"Good morning," said a voice from the back of the hallway. "How do you like your job?"
He recognized the voice, as well as the lumbering step that followed it, in time to be reassured. It was Dr. Fell's voice; but even then there was a difference. It had lost its aggressive rumble. It was heavy, and dull, and full of a bitterness that very few people had ever heard there. Stumping on his cane, catching his breath harshly as though he had been walking hard, Dr. Fell appeared round the corner of the staircase. He was hatless, and had a heavy plaid shawl round his shoulders. His reddish face had lost color; his great white-streaked mop of hair was disarranged. The small eyes, the curved moustache, the mountainous chins, all showed a kind of sardonic weariness.
"I know," he rumbled, and wheezed again. "You want to know what I'm doing here. Well, I’ll tell you. Cursing myself."
A pause. His eyes strayed up the dark staircase, and then came back to Donovan.
"Maybe, yes, certainly, if they'd told me about that passage in the oak room… Never mind. It was my own fault. I should have investigated for myself. I allowed this to happen!" he snapped, and struck the ferrule of his cane on the matting. "I encouraged it, deliberately encouraged it, so that I could prove my case; but I never meant it to happen. I intended to set the bait, and then head off…" His voice grew lower. "This is my last case. I’ll never play the omniscient damned fool again."
"Don't you think," said Hugh, "that Spinelli got not very far off what he deserved?"
"I was thinking," said Dr. Fell in a queer voice, "of justice, or what constitutes justice, and other things as open to argument as the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. And I couldn't see my way clear as to what to do. This new business" — he pointed toward the door with his cane—"has almost decided it. But I wish it hadn't. I tried to prevent it. Do you know what I've been doing? I've been sitting in a chair in the upstairs hallway at The Grange, after everybody else had gone to bed. I've been sitting there watching the entrance to a passageway giving on a line of bedrooms, where I knew Somebody's bedroom was. I was convinced Somebody would come out of there when the house was asleep, go downstairs, and out for a rendezvous with Spinelli. And if I saw this person, I would know beyond a doubt that I was right. I would intercept this Somebody, and then.. God knows."
He leaned his great bulk against the newel post of the stairs, blinking over his eyeglasses.
"But in my fine fancy conceit I didn't know about the secret passage in the oak room, that leads outside. Somebody did come out — but not past me. It was very, very easy. Out of one room in a step, into another, down the stairs; and I suspected nothing until I heard the shots down here…"
"Well, sir?"