Hume got up and went to the sideboard. He drew the stopper of the decanter, splashed in the soda for two weak drinks, and returned with them.
'May I wish you prosperity?' he went on. His expression changed a little. ' 'Mr James Caplon Answell',' he said, repeating his guest's name and looking at him steadily, 'I will be frank with you. That marriage would be advantageous - to both sides, I might say. As you know, I have already given my consent. I can find absolutely nothing against it' - Answell said something to the rim of his glass - 'I had the honour to be acquainted with the late Lady Answell, and I know that your family financial position is sound. Therefore I propose to tell you ... Man, man, what's wrong with you? Have you gone mad?'
Answell saw his host stop with his own glass half-way to his lips, and an expression of consternation on his face. But he saw it strangely. Something seemed to be burning his throat, and along his shoulders, and up into his temples. His head began to whirl, so that vision spun with it. The desk tilted forwards, and he knew he must be falling against it when he tried to rise. His last wild thought before he lost consciousness was a realization that his drink had been doctored; but even this was blotted out by the roaring in his ears.
A line of ideas was unbroken even in pain. 'There-was-something-in-the-whisky' kept swimming round in his mind, as though it were swimming back to life with him.
He sat up, feeling his back cramped in a hard chair. His head seemed to be rising towards the ceiling in long spiralling motions. First, before he could get back his eyesight, he must conquer this sickness at his stomach. It took some time, and the light hurt his eyes. He blinked at it. It was a desk-lamp in a curved green shade.
A moment of complete panic was succeeded by a vague realization of where he was. Then he got it all at once. As Hume had been in the act of giving a blessing to the marriage, something had knocked his guest out. Hume must have put something into the whisky. But that was nonsense. Why should Hume put anything into the whisky? And where in God's name was Hume?
Feeling suddenly that he had got to find Hume, Answell pushed himself to his feet. His head ached violently; and his mouth tasted as though he had been eating mint and slobbering a little. If he could only talk to someone he would be all right. This business was like missing a train, or watching the end of a procession disappear down the end of a street just before you could move. What had happened and how long had he been like this? He still wore his overcoat, which was clumsy when he groped inside after his watch. When he came into this house, it had been ten minutes past six. An unreal-looking watch in his hand now said six-thirty.
He put his hands on the desk and looked down at the floor to steady his swimming eyesight. That was how, glancing along the bottom of the desk to the left, he saw an old-fashioned laced boot and a few inches of tightly drawn sock. He stumbled over the foot when he walked round the side of the desk.
'Get up!' he heard himself saying. 'Get up, damn you!'
And again his own voice, more plaintive: 'Get up off that floor and say something!'
Avory Hume did not get up. He was lying on his left side between the windows and the side of the desk, so close to the desk that his sprawled right hand touched it as though he were trying to embrace it. Answell rolled him over on his back. Something rolled up and over with the body, so that Answell jerked back to avoid being touched by it. He also saw blood. A length of thin, rounded wood rose up to some height from Hume's chest. At the end of the arrow, which had been driven eight inches into Hume's heart, were attached three bedraggled and dusty feathers.
The man was dead, but still quite warm. In death the dour face looked surprised and angry; the high collar and tie were rumpled; there was dust on his hands and a cut on the palm of his right hand.
Trying to get to his feet and jump away at the same time, Answell almost fell over backwards. He felt then - though what it was he did not know until later-some sort of bulge in his hip pocket under the overcoat. It was impossible that Hume should be lying in the middle of his own carpet, skewered like a hen, with blood all over his coat. The desk-lamp shed a business-like light over the blotter, over the light brown carpet, and over the dead man's open mouth.
A very panicky young man looked round the room. In the wall behind him was the door. In the wall to his left were the two shuttered windows. Against the wall to the right stood the sideboard. And on the wall straight ahead of him hung the arrows - but there were only two arrows now. The one which had formed the base of the triangle, inscribed with the date 1934, had been driven through Hume's body. Painted a dingy yellowish-brown, it had three feathers; and half the central feather, coloured blue, had now been torn or broken off.
At the back of his mind he had known there was something wrong with this house from the moment he had walked into it. His interview with Hume had seemed fantastic. The grizzled butler, the great clock ticking in the hall, the woman leaning over the banisters, all seemed a part of a trap or an illusion. Someone had come in here while he was unconscious, and had killed Hume. But in that case where was the murderer now? He obviously was not here; the room was completely bare, without even a cupboard.
Moving back still further, he became aware of a loud and insistent noise somewhere in the region of his hand. It was the ticking of his watch. He put back the watch in his pocket, and went to the door; but he wrenched several times at the knob before he realized that the door was bolted on the inside.
But somebody got out of here I He went over more slowly to the windows. The steel shutters on each window were also locked, secured with a flat steel bar which had been shoved into its socket like a bolt. Then he began to hurry round the room. There was no other entrance. The only thing he had not previously noticed was a two-bar electric heater, set into the grate of the white marble mantelpiece. No way in or out by the chimney, either; the flue was only an inch wide and choked with soot which had not been disturbed. The fire seemed to throw out a blaze of heat, and made him conscious of how warm he was with his overcoat on. Also, he was walking fast. Had Hume killed himself? Had Hume gone mad and staged a weird dance of suicide in order to incriminate someone else: a situation very popular in his favourite form of reading? Nonsense! The only other alternative -
But surely nobody would believe he had done it? Why should he? Besides, he could easily explain: he had been given a drugged drink. It was true he had not seen Hume put anything into the glass; but the whisky bad been doctored somehow and by someone. He could prove it. With a flash of clearness he recalled that he had not even finished his drink. As the first black wave of nausea came over him, he had automatically put down the glass on the floor beside his chair.
He hurried over to look for it now. But the glass was gone, and he could not. find it anywhere in the room. Nor was there any trace of the whisky and soda which Hume had mixed for himself.
By this time in a collected, rather abstract state of fear, he examined the sideboard. On it were a cut-glass decanter of whisky, a syphon of soda-water, and four tumblers. The decanter was full to its stopper: not a drop of soda had been drawn from the syphon; the four glasses were clean, polished, and obviously unused.
He afterwards recalled that at this point he said something aloud, but he had no notion of what it was. He said it to cover his thoughts, as though by speaking rapidly he could prevent himself from thinking. But he had to think. Time was going on: he could still hear the ticking of the watch. If the one door and the two windows were both' locked on the inside, he was the only person who could have killed Hume.'It was like his own favourite novels turned to a nightmare. Only, with the police of this material world, they did not believe in your innocence, and they hanged you. Also, it is all very well to talk of ingenious devices by which a door is bolted on the inside by someone who is actually outside the room - but he had seen this door, and he knew better.
He went back to look at it again. It was a good heavy door of oak, fitting so tightly into the frame and against the floor that the floor was scraped where it had swung. There was not even a keyhole for any flummery: a Yale lock had been set to the door, but it was out of order and stuck fast in the 'open' position of the lock. Instead the door was now secured by a long, heavy bolt so stiff from disuse that, when he gave it a tentative wrench in its socket, he found that even for him a powerful pull would be needed to move it at all.
From the bolt he found himself inspecting his own right hand. He opened the palm and studied it again: after which he went over to the light to get a better look. The fingers, the thumb, and the palm were now smudged with1 a greyish dust which felt gritty when he closed his hand. Where could he have got that? He knew for a certainty that he had touched nothing dusty since he had come into this room. Again he felt the bulge in his hip pocket; an unaccustomed bulge; but he did not investigate because he was half afraid to find out what it was. Then, from the hypnotic light of the desk-lamp, his eyes strayed down to the dead man.
The arrow, from hanging so long on the wall, had accumulated a coating of greyish dust: except for a thin line along the shaft where, presumably, it had hung protected against the wall. This dust was now broken and smudged in only one place. About half-way down the shaft, there were signs that someone had gripped it. When he bent down to look, even with the naked eye he could make out clear finger-prints. Answell looked back at his own hand,
