Murder in the Maze

by J. J. Connington

Contents

Chapter I.
The Hackleton Case

Neville Shandon stood at the window of his brother’s study gazing contentedly out over the Whistlefield grounds. This was a good place to recuperate in, he reflected, especially when one could only snatch a couple of days at a time from the grinding pressure of a barrister’s practice. His eye travelled slowly over the prospect of greenery which lay before him, lawn beyond lawn, down to where a glint of silver showed where the river cut across the estate. Beyond that came the stretches of the Low Meadows, intersected here and there by the darker green of the hedges; then the long curve of the main road; and at last, closing the horizon, the gentle slope of Longshoot Hill surmounted by its church spire. A bee hummed lazily at the open window; then, startled by a movement, it shot away, the note of its wings growing higher and fainter as it receded in the sunlight. The King’s Counsel let his attention wander for a moment to the rooks sailing, in their effortless flight around the tree-crests by the river; then, with something more than apparent reluctance, he turned away from the landscape.

“You did pretty well when you bought Whistlefield, Roger,” he commented as he moved back into the room. “It’s as restful a place as I know. If it weren’t that I can get down here from time to time, I’d be hard put to it to keep fit for my work. Think of the Law Courts on a day like this! And that Hackleton case has been a bit of a strain, a bigger business than usual.”

His twin brother nodded a general assent, but made no audible reply. There was more than the normal family resemblance between the two men. In height and build they were much alike; both were grey-haired and clean-shaven; and even the hard lines at the corners of the barrister’s mouth found their counterparts in the deeply-chiselled curves which made Roger Shandon’s face a slightly forbidding one. Whether deliberately or not, the twins accentuated their physical resemblance by a similarity in their dress.

“We have the same tailor,” Roger once explained. “When I go to him, I say: ‘Make me a suit like my brother’s last one.’ I believe Neville says the same. The fellow has our measurements, so there’s no more needed on that visit. Neville and I have much the same taste in shades, so it generally comes out all right.”

The likeness between the twins went even deeper than the surface. Both owed their success in life to a certain hardness of character coupled with an abundance of energy. Neville, going to the Bar, had made himself feared from the first as a brutal and domineering cross-examiner; and his criminal practice had done little to soften his professional manners. Roger’s rise to prosperity had been more mysterious. It was vaguely known that he had made money in South Africa and South America; but the exact methods which had led to his fortune were never discussed by him. He had come home at the age of forty-five to find his brother one of the leading lights of the Bar. The purchase of the little Whistlefield estate had followed, and Roger had apparently been content to settle down in the countryside and make a clean break with the interests of his past.

The third brother, Ernest, seemed hardly to belong to the same family as the twins. Though five years younger, he had none of the vitality and energy which were so manifest in his elders; and the contrast was accentuated by the weakness of his eyes, which gazed incuriously at the world from behind the concave lenses of his pince-nez. Left to fend for himself by the time he was twenty, and with a couple of hundred a year of his own, he had simply vegetated without even attempting to go into any business; and when his brothers had made their fortunes, he had slipped into the role of parasite without a thought, had transferred himself to Whistlefield, and had continued to live there ever since. Roger had fallen into the habit of giving him a fluctuating allowance, which he eked out as best he could by betting on a small scale.

“What’s this Hackleton case that you were talking about?” he inquired with a certain dull interest.

Neville looked at his brother with an expression half quizzical and half contemptuous. For days the Hackleton case had extended in sordid detail over a good many columns of most daily newspapers, for its intricacy had been enlivened by frequent dramatic interchanges between witnesses and counsel. It had shown Neville Shandon at his best, relentlessly driving the defendants into one damaging admission after another.

“Do you never read newspapers, Ernest?” the barrister demanded, quite unnettled by his brother’s ignorance of one of the greatest cases in which he himself had taken a leading part. Ernest’s interests were limited, as Neville knew; and it was useless to expect him to go outside his normal range merely from family concern. Wide-ranging curiosity was the last quality one could expect from him.

Ernest blinked, took off his glasses and cleaned them, then replaced them carefully before replying.

“No. At least, not all of them. (Confound these glasses, they won’t grip my nose to-day, somehow. This is the fifth time they’ve fallen off.) I often look at the newspapers, Neville. I glance through the sporting news every day. I never read the law column, though. I can’t understand it, usually; and when I do understand it, it seems so damned dull. At least, it’s dull to me; so I don’t look at it, usually.”

The barrister shrugged his shoulders slightly. He was above petty vanity, and he felt no sting from his brother’s lack of interest in his work.

“Just as well you left the Hackleton case alone, then,” he said. “It’s an infernal tangle. It’s taken me months of work to see my way through it; and if I happened to break down before it comes to a finish, I doubt if a junior could take it on with anything like success. But I think this week will see the end of it.”

Roger had listened to the dialogue without moving a muscle. Ernest’s complete incuriosity was no surprise to him. He could almost have predicted it. The youngest brother had never had the slightest interest in anything which did not touch himself. Family triumphs meant nothing to him, except that indirectly they contributed to his welfare.

The barrister moved again to the window and looked out over the landscape. A cloud of rooks caught his eye, sailing together and then breaking up into a mass of wheeling individuals.

“After this sort of thing, the very thought of the air in the Law Courts makes one sick,” he said at last.

“Hackleton’s coming up for the rest of your cross-examination the day after to-morrow, isn’t he?” Roger asked.

“Yes. He’s a clever devil—sees a concealed point as well as I do myself, and generally manages to skate round it more or less. He’s just scraped through, so far; but I’ll have him yet. It’ll be a bad business for him if he makes a slip. This civil suit for breach of contract is only a preliminary canter, if things turn out as I expect. One single breach in his case, and the Public Prosecutor will be down on Hackleton instanter. There’s ever so much in the background which we can’t bring to light in this particular suit, but it would all come out if the thing were to be transferred to the Criminal Court. Then we could really get to the bottom of the business.”

“So I gathered, by reading the case. Anyone could see that there was a lot in the background that you couldn’t touch on.”

“Once it all comes out, it’ll be the end of Hackleton. Five years penal is the least he could look forward to. Pleasant prospect for a man who lives on champagne. He’s an amazing fellow: drinks like a fish and yet has almost as good a brain as I have.”

“And you think you’ll get him? Does he realise that?”

“I expect he does.”

“From all I’ve heard of him he hasn’t much to boast of in the way of scruples. He started his career by speculations in coffin ships, didn’t he? I seem to remember some trouble with the insurance companies in more than one case.”

The barrister nodded:

“Constructive murder, simply. But that would be a trifle to Hackleton. He’d do anything for money.”

Roger seemed to turn this over in his mind for a moment or two before he spoke again.

“If he’s as hard a case as all that, I think I’d put on my considering-cap if I were in your shoes, Neville. It seems to me that you’re the weak joint in the harness.”

“I? How do you make that out? I’ve got this case at my finger-ends, I tell you. No one knows it inside out as I do.”

“That’s precisely what I mean. Suppose he loosed a gang of roughs on you before this cross-examination comes off? A good sand-bagging would put you out of action for just the time necessary to keep you out of the case; and that’s all he needs. You say yourself that you have all the strings in your hands, and I don’t suppose you’ve brought every card out of your sleeve even for the benefit of your junior. It wouldn’t be like you if you have. You were always one to keep a good deal in reserve.”

“That’s true enough,” Neville conceded with a grim smile. “No one could handle Hackleton in just the way that I shall this week. But I’m not particularly afraid of sand-bags or that sort of thing. No one could tackle me here, so far as I can see. One can’t do that kind of business in broad daylight on the Whistlefield lawns. And there won’t be much chance of getting at me on the way up to town or in London itself. I quite admit the possibility of the thing when one’s dealing with Hackleton. It’s quite on the cards; and because it’s never been done before, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be done sometimes. I’m not nervous, of course; but I’m not likely to run any risks by going about much after dark until this affair is squared up.”

Roger Shandon’s face reflected the grimness of his brother’s smile.

“I quite understand what you feel about it. In fact, I’m in much the same boat myself. That’s what turned my mind to the possibility in your case.”

The barrister glanced at him keenly.

“Some more of your disreputable past cropping up, eh? I don’t care much for some of your old acquaintances. Who’s this fresh one?”

Roger grinned shamelessly. His brother knew something of the way in which he had made his money; for at times it had been useful to Roger to take legal advice without bringing an outsider into problems which came too near the edge of the law.

“It’s another gentleman with a grievance—from Cape Town this time,” he explained. “He says he acted as my agent in some I.D.B. business when I was out there. He says that I got the profit out of it and that the profit was big enough to split comfortably into two. According to him, I gave him away to the authorities later on; and he spent a period of retirement, on the Breakwater or some such health resort. The cure took some years in the sanatorium; and he hated the treatment. Too much open-air exercise with plain food; and too many uniforms about for his taste. That part’s true enough—he’s just out of gaol. As to the rest, he needn’t expect me to corroborate it on oath.”

“Blackmail, I suppose?” asked the barrister, perfunctorily. “I’ll have a talk with him, if you like. Perhaps my persuasive style”—the harsh lines about his mouth deepened—“would help to convert him to honesty. It’ll be no trouble.”

Roger nodded his thanks.

“I’ll turn you on if necessary; but it’s hardly likely. He seems to me a vapouring sort of beast. ‘Your money or your life’ style of thing, you know. When I naturally refused point-blank to pay him a stiver, he frothed over at once with threats to do me in. ‘Tim Costock, the Red-handed Avenger’—and all that sort of thing. I left him frothing. He didn’t seem to me the sort of type that would do more than froth—and he can prove nothing.”

“I don’t suppose he can.” Neville agreed, knowing from past experience that his brother left very little behind him for enemies to pick up. “Well, I want to run over my notes for the Hackleton case this afternoon. Where can I find a place where I’ll be free from interruption? With these youngsters in the house, one can never be sure of having a room to oneself for half an hour at a time; and even if one retires to one’s bedroom, somebody’s sure to start a duel with the piano. I thought piano-playing had gone out of fashion; but I’ve heard it every day since I came here.”

“That’s Arthur,” Roger Shandon interjected, irritably. “No one else touches the damned thing.”

Ernest had apparently been cogitating deeply. He now turned a dull eye on his elder brother.

“Try the Maze,” he advised.

“What do you mean by that?” demanded Neville. “Try the Maze? It sounds like an advertisement for tea or one of these riddles, like: ‘Why is a hen?’ ”

Ernest elaborated his suggestion.

“I mean the Maze,” he explained laboriously. “The thing like the one at Hampton Court, down by the river, close to the boat-house. None of the visitors is likely to find a way to either of the centres; and none of us is likely to disturb you. We don’t usually go there; at least, I don’t myself.”

Neville’s face had shown enlightenment at the first sentence.

“Oh, our Maze, you mean? We were talking about the piano when you burst in, Ernest, and I didn’t quite take the connection. That’s not a bad notion. As you say, nobody’s likely to bother me if I plant myself in either of the centres. Besides, I want all the fresh air I can get just now; it’ll be better out there than anywhere inside the house. Right. I’ll go to Helen’s Bower.”

He moved towards the door as he spoke; but before he reached it a piano sounded not far off, and the opening bars of Sinding’s Frühlingsrauschen came to their ears. Neville turned back with his hand on the door-handle.

“By the way, Roger, what about that young nephew of ours? He seems all right—a bit moody, perhaps, but nothing out of the common. What does the doctor say?”

Roger’s face clouded.

“Arthur? He’s a young pest. About thrice a week he takes a fancy to the piano, and then he spends the whole day playing one piece over and over again, like an automatic machine—except for the mistakes. Damnable. You don’t know how I hate the sound of the Spring Song and Frühlingsrauschen. You must have heard him at it this morning; and now he’s starting all over again.”

The barrister nodded.

“Yes, but what about his general tone?” he asked. “Has he got over the encephalitis completely? Did the Harley Street man find anything permanently wrong?”

Roger’s face betrayed little satisfaction.

“Oh, the specialist looked devilish wise the last time he examined him; but that was about all it amounted to. It seems they know next to nothing about sleepy sickness. I understood him to say that the brain cells are all churned up with the inflammation; and the result may be anything you please. Of course Arthur was lucky to get off with no physical damage—his eyesight and hearing and all that are quite all right. But it seems one can never tell what changes may have taken place in the brain structure—things that don’t normally show at all. He may be all right, for all one can tell. Or again, he might turn into a homicidal maniac any day; and then, as like as not, he’d go for the nearest relation handy. A nice sort of fellow to have in one’s neighbourhood.”

The barrister evidently considered this prophecy exaggerated.

“He seems quite normal to me,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t worry much over him,” Roger admitted. “It’s just that he’s got on my nerves so much that I can hardly see him without snapping at him. I’ll have to get rid of him, I think; send him on a sea-voyage or something of that sort.”

“Perhaps you get on his nerves, just the same way as he gets on yours,” Ernest began in his low voice. “That’s what usually happens. When one starts it, the other takes it up. Usually that’s the way these things go. I shouldn’t wonder—hullo, Sylvia! I didn’t expect you just yet; not for quite a while. I’m not quite ready.”

A girl in her early twenties had come into the room and now stood looking at her uncle with a fair pretence of indignation.

Sylvia Hawkhurst, the sister of the piano-playing Arthur, had been left an orphan before she came of age; and as her uncles were her trustees, she and her brother had been brought to Whistlefield by Roger Shandon. She liked “to play at house-keeping,” as she put it: and Roger soon learned that she could run his small establishment better than any paid housekeeper. Things went like clockwork after she had taken command; and he soon realised that the secret of her management was that everyone in the house adored her. One thing she had set her face against: “We’ll have no men-servants, if you please, uncle; at least, not in the house itself. I don’t mind a chauffeur, of course. But I know what a girl can do, and I’d prefer to keep within my limitations, if it’s all the same to you.” Her uncle had let her have her way, and he had never found any reason to complain of the results.

Sylvia’s housekeeping, however, occupied very little of her time. She hunted in the season, drove her own car, played tennis well and golf better still, and was reckoned one of the best dancers in the neighbourhood. Most characteristic of all, in spite of her looks, she was as popular with girls as with men.

As she came into the room, Ernest got out of his chair with his usual deliberation and began a faintly shamefaced apology for his unpreparedness; but she cut him short in mock irritation.

“He hasn’t even got his boots on!” she complained. “How is it that I can run everything to time in this house except you? Are you ever in time for anything, Uncle Ernest?”

“I always seem to have so much to do, Sylvia, usually. It’s been a very busy day.”

The corners of Sylvia’s mouth quivered a little in spite of her effort to look indignant.

“Very busy! I remember exactly what you did. You played tennis for precisely thirty-five minutes this morning. Then you organised a grand shooting tournament with the air-guns and bored everyone stiff with it except Arthur, who happens to be able to beat everyone else. Then you came into the house; and I suppose you looked at the newspapers till lunch. And since then, you’ve sat and smoked. You must be dog-tired, poor thing. Do you think you could wrestle with your boots now; or shall I have them brought here on a silver salver and give you a hand with them myself? I’d rather not; so if you can manage by yourself, I’ll go and bring the car round. Put your watch in front of you and pinch yourself once a minute. Then you won’t fall quite asleep. Do hurry up, uncle,” she concluded, more seriously, “I want to get off as soon as I can.”

“Where are you taking him?” asked Roger.

“I’m going over to Stanningleigh village to do some shopping first of all. Then I’m going to the Naylands to ask them to come across and play tennis. When Uncle Ernest heard that he begged me to take him along part of the way and drop him at the East Gate, so that he could walk along the main road to the bridge and have a look at the river.”

“I thought I’d like to see if it was worth fishing, just at present,” Ernest added, in further explanation. “I’ve been thinking about it for a day or two, but I’ve never found time, somehow. Usually, just when I was starting out something always seemed to come in the way. So to-day, since Sylvia was going that way in the car anyhow, I thought. . .”

He broke off, observing Sylvia’s indignant eyes fastened upon him.

“Boots!” she said, scathingly, and held the door open for him to go out.

“I’ll be ready in a minute or two,” he assured her hastily as he left the room.

“Men are a wonderful lot, aren’t they?” she said confidentially to her two remaining uncles, as the door closed. “It seems to me high time Uncle Ernest got married. He’s simply incapable of looking after himself. You two are at least able to cross the street for yourselves; but Uncle Ernest really gives me a lot of worry. I think I saw a fresh wrinkle when I was brushing my hair this morning.”

“I wondered what made you look peculiar at lunch-time,” Neville admitted. “Now you mention it, I see it on your brow. About as deep as this.”

He touched one of the deep-scored lines running down to the side of his own mouth.

Sylvia laughed.

“You alarm me, uncle. I must have a look at the ravages in a mirror before I venture out. Good-bye!”

She hurried out of the room. Neville looked at his watch.

“Time I was moving,” he said. “I think I’ll take Ernest’s advice and try the Maze for seclusion. It’s hardly likely that anyone will bother to go into it this afternoon; and I can’t stand this piano-playing of Arthur’s. It grows irritating, as you say. I’ll go now. But I must get my notes first.”

A thought seemed to strike Roger as the barrister opened the door.

“I think I’ll try the Maze myself this afternoon. I feel a bit sleepy; and it’s quiet in there. I shan’t disturb you. But if it’s all the same to you, I’ll take Helen’s Bower myself. I’m used to a chair there; it suits me. You can go to Narcissus’s Pool instead. There’s nothing to pick and choose between them, since they’re both in the Maze.”

“Very good,” the barrister agreed. “It’s all the same to me, so long as no one interrupts me.”

He nodded abruptly and left the room.

When his brother had gone, Roger Shandon went over to his writing-table and busied himself with some papers. The distant piano seemed to have become more intrusive now that he was left alone. It repeated Frühlingsrauschen with brain-wearying persistence and a reiterated error in one particular chord. Roger frowned irritably as he busied himself with the documents before him, jotting down a note from time to time on a scribbling-block.

“Damn that young whelp! I must talk to him about this. One can’t concentrate one’s attention when half one’s mind’s wondering if he’s going to make that same slip for the hundred and first time.”

He continued his work for a few minutes, then rose and rang the bell.

“Send Mr. Stenness, if you can find him,” he ordered when the maid appeared.

In Ivor Stenness, Roger had secured an ideal private secretary. Stenness not only had the efficiency of a machine, but he possessed a full measure of qualities hardly less important. If his employer was out of sorts, even the gruffest order failed to ruffle the secretary’s temper. He was capable of taking just the right amount of responsibility in emergencies without ever going a hair’s breadth over the score. And his especial recommendation in Roger’s eyes was that he could keep his mouth shut. He never asked for explanations which might have been difficult to give; and he never betrayed the slightest surprise when, as sometimes happened, he opened threatening letters.

“If I ever have a confession of murder to put on paper,” Roger used to say, “Stenness will take it down in shorthand, type it out, and get my signature, without turning a hair. So far as he was concerned, it would be just a letter.”

Stenness’s other qualities were more in demand among the remainder of the household. He had good natural manners; and he could play games well enough to make him useful where someone was often needed to make up a golf foursome or a bridge table. A casual glance at him would have suggested that he must employ a first-class valet; for his clothes always looked new and he had the knack of carrying them well.

With all this, he was a perfectly safe person to have in a house with a young girl. He was, somehow, too inhumanly efficient to be attractive to girls younger than himself; and he showed not the slightest desire to attract. Sylvia treated him as a good friend, but she had dozens of friends whom she treated in exactly the same fashion.

“Ah, Stenness!” Roger looked up as the secretary came in. “I’ve gone over these letters and jotted down some notes. You might get them off sometime to-day. There’s only one of them that needs any explanation. Here it is. . . .”

Neville Shandon’s grim face appeared at the door for a moment. In his hand was a sheaf of papers. Seeing his brother engaged with the secretary, he nodded without saying anything and closed the door behind him.

Roger continued his explanation of the matter in hand while the secretary took a note or two. As the instructions ended, the whirr of a car leaving the front of the house attracted Roger’s attention and he crossed the room to look out of the window. Sylvia was driving, and beside her was Ernest Shandon. They glanced up as they passed under the study window, and Sylvia waved her hand. Roger watched the car swing sharply off the main avenue on its way to the East Gate, and soon it vanished behind a belt of rhododendrons.

“They might have given Neville a lift,” Roger reflected as he turned back into the room again. “They’ll be passing the Maze on the road to the East Gate.”

The sound of the piano reasserted itself in the comparative silence which followed the passing of the car. Roger made a gesture of impatience.

“I suppose that’s my nephew playing?” he demanded.

“He was shooting darts at a target in the garden, a short time ago,” Stenness explained, “but I think he came in a few minutes ago.”

“It sounds like him. Since he had that attack of sleepy sickness he always fumbles a bit on his chords—doesn’t seem able to manage his fingers perfectly. That makes this din all the harder to bear.”

Stenness refrained from any comment. Roger, after a pause, continued irritably.

“Where are the visitors, Stenness? I wish they’d attract him out of the house. Some days he’s all right and one never sees him. Other days he sits and pounds that piano till one’s head rings with it.”

“I noticed Miss Forrest and Mr. Torrance going towards the rose garden a few minutes ago.”

Stenness confined himself to answering the direct question and quietly ignored Roger’s exasperation. It was no business of his to intervene in family squabbles.

“Well, that’s all I have for you at present, Stenness. As you’re passing the door, send my nephew to me, will you? I must put a stop to this nuisance. It’s gone on quite long enough.”

The secretary made a gesture of assent, then gathered up his papers and left the room. A few seconds later, the piano-playing stopped abruptly in the middle of a bar, and Roger’s ear caught the clang of the keyboard lid being carelessly slammed. After a moment or two, his nephew entered the study.

In order to give his irritation time to cool down, Roger refrained from speaking immediately. He motioned his nephew to sit down, whilst he himself pulled out his cigar-case and became busy with the preparations for a smoke. Having got his cigar well alight, he turned round.

“Must you hammer that piano for hours at a time, Arthur? I hate to interfere with your simple pleasures, of course; but the infernal din you make has had quite a long enough run. You’ve played Frühlingsrauschen at least two dozen times to-day; and that’s just twenty-four times oftener than I want to hear it. You can cut it out of the bill, after this. In fact, you can leave the piano alone, once for all. I’m sick of hearing you play. You’re a nuisance to everyone, raising Pandemonium at all hours of the day. Find some quieter amusement, or clear out of the house.”

Arthur Hawkhurst’s eyebrows rose in mild surprise at his uncle’s complaint.

“I’d no idea it worried you, uncle.”

“Well, drop it.”

“Perhaps I have been overdoing Frühlingsrauschen a bit. I hadn’t thought of that. Somehow I never seem to get through it without a mistake in one or two chords, and I want to make a clean job of it, once at least.”

“I’ve got a pair of quite good ears. You needn’t think I missed your mistakes. They make it more irritating, that’s all.”

Arthur hastened to admit his errors.

“Well, no more Frühlingsrauschen, then. What about the Barcarolle? Offenbach’s, I mean. Any objection to that?”

“Yes. Will you be good enough to understand that you’re not to bang on that piano again.”

“Oh, you mean it? I thought it was just your fun, uncle. But I like the piano. Surely you’ll let me use it sometimes.”

“No. I’ve had enough of it.”

“But . . .”

Roger’s face had been darkening.

“That’s enough! I’ve more important things to talk to you about. What age are you nowadays? Twenty-two or twenty-three, isn’t it? And you’ve never done a stroke of work in your life, so far? A pretty record, isn’t it?”

He paused, and paced over to the window and back again.

“That’s got to stop. I’ve had to support one loafer—your Uncle Ernest. But if you imagine that I have a fad for collecting loafers, you’re mistaken. I’ve got your uncle on my hands permanently, I suppose; but I don’t propose to increase my stock of parasites for your benefit. You’ll have to find something to do. I’m not going to let you hang around Whistlefield for ever.”

Arthur’s good-natured face had darkened in its turn.

“You might increase your stock of politeness without overdoing things, it seems to me. I’m not altogether a loafer. I’m an invalid.”

Roger took no notice of the plea.

“Whistlefield isn’t a hospital.”

“Or an asylum—I suppose that’s what you mean? You’d better take care, uncle. There are some things a fellow doesn’t forget, once they’re said.”

Roger’s temper, never very far below the surface, boiled up at his nephew’s remark.

“That’s enough, Arthur. I’ll give you three months more. After that, you can fend for yourself. You won’t starve. You’ve got enough money to keep you alive even if the worst comes to the worst. Anyhow, I wash my hands of you.”

Arthur Hawkhurst’s control was no better than his uncle’s when once the point had penetrated through the skin.

“A pretty specimen of an uncle! The kind one meets in the ‘Babes in the Wood,’ eh? Go out into the world and starve, Arthur dear. The little dicky-birds will put leaves on you—and I’ll get the money your mother left you! That’s the scheme, I suppose. It’s a wonder a thing like you is allowed to live.”

The flagrant absurdity of the charge checked Roger for a moment. After all, the boy was off his balance. One shouldn’t take him seriously.

“You’re an ass, Arthur!” was all he vouchsafed in reply.

But Arthur’s disturbed brain had tilted out of its normal equilibrium, and his rage found vent in a wild threat as he flung himself out of the room.

“I’ve a good mind to get in first myself; and do for you, before you can do me any more harm. Look out for yourself!”

As the door slammed behind his nephew, Roger settled himself back into his chair. Arthur’s outbreak had come as a complete surprise. Since his illness, the boy had given the impression that he merely needed a firm hand. He had loafed about the house in a condition not far from melancholia; and at first it had required steady pressure to bring him to take any interest in normal affairs. Gradually he had improved and had passed over into a state of cheerful irresponsibility. And now, just as the specialists were taking an optimistic view of the future, had come this collapse into something which seemed little short of mania, absolutely without warning.

“I’ll have to get this looked into,” Roger reflected. “He’s evidently not so far on the road to recovery as we thought.”

Arthur’s threat had left him completely indifferent. He had almost forgotten it when he rose again from his chair. In itself it seemed unimportant, merely some wild words flung out in a brain-storm. He left the house and took the road to the Maze.

Stenness saw his figure pass into the belt of rhododendrons; and as soon as it had disappeared, the secretary made his way to Roger’s study. An ABC time table was on one of the shelves; and Stenness, taking it down, began to study the times of trains.

“I can’t leave it later than that,” he said to himself at last. “The next one wouldn’t get me into London in time for the boat-train.”

His eye turned to the window and ranged over the lawns.

“Well, it’ll be a hard wrench to leave here, no matter what happens. And I wish I saw to-night over and knew where I stand.”

He passed to a fresh line of thought.

“At the worst, nothing will matter much if I don’t pull it off.”

He replaced the ABC on its shelf and went up to his own room. First locking the door, he began deliberately to pack his razors and other toilette articles in an attaché case. When he had completed this task, he glanced round the room.

“Nothing else? No, all the rest of the stuff is waiting for me in London.”

Chapter II.
The Affair in the Maze

Howard Torrance fidgeted a little and then turned to the girl beside him.

“A bit feeble, just sitting about like this and doing nothing. Care to go down to the tennis courts and play a single?”

Vera Forrest knew the symptoms well. A good many men would have been glad enough of the chance to monopolise her and would have asked nothing better than to sit there in the shade in her company. But Howard had a surplus of physical energy which could be worked off only by continual exercise. “What’ll we do next?” was a phrase which ran through his talk like a reiterated battle-cry; and he seemed to have exalted Sloth to the premier position in his private catalogue of the mortal sins. She glanced at him mischievously and decided to tease him a little before letting him have his way.

“No, thank you,” she said, sedately.

Howard had a second suggestion ready.

“Want to go over to the links and play a few holes?”

“No, thanks.”

“What about taking the car to Stanningleigh. I need some cigarettes and I’ll stand you a box of chocolates.”

“No.”

Howard looked at her suspiciously.

“Is this a new game? ‘No, thank you. . . . No, thanks. . . . No.’ Trying to make it shorter each time, is that it? Well, you’ve got to the bottom of the bag this shot. This is where the master-brain says ‘Checkmate!’ Ahem! Like to take a boat out on the river for a while? You can’t say No in less than two letters.”

Vera made no audible response, but she shook her head in refusal. Her companion admitted his defeat gracefully.

“Didn’t think you’d manage it. You win. Will you have a saucepan or a cheap alarm clock? All the other prizes have been awarded already.”

Then, as though dismissing trifles and becoming serious:

“What’s to be done? We can’t sit around like this the whole day. Time’s on the wing, and all that.”

Vera looked at the shadows on the grass.

“It’s getting on certainly. We really haven’t time to do much before tea.”

“It couldn’t miss that, I suppose? It wants its tea?”

“It wants its tea,” Vera admitted, gravely.

Howard looked at his watch.

“Pity we wasted the best part of the afternoon just sitting round and loafing,” he commented disconsolately.

For a few moments he remained silent, evidently turning various projects over in his mind.

“Tell you what,” he suggested at last. “Ever been in the old Maze down there by the boat-house? No? Neither have I. What about dashing over and trying our luck with it? Part at the entrance; and the first that gets to the centre wins the game. They say it’s a grand puzzler.”

“Well, if it will make you happy, I don’t mind. But wait a moment. Hasn’t the Maze got two centres? Somebody told me that once.”

Howard brushed the objection aside.

“The first one to reach either centre scores a win. If you get there, sing out. I’ll trust to your native honesty to keep you from cheating.”

It was comfortable under the trees, and Vera attempted to put off the evil moment of departure even by a few seconds.

“How many entrances has the Maze?”

“Oh, don’t know, exactly. Four or five, I think. Nothing in that. Take the first one we come to, whichever it is. Then you go to the right and I’ll go to the left, or t’other way about if you like; and the best man wins. I’ll risk a box of chocolates or a tin of cocoa on it, if you insist. Come along, don’t let’s decay here any longer; I see a bit of moss has grown on my toe since we sat down—and no wonder.”

Vera gave in and rose from her seat with feigned reluctance.

“Bit stiff in the joints with sitting so long?” Howard inquired, sympathetically. “It’ll wear off at once.”

As they sauntered across the stretches of turf which led down to the Maze, Vera was struck by the quietness of the grounds.

“Whistlefield’s a lovely place, isn’t it, Howard?”

“Top-hole,” he agreed, cordially. “First-class tennis courts; good golf-course only a quarter of an hour away; the river’s quite decent for punting; plenty of room in the house to dance, and I believe they run a pack of otter-hounds somewhere in the neighbourhood.”

“I didn’t know you were a house-agent.”

Howard saw the dig, but took no offence.

“Sounds a bit like their patter, doesn’t it? ‘Company’s water, gas, and electric light. Telephone. Main drainage.’ Well, nothing to be ashamed of, is it? Whistlefield’s all right.”

“Sylvia’s lucky to be here. By the way, where has she gone to this afternoon, do you know? I haven’t seen her since lunch.”

“Off in the car to see some people and arrange for some tennis to-morrow. I must say Sylvia looks after one well when one comes to stay. Always on the go.”

“Where are the rest of the villagers?”

“One uncle’s off with Sylvia. The other two were in the study when I saw them last. Stenness is somewhere around. I met young Arthur when you sent me up to the house a few minutes ago. He was coming out of the gun-room with a nasty look in his eye and an air-gun in his hand. Gave him a cheery hail and got a grunt in reply. Seemed peevish about something or other, quite fretful, even. Wished him Good Hunting and asked him if he was going to shoot rabbits in the spinney. All I got was a growl that he was going to shoot something sitting if he couldn’t shoot it any other way. Seemed determined to work off bad temper by slaughtering something, no matter what!”

Vera’s face betrayed sympathy.

“Poor Arthur! It’s hard lines on that boy, Howard. He’s been changed a good deal by that beastly illness he had.”

Howard’s expression showed that he shared her feelings.

“Pity. Used to be a bright lad. All right, even yet; but not quite the same, somehow. Moody at times; and apt to loaf about doing nothing for half the day. No real go in him. A queer temper, too, some days. When I met him just now, for instance, he looked ready to bite me in the gizzard. Not at all the society man.”

Vera dismissed the subject, which threatened to throw a gloom over them both. They liked Arthur Hawkhurst, in spite of the occasional flashes of abnormality which he had shown since the attack of encephalitis lethargica.

“You’re playing quite fair, aren’t you, Howard? You’ve never been inside the Maze at all?”

“You don’t suppose I’d cheat for the sake of winning a tin of cocoa, do you? It’s amazing what a low view of mankind some girls have. Soured from the cradle, what? And born in suspicion, belike. Shake it off, or it’ll grow on you, Vera. Go and dig in the garden when you feel an attack coming on.”

“Oh, don’t rub it in! I know your motto well enough: ‘Perspiration is better than cure,’ or something like that, isn’t it? I only asked out of idle curiosity. No reflections on your honesty really intended.”

“Your apology of even date duly received and filed. Sounds like the house-agent vein again, that, doesn’t it? Come on, I’ll race you this last hundred yards and give you a start to that rhododendron. Half a tin of cocoa on the event, since you’re so mercenary.”

Vera rejected his offer; and they walked over the last lawn to the nearest entrance to the Maze.

The Maze at Whistlefield was a relic of earlier days when such things were fashionable; but it had been kept in good repair, and Roger Shandon’s gardeners spent a considerable amount of labour in clipping its topiary hedges into the semblance of green walls. Somewhat irregular in outline, it covered about half an acre of ground; but into that limited space there was compressed more than half a mile of pathways; and the shortest route to either of the centres was at least two hundred and fifty yards in length. But few except experts could have found their way to either Helen’s Bower or the Pool of Narcissus by walking a mere two hundred and fifty yards. The Whistlefield Maze was a labyrinth far exceeding in complexity its kindred at Hatfield and Hampton Court. Its twelve-foot hedges were impenetrably thick; and in its design it followed the “island-pattern” to such an extent that incautious explorers might wander by the hour through its tiny archipelago without gaining a foot towards the innermost recesses or even realising that they were simply coasting round and round the outline of some detached hedge.

So many people had got temporarily lost in the labyrinth and, being so far away from the house, had been unable to get help even by shouting, that at last precautions had been taken to avoid mishaps of the kind in future.

As Vera and her companion reached the tall iron gate in the outer hedge which marked one of the entrances, they found themselves confronted with a small notice-board to which an old-fashioned horn was suspended.

Visitors entering the maze are advised to take this horn with them so that they can summon assistance if necessary. On leaving the maze, kindly hang the horn in its place again.

Howard went up to the board and read the notice with obvious contempt.

“Nice lot of incompetents they seem to have about the house!” he commented in a scathing tone. “I wonder they don’t provide a bath-chair and a man to push you to the centre, and be done with it. As if any person of ordinary intelligence couldn’t find his way through a thing about the size of a washing-green.”

“Ever been in a maze before?” Vera inquired.

“No, not that I can remember.”

“Ah, then kindly unhook the horn and give it to me. I’m not proud.”

Howard took the horn from its place and handed it over.

“What’s the good of one horn, since we’re not going in together?”

Vera looked him over coldly.

“When I get lost, I shall blow the horn and get someone to show me the way out. When you get lost, you’ll be able to practise breathing exercise in yelling for help. You see, you’ve got a much louder and harsher voice than I have. You’ll be all right, I’m sure. But if you think you can’t come up to the lung-power needed, you might go round to the next entrance and see if there isn’t a horn there. I should think there’s sure to be one at each entrance.”

Howard was put on his mettle.

“Oh, I shan’t get lost. Don’t fret too much about me. Now then, who’s for the centre?”

“Come along, then. I’ll take the left-hand path here, and you can go to the right. Whoever gets first to the centre can shout ‘I win!’ and then start for the exit door. If it’s a tie at the centre, then the first one out is the winner. Keep a tight hold on your honesty and don’t shout unless you get to the centre! These are all the directions necessary, I think. Now, go!”

Vera hurried along a straight corridor for some twenty yards and then turned sharply to the right as the path altered its direction. On again, until a promontory of hedge forced her to diverge into a recess in the greenery, from which she emerged again into the main track. Another corner to the right was turned and now she seemed to have come into a cul-de-sac.

“Rather a sell if I’ve chosen a blind alley at the very start,” she thought to herself. “Howard would jubilate over that when he found out about it.”

However, on reaching the wall of hedge which seemed to bar her way, she came upon a concealed turning to the right.

“After walking all that distance, I’m still on the very outer rim of this Maze! However, this turn’s going to take me in towards the centre.”

Up to that point her progress had been simplicity itself; but now alternative paths began to open up every few yards. The tall hedges cut off everything but the sky; and soon she found that she had completely lost her bearings and was wandering at random. For a time she hurried forward, choosing always those turnings which seemed likely to bring her nearer to where she supposed the centre to lie; but at last the continual windings confused her so much that she could not even tell in which direction to walk in order to reach the inner reaches of the labyrinth. Long zig-zag corridors ended, time after time, in blank walls; and in traversing them forwards and back again she grew more and more doubtful of her bearings. When she thought of taking the sun as a reference-point, it was too late; for by that time she had lost all notion of her whereabouts.

“I’m sure I’ve seen that patch of withered leaves in the hedge more than once before,” she said to herself, halting to examine it more carefully. “Yes, I’m certain I passed it a few minutes ago. I must be coming back in my tracks and just going over the same ground again and again.”

With the dying out of her own footfalls, the silence of the Maze impressed itself on her; and she strained her ears to catch the sound of Howard as he moved somewhere beyond these impenetrable green living walls.

“If I really get stuck in here,” she reflected, “I can always blow the horn and bring someone who knows the place to lead me out.”

She listened again, more intently. Then, suddenly there was no need to strain her ears.

First came a dull thud, which unconsciously she recognised as familiar, though she could not identify it at the moment. Then, almost at the same instant, a man’s voice gave an inarticulate cry in which surprise, pain, and anger seemed to be mingled. A moment of silence, then a peculiar metallic grating reached her ears, followed by a second thud and a fresh cry of pain. Again came the familiar metallic rasping, yet another of these familiar dull concussions, and then, lower this time, a last cry. Then there was silence once more.

Vera stood paralysed by what she had heard. In a flash of enlightenment she guessed that behind these inexplicable events some tragedy was in progress; something dreadful was happening quite close at hand, though screened from her by the high green walls which shut her in. She had never heard that note in a man’s voice before. Utterly shocked by the unexpected revelation of violence, she stood for a moment with her knees trembling under her, while her pulse beat in her throat so heavily as to prevent her uttering a sound. Then, with an effort, she found her voice.

“Howard! Are you there? What’s happened? Oh, what’s happened?”

“I’m here.”

She could not make out from which direction his shout came. The towering hedges seemed to deflect sound so that it was impossible to determine even approximately the position of a speaker.

“What were those cries, Howard? What’s happened?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Somebody hurt. But I can’t get to the place. Stay where you are, Vera. I’ll see if I can find my way to you.”

She listened intently in the silence that followed. Feet moved in the Maze; evidently Howard was doing his best to make in her direction. But beyond this she could detect no other noise, though she strained her ears to the utmost. She had expected to hear groans from the wounded man, but nothing broke the stillness until Howard called to her again. His voice seemed farther off than before.

“Shout, will you, Vera? I’ve lost your direction.”

She called again; and he replied. But as she listened, his footsteps seemed to recede and die away in the distance. Evidently he had found that the direct path was blocked and had had to retreat up some alley to try a fresh start.

Then, with surprise at her previous forgetfulness, she bethought herself of the horn in her hand. That would bring assistance. She ought to have remembered it before. The shock had put it out of her mind. She was in the act of lifting it to her lips when again her nerves were shaken by a new cry from the inner recesses of the Maze.

“Murder!”

She recognised Howard’s voice, tinged with horror. It was a loud-voiced ejaculation rather than a cry for assistance, she felt with relief. Howard hadn’t run into a trap. Before she could pull herself together, he shouted again, this time with the full strength of his lungs:

“Murder! See that no one gets away from the Maze!”

Vera’s nerves were almost attuned to the shock of the discovery. A picture of some swift and terrible act of violence crossed her mind. It must have been soon over, for she remembered that after the three cries she had heard no sound of any sort. Not twenty yards from her, it might be, a human being had been battered out of existence; and but for these cries she would have known nothing whatever.

She raised her voice again.

“Howard! I’m frightened. What’s happened?”

“One of the Shandons has been killed. I blundered into the centre, trying to get to you. There’s blood on his coat.”

He broke off for a moment, evidently gathering his breath, then again he shouted:

“Murder! Help! Here in the Maze! Murder!”

Vera held her breath, listening eagerly for some answering cry from the outer world which now seemed so peaceful and unattainable. Then in the silence, she heard the sound of a man running hard in the alleys of the Maze.

“Is that you, Howard?” she called. “I hear someone running not far from where I am.”

No sooner had she spoken than the noise of running footfalls ceased abruptly.

“Is that you, Howard?” she called again, nervously.

There came a sound of rustling and tearing, then Howard’s voice sounded across the labyrinth.

“I’m here. I’m trying to get to you. I tried climbing the hedge, but it’s no good. What did you say? I didn’t catch it.”

“There’s somebody moving about in the Maze, Howard. I heard his footsteps.”

Howard Torrance’s voice replied with that baffling indeterminateness in direction which the Maze seemed to impart.

“Can you hear me, Vera?”

“Yes.”

“Well, don’t utter another sound. Don’t use the horn. Keep absolutely quiet and try to make your way out of the Maze. If anyone comes round the corner, yell your head off; but unless you see something, keep silent and step softly. There’s someone in the Maze, and I don’t want him to know where you are.”

Vera leaned against the high hedge for a minute or two, trying to overcome the panic into which Howard’s last words had plunged her. He had been careful not to put the thing to her nakedly; but she saw what lay behind his directions. The murderer was still in the Maze, and on his way out he might come upon her. If he did, she would be too dangerous a witness to leave alive. She need expect no mercy. And what hope of escape would she have? There, shut in among these towering walls, isolated from all help in the intricacies of the Maze, it would be an easy business to silence her finally.

She listened intently once more; but no sound came to her ears. The murderer seemed to have made his way into some remoter part of the Maze. Suddenly a clatter at her feet startled her into an agony of terror. It was the horn which she had allowed to slip from her hand in the intensity of her concentration upon the sounds about her. She stooped to pick it up again; then, thinking that it would merely hamper her, she let it lie where it had fallen.

But at once came the realisation that the sound of its clash upon the path must have betrayed her position, if the murderer were lurking at hand. She tried to listen again; but her heart was hammering and the pulsing of the blood in her ears drowned all external sounds. A lump seemed to gather in her throat and she felt as though she would choke. With a physical effort she fought down her difficulties.

“Hysteria!” she told herself. “If I give way to it, I’ll be putting myself straight into the brute’s hands.”

At last the rustle in her ears subsided and she was able to listen again. For a few instants she heard nothing. Then, quite close at hand, a dry twig cracked as though someone had set his foot on it. The murderer had not left the Maze.

She felt almost unable to stir; but at last she forced herself into motion. Anything was better than staying in the place where the assassin might have heard her drop the horn. Softly she stole down the corridor. Once she had begun to move, all her impulse was to break into a run; but she fought hard against it.

“If I begin to run, I’m done for,” she thought. “I’d go on running. I wouldn’t be able to run to a corner; and it’s at the corners I must be careful, or I may run full tilt into him.”

And then her mind, despite herself, conjured up vivid pictures of that meeting. She could see a vague figure rising to block her passage. With an almost physical shrinking she thought of it with a knife in its hand, the blade dripping with the blood of the earlier victim. It came over her how safe and peaceful the normal world was—and now, in pursuit of an aimless piece of amusement, she had come into the slaughterhouse. The Minotaur was afoot in the labyrinth.

At the end of the alley she forced herself to halt and peeped cautiously round the corner. No one was in sight, so she ventured into a fresh avenue. Then came a fork in the path, and she took the passage which seemed to offer the longest clear view ahead. Then another corner, and more precautions.

She was moving at random now, all her attention concentrated on avoiding the unseen assassin. Once she heard steps, someone was walking on the opposite side of the hedge against which she was crouching. She held her breath, pictured that terrific figure which she had conjured up. He was stepping lightly like herself; and she almost feared that he would hear the beating of her heart, so near did he come. Then, when she thought she could bear it no longer, the footfalls receded softly into the distance.

“If that happens again, I’ll shriek,” she said to herself. “I simply couldn’t go through it twice.”

Two more corners rounded in safety, then in a straight alley a metallic object glittered at the foot of the hedge and with a sinking heart she recognised it as the horn she had dropped.

“I’m back again at the same place. I’ll never get out of this trap!”

Again she started, stepping as softly as possible; but to her strained ears the sound of her footsteps seemed to echo and re-echo along the green-walled corridors.

“What a fool I am! I ought to have taken off my shoes long ago. Then I could go as quick as I please, without making any noise.”

She slipped off her shoes, and some of her confidence came back when she found how silently she could move.

“Now I must keep things in my head and get off the track I followed last time.”

At one remembered turning, she took a fresh track and stole along it with every precaution. Again she heard the sound of steps; but they were farther off this time, and after halting for a few seconds she felt safe to go on her way once more.

“If I don’t get out soon, I’ll faint.”

But she refused to give in. The thought of lying helpless in one of these tenantless corridors at the mercy of the hidden murderer, kept her on her feet.

“He’d think I was shamming, and he’d make sure of me.”

The thought of that fate was just sufficient to nerve her to a desperate attempt to extricate herself from the labyrinth; but now her self-control gave way. She began to hurry along the interminable corridors, and before many seconds had passed she had broken into a run. Soon she was flying headlong down the alleys, slipping as she turned corners in full flight, dashing blindly into hedges which blocked her path in culs-de-sac, and striving only to outstrip the phantom murderer whom she felt at her heels. All thought of caution or direction had gone to the winds as she fled at haphazard down the tortuous paths.

Just as she felt that she could force herself no farther, a wider gap than usual appeared in one of the green walls, and she flung herself into it in the hope that it might be one of the exits. But instead of the broad lawns of Whistlefield, she found before her a tiny open space shut in on all sides by greenery.

A few garden chairs were scattered about it, under the shade of the hedges. One of them had been overturned, and beside it lay, face upwards, the body of a man in grey flannel clothes. Vera had never seen a dead man before; but it needed no second glance to tell her that she had stumbled upon the victim of the tragedy.

“It’s Roger Shandon!”

Almost subconsciously she noted that the body showed no visible signs of violence. Roger seemed to have collapsed as he rose from his chair. She could see no pool of blood which might have pointed to the manner of his death.

Vera’s nerves could withstand the strain no longer. The glimpse of the body proved to be the final touch which was more than she could bear. Almost incuriously she noticed the blue sky darken, turn violet, and then go black. She retreated a couple of paces, only to go down in a faint.

When she came to her senses again, it was to hear the sound of her own name in her ears; but when she looked round she could see no one standing beside her.

“Vera! Are you there? Why don’t you answer?”

Slowly she came back to normal consciousness and the realisation that it was Howard Torrance’s voice continually calling.

“Vera! Answer if you can. What made you shriek like that?”

So she must have uttered some involuntary cry before she fainted. She turned this over in her mind mechanically, hardly yet knowing where she was. Then all at once things came back to her and she rose to her knees. Roger Shandon’s body was close to her, and she turned away her head so as not to see the dead man.

“Vera!”

She pulled herself together and answered with a faint call.

“Thank God you’re all right,” she heard Howard answer.

“Where are you?”

“I’ve come to the centre where the body is. Oh, Howard, what am I to do?”

“The murderer’s gone, I think,” came the reply. “Can you walk at all? Get away from that place at once. No wonder you shrieked when you came upon it. If you’ll call as often as you can manage it, I’ll try to find my way to you.”

With an effort she forced herself to her feet once more. Her strength seemed to be almost gone; but by sheer will-power she succeeded in making her way out of the tiny enclosure into the green corridor. Anything to get away from the sight of the body! It was too grim a reminder of the perils of the Maze.

For a time she leaned against the hedge just outside the centre, trying to gather up enough energy to launch once more into the labyrinth. One horror had at least been banished. Howard said the murderer had escaped from the Maze; she need have no fear of meeting that demon in her wanderings. It seemed hours since she and Howard had come so light-heartedly into that daedalian web. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious; and when she looked back, she seemed to have spent an eternity in the paths of the Maze before she had blundered into the centre.

At last she pulled herself together and called again to Howard.

“Howard! I’m going to try for the way out now.”

“All right! Give me a call occasionally, so that I’ll know you’re all right. By the way, why don’t you blow the horn?”

“I’ve lost it. I dropped it when I thought the murderer was chasing me.”

“I wondered why you didn’t use it, after I’d told you he’d cleared out. Shouting’s no good. I’ve been yelling at the pitch of my voice for long enough, but there’s no one within earshot, evidently.”

Vera set off again. The rest had done her good. Now that the immediate terror of the murderer in the Maze was removed, she felt a different person. The horror through which she had passed began somehow to take on a tinge of unreality. Had she actually seen Roger Shandon’s body lying on the grass, or had it been a mere hallucination sweeping over her when she was on the verge of fainting? She had the feeling that the whole thing might be some walking nightmare which had passed.

And now, by that curious hazard which sometimes happens in mazes, she hit upon the shortest route to the exit. When she was least expecting it, a sudden turn in the corridor revealed one of the iron gates in the outermost hedge.

“Howard! I’ve come to the gate. What a relief!”

“Wait before you go,” Howard’s voice came to her over the intervening partitions. “Listen to me. Once you get outside, run to the house. If you meet anyone on the way, send him down to get me out of this tangle; I seem to have no luck. When you get to the house, find Stenness or one of the other men. Send the lot, if they’re there. Tell them about the murder and tell them to get the police on the ’phone at once. And get yourself some brandy or something. You’ll need it, poor thing!”

Vera made a careful note of his orders.

“I’ll see to that. I’m going now, Howard. Good-bye.”

She ran out of the iron gate and saw with immense relief the broad prospect of the lawns before her. Out at last! Then she hurried off in the direction of the house.

Chapter III.
The Immediate Results

As she took short cuts across the lawns, Vera kept a sharp look-out; but no one was in sight. She had expected this; for if anyone had been in the vicinity of the Maze they would assuredly have been attracted by Howard’s shouts for assistance. She wasted no time in seeking in the gardens for help, but hurried at her best speed to the house, where she could at least get in touch with the police by means of the telephone.

When, breathless with the last spurt she had made, she entered the hall, she found it empty. The whole place seemed deserted and silent. For a moment she thought of searching from room to room; but she changed her mind almost immediately.

“I must keep my head,” she impressed on herself. “I know nothing about the servants’ quarters and I’d lose time if I begin hunting. That last sprint took it out of me; and I’m not fit to rush about. Someone else must do that instead.”

She passed into the nearest room and rang the bell, keeping her finger pressed down on the button.

“That ought to bring them quick enough.”

In a few moments she heard steps, and one of the maids appeared. The sight of her amazed face reminded Vera of the picture she herself must present: dishevelled, breathless, and without shoes on her feet.

“Are there any men in the house, Shelton? Quick, don’t waste time.”

The maid stared at the haggard girl before her as though in this strange figure she could hardly recognise the cool and graceful Miss Forrest of normal life.

“What’s come to you, miss?” she asked, without replying to the question.

“Mr. Shandon’s been murdered. Is Mr. Stenness here, or Mr. Hawkhurst? Or anyone else? Go and find them immediately, if they’re anywhere about.”

Then, as the girl still seemed dazed by the news:

“Can’t you do as I tell you? Hurry! There’s no time to lose.”

A picture rose in her mind of the murderer returning to the Maze and coming upon the defenceless Howard. Unlikely, of course, but after this afternoon she would be slow to call anything unlikely. The maid’s slowness irritated her overwrought nerves.

“Will you go?”

But by this time the idea of murder had penetrated the dull mind of Shelton and produced a reaction which Vera had not foreseen.

“Mr. Shandon murdered, and the man creeping about the place! I’d never dare to go out of this room, miss. He might be in the hall now, waiting for me. Oh, oh!”

Her voice rose in hysteria. Vera looked at her wearily.

“Want to scream, Shelton? Perhaps it’s the easiest way after all. I’d have done it myself if I’d had any breath left. Come along with me.”

And taking the hysterical girl with her, she made her way to the front door.

“Now scream as loud as you like.”

Shelton had not waited for the suggestion. Already she was shrieking at the top of her voice.

“Anybody in the house or near it ought to hear that,” Vera said to herself contentedly, as Shelton continued to screech. “Now, that’ll do. Will you be quiet? I want to listen if anyone has heard you.”

It proved more difficult to stop the outcry than it had been to start it. The screams passed into a serious attack of hysteria. But they had served their purpose. From the back of the house appeared two panic-stricken maids, while almost simultaneously Stenness, the secretary, hurried down the main staircase.

“Thank goodness, a man at last!” Vera said, in relief.

Handing over the hysterical Shelton to the care of the other maids, she led Stenness into the nearest room and gave him the state of affairs in the fewest words. He listened intently without interrupting her with a single question. From his unruffled manner, one might have supposed that murders were all in the day’s work. And his calmness had the effect of soothing Vera’s nerves, which had been jarred afresh by the maid’s outbreak. When she had completed her narrative he nodded in comprehension and left the room for a few moments. On his return he had a tumbler in his hand.

“Drink this, Miss Forrest. You’ll need something to pull you together. I’ve sent one of the maids to ring the bell in the stable-yard. That’ll bring up a couple of gardeners fairly soon. They’ll think it’s a fire, you know.”

He persuaded her to sit down, then went to the bell and rang it. It was some time before any answer was made; and finally Shelton and another maid appeared together, evidently clinging to each other for company.

“Go up and get fresh shoes and stockings for Miss Forrest. Can’t you see she needs them?”

When the two girls had gone he turned to Vera.

“Nothing like making them do something, otherwise we’d have the whole lot down with their nerves.”

He glanced at his wrist-watch, and seemed to be making some rather intricate mental calculation which dissatisfied him.

“You’ll be safe enough here, Miss Forrest. I must get off to telephone for the police and put them on the alert. Then I’ll go down and get Mr. Torrance out of the Maze. You want nothing else?”

Vera made a negative gesture, and he hurried out of the room. The telephone occupied him for only a very short time; and in a few minutes Vera, through the window, saw him setting off in the direction of the Maze, accompanied by one of the gardeners. Both, she noticed, were armed with shot-guns. She began to admire the efficiency of Stenness. Hitherto she had looked upon him as the sort of man whose life was spent in pure routine; and it was a mild surprise to find how competently he had risen to this emergency. He had wasted neither words nor time; everything essential had been done without hesitation. He had even noticed her feet and had thought of sending for shoes and stockings for her.

When the maids brought her fresh outfit she took the opportunity of questioning them.

“Was Mr. Stenness the only man in the house when I came back?”

“Yes, miss. Miss Sylvia took her uncle away with her in the car—Mr. Ernest, I mean. And Mr. Neville went out of the house before poor Mr. Shandon did. And Mr. Hawkhurst, he went out quite early on. I saw him passing the window with his air-gun in his hand.”

Vera had ceased to listen. The word “air-gun” had linked up in her mind with the memory of the dull concussions which she had heard in the Maze. That was the noise she had heard—the dull report of an air-rifle! And the metallic rasping was the grating of the spring as the murderer recharged his weapon. But the recognition of the noises left her even more perplexed.

“Of course, one can kill a rabbit with an air-gun; but one couldn’t kill a man with it even at close-range. And yet I’m certain it was an air-gun that I heard. I’d have recognised it at once if it hadn’t been that I was so shaken up by the way things happened.”

She puzzled over the problem for a time without success; and at last dismissed it from her mind and began to make arrangements which she thought might be necessary when the men returned to the house.

Meanwhile Stenness, accompanied by the gardener, had made his way to the Maze. As they came in sight of it, they saw the figure of Howard Torrance emerge from one of the entrances and gaze in their direction. Recognising the secretary, he came rapidly towards them.

“Seen Miss Forrest, Stenness?” he demanded as soon as he reached speaking distance. “Is she all right?”

“She fetched us,” Stenness explained. “She’s completely done in, of course. That’s natural. But I don’t think she’ll come to any harm. I left two maids with her, just in case; though it looked more as if the maids would collapse before she did.”

Howard nodded without replying, and Stenness continued:

“We’d better get into the Maze now and stand guard over the body till the police turn up. They’ll be here shortly.”

Howard hesitated a moment.

“Sure you know how to get about in that Maze, Stenness? You won’t get tangled up? Got bogged in it myself once already. No desire to have another dose, you know.”

“There’s no danger of that. Both Skene and I know every inch of it. He cuts the hedges.”

This seemed to allay Howard’s doubts, and he led the way to the entrance. But here Stenness displaced him.

“I’ll take the lead, I think. I know the path. Besides, one never can tell. Somebody may be in there yet.”

He tapped his shot-gun in explanation of his full meaning, and Howard acquiesced.

“Right! In you go!”

They entered the labyrinth, Stenness in advance with his gun ready, Howard and the armed gardener bringing up the rear. For a minute or two they walked in silence along the intricate corridors, Stenness taking turning after turning without the slightest hesitation.

“I wish I had had the thing by heart as he seems to have,” Howard reflected, as he noted the easy way in which the secretary seemed to hold to his route. “It would have been a different business, then.”

All at once, Stenness halted abruptly and made a gesture of caution to his companions. His quick ears had caught something which they had missed.

“There’s somebody moving in the next corridor,” he whispered. “Wait here. I’ll fix him.”

With his gun ready he stepped suddenly round the corner of the alley and immediately they heard his curt command:

“Hands up!”

When they in turn had rounded the corner they found the secretary covering with his shot-gun an unattractive stranger. The reddish hair, the ugly mouth, made worse by a ragged and untidy moustache, the peculiar vulpine expression, and the flashy clothes, all combined to produce a bad impression even at the first glance. As he stood, hands in air, in front of Stenness’s gun, his eyes wandered from one face to another with something of the expression of a rat at bay.

“Run over this fellow, Torrance,” said the secretary. “He may be armed.”

Howard searched the man methodically and extracted from one pocket a heavy automatic pistol. Beyond that, the man had no other weapon.

“See if it’s been fired,” suggested Stenness.

“Fully loaded, and hasn’t been fired,” Howard reported.

“Good! Now, my man, how do you come to be here?”

“I was rowing on the river; and as I was coming near here, I heard someone yelling blue murder, so I came up. What would you have done, eh? Kept away, I expect. Then I came inside this monkey-puzzle to give a hand. And I’ve stuck here ever since. That satisfy you?”

“Nothing to do with me. The police will be here shortly. You can explain to them. Meanwhile, you’ll come along with us. Skene, take charge of this fellow. If he tries to run, empty your gun into his legs. Now come along.”

Again taking the van, Stenness continued on his way, and in a very short time he brought them to one of the centres of the Maze.

Howard Torrance followed him into the tiny precinct; but his first glance led him to protest.

“This isn’t the place where I found the body. It must be in the other centre.”

Stenness’s shoulders blocked the view for a moment; but almost at once he stepped aside.

“There’s a body here, at any rate,” he said, going forward as he spoke. “It’s Roger Shandon.”

“Roger!” exclaimed Howard in blank surprise. “It was Neville Shandon’s body that I found.”

“Then they’ve both been murdered,” Stenness pointed out coldly. “That’s obvious.”

“But what I heard sounded like a single attack,” protested Howard.

Stenness shrugged his shoulders.

“That’s for the police to explain,” he said. “No use barking yourself when you keep a dog.”

He went forward and covered the face of the body with his handkerchief.

“It’s Roger, obviously; and stone dead. Nothing more to do here. Let’s try the other centre next. Skene, you needn’t come. Keep your eye on this fellow till we come back.”

He led Howard through the alleys once more and in a short time they entered the second centre of the Maze.

“This is Neville Shandon, true enough,” the secretary reported. The identification had taken longer, since the body lay on its face. “Mustn’t disturb anything, Torrance. The police may be able to make something out of it if we leave things alone.”

He rose from his knees and mechanically dusted his trousers as he spoke. Howard was struck by the extraordinary matter-of-fact way in which Stenness had treated the whole affair. One might have expected some sign of emotion, surprise at the very least; but Stenness had gone through the whole business without showing the slightest disturbance. But as Howard reflected on the matter, he was forced to admit that, after all, it was much what one might have anticipated. Stenness, he remembered, had always been chary of showing any emotion whatever. Probably this was just a case of carrying the normal to an extreme where it became noticeable. Stenness, doubtless, took a pride in that mask of coolness.

The secretary stooped for a moment over Neville Shandon’s body and examined the left hand which lay clenched on the grass.

“There’s a piece of paper there. It looks as if it had been wrenched out of his hand and a scrap left in his grip. Let’s see what one can make of it without touching it.”

He knelt down and scrutinised the fragment painfully.

“Some of his notes on the Hackleton case, perhaps. I can read ‘Hackl . . .’ on it plain enough.”

Howard did not trouble to look at the paper at close range.

“What do you make of it?” he demanded, as the secretary rose to his feet again.

“I? Nothing much. It might be someone trying to put Neville Shandon out of business while the Hackleton case is on. That might account for the notes being taken. Or it might be someone with a grudge against Roger. He had some enemies. A threatening letter came from a man only the other day.”

Howard digested these suggestions for a few moments without speaking; then he offered an objection.

“But d’you think it’s likely that two murderers would choose an identical moment for their attacks. Two simultaneous crimes is a bit of a record, it seems to me.”

“Think so?” the secretary responded, carelessly. “It’s happened this time, for all that.”

Howard had to admit the truth of this.

Stenness looked at his watch.

“I must be getting off to the outside of the Maze. The police will be here very soon, and they’ll need a guide. I’ll take you back to Skene, if you like.”

Howard nodded assent and once more Stenness led the way through a tangle of alleys.

“Here’s Helen’s Bower,” he said, nodding towards its entrance. “You can sit down there till I bring the police.”

Howard watched his figure disappear round a corner of the corridor and then turned his steps to the entrance of the little enclosure where Roger Shandon’s body lay. As he entered it, he was surprised to see Skene on his knees at the foot of the hedge, evidently collecting some small objects.

“What are you after, Skene?” he demanded. “I thought you were supposed to be watching this fellow.”

Skene rose to his feet, rather sulky at being reproved.

“He ain’t escaped yet. I’m ’tween him and the door.”

Howard acknowledged the truth of both statements.

“What are you grubbing in the hedge for?” he continued, after he had made his apology.

Skene extended an earthy palm on which rested some small objects.

“ ’Tis the lid of a tin box—one o’ these round ’uns. And here’s some darts that Mr. Hawkhurst uses for that air-gun o’ his when he’s shootin’ at a target. Let’s see . . . one . . . two . . . three . . .”

He laboriously counted up to seven and held out his hand for confirmation.

“Put ’em in the box-lid, Skene, and lay ’em down somewhere safe. You found them where I saw you searching?”

“Just in there, among the roots o’ the hedge. Like enough the other bit o’ the box’ll be outside in the alley. I’ll have a look.”

“Don’t bother, Skene. We mustn’t disturb anything till the police get here, you know. If there’s anything more, they’ll prefer to hunt for it themselves. What you’ve got to remember is that you found these seven things—seven, remember—at that point in the hedge. Better mark it with a stick or something, so that you’ll know the exact spot again.”

The sight of the darts had put a thought into his mind. He went over to Roger Shandon’s body and examined it carefully. But so far as the exposed portions were concerned, he found no trace of the thing for which he was searching; and he did not care to take the responsibility of altering the posture of the corpse.

As he rose to his feet once more he heard the note of a motor horn in the distance.

“The police, I expect,” he said to Skene. “They’ll be here in a minute or two. Mr. Stenness has gone to lead them in through the Maze.”

Chapter IV.
The Chief Constable

As Stenness picked his way through the convolutions of the Maze, his face showed that his mind was at work on some puzzling problem.

“Things haven’t worked out quite according to plan,” he commented to himself as he walked along. “I’ve missed that train, now; and I may as well see the business through on the spot. If only I’d aimed for the earlier train, I might have pulled it off.”

His frown of annoyance faded out suddenly, as a new idea crossed his mind.

“Perhaps it’s all for the best after all. I never thought of that point. Nobody can swear to it: and it leaves me absolutely on velvet—safer than ever.”

His face cleared completely as he considered the fresh situation which had presented itself.

“This is worth a dozen of the other notion. All I have to do now is to sit tight and keep a straight face.”

The secretary soon reached the outskirts of the Maze. Then, taking up a position which commanded the road to the East Gate, he sat down on the grass and waited the arrival of the police.

Before long, a motor-horn sounded, and he rose to his feet as a big car came tearing up the narrow private road. In the front seats were two civilians, whilst the back held three uniformed policemen. Long before the motor reached him, Stenness had recognised the man at the wheel as the owner of a neighbouring estate.

“That’s Wendover of Talgarth Grange. I wonder what he’s doing here.”

Going out into the roadway, the secretary signalled them to stop and the long car drew up as it came level with him. Wendover jumped down from the driving seat and came forward while the others were getting out of the motor.

“Sad business, this, Stenness! Terrible affair! Is poor Shandon really dead? Why, I saw him yesterday, poor chap.”

Stenness was watching the remainder of the party, and he noticed that there had been a dog in the car. It was now fawning on the second civilian, evidently delighted to get out of its cramped quarters in the motor. Stenness turned back to his interlocutor.

“It’s worse than we supposed when I telephoned. Two of the Shandons have been murdered in the Maze, here.”

He nodded in the direction of the high green hedges.

Wendover was completely taken aback.

“Two of them! My godfathers! Here, Clinton!” he called to the second civilian. “Terrible business, this. There’s been a second murder.”

Then, as the man with the dog came up to them, Wendover turned back to the secretary.

“This is the Chief Constable, Sir Clinton Driffield. Clinton, this is Mr. Stenness; secretary to Roger Shandon.”

Stenness examined the Chief Constable with what seemed more than common interest. Sir Clinton was a slight man who looked about thirty-five. His sun-tanned face, the firm mouth under the close-clipped moustache, the beautifully-kept teeth and hands, might have attracted a second glance in a crowd; but to counter this there was deliberate ordinariness about his appearance. Had a stranger, meeting him casually, been asked later on to describe him, it would have been difficult; for Sir Clinton designedly refrained from anything characteristic in his dress. Only his eyes failed to fit in with the rest of his conventional appearance; and even them he had disciplined as far as possible. Normally, they had a bored expression; but at times the mask slipped aside and betrayed the activity of the brain behind them. When fixed on a man they gave a curious impression as though they saw, not the physical exterior of the subject, but instead the real personality concealed below the facial lineaments.

“A second case? H’m! You seem to be starting a wholesale trade at Whistlefield, Mr. Stenness.”

Stenness was not impressed by the cheerfulness of the tone. He had felt those keen eyes sweep over him; and though it had been anything but a stare, he had the sensation of being appraised and catalogued for future reference. He disliked the turn of the Chief Constable’s phrase, too. Whether intentionally or not, it seemed to verge on the macabre.

“What about starting, eh?” Wendover demanded. “Get on the track while the scent’s hot, Clinton? Every minute may count, you know.”

Sir Clinton assented with a nod and snapped his fingers to call his dog to heel.

“Suppose you show us the bodies, Mr. Stenness.”

Without replying, Stenness led the way into the Maze, followed closely by the whole party. The Chief Constable scanned the corridors as he passed along, but made no comment. Wendover evidently felt that some explanation of his presence was due, for as they traversed the alleys he overtook the secretary.

“Curious coincidence, this, Stenness. Sir Clinton’s a friend of mine, and he happened to be staying with me just now for a few days. Most fortunate affair! When you ’phoned down to the police station, they rang him up at once at the Grange. I got out the car, of course; and we picked up the constables at the station as we passed. Couldn’t have been better planned, could it?”

Then, passing to a new line of thought, he added:

“Terrible affair for the family! Dreadful business! It’ll be a frightful shock for Miss Hawkhurst, won’t it?”

Before Stenness could reply, they came to the entrance of one of the centres of the Maze. The secretary turned to the Chief Constable.

“This is what they call the Pool of Narcissus, Sir Clinton. We found Neville Shandon’s body here. Roger Shandon’s body is lying in the other centre of the Maze.”

Sir Clinton nodded without replying, took off his hat, and entered the enclosure. The body lay just as Stenness had seen it last; and the Chief Constable made no attempt to touch it, though he subjected it to a most minute inspection.

“I forgot to tell you,” whispered Wendover. “We ’phoned for a doctor to come and examine the body. He’ll be here very soon.”

The Chief Constable rose lightly to his feet.

“Two or three small wounds, apparently; but not much bleeding. Once the doctor’s overhauled him, we can make a fuller examination. In the meantime things had better be left as they are. Will you take us to the other body now, Mr. Stenness?”

Leaving one of the constables on guard over the corpse, the party made its way, under Stenness’s guidance, to the second centre of the Maze. On the road, Wendover gave Stenness some further information.

“Most fortunate that Driffield was on the spot, wasn’t it? He’ll get to the bottom of things quick enough; trust him for that. He used to be out in South Africa; a big post in the police there. Then he came home for family reasons and dropped into the Chief Constableship here. Much too good a man for the place, you know; but it gives him enough to keep him busy. By the way, he knew something about Roger Shandon out at the Cape.”

“I believe Shandon made part of his money there,” Stenness volunteered in confirmation.

As they entered Helen’s Bower, Stenness saw a momentary upward twitch of Sir Clinton’s eyebrows as his glance lighted on the stranger whom they had encountered in the Maze.

“Ah! Mr. Timothy Costock?”

The captive showed much more surprise.

“Why, it’s Driffield, so it is! Well, if that isn’t the damnedest luck. There’s no keepin’ out o’ the way o’ you busies, it seems. But you’re on the wrong track this shot. I never laid a finger on this fellow.”

He indicated Roger Shandon’s body as he spoke.

“Nobody’s accused you of laying a finger on him. Or of anything else—yet,” said Sir Clinton, curtly. “I’ll listen to your story later on. Don’t waste time elaborating it. You’ll find the plain truth’s best. This is more serious than illicit diamond buying.”

He paused for an instant, then continued:

“Now I think of it, you were Shandon’s cat’s paw that time I got my hands on you at Kimberley.”

Then, as Costock opened his mouth in protest, Sir Clinton cut him short abruptly:

“I’d keep my mouth shut, if I were you. Nobody’s asking you to incriminate yourself.”

The hint was sufficient for the ex-I.D.B. expert. His protest died on his lips. Sir Clinton paid no further attention to him, but set about a careful examination of the body of Roger Shandon. As he rose to his feet again, Stenness came forward.

“This is Mr. Howard Torrance, Sir Clinton, a guest at the house. He was in the Maze at the moment when the murder was done. Torrance, this is the Chief Constable.”

He turned to the gardener.

“This is Skene, Sir Clinton, one of the gardeners on the estate. He came with me here as soon as we learned what had happened.”

Sir Clinton nodded a brief appreciation of Stenness’s explanations. The secretary had wasted no words over the business, and yet had given all the information necessary at the moment.

Howard Torrance, thus brought to the front, seized the opportunity offered to him.

“Some darts here. Skene found them at the foot of the hedge. Lid of a tin box was lying beside them as well.”

Sir Clinton picked up the lid and inspected the tiny missiles which had been collected.

“Air-gun darts, evidently,” he commented.

Characteristically enough, he did not call attention to the equally obvious fact that they were not ordinary air-gun darts. The woollen feathering, instead of showing the usual gaudy colours, was stained brown; and a rusty powder seemed to cling to the fibre. A tiny patch of the same pigment showed on the metal jackets of the darts, near the points. Sir Clinton put the collection down again carefully.

“Now, Skene,” he said, turning to the gardener, “that was a good piece of work of yours. Can you show me exactly where you found these things?”

Obviously delighted with the Chief Constable’s compliment, Skene was only too ready to indicate the precise position where he had picked up the darts and the box-lid.

“You got the lot, I suppose? At least all you could see from here?”

Howard Torrance, watching the Chief Constable, was surprised to see that his eyes, instead of searching the ground, seemed to be ranging over the surface of the hedge; and when Skene answered the question, Sir Clinton’s thoughts appeared to be elsewhere. He turned to Stenness.

“Can you take us to the other side of this hedge at that point?”

Stenness led the way once more into the Maze; and Sir Clinton found that quite a considerable distance had to be traversed before they reached the required position.

“This is the place?” he inquired, as Stenness came to a halt. “That’s clear enough,” he added, as he stooped to pick something from the side of the path. When he held it out, they recognised it as the bottom of the tin box of which the lid had already been found. Sir Clinton turned to the constables.

“Hunt about and see if you can find any more of these darts. You mustn’t miss a single one, remember. And handle them carefully. They’re deadly things, evidently.”

Then, as Stenness and Howard Torrance showed signs of joining in the search, the Chief Constable stopped them with a gesture.

“I think we’ll leave the officials to do the work,” he said with a certain finality in his tone.

Again he appeared to be more interested in the hedge itself than in the roots where more darts might be hidden; and after a moment or two he went forward and seemed to peer closely into the greenery at one particular point. When he stepped back again, Howard moved forward in curiosity; and Sir Clinton made way for him. As he brought his eye to the position in which he had seen the Chief Constable’s, he looked into a concealed loop-hole. The twigs had been trimmed away to form a tunnel, the ends of which had been left covered with a thin screen of leafage; and a glance through the aperture showed that it bore directly on the chair in which Roger Shandon had been killed.

But already Sir Clinton seemed to have lost interest in the matter. He whistled; and the dog which had been left behind in Helen’s Bower came running to him.

“Have a sniff,” he invited the animal, holding out to it the part of the tin box which he still held in his hand. “Now see what you can make of it.”

He turned to his companions.

“It’s a poor chance. Don’t blame the animal if it fails.”

Part of Sir Clinton’s character was revealed in the whimsical apology. He was always noted for his loyalty to his subordinates and his readiness to recognise the impossibility of some tasks. It was the complement to his sternness when he had to deal with inefficiency.

“That’s right! Good dog! He’s on to something!” Wendover announced unnecessarily.

The beast had apparently picked up some scent or other, for it hurried off along the alleys, followed by Sir Clinton and the other three men. The constables were left to their search among the hedge roots.

It was anything but a simple route along which the dog led them; for it seemed to wind backwards and forwards almost at haphazard.

“Nobody who knew the Maze would have tried to get out this way,” Stenness commented at last.

His remark was hardly needed; for already the dog had more than once halted in the middle of an open alley and then retraced its course for no obvious reason. It was Howard Torrance who saw the meaning of these intricate tracings before the remainder of the party.

“Of course!” he explained. “The murderer didn’t go straight out of the Maze immediately. Probably he found Miss Forrest and myself blocking the road again and again as we wandered about. And he’d got to avoid being seen by us. That’s why he had to turn and wind about like this.”

At last the dog led them to the edge of the Maze, passed out through the iron gate, and went on eagerly across the grass. The track had brought them to the river side of the labyrinth, where a tiny clump of trees had been planted; and into this the dog plunged. A few paces further on it halted for a moment at the foot of a tree.

“Perhaps he climbed that,” Wendover suggested, going up and examining the trunk. “Look! There’s a faint mark here on the trunk, just about the height that a man could reach with his foot.”

Sir Clinton examined the mark, which was very slight indeed. Then he looked at the dog, which had set off in a fresh direction.

“I suppose he must have got tired of the view and come down again, in that case. One usually does come down. One rarely climbs higher than the top.”

He set off after the dog, which was now making for the road running past the Maze. But here it seemed to go astray. It snuffed about with the utmost eagerness, casting wider and wider in its attempt to recapture the scent; but soon it was clear that it had lost the track. Sir Clinton took it back to the tree once more and allowed it to start afresh. This time he followed closely on its track; and his companions noticed that he had pulled some paper from his pocket and was scattering tiny fragments on the grass to mark the animal’s route. But this attempt also ended in failure. Beyond the road, the trail seemed to be lost.

“We may as well give it up,” Sir Clinton admitted. “One can’t expect infallibility from a dumb animal.”

As he called the beast off, a motor-horn sounded, and they saw a car coming from the direction of the house.

“That’s our doctor, I expect,” Sir Clinton surmised; and Stenness confirmed the guess.

In a few minutes they had all made their way to Helen’s Bower, under Stenness’s guidance. Once there, the doctor proposed to begin his examination of the bodies; but the Chief Constable intervened.

“Just a moment, doctor. Before you shift anything, I want to take one or two photographs. Nothing like a permanent record for future reference.”

He took a case which one of the constables had carried and produced from it one of the largest-sized Kodaks. Then, by the marks of the feet in the grass, he replaced the overturned chair in its proper position; and finally he marked the position of the loophole in the hedge by means of a scrap of paper.

“I want something to give the scale,” he explained, at the last moment. “Would you mind sitting in the chair, Mr. Stenness? And perhaps you’d stand by the loophole, Mr. Torrance?”

He looked round the enclosure for an instant.

“And here, Costock, you get over into that corner. It’ll give some notion of the distance.”

When they had placed themselves, he took several photographs from various positions.

“Now, doctor, you can get to work if you like.”

The doctor made only a cursory examination.

“I think it would be best to shift the body up to the house. The light’s not very good here, now the sun’s going down. Besides, I’ll need to do more than I can do in this place.”

“There’s a second body waiting for you,” Sir Clinton explained. “We’ve the whole thing to do over again.”

The doctor, a taciturn man, shrugged his shoulders without making any audible comment and they made their way, guided by Stenness, to the Pool of Narcissus. Sir Clinton gave some directions to his constables and despatched the gardener to the house to bring down something on which the bodies could be carried. Then the photographic procedure was repeated; and the doctor made his examination of Neville Shandon’s corpse.

“There must be a loophole in this hedge as well,” the Chief Constable mused aloud, “but it’s not worth while hunting for it at present. It won’t run away.”

The constables reported the discovery of several fresh darts which had fallen either into the hedge itself or among the roots on the outer side. Skene, it appeared, had secured all those on the inner border. Sir Clinton counted the tiny projectiles carefully, dropped them into the tin box, and put the box in his pocket.

“That’s eleven altogether. Go back and hunt for anything more. I must have every one of these darts if you have to finish the search by lamplight. Make absolutely certain that you miss nothing.”

Skene arrived shortly afterwards with two other gardeners carrying hurdles; and the two bodies were transported to the cars and so conveyed to the house. Two more constables had arrived, and these were put under the guidance of Skene and given instructions to search the whole of the Maze for anything suspicious.

When the bodies had been taken up to a bedroom, Sir Clinton and the doctor carried out a minute examination. Each victim had been struck by three darts. In the case of Neville Shandon, the wounds suggested that the shots had been fired from the front and rather to one side. Roger’s body, on the other hand, contained one dart imbedded in the back of the neck, and two in the upper part of the rear surface between the spine and the shoulder on the left side. Beyond the punctures made by the darts, neither victim showed a trace of either wound or struggle.

“Poison, obviously,” Sir Clinton concluded.

The doctor agreed, adding in confirmation:

“None of these darts came near a vital spot. Alone, they’d never have killed a man.”

“Can you guess what poison was used?”

The doctor shook his head.

“Not my line. Some of these Indian arrow-poisons, perhaps. Ardsley could tell you something about them, most likely.”

“Who’s Ardsley? Could one get hold of him quickly?”

“He lives less than a mile from here. He’s a medical; but he doesn’t practise. Curiously enough, toxicology is his line, more or less. He’s a bit of a physiologist, too. I know he has a vivisection licence. You might do worse than look him up. He might be able to give you a hint.”

Sir Clinton looked thoughtful for a moment.

“What worries me is that a man can’t be in two places at once. I’m going to take over this case myself, and there’s enough work on hand in the next hour to keep two men busy. It’s time I’m up against at present.”

The doctor, reflecting on the conflicting calls of a country Practice, was inclined to think that Sir Clinton seemed to make a fuss about very little.

Chapter V.
The Evidence in the Case

When the doctor had completed his work and left the room, Sir Clinton pulled the tin box of darts from his pocket and went over to the window to examine it. The box itself suggested nothing in the way of a clue; it was of a common pattern. He turned from it to the darts themselves.

“That brown stuff on the feathering is evidently the poison, whatever it may be,” he reflected. “It doesn’t seem much of a dose to kill a man, especially if one assumes that it was a quick death. Even ordinary snake poison would hardly do the trick quick enough. And yet these fellows didn’t seem to have moved much after they were hit, to judge by the look of the ground.”

He took a Coddington lens from his pocket and scanned one of the darts carefully; then with a pin he probed a dark spot near the point of the projectile.

“So that’s it! He’s drilled a hole clean through the metal and filled up the hollow with poison. That would mean a fair quantity driven well home under the skin; and the blood would soon wash the stuff out of the cavity, since both ends are open. An ingenious devil, evidently.”

He thoughtfully replaced the dart in the box; but before putting the tin back into his pocket he counted the missiles carefully.

“Eleven of them here; and six more in the two bodies.”

He glanced at the open box again, trying to estimate its probable capacity.

“That must have been the lot.”

The doctor had extracted the six fatal darts from the bodies and left them lying on a piece of lint on the dressing-table. Sir Clinton rolled them up cautiously; took his cigarette-case from his pocket; emptied out the contents; and inserted the packet of darts instead.

“I’m not likely to get pricked now, short of a big smash.”

After putting the cigarette-case and the tin box containing the darts into his pockets, he left the room and went downstairs. The windows throughout the house had been darkened; but Sir Clinton found his way in the semi-obscurity to Roger Shandon’s study; and here he came upon Wendover, the two guests, and the secretary. Costock had been left in the hall in charge of a constable.

“Now,” Sir Clinton said, as he sat down, “I’m afraid I shall have to trouble you for information. What I want first of all are the plain facts—nothing else. We’ll come to suspicions afterwards. Which of you saw the Shandons alive last?”

“I believe I did,” the secretary volunteered. “At about ten minutes past three this afternoon, Roger Shandon sent one of the maids for me, and I came straight to this room. He gave me some directions about letters. While he was doing this, Neville Shandon looked into the room. He had some papers in his hand. Seeing us engaged, he went away again. That would be about twenty-five past three, approximately. Almost immediately after that, Roger Shandon dismissed me; and I noticed him from the window, going towards the Maze. That was the last I saw of either of them, till I found their bodies in the Maze.”

Sir Clinton went to the writing-table and made a note.

“You saw Neville Shandon last at about 3.25 p.m., and Roger at, say, 3.30 p.m.?”

“As near as I can gauge the times,” Stenness confirmed.

Sir Clinton considered for a moment.

“I judge that it would take a man walking at an ordinary pace at least ten minutes—say eleven or twelve—to reach the Maze from the house. That means that Neville Shandon could have reached the Maze at 3.37; and Roger might have got there at 3.42. But possibly they were some minutes later than that; and quite possibly, also, they may have arrived in a different order, since no one seems to have seen them actually enter the Maze, so far as we have gone with the story.”

The secretary indicated assent to this with a nod. Sir Clinton turned next to Torrance.

“I take it that you can carry our information further?”

Howard Torrance gave his version of the events up to the moment when he discovered the body of Neville Shandon in the enclosure by the Pool of Narcissus.

“Exact times are what we want,” Sir Clinton reminded him when he had completed his narrative.

“Can’t give you anything except two. I happened to look at my watch while Miss Forrest and I were sitting under the trees. It was some time after three, then—I think it was twenty past three, but I couldn’t swear to it. I took the time when I found Neville Shandon’s body. It was 3.52. I could swear to that, for I particularly noted it, knowing it might be wanted.”

Sir Clinton jotted down these figures also.

“Now, Miss Forrest, I know you’ve had a very trying time. I don’t want to worry you unnecessarily, but it’s essential to get your evidence as to what happened in the Maze. Take your time, and don’t let yourself get excited. It’s all over now.”

Vera gave him her account, to which he listened without putting any questions until she had finished.

“Thanks very much, Miss Forrest. There’s just one point. You heard steps in the Maze several times: a man running at one period and going on tiptoe at other times. You’re sure of that?”

“Quite sure. I’m not likely to forget it soon.”

“I can quite understand that,” said Sir Clinton, soothingly, for the girl was evidently affected by the mere remembrance of what she had gone through. “I’m merely asking these questions to make sure of my ground, you know. You couldn’t have mistaken Mr. Torrance’s footsteps for those of the murderer by any chance?”

At this question, the secretary’s face showed a gleam of enlightenment, as though he had detected a point which he had previously missed. He glanced at Howard Torrance for an instant as though trying to read his face; then he looked again at the girl.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Vera admitted frankly. “But I don’t think I did.”

“You heard Mr. Torrance’s voice from time to time,” Sir Clinton continued. “I’m trying to suggest that he may have called from a distance at the same time as you heard the steps near at hand. You see, it’s essential to find out exactly when the murderer left the Maze if possible; and we can only do that by checking his movements in the Maze.”

Vera thought for a moment or two before she replied.

“I can’t recall it. You know, Sir Clinton, I was nearly out of my mind with panic. I didn’t take note of things. I couldn’t. And there’s another thing—I did notice that I couldn’t make out the directions from which sounds came. The Maze seemed to shift them about anyhow. I really couldn’t tell where Mr. Torrance was at any time when he shouted to me.”

Sir Clinton nodded.

“I’d rather have you say that than try to strain your memory to make things fit. Now, just to make sure: You really did hear the murderer’s steps—or at any rate some steps—quite close to you—on the other side of the hedge, once? And that was before you found Roger Shandon’s body?”

Vera nodded assent to both questions. To her relief, Sir Clinton turned to Stenness.

“Did you note the time when Miss Forrest got back to the house again?”

“I looked at my watch when she was telling me her story. It was then 4.42. I reached the Maze myself at 5.16.”

“You were in your own room upstairs when Miss Forrest came to the house?”

“Yes. My room is at the back, so I could not have seen her coming in, even if I’d been looking out of my window. My first warning of the whole affair was when the maid began to scream.”

Sir Clinton added a jotting to his notes; then he turned to the company with a relaxation of his official air.

“These are the facts, then—the things you could swear to in the witness-box. I take it that you’ve told me all that’s relevant. But, candidly, these facts don’t take us far. The police don’t profess to know the details of people’s private lives; but when an affair of this sort crops up we have to poke our noses in, whether we like it or not. Hitherto we’ve kept to the facts; but now I’d like, if possible, to get your personal views of the meaning of the facts. You probably have intimate knowledge of affairs at Whistlefield which I haven’t got. Does it suggest anything to you in connection with this case?”

He glanced from face to face without putting a direct question to any of his hearers. Vera Forrest was the first to speak.

“I know almost as little as you do yourself, Sir Clinton. I’m a friend of Sylvia, of course; but I know no more about her uncles’ affairs than a casual visitor might pick up in a few days’ stay at the house. The whole thing is an absolute mystery so far as I’m concerned.”

Howard Torrance had the same story to tell.

“I’m in much the same state as Miss Forrest. Neville Shandon I met for the first time a few days ago. Roger was only a casual acquaintance; and I never felt inclined to force myself into his intimacy. I’m really a guest of Miss Hawkhurst, just as Miss Forrest is.”

Sir Clinton turned to the secretary.

“You’ve perhaps had better opportunities, Mr. Stenness?”

The secretary admitted this with a nod.

“I’ve been secretary to Mr. Roger Shandon for the last two years—nearly three. Do you expect me to divulge anything about his private affairs?”

“Anything that seems useful. It can’t hurt him now.”

“Then I needn’t conceal that from time to time he received threatening letters. The last one came only a few days ago. It was written by this man Costock who’s outside in the hall. I can produce it if necessary.”

Sir Clinton contented himself with saying: “I know something about Costock’s career.” He looked at Stenness as though he expected more, but the secretary seemed to have nothing to add on that subject.

“Perhaps you could tell us about the relations between the various members of the family. That must have come under your notice,” Sir Clinton suggested.

Stenness considered for a moment as though arranging his facts.

“The three brothers always seemed to me to be on good enough terms. I never noticed any ill-feeling amongst them. Neville was rather a bully—in his manner, I mean. He always treated one as if one were a hostile witness; but probably that was just a mannerism. Roger was hot-tempered at times. He didn’t hit it off with his nephew somehow. But as far as I saw, the feeling was all on one side. Young Hawkhurst seems a harmless boy—rather moody since he had that attack of sleepy sickness.”

Sir Clinton seemed to prick up his ears at the words.

“He had sleepy sickness, had he? Any ill-effects?”

“Nothing that one could see, except this instability—moodiness or whatever you like to call it. Very cheery one day and rather depressed soon afterwards, I noticed at times.”

Sir Clinton did not pursue the subject.

“Have you heard of any ill-feeling locally?” he asked. “I mean friction with the maids, or the gardeners, or the neighbours?”

Stenness racked his memory for a moment or two.

“No, nothing that I can recall. There was some slight disagreement with Dr. Ardsley over fishing rights not long ago; and a few angry letters passed between him and Roger Shandon. But it wasn’t an important matter—rather a squabble, but nothing to leave real ill-feeling.”

“Do you know anything about money matters? They were both well-off?”

“Neville was believed to make enormous fees in some cases. Roger, I know, had plenty of money. He often sent me to cash bearer cheques on his account and some of them ran into thousands.”

“And he took cash for these? Rather unusual.”

“My impression was that he gambled a good deal—roulette and that sort of thing—for high stakes. I’ve often paid in large sums in notes on his behalf.”

Sir Clinton seemed to make a mental note of this.

“Now what about the third brother—Ernest, I think his name is?”

A faint expression of contempt crossed Stenness’s face at the mention of Ernest’s name.

“He’s not like his brothers.”

Then the disdain of the efficient man for his inefficient fellow broke out.

“He seems never to have done anything, so far as I know. His brothers kept him going. He spends his time loafing about: fishing, shooting, or just hanging round. It was his fishing, as a matter of fact, that led to the row with Dr. Ardsley.”

Sir Clinton leaned forward in his chair and looked at the secretary keenly.

“All this is very interesting, Mr. Stenness; but I have an idea that there’s something in your mind that you haven’t told us. What is it?”

The Secretary gave him look for look before replying.

“I don’t think this is a local affair at all. The evidence points away from that, entirely.”

“Ah! Now this is what I really wanted, Mr. Stenness.”

Thus encouraged Stenness wasted no time.

“When Neville Shandon looked into the room before going to the Maze, he had a sheaf of papers in his hand. When I examined his body I noticed a scrap of paper—a torn bit. I could read ‘Hackl . . .’ on it in Neville’s writing, and a few other words as well.”

“That’s quite correct,” interrupted Sir Clinton, “I have it in my pocket-book. And you infer . . . ?”

“I infer that that scrap is all that remains of his notes for his cross-examination of Hackleton which was to come off this week.”

“In other words, you think someone in Hackleton’s pay is the murderer; and the intention was to put Neville Shandon out of the case finally?”

“That’s your statement, not mine,” said Stenness, suddenly becoming cautious. “But it’s been done before now.”

Sir Clinton nodded.

“You’re thinking of the shooting of Labori in the Dreyfus case, I suppose?”

“That would be a parallel case to the one you sketched.”

“And the notes might be useful to Hackleton’s side as showing the probable line of attack beforehand?”

Stenness maintained his caution.

“That’s your suggestion, not mine.”

“But assuming that,” demanded Sir Clinton, “why was Roger Shandon murdered at all? He had nothing to do with the case.”

Stenness had his answer ready.

“Assume that twin brothers resemble each other closely and even dress alike. Mightn’t a stranger mistake one for the other and kill him? Obviously. And then he might find that he’d made an error if the second brother turned up. The second man is the man he’s been paid to put out of the way. Wouldn’t he finish his job?”

“That’s an ingenious theory, Mr. Stenness,” commented Sir Clinton, but he refrained from saying anything further.

Howard Torrance had listened carefully.

“Hardly think that’ll fit, though. Neville was dead when I came across him; and I’d just heard Roger shouting . . . at least . . . at any rate,” he stumbled for a moment, then recanted. “No, you may be right. I was confusing the order of finding the bodies with the order of the murders.”

“There’s no proof of the order of the murders,” Stenness pointed out. “Both of them were dead when they were found, and that’s all we know.”

At this moment steps sounded outside, the door opened noisily, and Sir Clinton saw a stranger enter the room. At the sight of the air-gun in the newcomer’s hand, Vera Forrest gave a slight exclamation.

“This is Sir Clinton Driffield, Mr. Hawkhurst,” Stenness hastened to explain. “The Chief Constable.”

Arthur Hawkhurst leaned his air-gun against the wall and came forward.

“D’you usually travel with an escort, sir?” he inquired with a boyish grin. “A bobby and a plain clothes man in the hall outside, I see.”

Then, turning to Stenness, he went on:

“Uncle Roger anywhere about? I owe the old man an apology. He’s rather peevish with me over the piano, you know; and I must smooth him down. Not let the sun go down on his wrath, et cetera.”

Stenness threw an interrogative glance at Sir Clinton. Getting the answer he expected, he broke the news to Arthur.

“What! Both of ’em killed! Nonsense!”

Then the sight of the Chief Constable and the recollection of the uniformed man outside seemed to convince him.

“Of course! That accounts for the bobby. And they’re both gone, you say? Poor old birds! Poor old birds!”

It was hardly the requiem which might have been expected; but it seemed sincere enough in tone if not in words. He added thoughtfully:

“And now I’ll never get that apology off my chest, after brooding over it all afternoon. I owed him that.”

Sir Clinton crossed the room and picked up the air-gun.

“This seems pretty strong. Can you kill anything with it?”

Arthur’s grief seemed to pass away with the opening up of a fresh subject.

“I was out with it in the spinney this afternoon, potting rabbits. It makes less noise than a rook-rifle. Scares the bunnies less when you fire. But I only got a couple of brace in the whole afternoon.”

Sir Clinton made no reply. He tried the spring of the air-gun; looked to see that the weapon was unloaded; and then pulled the trigger. For a weapon of its size the report was not loud. He was about to try it a second time when his ear was caught by a sound of limping footsteps in the passage. Again the door of the room opened, and Sir Clinton hastily put the gun back against the wall.

Ernest Shandon shuffled into the room and blinked round the assembled group in dull surprise.

“I’ve had a devil of a time,” he said grumpily, “I’ve been walking miles with a nail in my boot.”

Stenness stepped into the breach once more and explained the state of affairs. At first, Ernest seemed frankly incredulous.

“This must be a joke of yours, Stenness. What I mean to say is, the thing’s impossible. Murders don’t happen to people like us, you know. It’s the kind of thing one finds among the lower classes.”

He peered from face to face, as if expecting to see a smile on one of them; but the seriousness of the company at last appeared to bring the truth home to him.

“You really mean it?”

He sank into a chair and gazed round the company once more as though dazed by the realisation of the tragedy.

“Both of ’em? Why, I was talking to them both not three hours ago. We were talking about that Shackleton case—or is it Hackleton? I remember Neville asking if I read the newspapers, and Roger . . . What was it Roger said? . . . Oh, yes, now I remember. Roger was giving Neville a hint that Hackleton might find it worth his while to sandbag him or something like that. I can’t think why; but Roger was very strong about that, I remember. And then I went off and left them together. And now you say they’re both dead! I can’t believe it, Stenness. Why, I was talking to them not three hours ago, or even less, it may be, here in this very room.”

“It’s unfortunately true, Mr. Shandon,” Howard Torrance assured him. “I found the body of Mr. Neville Shandon myself.”

Ernest paid no attention to him. He seemed to be quite thunderstruck, now that the news had penetrated his mind. At last he roused himself sufficiently to ask for some details, to which he listened with a sort of heavy interest.

“And they were killed by poisoned darts, you say? And I’ve got a nail in my boot myself. I might get blood-poisoning from it, if I’m not careful. I never thought of that till now.”

Sir Clinton had allowed a decent interval to elapse before entering the conversation; but he now glanced at his watch and put a question.

“Can you tell us when you last saw your brothers alive, Mr. Shandon?”

Ernest reflected for some moments as though trying to fix the time. Then he shook his head regretfully:

“I’d arranged to go in the car with Sylvia—my niece, you know—but she said I was late and she hurried me off to get ready. I was a bit hustled at the last moment. But Sylvia could tell you, most likely. She’s always punctual and she’d remember when we left.”

“It was just before I saw Mr. Neville Shandon look in that door that I heard your car leaving, Mr. Shandon,” Stenness volunteered. “That would be about ten minutes past three.”

Ernest nodded vaguely.

“I remember she sent me to put my boots on. That reminds me, my foot’s very sore. I hope it isn’t blood-poisoning.”

Quite regardless of the company he began to unlace his boot and finally examined a slight tear in his sock. He was busily engaged in feeling inside his boot for the nail before he spoke again.

“That nail came up just after Sylvia dropped me outside the grounds. I walked on for a bit, but it began to hurt. You know how a nail in your boot hurts? So I sat down for a bit by the roadside; and luckily the postman came along in his cart and gave me a lift after a while, or I don’t know what I’d have done. I’d nothing to hammer it flat with, you see.”

He returned to an inspection of his foot.

Sir Clinton glanced at his watch, and even his impassive face showed a trace of impatience.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Shandon, but I must get some facts from you before I go. It’s essential, or I should not trouble you at this time.”

Ernest looked up with a long-suffering expression.

“Oh, ask any questions you please. If I can give any information you want, I’ll be glad to do it, quite glad. It’s a sad affair for me, for all of us. Anything I can do, of course. By the way, do you mind if I ring for tea? I’ve had nothing since lunch-time and I feel a bit tired. One misses one’s tea. It would brighten me up, I think.”

Quite oblivious of the astonishment of the company he rang the bell and gave his order.

“Now, Mr. Shandon, perhaps you’ll give me your attention. I understand that your family consisted of yourself, your two brothers, and the late Mrs. Hawkhurst, your sister. Am I right, or have you any relations except your nephew and niece?”

Ernest blinked for a moment or two as if considering.

“Nobody nearer than a second cousin once removed. At least, I think that’s what you call it. She’s the daughter of a second cousin. Lives in Bath, I think.”

“Another point,” continued Sir Clinton. “Can you tell me if anyone could get the opportunity of learning the Maze without being noticed? The gardeners know the paths, of course; but can you think of anyone else?”

Ernest again blinked for some seconds while he thought over the matter.

“Ardsley took an interest in it at one time—that was before he made such a fuss over the fishing. He hasn’t been here since that row. Not that I bore any grudge over it, you understand, far from it. One may differ from a man without letting bad feeling come in, I always think, don’t you?”

Sir Clinton refused to follow him into this by-path.

“Nobody else?”

“No, I can remember nobody who ever took the slightest interest in it. It’s not, somehow, the sort of thing that does interest people. What I mean to say is, there’s not much use in it, is there?”

Sir Clinton diverged for an instant from his usual reticence.

“It’s strange the murderer didn’t leave some trace, then. I’d have expected to find him using a thread to guide him out of the Maze—like Theseus in the labyrinth.”

He paused for a moment, then added:

“But perhaps he rolled it up as he went out, so as to leave nothing behind.”

He rose as he spoke and put his last questions.

“Do you suspect anyone in this matter, Mr. Shandon? Was there anyone in the background whom we haven’t heard about? A woman, for instance?”

Ernest Shandon seemed to ponder these queries in his dull way.

“No,” he said at last, “I don’t think so. Not to my knowledge, at least. Of course my brothers had their own affairs; but that’s to be expected in families, isn’t it? I mean, they didn’t tell me everything, of course. But bar this Shackleton business, I can’t say I ever heard anything that would fit the case. No, I can’t remember ever hearing anything of the sort.”

The Chief Constable wasted no further time.

“I shall have to come back again, Mr. Shandon. Will you think over the matter meanwhile and take a note of anything you think likely to help us. And you also,” he added, turning to the rest of the group.

As the door was closing behind him and Wendover, he heard Ernest’s verdict, delivered in a disconsolate tone:

“This’ll be an infernal bother!”

In the hall, they found Costock in charge of a constable and apparently resigned to his detention. When questioned, he added but little to the story which he had told earlier in the day to Stenness.

“What brought you to this neighbourhood at all?” Sir Clinton demanded. “You don’t expect us to believe that you came here by pure chance, do you?”

“No,” Costock admitted. “If I was pitchin’ a yarn to a flattie or to an ordinary busy, I’d say that; an’ I’d stick to it. But you know a bit too much about me, Driffield; an’ it wouldn’t take with you. So I’ll just take an’ tell you the truth, so I will.”

Sir Clinton’s smile showed more than a touch of unbelief.

“Make it the whole truth, when you’re at it,” he advised, “and begin by explaining how you happen to be here at this particular period.”

“Well, you see, this Shandon man—Roger—he owed me something, so he did. He didn’t play straight with me out at Kimberley.”

“So you came home as soon as you got out, to blackmail him? That’s obvious. You needn’t protest, Costock. It’s really not of any importance, for I’m quite convinced that you didn’t reach the stage of negotiations, so there’s no harm done. You put up in the village, waiting for a chance to see him alone, I suppose?”

Costock nodded.

“And now explain how you came to be in at the death, please.”

“It was this way. As I was going through the village I came on a boatman. It’s a hot day, so I thought I’d go on the river for a row.”

“And perhaps spy out the land, seeing that the grounds are easily accessible from the river-bank?”

“Well, I don’t say yes and I don’t say no. It might have come in handy.”

“And you took a pistol with you on your outing?”

Costock had his explanation ready.

“I thought as perhaps I’d run across Shandon and we might get talking. He’s a violent-tempered swine—leastways, he was so. And ’t seemed to me best to have a quietener in my pocket; for I’d have stood no chance at all against him, man to man. He could ha’ licked me with one hand.”

“When did you leave the boat-house in the village?”

“ ’Bout three o’clock, as near as I can remember. But the boatman could tell you. He took the time for hirin’ the boat.”

“You came up the river fairly slowly, then; and what happened after that?”

“As I came along, I noticed a little private boat-house and a landing-stage. I knew that would be Shandon’s place, for I’d asked the boatman about it. Just as I was coming abreast of it, I heard some yells; so I stopped rowing and let the boat drift. Then I heard someone squalling ‘Murder’ at the pitch of his voice, behind some hedges near by the water. So I pulled in, hitched up my boat, and ran through the nearest hole in the hedge. And then I got tangled up in that fandango of a thing they have there—what they call the Maze.”

“You didn’t see anyone running away from the Maze before you got in?”

“No.”

“Did you run about in the Maze or did you walk?”

Costock considered for a moment or two.

“I walked. Once I was inside, I got tangled up, as I told you; and I didn’t want to be running round corners slap into a murderer.”

“And then?”

“Oh, after that I heard a lot o’ shoutin’ and a girl screamin’ an’ all that sort o’ thing. But I was that tangled up I could get nowhere. I’d got fair lost in that infernal monkey-puzzle.”

Sir Clinton turned to Wendover.

“This fellow was searched, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. Nothing on him but the pistol, and we took that away.”

Sir Clinton turned back to Costock.

“You can go now; but you’ll have to stay in the village for a day or two. You’ll be wanted at the inquest. I may as well tell you that you’ll be watched, so it’s no use trying to bolt.”

He dismissed the Ex-I.D.B. with scant ceremony; handed his dog over to the care of the constable with orders to take it to the Grange; and then went down the steps to Wendover’s car.

Chapter VI.
The Toxicologist

“The next port of call, Squire, will be Dr. Ardsley’s,” Sir Clinton informed his companion as they seated themselves in the car. “And you can put a bit of hurry into it, if you like.”

Wendover’s appearance had earned him the kindly nickname which the Chief Constable used. He was one of those red-faced, hearty country gentlemen who, on first acquaintance, give an entirely erroneous impression of themselves. Met casually, he might quite easily have appeared to be a slightly fussy person of very limited intellect and even more restricted interests; but behind that façade lived a fairly acute brain which took a certain sly delight in exaggerating the misleading mannerisms. Wendover was anything but a fool, though he liked to pose as one.

“All right,” he said, as the pace of the car increased. “It won’t take long to get there. But what do you know about Ardsley? Never mentioned him to you, so far as I can remember.”

“Well, don’t put off any longer. Tell me something about him now,” suggested Sir Clinton. “All I know is that he’s an expert in poisons or something of that sort.”

Wendover pricked up his ears.

“ ‘Poisons,’ sez you? You don’t think . . .”

But Sir Clinton was not to be drawn so easily.

“You’re quite right, Squire. I don’t think. I never caught the knack of it, somehow. Just tell me all about Ardsley, will you, and put it in a nutshell, for we haven’t much time.”

“Ardsley?” Wendover ruminated, “Ardsley’s one of these damned vivisectionists. Doesn’t even need to do it for a living, either; just cuts up dogs and cats for pleasure, I suppose, since he’s got a private income. He’s one of these cold-blooded beggars, all brains and no emotions, and that sort of thing. Swarms up mountains for amusement, they say—quite good at it, too. Member of Alpine Club, I believe. He’s a good fisherman; got an eye like a hawk and seems to have the devil’s own luck in clearing the streams round about here. He had a row with Roger Shandon over that, I remember.”

He pondered for a moment.

“That seems all about Ardsley.”

A fresh subject occurred to him.

“Not arresting anybody yet, Clinton? Seems funny to have two murders and no arrests. Aren’t you afraid of letting the fellow slip through your fingers?”

“Not very,” the Chief Constable reassured him. “I’m having Costock shadowed—I gave instructions to the constable about it. The rest of the Whistlefield people can’t budge either, for they’ll be wanted at the inquest to give evidence.”

“But the fellow might bolt in the meanwhile.”

“He may—assuming he’s one of the house crowd. But if he’s one of them, he’ll have to be fairly smart. I’ve got photographs of all the ones who were at the Maze—took them under pretence of needing someone to give the scale in the pictures. A photograph’s better than a description, you know.”

Wendover was silent for a few seconds.

“I suppose you’re going to Ardsley about the poison on the darts?”

“Partly that, partly to gather impressions, if you must know.”

“Oh, well, he ought to be able to spot the thing for you. They say he’s written a book on poisonology or whatever they call it.”

“Toxicology is the word you’re dredging for, I think.”

“Well, toxicology, then. That reminds me, do you think . . .”

“Never. Quite against my strictest principles. To-morrow I shall spend a penny on the local paper. I shall read up what the crime expert in it has got to say. Then I shall know all about it. Why should I bother to think?”

Wendover thought that he had surprised the Chief Constable’s subject of speculation. In spite of the hints he had received, he persisted in his probing.

“Then you think that Ardsley may be . . .”

“There’s a law of libel, Squire; and you’re just twittering on the edge of it at present. I tell you bluntly that I have no definite ideas just now; and you’ll get nothing by all this hydraulic pump business that you’re trying. If I ever get to the bottom of this affair, I promise you I’ll spout like an artesian well of information. Till then, the borings will show no results.”

Wendover accepted the rebuff placidly. Sir Clinton was grateful, and showed it by his next words.

“The fact is, squire, I’m keeping an open mind and I don’t want to be prejudiced. It’s as clear as print that you dislike this man Ardsley. Hence it wouldn’t pay me to listen to you unconsciously discrediting him beforehand. I tell you what. We’ll discuss the thing to-night when I’ve got my mind cleared up a bit; and then you can say what you like. But I don’t promise to give you much information, remember. I’m paid to keep my mouth shut so long as a quiet tongue is necessary; and I’ve got to earn my pay, you see.”

Wendover’s face cleared when this point of view was put before him.

“You can’t put it fairer than that, Clinton,” he admitted. “I hadn’t looked at it quite in that light, you know.”

He said no more at the time, and soon the car reached the entrance to the toxicologist’s grounds. At the house they learned that Dr. Ardsley was at home; and they were shown into a room. He did not keep them waiting long.

As he came forward to meet them, Sir Clinton saw a man of about fifty. Ardsley’s hair was silvered, and his face showed heavy lines; but his step was light and he was obviously in perfect condition. From below heavy eyebrows his grey eyes seemed to examine the world coldly; and the set of his mouth was sufficient to show more than a little toughness in the disposition which had moulded it.

Sir Clinton rapidly explained the cause of his visit; and producing the box of darts, he handed one of them to the toxicologist.

“I’m not sufficiently ignorant to expect you to tell me what this stuff is on the spur of the moment, Dr. Ardsley; but I’m really trusting to luck that you may be able to make a guess at what the thing might be. If you can do even that, it may be of great importance to us.”

Ardsley took the dart and examined it for a moment or two. Then he put questions about the state of the bodies and the times, which Sir Clinton was able to furnish.

“H’m!” he said at last. “I think, from what you say, that I might make a guess at it. It’s obviously one of these arrow-poisons or something of that sort; perhaps a strophanthus derivative or a member of the strychnos group.”

“Can you give me anything more definite?” Sir Clinton demanded, rather anxiously. “Time’s the main factor with me just now. I know these vegetable things are the very devil to spot; but it’s honestly a matter of life or death, and I want something definite if you can give me it.”

Ardsley frowned slightly as he examined the dart.

“Can you spare this? I mean, to examine it, chemically—and otherwise. I can’t promise to let you have it back intact, you know.”

“Give me information, that’s all I ask.”

“Very good.”

He paused for a moment.

“You won’t want to let this out of your sight, I suppose. Then you’d better come along to my laboratory. Luckily I have a guinea-pig in stock.”

He glanced under his eyebrows at Wendover.

“You’d rather stay here, I should think, Wendover. You dislike vivisection. I’m only going to put a needle into the little beast—quite painless; but you needn’t come and get your feelings rasped.”

It was phrased politely enough; but it was quite evident from the way in which it was said that Ardsley had no desire to let Wendover into his laboratory. Leaving the Squire to kick his heels, the toxicologist led Sir Clinton through the house to the research department.

“We’d better see exactly what phenomena the poison produces, first of all. I’ll get the guinea-pig.”

He washed some of the poison from the dart with liquid, and introduced the solution into a hypodermic syringe, by means of which he injected a minute amount of the fluid under the guinea-pig’s skin.

“Dead already?” Sir Clinton asked in some astonishment. “It’s like a thunderbolt.”

Ardsley had been experimenting on the animal and watching closely. His face showed that he had found something definite.

“I think I can make a guess,” he said. “It happens to be something with which I’m fairly familiar. Let’s confirm it.”

He made another extraction of the poison which he placed in a test-tube. To this he added a few drops of solution from a bottle which he took down from a shelf.

“Sulphovanadic acid,” he explained. “Just watch.”

On the addition of the reagent, the liquid in the test-tube turned black.

“It ought to change to dark blue, and then to red after a time.”

“What do you make of it?” Sir Clinton demanded.

“Curare. I’m pretty sure of it. I’ve used it a lot and I feel fairly safe in saying that. Of course, if you want me to swear to it, that’s a different matter. This is only a rough test. I’d need to do a lot more before I could go into the box and testify about it.”

Sir Clinton nodded.

“Of course, I know it by name,” he said. “South American arrow poison, isn’t it? Can you tell me anything more about it?”

Ardsley was engaged in writing some notes. He looked up apologetically for a moment.

“I have to enter up details of each experiment I carry out, you know, Sir Clinton—even if it’s only a case of pricking a beast with a needle. If you don’t mind, I’ll finish this entry. I like to have things always ship-shape in that line, and the more so since I’ve got the police on the premises.”

He smiled, not altogether pleasantly, as he turned again to his writing. When he had finished, he suggested that they should rejoin Wendover.

“I’m not going to give you a lecture on curare,” he said, when they had returned to the other room, “but one or two points may be of use to you. It’s a South American arrow poison, as you said. Its physiological effect is a powerful paralysing action on the motor nerve endings supplying striated muscle, but it has no action on the excitability of the muscle. You saw the actual results in that experiment.”

“I guessed something of the sort from the state of the two bodies,” Sir Clinton explained. “It was pretty clear that neither of them had struggled much before they died. I put that down to the swift action of the poison; but from what you say, they must have been paralysed when the stuff got into the blood-stream.”

Ardsley made no comment, but continued his exposition.

“It wouldn’t require a large dose to kill a man. Curare contains various alkaloids. Paracurarine and protocurarine are amongst them. A quarter of a grain of protocurarine would kill a ten-stone man quite easily. There was far more than a fatal dose of curare on that dart.”

“Can you tell us anything about how the stuff comes on the market?” Sir Clinton inquired.

“There are three brands of it to be had,” the toxicologist explained. “Para curare you can buy in bamboo tubes; calabash curare is packed in gourds; and what they call pot curare is sold in earthenware pots. The stuff’s a crude product, you understand. One specimen differs from another to some extent, though not materially for most purposes.”

“You have some of it in stock yourself for your experiments, perhaps?”

Ardsley smiled rather grimly.

“A man isn’t required to incriminate himself, is he? But I don’t mind admitting that I have some of the stuff. You could have found that out for yourself by examining my returns under the Act, you know, so I lose nothing by frankness.”

Sir Clinton acknowledged the underlying meaning of Ardsley’s words by a faint shrug of his shoulders, a completely non-committal gesture.

“You practically told me you had it, there in the laboratory,” he reminded the toxicologist. “What’s more important at present is to know if anyone else could have had access to it.”

Ardsley reflected for a moment or two before speaking again.

“There’s another source of supply close at hand,” he said, as though the point had just come to his memory. “Roger Shandon had a sort of museum up at Whistlefield—stuff he had picked up on his travels—rubbish mostly. But I remember he had a pot of curare amongst it.”

“Ah! That’s what I wanted to get at,” Sir Clinton broke in. “You’re sure about that?”

“Quite. It slipped my memory at the time; but I’m quite certain about it. It’s real stuff, undoubtedly. I remember that once, a while ago, I ran short of curare and I borrowed Roger’s specimen and took some of it. I returned it to him at once, of course; and I only took a trace for use. But it’s real curare all right, without any doubt.”

“And that stuff’s lying up at Whistlefield now? Is it under lock and key?”

“No,” Ardsley explained. “It’s just lying loose in an open museum-case. Anyone could lay their hands on it.”

Sir Clinton’s face showed perplexity.

“It’s time that we’re up against,” he repeated; and he seemed to be making some unsatisfactory calculation. “I wish I’d known about that stuff an hour ago.”

He turned to Wendover.

“Look here, you must do this for me. I’ve other things to attend to which must be put through immediately. Will you take Dr. Ardsley up in your car to Whistlefield? He’ll identify the pot of curare for you; you couldn’t be sure of it yourself. And then take charge of it. Quote me, if anyone raises objections. And make a note of who objects, if anyone does. Now it’s a matter of hurry, and more hurry. You must get that stuff into your hands without a second’s delay, Wendover.”

The toxicologist wasted no time.

“I’ll get my coat now,” he said, going towards the door.

“We must stop any chance of further supplies at once, just in case of more trouble,” Sir Clinton said, when their host had left the room.

Wendover was plainly astonished.

“Do you expect another crime? Surely two’s enough?”

“One never knows,” Sir Clinton affirmed, with a hint of trouble in his tone. “I’d never forgive myself if I neglected the possibility—even though it’s a very remote one. One can’t bring dead men back to life with a few regrets, you know.”

Ardsley put his head in at the door.

“I’m ready.”

“Then let’s get off,” said Sir Clinton. “Drop me in the village as we pass, Wendover, I’ve something to do there. I’ll join you at Whistlefield as quick as I can. Wait for me there. Now drive for all you’re worth.”

As they came into the village, Sir Clinton gave a sigh of relief.

“Shops still open, I see. That’s all right!”

He got down from the car.

“Now, off you go. Don’t waste a moment!”

As the car moved off, the Chief Constable glanced along the street and then, with deliberate restraint, he lounged over to the door of the local ironmonger. All traces of hurry had disappeared. He seemed merely a casual purchaser.

“Good evening,” he said pleasantly to the man behind the counter. “You seem to stock a fairly wide selection of things, to judge by your window. I’m looking for a small drill, if you have one on the premises. Could you let me see one or two?”

The ironmonger, it seemed, kept such things in stock.

Sir Clinton examined them.

“This seems to be what I want,” he said at last. “Have you a brace to fit it?”

He fitted the drill to the brace, took out a penny and tried the drill. Then, with the hole half-bored, he seemed to lose interest in the matter.

“You don’t stock air-gun slugs, do you?”

“As a matter of fact, we do, sir. Mr. Hawkhurst of Whistlefield uses a lot of them, and he persuaded me to keep a stock of them. Nobody else has any need for them; but he buys quite a lot from time to time.”

“Perhaps you keep darts, too?”

“Yes, I’ve got some in stock.”

Sir Clinton considered for a moment.

“Let’s see. I’ll take a hundred slugs and a couple of dozen darts. You might put the whole lot in one parcel—I’ll take the brace and drill as well.”

While the man was packing up the articles, Sir Clinton made inquiries as to the position of the druggist’s shop in the village; and on leaving the ironmonger’s he made his way to it.

“Let’s see,” he reflected aloud, after he had had a few words with the druggist on local gossip. “I’ll have a pennyworth of Condy’s Fluid crystals. They’re a good antiseptic, aren’t they? And about threepence worth of some carbolic solution, too. Have you any litmus, by any chance—the solid stuff is what I want.”

It happened that the druggist had all these in stock.

“That will be all to-night, sir?” he inquired, as Sir Clinton took the packets and paid for his purchases.

“That will be all for the present,” said the Chief Constable absent-mindedly; and he left the shop after saying good-evening.

He made his way to the police station, where the sergeant-in-charge, recognising him, came forward at once.

“Have you a room here that I can have to myself for ten minutes or so, sergeant?”

“Yes, Sir Clinton. This way.”

“This will do all right,” the Chief Constable said, after a glance at the place. “By the way, sergeant, send a man out at once to get me a small table vice—you know these portable things—at the ironmonger’s. I saw one in the window as I passed. And wait a moment—can you smoke Navy Cut? Good. Then get a couple of small tins as well.”

Considerably mystified, the sergeant executed his orders; and when the various articles had been procured, Sir Clinton closed the door behind him and set to work. His task took him rather longer than he expected, but at last it was done to his satisfaction. He called his subordinate in again.

“A glass of water, sergeant, if you please.”

When this was brought, he shut the door again. Some minutes later he came out and called the sergeant.

“Here’s your Navy Cut, sergeant. I’m sorry I can’t give you the tins.”

The sergeant, completely at a loss to understand these proceedings, thanked him in a dazed fashion and began to sweep the tobacco from the table into his pouch.

“How far is it to Whistlefield?” Sir Clinton inquired.

On learning the distance he borrowed a bicycle from one of the constables.

“Send up to Whistlefield for it to-morrow—or in an hour, if you like. I’ll leave word that you’re to get it.”

And with that the Chief Constable mounted the machine and rode off. The sergeant watched him out of sight and then returned into the police-station. He entered the room which Sir Clinton had been using and looked at the debris of the unknown experiment.

“He’s had something clipped in that vice, I suppose. And there’s a drill; I wonder where he picked that up. And he’s got some pinky stuff in that glass of water, too. And he takes away the tins and he leaves the tobacco to me. This is a rum kind of Chief Constable to have, for sure. What’s he getting at?”

Chapter VII.
The Pot of Curare

After leaving the Chief Constable in the village, Wendover took the road to Whistlefield. Sir Clinton’s obvious anxiety had impressed him; and he drove fast. He was not altogether pleased at having Ardsley thrust upon him as a companion; for he disliked the toxicologist. Whenever he saw Ardsley’s grim, clean-shaven face he had a vision of tortured animals, and a spasm of repugnance attacked him. His knowledge of the Vivisection Act was negligible, and his imagination pictured helpless beasts strapped to tables and writhing under the knife of the vivisector. For politeness’ sake, he forced himself to make conversation.

“It’s to be hoped we can manage this for Driffield without a hitch,” he said. “He seems to be afraid of leaving the stuff lying loose. You can find it all right, I suppose?”

“I can go straight to the place where it used to be kept,” Ardsley assured him coldly, paying no attention to the speculative part of Wendover’s speech.

He seemed to feel no desire to continue the conversation; and Wendover felt that he had suffered a snub.

“Surly devil!” he commented inwardly. “He won’t even meet one half-way.”

He had no time to brood over the matter, however, for very soon they reached Whistlefield.

“You’d better do the talking,” Ardsley advised, as they got out of the car and approached the door of the house. Wendover nodded in agreement and rang the bell. When the maid appeared he asked if Ernest Shandon was disengaged. The maid seemed doubtful.

“He’s in the study, sir, and he left word that he wasn’t to be disturbed.”

Wendover thought of asking for the secretary; but it struck him that since they had come to commandeer the drug, it would be best to see one of the family. After all, it was private property, even if it was dangerous stuff.

“Is Mr. Hawkhurst at home?”

The maid showed them into a room and asked them to wait until she could find him.

“If he isn’t, then ask Miss Hawkhurst to see us for a moment if she can,” Wendover directed.

In a few moments, Arthur Hawkhurst entered the room, looking rather surprised when he saw who his two visitors were.

“Fairly travelling round and seeing the country, aren’t you, Wendover? Morbid curiosity, I think, haunting the scene of crime like this.”

He nodded to Ardsley. Quite obviously the double murder had not affected his spirits to any extent. Wendover was not much surprised. The boy had never been a favourite with either of his uncles; and though he seemed lacking in decent respect for the victims, Wendover put it down to Arthur’s slightly unbalanced mentality.

“I’d have preferred a shade less cheeriness, I must say,” he thought to himself, “but I suppose it would have been mere hypocrisy in his case, and one must make some allowance for his brain being a bit abnormal just now.”

He came to the point at once.

“We’ve been sent up by Sir Clinton Driffield to see if something is in that museum of your uncle’s. He wants to know if it’s been removed by any chance.”

“What the devil does he know about the museum?” demanded Arthur. “He never saw it when he was here in the afternoon. What does he want with it anyway? And what is it that he does want? Does he think one of the blokes upstairs had offended one of the Mayan idols and got a settler by way of squaring the account?”

“No,” Wendover said, hastily. “Nothing of that sort.”

“Well, what is it then? I’ll get it for you.”

“Don’t trouble, please. Dr. Ardsley knows the look of it and it will be easiest for us to go to the museum and look round ourselves.”

“Oh, indeed!” Arthur grew distinctly hostile. “You seem to take a good deal on yourselves. Why not wait till you’re asked, before wandering about in people’s houses?”

Wendover felt that the matter was becoming awkward. The boy seemed to have flown into a passion, one of these storms of emotion to which he had been subject since his illness. And then another thought crossed Wendover’s mind, though he tried to dismiss it. Why should Arthur be so anxious to prevent them entering the museum? Curare had not been mentioned. Surely young Hawkhurst could have no suspicion of what they wanted; and yet he seemed determined to put difficulties in the way. It was with great relief that he saw Sylvia come into the room. After greeting her, he turned away from Arthur and explained the matter to the girl.

“Of course. Come along at once,” she invited them, ignoring Arthur’s lowering face. “Anything we can do to clear up this miserable affair ought to be done.”

She led them through the house to the museum. It was, as Ardsley had said, mainly filled with rubbish—odds and ends which might possibly call up recollections in the mind which had gathered the stuff, but of very little interest to a casual visitor. It was a miscellany of souvenirs rather than a museum; and the items seemed to be lying on the shelves without any system whatever.

Ardsley evidently knew exactly where to go. Leaving the others, he moved across to one of the cases on the wall, opened it, and took down from a shelf a little pot of unbaked earthenware.

Arthur had followed him suspiciously.

“What’s that you’re doing?” he demanded, abruptly.

“The Chief Constable asked me to find this for him,” Ardsley replied, examining the material in the pot as he spoke.

“You’re not taking any of it, are you?”

Young Hawkhurst put the question with obvious distrust. He had his eyes fixed on the toxicologist’s hands, as though he feared that Ardsley might remove some of the stuff under their very eyes.

“No,” Ardsley retorted, with a certain sharpness in his tone. “I’ve nothing further to do with it.”

He handed the little vessel to Wendover as he spoke; and seemed to dissociate himself from any further connection with the matter. Arthur’s eyes fixed themselves on the pot. He was still, apparently, disturbed by the way things were going.

“I don’t care about this way of doing things,” he complained. “Here you come along. For all we know you’ve no authority whatever behind you. And you go straight to this stuff and want to take it away with you, by the look of it. I know what it is. It’s curare—Indian arrow-poison. And you propose calmly to walk off with it! We can’t have that sort of thing. It’s dangerous stuff. You’ve no right to take it: I object.”

Wendover tried to throw oil on the waters.

“We aren’t going to take it away,” he explained, turning to Sylvia. “Sir Clinton asked us to pick it out—that’s all. He’ll be here shortly and you can learn from himself what he intends to do. But in any case, I think it ought to be in a safer place than this. As you say”—he turned again to Arthur—“it’s dangerous stuff.”

Sylvia agreed immediately.

“It was rather careless to leave it about like that if it’s poisonous,” she confirmed.

Wendover’s mind had been busy in the meanwhile. He had noted for Sir Clinton’s benefit that Arthur evidently knew the nature of the stuff, although there was no label on the specimen. If Arthur knew, then the chances were that other people knew also. He glanced at the contents of the pot in his hand, and he thought he could detect that some of the stuff had been removed. The original surface seemed to have been disturbed. Then he remembered that Ardsley had volunteered an account of how he had run short of curare and had taken some of Roger’s specimen. That might account for the disturbance. Another thought occurred to him, and he asked permission to inspect the museum.

“Do you mind if I look round the shelves?” he asked Sylvia. “I’ve never been in this place before, you know. Your uncle seems to have collected a lot of specimens.”

Sylvia accompanied him in his tour of inspection; but she could throw little light on the various objects.

“Hardly anything’s labelled, as you see,” she pointed out.

“Once or twice I offered to label them all for Uncle Roger; for it seems so silly to have a lot of things there with no explanation, doesn’t it?”

They moved down the room, scanning the shelves. Ardsley remained near the door, grimly aloof from the rest of the group. Arthur hovered uncertainly about the room, evidently keeping his eye on the visitors as though troubled by suspicions of their motives.

“This is a dreadful business about my uncles,” Sylvia said in a low voice, when she and Wendover had moved away from the others. “I was terribly shocked when I got back here and heard what had happened. I’m not going to pretend I was very fond of either of them—they always seemed to me different from the rest of us, somehow—but I liked them in a way; and it was horrible to come back and find that while I’d been enjoying myself in the afternoon, they’d been . . .”

She hesitated, evidently disliking the word—“murdered.”

Wendover nodded understandingly. He quite appreciated her feelings. Neither of the dead men had been of the type that would attract the admiration or even the respect of a girl like Sylvia. Their disappearance would leave no real gap in her world. But after all, they were relations of hers and the sudden incursion of violence and death into her family was bound to leave its impression.

“You’re not frightened, are you?” he asked.

“No, of course not. But it seems a frightful affair, doesn’t it? It leaves one dazed, somehow—like a bad dream. Only one doesn’t wake up. We all seem to be going about trying to persuade ourselves that the world’s just the same as ever; but somehow I don’t seem to succeed. It’s too horrible for that.”

Wendover did his best to soothe her. Behind the pretence of indifference he could see that she was badly shaken. Quite obviously she was trying to minimise her feelings so as not to make him uncomfortable. They continued their tour of the collection, and she tried to interest herself in explaining to him the various objects in it.

When they had completed their inspection, Wendover suppressed a sigh of relief.

“Well,” he said to himself, “there are no poisoned arrows there, at any rate. This pot of stuff seems to be the only danger-point in the whole lot.”

He bent his efforts to infusing at least a semblance of harmony into the company, but it was not a very successful attempt. Sylvia seconded him to the best of her ability; but Arthur still maintained his suspicious attitude; and Ardsley seemed disinclined to emerge from his state of unfriendly neutrality. It was a relief to them all when the door of the museum opened and Ernest Shandon ushered in the Chief Constable. Stenness followed close on their heels.

“This is Sir Clinton Driffield, Miss Hawkhurst,” Wendover hastened to say, when he remembered that they had not met in the afternoon. Sir Clinton bowed to the girl and then, with a word of apology, he turned to Wendover.

“Got the stuff?” he demanded; and his face cleared when Wendover held up the little earthenware pot. A glance at Ardsley confirmed that it was the right thing; and Sir Clinton seemed to pay no further attention to it at the moment.

“I’m afraid I disturbed your uncle, Miss Hawkhurst. He was busy in the study, and I was rather loath to interrupt him; but he very kindly came out at once.”

Ernest, in the background, fumbled for a moment with his eyeglasses.

“I was very busy,” he admitted. “But of course I wasn’t so busy that I couldn’t stop. In fact, I was just turning over papers and going through the safe with Stenness. It wasn’t really important, or at least not so important that it couldn’t be put aside for a time, and Sir Clinton said he wasn’t going to stay more than a few minutes. So I just left things, of course. I’d just been looking over Roger’s will. We happened to come across it on the top of a pile of things in the safe. I couldn’t understand it—to tell you the truth. These lawyers are terrible fellows for putting in long words—like ‘hereinafter’ and ‘heritable’ and ‘moveable’ and ‘accretion,’ and so on. And all about ‘survivor or survivors’ and ‘beneficiaries’ and a lot of complicated things besides. If it hadn’t been for Stenness I don’t think I could have made out what it was all about.”

He blinked helplessly at the group, and then continued with a tinge of pride in his tone.

“Roger made me one of his trustees. Neville was another of them. And there’s a third, the head of his firm of lawyers, I think, or at any rate, a lawyer.”

Then, in a rather discouraged voice:

“I suppose that’ll mean a lot of bother—signing papers and all that sort of thing.”

Sir Clinton waited patiently for the end of Ernest’s speech; and then he came to the point at once.

“If you’re an executor that simplifies matters, Mr. Shandon. I want to take away this article here”—he indicated the pot in Wendover’s hand—“but only for a day or two, probably. You’ll get it back again in due course. It’s only a loan, you understand.”

Ernest evidently felt the dignity of his new position. He put out his hand for the pot, examined it carefully through his glasses, then handed it over to Sir Clinton, though with a certain reluctance.

“Have I any right to part with it, Stenness? You know what the will says.”

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t, Mr. Shandon,” the secretary reassured him. “Besides, if the Chief Constable wants it in connection with this afternoon’s affair”—he glanced interrogatively at Sir Clinton—“I’ve no doubt he could get power to take it, whether you want to give it up or not.”

Ernest seemed to feel that he had got into deeper waters than he cared about.

“Well, if Stenness says that, I suppose it’s all right. He understood the will and he ought to know. He explained it all to me very carefully just a few minutes ago, so he knows what’s what. I could understand him all right. Why can’t lawyers use plain language like Stenness, instead of wrapping it all up in ‘hereinafters’ and ‘aforesaids’? It’s a stupid sort of way to write. I can’t think what they do it for.”

Rather to Wendover’s surprise, Sir Clinton showed no great eagerness to be gone. He pulled from his pocket the tin box which had been found in the Maze and slowly removed the cover.

“You’re an expert with air-guns, I think, Mr. Hawkhurst?” he asked pleasantly, as though appealing to an authority. “Would you mind having a look at these things and telling me what you make of them? Don’t touch the points,” he added quickly. “They’re very dangerous.”

Arthur Hawkhurst had been listening with a frown to Sir Clinton’s negotiations for the pot of curare; but he seemed to be flattered by the Chief Constable’s direct appeal to him. He came forward, took the box in his hand, and examined the contents minutely.

“May I take one out to look at it?”

“Of course—but be careful,” Sir Clinton agreed.

Arthur removed one of the darts and inspected it.

“They seem to be just ordinary-pattern air-gun darts. They’d fit any of the guns we have. But someone seems to have been monkeying with them—boring holes in them and filling them up with some dirt or other. And the feathering’s all filthy, too.”

He completed his examination and handed the box back to Sir Clinton.

“Anybody else claim to be an expert?” asked the Chief Constable.

Sylvia looked at the tiny missiles with a shudder.

“They’re just ordinary darts so far as I can see,” she said. “And was it one of these things that killed my uncles? They seem such harmless little things. I’ve fired them often and often at targets myself. One would never dream they could be deadly.”

Sir Clinton closed the box and put it down on the mantel-piece behind him. He seemed suddenly to have been struck by a fresh idea.

“You said ‘any of the guns we have,’ Mr. Hawkhurst. I’d like to know how many air-guns you have on the premises.”

Arthur looked at him distrustfully.

“I can’t tell you on the spot,” he admitted, grudgingly. “We have half a dozen that I could lay my hands on; but we’ve got more than that lying about somewhere or other. They get left in odd places. The gardeners sometimes use them for shooting rats for amusement and so on, and one never knows where the guns are till one asks for them.”

Sir Clinton seemed rather taken aback.

“You seem to have a regular armoury,” he said.

“I’m keen on air-guns,” Arthur explained. “You’re not going to take them away, are you?”

Sir Clinton waved the suggestion aside at once.

“Of course not. I only asked out of curiosity. I knew you were interested.”

Arthur seemed to be relieved by this.

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said in a much more cordial tone. “So long as you leave me one of them, it’ll do all I want.”

“Now, Dr. Ardsley, if you’ll just show me where this pot used to stand, I think we shall be able to go,” Sir Clinton said, turning to another matter and dismissing the air-gun question.

At this, Ernest came forward.

“I think I can show you where it stood,” he volunteered. “I remember Roger bringing it back from South Africa. He used to keep it on a shelf in his study in his last house, I remember; the third shelf from the top, to the right of the door. Then when he came here, he had such a lot of stuff that he’d collected that he found he’d got to make a museum of it; so he put it all together in this room. I’ve been over it all with him—I helped him to arrange it, I remember. But it seemed to me very dull. Not a bit interesting. But, of course, if you like, I could show it to you and tell you all about it. Perhaps it might interest you, though I found it dull. People’s tastes differ so much. One never can tell, can one?”

Ardsley had paid no attention to Ernest’s flood of information. He had gone down to the proper shelf and now he pointed out the empty space to Sir Clinton. The Chief Constable examined the place carefully, but said nothing.

At length he went to the windows of the room and inspected the catches.

“Anyone could have got in here without much trouble,” he commented. “You don’t seem much afraid of burglars, Mr. Shandon.”

“No,” Ernest admitted, refixing his eyeglasses with care and looking wisely at the window-fastenings. “You see, we’ve never had any burglary here. It may seem strange, for of course Whistlefield’s a bit isolated and it might be a good place to burgle. I never burgled myself, you know, so I don’t really know about these things. There’s a lot of silver, of course,” he added. “Perhaps it is strange that we never had a burglary. Now I come to think of it, it would be quite an easy house to get into. We ought to have burglar alarms put on. Really, things are an awful bother. Can you recommend a good burglar-alarm, Sir Clinton?”

The Chief Constable deprecated the proposed task with a smile.

“Really, Mr. Shandon, I’ve had no particular experience. You’d better have a look at a few and choose the one you think most satisfactory.”

Ernest’s face expressed as clearly as print his inward comment: “More trouble!”

“I don’t know, Sir Clinton; perhaps I’d better get some. But then, you know,” he added with a touch of relief, “we’ve never had a burglary yet. Hardly worth while fitting alarms, perhaps. It’s such a nuisance getting the things, and then getting workmen up to fit them—turn the whole place upside down and all that—and then having to remember to set them at night before one goes to bed. You don’t think it’s worth while, do you?” he ended, hopefully.

Sir Clinton shook his head.

“You’re in charge now, Mr. Shandon, you know. You must do what you think best yourself.”

He turned to Ardsley and Wendover.

“I think we must be getting on the road again.”

They took their leave and got into Wendover’s car again.

“We’ll drop you at your house,” said Sir Clinton to the toxicologist. “It was very good of you to take all this trouble to help us. I feel a good deal easier in my mind now that I’ve got this.”

He tapped the little jar of curare which he had brought away with him.

Chapter VIII.
Opportunity, Method, and Motive

Wendover picked up the decanter and poured out some whiskey for his guest.

“You can’t complain that I’ve worried you with questions, Clinton, but I think you might tell me something about this business at the Maze. You seem to have definite ideas, and I’d like to know what they are.”

He glanced at the tumbler as he spoke, then added:

“ ‘In vino veritas,’ you know.”

Sir Clinton looked up with a quizzical expression on his face:

“Truth at the bottom of the decanter, eh?” he inquired. “Well, if that’s the method you can give me just two fingers and all the soda. The truth’s sometimes dangerous when it’s undiluted. And, remember, I warned you frankly that it might not be convenient to tell you very much just at present. The arrangement was that you were to give your views and I was to say what I thought of them.”

Wendover acknowledged the accuracy of this.

“At least you might give me something in the way of general principles, though. They aren’t hush-hush matters, at any rate.”

Sir Clinton came over, lifted his tumbler, and went back again to his seat before replying.

“That’s true enough,” he admitted. “But I don’t think general principles are likely to take you far in this case. I can make you a present of them without giving much away.”

Wendover poured out his own whiskey and soda and returned to his chair.

“Go on,” he said. “Make a lecture of it, if you like. The night’s still young.”

“I’ve a good mind to take you at your word, and you’ll have only yourself to thank if it bores you. To begin with, then, there are three basic points on which a prosecutor has to satisfy the judge—or the jury, if it’s a jury case. These are: opportunity, method, and motive. It isn’t absolutely necessary to prove motive; but one does what one can to establish it if possible. A jury might be chary of convicting unless they saw something of the sort.”

“You might expand that a bit,” Wendover suggested. “All you’ve given me is three words.”

“Take them one by one,” Sir Clinton went on. “First of all, opportunity. The accused man must be somebody who had a real chance of committing the crime—somebody who isn’t excluded by ordinary physical impossibilities. If a body with its throat freshly cut were to fall into this room at the present moment, it would be no use trying to bring a case against the Mikado or the President of the United States. We know that they’re thousands of miles away at this time. It would be physically impossible for them to have done the trick.”

“That’s self-evident,” said Wendover. “A murderer’s bound to have been on the spot when he committed his murder.”

“Not necessarily,” Sir Clinton contradicted at once. “A poisoner needn’t be near his victim when the victim dies. He might have sent poisoned chocolates by post or something like that. But he must have had the opportunity of committing the crime, whether he was on the spot or not. You couldn’t have accused Robinson Crusoe in a poisoned chocolates case; he was outside the postal radius.”

Wendover nodded in agreement.

“But in this particular case at the Maze,” he commented, “it’s pretty plain that the murderer was on the spot all right. The person who killed the Shandons was somebody who was in or near the Maze between three and four o’clock this afternoon.”

Sir Clinton passed to his second point.

“Method is the next thing. It’s an axiom that the more ordinary the method of killing is, the more difficult it is to spot the murderer. Suppose you find a body in a by-street and it turns out that the man has been stabbed to death. What have you to go on? Not much. But if you find somebody poisoned with some fairly out-of-the-way alkaloid, then you limit the number of possible murderers very considerably. You remember the Crippen case. Divergence from the normal is the weakest link in a murderer’s chainmail.”

“Well, you ought to be happy in this affair. You’ve got a sufficiently out-of-the-way method.”

“That’s so,” Sir Clinton admitted. “But what you gain on the swings you sometimes lose on the roundabouts, you know. The method in this case was one that either a man or a woman could have used. Even a child can pull a trigger. That extends the range a bit.”

“But a child would need to have had the chance of getting at the curare.”

“And the curare has been lying open to anyone for the last year or two. Don’t forget that.”