“Not at once,” said David obtusely. “I went down to the bath-room first.”
“No, you didn’t,” Roger retorted, with some exasperation. “You never went near the bath-room. You followed Nicolson straight into the ballroom. In fact, you both went together.
He remembers you did.”
A very faint smile appeared on David’s pale face. “Yes, that’s right. I remember now, too. And if you want to know, I went straight up to Agatha and asked her to dance, because I hadn’t been able to dance with her before. My wife,” said David in an expressionless voice, “didn’t like her. God knows why.”
“Exactly. She’ll remember that, too. And you stayed with her some time, of course, and after that you were never alone until Ronald actually saw you off the premises.”
“Ronald didn’t. I—”
“Yes, he did.”
“Oh, all right. It all seems very unnecessary,” said David wearily, “but I suppose you’re right.” Roger snorted.
Leaving the study, Roger hurried off in search of Mrs. Lefroy. He ran her to earth in the drawing-room, detached her from a group, and led her outside the door. Time was short, and he could not mince matters.
“You remember when I took David off to have a drink, after his wife had flung herself out of the ballroom? Well, I didn’t come back with him. Colin Nicolson did. You remember seeing them come in, don’t you?”
“No,” said, Mrs. Lefroy doubtfully. “I remember David coming and sitting by me, but I think that was some time later, wasn’t it?”
“It was exactly thirteen minutes after I took him out, but you don’t know that. What you do know is that you saw him and Colin come into the ballroom together, and David came straight across and joined you.”
Mrs. Lefroy was a rare woman. “Yes,” she said at once. “I remember perfectly.”
“Bless you,” said Roger. “Where’s Ronald?”
Ronald was discovered in the study, with David. They were not talking.
“Go home, David,” said Roger. “You mustn’t be here too much. We don’t want to look like a conspiracy, whether we are one or not. Go home and stick to your story, and you’ll be all right.”
David went.
“The police have gone,” Ronald said. “Shall we——”
“Damn the police,” said Roger. “They’ll be back soon enough.”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. By the way, they’ve altered the place of the inquest. It’s to be in Westerford now, not here.”
Roger nodded. “I expected that. Now, listen to me Ronald, because I’m going to speak very carefully.” He repeated the gambit which he had already used on David.
“Yes,” said Ronald. “I understand perfectly. But I don’t think you do.”
“I don’t want to, any more than that,” Roger said quickly. “All I want you to do is to look after your own alibi, because I haven’t the time, and be ready to swear that you went down to the front door with your brother and saw him out of the house.”
“Oh, my alibi’s all right,” Ronald said carelessly. “I never left the ballroom at all from the time Ena went out of it till just before David went, when I was at the bar with you.”
“You didn’t?” said Roger.
So it had been David after all.
“No. Heaps of people can swear to that. But look here, Roger,” said Ronald anxiously, “are you quite sure David’s is all right? Is it really cast-iron?”
“Absolutely. No, not cast-iron. Not so brittle. Wrought iron. I’ve just,” said Roger with a smile, “been forging it.”
“Ah! Well listen, Roger,” Ronald said slowly, “I want to speak carefully to you, too. I haven’t said a word to David, and he hasn’t said a word to me. I quite agree with you that it’s much better not to
know
anything. I can see that’s your line, and it’s the right one. But I do just want to say this, Roger. That woman utterly deserved—well, anything she got.”
“I know she did,” Roger said, not without emotion. “And that’s just why I’m not knowing anything at all. But I’ll say this, Ronald. Everything will be all right.”
“Sure?”
“Sure. You see, after all, there’s no evidence at all. Not to say, evidence.”
Fleeing any more emotion, Roger hurried off in search of Colin. The police might be back at any moment, and Roger wanted everything nice and simple for them when they came.
Colin was smoking his pipe with Williamson on the lawn in front of the house.
Roger called him aside and began once more.
“Colin, after I’d gone up on the roof last night and left you with David, you didn’t go back to the ballroom alone. David went with you.”
“But I’ve told you already I…”
“Colin, I haven’t got much time. Listen. David went with you. Mrs. Lefroy remembers seeing you both come in together. And,” said Roger with emphasis, “David himself remembers that he went in with you. David himself remembers it, Colin.”
“Oh!” said Colin slowly.
“Yes, you were wrong, I’m afraid. But the lad’s perfectly safe, so long as you remember just that thing.”
“Of course I remember we went in together,” said Colin firmly. “Haven’t I told you so all along?”
“Then thank goodness that’s settled.” Roger mopped his brow and took a breath of relief.
“But Roger, man, what are the police up to? Do you mean to tell me they smell a rat? What were they doing, taking photographs on the roof?”
“I don’t know,” Roger admitted. “But that appears to be my next job, to find out. Little did I think that the Great Detective would ever come down to detecting what the official detectives may have detected already. Well, well.”
“Does it look serious, do you think?”
“No, I don’t think so really,” Roger said as they walked back towards the house. “It’s alarming, of course, but I don’t see how it can possibly be serious. They can’t have anything more than the vaguest suspicions; and suspicion never even arrested anyone without some kind of evidence too, let alone hanged him. Anyhow, if the coast’s clear, we’ll see if we can make out what they’ve been up to.”
The coast was clear, and the roof unguarded. Even the large constable had been withdrawn.
“Ah!” said Roger, and looked round.
At a first glance everything seemed exactly the same.
“Well, I don’t know what the deuce they were at, unless they really were still worried about that chair,” said Roger, and walked towards the gallows.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed in surprise. “It’s gone!”
He looked round again. Undoubtedly the chair had gone. Three chairs still stood on the roof, but exactly as they had stood before. The fourth, under the gallows, had disappeared.
“Let’s see if it’s in the sun-parlour,” said Roger.
It was not in the sun-parlour.
“Well, what on earth would they want to take it away for?” asked Colin, no less puzzled.
“Heaven only knows.” Roger was beginning to feel worried, in the way that the inexplicable does worry. “I can’t make it out at all. The only importance in the chair to them was its position with regard to the gallows. As an object apart from its position, I can’t see how it could possibly interest them.” Already such a simple act as the carrying away of the chair was beginning to look sinister. Roger felt perfectly equal to combating the known moves of an opponent, but this was an unknown one, and how can one combat that?
“Ach,” Colin tried to be reassuring, “they’re just daft. Trying to be too clever, that’s all.”
“No,” Roger worried. “No, I don’t think that can be it. They must have had some reason.”
He stared at the roof where the chair had lain.
Suddenly he uttered an exclamation and dropped on his hands and knees, to peer intently at that same bit of roof.
“Have you found something?” Colin asked eagerly.
Roger blew gently at the ground, and then again. Then he got up and faced Colin.
“I know why they took that chair away,” he said slowly. “Colin, I’m afraid we’re rather up against it.”
“What do you mean, man?”
“I was wrong when I said they were working just on suspicion, with no evidence to back it. They have got evidence. Can you see faint traces of grey powder there? That’s insufflator powder. They’ve been trying to take fingerprints off that chair, and they’ve found that there aren’t any at all—not even Ena’s.”
UNSCRUPULOUS BEHAVIOUR OF A GREAT DETECTIVE
“We must keep calm,” said Roger, not at all calmly. “We mustn’t lose our heads. We’re in a nasty jam, but we
must
keep calm, Colin.”
“It’s the devil,” muttered Colin, in a distressed voice.
“We must try to work out their moves,” Roger continued, a little less wildly, “so that we can forestall them. You’re the only person I can talk to freely, so you’ve got to help me.”
“I’m with you all the way, Roger.”
“You’d better be,” said Roger grimly. “Because we’re both of us for it if the truth comes out. In a moment of lunacy I put myself in the position of accessory after the fact, to shield someone else (I suppose one can be an accessory after the fact to a crime, by the way, without having the least knowledge of the criminal’s identity? It’s an interesting point); and you did the same by shielding me. I hope you realise that?”
“I’m afraid you’re right. I’m an accessory to an accessory, at any rate, if there is such a position. But let’s look on the bright side, Roger. Things might have been worse if I hadn’t wiped those prints of yours off the chair. Worse for you, I mean.”
“And possibly worse still for someone else besides me,” Roger retorted.
The two were sitting in the sun-parlour, whither they had retired in some alarm after Roger’s discovery on the roof, to talk the thing over. Roger had spent another five minutes, crawling about on his hands and knees round the gallows, to see whether anything else was to be read from the surface of the roof, but beyond one or two burnt match-stalks had found nothing. He had explained to Colin that the police would have done exactly the same thing and equally, it was to be presumed, found no scratches or other marks on the surface of the asphalt to indicate that anything in the nature of a struggle had taken place there; though whether they might have found anything else of a removable nature could not be said.
Roger relit his pipe and continued, considerably calmer. Unlike many people, Roger found argument soothing.
“Yes, that’s quite true, Colin. If you hadn’t wiped off my prints, what would they have found? That officious inspector was going to test the chair for prints in any case. He’d have found mine, and presumably those of the person who carried all the chairs on to the roof, and probably several others as well. But he wouldn’t have found Ena Stratton’s, which he was looking for; and that might have made things more awkward even than they are now. I wonder, by the way,” Roger added vaguely, “how the particular chair of the four which I chose happened to get where it was, right in the middle of the fairway. It was the one, of course, which you knocked over.”
“I didn’t knock it over,” Colin contradicted. “It nearly knocked me over. It was lying on its side. That’s why I didn’t see it.”
“Lying on its side, just about half-way between the gallows and the door into the house,” Roger meditated. “It might have been there, of course, when I was standing just outside the door earlier, but if so I don’t remember noticing it. And it certainly wasn’t there at the beginning of the evening, when Ronald took me up to show me his gallows, because we walked abreast straight across from the door. Somebody must have put it there later. I wonder if that has any significance?”
“Well, there was a chair missing from the picture,” Colin pointed out.
“Exactly. Could the murderer have been going towards the gallows with it, intending to complete the picture, and then been alarmed or distracted, and dropped it there to make his escape?”
“That sounds feasible enough, Roger.”
“Yes, but it’s so easy to think of a feasible explanation of a fact, without knowing in the least whether it’s the right one, and without probably realising how many other feasible explanations of the same fact there may be. That was the trouble with the old-fashioned detective-story,” said Roger, somewhat didactically. “One deduction only was drawn from each fact, and it was invariably the right deduction. The Great Detectives of the past certainly had luck. In real life one can draw a hundred plausible deductions from one fact, and they’re all equally wrong. However, we’ve no time to bother with that now.”
“You were talking about the chair,” Colin reminded him.
“Yes. It’s odd that it should have been there, but I can’t see that it has any real bearing on the actual crime. Though if my explanation is right, the police would have found the murderer’s prints on it, though not Ena Stratton’s. I’m sorry, by the way, to keep on using that term for the poor fellow who retorted on her at last in the only possible way, but there doesn’t seem to be another. Executioner is too formal.”
“David,” said Colin carefully, “actually admitted it to you?”
“Oh, no. He didn’t try, and I wouldn’t have let him if he had. It just went tacitly, by default. But Ronald did.”
“Ronald told you he and David had done it?”
“No, no. Ronald apparently had no hand in it. He doesn’t appear to be in the least worried about his alibi. But he knows David did it. He told me with some care that David hasn’t said a word to him, or he to David; but he knows all right, and I should imagine that David knows he knows. But Ronald and I took some time in explaining elaborately to each other that neither of us do know anything, and don’t intend to; so that’s all quite satisfactory.”
“And the police don’t
know.
”
“No, that’s our great consolation. And that’s what we’ve got to build on. Let’s try to reconstruct their ideas. They can’t possibly
know
even that murder has been committed at all, let alone who did it. They may remotely suspect, but all they actually know is that there has been some hanky-panky going on. Some interested party wiped that chair clear of finger-prints; and not just the back, but the sides and seat and everything. You did wipe the seat, didn’t you?”
“I polished the blessed seat!” groaned Colin.
“Don’t be unhappy. It’s a very good thing you did. Don’t you see that with a wooden seat like that, not only finger-prints but traces of foot-prints would be looked for. The suicide theory involves Mrs. Stratton having stood on a chair. Well, with modern methods of detection it would be perfectly simple to establish whether anyone had or had not stepped recently on to the seat of that chair from this roof. The surface of the asphalt is covered with flint; quite a large amount of it would be carried up on to the seat of the chair, and pressed firmly into the varnish, and even into the wood, by the weight of the person. The knocking over the chair would displace some, but not all; and the traces of what had been displaced would be quite visible. A microscopic examination of the seat would tell all this as clearly as I’ve told it to you.