“What’s the matter, Bern?”
“He or she,” I said. “His or her. If nobody objects, I’m just going to use the masculine pronouns from here on.” Nobody objected. “Good,” I said. “The point is, there are other lamps that could have been lit that a passerby could have turned off without ever coming into line of sight of Jonathan Rathburn’s body. He could have walked in, turned off the light, and left the room without the slightest idea there was a corpse on the floor.”
A murmur approved this line of thought. Even as it died down, Gordon Wolpert cleared his throat. “I wonder,” he said. “Would you turn out a light in the library without taking a look to make sure there was nobody curled up in a chair with a good book? I should think simple manners would demand it.”
“Good point,” I said.
“And when you looked round, you’d almost certainly see Rathburn.”
“If you actually looked,” Carolyn said. “But you might just call out, ‘I say, anybody here?’ And, unless Rathburn managed to say something, you’d figure you had the room all to yourself.”
Wolpert thought that made sense, and no one else offered any objection. “Fine,” I said. “So there’s only one question left to answer. Who turned off the light?”
No answer.
“It would have to have been one of us,” I said, “and I don’t think it’s the sort of thing we’d be likely to forget having done. Did anybody here come in late last night or early this morning and switch a light out? Any of you?”
They looked at me, they looked at each other, they looked at the floor. Leona Savage whispered discreetly to her daughter, and Millicent piped up to deny that she’d even been to the library at the time in question, let alone turned out any lights. Her father supported her claim, pointing out that the child had never voluntarily turned out a light in her life.
“It seems no one turned off the light,” Colonel Blount-Buller said. “So it would appear we’re left with two possibilities. Rathburn climbed the stairs in the dark or the light went out of its own accord.”
“Neither of which makes any sense,” I said. “Here’s another-someone did turn off the light, but he can’t admit to it because he can’t let us know he was anywhere near this room last night. Because he murdered Rathburn, and he turned off the light to delay discovery of the body, never considering how suspicious it would look for Rathburn to be found in a darkened room.”
“But that’s plainly impossible,” Nigel Eglantine said.
“Why?”
“Because it would mean…”
“Yes?”
“That someone in this house committed murder,” he said.
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
“But none of us…”
“Not one of us,” Cissy Eglantine said stoutly. “If anyone actually did harm poor Mr. Rathburn, there’s no way on earth it could have been one of us.”
“Who else could have done it?” Miss Dinmont wanted to know.
“It must have been someone passing through the neighborhood,” Cissy said. “A tramp or vagrant of some sort.”
“In this weather?”
Everyone looked at the window. Outside, the snow lay sufficiently deep and crisp and even to gladden the heart of King Wenceslaus, and of almost nobody else.
“He’d want shelter,” Cissy said. “He couldn’t sleep outside on a night like this. And so he broke in, and-”
“And wanted something to read,” Mrs. Colibri suggested.
“And was drawn into this room by the light-”
“Like a moth,” Earlene Cobbett said, and then looked quite startled at having spoken the thought aloud, and clapped a freckled hand to her little mouth.
“And found poor Mr. Rathburn,” Cissy went on, “who had already died in an accidental fall. And then the tramp, fearing he’d be suspected of involvement in the death, turned off the light and left.” She heaved a sigh. “There, Mr. Rhodenbarr! None of us were involved, and it’s not a murder after all!”
“Darling,” Nigel Eglantine said. “Darling, that was so well said that I only wish it weren’t ridiculous.”
“Is it ridiculous, Nigel?”
“I’m afraid so, darling.”
“Oh. But-”
“There’s something else,” I said, and stepped closer to the fallen Jonathan Rathburn and pointed down at his eyes, which continued to stare vacantly up at us. I bent down, clucked knowingly, and got to my feet. “If you look closely,” I said, “you’ll see evidence of pinpoint hemorrhages in both eyes.”
No one went over for a closer look. Most of them stared instead at me.
“I don’t think he died of loss of blood,” I said. “He did bleed quite a bit, and it is possible to bleed to death from a scalp wound, but he didn’t lose that much blood. And it’s possible to strike your head and die of the effects of the blow, but I don’t think that’s what happened here. The kind of fall that could have caused that much damage would have been a noisy affair, yet nobody here seems to have heard a thing. I don’t think Rathburn fell from the library steps. I don’t think he mounted them in the first place. I think he was sitting down when his killer struck him.”
Greg Savage wanted to know what gave me that idea. I crouched down beside the corpse and pointed to the source of the bleeding, a gash high on the left temple, the area around it showing a lot of discoloration. “If the killer was standing over him,” I said, “and if he was right-handed and struck downward, well, that’s a logical place for the blow to land.”
The colonel wanted to know if a fall couldn’t inflict a similar injury. I said I supposed it was possible, but he would have had to bang his head on something-the bottom step, say, or the sharp corner of a table. In that case we ought to see blood on the surface he struck.
“But we don’t,” I said. “We don’t see the proverbial blunt instrument lying about, either, probably because the killer carried it off, but that’s very likely what was employed. A bookend, say, or a glass ashtray, or a bronze knickknack like that camel over there. In fact…”
The colonel followed me over to the revolving bookcase, and I caught his hand as he was reaching for the camel. “Best not to touch,” I said, “although I’ll be surprised if it hasn’t been wiped clean of prints. There’ll probably be microscopic evidence, though. It looks to me as though there’s blood on the base of it, but you’d have to run tests to establish that conclusively.”
“My God,” Cissy Eglantine said. “You can’t be saying he was killed with our camel.”
“I think he was struck down with it,” I said. “But not killed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the blow knocked him down,” I said, “and drew blood, and may well have rendered him unconscious. It might have eventually proved fatal-it’ll take an autopsy to determine that-but it didn’t kill Rathburn right away, and the killer didn’t want to sit around and wait. He knew better than to strike a second blow and try to pass it off as the result of a fall. So he used something else.”
“What?”
I pointed to the couch. “That throw pillow,” I said. “No, don’t pick it up, but have a look at it. I think the fabric’s stained, and my guess is the stain’ll turn out to be blood, and the blood’ll turn out to be Rathburn’s.”
Rufus Quilp blinked rapidly. He was sitting on the couch within reach of the pillow in question, and drew away from it now. “I was following you up to that point,” he said slowly, his voice thick as if with sleep. I don’t think I’d heard him speak before, and had barely seen him awake. “But now you’ve lost me. Are you suggesting that, having struck the man once with a bronze camel, your killer finished the job by swatting him with a pillow?”