She looked round dazedly for a place to put the cigarette, and I took it out of her hand and threw it into the empty grate. She leaned her head quietly against the back of the chair, but the muscles of her throat were working. "I wonder," she said, "whether I could have some brandy? I've been locked up in this room "
"Sorry, ma'am," Bowers told her hoarsely, "but the poor old governor was a t.t. There's nothing in the house, only…" I could have sworn there was a tear in the corner of his eye. He nodded towards the glass and the bottle of mineral-water on the centre table. It was the "Eisenwasser" with the blue-and-red label, the same sort of bottle as those over which l; had stumbled at the back gate of the house.
"Don't touch that, you fool!" I said. "That's probably the glass be drank from. He mixed himself what he thought was a bromide in that mineral-water — "
"Yes, I thought of that," said Mrs. Antrim, sitting up, quickly, "but how was it he didn't know straightaway he wasn't taking bromide? He couldn't have been mistaken like that. I don't suppose you know what strychnine salts are. They're easily soluble, but they're the most horribly bitter-tasting stuff you could find. He must have known something was wrong at the first sip. But he drank over half a glassful."
"He wouldn't have known it if he drank it in the mineral-water. That's the point. It tastes worse. Here-" I brought Bowers into it. "Go out and get Mrs: Antrim some real water from the kitchen."
Even in her daze and uncertainty, I thought that she looked at me in a curious way, and Bowers scurried out. I asked her if she wished to go into another room, but she refused, holding tightly to the arms of the chair. One thing was clear: I was in a much worse mess than before. I couldn't go out of the house, which was sanctuary, and at the same time I couldn't stay in. If the police discovered me here — and, in Bowers's or Mrs. Antrim's panicky condition, betrayal seemed likely — it was not merely that I should be clapped back into the police station, for sooner or later I could telephone to H.M. and prove my identity. But now I should be held as a material witness for the inquest: and I was to be married the next morning. The best course was to duck out of the house, get rid of my policeman's uniform, and trust to luck. Yet if I made one suspicious move, Bowers would be after me. I looked towards the window. Something momentarily flickered on the shutter. Faintly beyond, past the open sashes, was a noise of footsteps and muffled voices in the alley to indicate that my pursuers were tolerably close at hand. My safety was this lighted house, since they would look in all the dark corners first…
"What's the matter with you?" asked Mrs. Antrim suddenly and sharply. "What are you going to do? Will you just stand there? Don't you have to inform your superiors or whatever it is? I can't stand this much longer."
"Just one moment, madam. I shall have to have your story first, if you please…. How did you come to be here?"
"Oh — that." She shuddered. "Yes. Yes, I'll tell you that, but I can't understand why you stand there like a mummy. What was I saying? Oh, yes. Well, when I discovered this evening that the bottles had been changed-"
"At what time was that?"
"At about a quarter to eight. Thereabouts. I was expecting Larry — Dr. Antrim-home at any minute. And I had given all that strychnine to Mr. Hogenauer. And I couldn't alarm Larry: I tell you I couldn't! The only thing to do was to try to get in touch with Mr. Hogenauer. I didn't think he'd taken the stuff already, or we should jolly well have beard of it. But I couldn't telephone him: I knew he didn't have a phone in the house. That was pretty ghastly, if you like. I knew I had to come over here at once. I looked out of the window; we live next door to Col-" She paused, and lifted a hand to shade her steady, rather large and shinylidded eyes. She seemed puzzled. "You said, didn't you, that you saw my husband at Colonel Charters's?"
"Yes, ma'am. Routine business," I said briskly. "Go on, please."
"Two men I didn't know, one of them in an outrageous-looking hat, were just driving up in an open car. The colonel's Hillman was in the drive, and I knew he wouldn't mind if I took that to come over here. So I hid the two bottles in my room; it was sheer panic really, because they couldn't do any damage now; and I ran over to the colonel's. But just as I was leaving our house, I saw someone — I think it was Mr. Serpos, the colonel's secretary — come out of the house and get into the Hillman and drive away. I hailed him, but he didn't stop. So I had to catch a bus. It's a roundabout way, and takes ages, and afterwards I had to walk here from the bus-stop. It was past nine o'clock when I got here…."
"Yes?"
She spoke now in a monotonous voice. "I banged on the door, but there wasn't any answer. Then I went round the house and tried the back door, and looked in at the windows. I knew it had happened. I knew it even before I looked in through the shutter and saw that red hat sticking up over the back of the chair. I called out, but it didn't move."
"How did you see it — the cap, I mean? How did you know what it was? You may as well know," I added quickly, "that we've been a good deal interested in what has been going on here."
"So?" she said with a curiously Teutonic inflection, and looked at me steadily. Then she spoke with quiet emphasis. "I think you are right. I think you would do vary well to investigate. That's what I was going to tell you. There will be trouble about this, but my husband is not going to be involved — or myself either, if I can help it… Well. I saw that hat because there was then a light in this room. But it wasn't a usual sort of light. I'll tell you about that in a second.
"I found out that the back door was open. So I came in. I had to know. The door to this room was locked, with the key on the inside. But you can see for yourself," she pointed, "it's an old-fashioned lock, with the key loose. You push a piece of paper under the door; then you push the key out from your side, and it drops on the paper, so that you can pull it through under the door. Oh, yes, I'm quite capable: thank you. I did that with a piece of newspaper I found in the scullery. Then I unlocked the door from the outside. Now look here."
She got up from the chair. She was small, with a sturdy figure like a swimmer's, but she was still unsteady on her feet. She went over to the fireplace, and pointed to the hearth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Bowers, with a glass of water in his shaky hand, had come back into the room. But she paid no attention to the water, and I believe Bowers drank it himself. She was pointing to an object lying on the brown tiling of the hearth, which I had seen when I threw her cigarette into the grate, but which I believed to be an ordinary fountain-pen. It was not. I picked it up, and it was a flash-light shaped like a pen-another of the knickknacks which apparently Hogenauer had loved-with its tiny bulb smashed.
"When I came in here," Mrs. Antrim went on coolly, "the room was dark except for this, which was switched on and the switch caught. It was lying here," she put her hand on the mantelshelf, "and there was a little stream of light going diagonally past Mr. Hogenauer's body… like this."
Placing the pen diagonally on the mantel, she drew an imaginary line in the air towards the desk. It passed about two feet over Hogenauer's head, slanted over the desk on a line with the lamp-cord, and ended on one of the open bookshelves against the wall.
"I was curious," said Mrs. Antrim, with a little colour in her cheeks now, "to know what book or books that light was pointing straight to. The answer was: to none. See for yourself. There's a gap in the shelf just where it ended, and a couple of books have been taken out. You can see by the curved markings in the dust."
I followed her to the other side of the desk. The missing books were the two middle volumes of a set, elaborately tooled and gilded, of an old work on aeronautics before the invention of the heavier-than-air machine: Astra Castra, Experiments and Adventures in the Atmosphere, 1865.