‘But,’ cried Mary ffolkes, ‘locking poor Roger in! How awful! What if he should wake up and find he can’t open the door?’
‘Any chance of his prematurely coming to, Rolfe?’
‘None at all.’
The Doctor took Mary’s hand in his.
‘You’ll have to trust me in this too, Mary dear. I can guarantee that Roger will sleep soundly for several hours. But if you’re really worried, Trubshawe and I will look in on him every half-hour or so to make sure nothing’s amiss. To be honest, it’s a needless precaution but, if it reassures you, we’ll be glad to take it. Now, Trubshawe, Don, let’s get him into his bedroom.’
‘Doctor?’
‘Yes?’
‘Anything else you need done?’
‘If you’d really like to make yourself useful, Farrar, what you could do is go down to the kitchen and have Mrs Varley prepare some consommé for Mary.’
‘Consommé?’
‘Yes. Very thin and very hot.’
‘Right.’
‘Farrar?’
‘Yes, Chief-Inspector?’
‘I don’t think it would be helpful for the servants to know what’s just happened. With this second crime following so close on the first, there’s a risk of them really getting the wind up. The last thing we need is a gaggle of sniffling, snivelling, moronic maids threatening to give notice.’
‘Understood, sir. No mention of anything they shouldn’t know about.’
‘Good. Well, boys, let’s get going. And again – right, Rolfe? – the word is gently.’
Half-an-hour later, after the Colonel’s wound had been attended to, after he had been given his shot and lapsed into a peaceful slumber, Evadne Mount, who had now come back downstairs from her bedroom, took the opportunity of a moment’s pregnant silence to arrest everyone’s attention with just three words. Three Latin words.
‘Lux facta est.’
‘And what in heaven’s name is that supposed to mean?’ enquired Cora Rutherford.
‘“Lux facta est”? Your Latin not up to scratch, Cora?’
‘Never mind my Latin. Just answer the question.’
‘It means “Light is shed”. From Oedipus Rex. Sophocles, you know.’
‘Thank you, dearie. But, yes, I do know who wrote Oedipus Rex.’
‘Ah, but have you forgotten I rewrote it? With calamitous results! It was my very first play, Oedipus vs. Rex, and what I tried to do was retell the myth as a conventional courtroom drama. The defending counsel was Tiresias, the sightless seer – I was thinking of Max Carrados, you know, Ernest Bramah’s blind detective? No? Anyway, it was he who proved, solely by his powers of deduction, that “the Oedipus case”, as it was referred to throughout the play, was in reality a travesty of justice.
‘The climactic twist, you see, was that Oedipus had been framed by his political enemies, who hadn’t just spread the rumour that Jocasta was his mother but had themselves killed Laius, his alleged father. Then they substituted some hapless double to be murdered by Oedipus when they met each other at the crossroads of Daulis and Delphi.
‘Well, what a dud, what a stinkeroony, what a pile of horse manure! The whole thing was done in masks and, if I’d had any sense, I’d have worn a mask myself! Poor “Boo” Laye – Evelyn Laye, you know, heavenly in intimate revue but, typically, fancied herself as a great dramatic actress – why won’t they stick to the one talent they do have? – well, “Boo” Laye played Jocasta – rhymes with “disaster”, I used to quip! – and when the audience began to boo us all at the curtain call, the poor, addlepated darling believed they wanted her to take a separate bow. I thought I’d die!’
‘But why,’ the actress persisted, ‘has light been shed, as you so gnomically put it?’
The novelist fell suddenly serious.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you why. Thanks to a chance remark made in this very room not upward of two hours ago, a bulb flashed on in my rapidly dimming old brain and I saw – I saw as though it had been illuminated by a bolt of lightning – exactly what has been happening here these past thirty-six hours.’
There was a silence while everyone absorbed this startling claim.
Then the Chief-Inspector, who had reverted to sucking on the stem of his unlit pipe, said:
‘Let me get this straight. Just so there’s no chance we’re talking at cross-purposes, do I take it you’re referring to Gentry’s murder?’
‘I am.’
‘As well as the Colonel’s attempted murder?’
‘That too. Actually, it was the attempt on Roger’s life which provided me with the very last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. A giant piece. Now I know the whole plot.’
‘The whole plot, you say?’
‘Even its twist. For, unless I’m mistaken, just like my Oedipus plot, this one does indeed have a climactic twist. I’ve been doing quite a bit of sniffing about, more than any of you realise, and, as I say, I now believe I’m in a position to lay the entire case out in front of you all.’
‘Look here, Miss Mount,’ grunted Trubshawe, ‘if you do indeed possess certain facts – or theories – about this business, facts or theories of which we all ought to be apprised, me in particular, then let’s have them. No more monkeying about, please. In your opinion – I repeat, in your opinion, for it is only an opinion – and I repeat yet again, with a different but no less relevant emphasis, in your opinion, for it is only yours – who killed Raymond Gentry and who tried to kill the Colonel?’
‘Forgive me, Trubshawe, but I’m not ready to tell you yet.’
‘What!’
‘Oh, just let me explain. I’m not simply being a tease, you know. It all has to do with the difference between what you might call proposing and exposing. Don’t you see, if I were baldly to announce who I believe did it, it would be like a maths teacher proposing a problem to his students, then instantly giving them the solution without in the meantime exposing any of the connective tissue which enabled him to arrive at that solution, connective tissue which would also enable those students of his to understand why it was the only solution possible.
‘I want you all to understand why the person who I believe killed Gentry and tried to kill Roger could only be that person and no other – and to do that I’ve got to let the whole story unfold as I myself gradually came to understand it.’
‘Well – well, all right,’ replied Trubshawe with surprisingly good grace, ‘I suppose that’s fair enough. But just when do you intend to tell us?’
‘Oh, now. At once. Immediately. But what I’d like is for all of us to gather again in the library. A criminal, so they say, always returns to the scene of the crime. So why shouldn’t a detective – if I may flatter myself by appropriating such a label – not return to the scene of the investigation?’
For a few moments nobody said anything. Some of those present plainly thought the novelist had finally taken leave of the little that was still left of her senses. As for the others, though they would never willingly have owned up to it, even to themselves, they were perhaps obscurely tempted by the prospect of participating in a real-life rehearsal of the last – more accurately, last-but-one – chapter of a classic whodunit.
Then, finally, the Chief-Inspector gave his response to the proposal.
‘There’s one thing you seem to have forgotten,’ he said. ‘I haven’t yet finished my own investigation.’
‘Yes, you have,’ retorted Evadne Mount. ‘You’ve questioned all of us. All of us, that is, except Mary here, but I can’t imagine you suspect her of trying to kill her own husband.’