"No! I swear I didn't. I only seem to be a kind of dummy they're using for their own purposes… "
"This Merrivale is your uncle, I understand? Do you know him well?"
"I met him yesterday for the first time in my life. Why?"
"Do you think," asked Willard quietly, "a man could lie to him and get away with it?… I'll tell you why I ask. I've been sitting at Louise Carewe's bedside. She's been babbling about murdering Marcia Tait."
Bennett whirled round. Something strange in Willard's expression caught him like a hypnosis. He tried to think of what that expression reminded him. And then a cloudy memory returned to him, of words that Willard had spoken that morning; words echoing and clanging with dull cynicism. "We poor striped brutes went through the paper hoops and climbed up on the perches, and usually she had only to fire a blank cartridge when we got unruly." Then he knew what it was, at last, that those queer yellow-brown eyes of Willard's reminded him of. It was of something prowling inside a cage.
"You don't mean," Bennett heard himself saying, "she admitted she-?"
"I don't know. It was a kind of delirium. I thought, and later found, she'd taken an overdose of some kind of sleeping drug-but I'll tell you about that in a moment. I was sitting there wondering when Dr. Wynne came in. He said you'd mentioned something about her being ill. While he was looking at her I came close to the bed, and my foot kicked something under it: a hunting-crop with a heavy silver end, loaded with lead and shaped like a dog's head…"
"That's nonsense! It wasn't her room; it was-"
"Kate's? Yes, I know." Willard regarded him with a flash of curiosity. "But Louise had the thing with her when she screamed in the gallery last night, and I picked her up in a faint. This is what I didn't tell that detective. I — quite frankly — how can I express it, anyway?" He floundered among words, and made a gesture as though to clear them away.
"Quite frankly, I don't want to run my own neck into a halter. But Louise. she's so harmless, man! That's all. I don't want to mention it. When I picked her up, she was wearing a sort of long outdoor coat over a nightgown and dressing-gown, and that hunting-crop was stuffed into the pocket."