“Don’t worry, the firing’s all in the wrong direction so far. The police are waiting to see the whites of their eyes. And that’s going to need television, considering where the enemy is in hiding.”
Sergeant Stebbins apparently thought so too. The disturbance came from under the porch of the servants’ wing, and from the floor of the porch to the ground, a drop of eight or ten feet, a fine-meshed lattice enclosed a garden tool-room and formed a walled passage to the basement. Its outside door was closed, undoubtedly barricaded. Stebbins had tried the basement approach and found it closed and sealed. But he had decided on squeezing tactics. Two of his men, stationed in the cellar, were to burst through the inner door at the moment of a supporting attack from the yard.
Without warning Sergeant Stebbins gave his two-shot signal. And the din was on. Julian, really pale, stepped back and held his hand across his eyes.
“Shiver my timbers!” he said, with a deep, trembling shudder. “God help whoever it is. He has pluck.”
The smell of gunpowder had sifted into the room. Underfoot the sounds of the splintering door were somehow more affecting than the actual shots. The tensity and misery of the five in the dining-room were reaching an unbearable pitch. The loss of the restraining influence, though not a happy restraint, of Belknap and Berry, who had gone to the front as staff officers, was tending to break down such morale as had existed. Joel was moaning as if she had been wounded. Sydney Crawford, with staring eyes, was gripping Neil’s arm between her two hands until every knuckle showed white. Neil was shivering from head to foot as a man shivers after too long a swim in cold water.
Suddenly it was the silence, crashing back into place, that seemed deafening, like lightning-cut cloud meeting in thunder. In it, Nadia Mdevani, who had appeared to be holding her nerve, lost it. She pointed, as if at blood.
“Look! In the name of Christ, look there. There’s what spelled Bertrand Whittaker’s death.”
It was a figure eight in the form of two overlapping holes bored in the paneling of the wall at the height of a man’s head. Freshly cut: there was a faint salting of sawdust on the hardwood floor beneath.
It took Joel to break the stillness in the room. With a face like a death-mask she gazed at the dark spot on the wall.
“I know now,” she said. “I know who killed Colonel Blake and Romany and Uncle Bertrand. But it can’t be true. It can’t be true that—” Julian didn’t let her finish. He crushed his hand over her mouth as Belknap came in from the butler’s pantry, with the sergeant and Berry.