"And Kate knew this?" demanded Bennett. He was beginning to remember things. He remembered the girl's own slip of the tongue, instantly denied and retracted, that Marcia Tait had been killed with a hunting-crop. "She knew it?"
"Yes. I didn't see the coat when I went into the room this morning, but Kate seemed to regard me as a kind of fellow-conspirator. Anyway, I was telling you that my foot struck the hunting-crop under the bed. I didn't dare risk Wynne's attention-so I kicked it farther under the bed. But, while Wynne was there, Louise called out something to the effect that she had tried to shove Marcia downstairs last night:.. Yes, I know it looks bad. Whereupon Wynne never said a word, but went about giving her some kind of emetic. Afterwards, when she seemed to be resting easier, he said he'd got something to tell me. There was rather a strange look about him. He took me out in the hall. When we came out, by the way. " Willard frowned. He snapped his fingers as after an elusive memory. "Somebody's voice was talking a bit loudly on the telephone down on the stair-landing, now that I remember it. It kept saying, `At the pavilion, at the pavilion, I tell you.' I remember because he was making so much noise I intended to go and tell him to shut up. But Wynne said, `It's that so-and-so Rainger. I left him talking to the inspector in the library, and now I suppose he's got loose again. He's crazy drunk."'
"When was this?" demanded Bennett. "We left him lying on the couch in the library when we went to the dining-room. I'll swear he'd passed out cold."
"I don't know. Possibly fifteen minutes or so after Wynne had come up to look at Louise. Anyhow, Wynne said he had something important to tell me. They seem to regard me," said Willard, wrinkling his brow and staring out of the window "as the guardian and father-confessor of everybody. The voice on the telephone stopped then. Wynne took me round to where we're standing now. He had just begun to talk, and was in the preparatory stage of saying nothing in an acute medical way (or so it seemed to me) when we heard the shot…
"My God, man, that was a horrible feeling! I think we both had Louise on our minds. We looked at each other, and then we both ran to Louise's room. She was all right; she was sitting up in bed as though she'd recovered herself: shaking a bit, perhaps, but very quiet and apologetic as she always is. That fever of sorts she'd had seemed to have gone. She said, `What was that noise?' and then, `What am I doing in this room?' Then was when we heard the rest of you running up the stairs.
"You know the rest."
Willard sat down in the embrasure of the window. He seemed shaken, as though he had got through a story he was determined to tell; but he assumed unconsciously a stage gesture with one fist on his hip and his head lowered. Bennett heard his breathing.
"If," he added after a moment, "the police get suspicious of her — steady!"
He jerked his head round. Katharine Bohun was coming down the passage.
"I saw them," she said, "take John out in that — that thing they carry dead bodies in. And I heard them talking. They said, at least from what I could hear at the upstairs window, somebody had said definitely he wouldn't die. Is it true?"