“You don’t mean there’s something about the body that makes you think…?”
“I mean that exactly!”
He ran a hand across his rather untidy dark hair. “Perhaps you would like me to tell you some of the things I noticed. In the first place there’s a curiously curved abrasion on Ivor Drake’s right temple just above the hairline. The blow which caused it would not have been strong enough to kill him, but it could have rendered him unconscious. Of course, he might have knocked his head on the gunwale of the boat or on the dock as he fell overboard. But it’s equally possible that someone deliberately struck him with some hard curved object, isn’t it?”
“Possible, but…”
“In the second place there are several bruises and scratches on his face and neck. Of course, Bermuda coral is very sharp.” Dr. Thorne shrugged. “But it looks to me as if those marks were almost certainly made before death and by human fingers—and fingernails.”
Suddenly, dreadfully, there came the memory of Elaine’s scratched cheek, Elaine’s torn evening dress with its telltale scarlet stain.
His voice sounded again. “Unless it can be proved that Drake was in some sort of physical fight earlier this evening, it’s going to be difficult to explain those scratches away.”
“But bruises and scratches!” echoed Kay desperately. “That’s ridiculously flimsy. Besides, you—you can’t think that any of the Chilterns could have killed him. He’s—he’s done so much for them.”
“So very much!” echoed Dr. Thorne with unmistakable irony. He was still looking at her. “So you expect me to supply a motive too.” One hand moved to the pocket of his tweed jacket and drew something out of it. As he held it up for her to see, the room seemed to swim around her.
For the thing he was holding in his hand was a little green leather-bound notebook.
Rosemary’s diary…!
“Don’t you think,” he said quietly, “that this might supply a motive?”
For a moment she could not believe it. It seemed so entirely impossible that the little book which had disappeared from her dressing-table drawer could now be in the possession of this unfriendly, amazing young man who was, if not actually a policeman, at least very definitely on the side of the law.
“From the note Rosemary Drake wrote you on the first page,” he was saying in that soft voice which was so inexplicably hostile, “I assume this book is your property. I assume also that you brought it with you to Bermuda to try to stop the wedding.” With an unexpectedness which was devastating, he showed very white teeth in a smile. “Well, the wedding’s certainly stopped now, isn’t it?”
Kay stared at him helplessly.
“You did bring the diary here, didn’t you, Miss Winyard?”
It seemed futile to pretend any longer to this young man who seemed so uncannily to know everything. She nodded. “But how—where did you find it?”
“On the swimming beach just now. Major Clifford’s man called him down to look at something on the beach as I was finishing my examination of the body. I followed and my flashlight happened to pick out the book caught up in the yuccas. Someone must have thrown it there.”
“And—and Major Clifford saw it too?”
“No. He has not seen it.”
“But you’ve told him—what you told me?”
“I have made my report to him. Yes.”
So it was definitely gone now, the pitiful chance that the night’s events might pass without leaving a wake of fear and danger behind them.
Kay said, almost in a whisper: “You told him you suspected—murder?”
Dr. Thorne tapped with his little finger on the diary. “It’s my job to report my medical findings to the police. I passed on to Major Clifford, as the local police magistrate, the facts which I, as a doctor, observed from a superficial examination of the body. I shall make a full official report to him after the autopsy.”
He had flicked open the diary and was reading a page. Slowly he shut the book and looked straight at her, his lips very tight.
Kay was startled by the change in his expression. The cold impersonality had slipped away like a mask and his face, with its sharp cheekbones and tightly drawn skin, was the haggard, tormented face of a man living in his own private hell.
His voice suddenly rasping, he said: “You don’t really remember me, do you? My face is familiar, but you haven’t placed me. I’m not surprised. You only saw me once—when you were here three years ago. We met at Rosemary Powell’s house, Rosemary Powell who became Rosemary Drake.”
It came back then. She had gone with Ivor in the very early days to Rosemary’s house for cocktails. There had been a young man there who had hardly spoken, a dark, smoldering young man who had left almost as soon as they had arrived.
“I happen to remember you vividly,” he was saying. “Partly I suppose because you’re a very attractive girl. But mostly because I’d heard so much about you from Rosemary.”
His gaze still fixed her. She felt strangely weak, hypnotized, as if there was no escape from that dark, steady gaze. “What I heard about you didn’t appeal to me. At first I thought you were just another cheap thrill-chaser in Ivor’s life. Later, when I realized you had seen through him and cut loose, I disliked you even more because by breaking with him you left Rosemary entirely at his mercy.”
“But why…?”
“You may understand my position a little better when I tell you that I had known Rosemary ever since she was a child. Before she met Ivor I was…” He stopped and looked down at the whitening knuckles of his clenched hand. Then he looked up again abruptly. “Before she met Ivor, I was hoping to marry her myself.”
His fingers had tightened around the diary. “It was not easy for me, first watching Rosemary going through hell when you stepped between her and Ivor; and later watching her go to—to hell when you’d stepped out again.”
“But I tried to warn her. I did everything to try to make her see what sort of a person Ivor was. I…”
Kay broke off, frightened at what the impulse to justify herself had forced her to admit.
“You may have tried,” he said in a low, dry voice. “But you didn’t succeed in stopping Rosemary’s wedding the way you appear to have succeeded in stopping Elaine’s.”
His bitterness against her was vibrant in his voice and it kindled anger in her. He had no right to hint that she had killed Ivor. No right…
His voice sounded again. “When I looked at Rosemary’s diary just now, when I saw in writing some of the ghastly truth that I’d always suspected, I hated Ivor more than I thought I could hate anyone. Not that I’d had any love for him before. This last year after Rosemary’s death when Ivor came back here, I attended him and his guests just because I’m the only doctor in this parish. That was a purely professional affair.”
It was so difficult to make the adjustment, to find out where she stood with this man who fantastically was saying these things and yet was—on the side of the law.
Kay asked falteringly: “But I don’t understand. Why are you telling me these things—now of all times?”
“Because I feel I have to. For three years I have been holding you partly responsible with Ivor for the dreadful thing that happened to Rosemary. Now I think I may have misjudged you.” He paused, moistening his lips. “And now Ivor is dead.”
His mouth moved in a slight, humorless smile. “In my official capacity it is my responsibility to find out if Ivor Drake was murdered and, if he was, to help bring his murderer to justice. That puts me in a strange position, and I think you have the right to know. You see, as a private individual, my sympathies are entirely with the person who killed him.”
Coming then as it did, at the climax of that queer mood of guarded intimacy, there seemed nothing extraordinary about that very extraordinary statement.
Kay said in a strange little voice: “I see now why you were so sure we all thought Ivor had been murdered. It… it’s because you—you almost hoped it would happen.�
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“If you like to put it that way.” It was curious, the feeling that was passing between them, almost as if they were friends instead of near-enemies.
Kay said: “Then, if you feel that way, why did you tell the Major you suspected murder?”
“I never said I told him.” Dr. Thorne’s dark lashes flickered over his dark eyes. “I merely said I gave him my report of the facts I observed as a doctor. I felt no obligation to tell him what I suspected as a private individual.”
Kay felt an impossible surge of hope. “Then you— what are you going to do?”
His fingers closed over the little green book which had in it, perhaps, the power to put a noose around the neck of—one of them.
“Just what I’ve done already.” He must have understood her expression because he added: “But don’t think it means a great deal. Major Clifford is a very astute man. He may seem to you just a fact-finding machine, a walking timetable, but don’t be fooled. He’s perfectly capable of drawing the right conclusions from the facts.”
He paused. “But there’s one fact we might keep to ourselves.” He flicked the corner of the diary with his thumb and gave her the shadow of a bow. “I must apologize to you, Miss Winyard, for reading something which I had no right to read, something which I would gladly have spared myself from seeing. The least I can do is to return your property.”
Incredibly he was holding out the diary.
Kay took it with fingers that were trembling and slipped it in her pocketbook.
“Thank you. I can’t begin to say…”
But suddenly that obscure link between them, half of sympathy, half of hostility, snapped and they were just strangers again—a Bermudian police doctor interrogating an American girl who was a potential suspect in a potential murder case.
His face impassive and remote again, Dr. Thorne gave a formal little nod.
“I think we should get back to the others. Major Clifford’s probably with them by now. He will want to talk to you too.”
Chapter Six
WHEN THEY RETURNED to the living room, it was immediately apparent that Major Clifford had arrived. In any group he would have been conspicuous, a solid and imposing giant in a spotless white drill uniform.
As he turned to look at Kay and Dr. Thorne from keen gray eyes under bushy, graying eyebrows, the impression of granite was even more marked. The stiff squareness of his shoulders, the weathered regularity of his features had the massiveness of an heroic war memorial.
Until then Bermuda had seemed to Kay more or less a picturesque American vacationland. Now, by the simple fact of Major Clifford, it had established itself as a foreign country.
The Major had been talking to Maud. But at the entry of the others he broke off with a majestic clearing of the throat. Maud said: “This is Miss Winyard, my sister, Major.”
Major Clifford inclined his head in a gesture of gruff greeting.
“How d’you do, Miss Winyard?” His voice was booming. “Been talking to Thorne, I understand. Take a chair, will you?”
Faintly intimidated, Kay sat down close to the window where Don Baird, white and grim, had joined Terry and Elaine. The Major turned back to Maud.
“Well, Mrs. Chiltern, pretty straight the picture, I think. Drake was with you, Miss Lumsden and Miss Winyard playing bridge from soon after dinner right until the time came for him to go down to the dock and take the speedboat over to the island.”
Maud, serene and unruffled, said: “Yes, Major.”
“And at what time was your bridge game finished?”
“About eleven-thirty.”
“And Drake went straight to the dock?”
“Yes.”
Major Clifford was watching Maud fixedly as if through an invisible monocle. “And you went with him, eh?”
“I did.”
“You saw him get into the boat, of course? You were there on the dock when he set off for the island?” For the barest instant Maud hesitated. Slim fingers pushed the dark hair from her ear. “Yes, Major. We chatted for a moment. Then I said good night. As I turned away from the jetty, the motor roared and the boat started off toward the island.”
“About what time?”
“Oh, about ten minutes or so after we finished bridge, I suppose. About eleven-forty-five.”
“And after Drake had left for the island?”
“I went straight back to the house.”
With sudden vividness Kay remembered that she had seen Maud moving back to the house when she herself had been slipping down to the dock. That had been at least ten minutes after she had seen, through her bedroom window, Ivor’s speedboat starting for the island.
Ten minutes later! And yet Maud had said she left the dock immediately. She had deliberately lied. Why…?
Her anxiety growing, Kay watched Major Clifford’s rugged face. It was impossible to guess even the shadow of what was in his mind.
“Too bad you didn’t stay at the dock a little longer, Mrs. Chiltern. Might have seen the accident, heard him call out.” The Major cleared his throat again explosively. “Well, no good worrying about that now. You left Drake at eleven-forty-five. The accident must have happened almost immediately afterwards. Somewhere around ten to twelve.”
Kay noticed with increasing alarm that, in his pursuit of The Facts, the Major was showing not the slightest sympathy for the bereaved Chilterns. Was that just British phlegm? Or was it something—much more sinister?
The Major’s beetling gaze had shifted now and was moving slowly from one to the other of them. Now it’s coming, Kay thought, Now he’s going to ask us all where we were. This is where the real danger starts. I just feel it.
“So none of you others saw Drake or the speedboat after it left the mainland dock?”
There was a prolonged silence.
Kay said: “Not until Miss Morley and I found the boat on the island beach.”
It was rather terrifying, having the Major’s full attention switched on her. “And approximately what time was that?”
“About twenty minutes past twelve, I’d say.”
A large finger and thumb twisted one tip of his clipped graying mustache. “I gather you’ve already told Thorne your reasons for going to the island at that particular time?”
Under the Major’s X-ray stare, the little green leather notebook seemed to burn in Kay’s pocketbook. She should have known this would come! She should have thought out a plausible reason to bolster up that fictional story of her trip with Simon to the island.
“Why, n-no,” she faltered. “Dr. Thorne didn’t ask me that. He…”
“We went out canoeing to enjoy the moonlight,” broke in Simon suddenly. “We heard the speedboat motor when we were out in the bay and we went to investigate.”
Kay felt extreme relief that Simon had had more presence of mind than she. And yet… She watched the Major tensely. Would he be satisfied with that sketchy explanation? To her surprise, he appeared to be. Or at any rate it was not a subject which he wanted to follow up at that moment. His bushy gaze had turned to Don.
“You’re the boatman, eh, Baird? Little point I want cleared up. Drake’s boats, the dinghies, canoes, small craft, where are they moored as a rule?”
Don stared back steadily. “At the dock.”
“They’re not kept at the swimming beach?”
“During the day, maybe, if anyone happens to take one there. It’s my job to see they’re all at the dock at dinnertime.”
“And they were tonight?”
“Yes.”
Major Clifford grunted. “Did any of you here leave any sort of craft at the swimming beach this evening?” His all-observing eyes included Simon in their scrutiny.
She shook her head. No one else spoke.
“Then did any of you bathe from the beach?”
In the silence which followed that innocuous-sounding question Kay felt a queer sensation of imminent danger. Almost without realizing it she glanced at Dr. Thorne. He was watching her fro
m dark, unwinking eyes.
“We all went swimming this afternoon,” put in Maud placidly.
“I mean this evening—after dinner.”
“Why, no, Major. The four of us were playing bridge. My husband always goes to bed early. Terry was out sailing. And Elaine…”
“I went swimming this evening,” put in the girl jerkily. “About eleven I—I swam out to Terry’s sailboat. But I didn’t swim from the beach. I—I dived off the dock.”
Kay knew, of course, that was a lie—Terry’s impulsive lie which he had made at the dock and which now Elaine was using. The Major’s gaze had settled on Elaine’s scratched temple. He said slowly: “So you dived off the dock. Scratched yourself too, didn’t you? Well then, I’m to understand that none of you went to the swimming beach this evening.” Major Clifford drew himself up to his full towering height. “Drake was pretty strict on trespassers. Happen to know that. He had a couple of colored boys up in court in front of me not so long ago for walking across the property. Unlikely any outsider would have used the beach this evening, very unlikely.”
He had taken on a quality that was distinctly ominous.
“I’d be grateful if some of you’d come out to the beach with me for a moment.”
“To the beach?” The words came sharply from Alice Lumsden who had been standing withdrawn and starchy white by the door. “What is it? What do you want?”
“It’s just something I want you people to see—something one of my men noticed there.” The Major strode to the French windows leading to the terrace, opened them, and stood at attention on the threshold, waiting for the others.
Gilbert said: “We might as well all come, Major.” He glanced at Kay. “I can’t get the wheel chair down the terrace steps. Perhaps you’d help push me. We can go out through my room.”
While the others trooped uneasily out onto the terrace, Kay wheeled Gilbert down a passage to his ground-floor bedroom and out of the French windows there which opened out onto the level lawn. They caught up with the others who, led by Major Clifford, a gigantic monolith in the moonlight, were moving toward the swimming beach.
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