"Wait!" urged Ann.
She put her finger-tips to her forehead.
"You don't mind?" she asked Hubert.
Hubert gestured the courteous assent of a man who, privately, would like to put her across his knee and wallop her.
"You couldn't have exchanged those daggers before you went out of the room," said Ann. "Because the same thing applies to you as applies to the rest of us. You never went near that table at any time. When you were called out of the room, I remember watching you. You never left the semi-circle before you walked straight out of the room after Daisy."
"That also," agreed Sharpless, "is true."
"Sir. Madam. I thank you. But—"
"But," said Ann, "I don't see how you — oh, please! — you or anybody else could have got in here to do it afterwards. Or to do it at any time, if it comes to that."
Dr. Richard Rich appeared to be considerably taken aback by the rush with which this quiet girl had gathered up the proceedings in her own hands.
"Nobody could have got in at any time? I don't follow that."
"Well… for instance, the door."
"Yes?"
"It's almost on top of us," said Ann. "It creaks badly no matter how you try to open it. Could anyone have come in there, walked past die light clear across to that table on a bare hardwood floor, changed the daggers, and walked out again, without our seeing him?"
They envisaged this.
"No," said Sharpless. "It's impossible. Besides, I'll swear nobody did."
Rich massaged his head. "But the windows?" he suggested.
"That floor!" cried Ann. "And the drawn curtains! And-"
With a cluck of his tongue as though in realization, Sharpless strode across to the windows. As soon as he reached the section of the floor anywhere near the windows, the resulting creaks and cracks made him pause.
He looked at the white curtains, smoothly drawn and undisturbed. He pushed them aside on one window, and put his head out.
"This window," he reported, "is eight feet up from the ground. Has anybody got an electric torch?"
Hubert Fane fetched one out of a drawer in the telephone table. Sharpless switched it on, and swept its beam outside.
"Eight feet up," he said, "and there's an unmarked flower-bed underneath. Nobody even climbed up here, much less disturbed those curtains, climbed in, and got twelve or fifteen feet across hell's own squeaky floor to the table — all without being seen or heard. It's just impossible. Come and look for yourselves."
He switched off the torch. He turned round from the window and ran a hand through his hair. The tall black-and-scarlet devil seemed to have become a much bewildered and harassed young man.
"But we didn't do it," he protested.
"No." Rich's voice was sharp. "We can be certain we didn't do it. Any of us. We can — what's the word? — give each other an alibi."
"But somebody changed the daggers!"
"How?" asked Ann.
"You don't suppose—" Sharpless hesitated—"you don't suppose Fane did it himself?"
"When," inquired Rich, "he knew he was going to he stabbed with it? And, in fact, insisted on this when I wanted to stop the experiment?"
They looked at each other.
Rich fastened the button of his shabby dinner jacket, and squared his shoulders. Though he seemed the most disquieted person there, you would also have said that he was the most resolute.
"I'm afraid we can't stop here arguing," he dedared. "Whether we like it or not, we've got to call in the police. I suggest that we delegate one of us to ring up now, and try to explain what happened. It won't be easy."
"I'll ring the police, if you like," offered Ann Browning.
Again they turned to stare at her, and she lowered her eyes.
"You see," she explained hesitantly, "I–I live in Cheltenham. But I work in Gloucester. I'm the Chief Constable's, Colonel Race's, private secretary. I know a little about these things, because Colonel Race sometimes takes me along with him. He says I can get things out of the women."
She made a deprecating grimace with her lips.
"So I thought perhaps if I could get in touch with Colonel Race himself, it might help. But still, maybe it would be better if a man did it. Do you think so?"
Rich regarded her with deepening interest. Even Frank Sharpless pricked up his ears, as though he had never noticed the girl before. Hubert Fane's expression was one of mild pride.
"My dear young lady," Rich told her with some fervor, "the job is yours. There's the telephone. Go to it. But what in the name of sanity are you going to tell them?"
Ann bit her lip.
"I don't know," she confessed. "It may be rather nasty for us. Especially if they call in Scotland Yard: as they probably will, because Colonel Race won't like his own people making awkward situations here. But there you are. You see, I'm certain none of us did it. But-"
It was Sharpless who finished this for her. "But," he said rather wildly, "you're just as sure about the other thing. So am I. I've got eyes. I've got ears. I'll take my Bible oath, I’ll swear to my dying day, that nobody could have got in here either by the windows or by the door!"
And, as a matter of fact, he was perfectly right.
Six
In the library of a house not far away, Sir Henry Merrivale was beginning to dictate his memoirs.
It was an impressive moment. H.M., his spectacles down on his nose and his bald head glistening, was piled somehow into the desk chair in the room whose walls were hung with his host's collection of old weapons. H.M. had assumed what he believed to be an impressive posture: his elbow on the desk, and one finger at his temple like Victor Hugo. He tried to refrain from looking pleased with this, and merely succeeded in looking stuffed.
"I was born," he began, with suitable portentousness, "on February 6, 1871, at Cranleigh Court, near Great Yewborough, in Sussex."
This, Philip Courtney thought, was going to be easy.
Courtney had spent a lazy afternoon. He strolled along the Promenade. He had coffee at the Cavendish. He tasted the "waters," and visited the museum. Towards nine o'clock, after a late dinner, he boarded a number three bus at the Center and was put down by the conductor at the beginning of Fitzherbert Avenue.
Yet he remained uneasy.
There were only half a dozen houses in the avenue, each set back in its own grounds behind shoulder-high stone walls. As he passed the big white square house which must belong to Arthur Fane, he stopped and looked at it.
No lights showed at the front. The summer dusk lay warm on quiet trees.
He wondered how Frank Sharpless was getting on, and how love-affairs could so play the devil with a man's mentality. But he had little time to wrestle with this. At the last house in the road — with the Cotswolds looming behind it — he was greeted by Major Adams, who passed him on to the library.
Here he was met by Sir Henry Merrivale with a violent handshake but a glare of such active malignancy that Courtney hurriedly thought back over recent events, wondering what the man could have heard against him. It presently struck him, however that this must be part of H.M.'s normal social manner; for he could tell that his host was trying to be affable. At all events, H.M.. settled down at the desk, assumed his heroic pose, and indicated that he was ready to begin.
"Yes, sir?"
H.M. cleared his throat.
"I was born," he said with suitable portentousness, "on February 6, 1871, at Cranleigh Court, near Great Yewborough, in Sussex. My mother was formerly Miss Agnes Honoria Gayle, daughter of the Rev. and Mrs. William Gayle, of Great Yewborough. My father— notwithstanding the slanderous rumors circulated at the time — was Henry St. John Merrivale, eighth baronet of the name."