“Oh, Peter Pienaar,” I groaned inwardly, and for a moment I was very near damning myself for a fool and asking their pardon.
“Meantime I vote we have a game of bridge,” said the plump one. “It will give Mr Hannay time to think over things, and you know we have been wanting a fourth player. Do you play, sir?”
I accepted as if it had been an ordinary invitation at the club. The whole business had mesmerized me. We went into the smoking-room where a card-table was set out, and I was offered things to smoke and drink. I took my place at the table in a kind of dream. The window was open and the moon was flooding the cliffs and sea with a great tide of yellow light. There was moonshine, too, in my head. The three had recovered their composure, and were talking easily—just the kind of slangy talk you will hear in any golf club-house. I must have cut a rum figure, sitting there knitting my brows with my eyes wandering.
My partner was the young dark one. I play a fair hand at bridge, but I must have been rank bad that night. They saw that they had got me puzzled, and that put them more than ever at their ease. I kept looking at their faces, but they conveyed nothing to me. It was not that they looked different; they were different. I clung desperately to the words of Peter Pienaar.
Then something awoke me.
The old man laid down his hand to light a cigar. He didn’t pick it up at once, but sat back for a moment in his chair, with his fingers tapping on his knees.
It was the movement I remembered when I had stood before him in the moorland farm, with the pistols of his servants behind me.
A little thing, lasting only a second, and the odds were a thousand to one that I might have had my eyes on my cards at the time and missed it. But I didn’t, and, in a flash, the air seemed to clear. Some shadow lifted from my brain, and I was looking at the three men with full and absolute recognition.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck ten o’clock.
The three faces seemed to change before my eyes and reveal their secrets. The young one was the murderer. Now I saw cruelty and ruthlessness, where before I had only seen good-humour. His knife, I made certain, had skewered Scudder to the floor. His kind had put the bullet in Karolides.