Seeing is Believing

added to them was a small spoon, together with the analyst's report that in the coating of grapefruit juice adhering to the spoon he had found one-fifteenth of a grain of C₂₁H₂₂N₂O₂, or strychnine.

Rain sluiced down the windows and gurgled along the gutters. It was nearly ten o'clock.

'We're agreed on that?' demanded H.M.

'Definitely,' said Agnew.

'Oh, ah,' conceded Masters, cautious even here.

'Good. Then what in the name of St. Ignatius's beans is delayin' you? Write out your warrant and get the chief constable to sign it. There's no honey-sweet savor about these murders. I tell you, our friend is too dangerous to be allowed loose any longer.'

Masters fingered his chin.

'We're protecting that gal,' pursued H.M., 'as much as we can, without actually havin' a policeman sleeping with her—'

'Now, now!' growled Masters, his sense of the proprities offended.

'But we can't go on doin' it forever. Something's got to be done, and done quick.'

Inspector Agnew picked up the spoon and tapped it on the desk.

'Do you think, sir,' he asked, 'that the person in question has twigged it that we know what we do know?'

H.M. meditated.

'I don't see how, son. The subject's never been brought up, at least by Masters or me; and our star witness is primed in case questions are asked. Now, Masters, speak up: what about it?'

Masters was dogged.

'Now, sir, it's all very well to say that,' he complained. 'But we can't go flying off the handle like that. I admit that the person you say is guilty is guilty. Lummy, I can't very well deny it! We've been fooled by as innocent-faced a piece of acting from a thoroughgoing snake as I ever saw.'

'You're right there,' agreed Agnew, contemplating the past without amusement.

'Very well!' said Masters. 'The case is good. But it's not complete.'

He tapped a sheaf of documents.

'We've got here evidence of motive: that's good. We've got here,' he tapped an official form, 'the statement of the chemist, Lewis L. Lewis: that's better. We've got here, after some downright fine staff-work by Inspector Agnew,' continued Masters, who believes in keeping in well with the local police, 'evidence of the purchase of the knife in Gloucester. That's still better.'

He held up the knife with which Arthur Fane had been stabbed. It still bore, at a distance, resemblance to a rubber one.

'The ironmonger's willing to identify the person who bought it. That was a bad bloomer on our friend's part. But it always happens. These clever people will do it.'

Masters put down the knife, and picked up an official cellophane envelope containing traces of a whitish powder.

'Finding the stuff itself, in the place where we did find it. Lummy! That's the best yet. So far as I'm concerned personally, or a jury's concerned, that's hanging evidence. But, sir, the case isn't complete. It's all very well to say, 'Write out your warrant.' We can't make out one, and the chief constable can't sign it, until we know how the ruddy knife was used, and how the person in question managed to exchange it with the toy one in full view of all the other witnesses.'

'Oh, that?' murmured H.M., as though completely uninterested.

Masters pushed his chair away from the desk. His temper was simmering again.

'Oh, that?' he mimicked. 'I suppose you don't think that's important?'

'It's important. Sure. But it's not difficult.'

'No? You just tell me how it was done — tell me a practical way — and I'll have our friend in chokey before you can say Jack Robinson. The poison-in-the-grapefruit part of the thing, I admit, is easy. That's just what we thought it must be. But the dagger business has got me up a tree, and I don't mind saying so.'

H.M. looked distressed.

'Oh, son, think! I thought you'd tumbled to it long ago. Especially considering what went on in that room that you've heard all about but haven't understood. And considering that most people's idea of usin' their eyesight and estimatin' time is rummy enough to interest J.W. Dunne.'

'You're not going to tell me that the whole blasted crowd except one were blind?'

'No, no, no. Looky here. I'll do better than tell you how it was done. I'll show you how it was done, if you'd like to go out there again tonight.'

'That suits me, sir!' declared Masters, with a breath of deep and wicked satisfaction.

'And me,' said Agnew.

'Good. I sort of thought you might want a demonstration. So I asked Adams's chauffeur to…'

H.M. paused. His eyes opened, and then narrowed.

'Lord love a duck,' he muttered. 'Adams! And young Courtney!'

'What about them?'

H.M. looked guilty. 'I haven't seen the young feller since this afternoon, when-we sent him and the Browning gal up to see Mrs. Fane. But I told him I was feelin' in fine fettle for dictation as usual tonight. I told him to be at Adams's house at nine sharp. He's gone out there in the pourin' rain, and it's past ten already. Y'know, I've got a sort of idea that I may have some explaining to do.'

'Well, there's the telephone,' said Masters impatiently. 'Ring him up and explain.'

The telephone was supported at the desk on one of those folding steel frameworks by which you can pull it out or push it back. H.M. put his hand on the receiver, but for the moment he was not looking at it. He blinked absent-mindedly at the articles on Agnew's desk, revealed with hypnotic clearness by the green-shaded lamp. They were the rubber dagger, the real dagger, the spoon, and the little rows of numerals on another equally important piece of evidence.

“They may have gone to bed at the Fanes',' continued Masters, taking down his raincoat from a hook. 'But, I tell you straight, if I could see my way clear to putting a certain party under lock and key, I'd wake up the Assistant Commissioner himself. If—''

There was an interruption.

'Gaaal' roared Sir Henry Merrivale.

He pushed back his chair with a hideous, chalk-like squeak on the bare boards which made his two companions jump. When they whirled round to look at him, he was regarding the desk with the expression of one whom during a bout of delirium tremens, has just seen another spider walk along the wall.

'The Haunted Man,' ' said H.M.,' 'or The Ghost's Bargain.' Masters, don't ever wish you were me.'

'I never did,' said Masters, 'and, by George, I never will! What's all this foolishness now?'

'It's not foolishness,' H.M. assured him with the utmost earnestness. 'I'm being pursued. I wish you had the sense to see how you were bein' pursued too.'

'Pursued by what?'

'Never mind,' said H.M. darkly. He turned back to the telephone again. 'Oi! Operator! Operator? Gimme Cheltenham double four, double four. That's right… So. Line's engaged.' He banged back the receiver. 'I wonder what that young feller's doin' now?'

Courtney himself would not have been pleased with this question. What he had been doing, up to a few minutes of that call, was sitting in Major Adams's library and listening to a long lecture on India.

It was being delivered by the major himself. And, since it was the second long lecture on India to which he had listened recently, he had grown a trifle fed up.

He preserved a Chesterfieldian politeness. Aside from his first visit to the house, he had not since set eyes on his host, whose habit was to play golf all day and bridge most of the night. But, in the absence of H.M., the major was now laying himself out to be agreeable.

The rain sluiced down. H.M. was an hour and ten minutes late. Courtney, having brought no raincoat to Cheltenham, had been imperfectly protected on the journey out by an umbrella he borrowed from the hall-porter at