had been when Bennett first saw them. The fragments of the decanter lay at the edge of the carpet before the fireplace; fragments and crushed pieces of the glasses were still on the hearth; the poker had been put back with its tip in the little heap of ashes; the one chair upright, the other overturned to the right of the fireplace, the overturned tabouret and the scattered burnt matches — these things again played the dumb-show of murder.
'H’mm' said H. M.
He blundered in his near-sighted fashion over to the fireplace, where he examined the ashes carefully. In peering up the chimney with the aid of the lighter, he endangered his tall hat, and growled curses to himself. Next
