'Some kind of disinfectant. I thought I could face it, but I can't. I - I feel horrible. Can I get to a hospital?'
'Joe!' said the warder sharply. 'Come here and lend a hand!'
'You see, I killed him. That was why I drank the stuff.' 'Killed who, ma'am?'
'I killed poor Avory. But I'm sorry I killed him; I've always been sorry. I wanted to die, if it didn't hurt so much. My name is Amelia Jordan.'
EPILOGUE
'ALL I'm saying,' observed Evelyn, 'is that I thought the Attorney-General made the strongest speech of all of you. Even at the last minute 1 was afraid he might swing it. That man impressed me enormously: I don't care who knows it: and -'
'Ho, ho,' said H.M. 'So that's what you thought, hey? No, my wench. Walt Storm's a much better lawyer than that. I won't say he did it deliberately, but he put it all up so the judge could knock it down. It was as neat a trick of feedin' lines, or arrangin' your chin for the punch, as I've ever seen. He tumbled too late to the fact that the chap wasn't guilty. He might 'a' thrown up his brief; but I wanted the business carried on so it could be proved up to the hilt - with the full story of the crime. So you saw the spectacle of an intelligent man tryin' to make brickbats without straw. It sounded awful impressive, but it didn't mean a curse.'
We were sitting, on a boisterous March night, in H.M.'s office up all the flights of stairs of the building overlooking the Embankment, H.M., after having been engaged in brewing whisky-punch (in commemoration, he said, of the Answell case), sat with his feet on the desk and the gooseneck lamp pushed down. There was a good fire, and Lolly pop sat by the table in the window corner, evidently making up some accounts. H.M., with the smoke of a cigar getting into his eye and the steam of whisky-punch getting into his nose, was alternately chuckling and strangling.
'Not,' declared H.M., 'that there was ever any doubt about the verdict -'
'You thought not?' said Evelyn. 'Have you any recollection of what you did? When they brought back that verdict, and the court adjourned, someone came to congratulate you, and accidentally knocked a book off your desk. You stood there and you cursed and swore and gibbered for two minutes by the clock -'
'Well, it's always more comfortin' when you get that kind of case off your mind,' growled H.M. 'I had a few shots still in the locker; but, somewhat to mix the metaphors, you're nervous about a race even if you're dead certain the favourite's comin' in. Y'see, I had to fight it through. I had to get it on so I could make my closin' speech, and I thought a few hints in that speech would have a salutary effect on the real murderer -'
'Amelia Jordan!' I said. We were silent for a short time, while H.M. contemplated the end of his cigar, growled, and ended by taking a gulp of whisky-punch. 'So you knew she was guilty all the time?'
'Sure, son. And if necessary I could 'a' proved it. But I had to get the feller in the dock acquitted first. I couldn't
'Well?'
'I'll talk about it,' said H.M., shifting in his chair, 'because it's such a bleedin' relief not to be governed by any rules in my talk.
'Now, I don't have to retrace the course entirely. You know just about everything up to the time Jim Answell drinks his drugged whisky and tumbles over in Hume's study. You know everything, in fact, except what seem to me pretty solid reasons for believin' a certain person was guilty.
'Back at the beginnin' of the case I had the lunacy-plot part of it worked out straightaway, as I told you.
'As I first saw the business, there were only two persons concerned in the scheme to nobble Reginald Answell: Avory and Spencer. I still think that. It was pretty evident, though, that someone had found out about that scheme, and insisted on comin' into it at the last moment.
'Why? Looky here! If the Judas window was used to do the murder, the murderer must have been workin' with Avory Hume. The murderer must 'a' been at least close enough to know what was going on in the study. It must have been the murderer who carried away an extra decanter - I've made a query about that decanter in my time-table - so that it shouldn't be found by the police. All that implies co-operation with Avory. Someone was in on the plot: someone carried it just so far:, and then someone used it neatly to kill the old man.
'Who? Of course, first of all you'd have plumped for Uncle Spencer, since he undoubtedly was a confederate in the plot. But that won't do; at least, as regards Uncle Spencer's committin' the murder with his own hand. He's got a really remarkable alibi, vouched for by half the staff of a hospital.
'Who else, then? It's a remarkable thing, y'know, how the mere certainty of another confederate in the business narrows down the field. Avory Hume was a man with few friends and no intimates, except his own family. He was a great family man. If he went to the extent of confidin' that scheme to someone not necessary to it - even confidin' it under pressure - it must be someone very close to him.
'You understand, at this point I was just sittin' and thinkin'; I'd got no more than an idea to roll about. Someone close to him, says I. Now, while it was theoretically possible for an outsider to have sneaked in and done it (like Fleming, to take an example), still this looked very doubtful. Fleming wasn't an intimate; he wasn't even a close friend, as you can easily tell from the way they speak of each other. Furthermore, an outsider would have had to sneak past a battery of watchful eyes composed of Dyer and Amelia Jordan, one of whom was in the house all the time. Still grantin' that it's
'It leads to the belief that the other confederate must 'a' been either Amelia Jordan or Dyer. That's so simple that it takes a long time before it can fully penetrate. But it pretty certainly wasn't Dyer. I'll say nothin' of my own belief that the painfully respectable Dyer was the last person that the painfully respectable Mr Hume would admit to a peep at any family skeletons from inside the cupboard. As a witness to Captain Reginald's gibberin' lunacy, yes. As a colleague, no. And that it couldn't have been Dyer is clear from the time-table.
'Like this: I'd already come to the conclusion, from reasons you know, that Hume was murdered with that arrow fired from a cross-bow. Somebody had to wait until Jim Answell was under the influence of the drug. Somebody had then to go into the study with Hume, assist in pourin' mint-extract down an unconscious man's throat, and get the other decanter and syphon out. Somebody had to make a pretext for takin' the arrow out of the room. Somebody had to get Hume to bolt the door; how Hume was to be persuaded to do this, with the arrow still outside the door, I didn't know. Somebody had to work the mechanism of the Judas window. Somebody had to kill Hume, close up the window, dispose of the cross-bow and the decanter, and generally tidy up. You follow that?
'Well, Dyer let Jim Answell into the house at 6.10. (Established.) It was three minutes at least before Answell took that drugged drink in the study, and longer than that before it hit him over the brain. (Established by Answell himself.) Dyer left the house at 6.15. (Established by me; I put into the right-hand column of my time- table, where I've put only absolutely unquestionable facts, that he got to the garage at 6.18; and, as he himself correctly said at the trial, the garage is a three or four minutes' walk away.) Is it possible to think that in the space of a minute and a half he went through all the hocus-pocus necessitated by Avory Hume's murder? It IS not. The time-element makes it impossible.
'Which brought me up against the revealin' fact that Amelia Jordan was the only person who was known to be alone in the house with Hume and an unconscious man. And she was alone there for seventeen minutes, until Dyer returned with the car at 6.32.
'Oho? Think about this woman for a minute. How would she fulfil the specifications for somebody who'd horned into the plot? She'd been livin' with the Humes for fourteen years: fourteen years, my children, which is certainly enough to qualify her as a member of the family. She was, or seemed to be on the surface, fanatically devoted to Avory. When she got excited - as you noticed she did at the trial - she called him by his first name, which was more than anybody except his own brother had the nerve to do. She was in a position to find out a good deal of what was goin' on in that house. If Avory had to confide his design to anybody, the likeliest person seemed to be a practical, swift-workin', hard-workin' woman who'd been there long enough to grow up in the closed circle of
