“Do they believe it?” she asked, suddenly nodding towards Bostwick and Elliot.
“What we believe, miss,” snapped Bostwick, “is neither here nor there. But the Inspector,” he looked at Elliot, “came over here (came over here, mind) expressly to ask you some questions——”
“About a hypodermic needle?” said Marjorie.
The trembling in her fingers now seemed to have spread to her whole body. She stared at the catch of her handbag, opening and shutting it in a series of nervous clicks; her head was lowered, so that the brim of the soft grey hat hid her face.
“I imagine you found it,” she went on, clearing her throat. “I found it myself, this morning. In the bottom of the jewel-casket. I wanted to hide it, but I couldn’t think of a better place in the house and I was afraid to take it out of the house. How
can
you dispose of a thing? How
can
you put it down somewhere and make sure nobody’s seen you do it? There aren’t any fingerprints of mine on it, if there ever were any, because I wiped it off. But I didn’t put it in the jewel-casket. I didn’t.”
Elliot took the envelope out of his pocket and held it so that she could see inside.
She did not look at him. There was now no more sense of communication between them than though it had never existed. It was a snapped cord, a dead line, a new wall.
“Is this the hypodermic needle, Miss Wills?”
“Yes. That’s it. I think.”
“Is it yours?”
“No. It’s Uncle Joe’s. At least, it’s like the ones he uses; and it’s got ‘Cartwright & Co.,’ and a grade and trade number on it.”
“Would it be possible,” requested Dr. Fell wearily, “to forget that hypodermic needle for just one moment? Would it be possible, even, to expunge the hypodermic needle from our minds? Confound the hypodermic needle! What difference does it make what’s on it, whose it is, or how it could have come into the jewel-box, provided you know who put it there? No, I say. But if Miss Wills really believes what I told her a minute ago”—he contemplated her steadily—“she could tell us, instead, about the revolver.”
“The revolver?”
“I mean,” said Dr. Fell, “you might tell us where you and Harding and Dr. Chesney really went this afternoon.” “You don’t know that too?”
“Oh, Lord, I don’t know!” roared Dr. Fell, making a hideous face. “Maybe I’m wrong. It’s all a question of atmospheres. Dr. Chesney had the atmosphere, in his own way. Harding had it in his way. You have it: in your way too. Look at you. Please tell me if I’m a blundering ass, but there are other outward signs.”
Lifting his stick, he pointed to the white carnation lying in the drive; the carnation which Dr. Chesney had taken out of his button-hole and thrown overboard as the car approached the house. Then Dr. Fell moved his stick down and touched Marjorie’s shoe. Instinctively she jerked away, drawing her foot back and up, but one of the minute whitish spots adhering to the sole of the shoe now adhered to the ferrule of the stick.
“They wouldn’t have thrown confetti at you, of course,” said the doctor. “But I seem to remember that the pavement outside the registry office in Castle Street is usually thick with it. And this is a damp day.—Have I
got
to do this sort of thing?” he added, fiercely.
Marjorie nodded.
“Yes,” she said coolly. “George and I were married at the registry office in Bristol this afternoon.”
As still nobody spoke, during a pause in which they could hear noises inside the house, she tried again.
“It was a special licence. We got it the day before yesterday.” Her voice rose a little. “We—we intended to keep it a dead secret. For a year.” Her voice rose still higher. “But since you’re such clever detectives, and we’re such rotten criminals that you guessed straightaway, all right. There you are.”
Superintendent Bostwick stared at her.
Then he was shocked into honest speech.
“My girl,” he said in an incredulous tone, “God alive! I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Even when I thought there was something wrong with you; but we won’t discuss that, look; even then I never thought you’d go and do a thing like this. Or that the doctor would let you. That’s what beats me.”
“Don’t you approve of marriage, Mr. Bostwick?”
“Approve of marriage?” repeated Bostwick, as though the words meant nothing to him. “When did you decide to go and do this?”
“We were going to do it to-day. That’s what we’d planned. We were going to be married quietly at a registry office anyway, because George hates church-services and fuss. Then Uncle Marcus died; and I felt so—so—well, anyway, we decided this morning we’d go and do it anyway. And I had my reasons. I had my reasons, I tell you!”
She was almost screaming at him.
“God alive,” said Bostwick. “That’s what beats me. I’ve known your family for sixteen years. I have: I tell you straight. And that the doctor would go and let you do this, with Mr. Chesney not even in his grave——”
She had backed away.
“Well,” said Marjorie, with the tears starting into her eyes, “isn’t anybody at least going to congratulate me, or at least tell me they hope I’ll be happy?”
“I do hope it,” said Elliot. “You know that.”
“Mrs. Harding,” began Dr. Fell gravely; and she flinched with surprise at the name, “I beg your pardon. My lack of tact is so notorious that it would have been surprising had I been anything but blundering. I do offer you my congratulations. And I not only hope you will be happy. I promise you that you shall be happy.”
Whereupon Marjorie’s mood changed in a flash.
“And aren’t we being sentimental, though?” she cried, with a satiric kind of grimace. “And here’s a great booby of a policeman,” she looked at Bostwick, “suddenly remembering how he knew my family; or at least the Chesney family; and how he’d like to put a rope around my neck! I got married. All right. I got married. I had my reasons. You may not understand that, but I had my reasons.”
“I only said—” began Elliot.
“Forget it,” interrupted Marjorie, with deadly coolness. “You’ve all had your say. So now you can stand round as smug and solemn-faced as owls. Like Professor Ingram. You should have seen
h
is face, when we drove by his house and asked him to be the second witness. No, no. Oh, no. Horrible. He couldn’t countenance it.
“But I forgot. All you want to know is about the revolver, isn’t it? I can easily tell you that, and it really was a joke. Perhaps Uncle Joe’s sense of humour isn’t as refined as it might be, though at least he rallies round when others don’t. Uncle Joe thought it would be a great j-joke to pretend that this was what he called a ‘shotgun’ wedding; and he would hold that revolver in such a way that the registrar couldn’t see it but we could, and he could pretend he was there to see George made an honest woman of me.”
Bostwick clucked his tongue.
“Oh, ah!” he muttered, with a gleam of something like relief in his face. “Why didn’t you say so before? You mean——”
“No, I do not mean,” said Marjorie almost tenderly. “What a master of anti-climax you are! I get married to avoid being hanged for murder, and you’re filled with understanding when you think I got married to be made an honest woman of. This is beautiful.” Her mirth grew. “No, Mr. Bostwick. After all the things you think I’ve done, it may startle you terribly; but (as you would say) my purity remains unsmirched. What a world. Anyway, never mind that. You wanted to know about the revolver, and I’ve told you. I don’t know how a bullet managed to get into it; it was probably Uncle Joe’s carelessness; but it was a pure accident; and nobody meant anybody to be killed at all.”
Dr. Fell said politely:
“That is your impression?”
With all her quickness of understanding, she did not at first understand this. “You don’t mean George’s being shot wasn’t an—” she began; and broke off. “You don’t mean the murderer’s been at it again?”
Dr. Fell inclined his head.
Evening was drawing in over Bellegarde. Towards the east the low hills were turning grey, but the sky to the west was still fiery: the sky on which faced the windows of the Music Room, the office, and the windows of Wilbur Emmet’s bedroom above. Out of one of these windows, Elliot remembered in an idle sort of way, Dr. Chesney had put his head last night.
“Do you want me for anything more?” said Marjorie in a low voice. “If you don’t, please let me go.”
“Of course,” said Dr. Fell. “But we shall want you tonight.”
She was gone, and the other three stood by the bullet-hole in the yellow pillar. Elliot hardly even noticed her. It was, he afterwards remembered, a vision of those windows facing the sunset light which made a window open in his own mind. Or it may have been the shock of a combination of circumstances, of what Marjorie Wills said and thought and did, which shook him out of a mental paralysis. His judgment was released, as a blind is released, with a snap. And, in the pouring clearness of that revelation, he cursed himself and all the works about him. A. plus B. plus C. plus D. raced into a pattern, clearly forming. He had not been a police-officer: he had been a blasted fool. Wherever it had been possible to take a wrong turning, he had taken it. Wherever it had been possible to read a wrong meaning, he had read it. If one clear piece of folly be allowed once to every man, then by the Lord Harry he had had his! But now——
Dr. Fell had turned round. Elliot felt the doctor’s sharp small eyes on him.
“Oho?” said the doctor suddenly. “Got it, have you?”
“Yes, sir. I think I’ve got it.”
And he made the gesture of one who strikes with his fist at nothing.
In that case,” said Dr. Fell mildly, “we had better go back to the hotel and talk about it. Ready, Superintendent?”
Elliot was again cursing himself, rearranging bits of evidence, sunk so deep that he only vaguely heard Dr. Fell whistling a tune when they went towards their car. It was a tune to which you could keep step. It was, in fact, the wedding march of Mendelssohn; but never before had it sounded evil or ominous.
At eight o’clock that night, when four men sat before the fire in Elliot’s room at “The Blue Lion,” Dr. Fell spoke.
“We now know,” he said, holding up his fingers and checking off the points, “who the murderer is; how he worked; and why he worked. We know that the whole series of crimes were the work of this one man, acting without a confederate. We know the astonishing weight of the evidence against him. The guilt, we see, will prove itself.”
Superintendent Bostwick uttered a decisive grunt.
Major Crow nodded with great satisfaction.
“Even granting everything, which I’m only too happy to grant,” he said, “the idea of this fellow living among us—!”
“And disturbing the atmosphere,” supplied Dr. Fell. “Exactly. That’s what upsets the Superintendent so. The influences touches everything it comes into contact with, however harmless. You cannot pick up a tea-cup, go for a motor drive, or buy a film for a camera, without this influence somehow touching the action and somehow twisting it wrong. A quiet corner of the world, like this, is turned upside-down because of it. Guns are fired in front gardens, where people would have stared even to see a gun before. Stones are flung in the street. A bee buzzes in the Chief Constable’s bonnet, and another under the Superintendent’s cap. And all because of an influence or emanation which a certain person chooses to give out at last.”
Dr. Fell took out his watch, looked at it, and laid it on the table beside him. He filled and lighted his pipe with massive deliberation, sniffed, and went on.
“Therefore,” he said, “while you think over the evidence, I should like to lect—ahem!—should like to discuss the art of poisoning, and give you a few tips.
“In particular, since it applies to this case, we might classify a certain group of murderers under one head. Oddly enough, I have never seen them set down into a class: though their characters are as a rule so startlingly alike that they might be cruder or subtler copies of each other. They are the eternal arch-hypocrites and the eternal warning to wives: I mean the male poisoners.
“Women poisoners are (Lord knows) dangerous enough. But the men are a more uneasy menace to society, since to the slyness of poisoning they add a kind of devilish generalship, an application of business principles, a will to make good by the use of arsenic or strychnine. They are a small band, but they are evilly famous; and their faces are all alike. I grant you certain exceptions who will not fit into any category; Seddon, for instance.
2
But I think that if we take a dozen well-known examples from real life, we shall find the same mask on the face and the same false stuff in the brain. Note how our murderer here at Sodbury Cross fits into the group.
“First of all, they are usually men of some imagination, education, and even culture. Their professions indicate as much. Palmer, Pritchard, Lamson, Buchanan, and Cream were doctors. Richeson was a clergyman, Wainewright an artist, Armstrong a solicitor, Hoch a chemist, Waite a dental surgeon, Vaquier an inventor, Carlyle Harris a medical student.
“And immediately our interest springs up.
“We do not care about the illiterate blockhead who bashes somebody in a pub. We are interested in the criminal who should know better. Of course, that most (if not all) of the above men were blockheads I should be the last to deny. But they were blockheads of a sort whose manners fascinated, whose imaginations really moved, whose acting ability was of the first order; and some of them startle us with the ingenuity of their devices to kill or avert suspicion.
“Dr. George Harvey Lamson, Dr. Robert Buchanan, and Arthur Warren Waite committed murder, each one for financial gain, in 1881, in 1882, and in 1915. At this time the form of fiction we know as the detective-story was in its infancy. But consider the way in which each of them went about it.
“Dr. Lamson killed his victim, a crippled nephew of eighteen, by means of raisins poisoned with aconitine and baked into a Dundee cake. He went so far as to cut the cake in the presence of the boy and the headmaster of the boy’s school; all three ate a piece of it at the tea-table, so that Lamson might protest his innocence when only the boy was affected. Somewhere, you know, I seem to have heard of that device in fiction.