The Dalehouse Murder

by

Francis Everton

Contents

Chapter I.
I Go to Merchester

“Dear Francis:—

“It will be jolly to see you again. For your partner in the mixed I have only missed the most perfect peach by the skin of the pips. (Do peaches have pips, I wonder? See how poor we are!) However, Margaret Hunter, the girl you are to play with, is really very nice, and—let me warn you in time—has a devastating attraction for men. She is a Merchester girl, but has been away for some time teaching in Sheffield, and as the aunt with whom she lives is away, she is staying with us for the tournament week. I have reported fully on your great personal charm—so beware!

“The girl I just missed for you is Stella Palfreeman—one of the prettiest girls I ever set eyes on. I met her at the Camford Tournament last week. She is to stay with us too. Then there will be Kenneth and of course Ralph Bennett, who, by the way, were articled to the same solicitor in Sheffield—a regular house-party for the event.

“Daddy has had a sort of nervous breakdown and has gone to Folkestone with mother. They are to be there for a month and The Tundish is looking after the practise. I wish daddy could get him for keeps—he needs some one badly.

“You’ve never met The Tundish, have you? I wonder how he will strike you. He is quite old—older than you by a year or two, I should think—but like you, jolly in spite of his age and graying hair. He can tell the most thrilling yarns about his experiences in China.

“So you see I shall be acting as hostess and I can tell you we are going to make things buzz.

“Yours ever,

“Ethel.

“P. S.—Can you come on Saturday? All the others will be here then excepting Stella, who hails from London and will not arrive until midday on Monday.”

It was Monday, June the fifteenth—the opening day of the Merchester Lawn Tennis Club’s annual open tournament at which I had played regularly for the past few years. My sister Brenda and I were finishing an early breakfast and I was rereading Ethel Hanson’s letter.

I should explain that I am chief engineer to a firm in the little Midland town of Millingham, where, since our father’s death, my sister and I have lived happily together. Wisely, we spend our holidays apart, and I, when I can, take mine in small doses. It suits my business arrangements to do so, and I spend such periods of leisure as I can snatch from my work in playing in the lawn tennis tournaments at the neighboring small towns. Given kindly weather, I challenge any one to name a more enjoyable little holiday.

It is five years since I first went to Merchester, and my friendship with the Hansons dates from then. Ethel, I remember, had not left school, but had obtained a special holiday for the event. You will see that in her letter she refers to my age and gray hairs, but she is one of those intensely young things to whom anything over thirty is well on the downward slope. I am thirty-eight, moderately good at my work, and hardly that at games. I know that I am quiet, and I believe that my friends count me dull. Indeed, I can lay claim to only one exceptional quality of any kind whatever, and that, my remarkably acute sense of hearing, is nothing but an accident of birth.

At times, though, I am almost uncanny, and when playing tennis I can generally hear most of my opponent’s private comments. “Play everything on to Jeffcock and we shall be sure to win,” is the sort of remark I hear more often than I like.

The summer was one of the hottest on record, and no drop of rain had fallen since the latter end of April. Day after day the sun shone unclouded. Grass and gardens were scorched and brown, and even the larger shrubs and trees began to droop and wilt.

Nearly every one was feeling the unusual heat, and on Thursday I had caught a chill and had had to give up all idea of accepting Ethel’s invitation for Saturday. But when Monday came I decided that I was well enough to risk it, though Brenda did her best to alter my decision. Had I known then of what the week held in store for me, I think I should have needed no persuasion of hers to make me stay away.

Brenda—dear good soul that she is—had got the car round before we sat down to breakfast, and shortly after half past eight I started out on my forty-mile run. It was scorching hot before I finished my journey, and having made good time I drew in to the side of the road under the shade of a tree, in order to light my pipe.

A slight rise in the ground gave me a wonderful view of Merchester Cathedral from where I sat. It is built of a pale red sandstone that seems able to reflect every shade of light and color. That morning it looked as though it were wrought in pale gold; with the windows ablaze as they flashed back the sun, and the lower part of the building and the top of the hill on which it stands hidden by a summer morning haze, it might have been some fairy structure floating in the air. It seemed to dominate the whole countryside.

The city lies huddled round the base of the hill on which the great cathedral and the close are grouped, odd streets straggling out—like the roots of some great tree—into the surrounding flats. I imagine there can hardly be a point in the whole city from which the cathedral can not be seen towering up above, and at the hour and at the quarters, every street reverberates with the boom of the chimes from the central tower.

The doctor’s house stands just at the foot of the hill, and the long garden behind it lies dead level at first and then rises steeply at about half its length. The garage stands on a tiny plateau leveled off at the top of the slope. There is the shortest of wash yards and then a double door leading on to the narrow lane that runs the length of the garden and enters the main road at the side of the house. The narrowness of the lane and the abrupt little hill make a very awkward entry and my old two-seater still bears the scars of my first attempt to negotiate it.

The house itself is built of a dull red brick and is of the Georgian period. There is something in the proportions and the setting of the windows that gives it a quiet air of character and strength. It is far too large for the doctor’s needs, and the attics and some of the upper rooms are never used. At some time or other a one-story wing which is of stone with a flat-topped roof had been built out at the back on the side next the lane. This, Hanson has turned into a private business wing complete with consulting-room, dispensary and waiting-room. A small hall with a door opening on to the little lane—Dalehouse Lane it is called—and another passage connecting it to the house itself, make it a really convenient arrangement.

The strip of garden in front of the house and the large garden behind are alike surrounded by a ten-foot wall, buttressed at intervals, and built of the same red brick as the house. This wall—it must be some eighteen inches thick and is tiled at the top like the roof of a house—has made a very secluded spot of the doctor’s garden, and there is an air of quiet secrecy about the place that in some subtle way is enhanced by the fact that the front door-bell is rung from a door in the outer wall.

Yes, sheltered and shut in is the right description for the old garden, with its red buttressed walls, that lies behind Dalehouse, and when after dinner we used to take our coffee on the lawn—Hanson and I with our pipes and perhaps Mrs. Hanson and Ethel with their sewing and their books—I used to think it must be the most peaceful spot in all the world.

One night on my last year’s visit I particularly called to mind. Hanson and I were alone, and we sat almost silent while the light faded and the moon crept over the top of the wall and up the sky till it cleared the cathedral tower. It was then that he first told me of his friend Dr. Wallace—The Tundish—and I gained the impression that he would not be disappointed or surprised if Ethel and he were to make a match of it together. And now, only a few weeks ago, she had written to tell me that she was engaged to Kenneth Dane. He must have carried her off her feet pretty quickly, for I had seen the Hansons only a month or so before—I know them well—and until I received her letter I had never even heard his name.

As I sat dreaming and wondering what manner of man I should find him, the slight change in angle as the scorching sun moved round had caused the lights in the cathedral windows to flicker and fade away, and the color of the stonework to change from pale gold to a gold of a darker shade. I had dallied long enough, and, starting up my engine, I slipped in the clutch and set out on the few remaining miles that separated me from the end of my journey. The cathedral clock was chiming ten as I rounded the corner from the main road into Dalehouse Lane.

I found Ethel and two of her guests under the old cedar tree that gives grateful summer shade to one side of the lawn. Whatever her faults may be, and I could list several, beginning with a reference to a rather hasty little temper, she is entirely unaffected and honestly cordial. Indeed, I know of no one who can show at once so gaily and sincerely that she is pleased to see her friends, and as she met me I was gratified to feel that in spite of her engagement I still held my old place in her affections. She introduced me to Ralph Bennett and then to Kenneth Dane.

To paint a word picture of any human being is a hazardous undertaking, but in the case of Kenneth Dane I feel that the risk attached to the attempt is a little less than usual, for I summed him up at once, and my later experience proved me correct, as one of those downright souls who carry their character plainly written all over them for each and sundry to read. Black for him, I felt certain, was always black, and white was always white, and that there simply were no intervening shades of gray. No, there could be no subtle grays for Kenneth. Tall, his broad sloping shoulders made him appear of medium height until you stood against him. With fair brown hair of that close crisp wavy kind that it is a thousand pities providence does not keep exclusively for girls, eyes of a rather bright pale blue, a straight aggressive nose and a firm mouth and chin to match, he was a fine example of athletic British manhood. The grip he gave to my hand, nearly making me cry out, and his deep pleasant laugh as he acknowledged my congratulations, were both in keeping with his vigorous appearance.

In Ralph Bennett, his friend, I found an entirely different type. Slim and dark, with rather unusual dark brown eyes, you had only to see the two together—and I soon found that they were almost inseparable—to recognize that while Kenneth might be the better equipped with character and determination, Ralph was more than his match so far as brain power and intelligence were concerned. But he was so quiet and reserved that one almost overlooked him, and later I was often to wonder on what foundation their friendship had been built.

At Merchester play is scheduled to start at ten o’clock, and though they are lenient to a fault about such matters, it was agreed that Ethel and the two boys should go on to the club, leaving me to garage my car, change into flannels and follow them as soon as I could. I understood that Miss Hunter, my partner, had already left for the ground when I arrived. The doctor’s garage was occupied, for young Bennett, whose people were of considerable wealth, had brought a splendid Daimler with him that entirely filled it, and so I had to find accommodation for my car at the rear of a neighboring inn. It was already intensely hot and I felt dizzy on reaching my bedroom, which, although the blinds had been drawn against the sun, was like a baker’s oven.

Having rested for a short time, I bathed my face and changed and came down-stairs to meet Dr. Wallace at the bottom. How he came by his nickname of “The Tundish” I have never yet been able to fathom, but we introduced ourselves, no one being present to perform the ceremony for us. He was kindness itself in the way he questioned me about my cold, made me go back and pack up a couple of spare shirts, promise to change after each match, and vowed that when we returned in the evening he would take me in hand and not only have me fit to play next day, but able to enjoy myself as well.

Although I have no use for faith healing, or any buncombe of that description, there is no doubt that the personal equation does come into play where doctoring is concerned. When I had sat on my bed holding my head in my hands I had begun to think that Brenda had been right after all, and that I had been a fool for coming, but it needed only a few of the doctor’s short decisive sentences, when, hey presto! I was feeling a little better already, and there was nothing so very much amiss.

While I liked him from the outset, even at the beginning of our acquaintance I think I felt that he was not exactly abnormal, but that he possessed hidden qualities that differentiated him from the rest of us. Of medium height and a thick-set build, his black hair showed just a powdering of gray at the temples, while his pallid regular features seemed a mask through which his deep-set, twinkling eyes looked at you derisively—mocking you and defying you to guess what manner of man it really was that lay beneath.

He took me with him into the dispensary to get some capsules to take with me to the club. It lies to the left of the passage that runs along the garden side of the doctor’s wing. The consulting-room is at the end of the passage and both rooms have doors opening on to the little hall or lobby that forms the patients’ entrance from Dalehouse Lane. A further door connects the two rooms. Beyond the lobby is a small waiting-room.

I was leaning against the table in the middle of the room, while the doctor, humming a gay air, was finding a pill-box to put the capsules in, when I heard some one laughing—a woman most certainly—in the waiting-room. Not a matter for comment, you may think, but you should have heard the laugh. It was very low, and apparently did not reach the doctor’s less sensitive ears, but, oh, how mean and cruel it was! You know how a certain sound, or the scent of a flower say, may recall to life some vivid scene of childhood’s days? When we were children at home there was an old forbidden book describing the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition and in it there was one illustration depicting a young girl stretched out on the rack with a woman standing by her side laughing at her, which had impressed my young imagination, and had caused me many hours of secret grief. It was an old woodcut, crudely drawn, and I had not thought of it for years, but the woman laughing in the waiting-room brought the gruesome little picture back to life.

The laugh came twice, then there was the sound of an opening door, then whispering in the lobby.

“Who was that, Miss Summerson?” the doctor asked, as the door connecting the dispensary with the lobby opened and a pale nervous-looking girl wearing a white coverall came in—the dispenser, I gathered.

The doctor was fiddling about with my pill-box as he spoke, but I was looking at her as she came in through the door and I could have sworn that she was startled when she saw that we were there—and if she were startled, I was surprised when she answered the doctor’s question.

“There wasn’t any one,” she said. “I’ve been changing the water in the waiting-room and I shut the outer door as I crossed the lobby. Some one had left it ajar.”

Both her look and the rather over-elaborate nature of her explanation convinced me that she was lying. Too, I could have sworn to that laugh, to the whispering, and to the fact that some one had been there besides Miss Summerson herself. At the time I thought very little about it, however; some one—some one with a most amazingly repulsive laugh—had been to see her and she didn’t want the doctor to know of the visit. That was no business of mine, and I was just making my way toward the lobby—the club lies at the end of Dalehouse Lane—when who should come out of the consulting-room but Ethel. She had been to the club and as she was not required to play for a time she had come home for some rubber tape to wind round the handle of her racquet. As soon as her wants had been supplied we returned to the ground together.

On our way I felt half inclined to tell her of Miss Summerson’s little act of deceit. Then, how very easy it would have been. Later it was to become more difficult, but that I could not foresee.

No sooner had we reached the club than I heard the names, Miss M. Hunter and F. H. Jeffcock, being shouted down the conical sound-muffle which the secretary is pleased to call a megaphone. We were to play on court number ten and I found that both my partner and our opponents were waiting for me there.

My partner looked a jolly girl. Pink and white and well rounded, with the bluest of sparkling eyes and her hair tightly braided in two little close packed coils—pale gold shells hiding her pretty ears—she had somehow missed real beauty. For a proper chocolate box lady all the ingredients were there, but there was a certain slight heaviness about her features, that just, and only just, spoiled the picture she made, and inexplicably led me to the conclusion that her mother was fat. Perhaps, however, that was due to the fact that while the modern girl looks like a boy in a smock, she seemed unwilling to disguise her pretty femininity.

I found her an excellent partner and we won our first match. Yes, so far as playing went, Miss Hunter and I got on very well together, but she was just a little annoying in the way she constantly reiterated “Sorry, partner,” whenever she missed a shot, and found it necessary to make some little remark or other whenever the opportunity occurred. Then I was still to learn that her conversational ability was prodigious if volume alone were taken into account, and that she beat every one I ever met for platitudes and proverbs.

No doubt Ethel’s description of her caused me to look out for something of the sort, but I could not help thinking that her rather pronounced physical attractions were deliberately assisted in their deadly work by all those little wiles that a girl who sets herself out to captivate knows so readily how to use. A coquette and a minx?—no, certainly. A little immodest then?—no, certainly not, again, but somehow in a way that I can not account for, her very modesty itself seemed suggestive of everything that modesty ignores. But in spite of the fact that I saw through her, and was just a little annoyed with myself for feeling her attraction, none the less, we got on very amicably, and I was quite satisfied to have missed the beautiful Miss Palfreeman, who had yet to arrive from London.

She arrived at lunch-time, Ethel and Ralph going to meet her while Margaret and Kenneth and I reserved a table in the refreshment tent and started our meal. Ethel had not exaggerated her beauty. Tall and slim, her coppery brown hair, which later I was to learn was of the “kinky” variety, almost concealed by a little hat that matched it exactly, it was the light in her amber eyes and her complexion that added more than anything else to her general loveliness. More than one head turned in her direction.

The tent was almost unbearable, but we were a gay little party; the liquid butter, the peculiar physiognomy of one of the waitresses, the hat of one of the competitors, and such like trivialities were each in turn the excuse for jest and laughter.

The Tundish joined us in the middle of one of our bursts of merriment, and had made the remark that it was obviously time that a steadying element was added to the party before we knew that he was there. I happened to be looking at Stella when he first began to speak in his distinctive tone of voice, and to my surprise I saw her suddenly and unmistakably turn pale and the glass she was lifting to her lips slip from her fingers to the ground. She stooped to pick it up and recovered her composure so quickly that I imagine none of the others noticed it. They were introduced, and I half fancied that she hesitated for the fraction of a second before holding out her hand, but I could see no disturbance on the doctor’s placid face and the greeting he gave her was suavity itself. I did notice, however, that although I made room for him between Stella and myself, he squeezed himself in between Margaret and Kenneth, where the arrangement of the table dishes made it a much less convenient position.

Ralph was obviously impressed with Stella, and I was not a little amused to see how readily and openly he showed it. I gathered that Margaret’s thoughts were running in the same direction, for I saw her glance at Stella and a little smile—a mixture of amusement and appreciation—flicker across her rather full wide mouth. It was unkind of me, perhaps, but I could not help imagining that there was self-satisfaction in her smile as well, and that it might be the result of some such thought as: “Yes, very beautiful indeed—there’s at least fifteen between us, but where men are concerned——!”

Cigarettes were alight and we were on the point of leaving the table, when Ethel with characteristic suddenness decided she would like another ice.

“No, please don’t—I think not—I’m sure you’d be better without it,” The Tundish warned her.

“Ethel goin’ ’ave another ice,” she laughed emphatically, I imagine mimicking some childhood saying.

“Ethel’s doctor says she mustn’t.”

Kenneth sprang to his feet saying: “Why, of course, she can. It’s just the weather for ices,” and he went over to the buffet and fetched her the pinkest and largest he could procure. She waded through it quizzing The Tundish with every spoonful she ate, and Kenneth seemed aggressively and absurdly pleased that he had persuaded her to ignore the doctor’s wishes. But in some subtle way, The Tundish, sitting with impassive face and twinkling eyes, seemed to turn his rebuff into a moral victory, and while he appeared satisfied and pleasant, they had the air of being a little ashamed of what they had done.

Why this little incident should have stuck in my memory I can’t quite explain, except perhaps that it was the forerunner of so many similar little incidents between Kenneth and the doctor, but without opening his mouth he had made them both look like naughty children disobeying their nurse, and I think that it was about from this time that I began to suspect that, somehow, somewhere, there was something amiss with our party. Although we still continued to laugh and be jolly, I could not help feeling sensible that the pace was being forced, and that it was only by effort the ball was kept rolling.

I wondered whether it was due to the arrival of The Tundish, and if so why. Or whether it was due to the fact that my cold was making me feel depressed, and that while I was approaching the forties, the rest, with the exception of The Tundish himself, were all young and in their early twenties.

Chapter II.
The Chinese Poison

That evening the four younger members of our party went to a scratch gramophone dance and The Tundish and I were left to our own devices. He had tried to persuade them not to go on account of the heat, and had been particularly emphatic so far as Margaret was concerned. Stella did look a little fagged and pale, but my partner seemed in the best of spirits, and I could not understand why he should think that she especially required rest.

Supper was late, as they dressed before they had it, but they did get away at length, and we went into the dispensary to get some medicine for my cold. While he was measuring it out I wandered aimlessly round the room glancing at the bottles on the shelves. The labels were written in so neat a hand that I asked him who had done them.

“Oh, that is one of Miss Summerson’s jobs,” he replied.

“And does Miss Summerson deal with the high finance in addition to her other duties?” I asked, standing in front of what looked liked a heavy safe.

“That is the poison cupboard,” he laughed, and taking a small key from his waistcoat pocket he opened the door.

I was astonished at the number of bottles it contained. On the lower shelves were the larger ones which I assumed held the poisons more commonly used, but the top shelf was packed with diminutive bottles of uniform shape and size. There was one, however, that differed from the rest, and that was the most peculiar little bottle I have ever set my eyes on. It was like a miniature flagon of Burgundy in shape, but it had an exceptionally long and slender neck that was fitted with a large glass stopper of a flat irregular design, giving it the appearance of some delicate imitation toadstool rearing its head above its little neighbors.

“What an extraordinary number of poisons!” I exclaimed. “Surely all these are not the normal requirements of a country doctor’s practise?” And I took up the funny flagon as I spoke to examine it more closely.

“Be careful—put it back—put it down, man,” he almost shouted at me, and banging the door shut as soon as he had seen me restore the weird little bottle safely to its old position, he dragged me to the sink and made me rinse my hands in some strong disinfectant.

I should have been amused, had he not been so obviously alarmed, and I protested that I might have been handling a bomb that had the fuse alight by all the fuss he made about it.

“A bomb’s a plaything for a baby in a pram compared with that dear little bottle,” he laughed, and went on to explain that Hanson was by way of being a bit of a specialist in the study of poisons, and that the little flagon I had handled so carelessly contained a very deadly and almost unknown poison, that he, The Tundish, had been fortunate in securing for his collection from central China.

The tiny bottle apparently contained enough to finish off the whole of Merchester, and as yet they had not succeeded in finding any antidote to its action. A colorless fluid with a distinctive taste and smell, it was immediately narcotic, but it engendered a sleep from which no one ever woke. The body of the victim looked exactly as though it had passed out of a peaceful slumber into death, except for the eyes; and they, in addition to the usual contraction of the pupils due to a narcotic, were horribly suffused with blood. It seems that had any of the poison got on to my fingers from the side of the bottle and had I then allowed them to touch my lips, so deadly was the stuff that he might have been unable to save my life.

All this he told me as I disinfected my hands at the sink, and by the time he had finished I began to think that I had had a lucky escape and I was no longer inclined to laugh at his considerate alarm. My hands properly rinsed and dried, we went back into the drawing-room to finish our pipes before going to bed; The Tundish told some interesting tales about his life in China, where he had gone out to live with an uncle when he was twenty-four and had only returned a few years ago. Then our conversation turned to tennis and the tournament, and I was telling him of the interest Miss Palfreeman had aroused as she joined us in the tent at lunch-time, when he interrupted me.

“You know it’s a most extraordinary coincidence—” he began, with something akin to excitement in his usual level voice, and then instead of telling me what the curious coincidence was, his statement dwindled into indecision and he sat thoughtfully watching the blue smoke spirals that curled to the ceiling from his pipe.

“Well?” I asked after a pause, turning to look at him in surprise.

But there he sat staring vacantly at nothing, his face an expressionless mask, his eyes introspective and dead. They regained their normal twinkle as I watched, and he continued, “Oh, nothing really—nothing at all—only something that something you said reminded me of. Now I’m sure it’s time that you went off to bed.”

We said good night at the bottom of the stairs, and with my foot on the bottom step I asked him what on earth had made him say that Miss Hunter in particular looked as though she needed rest. I can not think what made me ask the question, and it had no sooner crossed my lips than I realized how indiscreet it was. He looked at me quizzically. “Should a doctor tell!—eh?”

I apologized profusely.

“Well, there is no harm done, and I don’t mind telling you—no, after all, I think that perhaps I had better not.”

I thought how annoying his little habit of starting out on some interesting confidential statement and then breaking off in the middle of it was, but obviously I could not press him, and I said good night again and went up-stairs to bed.

To bed but not to sleep. For interminable hours I checked the quarters chimed by the great cathedral clock. And when sleep did come it was thin and dream-streaked. Once more I was in the dispensary standing in front of the poison cupboard with the murderous little bottle of poison in my hands. The Tundish—not the placid kindly man to whom I had said good night, but a man with the face of a devil enraged—came rushing at me round the table in the middle of the room. “Put it down, you damned fool,” he yelled, and seizing me by the arm he twisted it back until my hand was thrust inside the safe. Then in a flash his anger was gone, The Tundish was masked and placid again, and, looking at me with a pleasant quiet smile, he said in the friendliest and silkiest of voices: “Poisoned, I fancy, my dear Jeffcock—better have it off,” and he closed the heavy door with a crash, severing my hand above the wrist.

I heard a tinkle of broken glass as the baby flagon dropped among its deadly little comrades, and then a plop as my own severed hand reached the bottom of the safe and I awoke with a start to hear a door really banging in the hall below. Then giggles, and Stella’s carrying, high-pitched voice: “Oh! for heaven’s sake don’t make me laugh any more, my sides are sore and aching as it is.” Next a noisy laugh from Ralph, and Kenneth whispering—he meant it for a whisper—and urging him not to wake up Jeffcock and The Tundish.

The dancers were back home and coming up-stairs to bed. They laughed and played about on the landing, and made as much noise again in urging one another to stop. I thought how selfish and inconsiderate they were. Then I heard Stella and Ralph go up to the landing above and their doors bang shut. It was nearly three o’clock when at last I fell into a quiet and untroubled sleep.

I woke surprisingly refreshed and got down-stairs to find The Tundish seated in lonely state at the head of the breakfast table. He greeted me with his friendly smile, asking whether I had been able to sleep through the dancing party’s united efforts to keep one another quiet. He told me that the thermometer had already beaten the record of yesterday at the same time, and that we were in for a frizzly time at the club.

Stella came in just as we were finishing our last cups of coffee and I noticed at once how wretchedly tired and pale she looked. The doctor remarked on it too, and she told us that she had hardly slept and had wakened almost too weary to dress. On learning that she had been sleeping badly for some nights he promised to put up a mild narcotic for her to take that night. He was kindness and tact itself in that he made no reference to the dance and his own neglected advice, but Stella almost snubbed him for his trouble, and hardly bothering to thank him turned to me with some casual remark or other.

Ethel, with Kenneth and Ralph, came in as the doctor was talking to Stella, and Margaret, pink and white and full-blown, Margaret smiling to herself, followed them a moment later. I was looking at her as she came in through the door, and whether I unconsciously stared a little I don’t know, but the pleasant smile vanished, to be replaced by an unpleasant frown.

The Tundish was right. We had a very warm time at the club that day, but in spite of my cold I enjoyed the tennis and in spite of her conversation I enjoyed my partner. She and I had lunch alone together, and Stella was one of the many subjects we discussed.

“Do you think that she is very bewitching?” she asked.

“She is certainly more than ordinarily pretty,” I replied, “but as to being bewitching that is another matter.”

“Oh! Don’t make any mistake of that sort. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s one and the same thing. A pretty face and a good figure seem to meet the case with most men.”

“I did not know we were discussing a case at all,” I laughed.

But she closed the conversation by adding: “Fine feathers make fine birds,” and she said it very impressively, though for the life of me I could not see the connection.

I played a number of matches during the day, and I did fairly well, but tennis has nothing to do with this story and there is only one little incident that I need describe. It was just after tea and I was in the umpire’s chair. I had to keep my attention closely on the game, both of the men having a service that was difficult to follow, but as I sat perched in my lofty seat, I noticed Ethel and The Tundish conversing very earnestly together.

A few minutes later I heard Ethel say: “Well, it’s spoiling everything, and I certainly wouldn’t have offered to put her up for the tournament if you hadn’t been so insistent.”

They were the full width of the court and then another space away, but the whispered words came to my sensitive ears with every inflection of Ethel’s voice distinct and clear. I could hear the annoyance in it as though it were to me she had whispered and not to the doctor away across the court. I wondered to which of the two girls she referred—my partner or Stella—why it, whatever it was, was spoiling everything, and why The Tundish should have to suggest that either of them should be invited to Dalehouse. The more I thought of it the less I understood it, but Ethel was quite right about our party, there was something the matter with it—something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on was just spoil——

“Wake up, umpire.”

I did with a jerk, to find that they had played two unregistered points while my thoughts had wandered. It was a long, three-set match and when I took the result in to the referee’s tent, although it was getting late he put me on to play, and I was the last of our party to leave the club.

By the time I reached Dalehouse the others had nearly finished supper. There was a sudden lull in the conversation as I came into the room and I felt certain that I had been the subject of their talk; I quickly gathered from their subsequent remarks that Ethel had felt that one of the other two men should have waited for me at the ground. It was quite absurd, of course, but her quick little temper was easily roused, especially so if she imagined that one of her friends had been slighted, and apparently she had not hesitated to lay down the law on the matter.

I did my best to smooth things over, but if at lunch-time on the previous day I had felt that the gaiety of our party was forced and rang false, I had no doubt at all on this occasion, that the general feeling of irritation was genuine enough. The very flies seemed to have caught the disease and to be more persistent than usual in their attempts to annoy.

The Tundish was the only one of us to make the least attempt at general politeness, and he, I believe, was secretly amused at our united and childish ill-humor. Stella was positively rude when he reminded her of the medicine that he had had sent up to her room. First she refused to take it at all. Then she would take it at once, and there was another little scene before she could be persuaded to obey the doctor’s wishes and wait for an hour after her meal.

The two boys had left the room while we were pacifying Stella, but when Ethel suggested that the four of us should have a quiet game of bridge while The Tundish did some work in the dispensary and she and Margaret descended to the basement to tackle some ironing, the boys were nowhere to be found.

Ethel seemed absurdly put out over so trivial a matter. She went into the dispensary with The Tundish and I overheard her say: “It’s abominably rude of Kenneth to leave Francis alone with nothing to do, and I shall tell him so when he gets back,” and I must admit that I was childishly gratified that she should care enough about my comfort to risk having words with Kenneth. Truly, along with the rest, I was feeling the heat.

My ears must have been in a hypersensitive condition, for I had heard Ethel in the dispensary quite plainly, and a little time later as I stood at the telephone in the hall trying to get a connection through to Brenda, I heard The Tundish talking to Stella in the drawing-room though the door was half closed. It was a moment before I realized that I was listening to a confidential conversation and then it was too late.

It was the doctor speaking in his most persuasive voice: “Look here, Stella, I am most truly sorry about it, but until I saw you at the club, I really had no idea that the Stella Palfreeman Ethel spoke of was the ‘Dumps’ I used to know in Shanghai.”

Then I got my connection and heard no more for a short time, but Brenda was out and my conversation with the maid was brief, and they were still talking together when I put the receiver up. It was Stella speaking this time and she was not so clear. Her voice came and went in broken snatches as though some one were opening the door and closing it again; a few words clear and distinct and then a blank.

“——it’s as well I came . . . the Hansons certainly ought to be told . . . your abominable share . . . father’s death . . . I shall tell them!”

Evidently it was the end of the conversation, for as I was hurrying away from my embarrassing position, The Tundish came out of the drawing-room and met me in the hall on his way back to the dispensary. He smiled at me pleasantly, appearing quite unmoved by the words I had overheard, and I thought to myself that whatever else he may have learned by his long residence among the Chinese, he had certainly acquired their proverbial bland impassivity.

I wandered into the garden, where long evening shadows were creeping across the lawn, and sat down in one of the wicker chairs that stood beneath the cedar, my thoughts turning naturally to what I had overheard. Now I began to understand better why Stella had dropped her glass. The little scene in the luncheon tent came back to me. Stella’s momentary hesitation when the doctor held out his hand; the doctor, suave and unperturbed, taking the less convenient seat.

Then I remembered what I had overheard between Ethel and The Tundish as I sat in the umpire’s chair and endeavored to connect the one conversation with the other. Had Ethel referred to Stella when she said that she would not have asked her unless he had persuaded her to do it? But they had met only the week before at Camford—or was it possible that he had seen Stella’s name in the paper and had written asking Ethel to invite her to Dalehouse? In that case Ethel probably knew something about the mystery—if mystery there was—and the doctor had lied when he spoke to Stella in the drawing-room. And if the reference had not been to Stella, then it must have been to Margaret, my partner, and that was equally inexplicable, for what possible reason could Ethel have for saying that Margaret was spoiling everything? True, there was her rather inane conversation, but they were old friends, and Ethel must have known all about that. No—I decided that she must have meant Stella, and no sooner had I come to the decision, than I felt equally convinced that the doctor did not look like a liar.

Miss Summerson had lied in the dispensary—the place seemed full of lies and ill temper. As I sat pondering under the cedar with its far-spread boughs black against the sky, a couple of bats went fluttering in the fading light and somehow their floppy uncertain flight seemed symbolic of deceit and lying too. The half-hour after nine came floating across the still calm air from the clock in the cathedral tower. Looming big and white over the black of the shadowed garden wall, it looked ghostly, I thought, and seemed less real than the bats and the shadows themselves. I rose and went back to the house full of a vague uneasiness and wishing that I was home.

Stella was still tucked up on the settee immersed in a book and obviously desiring neither company nor conversation, so I picked up the daily paper.

I could not have been seated for more than five minutes when the bell at the consulting-room entrance began to peal, and a few moments later Ethel appeared at the drawing-room door asking me if I would go to the doctor in the dispensary. There had been a motor accident and he required my help. I found a small boy of about eight stretched out on the couch. He had been badly cut by the broken glass and his poor little face made a pitiful sight as the tears trickled down through the blood. It fell to Ethel’s lot to look after the parents, who were distracted to incapacity, and to mine to hold the child while the doctor swabbed and stitched and bandaged.

I was astounded at the way he handled that small boy. His deft fingers moved at such lightning speed that the bandages seemed to fly into place of their own volition, and all the time he worked he was chatting kindly to the boy and giving me instructions. How can I describe it—unadulterated genius—magical—a superman at work on work he loved. Anyhow, incredible as it may sound, the job was completed and he was lifting the patient into the taxi that Ethel had sent for, as the cathedral clock chimed ten.

Have I described The Tundish as impassive and imperturbable—a man with a face like a mask that nothing could move? That was not the man who had bent tenderly over the morsel of damaged humanity that I had held in my arms. No nurse could have been more gentle; no mother more anxiously loving. Night and day, ice and fire, could not have differed more.

I was alone with Ethel for a moment while the doctor was talking at the side of the taxi, and she asked me with an amused little flicker of a smile whether I had been impressed.

“Why, the man must be a marvel,” I replied. “Please don’t spoil it by telling me that all G. P.’s can manage such things with similar proficiency.”

“My dear old thing,” she laughed, “did daddy never tell you about our Tundish? He is supposed to be one of the best surgeons in the country, and with children he is almost uncanny. When he left Shanghai they broke their yellow little hearts in dozens. Now he is resident doctor at a large children’s home in London, merely because he is so passionately fond of them and has money enough to do as he likes. But here he comes, and he wouldn’t thank me, or any one else, for singing his praises.”

Ethel returned to Margaret and the ironing, and the doctor and I went back to the drawing-room where Stella was still reclining on the settee. He told her that she could take her draft any time she liked, said good night to us both and went up-stairs to bed. Stella answered all my attempts at conversation with a disheartening “yes” or “no” and after pottering about for a time, I left her too, intending to follow the doctor’s example.

I met the boys in the hall, however, and we all three proceeded to the basement to find out what progress the laundresses were making. The hot weather had played havoc with our things, and they had kindly undertaken them. We were vastly amused at the results of their labors, a few pairs of socks and a badly scorched shirt of my own apparently representing the work of something over an hour. They pleaded the interruption of the accident, a defective electric iron, the stained condition of the socks which they had had to rewash, and lastly that they had dealt with several garments of the feminine gender which their maidenly modesty did not allow them either to mention or produce.

Ethel retaliated by asking for details of Kenneth’s and Ralph’s movements since supper-time and refused to be satisfied with the reply that they had been for a stroll to get cool. She asked them to state specifically where they had been, and they looked, I thought, not a little confused. Kenneth definitely reddened, and she was unkind enough to call our general attention to the fact, and to say that his efforts to get cool must have sent a rush of blood to the head. We stood chafing one another pleasantly in this way for some little time, and I dare say it was after half past ten when I left them at it and went to bed.

I switched on the landing light from the bottom of the stairs, and when I got to the top I found that The Tundish had written out a notice and had stuck it up above the landing switch, so that we should all see it on our way to bed. It read:

Please let a fellow get some sleep to-night and don’t wake him up by telling one another to be quiet.

Sgd., The Tundish.

I took it down and going into my room I found that the ink in my fountain pen was identical in color—as I half expected it would be, having filled it only the previous day from the ink-well in the consulting-room—and that by writing with the back of the nib I could imitate the thin strokes with which the doctor had written, I quickly added the words:

dark deeds are done at night

and stuck it up again in its old position. I made what I thought a very creditable copy of the doctor’s print, having imitated to a nicety his flat-topped a’s and sloping d’s. My forgery completed, I got into bed.

The others came up before I got to sleep and I heard them discussing it in whispers and then a little later calling out to one another to “Just come and look here,” with a great deal of laughing and running about from room to room. Next I heard Kenneth say: “Shall we go and pull him out of bed?” and Ethel reply that she believed it was I and not The Tundish at all. This was followed by a declaration that, whoever it was, they would deal with him to-morrow, and the household gradually settled down into silence and sleep.

Next morning, Wednesday, I was up betimes and out in the garden before breakfast. The Tundish joined me there. We were just going in in answer to the gong when he said: “By the way, your addition to my little effort of last night was remarkably apt, for I played Old Harry with all their bedrooms before I went to bed.” He went on to tell me that he had made a realistic skeleton with the aid of a bag of golf clubs in Kenneth’s bed, sticking the clubs down the legs and arms of his pajamas and utilizing a pair of shoe trees for the ears. Ethel’s bed he had peppered with tennis and golf balls carefully placed beneath the under blanket, and Margaret’s and Ralph’s had also received treatment.

In spite of the merry twinkle in his eyes, such a practical joke seemed to be entirely out of keeping with his character, and although I am sure I gave no visible signs of my surprise, he might almost have read my thoughts, for he said at once, “Yes, I surprised myself too, but I fancy that I must have been a trifle fey last night. I shall have to look out to-night though, for they are sure to attempt revenge.”

I told him of the whispered conversation I had overheard on the landing, and he suggested that as I might be going home before night, we should attempt to make them believe that I had really been the culprit. We both of us agreed that a too nice adherence to the truth was not essential in the matter of a practical joke. “No, we will both of us lie like troopers,” he said as we took our seats at the table, and whether I succeeded or not, he certainly kept his promise to the full.

We arranged that we would both make out that we knew nothing about either the notice or the raided beds, but that my denials should be less assertive than his so that their suspicions would gradually turn in my direction. We had great difficulty, however, at least I had, not to give ourselves away by laughing when the others came into the room. They came in procession, marching solemnly round the table, Kenneth chanting, “Oyez! Oyez! a trial will be held.” Ethel led the van bearing the notice on a large tray held out at arm’s length. Then came Ralph carrying Kenneth’s pajamas and the golf bags and clubs, together with a collection of tennis and golf balls and other evidence. Kenneth followed, arrayed in an old cap and gown of Hanson’s, and Margaret brought up the rear as train bearer to Kenneth.

They drew up in a row in front of us and said in unison—there had evidently been a rehearsal, “There sits the culprit,” but we noticed with secret satisfaction that while Margaret and Kenneth pointed at The Tundish, Ethel and Ralph were pointing at me.

It seems that up to this point in telling my story I must be constantly detailing trivial matters which can have no possible interest taken by themselves, and yet which have a real bearing on the more important later events. Kenneth’s inquiry into the doings of the previous night was amusing at the time, and I don’t mean it unkindly, but I am sure he enjoyed showing Ethel how acute an inquirer he could be, but it is not a matter of sufficient apparent importance to set out at any length. And yet I think we were all of us to go over every word that was spoken at the breakfast table, time and again in our minds afterward, wondering what possible bearing they could have on the terrible tragedy that was so soon to befall us.

I was sitting at right angles to The Tundish, who was at one end of the table, and Kenneth handed him the notice and took his seat at the other side of the table opposite to me, saying, “Well, a confession won’t earn a free pardon, but it may certainly incline us to temper justice with mercy.”

The Tundish turned the paper round and round, pretending to examine it with surprise and care. “And what may this be?” he said at last. “I see that it has been written in my name, but apart from that it seems to be reasonable enough, and it expresses what I actually felt very aptly indeed.”

“You didn’t write it, then, and stick it up on the landing?”

“My dear boy, I am really far too old for that sort of childishness. Besides, I ask you, if I had been the author, should I have bothered to print my name at the bottom instead of signing it in the ordinary way? No, I think we shall find that the guilty party is seated immediately to my left, and if you haven’t foolishly smudged it all over, we shall probably find his fingerprints.” He was sprinkling the notice with salt and blowing it off again into Kenneth’s bacon as he spoke, while I protested loudly that I could not understand what they were all of them talking about.

Am I doing Kenneth an injustice, I wonder, and do I exaggerate his ill temper and puerile behavior? Then, I had not realized how jealous he was of the doctor, and could make no allowances for it, but oh! how easily he “rose” and how absurdly he showed his dislike! He resented the “My dear boy,” and he did not like the salt being blown into his bacon, but he endeavored to imitate the doctor’s bantering tones.

“My dear Tundish,” he said, “I happen to know that rough paper of that description does not show fingerprints.” It was a poor imitation—as well might a cow pretend to be a swan—and even then he could not maintain the role he tried to play, adding with some heat, “You may be a very good surgeon, but you’re a very good liar too. Do you mean to tell me that you didn’t upset all our beds last night?”

The Tundish never turned a hair as he replied, “I never did anything of the sort. Was your bed upset, Jeffcock?” He could certainly lie magnificently and he looked the essence of simple injured innocence.

“Of course his bed wasn’t touched,” Ethel chipped in, endeavoring to save Kenneth from making a complete fool of himself, “for the simple reason that he upset the rest.”

I in turn denied her accusations and that I had any knowledge of the affair. I pointed out that the inquiry was entirely irregular, inasmuch as Kenneth himself, who was acting as the judge, and the others who presumably represented the jury, were all claimants in the action as well, which was a manifestly absurd position. My chief concern, I went on to add, was on account of Ethel, as it went to my heart to think that she was the affianced bride of a young man who had so little knowledge of the world that he could be duped by the statements of such an obvious liar as The Tundish, but I am such a duffer at acting that quite unconsciously my denials only emphasized my guilt, and I did more to confuse them than the doctor himself.

Kenneth, who had regained some of his usual equanimity, next produced paper and pencils, and asked us both to repeat the notice from memory, but this gave no very definite results.

I tried to visualize the doctor’s rather peculiar printing. I remembered his sloping d’s and flat-topped a’s and made my attempts as much like the original as I could, but I went badly astray over some of the other letters. The Tundish, on the other hand, did his best to repress his normal style, but just failed to succeed, with the result that both our duplicates held certain resemblances to the one that had been placed over the switch, and neither was quite like it.

It was The Tundish who pointed out that any of the party in addition to ourselves might equally have been responsible. That either Ethel or Margaret might quite easily have slipped up-stairs from the basement during the evening, and that as a matter of fact their poor performance as laundresses was probably due to their absence and not to the reasons they had alleged. That Miss Palfreeman had been left all alone while we had been engaged with the injured child. That Kenneth and Ralph had pretended to spend a whole evening strolling about to get cool, but that they obviously had some hidden secret and were unwilling to give any details of their movements. And finally that whichever of them had done it, he or she would certainly have upset his or her own bed as a blind for the rest of us and that the fact that neither his bed nor mine had been touched was a most important piece of evidence in our favor.

In the end, after much argument, carried on pleasantly by all of us with the exception of Kenneth, who seemed incapable of differentiating between an argument and a dispute, they had to admit that each one of us had had the opportunity of spending at least a quarter of an hour up-stairs without being missed by the rest, and though suspicion remained divided, we had lied so well that they were not only in doubt as to which of us was guilty, but they really began to wonder whether we were either of us responsible at all.

When we had concluded that no conclusion could be reached, Ethel got up from the table saying that she would run up-stairs and find out whether Stella was getting up or whether she might not like her breakfast sent up to her room. She was back in a couple of minutes and although I was seated with my back to the door I could tell at once by the way she almost stumbled into the room, that there was something serious amiss. She hardly had breath enough to speak, but at last she managed to get out:

“Tundish, I’m frightened—do come and look at Stella—oh! I’m so afraid.”

The Tundish jumped to his feet saying, “What on earth is the matter?” and hurried after her out of the room, leaving us to wonder what could have caused her extreme agitation. He returned in less than five minutes and stood in the doorway looking at us as we sat round the table. I have said, looking at us, but I very much doubt if he saw us at all, for he stood there in the doorway like a man in a trance, muttering away to himself again and again:

“I can’t have made a mistake. No, I simply can’t have made a mistake.”

I can see the scene again all as clearly as this paper I am writing on. Ralph, who was seated next to me with his back to the door, looking over his shoulder, held his cup of coffee in mid-air. Kenneth, on the point of lifting a piece of bacon on his fork, held it poised. Margaret, sitting opposite, looked pale and scared, and we were all looking first at the doctor and then at one another, while he stood muttering in the doorway and gazing into space. It was almost as though some magician had suddenly thrown an evil spell which we none of us could break.

He seemed to come back to life quite suddenly and to realize the amazement with which we were watching him, then, after a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Stella is dead and I’ve every reason to believe that she’s been poisoned. Please all of you stay here for a few minutes until I come back.”

There was one wild, piercing shriek and Margaret burst into half-hysterical sobs. It was horrible. First the silence while we waited, amazed, for the doctor to speak, then the appalling words he spoke in his quiet level voice, and then the sudden piercing shriek that filled the sunlit room.

Chapter III.
Stella Murdered

Stella dead! Stella poisoned! I think that, apart from Margaret, who sat silent after her one piercing cry of alarm, we none of us quite realized the horror of the situation, and I am sure that we none of us understood the doctor’s muttered references to a mistake, or gave any thought to the manner of her death. Nothing in the scene before us suggested tragedy. The sun shone in at the three long windows which were open wide, and one of the two family cats sat leisurely washing her face on the sill, the drowsy hum of the bees at work in the garden border below making a fitting accompaniment to her deliberate graceful movements. The breakfast table was in the homely disorder of a completed meal and we sat round it in flannels, prepared for tennis. Kenneth was still arrayed in cap and gown. The golf clubs, the shoe trees, and the tennis and golf balls collected from Ethel’s bed lay heaped together in one of the two armchairs. None of these things suggested tragedy and death—but poor beautiful Stella lay dead up-stairs.

Only yesterday I had watched her playing vigorous tennis and one little picture stood out clearly in my mind. She had stooped low to the ground to reach the ball, her bare arm sweeping gracefully at its fullest stretch; her lovely pose, as, lightly poised, she held her balance with one white-clad shapely leg reaching out behind, tip of toe and finger-tips of her free hand just touching the ground; her coppery hair showing little pools of sun-kissed ruddy gold; her amber eyes alight with pure enjoyment as she gave a little involuntary cry of pleasure when the ball, curving low, just skimmed the net; all made a vivid picture of joyous slim agility. And that was only a few hours ago, but now, while we had been fooling round the breakfast table, she lay stiff and cold and dead.

Kenneth took off his cap and gown, but for once Ralph was the first to speak. “Look here, we can’t just sit round the table gaping! What did The Tundish mean by a mistake? Where is he and where on earth is Ethel? I’m going out to find some one.”

I tried to persuade him to wait a few minutes as the doctor had so particularly asked us to stay until he came back, and we sat silent again.

Then Ralph wondered, “Why on earth didn’t he want us to leave the room?” and Kenneth made for the door saying that he for one wasn’t going to be told what he could and he couldn’t do at a time like this. Fortunately, Ethel came back before he reached it and added her request to mine. She told us that the doctor was in the dispensary, examining the bottles from which he had made up Stella’s sleeping draft, and that he would be with us in less than five minutes. She went over to Kenneth and put one hand on his shoulder as she spoke, saying, “Oh! it is all too dreadful! We must try to help The Tundish all we can—it is simply terrible for him.”

“Do you mean that he has made a mistake then?” Kenneth replied, and I was surprised to hear how hard and harsh his voice was. No hint of sympathy softened the bluntness of his question, and Ethel’s hand fell slowly from his shoulder.

The door opened and The Tundish came in. He stood in the doorway for a moment looking at Kenneth with as sad a smile as ever I wish to see.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think that I have made any mistake, but I have very serious news for you all. Will you please sit down?”

He took the chair at the end of the breakfast table again as he spoke, motioning to Ethel to come and sit beside him. His arm was resting on the table, and I saw her put her hand against it with a timid little touch of sympathy which he acknowledged with a smile of thanks.

Kenneth saw it too and reddened and said in an unnaturally formal voice, “Now, Doctor, we are very anxious to hear what you have to tell us.” I could have kicked him for the way he said it, and I think that that was the first time that it crossed my mind that he might be jealous of The Tundish.

The doctor took no notice of his remark, but proceeded immediately to tell us in a calm friendly voice, that, as we already knew, he had made up an ordinary sleeping draft for Stella the night before. The medicine had been taken up to her bedroom and placed on a little table by her bed, by the maid, Annie, just before supper. It had consisted of a mild narcotic taken from one of the bottles that stood on the lower shelf of the poison cupboard, to which he had added one or two other ingredients which it was not necessary for him to specify, as they were entirely harmless in their action. Every prescription, he explained, was registered in a special book kept for the purpose in the dispensary, as soon as it was made up, and this he had done in the usual way. The draft was a mild one and there was no possibility that it by itself, could have caused death or have had any harmful action. He had just roughly checked over the contents of each of the bottles he had used and they each of them contained exactly what they were alleged to contain.

He told us how the poison cupboard, in addition to the stock poisons that were placed on the lower shelf, held a number of rare and some of them very dangerous poisons, collected by Dr. Hanson over a long period in connection with his research work, on a shelf at the top. These were seldom touched and it had not been necessary for him to handle them in making up the sleeping draft for Stella. As far as he could tell they had not been disturbed. Here he turned to me, saying, “But you may be able to help us there, Jeffcock, for you saw them with me only the night before last. You had better come along and tell me if, as far as you can remember, they are still placed as they were then.”

We trooped into the dispensary, and he opened the heavy steel door of the cupboard, with the little key which he took from his waistcoat pocket. The bottles, apparently, were in the exact positions in which I had seen them only two nights before, the tiny Chinese flagon lifting its long slender neck with its queer flat stopper above the diminutive bottles that surrounded it. As far as I could recollect, it was in the identical place in which I had replaced it when The Tundish had so urgently begged me to put it down, but, as I explained, any of the other bottles might have been changed or moved about, for they were all identical in shape and size, and I had not taken any note of the names and formulæ on the neatly written labels.

“As far as you can see then, the Chinese flagon has not been moved?” The Tundish asked. “Do you think that you would be prepared to swear to that?”

I hesitated before I replied, “No, I don’t think I could swear to it, but I could state on oath that if it has been, it has been put back again in very nearly the exact position in which I saw it last.” I pointed out, however, that unless some of the other bottles were moved as well, it would be practically impossible to have put it down anywhere else, and I finished up by asking him if the Chinese flagon were particularly important.

“Yes,” he said, “it is. I am convinced that some one or other has added some of the contents of that little bottle to the draft that I made up for Stella, and that that is the cause of her death.” He spoke in his quiet precise voice as though he had been making some trivial statement in general conversation, but the rest of us were too astonished to say anything at all.

“Come, time presses,” he added after a pause, “let us go back to the dining-room.”

As soon as we were seated again in our old positions he repeated to the rest what he had told me with regard to the history of the weird little Chinese bottle, and the action of its deadly contents. He explained to us how, in China, he had seen a man who had been poisoned by it, that Stella’s appearance was exactly similar, and that he knew of no other poison which produced even approximately similar symptoms. He feared, although he had of course only had time for a very brief examination, that there was little if any likelihood of his opinion being incorrect.

We sat nerved and taut, as one sits looking for the lightning flashes in a violent storm, and it was Margaret who first broke the silence. I noticed that she was holding to the table edge, and her finger-tips were white with the pressure of her grip.

“Did Stella know of the Chinese flagon?” she asked.

“No, not to my knowledge,” he replied, “besides which, it is difficult to see how she could have got at it had she wished to do so. There are only the two keys to the cupboard—mine and Miss Summerson’s. Mine I can answer for, and Miss Summerson left the dispensary yesterday afternoon at three o’clock in order to go over to Millingham to see some friends of hers. I gave her special leave for the purpose and she is not to return until midday to-day. She always carries the key on a chain attached to her waist and is a model of care in such matters.”

“Then you really do suspect foul play?” I asked. “But who could have done it and what motive could they have had?”

“Yes, I suspect foul play, murder in short, to use the horrid word, but I am not able to answer the rest of your question. The position as I see it is this. Besides the six of us sitting here at this table there were only the two maids in the house last night after the medicine was taken up-stairs, making eight in all. Of the eight, obviously suspicion falls most readily on me as I made the medicine up, but I can assure you most positively that no mistake was made with the prescription. So far as I know, Annie, who carried it up-stairs, does not even know of the existence of the little flagon, and I think that we can probably rule her out of it. Of the rest of you, suspicion points most readily to you, Jeffcock, for I told you all about the poison only the night before, and to you, Ethel, who already knew about it from your father.”

He put his hand over hers and smiled at her as he spoke, but Kenneth sprang up at once crying out angrily, “How dare you make such a suggestion about Miss Hanson?”

“Don’t be a fool, Kenneth,” she replied tersely, “and I was ‘Ethel’ to The Tundish when you were a little boy at school.”

The doctor stood up, all pleasant serenity. “I do think I was very careful to say that suspicion pointed most readily to me, but we are delaying too long and there are things that must be done. The police must be informed—they will have to investigate the matter—and so this is perhaps the last opportunity we shall have of talking quietly together. Stella has been killed unmercifully and in cold blood—it seems impossible to believe, but terrible if it is true—that the murderer is probably here with us in this room now. Possibly you are wondering, even as I am talking to you, whether I am the murderer and whether I could have nerve enough to face you all like this. Well, I want to beg and pray of you that you will put all such thoughts on one side, for if we once allow our imaginations to run riot and let our suspicions get the better of our friendships and beliefs, these next few days may grow memories that we shall all look back on with nothing but shame and regret. I do solemnly swear to you that I did not do this horrible thing. If I am arrested on suspicion, remember that suspicion may still fall on you. We shall all be questioned again and again by the police. If any information should come to light to ease my own position, then it may equally throw suspicion on one of the rest of you. I don’t for one moment suggest that we should do anything to hinder their investigations, but apart from that, for God’s sake let us keep our heads and admit no one guilty until his or her guilt has been actually proved.”

I think that we were all of us impressed by the earnest way in which he spoke, and Ethel went up to him and kissed him there in front of us all. “Of course you didn’t do it, Tundish dear,” she said, “and no one who knows you could think so for a moment.”

Kenneth said, “Oh, yes, that’s all very well, but doesn’t it apply equally to us all?”

“Why, of course it does. Who suggested that it didn’t.”

“But unless the doctor is mistaken about the poison, one of us must have done it. You simply can’t get away from that.”

I said, “I am sure that the doctor is right, the less we think about who it may have been the better.” But I was already thinking of the conversation I had overheard between Ethel and the doctor at the club, and what he and Stella had said in the drawing-room last night. The words, “Your abominable share . . . father’s death . . . I shall tell them,” came whispering in my ears.

Ethel had taken her chair again, and I saw the tears well up in her brown eyes as Kenneth was speaking, and then suddenly she buried her face in her arms. The Tundish put his hand on her shoulder, saying, “Now we must waste no more time. First the servants must be told. Ralph, please ring the bell. And I must telephone or wire to Stella’s people. What is her address, Ethel?”

“It’s in Kensington. She lives with her uncle, Mr. Crawford, but she told me only yesterday that he is away and that the house is shut. I haven’t the least idea where he has gone to or what his address is now. Whatever shall we do?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. The police will see to it for us. Very likely she may have some letter stating where he is. We will tell them directly they come.”

Annie, the maid who had taken the fateful medicine up-stairs the night before, appeared with a tray to clear away the things. She was a nice quiet girl of about twenty-eight who had been with the Hansons a good ten years. She put the tray down on the sideboard, saying, “Why, what’s the matter with. Miss Ethel? There’s no bad news from Folkestone, I hope, sir?”

“No, Annie, but run down-stairs and tell cook that I want her here at once. Come back again yourself.”

The cook was an acquisition of about six months. I suppose that it really is impossible for the mere male to appreciate the value of a good servant, and to understand how easily the mistress of a house may be willing to allow efficiency to pardon defects in appearance and manner, but I felt that, for myself, I would sooner live on perpetual bread and cheese than suffer the Hansons’ cook. Ethel had told me more than one story of her selfish unreasonableness, but had added that she was a good cook, and that they preferred to put up with her, rather than risk a month or two of cooking and washing up with possibly something more disastrous still at the end of it.

She came back with Annie, standing just inside the door with her arms folded and her beady black eyes darting from one of us to the other, as she took in the scene. Her face was unhealthily pasty and her small shapeless nose tilted upward from a mouth that seemed ever to be posed in a disagreeable smirk.

The Tundish explained that Miss Palfreeman had been found dead in her bed, and that, as there was some uncertainty as to the reason for her death, it would be necessary for him to call in the police, and for an inquest to be held.

Cook, who had been christened with the inappropriate name of Grace, was all alarm and anger in a moment. “What! The police in this ’ere house,” she said, “and the master and mistress away as well! Not if I have anything to do with it, by your leave, sir! I come here with a good character to cook, I did, and if I am to be questioned by the police I’d better pack and be off at once, by your leave, Miss Ethel,” and she gave her head a nasty little shake and stood with her arms folded and a smirk on her pale unwholesome face, as she waited for the doctor and Ethel to unite in begging her to stay.

But she hadn’t bargained for The Tundish. “Very well then, Grace, you had better go and pack up your belongings at once, for the police will be here in less than half an hour. I warn you, however, that they will look on your action as being very suspicious, and that they will take you to the police station and ask you any questions they may want to in public, instead of quietly here in private. You can go. And you, Annie?” he added, turning to the younger woman.

“Oh, I shall stay, sir.”

“Well, look here, Annie, I may as well warn you that we are all in a pretty mess. Miss Palfreeman has most certainly been poisoned, and I don’t see how she can possibly have poisoned herself. I shall be the object of most suspicion, as it was I who made up medicine for her last night, but you will be suspected too, for you took it up-stairs to her room. But neither you nor I will have anything to fear, if we answer truly all the questions we are asked. Now be a good girl, and get the table cleared quickly, while I ring up the police.”

The telephone is fixed just outside the drawing-room door on a little bracket in the hall, and he went to it as he finished speaking, but before he reached the instrument the bell rang sharply. Somebody was calling us.

The doctor lifted the receiver and we could tell at once by his tone of voice as he replied that he had been listening to serious news. “Oh, dear, I am sorry. Yes, of course I’ll come at once. I’ll put a few things together and be with you as soon as I can.” He replaced the receiver and stood thinking deeply. Then he explained to us that he had been called to an urgent case—a case that he could not possibly hand over to another doctor, at least not without seeing him first. He could do nothing for Stella, and it was his obvious duty to go. Would I ring up the police? “And by the way,” he added, “you, Ralph, had better run up to the courts and scratch all your names from the tournament. You need not give too much information. Tell them that Miss Palfreeman is ill and that the rest of you have decided to scratch on account of the heat. We can then be guided by the police when they come. We must all of us remember that this is going to be none too good for your father’s practise, Ethel. You ring up the police, Jeffcock, while Ralph goes to the club. I must go at once. There are other people in trouble besides ourselves.”

He turned at the door to give one look at Ethel, who still sat at the table with her face buried on her arms, “You look after her, Kenneth,” he said kindly. But Kenneth looked straight back at him with his lips tight shut and a scowl on his handsome young face, and said never a word in reply. The Tundish shrugged his shoulders, made a little grimace, and went off down the passage to the dispensary. I went to the telephone.

Now, I had some difficulty in getting my connection, and I dare say I may have stood for a full five minutes at the instrument with my back to the hall and the receiver pressed to my ear. The heat was already oppressive and the delay irritating in itself. My hand I found was trembling slightly as I held the receiver. The cathedral clock chimed out ten as I stood, and I had to look at my watch to make sure that I hadn’t missed a chime, for it seemed incredible that only a little more than an hour had passed since The Tundish and I had sat down to breakfast, and we began the farce of the mock inquiry about the notice that he had stuck up over the landing switch. To look back to the earlier part of the morning, was, I felt, like looking at the sunshine receding across the valley as one sat perched on a mountainside with the rain clouds and the thunder drifting up behind.

I heard Margaret say that she would go to the basement and fetch something or other for Ethel, and she passed close behind me just as the exchange was putting me through to a wrong number. I had to shout and it was some time before I could persuade whoever it was speaking to me to hang up his receiver. The girl at the exchange seemed to pay no attention to my repeated attempts to attract her attention, then just as I did get the number I wanted at last, I fancied that I could hear some one coming softly down the stairs behind my back, but my attention being all for my message I did not turn round to see who it was. Fortunately, I got through to the station superintendent himself without any further delay. I told him briefly how one of the doctor’s guests had been found dead in bed, and that Dr. Wallace, the physician in charge of the practise, had asked me to ring him up and tell him that he strongly suspected poison. Would he please send some one round at once along with Dr. Jeffries, the police surgeon, if he was available? He promised me that they would both be round in less than a quarter of an hour.

I put down the instrument with a sigh of relief. A step, however small, I felt, had been taken toward knowledge and away from uncertainty and indecision.

I turned round to find The Tundish standing close behind me in the hall. I was surprised, because my hearing is so acute that I am not often taken unawares. I wondered how long he had been standing there quietly behind me. He explained that he had come back to ask me to make quite sure that in his absence no one went up to Stella’s room before the police were on the scene. He ought to have locked the door, but had forgotten. I promised him that I would see to it, and he went back down the passage to the consulting-room and out into Dalehouse Lane, his patient apparently living in that direction.

Margaret came up the stairs from the basement, carrying a tray, as we concluded our brief conversation, and I stepped forward to take it from her. Somehow or other I felt every bit as sorry for her as I did for Ethel. She was so soft and feminine and there had been such a note of horror in that one shrill cry of hers when The Tundish had told us so calmly that Stella was dead, and now that she had recovered from her first alarm she seemed all concern for Ethel, her blue eyes shining brightly, her deep breast rising and falling and her hands fluttering against mine as we stood with the tray between us.

“How splendid he is,” she whispered, looking back at The Tundish as he disappeared through the baize door at the end of the passage. “How awful when they arrest him, and what will poor Miss Summerson do?”

“Miss Summerson!” I echoed in surprise, but she gave me no explanation—just shook her pretty golden head and turned into the dining-room to rejoin the others.

We found Kenneth standing awkwardly in front of Ethel. She had been very brave and was recovering again from her little collapse. Margaret sat down at her side, and made her drink and did her best to comfort her. “It may be a mistake about the Chinese poison, dear,” she said caressingly, “doctors do make mistakes, you know.”

I remembered the doctor’s words, however, and how he had described a death like a peaceful slumber—a slumber rendered horrible by staring bloodshot eyes and narrow contracted pupils. There could be no mistaking such a death, I thought.

The front door-bell rang from the outer gate in the garden wall, and we could hear the tread of feet along the garden path. Annie came up to open the door. We were face to face with the situation at last.

The three men who were shown into the room were of strikingly different types. The foremost, Inspector Brown, introduced the other two to us with a wave of his hand. With his flat-topped peaked hat, his dark blue uniform braided with black, and his ruddy, healthy, none too intelligent face, I thought him typical of that section of the police who have been promoted from the helmet and the beat to higher spheres of action. He spoke briskly, however, and to the point.

“Dr. Jeffries you know already, I think, Miss Hanson,” pointing to a thin elderly gray-haired man. “But I have been fortunate in bringing with me Detective Inspector Allport of Scotland Yard, who happens to be in Merchester, and was, as a matter of fact, with me in my room when your message came through.”

Now we must all of us have painted some sort of a mental picture of the detective of fiction, even if we have never seen the real living article in flesh and blood, but I am not willing to imagine that Detective Inspector Allport of Scotland Yard could hold a place in anybody’s mental picture. Without exaggeration he was the ugliest little man I have ever set eyes on, and yet, scanning him feature by feature, I was only astonished that the tout-ensemble was not even more grotesque. Little and undersized, his pale watery eyes bulged after the manner of those of a great many extraordinarily clever people. His forehead was broad but sloping, and if his skin had not been of such a visibly coarse unhealthy-looking texture, this would have been his one redeeming feature. His nose was bulbous, his mouth slopped all over the place, and his little chin was bunched up into a kind of irregular prominence which was rendered interesting by reason of an unbelievably regular, circular dimple in the middle. I gazed on him, fascinated, and thought at once that for a man so handicapped to be anything higher in the social scale than a lavatory attendant, must argue a character and mental equipment to be reckoned with, and I very soon found out that if perhaps I was inclined to exaggerate his apparent deficiencies and defects, I altogether underestimated his brain power and those hidden qualities that compel attention and respect.

He took charge of the situation at once, speaking rapidly in a voice of markedly pleasant tone.

“Dr. Wallace, I presume?” he said, turning to me.

I explained the circumstances of The Tundish’s enforced absence, and how we had been unable to wire to Stella’s uncle. Ethel gave him the uncle’s address.

“I will look after that—as you suggest, there may probably be information as to Mr. Crawford’s present whereabouts among the unfortunate young lady’s papers. If not they will soon find it for me in London. You can leave it to me and need not bother further. But the doctor! It is very unfortunate that he has been called away, but I suppose that he will be back before long. He has no doubt left a note of the address to which he has gone?”

I had to confess that I didn’t think he had, and Ethel, on being questioned, could only state that so far as she could gather from what she had heard of his conversation on the telephone, it might be one of three.

He pulled down a corner of his funny little mustache and stood biting at it, obviously annoyed. “Strange, very strange, that he should have left the house,” he muttered angrily. “However, Doctor, you had better examine the unfortunate young lady yourself in the meantime. Perhaps Miss Hanson will be kind enough to show us up to her room. The rest of you will kindly oblige me by not leaving this room until my return. Please call up the servants and keep them here as well.”

He asked Ethel if the room had been locked up and everything in it untouched, and I explained what The Tundish had told me about how he had left the door unfastened and the instructions he had given me.

The little gargoyle frowned his disapproval, turned on his heel and left the room, Ethel, Dr. Jeffries and the inspector following. I rang the bell for Annie and cook.

“Little swipe,” was Kenneth’s comment, and I think we all of us felt that we could endorse it. The maids came up at once. Grace, clad in her outdoor clothes, sat down ostentatiously on the edge of a chair with the feather in her atrocious hat nodding her disapproval and independence. Her whole attitude showed that she considered her term of service to be at an end, and that, far from taking the doctor’s advice, another minute would have seen her out of the house. I saw Ethel give a wry little smile. Annie stood respectfully against the wall.

Grace—God save the mark!—and Annie had barely settled down when we heard footsteps on the stairs. I imagined that it would be Allport and Brown returning with Ethel to ask us the questions we all expected to have to answer, but to my surprise Dr. Jeffries came in with them as well.

Allport came in first, rudely stepping straight in front of Ethel, and his bulging eyes seemed more prominent than ever as he asked me angrily, “Where is the key? You told me Dr. Wallace said that the door of the room was unlocked.”

Chapter IV.
Detective Inspector Allport

Ralph, evidently, had not heard what I had said about the key to the bedroom and neither could he have heard Allport correctly, for he asked Kenneth in a loud whisper whether he was talking about the key of the poison cupboard. Allport gave him one swift glance, but then he turned to me, waiting for my answer to his question.

“Surely you must be mistaken,” I answered at length when I had conquered my astonishment. “Dr. Wallace told me most definitely that he had forgotten to lock the door and he came back on purpose to ask me to prevent any one from going up-stairs until the police arrived to take charge.”

“Oh! I must be mistaken then, of course, if you say so. The key is in the door all the time and we all came down-stairs again for the sake of a little exercise.”

My reply seemed to have angered him beyond all reason, and he stuck his ugly little apology for a face over the edge of his stiff stand-up collar and glared at me as he spoke.

Then he turned to Ethel. “You are quite certain that the key was in the door?”

“No, I am not.”

“But you told me just now that it was.”

“I beg your pardon, but I said nothing of the kind. What I said was that the key was generally in the door. You don’t suppose that I stopped to make an inventory?”

I could have clapped her on the back for standing up to the little spitfire, and as a matter of fact, he seemed rather to enjoy it himself, for he smiled quite amicably and turned to Annie, asking her if she could give him information on the subject.

“No, sir, as Miss Ethel says, all the bedroom door keys are usually on the inside, and I should expect that Miss Palfreeman’s would be there like the rest.”

“Did any one else hear the doctor tell Mr. Jeffcock that he had forgotten to lock the door?” was his next question. No one replied, and I answered rather stiffly that I should have thought that my statement would have been enough, but “I dare say,” was all the comment he made.

This, I felt, was not a very auspicious start and argued ill for the more detailed questioning to which we should have to submit, and I wondered what attitude he would take toward The Tundish on his return if he could behave so abominably to the rest of us now. However, there seemed to be nothing to gain by remonstrance, so I merely shrugged my shoulders and picked up the morning paper which was lying on the table. I think that neither Dr. Jeffries nor Inspector Brown relished their association with the boorish little man.

He was undoubtedly master of the situation though, and he asked, or rather I should say told, Inspector Brown to have the bedroom door broken open immediately, and to send a plain clothes man to the three addresses at which it was most probable the doctor might be visiting. He got Ethel to write them down on a slip of paper. The man was to come back at once if the doctor was not located. If he was, then he was to be told that he was wanted back at Dalehouse as urgently as possible, and the man was to wait and escort him home.

His instructions were rapped out without the least consideration for our feelings, and I for one felt certain that The Tundish would be arrested on suspicion directly he set foot inside the house. Having packed off Dr. Jeffries and the inspector, he crossed the room to where Ethel was standing, a picture of unhappiness, gazing out of the window at the sunlit garden. I think that even he was touched.

“I am truly very sorry, Miss Hanson, to cause all this bother,” he said, “but it simply can not be avoided. My temper may be at fault, but there is really no time on such occasions for niceties of conduct. As soon as I am satisfied that Dr. Jeffries can make his examination, and if it confirms Dr. Wallace’s opinion that Miss Palfreeman has been poisoned, then the house must be searched from top to bottom before anything else is done. I will have the kitchen premises dealt with first so that the maids can return to them, and then the drawing-room, so that you can use it in addition to this. Later on, when my search is completed, I shall require you all to tell me everything you can think of that might have a possible bearing on the case. That may be quite a lengthy business, and I can allow no delay for any reason whatsoever. Will you please, therefore, arrange for an early lunch and I shall hope to be ready shortly after twelve.” He made a stiff little bow, and without waiting for any reply, he left the room.

I heard him run up-stairs, and a little later a crash as the door of Stella’s room was broken in. Then he came down to the telephone, and I heard him asking for additional men to be sent from the police station. To my astonishment, I next heard him ask for the clerk in charge at the exchange, and after explaining who he was, tell her to take down in full and report immediately to him any messages that came either to or from our number until further notice. I suppose it was quite an ordinary precaution, but it brought home to me, as nothing else had, the terrible plight in which we all were.

Apparently I was the only one to overhear his message, and I went over to Ethel, who was sitting in the window-sill with writing-pad and pencil. She told me that she was writing to her father and mother, but did not know whether she ought to post it, on account of her father’s health. I felt that our letters would probably be intercepted and opened, and I told her of the conversation I had overheard.

“But it’s preposterous,” she exclaimed angrily, and it seemed to me that there was a note of alarm in her voice. “Surely he has no right to do a thing like that, and oughtn’t he to have a warrant before he searches the house?”

I explained that he could most certainly get one if The Tundish’s diagnosis proved correct, and that we should gain nothing by delaying matters or by being awkward.

She bent to her letter again, saying, “Oh, how I wish he would come back.”

Kenneth was standing against the mantelpiece talking to Ralph, and I heard him mutter gruffly, “If he ever does come back!”

Ethel gave him one angry look, but she made no reply. I could not understand Kenneth at all. Even if he did believe the doctor guilty he seemed to have nothing to gain by his behavior. He knew that The Tundish was a very old friend of Ethel, the girl to whom he had quite recently become engaged, and yet his love seemed to be of such poor stuff that he could not hide his feelings for her sake. Ralph looked pale and wretchedly ill at ease, and I could more readily have understood it had he shown ill will toward the doctor. He had fallen head over heels in love with Stella, and whether his feelings went to any depth or not, it must have been a bitter blow for him. The evidence was certainly heavy against The Tundish; it seemed to me inevitable that Ralph should feel antagonistic toward him, and I thought that in the circumstances he was showing a very creditable forbearance. With Kenneth, on the other hand, there was no apparent reason for such uncontrolled hostility, but I had overlooked the ready jealousy of a young man in love, and was yet to learn that weeks before poor Stella’s death, Ethel had already sown the seeds from which many unhappy moments grew, by singing the doctor’s praises.

Clean cut in his own opinions, he altogether failed to understand that while engaged to him, Ethel might yet have a very real affection for The Tundish. I believe that every action of hers showing loyalty to her old friendship added fire to his hot resentment. Having once decided in his own mind that the doctor was guilty, then he was a murderer and no longer a human being in need of sympathy and understanding. Kenneth’s love was overwhelmed by his jealousy, which in turn was fed by Ethel’s loyalty to her friend and his own utter inability to compromise or look at a situation through any eyes but his own. That she could distress herself over a man who in cold blood had taken the life of a young girl, a girl staying in her own home at the time, and that she could brazenly kiss such a man in front of us all, was to him proof positive that her feelings were stronger than those of friendship alone.

But in spite of his unreasonable behavior, I was truly sorry for Kenneth, though it was incomprehensible to me that he could stand aloof and frowning, while Ethel sat alone, wretched and distressed. It was bad enough for us all, but for her, with her father and mother away, it was a truly devastating experience.

Never, I think, shall I forget that half-hour’s wait in the Dalehouse dining-room. We could hear the police moving about as they searched the rooms. Any intimate conversation was impossible by reason of the presence of the two maids. The cook sat with folded arms, insolently defiant, sniffing loudly at intervals. Annie stood with quiet tears rolling down her cheeks. They neither of them spoke a word. Ethel pretended to write. I leaned over the table with the morning paper spread out. But we were all of us listening—listening to the police and for The Tundish to return, wondering what the disagreeable little detective would do when he did come back—and thinking which of the rest of us it could be if the doctor were acquitted. Across my own mind as I leaned over the table gazing with unseeing eyes at the paper I was pretending to read, there flashed a succession of little scenes—Ethel and The Tundish sitting close to each other, earnestly conversing, two courts and more away from where I sat perched in the umpire’s chair—The Tundish talking to Stella in the drawing-room and the sound of threat in her high-pitched voice—The Tundish meeting me in the hall directly afterward, pleasant and serene—and lastly, the sound of a woman laughing, in the waiting-room, suddenly reviving my childhood’s terror-fascinated memories, pale Miss Summerson lying elaborately to the doctor in the dispensary, and Ethel, who was supposed to be up at the club, appearing surprisingly from the consulting-room, having returned to get some tape for the handle of her racquet.

The heat alone, apart from all other considerations, was almost more than we could bear. While the clock on the mantelpiece ticked the seconds away with a regular monotony, time seemed to stand holding its breath. Our nerves were so on edge that when at last the door was briskly opened there was not one among us that did not give a little jump.

It was Allport. He asked Ethel to go with him up-stairs and tell him who had slept in the different rooms. She was with us again in five minutes, and told the maids that they could go down-stairs, and that we, if we wished, could use the drawing-room once more. I felt as though we had been imprisoned for hours, but it was barely half past eleven.

Ethel and Margaret and I moved into the other room at once, but Kenneth and Ralph stayed where they were, talking in low tones together. Ethel hesitated at the door, and I wondered if she were going to ask them to join us, but she thought better of it and followed Margaret and me. She was about at the end of her endurance, and for her sake alone I dreaded the impending conference.

The drawing-room had been turned topsy-turvy. The carpet had been rolled up into the middle of the floor, and the furniture, including the heavy piano, had all been hurriedly moved. The music, the book-shelves, the chair covers, they had all been searched and scattered. We had expected nothing so disturbing and thorough, and the state of the room took us all three by surprise, but I for one was secretly glad to have something active to do in putting things to rights.

Margaret, I thought, was wholly admirable in the way she unselfishly suppressed her own feelings and helped to steady Ethel.

As we had crossed the hall I observed that a policeman had been stationed at the end of the passage to the doctor’s wing, standing in such a position that he could command a view both of the stairs to the landing above and to the basement below. I wondered what our neighbors must be thinking of all this police activity and how long it would be before we had to bear with newspaper publicity in addition to our other troubles. My imagination grew busy with the head-lines.

Early as it was, Annie was already setting out a cold lunch in the dining-room, and Ethel explained that Allport had particularly asked her again to hurry it up, saying that directly their search was completed he would want to begin his preliminary inquiry.

I could not understand the desperate hurry, but she said he had told her that speed was everything; that he could do nothing until he had all the available information at his finger-ends and that such a detail as a meal-time could not be allowed to interfere with his plans. He improved, she thought, on better acquaintance, but I agreed with Margaret when she said that it would be difficult to imagine him doing anything else.

We had barely finished our little conversation, and it was a great relief to talk, when the telephone bell rang in the hall. I opened the drawing-room door. The policeman still stood on guard at the end of the passage, but although the instrument was only a few yards away from where he stood, he asked me to answer it for him. He evidently had very strict instructions not to move from his position. It was the police station calling and asking for Inspector Brown. I promised to tell him to ring them up at once, and after consulting with the sentry, I went up-stairs to find him. There was no one about on the landing, and full of curiosity as to what was going on, I ascended the stairs to the floor above.

The room in which Stella had slept is so placed that any one going up the stairs can see right into it when the door is open. It was open on this occasion, and as my eyes reached the level of the upper landing I found myself looking straight at the nightmare face of the hideous little detective. For a moment I could not understand how it could be at such a level, but on moving up a few steps I realized that he was kneeling on the floor in the middle of the room.

He had just taken a small envelope out of his pocket and as I watched he allowed what looked like two tiny fragments of glass to trickle into it out of his hand. He was evidently deep in thought and entirely lost to his surroundings, for I had taken no precautions to move quietly, and he neither saw me nor heard. There he knelt immovable, the envelope in one hand, a perplexed little smile on his shapeless protruding lips.

I moved forward, but it was not until I was right up to the bedroom door that he realized that he was not alone. If not actual abuse, the very least I expected was some sarcastic remark about my intrusion, but he merely lifted up his hand for silence, for all the world like some diminutive father admonishing his child. I could hardly refrain from laughing at the grotesque little scene, until I looked beyond him at the bed with its white sheet covering all that was left of poor Stella. A single wisp of her kinky coppery hair came curving over the edge of the sheet.

He waited a minute in thought and then asked me what I wanted, moving out on to the landing and closing the door, which still hung on its hinges, reverently behind him. “This is a sad, strange business,” he said.

I told him about the call for the inspector, and he said he would go and find him at once, but the inspector saved him the trouble, for he came up the stairs as we were speaking together. He was carrying a coat, and he was evidently in a state of some excitement.

“Well, we have found the key, Mr. Allport, at least I believe we have,” and he put his hand into the side pocket of the coat and brought out an ordinary bedroom door-key. It fitted without any trouble, although the lock itself had been almost wrenched from the woodwork when the door was broken open. He handed it over to his superior.

“Where did you find it?” he asked, holding out his hand for the coat as well.

“Among the other coats on the pegs in the hall.”

It was a thin Alpaca house coat that The Tundish had been using during the hot weather. I recognized it at once and remembered that the doctor had been wearing it only that morning at breakfast time. My heart sank. It was difficult to believe that in the excitement he might have locked Stella’s door and then have forgotten all about it. On the other hand, I could think of no reason, even assuming I were willing to admit him a liar, why he should so deliberately come and tell me that the room was unlocked, with the key with which he had locked it in one of his own pockets all the time. The detective asked me to whom the coat belonged, and I had to tell him.

We stood silently on the landing, the three of us, Allport holding out the key in front of him as if it were some astonishing specimen, instead of an ordinary key to a bedroom door. I remembered how, as I stood at the telephone when ringing up the police, I had thought that I heard some one on the stairs, and how a few moments later I had been surprised to find The Tundish standing close behind me, but puzzle my brains as I might, I could see no reason why, even if he were guilty, as both the detective and the inspector obviously thought him, he should run secretly up-stairs to lock Stella’s door, and then go out of his way to tell me that he hadn’t. While it did not seem to me to add much to the real evidence against him, it was certainly one more item for him to explain away on his return.

Now my thoughts had been so absorbing that for a time I had forgotten both my companions and my whereabouts. However, a gentle chuckle from the inspector brought me to my senses, and, looking up, I found that if my thoughts had been interesting, the detective was still gazing at the key as though he had been hypnotized.

“That is strange—very strange—very strange indeed,” he whispered at last.

“Well,” said the inspector, “both of you two gentlemen might have been crystal gazing, but there seems to me to be nothing very extraordinary in Dr. Wallace locking the door, putting the key in his pocket, and then forgetting that he’d done it.”

“Oh!” was Allport’s comment, and he shrugged his shoulders in a manner that must have riled the inspector, for his shoulders said “Poor fool” as plainly as shoulders could, then smiling at me he added, “And so you found it rather intriguing also, my friend? Now I wonder why?” And he looked at me appraisingly as though I had suddenly gone up in his estimation.

Then he stood thinking deeply again, and I thought for a moment that he was sinking into another reverie, but he went back into Stella’s room and looked out of the window which was immediately over the flat-topped roof of the doctor’s wing. Next to the house the roof is of plain cement, but at the end away from it it is covered thickly by a large-leaved ivy which runs riot a good foot deep. I went up and stood beside him, but I could see nothing that might have aroused his sudden interest, or which could have any possible connection with the key that had been found in the doctor’s pocket.

He shut the window down again saying, “Well, we are wasting time. Inspector, you are wanted on the telephone. Mr. Jeffcock, and you, Inspector, as well, I want you both to promise me most solemnly that nothing we have spoken of together, and nothing you have seen, Mr. Jeffcock, shall be mentioned to another soul. Neither the finding of the key, nor anything else must be spoken of.”

I gave him my promise.

“I thank you, it is of great importance, and now I shall be obliged if you will return to the rest.”

What on earth could he have seen that was so important in the finding of the key in the doctor’s coat? Why did he go back into Stella’s room and look out of the window, and what were the little pieces of glass that I had caught him so carefully preserving? These were the questions I asked myself as I went back to the drawing-room, but I agreed with Ethel that the little man was inclined to improve as one got to know him better.

Ethel and Margaret, had, I found, completed the straightening out of the furniture. I was afraid that they might ask me for the reason of my prolonged absence, and I had no answer ready to give them, but although I fancied Margaret watched me with a kind of half-eager expectation, they neither of them asked me any questions.

Annie came to tell us that lunch was served.

It was a sad meal. A place had been set for Stella by mistake. The Tundish had always said a short grace before our meals; it was a practise of Hanson’s which he kept up while he was away. Ethel began to say it in his absence, but she broke down after the first sentence and had to retire to the window while she regained her self-control. What little we ate, we ate in silence. Any attempt at general conversation seemed out of place, and the thoughts that occupied all our minds were too painful for speech. Yes, and too secret for speech—for I am sure that in spite of the doctor’s appeal we were each one of us busy with conjecture. The Tundish—and if not The Tundish, then who?

We were about half-way through our meal when he returned. We heard him tell the man stationed in the hall to let Inspector Brown know that he was back, and then he opened the door.

Ethel got up at once with a little cry, and went to meet him, her arms half extended. We were all forgotten. “Oh, Tundish, I’m so glad—so glad that you’re back again,” she said, and there was such pleasure and trust in her voice, and such sympathy in her looks that it was no wonder Kenneth bit his lips and turned the other way.

The doctor looked tired, and little beads of perspiration glistened on his forehead, the result of a hurried return, I surmised, and not of fear or panic, for his eyes were steady and his look self-confident and calm.

“You goose,” he laughed, putting his hand gently on her shoulder. “But where is my thin coat? This one is well-nigh unbearable. I thought I left it hanging in the hall.”

Ethel told him how the whole of the house was being searched and how Stella’s door had had to be broken down. I was observing him very closely, as indeed I think we all were, but he showed no trace of embarrassment. His astonishment seemed both spontaneous and genuine, and to have no appearance of being overacted or forced. I concluded that it was altogether too natural to be simulated, but then I remembered how, within half a minute of his conversation with Stella in the drawing-room on the previous night, he had met me in the hall with a pleasant smile and a face that showed no trace of either trouble or concern.

Now again he was not perturbed, and he spoke quietly and without emphasis. “But I know for a fact that I did not lock the door. I intended to go back and do it and then the telephone call came through and put it out of my head. You are sure that you didn’t run up-stairs and lock it after I spoke to you in the hall?”

I assured him that I had not, and he stood for a moment obviously puzzled. I glanced round to see what the others were making of it. Kenneth sat looking straight at the doctor, fierce and grim. Ralph, his face pale and his head bent, was playing with a little heap of crumbs. Margaret was looking at Ralph.

“Ah well, that will be another little mystery for our friends the police to explain.” And he took his seat at the end of the table.

“It will be for you to make the explanations,” I thought to myself as I remembered where the key had been found, and I must confess that I longed to break the solemn promise I had only just made.

Directly the doctor took his seat, Kenneth got up from his with deliberate ostentation, though he obviously hadn’t finished his lunch, asking Ethel if she would go with him into the drawing-room. She followed him reluctantly, and The Tundish went on with his meal, but I could see that his thoughts, like mine, were busy with the subject of their conversation.

Shortly after they had left us Allport came in followed by Inspector Brown. The Tundish, bland and dignified, rose at once to greet them. “I am so sorry that I have put you to all the trouble of sending out a man to track me down,” he said, offering his hand to the inspector, with whom he was evidently acquainted, “but I must confess that I deliberately omitted to leave my address—my case was a serious one and I had no wish to be interrupted. But now, gentlemen, I am entirely at your disposal.” He turned to Allport with hand outstretched, a quick look at Inspector Brown inviting an introduction.

The detective took his hand at once, saying, “That’s all right, Doctor, though I admit that you have caused me some anxiety. Now I should like you to take me into the dispensary and show me the poison cupboard which up to now we haven’t disturbed.”

The Tundish asked if I might accompany them, explaining how I had been with him when the cupboard was last opened, and that I could testify to the position of some of the bottles. Allport agreed, and I went along with them.

The safe was opened, and for a time he stood silently looking at the collection of bottles; I could see how immediately the Chinese flagon attracted his attention. The doctor told him which bottle he had used in preparing the fatal draft. Allport grunted, and asked the inspector to fetch him his bag from the hall. From it he took a pair of rubber gloves, and putting them on, he picked up the bottle, and placed it carefully in a box containing cotton wool at the bottom of the bag.

Next, he asked The Tundish from which bottle he thought the poison had been taken, assuming that an addition had been made to the sleeping draft in the manner he suspected.

“That is undoubtedly the bottle,” The Tundish replied, pointing to the little flagon.

“You say—undoubtedly—how can you be so sure that it was poison from that particular little bottle, and not from one of the others? There are many to choose from.”

“I am sure about it, first, because of the peculiarly bloodshot eyes, and second, because of its very unusual smell. I smelled the dregs at the bottom of the medicine glass when I went up-stairs immediately after breakfast to make my first examination, and having smelled it before I can not be mistaken.”

“Does it taste?”

“Yes, even in extremely dilute quantities it is bitter.”

Allport took the fragile little bottle between finger and thumb of his gloved hand and held it up to the light. He held it up, looking at it absorbed in thought, and then quite suddenly I saw him give a little start as if he had noticed something of particular interest, and he smiled to himself as I had watched him smiling on his knees in Stella’s room. I turned from him to the bottle he held in his hand, but I failed to see what it was that had quickened his attention.

“But this little bottle is very nearly full,” he said after a pause, “the neck is exceedingly narrow and the liquid is less than half an inch from the bottom of the stopper.”

Once more The Tundish explained how he had obtained the poison, telling the detective exactly what he had told me only two days ago. He ended by saying that a single drop, added to Stella’s medicine, would have been quite sufficient to kill.

“Can you tell me, from the position of the liquid in the neck, exactly how much of the poison has been used?”

The doctor thought for a moment and then replied, “Not with any very great accuracy, of course, but I should say not more than two or three drops at the most. I brought two similar bottles with me from China, giving them both to Dr. Hanson. They were both of them full to the stoppers and I had them sealed before my journey. Hanson used about half the contents of one bottle in the course of his investigations, with which I helped him. The remainder he sent away for further examination and test to a chemical society to which we both belong. Of the contents of the second bottle, we used exactly one cubic centimeter in an experiment we made together the last time I visited him, which would be about six months ago. As far as I can remember, we left it with the liquid in practically its present position. I asked Hanson if he had done any further work on it the day he left for Folkestone, and he told me that he had not. You will understand we were interested together. That is why I can state with a considerable amount of certainty that at the most only two or three drops have been used.”

Allport stood turning the tiny flagon this way and that, but obviously listening attentively to the doctor’s statement, which had been made in a voice that showed not the slightest tremor or concern. Then he turned round quickly and asked him, “You would be surprised then if I were to find any recent finger-prints of yours on the bottle?”

“Yes. Any more recent than six months ago.”

“Has it occurred to you that whoever added the poison to Miss Palfreeman’s medicine—providing you are correct in your assumption that it has been taken from this bottle—must have been closely familiar with its properties? He or she evidently intended to kill, or else why add poison at all? Yet, on your own showing only two or three drops were added. It was known to the murderer that that would be enough. He was familiar with its action.”