“There must be some entrance to the space between the wall and the tapestry of the library,” Belknap said. “We’d better call John.”
John came. He showed them a thin door within a door—a long, narrow, hinged panel that formed a door jamb in the dining-room-library doorway. Belknap went through it. No one spoke. When he returned he carried a Colt twenty-two in his handkerchief. He went directly to Nadia.
“I would offer you this back,” he said in a low voice, “but we shall need it. I’m truly sorry.”
“Don’t worry in the least.” She looked him straight in the eyes. “It is mine, yes. I missed it when I needed it last night.”
XIV
Late in the afternoon a ‘London’ fog had crept up from the Sound, and smothered in its furry, suffocating waves, Thorngate was sinking into depth below depth of depression. Julian asked weren’t there seven levels of Purgatory because if so they must be about six down at five o’clock and rapidly approaching the bottom. It was the total lack of headway made by the investigators, and the apparent helplessness of the law, that tripled and quadrupled the early gloom of the second night. Hours upon hours of questioning and cross-questioning by Stebbins, Belknap and Berry in turn had gathered no really tangible results. Yet the steady, unremittent grilling went on—and on and on and on, as Julian said, like the tail of Christopher Robin’s mouse.
Julian was unquenchable. During his own brief appearance in the witness box—an uncomfortable, straight-backed chair at one side of the dining-room table, the dining-room being the temporary seat of legal authority—he had played a combination of clown and dunce, to the rage of Stebbins, the scorn of Belknap, and the amusement of Berry. For Julian had at last made up his mind to throw in his lot, and his clues, with Berry’s, as soon as he could isolate Berry. And it was for this he was managing to keep his own counsel. He wasn’t casting bread on the troubled waters for that Savonarola Belknap, or Stebbins, to pick up and grow fat upon. But he did feel that he perhaps shouldn’t rate a whole investigation to himself, seeing it was his first. It would be positively presumptuous to suppose he had a chance to make a coup (not that he didn’t suppose it just the same) against such a field of stars. Belknap might even be called a first magnitude.
So when Stebbins was severe with him, chronically severe, he took refuge in an india-rubber persiflage.
“Miss Mdevani saw you on the stairs at 4:30 A.M. What did you say you were doing about that time?”
“I swear I was doing nothing whatever about it. Time is one of those things you save time by leaving to its own devices.”