“No, that I am not. I find it desperately difficult to associate him with murder, an association, however, that I find equally improbable when I think of you or any of the rest of us who were in the house that night. That’s the trouble, Ethel. The evidence against The Tundish is so very much the strongest. I try not to believe that he did it. I know that I didn’t. And that leaves—— And I can’t make out a case against one. So, like a circle train on its dismal round of repetitions, I come back ever to the doctor. The circumstantial evidence is pretty deadly. A prosecuting counsel would make a good deal of his previous acquaintance with Stella, and his reticence on the subject. We know that he quarreled with her father—the prosecution would suggest that she had knowledge of some disgraceful secret in his past, knowledge which, if published, might ruin his career in this country, and that he took instant measures to silence her.”
Ethel sat, a picture of limp dejection, with her dark head bowed, her hair falling forward—a screen to hide her face. My suggestions roused no sign of quickening interest, and in spite of the conversation I had overheard at the club, I came to the conclusion that she knew no more of the doctor’s quarrel with Stella’s father than I did myself. And yet, that conversation! What was it she had said? “I certainly would not have offered to put her up if you hadn’t suggested it to me.” A statement that surely must be pertinent to our pernicious tangle, and if so what tragic thoughts were filling that dark brown head?
“But surely, Francis, no one could suppose him to have done it so clumsily—a doctor could so easily, if he wished, find a way that would not point so obviously to wilful murder?”
“His own counsel would make the most of that point, of course. But anyhow, unless the real murderer is found, he will be under a cloud for the rest of his life.”
“It’s horrible, simply horrible,” Ethel shuddered, burying her face in her hands, “to think that a man who has never willingly wronged a soul can be put in the position he is in, by nothing but chance and ill luck.”
“I’m sorry if what I’ve said has made you feel still more unhappy, Ethel. Quite half the time I am convinced that he had nothing whatever to do with it, and then at times my convictions fail me. There is just one thing, however, that strikes me as being in his favor. Has it ever occurred to you, I wonder, as it has to me, that he has just a tiny suspicion himself as to who did it?”
Ethel turned in her chair and stared at me. “Do you mean that he suspects one of us in this house, you or me, or one of the others? What makes you think so?”
“I can’t tell you,” I answered. “It’s just an idea at the back of my head, perhaps so vague that I should not have mentioned it. I have the impression though, sometimes very strongly, that he could throw suspicion on some one else if he chose. Somehow, I don’t quite know why, I feel that he is waiting for something, biding his time.”
We sat a while in silence. A light breeze had sprung up, a breeze laden with heat and the sweet overpowering scent of syringa. A mowing machine droned a garden or two away. The air was saturated with summer scents and sounds, and we sat nursing our unhappy thoughts—thoughts more in keeping with the rotting leaves and sodden undergrowth of some November wood.
“What time does Mrs. Kenley arrive?” I asked after a prolonged pause.