Martin, flung backwards, tripped and caught himself as he went down. Master's yellow pencil rolled underneath him as he got up, among reeling reflections less like a mirror maze than like a kaleidoscope. Puckston, still shouting, had driven his adversary into a short passage at right-angles to the other.
But it was all over.
One last blow Puckston landed before Masters locked both his arms from behind. Puckston's adversary, flung back again a mirror at the end of the passage, struck it with too great a weight With a crunching noise, opening in slow cracks, great shards slid down and splintered on the floor as the figure sat down and lay motionless.
"Y’know," said H.M. in a calm and meditative tone, "it’s interestin' to nab this feller in a house of mirrors. He may be the most vicious, he's certainly the most conceited murderer, I've ever met"
And all of them, panting, looked down amid smashed glass-shreds at the unconscious figure and bloodstained face of Richard. Fleet.
Chapter 20
The policeman, pacing his beat through Moreston Square, South Kensington, glanced up to see the lighted windows on the top floor of number 16. It was the Thursday night — or, to be exact, the Friday morning — exactly a fortnight after he had seen lights burning so late in Miss Callice's flat
From St Jude's tower the chimes rang and rippled with the hour of three. The policeman smiled and sauntered on.
If he had looked into the comfortable living-room on the top floor, he would have seen in its easiest chair a large, stout, barrel-shaped gentleman in a white linen suit, with a cigar in one hand and a strong whisky-and-soda in the other.
Ruth was there, and Stannard, and Jenny, and Martin, and, as it happened, Lady Brayle. The light of the silver-shaded wall-lamps touched unquiet faces. It had taken a long time, and a very fair amount of whisky, to work themselves toward hearing what H.M. had begun to say.