“Sheer moral prejudice, old dear.” Vance’s voice assumed a note of raillery. “I’m a bit cynical myself, and the only person at the Greene mansion I’d eliminate as a possibility would be Frau Mannheim. She’s not sufficiently imaginative to have planned this accumulative massacre. But as regards the others, I could picture any one of ’em as being at the bottom of this diabolical slaughter. It’s a mistaken idea, don’t y’ know, to imagine that a murderer looks like a murderer. No murderer ever does. The only people who really look like murderers are quite harmless. Do you recall the mild and handsome features of the Reverend Richeson of Cambridge? Yet he gave his inamorata cyanide of potassium. The fact that Major Armstrong was a meek and gentlemanly looking chap did not deter him from feeding arsenic to his wife. Professor Webster of Harvard was not a criminal type; but the dismembered spirit of Doctor Parkman doubtless regards him as a brutal slayer. Doctor Lamson, with his philanthropic eyes and his benevolent beard, was highly regarded as a humanitarian; but he administered aconitine rather cold-bloodedly to his crippled brother-in-law. Then there was Doctor Neil Cream, who might easily have been mistaken for the deacon of a fashionable church; and the soft-spoken and amiable Doctor Waite. . . . And the women! Edith Thompson admitted putting powdered glass in her husband’s gruel, though she looked like a pious Sunday-school teacher. Madeleine Smith certainly had a most respectable countenance. And Constance Kent was rather a beauty—a nice girl with an engaging air; yet she cut her little brother’s throat in a thoroughly brutal manner. Gabrielle Bompard and Marie Boyer were anything but typical of the donna delinquente; but the one strangled her lover with the cord of her dressing-gown, and the other killed her mother with a cheese-knife. And what of Madame Fenayrou——?”
“Enough!” protested Markham. “Your lecture on criminal physiognomy can go over a while. Just now I’m trying to adjust my mind to the staggering inferences to be drawn from your finding of those galoshes.” A sense of horror seemed to weigh him down. “Good God, Vance! There must be some way out of this nightmare you’ve propounded. What member of that household could possibly have walked in on Rex Greene and shot him down in broad daylight?”
“ ’Pon my soul, I don’t know.” Vance himself was deeply affected by the sinister aspects of the case. “But some one in that house did it—some one the others don’t suspect.”
“That look on Julia’s face, and Chester’s amazed expression—that’s what you mean, isn’t it? They didn’t suspect either. And they were horrified at the revelation—when it was too late. Yes, all those things fit in with your theory.”
“But there’s one thing that doesn’t fit, old man.” Vance gazed at the table perplexedly. “Rex died peacefully, apparently unaware of his murderer. Why wasn’t there also a look of horror on his face? His eyes couldn’t have been shut when the revolver was levelled at him, for he was standing, facing the intruder. It’s inexplicable—mad!”
He beat a nervous tattoo on the table, his brows contracted.
“And there’s another thing, Markham, that’s incomprehensible about Rex’s death. His door into the hall was open; but nobody up-stairs heard the shot—nobody up-stairs. And yet Sproot—who was down-stairs, in the butler’s pantry behind the dining-room—heard it distinctly.”
“It probably just happened that way,” Markham argued, almost automatically. “Sound acts fantastically sometimes.”
Vance shook his head.
“Nothing has ‘just happened’ in this case. There’s a terrible logic about everything—a carefully planned reason behind each detail. Nothing has been left to chance. Still, this very systematization of the crime will eventually prove the murderer’s downfall. When we can find a key to any one of the anterooms, we’ll know our way into the main chamber of horrors.”