“Yes?”
“Nothing more. Only I got the idea they were doing it to cover up traces that might show in the dust. Traces of other substitutions, or plain thefts.”
“Might be,” Ellis said.
“I had an idea, too. What about finger-prints on the substituted books?”
“No good.”
“You mean, there aren’t any?”
“It doesn’t matter how many there are. Matt had to ask ’em to fetch any book he wanted. Their prints have a right to be on any and every book in the place. Thanks for suggesting it, all the same.”
Gilkison looked hard at him, and flushed.
“Are you laughing at me?”
“I laugh at you often and regularly, my dear Gilkie. You are one of the joys of my drab existence. But I am not laughing at you now. For the matter of that, I’m not laughing at anything. Well—thanks again for telling me.”
“Where are you going?”
“To see Martha Attwill. I’ve an idea she’ll be helpful about this business. So long.”
“You haven’t time. It’s close on one o’clock.”
“Lord. So it is. We must have been longer over that waste-paper basket than I thought.”
“That what?”
Ellis explained. “Look here,” he added. “I must go to see the old hen. Tell ’em I’ll be late.”
Whether Ellis’s idea was well founded he did not discover. Miss Attwill’s door was shut. Milk stood on the step, and a parcel was half hidden near the door. A note held under the knocker announced in bold scrawly characters: “Gone away for the day. Please leave as usual. M. A.”
Disappointed, Ellis turned and went slowly back to the inn. This second murder had deeply depressed him. He kept seeing the misused, tumbled body, the swollen face. Avid for sensation, she had had her will, poor girl, shortly and finally. And there was nothing of the murderee about her. She had seemed strong, self-centred, capable. You couldn’t tell, though, how love would take a girl, making her exigeant, clinging, reproachful, a creator of scenes. Or were Bradder and Co. right, and was Eunice Caunter victim of a common rape? A girl so strongly built might have fought so hard there was no other way to quiet her?
Ellis shook himself. This was no accidental crime, he felt in his bones. It was the outcome of a relationship. But had it anything to do with what had already happened? If so, what? Where was the connection?
He was in a thoroughly bad temper by the time he reached the hotel. Gilkison had only just started his meal. To Ellis, his appearance seemed smug: but, as he said nothing, and asked no question, he gave no outlet for ill temper.
Ellis prodded viciously with his fork.
“Potatoes aren’t cooked,” he growled.
Gilkison raised his eyebrows. “Mine are all right,” he observed, with an expression that implied polite disbelief.
“Call me a liar, and have done with it.”
“By all means. If it will give you any pleasure.” He took a little more mustard. “Wasn’t Miss Attwill helpful?”
“She wasn’t anything, blast her. She was out.”
“Going to try again after lunch?”
“May be something else to do by then. Sorry, Gilk. I’m all on edge. I hate these gaps in a case, when one’s waiting for something to happen.”
“What do you expect to happen?”
“Any of about five things. Or all at once.”
“Sounds very dramatic.”
“Yes, it does, doesn’t it.”
Ellis’s antagonism rose again. Gilkison had a knack, quite unintentional, of flicking his nerves. He looked at the neat, careful scholar, eating his food so discreetly, so self-containedly, and thought, he ought to have been born a governess; then proceeded to imagine such a series of adventures for this feminine incarnation of Gilkie that he began to grin, and his humour restored, attacked his food with ferocious relish.
He read for twenty minutes when the meal was over, to aid digestion—an unnecessary precaution, since he had the digestion of a horse—then went up to his room, pulled the furniture about, sat down, and wrote another letter to his wife, giving her a fresh report on the case, and adding his solution.
“If I’m right,” he concluded, “we shan’t be long. It’s true there are gaps, and I’ve had to advance more than one motive, which I never like. But what other explanation fits the facts?”
He sealed the letter and posted it, resisting the temptation to keep it open for the medical evidence and any possible discovery which Bradstreet might make among the dead girl’s belongings. Ellis inclined always to the school of thought which looks to character and motive for a solution, and regards circumstantial evidence as confirmation rather than as proof. His sense of character and his intuitions were so strong that in most cases this arrogant method brought success. Every now and then, however, it came a cropper: and the feeling deepened that this was to be a case in the latter class. He wished that he could get back his letter. “Why volunteer a solution before all the evidence was in? A bundle of love-letters in the girl’s rooms, the discovery of the rest of the paper from which those grisly little plugs were torn, the arrest of a soldier—anything might knock his theory cock-eyed and expose him once more as a self-confident fathead to the one person in the world who had best reason to know he was one, and whom, therefore, he had best reason not to furnish with additional and quite gratuitous evidence on the point.
Returning from the post, Ellis looked at the hotel clock. It said ten to four. He pondered whether to go to the station before tea, decided against it, and went into the garden. He tried to read, but found that he couldn’t concentrate. Finally, in an angry fever of impatience, he decided that he couldn’t wait till half-past four for his tea, went inside, and rang the bell.
When the little waitress appeared, he put his head on one side at her.
“Do you think I could have tea early? I have to go off and work.”
She smiled at him. “I’ll see, sir.”
In a minute she reappeared. “Yes, sir. It’ll be ready in about ten minutes.”
“Good. Thank you so much.”
But it was a long ten minutes; and Ellis, as he ate his tea, was all the time listening for the telephone, and so did not enjoy his meal.
“You fool,” he apostrophised himself. “What’s come to you? Steady. Steady the Buffs.”
But no nursery phrases, no self-exhortation would still that little crawling toad of apprehension inside him: and, as he realised its insistence, Ellis felt real alarm, for he knew it of old, the extra sense that, reacting almost physically as to a coming change in the weather, presaged always something ugly, violent, unforeseen, something which took the conscious planning brain by surprise; though the unconscious mind, perceiving it all too well, tried with these frantic signals to warn its crass colleague before the happening was precipitated upon them.
Gilkison came in just as Ellis was standing up and wiping his mouth.
“I didn’t wait for you. Sorry. I’m off to the station. Anything new?”
“Not so far.”
“Joan about yet?”
“I heard her mother go up to her and ask if she’d like some tea.”
“M’m. I’ll give her a miss, I think.”
The weather was hot, no longer with the serene steady heat which had met them when they came down, but an uneasy heat, the sun flaming through a clear, thin air. Walking and the tea he had drunk brought Ellis out in a sweat. He pulled out a handkerchief, and mopped his high, crimson forehead.
“Hallo,” Bradstreet said. “I’ve just been ringing you, but they said you’d started.”
“Got anything?”
“Yes and no. First, Wilbraham’s report.”