"'Interested.' Is that the word they use over here? All right; take it as the word. Say I'm `interested' in you. Say anything you like. Just how `interested' I can't tell you now; because there's murder here, and the whole house is poisoned, and down there's the room where somebody you'd known all your life tried to kill himself in your own home not an hour ago. I can smell that smoke from the gun too, and neither of us would dare talk about Interests here. But the house won't stay poisoned, and then maybe by God you'll know why I think you're the loveliest thing I ever saw in the world! — so if somehow you've got yourself into any false position, and whatever it is you did that never mattered and never would matter, don't do any such fool thing as admitting it."
"I know," she said, after a long silence. "All I'm glad of is that you said what you did," her eyes brimmed over, "you — you —!”
"Exactly," he said. "Steady, now. Let's go downstairs."
CHAPTER TWELVE
H. M. Argues the Case
A clock in the passage was striking eleven-thirty when they reached the library.
"— full reports," Inspector Potter was intoning. "Statement of police surgeon, post-mortem order for you to sign. Here's plaster-of-Paris casts of two sets of footprints, Mr. Bohun's and Mr. Bennett's: only tracks before we got there. Plan showing exact line of footprints, measured to scale. I thought that was wise; it's beginning to snow again. Here's the fingerprint reports. Photographs will be developed and sent back this afternoon. The body's still there, but it's been moved up on the bed."
Potter was laying out articles in an orderly line on the table under the yellow-shaded lamps. It had grown darker outside, and dead tendrils of vine whipped the windows as the wind rose. There was a growling in the chimney, a draught in which one high sheet of flame cracked like thorns and flicked out spurts of fiery embers. Masters, his heavy face showing more wrinkles under the lamp, sat at the table with an open notebook. Maurice Bohun, looking interested and pleased with his bright unwinking eyes fixed on a corner of the fireplace, also sat at the table. Over at one side, in silhouette against the firelight like two Dutch dolls, stood Thompson and a gray-haired sturdy woman in black. Bennett could not see H. M. But there was a big mass of shadow in the far corner of the fireplace, where he thought he could make out a gleam on enormous glasses and a pair of white socks.
"Thanks, Potter," said Masters. "Here's your notebook back. I've been reading Sir Henry all, the testimony we've accumulated to date. And now… any instructions, sir?'
"Uh?"