In a moment or two Blodwen had regained her self-control.
“I’m sorry,” she said, drawing stiffly away from him. “I didn’t think I could be such a fool. There seems to be a limit to what one can bear, after all. And now this —this horrible ring! I’d better tell you, I suppose—”
There was a questioning note in her voice as if she were still half-minded to leave him in the dark to think what he would.
“You certainly had,” said John emphatically. “And whatever the truth is, it can’t be so dreadful after all. You wouldn’t have thought it so dreadful yourself if it hadn’t been for the strain you’ve been living under this past week. Come, Blodwen. I am certain that your uncle is innocent.”
“But why? But how?” she faltered. “Oh, so was I at first! But everything points to him and I can’t be certain any longer! I feel a traitor, but I can’t, I can’t!”
She seemed disposed to weep again, but mastering herself said quietly:
“I found that ring pushed down at the side of the seat in my uncle’s car. That’s all. The car he was driving when he—when he met Charles. I was out in the car last night, and I dropped a shilling in the dark. And I felt about and pushed my hand down at the side of the cushion, and found—that.”
“And you think he put it there?”
“Who else? It was the last straw, John! I’ve been fighting and fighting not to think him guilty. But that coat found on the Forest! And now this! Oh, it’s so like Uncle Morris! To be so careless, I mean, to be so thoughtless—to underestimate so the forces that would come to work against him!”
“There’s one obvious thing to be said, my dear. What did he want with the ring at all? Why didn’t he leave it on Charles’s finger?”
“Oh, I don’t know! You said yourself, long ago, it might have slipped off in a struggle.”
“A ring must be loose to slip off accidentally, very loose. But be comforted, Blodwen, this ring was tight on Charles’s finger. Lion Browning told me so, and young Lion’s an intelligent observer.”
“But who—?”
“Who took it off and planted it in your uncle’s car? Ah, who? The murderer. And who is he? I don’t know yet. Obviously not a friend of your uncle’s, that’s all we can say at present. But I’m feeling rather optimistic to-night.”
Blodwen, a little cheered by his calm and talkative manner, took his arm, and they went together across the lawn towards the house.
“Optimistic!” she echoed with a faint sigh. “Oh; John, why? Has anything happened that I don’t know about?”
“A lady tried to poison me this afternoon,” said John with enjoyment. “Perhaps two ladies, but I think only one. Nothing makes a detective so happy, my dear, as an attempt on his life. It shows that somebody is finding him a nuisance.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
JIGSAW PUZZLE
Rampson and Mr. Clino were occuping chairs opposite one another in the library. As John came in from outside the latter rose hastily. He was still wearing his Inverness but had laid aside the Homburg hat. His thick grey hair stood up like the crest of a tropical bird. He was obviously puzzled, offended and very much on his dignity. So much so that even the sight of Blodwen, dishevelled in her evening dress, did not cause him more than a momentary surprise.
“Blodwen, my dear!” he exclaimed. “Were you also disturbed by our guests’ curious behaviour?” He glanced balefully at Rampson. “Perhaps, sir, you will now be so good as to allow me to return to my room.”
“Really, Cousin Jim,” said Blodwen with a faint smile. “I do think you owe our guests an explanation, if it’s true that you’ve been trying to shoot them.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Rampson in some amusement. “We’ve been having a heart-to-heart talk about it. Mr. Clino thought we were burglars, and very natural too. All forgiven and forgotten.”
But Mr. Clino was not to be thus pacified.
“Not at all, not at all,” he declared peevishly. “All is not forgotten. And I never for a moment took you for anybody but yourselves.”
“And yet you tried to shoot them, Cousin Jim?”
“I had no intention of killing them,” said the old man with dignity. “I merely intended to—ah! wound one of them a little. And I did not fire at all until I had plainly seen a revolver in the hands of this—ah! gentleman.”
“It was awfully kind of you not to kill us,” murmured Rampson, who appeared to be enjoying himself. “Do you often have midnight shooting-parties here with harmless humans for targets?”
“Harmless!” echoed Mr. Clino, quivering with indignation. “I don’t regard you as harmless, sir! Neither you nor your so-called detective friend! Harmless people don’t prowl about people’s gardens in the small hours of the morning flourishing revolvers—”
“Nor sporting-guns,” put in Rampson mildly.
“I’ve had my suspicions of you two for some time,” continued Cousin Jim. “No, Blodwen, I will have my say. The time has come to speak plainly. Who are these two people living under our roof? Nobody knows. What are they doing here? Investigating the crime! Ha! Their own conduct needs a little investigating, I think. We’re not the first household to be taken in by a pair of presentable crooks. Investigating the crime, indeed! Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? You may take it as a matter of course, Blodwen, when slippery-tongued young men descend from nowhere and plant themselves under your roof as amateur detectives. You may even take it as a matter of course when they go downstairs in the middle of night and flourish revolvers about the garden, but—”
“It’s not a scrap more extraordinary than one’s cousin flourishing a gun. Do stop it, Cousin Jim! If you want to know, John and Mr. Rampson were looking for me with a revolver just as you were looking for them with a gun, and with the same worthy motives. I’d no idea”—she gave a pale smile—”that I should disturb the entire household. Now do apologize to them, Cousin Jim, for calling them crooks, and then we’ll all go to bed.”
Mr. Clino, however, stood firm.
“I’ll apologize,” he said coldly, “when I learn that I have reason to.”
Blodwen flushed angrily and seemed about to make a stinging retort, but John interposed.
“Mr. Clino,” he remarked pensively, “has been reading his favourite authors again, I imagine. I mean, of course,” he added, meeting with a placid eye Cousin Jim’s look of swift suspicion and reproach, “Scott and Thackeray.”
There was a pause, while Mr. Clino seemed to advance to the very verge of a furious tirade and then, cautiously, with an eye on John’s tranquil face, to retreat from it. And suddenly John was sorry and wished he had not taken this advantage. Poor dilettante Cousin Jim, with his purple pyjamas and his Holmes-like Inverness and his sporting-gun and his sense of dignity! He was not lacking in courage, when all was said. For the old man to venture alone into the garden at dead of night in search of two desperadoes was no mean feat of bravery, even allowing for the spiritual exaltation natural to one whose mental diet is stories of detection and crime. And it is never agreeable to discover that the marauding wolf one has strung oneself up to capture is only a poor sheep after all. “I’m sorry,” said John sincerely. “Don’t let’s be rude to one another. We’ve all been horribly excited and—”
“I,” put in Mr. Clino, with sotto voce, cautious indignation, “am never excited.”
“—and now we’re all suffering from reaction. We’d better all try and get a few hours’ sleep.”
“Sleep!” echoed Blodwen softly, as if the sweet word had almost ceased to have a meaning for her. “I’ll go to bed, because there’s nothing else to do. But I don’t think I shall sleep.”
“Neither shall I,” said John, “until I’ve discovered what it is that’s worrying me.”
“Worrying you?”
“Yes. Do you know that feeling when you’re trying to work out a problem and you feel you’re nearly there— so nearly, and yet not there at all? I’ve got it now. You’ve got all the facts in your mind,
and you feel that it only needs a touch, a thought, to make them all slip together into a solved problem. But the touch won’t come, though you think and think. It’s like when you forget a word you know as well as your own name. You’ve used it hundreds of times, but the more you try to call it up the more it hovers just out of reach, teasing you with ghosts of its shape and sound. That’s how I feel. Until this evening I’ve had just a collection of stray facts in my head, with one or two carefully worked out possibilities, but I’ve had none of that sense of conviction, of utter certainty, that comes with the right word. It came for a moment, or rather it nearly came, this evening—when was it? I don’t even remember now when it came.”
John looked thoughtfully from Blodwen to Mr. Clino and around the room. His wandering eye fell on the log-piled hearth.
“Yes! Yes!” he cried. “Sydenham, it was when we were standing behind the cedar and you whispered: Fire! Fire! and I found the pistol was broken. It seemed in a moment a terribly important thing that the pistol was broken; it was like the key to a puzzle, and I had a sense that if only I could keep my mind blank for a moment the puzzle would be solved. But”—he glanced humorously at Mr. Clino—”there was a pressing reason why I couldn’t keep my mind a blank. And the thing never happened. The flash passed over. But that sense of being on the verge of the truth and yet not being able to reach it—I’ve got that dimly still.”
Blodwen, who had listened with eyes half sceptical, half hopeful, said quickly:
“Can’t we help? If we talk it over together?”
“No, no. Leave it alone, as one leaves alone the word one can’t remember, and it may come of itself. I’ll go to my room and read some not too exciting book, and perhaps it’ll come to me through the print. Or, if not, in my dreams.”
But John was not destined either to read or dream that night. Suddenly, with an eerie urgency, the telephone bell began to ring. Dulled beyond the thick library door, yet penetrating and insistent, so startling at that hour of the night that the four people in the library looked blankly at one another without moving, its hard, mechanical purr suggested the vague alarm of some far-off, unforeseen disaster. Without a word from anyone Blodwen left the room.
The three remaining in the library said nothing, each mind occupied with its own surmises. She was a long time away. Felix, awakened by the ringing of the bell, put his head into the room, said blankly: “Hullo! What the deuce?” and without appearing to need an answer lit a cigarette and joined the group round the mahogany desk, waiting for Blodwen to return.
When she came back it was hurriedly, but with eyes more puzzled than alarmed.
“It’s Dr. Browning,” she said. “Ringing up about Nora.”
John’s heart stood still for a moment.
“It seems she’s disappeared or something.”
“What?”
Felix’s cigarette dropped and he glanced quickly at John.
“What do you mean? What did he say?” Slowly John grew cold all over with the premonitions of disaster.
“Well,” said Blodwen, “he wanted first to know whether she’d come here. It seems her sister rang up to tell him the silly girl had started to drive home by herself.”
“What, at this hour?”
“Well, of course she started hours ago, but she hasn’t turned up, and Dr. Browning’s naturally getting worried. Apparently she went out in the afternoon with a friend to do some shopping, saw the friend into a cinema and went off somewhere by herself. Then about seven o’clock she came home and said she must drive back to her father’s straight away. Her sister tried to stop her, but she would have her way, borrowed her sister’s car and set out in it. And she hasn’t arrived yet. The doctor’s half off his head with anxiety. I must say I don’t quite see why. Nora’s quite capable of driving herself home, though it’s a silly thing to do when she might just as well have waited till to-morrow and let her father sleep in peace. After all, it’s only half-past two now, and one can’t drive fast at night. Besides, she may have had a puncture. But of course the doctor’s afraid of an accident.”
John and Felix looked at one another.
“Did Nora’s sister know the name of the friend Nora went to see?” asked John quietly.
Blodwen looked at him in surprise.
“Friend? Nobody said anything about her going to see a friend!”
“No, of course not. But that’s what she did, I’m sure.” John looked stonily at the desk. “I ought never to have taken Nora to London. I ought to have insisted on her coming back with me. I ought to have made her promise —oh, what’s the use of all this? We must drive back to London and look for her, that’s all. What else can we do? But a five-hour journey, and at the end of it— what?”
Felix said swiftly:
“But think, John! Even if it’s true what you fear, they’ll never dare hurt Nora. For they know that you suspect them. They’ll never dare.”
“That’s true,” said John slowly. “It ought to be true. But one never knows what desperation will drive a person to. Suppose Nora did go there. Suppose she found out something—something that we don’t even guess at. Oh, if only I could see the meaning of all this! For one minute when I pulled the trigger and that revolver wouldn’t fire, I thought I was on the verge of knowing everything. But it’s gone, gone, gone and won’t come back. Yes, Felix, we’d better fling some clothes on and drive to London. We daren’t take any risks. There’s too much at stake.”
He was about to follow Felix out of the room when Blodwen said in a low voice:
“You’d better take care of—this, John.”
She held out to him the blood-stone ring which, in the stress of this new fear, he had put down upon the desk and forgotten. He took it and slipped it hastily on to his little finger, and was about to go when his mind, below the stress of his fears for Nora, seemed to become suddenly, deeply aware of some vague anomaly. The ring? He looked at it. Yes, a blood-stone ring. That was a blood-stone, wasn’t it, that dark green, red-flecked stone? He used force, he pushed, he pulled, he tried it on the little finger of his other hand above his own signet-ring. He stood quite still, frozen, looking down at the ugly blood-stone ring which, try as he might, would not pass the middle joint of his little finger.
“But of course,” he said to himself very quietly, “Of course. Of course. Of course. And now we know.”
Felix, hovering in the doorway, looked at him with impatient surprise, and Blodwen asked with a wild hope that she tried to disguise as scepticism:
“What do we know?”
“Everything,” said John. “Everything. Who murdered Charles, for instance, we know that now. Oh, it all fits in so beautifully now. All the stray facts, one after another, up they come and fall into place. Yes, the apples in the quarry, and the egg-shells in the orchard, and the red ink in the fountain-pen and the blood on the darning-needle, and the iodine at Moseley, and the raincoat on the Forest and the broken revolver in the bedroom. Even young Smiler’s bicycle. I wonder where it is now, young Smiler’s bicycle? At the bottom of what pond? And Charles took the single room that ought to have been Dr. Browning’s, didn’t he? That fits in, too. And he didn’t care for bathing—yes, that, too. Oh, yes,” finished John quietly, “we know now. Everything. Everything except what’s happened to Nora. And you don’t tell me that, do you, ugly little blood-stone ring? But you let me guess! You let me guess!”
That nightmare drive was a thing John never forgot. Almost in silence the three of them drove towards Penlow, on a clear road, with the queer grotesque tree-shapes of night all round, and an absurd cock at some distant farm proclaiming morning. Rampson drove the car, while John occupied himself with fruitless guesses at Nora’s actions. Why had she suddenly decided to drive home, alone, at such an hour? How had her sister, who had appeared to be a sensible young woman, come to consent to such a thing? John smiled grimly in spite of his anxiety. He could imagine that Nora Browning was not the person to wait for anybody’s consent when she had made up
her mind to a course of action. If she had determined to drive home through the night, her sister’s commonsense objections would be less than the dust beneath her borrowed wheels. But what could have brought her to such a determination? John could think of only one thing. She had taken the law into her own hands, and sought out Isabel and her aunt; and she had discovered something which seemed to her so important that she had set out immediately to bring the news to John.
“I shall never forgive myself,” said John between his teeth, “if Nora’s come to harm.”
“Nor I,” said Felix.
“You!” said John, and for a second there was the queerest little flash of enmity between the two of them. “You’re not to blame. You didn’t know what Nora intended to do. I did. I guessed, I spoke of it, I made a joke of it, and at the slightest, vaguest reassurance I dropped my responsibility.”
“Neither of you,” said Rampson, reaching sixty miles an hour, “can be held to blame for what a grown-up person like Nora chooses to do.” But neither of them thanked him for his comfort.
They passed Dr. Browning’s house, and noted a light burning in one of the upper rooms—the doctor anxiously sitting up for his missing daughter. There was no travel-stained car standing outside the garden gate.
In Penlow High Street a solitary policeman was conversing with a thin and anxious-looking black and white kitten. He answered John’s beckoning hand with alacrity, and the kitten trotted after him, tail erect and all the troubles of the world reflected in her anxious eyes.
Yes, a car had passed through the town about an hour ago. Driving faster than it had any business to, even on a clear street. He’d taken its number, a London number. A lady driving? No! This was a large coupe, with two or three people in it and a man driving. No, he hadn’t noticed any car driven by a lady pass through the town, and he’d been on his beat since midnight. He was prepared to swear there hadn’t been a car with a lady driving, not through the town since midnight. Oh, yes, he was quite sure it was a man driving the coupe. Driving faster than he’d any right to, too. There might have been a lady inside, he couldn’t say. A party coming back from a dance, he opined, and a bit above theirselves. They’d feel different if they got summonsed. Nearly run over the kitten, they had.
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