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“Oh! You’ve seen it? When?”

“On Sunday morning,” said Herbert pleasantly. “It looked extremely clean then, but you never can tell.”

The Inspector was rather silent after that. They got to the Lancaster house and saw George Talbot asleep on the library couch, with his automatic on the floor beside him. They wakened him finally by rapping on the window, for Herbert Dean was firm about not ringing the bell. Once inside the house, however, the problem was not solved.

“What about the nurse?” George said. “She’s settled in the hall up there. She’s probably asleep, but she may not stay asleep. What’s the idea anyhow?”

“Why not ask her down? Tell her you’re lonely?” Herbert asked.

“I’ve tried that. She’s not having any,” said George gloomily.

“Well, make some coffee. She probably has
one
vice.”

In the end that is what they did; and at something after two o’clock that morning Herbert and the Inspector got into Mrs. Lancaster’s room; while George, who had relieved the nurse in the hall, stood guard at the head of the stairs.

I
T MUST HAVE BEEN
an odd performance, all in all. For I believe Herbert took at first only a casual glance at the room, and then immediately got down on his stomach and wriggled under the bed. The chest had not been replaced, and with his searchlight he examined every inch of the under-side of the bed, including the box mattress.

All this was in silence, with the Inspector watching him and half-amused.

As I have said before, Mrs. Lancaster’s bed stood with its head toward her husband’s room behind it, and she had been found lying on the side toward the door into the hall. This was her customary place in it. Beyond the closet door stood a small chest of drawers, and it was to this corner, between the bed and the door to the hall, that Herbert Dean practically confined his activities that night.

From the bed he moved to the bed table beside it and followed much the same procedure there. The chest of drawers he examined, not only from beneath, but by pulling out each drawer and minutely inspecting its edges. And at last he took down a picture or two from the wall.

“Has it ever struck you,” he asked the Inspector, “that she may not have been in the bed when she was killed?”

“How the devil could she get out of it?”

“I’m leaving that to you. I’d say at a guess that she was standing in front of this chest when the first blow was struck, and that the others followed after she fell to the floor. It’s hard to explain blood on the under-side of the box springs in any other way, Inspector, and it’s there. It’s under the bottom of this chest too, and under the edge of the top drawer.”

“The woman couldn’t walk. Hadn’t walked for years.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that.”

“Listen, Dean,” said the Inspector. “I’m not saying you don’t know your stuff. You do. But I’ll put this to you. She was back in bed all right when she was found. Remember, I’m taking your word now for this idea of yours. I’ll go as far as to say that she didn’t weigh a whole lot, and she could have been lifted back easily enough. But I’m saying this too; that wasn’t done without leaving any marks. I’ll go so far as to say that whoever did it would have been smeared with blood from head to foot. It isn’t pleasant but it’s a fact.”

Herbert agreed grimly.

“I’ve never doubted that, myself. Of course blood washes off.”

The Inspector eyed him.

“What do you mean by that? We examined every inch of this house, and if anyone left it in that condition he wouldn’t have got a hundred yards. Unless—look here, Dean.” He lowered his voice. “I suppose somebody in this house could have stripped mother-naked and done it? This Margaret—by the Lord Harry, Dean! She was taking a shower when the other one called her!”

“Getting ready to take a shower. That’s not quite the same thing.”

“We’ve only her word for that, and I haven’t been any too sure of her right along.”

And then and there, and with some considerable excitement, he told Herbert Dean of the Daltons’ strange excursion to the woodshed that Thursday night, and of the anonymous letter.

“There’s your motive,” he finished triumphantly. “She and Dalton were about to hop it, and of course they needed money. Probably Emily knew or suspected, and so she had to be put out of the way. It even explains the axe. She could get it in any night and nobody would be the wiser.”

“Precisely,” said Herbert. “That’s one of the reasons why I know she didn’t do it. You see, the axe wasn’t brought in that way, Inspector. It was tied to a cord and brought in through an upper window. I’ll not explain that now, but you can take it as a fact.”

“The hell you say!”

“And before anyone does any more cleaning around here,” Herbert added smoothly, “I’d see if there’s print on that bell over the bed, and compare it with the ones on top of the chest. I think you’ll find them the same.”

“And I suppose you know that, too!”

“I can only guess. I think you’ll find that both are Mrs. Lancaster’s.”

It was then that George Talbot tapped warningly at the door, and the two men slipped down the back staircase as the nurse came up by the main one.

The Inspector was upset and uncomfortable. The two men had some coffee in the kitchen, but he was taciturn and annoyed. He asked only one question, and he brought that out of a brooding silence.

“Then where is the bird cage in all this?” he inquired. “And what’s the big idea as to Louisa Hall next door? Why try to bump her off? What’s more, how? I’ve got two operatives on the Dalton house next door; good men too, and they don’t see or hear a thing until she screams. It isn’t natural, Dean.”

“It’s not so hard, Inspector. Take someone who knows every foot of these grounds and every house, as all these people do, and it’s not as difficult as it sounds.”

“But the Hall house was locked too. The mother states that positively. She went over it herself.”

“Not all night. The kitchen door was open for an hour or so, earlier in the night.”

The Inspector actually dropped his cup.

“How do
you
know a thing like that?”

“I watched Lou Hall open it.” And although he explained, the Inspector continued to eye him grimly.

“Damn it all, Dean,” he said at last, “I believe in my soul that you’re the criminal yourself!”

It was four in the morning when he finally departed in the police car which, with its uniformed driver, had been waiting patiently all the time. And at a quarter to five any interested observer could have seen a tall man in dark trousers, sneakers and a pull-over sweater, sitting in the August dawn beside a pile of ashes out in No Man’s Land, and carefully combing them over with his fingers.

By six o’clock he had finished. No one was about except the operative at the rear of the Dalton house, who was watching him with fascinated interest. The tall man got up, stuck an old envelope into his trousers pocket, and carrying something warily in his hand, padded on noiseless feet to the Wellington house.

There I believe he roused a sleepy butler and was admitted. His coat and hat were there in the hall, but he did not take them. Instead he went to the lavatory off the lower hall.

“Got plenty of hot water?” he asked.

“I think so, sir. There’s an automatic heater.”

“Good. Then I’ll need a sieve, if you have one, and—What’s your name?”

“John, sir.”

“I’ll need two flat pieces of glass, John. Window glass. Know of any about?”

And it speaks well either for John’s training or for certain private instructions that he never turned a hair.

“I’m new to the house, sir. But I dare say one could break a basement window.”

“One could, and one might as well hurry and do it.”

He went away, with only the faintest flicker of a glance at what lay in Herbert Dean’s palm, and in five minutes he was back with a wire sieve and two flat pieces of glass.

“Afraid they’re rather irregular,” he apologized.

“Well, breaking a window is irregular too, John. And I’m not doing this for looks.”

The thing he was doing, it appeared, was to place very carefully in the sieve a small charred piece of heavy paper, badly curled and black. After that he turned on the hot water and held the sieve in the steam; held it until the butler offered to relieve him. But he shook his head.

“Hold one of those pieces of glass,” he said. “I’ll be ready to dump it soon.”

And John held it, much as he would hold a card tray at the front door. It is, I think like the bird cage incident, one of the few light notes in all that grisly business of ours, that picture of the two men in that lavatory, the one dirty and unkempt, the other in an old dressing gown, and both enveloped in a cloud of steam while one of them held a sieve and the other the glass from a broken window.

“What do you think it is, John?”

“Perhaps they’ll be able to say at the laboratory, sir.”

Herbert Dean glanced up quickly, but the man’s face was as impassive as ever.

“Headquarters?” he asked quietly.

“Yes. The Inspector got me the job, Mr. Dean. I’d be glad if you kept it to yourself. I do a good bit of inside work of this sort.”

“All right. Now I’m ready.”

And that was how Herbert Dean after a bath, shave and breakfast, turned up rather early in the morning at a downtown laboratory with a piece of heavy charred paper, still bearing along one edge a bit of dingy gilt and securely fastened between two plates of ragged window glass; and also with an envelope containing eight discolored buttons, each with a miniature automobile stamped on it, and a bit of flower or plant stem, an inch or so long.

He was indeed probably leaning over a microscope in that same laboratory when, at a quarter to nine that Tuesday morning, George Talbot was taken to police headquarters for interrogation as to the murder of Emily Lancaster.

S
O QUIETLY HAD THIS
been done that even Herbert Dean had not known it when he had made that visit to me between ten and eleven o’clock of that day.

It was Jim Wellington who came bursting in to tell me at noon, fortunately finding Mother at the Lancasters’ again and myself up and in a chair. But he wasted no time on polite inquiries.

“Look here,” he said. “Where’s Dean? We’ve got to locate him.”

“Why? Is there anything new?”

“New? They’ve arrested George Talbot for killing Emily Lancaster. That’s new, isn’t it? And the devil is that they’ve got it on him. The bullet that killed Emily fits his gun. And when I say fits it, I mean fits it; scratches and all.”

He was almost inarticulate with fear for George and anger as to the whole situation, but at last I got the story pretty much as I know it now.

Early that morning there had appeared at Headquarters a rather frightened negro woman, the Talbots’ Amanda, accompanied by a pompous black man who was her husband; and prompted by him Amanda had told when and where she had found the empty shell in the Talbots’ drying yard.

The Inspector after his long night was still at home and in bed, but Mr. Sullivan was there and heard the story. He let the negroes go but kept the shell, and he apparently sat back and thought about it for some time. Before him on his desk was the report of that scuffle on the grapevine path between Herbert Dean and George the night before, and also of the incident of the stable later on. It seemed to him, and he has repeated this since, that things in general, including Emily Lancaster’s murder, had rather shifted toward the Talbot end of the Crescent, so at last he got a car and drove out there.

George had a forty-five; he knew that. Not only that. George had acknowledged being outside the night of the shooting, and having had to be admitted to the house later on. The more he thought it over the less Sullivan liked it, or the better; I suppose it depends on the point of view. But he had no intention of arresting George Talbot at that time.

He had taken a uniformed man with him and they found George, grumpy after an almost sleepless night, in the stable and ready to get out of his ancient car. Rather apologetically they asked if they might see his gun.

“What for?” he demanded. “Am I under suspicion now? You seem to have tried everyone else.”

“Not at all, but you understand that there is a routine to all this. We’re checking all the guns in the vicinity.”

That seemed to satisfy him, for he produced it at once from the pocket of the car. He was not particularly gracious about it, however.

“It’s such damned nonsense,” he complained. “I sit up all night and lose my sleep to protect the Lancaster house with that gun, and now I’m a suspect myself. I’ve got a permit, by the way. Do you want that?”

He seemed astounded when they did, but he produced it and they checked the number on it, which was correct. Certainly it was his own gun.

“I’ve cleaned it recently,” he said. “Yesterday evening, as a matter of fact. I knew I was taking it with me last night.”

“And when did you fire it last?” Sullivan asked him. But he could not remember. In the spring, he thought, or early summer, at a picnic. They had been shooting at empty bottles.

He was rather affronted than alarmed apparently when they took it away with them. After all, he had been up most of the night and was generally disgruntled anyhow. But in less than an hour he was at Police Headquarters. Examination had showed that bullets fired from his gun corresponded exactly under the microscope with the one which had killed Miss Emily.

Confronted with this fact, even shown the pictures, greatly enlarged, he either maintained a stubborn silence or reiterated his earlier story. He had slept with the gun under his pillow ever since Mrs. Lancaster was killed. He had put on the safety catch and crawled out the window with it in his hand. He had not fired it at all; had had no reason to fire it.

What was more, no one else had fired it. It had never left his possession. Since the Thursday before he had slept on it at night and carried it with him by day.

On the night before, knowing he was to spend the night as he had, he had taken it entirely apart, had taken out the barrel and the spring, had oiled and rubbed it and then reloaded it.