“Where did you find it? I mean the other?”
“It found me. Can you understand that?”
She nodded, her eyes still wide. “All the time I knew it was here. I could hear it talking, talking in the dark.”
“It has been there for two years, and I do not know how much longer. Did it send the fear that was worse than death?”
“What else could have sent it? But it was not on his desk when I found him.”
“Then if the man who killed your master had captured this as he hoped, there would have been no death here that night?”
“No,” she whispered, “no death, and perhaps no fear.”
“So that the man who wanted it then may after all be the same as the one who wants it now, and, having washed his hands, he returns for what he then sought?”
Again the sudden light in the baffling eyes, as of torches lit in the gloom. Derrick saw it and racked his brain. It was not an old thought that moved behind the mask now, but some conception new to that mysterious mentality. Were Blunt indeed the criminal, and assuming his return to recapture his prize, why should the suggestion of this produce so vivid a reaction? If this were the truth, why conceal it? What could this woman lose by coming into the open? She would write herself down a liar, and an innocent man be avenged. No, there was something else, and it beckoned a mystical finger to Derrick’s imagination and invited him on. The grim reality of the moment fell on him like a cloak. In a few more clock-ticks there would be others with whom to deal.
“Perkins,” he said evenly, “for better or worse this matter must soon take another form. Two men will shortly be in this room, and one of them in all probability is guilty of murder. You know this, and I know it. The hand of fate may descend suddenly and point clearly, or it may be that the innocent may suffer for the guilty. God forbid that this should happen, but it has happened before, and sometimes because those who knew the truth were not there to tell it or, knowing it, kept an infamous silence. I ask you again, has Blunt to your knowledge ever been at Beech Lodge before, and, if so, was he here at the time your master died?”