Another scene returned to Holden in sharp colors of memory.
" 'Show himself a fool,'" he repeated. "That was what Hurst-Gore said! It was when you were deviling Thorley to admit the whole truth, and nearly did get him to admit it. Hurst-Gore intervened, and shut Thorley up. Do you think our Derek knew everything?"
"That is my belief. He was Thorley's tutor in that gentleman's political ambitions. However, consider the situation just before Margot Marsh's death.
"To young Merrick, writhing, it had become simply intolerable. He is more than shying away from this older woman; he is frightened of her. She may do anything. Doris will hear of this! Hell never marry Doris! It will ruin his life!”
"Youth, when frightened, can become insensately cruel. Merrick, as I met him later at Widestairs, was a likeable sort But he was jumpy, unsteady (surely you saw that for yourself?) and blind to the matter in its right perspective. Like many another young man in a love affair from which he hasn't the experience to extricate himself, he could see only one way. He lost his head and decided to kill her.
"Margot suggested the suicide pact. And he, at the unnoticed suggestion of Locke, had been reading about another hysterical woman: Mrs. Buchanan. Mrs. Buchanan dies of morphine-and-belladonna poisoning, and the doctors call it a natural death.
"Could it be done? Can it be done? I see him gnawing his fingernails over the question, and deciding to try.
"So I attempted to discover just when Merrick might have given the prepared poison bottle to his victim. She had visited Widestairs mat afternoon; but apparently she hadn't met Merrick.
"It was not until last night that I learned Merrick had been seen trudging back from the trout stream, with a greatcoat over his sodden clothes, meeting her in the fields near Widestairs . . ."
"And giving her the poison bottle!" interrupted Holden, "Locke saw him do it!"
Dr. Fell blinked at him.
"True," he grunted. "So I was informed by Locke last night But how did you know it?"
"From overhearing Locke talking to a certain Mademoiselle Frey. Locke had been putting two and two together, with a suspicion which terrified him. Yes! And when he gave that fierce lecture about the 'utter callousness' of young people, he wasn't talking about Doris at all. He was thinking of Ronnie Merrick."
"But—Margot?" asked Celia.
"Your sister," returned Dr. Fell, "went back to Caswall with a plain (I repeat, a plain) brown bottle. She was going to make a last fiery appeal to her husband. And so she . .."
"She printed a label," whispered Celia.
"A label" said Dr. Fell, "dramatically crying poison. I think I can see her holding it up before Thorley and saying, You see what this is? Let me go, or I'll drink it tonight Let me have Ronnie; or I’ll die.'
"And Thorley Marsh didn't believe her.
"She had cried, 'Wolf too often. She had threatened suicide too much. Here he saw a fake label clumsily printed on a toy press from the nursery. (You recall, I asked whether he knew about that printing press?) After her threat she put the bottle more or less openly in the medicine cabinet. And, in an atmosphere of horrible strain, your party started for Widestairs."
Dr. Fell's cigar had gone out He put it down on the little table with the decanter, the glasses, and the glass water jug. He eyed the water jug before continuing.
"We needn't recapitulate the events of that night, except for the actual murder. Ronnie Merrick got a bad fright when he was unexpectedly faced with the part of Dr. Buchanan at the party. But he had gone too far to retreat
"The party was over. The hours went on striking. Widestairs was now asleep. Well before one o'clock, the time ranged for both of them to drink poison, Merrick dipped away from Widestairs to Caswall. Under a greatcoat he wore the sodden-wet clothes of the trout stream.
"He removed the greatcoat swam across the moat, and / swung himself up the pipe. From outside he could see his victim, wherever she happened to be in her suite; as I discovered by questions, an the curtains were wide open and a ledge along the wall runs underneath them. He saw her in one of those rooms, now wearing a black velvet gown."
"Dr. Fell," said Celia, "what is the explanation of that gown? None of us had ever seen it! It was ..."
"A black velvet gown," said Dr. Fell, "for a black velvet room."
"What?"
"You of course appreciate that your sister, before everything else in her life faded out under the stress of her passion for Merrick, had set up as a fortune teller as other women have done before her? It was an outlet for her hysteria, her frustration, her hatred of life.
"Once the affair began with Merrick, all that was forgotten. Madame Vanya disappeared. Her clients' cards were destroyed. The door was locked. The inner room became sacred to the love affair that destroyed her. But it was the dress she had worn as Madame Vanya; and in it Merrick painted her portrait."
Holden stared back. "He painted—?"
"Dash it all!" complained Dr. Fell. "Didn't you notice what was burned in the fireplace? Didn't you smell burning canvas?"
'Yes. Yes, I did!"
"And the burned sticks, arranged in a rectangle, with what might have been shreds of cloth attached? And the broken lengths of varnished wood, which had been the easel before he smashed it up? The room had a skylight, you know; a north light; an artist's light That was why you saw me looking for the marks of the easel on the carpet But that big velvet-covered divan . . . well, never mind."
Celia seemed about to comment on this last remark, but changed her mind.
'You—you were telling us," she said, "about the murder. About Ronnie crawling up out of the moat. And poor Margot getting dressed to die. What then?"
Dr. Fell pondered.
"For that" he said, "we have the testimony of no living person. Let me tell you what I think happened in those rooms.
"Merrick hasn't wanted to do this, you know. But he has got to the point of believing he must dispose of this woman, must take one last step, or he will never get Doris Locke.
"Clinging to the drainpipe outside, he peers through that never-quite-closed window into the bathroom. He sees his victim standing in front of the mirror, holding up a glass that contains an alcohol solution of morphine and belladonna. He sees his victim, with a swaggering gesture which does not quite mean business, lift the glass and drain it.
"But he means business. And he climbs through the window.
"He ran very little risk. The husband, drunk, can be heard snoring in the next room. Everyone else is far away. If she is startled by that specter, face twitching and sodden wet, then the hysterical brain will assume he has come to die with her and it will seem absolutely right
"He stops only long enough to mop head and hands on a towel. She points toward the other rooms, her bedroom and sitting room beyond, and leads the way. He follows her. In the bedroom, while her back is turned, he can snatch up a weapon ...
"Of course you guess what it was?
"It was a weapon from among the fire irons in the bedroom. It was the brass-handled poker which you, Celia, described as being in the sitting room on the following morning. A supernumerary fire iron, the touch of the murderer.
"As she steps into the sitting room, she collapses from a frantic blow across the back of the skull. Not hard enough to kill; not hard enough to leave a mark under that heavy hair. But hard enough to stun until the morphine can make her helpless.
"He drags that handsome, inert body over to the chaise longue, in the warm room with the lights burning. He must find and destroy her diary, that famous diary in the Chinese Chippendale desk. He finds the diary unlocked; he burns the pages.
"Young Bryon is freezing cold and nearly fainting. But he goes back to the bathroom, rinses out the glass she has drunk from, and puts the poison bottle in his pocket. He switches off the light in the bedroom and the bathroom. And down he crawls again into the moat"