The Grange, after everybody else had gone to bed. I've been sitting there watching the entrance to a passageway giving on a line of bedrooms, where I knew Somebody's bedroom was. I was convinced Somebody would come out of there when the house was asleep, go downstairs, and out for a rendezvous with Spinelli. And if I saw this person, I would know beyond a doubt that I was right. I would intercept this Somebody, and then.. God knows.'
He leaned his great bulk against the newel post of the stairs, blinking over his eyeglasses.
'But in my fine fancy conceit I didn't know about the secret passage in the oak room, that leads outside. Somebody did come out — but not past me. It was very, very easy. Out of one room in a step, into another, down the stairs; and I suspected nothing until I heard the shots down here…'
'Well, sir?'
'Somebody's room was empty. Across the corridor, the door of the oak room was partly open. A candle had been indiscreetly left there, lighted, on the edge of the mantel—'
'My father put that candle there,' said Hugh, 'when he explored—'
'It had been lighted,' said Dr. Fell, 'against Somebody's return. When I saw the piece of panelling open —'
There was something odd in the doctor's manner; something labored; he went on talking as though he were giving a long explanation for the benefit of some person unseen, and using Hugh only as an audience.
'Why,' said the latter, 'are you telling me this?'
'Because the murderer did not return,' replied Dr. Fell. He had raised his voice, and it echoed in the narrow hall. 'Because I stood at the entrance to the secret passage on the outside, and waited there until Murch came up over the hill to tell me the news. The murderer could not get back. The murderer was locked out of that house, with all the downstairs windows locked, and every door bolted; shut out tonight as certainly as Depping was shut out here just twenty-four hours ago.' 'Then-'
'The whole house is aroused now. It will only be a matter of minutes before the one room is discovered to be empty. Murch knows it already, and so do — several others. A searching party, with flash lights and lanterns, has begun to comb the grounds. The murderer is either hiding somewhere in the grounds, or' — his voice lifted eerily —'is here.'
He took his hand off the newel post and stood upright.
'Shall we go upstairs?' he asked gruffly.
After a pause Hugh said quietly, 'Right you are, sir. But I suppose Murch told you the fellow's a dead shot, and he's still armed?'
'Yes. That is why, if somebody is here, and could hear me, I would say: Tor God's sake don't commit the madness and folly of shooting when you are cornered, or you will certainly hang. There is some excuse for you now, but there will be none if you turn your gun on the police.''
Dr. Fell was already climbing the stairs. He moved slowly and steadily, his cane rapping sharply on every tread;
'I do not intend to look for this person,' he said over his shoulder. — 'You and I, my boy, will go to the study and sit down. Now I am going to turn on the lights in the upstairs hall, here.'
A silence. Hugh felt his heart rise in his throat as the switch clicked; the bare, desolate hallway was empty. He thought, however, that he heard a board creak and a door close.
In desperation Hugh tried to think of something that would help him. The doctor spoke with quiet steadiness. He was trying to draw the murderer out into the light, delicately, with gloved hands, as you might handle a nest of wasps. And the house was listening again. If the murderer were here, he must have heard in desperation each hope of escape taken from under him; and each tap of the cane must have sounded like another nail…
Hugh expected a bullet. He did not believe the sniper would submit without a fight. Nevertheless, he played up to the doctor's lead.
'I suppose you can prove your case?' he asked. 'Would it be any good for the murderer to deny guilt?'
'None whatever.' Dr. Fell leaned inside the study door. He stood there a moment, looking into darkness, silhouetted against the light if there were anybody inside. Then he pressed the electric switch. The study was as neat as it had been that day, and the body of Depping had been removed. The bright hanging lamp over the desk left most of the room in shadow, but they could see that the chairs still stood as before, and the covered dinner tray on its side-table with the bowl of withered roses.
Dr. Fell glanced round. The door to the balcony, with its chequered red-and-white glass panel, was closed.
For a time he stood motionless, as though musing. Then he walked to one window.
'They're here' he said. 'Murch and his searching party. You see the flash lights, down there in the trees? Somebody seems to have a very powerful motorcycle lamp. Yes, they've covered that end of the grounds, and the murderer isn't there. They're coming this way…'
Hugh could not keep it back. He turned round, his voice was almost a yell: 'For God's sake, you've got to tell me!
A beam of white light struck up past the windows. Simultaneously, somebody cried out from below. The number of voices rose to a shouting; feet stamped and rustled in the underbrush, and more beams were directed on the balcony.
Dr. Fell moved over and touched the glass of the door with his stick.
'You'd better come in, you know,' he said gently. 'It's all up now. They've seen you.'
The knob began to turn, and hesitated. There was a clink of glass as the muzzle of a firearm was jabbed towards them against the panel; but Dr. Fell did not move. He remained blinking affably at it, and at the silhouette they could see moving behind the door in the broadening white glare of the flashlights…
'I shouldn't try it, if I were you,' he advised. 'After all, you know, you've got a chance. Ever since the Edith Thompson case it's been tacitly agreed that they will not hang a woman.'
The steel muzzle slid down raspingly, as though the hand that held it had gone weak. A sort of shudder went through the person on the other side of the door; the door wavered, and then was knocked open.
She was pale, so pale that even her lips looked blue. Once those wide-set blue eyes had been determined, and not glazed over with despair. The fine face seemed as old as a hag's; the chin wabbled; only the weariness remained.
'All right. You win' said Betty Depping.
The Mauser pistol rolled over a hand weirdly encased in a yellow rubber glove, and fell on the floor. Dr. Fell caught the girl as she slid down in a dead faint.
CHAPTER XIX
A Highly Probable Story
The story, it is to be feared, has already been told too many times. It has been featured in the public prints, made the subject for leading articles, controversies in women's magazines, homilies, sermons, and the tearful 'humanists' of the family pages. Betty Depping — whose name was not Betty Depping, and was no relation to the man she murdered — told the story herself a week before she poisoned herself at Horfield Gaol in Bristol. And that is why Dr. Fell insists to this day that the case was not one of his successes.
'That was the key fact of the whole business,' he will say. 'The girl wasn't his daughter. She had been his mistress for two years during the time he lived in America. And this was the explanation I had only begun to guess at the end. From the evidence on hand, it was easy to fix on tar as the killer; that was fairly obvious from the beginning. But her motive puzzled me.
'Now we have the answer, which would appear to lie in Depping's character as well as her own. You see, she was the one woman who had ever succeeded in holding Depping's fancy. When he grew tired of making cutthroat money in the States, and decided to chuck it up and create another character for himself in England (I do not, at this juncture, make any comparisons), he took her along with him. She, by the way, was the 'high-class dame with
