And Belknap turned back to continue, with Berry and Stebbins, the heated interrogation of Nadia Mdevani by which they hoped to run her to earth by her own admission, and so, clearing the decks of legal red-tape, hasten and simplify her path that led but to the grave as best you looked at it. For, admitted or not admitted, denial could no longer stand against a sealed order to kill Blake, a gun left lying on the scene of Whittaker’s murder, and a poisoned sleeping drug administered to Crawford. This last, in a brief preliminary test, Belknap had proved to be arsenous oxide; anyway arsenic in one of its forms.
They had of necessity quickly abandoned all attempts on Sydney Crawford. Not that she stood above suspicion, hardly that (Stebbins had even taken it upon himself to arrest her willy-nilly), but Sydney, passing from one phase of excessive shock to another, was now wandering the house like a modern Ophelia, modern in that nothing she said bore the least resemblance to her predecessor’s soliloquy. She said cruel, bitter, terrible things to the walls and the ceilings in a hard, glinting voice: “I’ll call up Victor and tell him his Daddy’s dead. He’ll remember it for life if he’s fetched out of bed to be told.” “The place to stab a man with a paper knife is between the fourth and fifth vertebræ, I mean ribs. I’ve found that out.” “Well, Romany, if it’s true that the first two of a triangle to die make the couple in Heaven, you should worry now. You’ve got him.” Until she changed her tune a little there was no use bothering with her, for questioning or pressure brought to bear might push her beyond this ragged edge of insanity.
No danger of insanity in Nadia Mdevani’s case! But apparently no danger either of obtaining any satisfaction from her. Wanting a confession from her was one thing—obtaining even a modicum of it was another. Nadia sat limply, almost unconcernedly, in a deep chair before the East Room fire, and, never lifting her eyes from a bemused contemplation of the flames, refused to yield a hair’s breadth of vantage to her tormentors. The ground they covered with her was the old ground covered in the morning, but, though her three examiners bore the same names that they had then born, they were three men of different attitude and temper. Each blaming himself secretly for an earlier male to female softness, that had perhaps been responsible for the extra hot water they were now in, was now out for blood in earnest, beauty or no beauty. It angered them that she seemed not to notice a difference. Quite as collected, equally as cool, as during the morning’s session on the stand, she shed their individual and concerted attacks.
Yes, she had received the order regarding Colonel Blake. No, she could not say when, or from whom. That was for them to find out—if they could. Yes, she had taken it to Mr. Belknap. Why? She didn’t exactly know; an impulse. Perhaps a wily way to further the intimacy between them! Here she threw a little whimsical smile in Belknap’s direction. If he saw it he gave no sign. She said she intended telling him she had not obeyed orders—even though Blake lay dead at that moment on the library floor. She had intended asking his protection, such protection as a man of law and justice, power and respect, can give a woman of doubtful antecedents. The sarcasm, if there was any, was ever so slight.
What had she been doing during the hours before consulting with Mr. Belknap? Oh-my-God, her weary tone of telling and retelling implied, what a twice and thrice told tale to repeat. She had gone to her room and been restless. Naturally; no one else had claimed to be anything but restless last night, and she wouldn’t profess to be any exception to the rule. She had read a little, and then done a bit of reconnoitering— Oh well, call it prowling. What difference did it make? She had been made aware, putting the two of his absence from his own room and the two of his voice in Romany’s together, that Bertrand Whittaker was paying a visit. And that couldn’t be said to have made her any the less upset. Not that she would have called him one of your story-book lovers; but this evening she needed him to be his own best friend with her in his own behalf. Her new distrust of him, a blend of anger, disrespect and fear, rising from his cat-and-mouse play with his Diary, was running her blood up close to killing heat. Romany was rather a last straw. She had returned to her room for her Colt, to find it had disappeared from the dresser; and had gone on down for a drink to restore her equilibrium. Again her smile. It was then she had remarked the gnawing of a rat in the wainscoting—a persistent rat, Mr. Belknap; a purposeful rat; one intent on going places. She had left him working his way through, and had gone for a long cooling-off stroll, down to the water and back. What a night! What a moon!
Stepping back over the low sills into the library, and crossing the dark room to the door dimly blocked in by the hall light, her foot had encountered something soft and humpy. By that seventh sense that comes to one’s aid at such moments she knew it for a body. She had her own pocket flash. Turning it up she discovered Blake. The message she had received was illumined in red letters. She was on the point of destroying it when Belknap occurred to her mischievous mind! It was Mrs. Crawford who had interrupted their exciting tête-à-tête.
Romany? The first she had seen of Romany last night was this morning when, with the others, she had seen her dead. No, it wasn’t Romany she would have killed under the spur of jealousy—if they wanted to name it jealousy—but Whittaker. Another reason for killing Whittaker, whom she hadn’t killed. Not even in his case was she guilty, much as she had intended being. Someone had been ahead of her. Someone who had planted her gun with one shot fired from it—and in using another gun had had the misfortune to have to fire twice in order to get the victim cold.
The three men exchanged glances of unmistakable surprise and shock. This was new testimony on Nadia’s part, though not altogether fresh, and an entirely new explanation of it. But Nadia never showed by as much as a shifted finger that she realized the importance of what she had just let fall.
“Two shots!” Berry said.
“I said two shots.”