“Yes, but mine was the vital part of that. It meant nothing, surely, until I printed my asinine addition?”
“Surely it did. Think how I called attention to the fact that each of us might have been alone up-stairs last night. Think how odd and out of keeping the whole silly practical joke must appear to Allport. Why, you thought so yourself, you know you did! And now this second notice, me caught prowling about the house at night, and the newspaper found in the only vacant bedroom. Whether any further crime was intended to-night or not, nothing could have told more heavily against me. Remember, too, how at Allport’s inquiry Kenneth stressed——”
His sentence trailed away to nothing, and he stood gazing into vacant space, a puzzled frown on his clear-cut pleasant face. “Well, off you go to bed,” he said, breaking through his reverie, “I may yet get my call to that young citizen’s reveille.”
I staggered to my room and tumbled out of my clothes and into bed. My brain refused to tackle further problems, but my last conscious thoughts were of Kenneth. Could I imagine him guilty? Kenneth a murderer—yes, just possibly—perhaps. But Kenneth diabolically clever? No, most emphatically no!
Chapter XII.
Janet Arrives on the Scene
A beauty gazes with a smile of pleasurable anticipation into some distorted mirror, to start back in horror from the grinning image that greets her so unexpectedly. But were little Allport to gaze into a distorted mirror, what then! What unthinkable monstrosity might he not see depicted! And so it was with my dreams and the way they reflected my already gruesome waking thoughts as I dreamed and woke intermittently through what remained of that hot, airless night. If the day had seemed long, those few hours of dream-disturbed sleep were like a slice of eternity itself. An eternity which I occupied in playing tennis at the club, serving through an interminable game, first with the baby flagon of Chinese poison and then with my own severed hand, which Margaret handed to me on her racquet like a ball; in racing frantically from room to room, to find Ethel, then The Tundish, then each of the others in turn, lying dead on their backs with staring bloodshot eyes—all dead, and myself alone with the dead—alone and tearing desperately from one room to the next to find a sign of life; thumping madly on resounding doors; crouching, shrinking down outside them; opening them in fear and banging them to again in terror when I saw what there was within; looking furtively behind me to see little Allport standing there, grinning sardonically, leering at me, dangling a pair of bloodstained handcuffs before my starting eyes, and asking me in a way that left me gasping for breath if my initials were F. H. An eternity which I occupied in overhearing Ethel and the doctor callously plotting together to poison Kenneth, and in creeping on hands and knees down mile-long dimly lighted corridors, to and from a succession of scenes of horror.
Finally I woke to see the sun shining in at my window and to the dull realization that some of my dreams at any rate came uncomfortably near to the truth.
Down-stairs I found The Tundish—unshaved and unabashed—at one end of the breakfast table with a medical journal propped up in front of him, and Kenneth and Ralph at the other, each with a morning paper. I saw the doctor’s eyes twinkle with amusement as I took my seat next to him, and he told me that he had been called out of bed again at four and had only just returned.
“And what about the escort, did he accompany you?”
“No, I rang up the police station yesterday evening telling them that I expected the call, and they trustfully allowed me out on parole.”