From this moment Thorngate, house and grounds, was pandemonium let
loose.
It was clear that the first thing to be done, when it became certain
that Joel Lacey was really among the missing, and had last been seen
sleeping on the library couch, was to institute a searching party.
Because of the numberless recruits, three groups were formed—two taking
the great outdoors and one the sliding panels and the secret attics. The
way the police, Belknap groaned, came scurrying out of corners, like the
Hamlin rats to the piper’s pipe, at news of a safe and sane hunt, when
there was never one of them underfoot when he was needed to block a
murder, made one positively ill. Not that the hunt wasn’t important. But
the bare chances of _finding_ Joel Lacey, much less finding her alive,
seemed so slight in view of the thoroughness of the earlier crimes.
In the midst of it all, behind and before, to right and to left, came
Julian. Julian joined first one searching party, then another, urging,
beseeching, cursing, cajoling, diving into a closet or under a bush as
the case might be. Julian was every which way. Julian was at sixes and
sevens. Julian had gone berserk. Losing Joel, Julian seemed to have lost
whatever of value he had recently possessed: his boyish philosophy, such
as it was; his sense of humor, which hadn’t been bad; his kindly,
inconsequential wit which had served rather to balance the household
during the late unpleasantness. These had vanished in thin air. Instead
here was a frantic, unreasonable, hysterical, bothersome young man who
dogged everyone’s footsteps like a spoilt child, stubbornly refused to
remain even passably steady, and flung wild and outrageous accusations
about like so much confetti. No one escaped his fury or his suspicions.
Even his idol Berry took a raking over the coals that under normal
conditions would have been unpardonable. But when Julian burst into
tears at the end of his peroration Berry let that be the end of it.
Julian said no one was _trying_ to find Joel; he said Nadia Mdevani had
cremated Joel in the furnaces and they must sift the ashes for her
bones; he said Milton Dorn was murdering her by unspeakable degrees in
some god-forsaken hole-in-the-wall where her screams would never be
heard; that Belknap, Berry, and Stebbins had whisked her off to some
Inquisitorial chamber where their minions were torturing a statement
from her. He said the whole investigation from A to Z had been stupidly
handled (he said it very loud and clear, and embellished it with bad
words); that a lot of helpless and innocent people had been kept in a
house which had a chronic disposition to murder, where they had been
nipped off one by one like sheep by wolves; that Thorngate was proving
no better than an Island of Dr. Moreau, only worse, because it was human
beings instead of rabbits being experimented with; he said—
But this was going one further than the harassed Belknap could quite
tolerate. He thrust Julian gently but firmly from the East Room into the
hall, saying, as he closed the door on him:
“Go along, Prentice. I’m sorry. We’re doing all we can, and the best
possible. I have even got in touch with Headquarters again and have
asked them to send an extra man or two. I admit things are pretty damn
thick, but you aren’t thinning them out. So beat it.”
And Belknap turned back to continue, with Berry and Stebbins, the heated
interrogation of Nadia Mdevani by which they hoped to run her to earth
by her own admission, and so, clearing the decks of legal red-tape,
hasten and simplify her path that led but to the grave as best you
looked at it. For, admitted or not admitted, denial could no longer
stand against a sealed order to kill Blake, a gun left lying on the
scene of Whittaker’s murder, and a poisoned sleeping drug administered
to Crawford. This last, in a brief preliminary test, Belknap had proved
to be arsenous oxide; anyway arsenic in one of its forms.
They had of necessity quickly abandoned all attempts on Sydney Crawford.
Not that she stood above suspicion, hardly that (Stebbins had even taken
it upon himself to arrest her willy-nilly), but Sydney, passing from one
phase of excessive shock to another, was now wandering the house like a
modern Ophelia, modern in that nothing she said bore the least
resemblance to her predecessor’s soliloquy. She said cruel, bitter,
terrible things to the walls and the ceilings in a hard, glinting voice:
“I’ll call up Victor and tell him his Daddy’s dead. He’ll remember it
for life if he’s fetched out of bed to be told.” “The place to stab a
man with a paper knife is between the fourth and fifth vertebræ, I mean
ribs. I’ve found _that_ out.” “Well, Romany, if it’s true that the first
two of a triangle to die make the couple in Heaven, _you_ should worry
now. You’ve got him.” Until she changed her tune a little there was no
use bothering with her, for questioning or pressure brought to bear
might push her beyond this ragged edge of insanity.
No danger of insanity in Nadia Mdevani’s case! But apparently no danger
either of obtaining any satisfaction from her. Wanting a confession from
her was one thing—obtaining even a modicum of it was another. Nadia sat
limply, almost unconcernedly, in a deep chair before the East Room fire,
and, never lifting her eyes from a bemused contemplation of the flames,
refused to yield a hair’s breadth of vantage to her tormentors. The
ground they covered with her was the old ground covered in the morning,
but, though her three examiners bore the same names that they had then
born, they were three men of different attitude and temper. Each blaming
himself secretly for an earlier male to female softness, that had
perhaps been responsible for the extra hot water they were now in, was
now out for blood in earnest, beauty or no beauty. It angered them that
she seemed not to notice a difference. Quite as collected, equally as
cool, as during the morning’s session on the stand, she shed their
individual and concerted attacks.
Yes, she had received the order regarding Colonel Blake. No, she could
not say when, or from whom. That was for them to find out—_if_ they
could. Yes, she had taken it to Mr. Belknap. Why? She didn’t exactly
know; an impulse. Perhaps a wily way to further the intimacy between
them! Here she threw a little whimsical smile in Belknap’s direction. If
he saw it he gave no sign. She said she intended telling him she had not
obeyed orders—even though Blake lay dead at that moment on the library
floor. She had intended asking his protection, such protection as a man
of law and justice, power and respect, can give a woman of doubtful
antecedents. The sarcasm, if there was any, was ever so slight.
What _had_ she been doing during the hours before consulting with Mr.
Belknap? Oh-my-God, her weary tone of telling and retelling implied,
what a twice and thrice told tale to repeat. She had gone to her room
and been restless. Naturally; no one else had claimed to be anything
_but_ restless last night, and she wouldn’t profess to be any exception
to the rule. She had read a little, and then done a bit of
reconnoitering— Oh well, _call_ it prowling. What difference did it
make? She had been made aware, putting the two of his absence from his
own room and the two of his voice in Romany’s together, that Bertrand
Whittaker was paying a visit. And that couldn’t be said to have made her
any the less upset. Not that she would have called him one of your
story-book lovers; but this evening she needed him to be his own best
friend with her in his own behalf. Her new distrust of him, a blend of
anger, disrespect and fear, rising from his cat-and-mouse play with his
Diary, was running her blood up close to killing heat. Romany was rather
a last straw. She had returned to her room for her Colt, to find it had
disappeared from the dresser; and had gone on down for a drink to
restore her equilibrium. Again her smile. It was then she had remarked
the gnawing of a rat in the wainscoting—a persistent rat, Mr. Belknap; a
purposeful rat; one intent on going places. She had left him working his
way through, and had gone for a long cooling-off stroll, down to the
water and back. What a night! What a moon!
Stepping back over the low sills into the library, and crossing the dark
room to the door dimly blocked in by the hall light, her foot had
encountered something soft and humpy. By that seventh sense that comes
to one’s aid at such moments she knew it for a body. She had her own
pocket flash. Turning it up she discovered Blake. The message she had
received was illumined in red letters. She was on the point of
destroying it when Belknap occurred to her mischievous mind! It was Mrs.
Crawford who had interrupted their exciting tête-à-tête.
Romany? The first she had seen of Romany last night was this morning
when, with the others, she had seen her dead. No, it wasn’t Romany she
would have killed under the spur of jealousy—if they wanted to name it
jealousy—but Whittaker. _Another_ reason for killing Whittaker, whom she
hadn’t killed. Not even in his case was she guilty, much as she had
intended being. Someone had been ahead of her. Someone who had planted
her gun with one shot fired from it—and in using another gun had had the
misfortune to have to fire twice in order to get the victim cold.
The three men exchanged glances of unmistakable surprise and shock. This
was new testimony on Nadia’s part, though not altogether fresh, and an
entirely new explanation of it. But Nadia never showed by as much as a
shifted finger that she realized the importance of what she had just let
fall.
“Two shots!” Berry said.
“I said two shots.”
“You agree with Prentice?”
“I do.”
“Why haven’t you said so before?”
“I had my reasons.”
“You knew something?”
“If you care to put it that way.”
“You suspected and were afraid?”
“I suspected. I was not afraid.”
“Your explanation of the two shots—whether true or false—is amazingly
clever.” Belknap was deeply respectful.
“Thank you.”
Stebbins interrupted angrily.
“And what about your amatol turning out to be arsenic. Got as clever a
way out of that, lady?”
“I don’t need it—and wouldn’t take it if I did. It’s self-explanatory.
Oh, you detectives!” Nadia threw back her head and laughed suddenly,
weakly, brokenly. “If you want to send me to eternity for Crawford’s
murder you are welcome to do it that I may have the last laugh on you
with the Devil in Hell. He’d understand.”
She covered her face with her hands. It was impossible to be certain
whether she was laughing still, or crying.
“Get out of here, you two,” Berry said quietly to Belknap and Stebbins.
“I want a word with Miss Mdevani alone.” He herded them unceremoniously
toward the door.
“We’ve got under her skin,” he added under his breath. “I think with an
extra hint or two that I have the means to convey (remember she’s not
new to me) we’ll have her where we want her in half a jiffy.”
He shut the door carefully and returned to Nadia.