‘And how do you get out of that one?’ demanded Dr Fell.

  ‘Easy! The man’s never left the field. But you don’t see him. You don’t see him because that grand blue uniform is made of paper – over a real white one. As soon as the fan goes up, he tears off the blue one and stuffs it under the white. He jumps down off the horse, and just joins in the gang of white uniformed attendants. Point is, nobody ever takes the trouble to count them attendants beforehand, and they all exit without anybody ever seeing. That’s the basis of most tricks. You’re looking at something you don’t see, or you’ll swear you’ve seen something that’s not there. Hey presto! Bang! Greatest show on earth!’

  The stuffy, gaudily coloured room was quiet. Wind rattled at the windows. Distantly there was a noise of church bells, and the honking of a taxi that passed and died. Hadley shook his notebook.

  ‘We’re getting off the track,’ he said. ‘It’s clever enough, yes; but how does it apply to this problem?’

  ‘It don’t,’ admitted O’Rourke, who seemed convulsed by a noiseless mirth. ‘I’m telling you – well, because you asked. And to show you what you’re up against. I’m giving you the straight dope, Mr Superintendent: I don’t want to discourage you, but if you’re up against a smart illusionist, you haven’t got the chance of a snowball in hell; you haven’t got the chance of that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘They’re trained to it. It’s their business. And there ain’t a prison on earth that can hold ’em.’

  Hadley’s jaw tightened. ‘We’ll see about that when the time comes. What bothers me, and what’s been bothering me for some time, is why Fley sent his brother to do the killing. Fley was the illusionist. Fley would have been the man to do it. But he didn’t. Was his brother in the same line?’

  ‘Dunno. At least, I never saw his name billed anywhere. But—’

  Dr Fell interrupted. With a heavy wheeze, he lumbered up from the couch and spoke sharply.

  ‘Clear the decks for action, Hadley. We’re going to have visitors in about two minutes. Look out therel – but keep back from the window.’

  He was pointing with his stick. Below them, where the alley curved out between the blank windows of houses, two figures shouldered against the wind. They had turned in from Guilford Street; and, fortunately, had their heads down. One Rampole recognized as that of Rosette Grimaud. The other was a tall man whose shoulder lunged and swung as he walked with the aid of a cane; a man whose leg had a crooked twist and whose right boot was of abnormal thickness.

  ‘Get the lights out in those other rooms,’ said Hadley, swiftly. He turned to O’Rourke. ‘I’ll ask you a big favour. Get downstairs as quickly as you can; stop that landlady from coming up and saying anything; keep her there until you hear from me. Pull the door shut after you!’

  He was already out into the narrow passage, snapping off the lights. Dr Fell looked mildly harassed.

  ‘Look here, you don’t mean we’re going to hide and overhear terrible secrets, do you?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve not got what Mills would call the anatomical structure for such tomfoolery. Besides, they’ll spot us in a second. This place is full of smoke – O’Rourke’s shag.’

  Hadley muttered profanities. He drew the curtains so that only a pencil of light slanted into the room.

  ‘Can’t be helped; we’ve got to chance it. We’ll sit here quietly. If they’ve got anything on their minds, they may blurt it out as soon as they get inside the flat and the door is shut. People do. What do you think of O’Rourke, by the way?’

  ‘I think,’ stated Dr Fell, with energy, ‘that O’Rourke is the most stimulating, enlightening, and suggestive witness we have heard so far in this nightmare. He has saved my intellectual self-respect. He is, in fact, almost as enlightening as the church bells.’

  Hadley, who was peering through the crack between the curtains, turned his head round. The line of light across his eyes showed a certain wildness.

  ‘Church bells? What church bells?’

  ‘Any church bells,’ said Dr Fell’s voice out of the gloom. ‘I tell you that to me in my heathen blindness the thought of those bells has brought light and balm. It may save me from making an awful mistake . . . Yes, I’m quite sane.’ The ferrule of a stick rapped the floor and his voice became tense. ‘Light, Hadley! Light at last, and glorious messages in the belfry.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s not something else in the belfry? Yes? Then for God’s sake will you stop this mystification and tell me what you mean? I suppose the church bells tell you how the vanishing-trick was worked?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Dr Fell. ‘Unfortunately not. They only tell me the name of the murderer.’

  There was a palpable stillness in the room, a physical heaviness, as of breath restrained to bursting. Dr Fell spoke in a blank, almost an incredulous voice which carried conviction in its mere incredulity. Downstairs a back door closed. Faintly through the quiet house they heard footsteps on the staircase. One set of footsteps was sharp, light, and impatient. The other had a drag and then a heavy stamp; there was the noise of a cane knocking the banisters. The noises grew louder, but no word was spoken. A key scraped into the lock of the outer door, which opened and closed again with a click of the springlock. There was another click as the light in the hallway was snapped on. Then – evidently when they could see each other – the two burst out as though they had been the ones who held in breath to suffocation.

  ‘So you’ve lost the key I gave you,’ a man’s thin, harsh, quiet voice spoke. It was mocking and yet repressed. ‘And you say you didn’t come here last night, after all?’

  ‘Not last night,’ said Rosette Grimaud’s voice, which had a flat and yet furious tone, ‘not last night or any other night.’ She laughed. ‘I never had any intention of coming at all. You frightened me a little. Well, what of it? And now that I am here, I don’t think so much of your hideout. Did you have a pleasant time waiting last night?’

  There was a movement as though she had stepped forward, and been restrained. The man’s voice rose.

  ‘Now, you little devil,’ said the man, with equal quietness, ‘I’m going to tell you something for the good of your soul. I wasn’t here. I had no intention of coming. If you think all you have to do is crack the whip to send people through hoops – well, I wasn’t here, do you see? You can go through the hoops yourself. I wasn’t here.’

  ‘That’s a lie, Jerome,’ said Rosette, calmly.

  ‘You think so, eh? Why?’

  Two figures appeared against the light of the partly opened door. Hadley reached out and drew back the curtains with a rattle of rings.

  ‘We also would like to know the answer to that, Mr Burnaby,’ he said.

  The flood of murky daylight in their faces caught them off-guard; so much off-guard that expressions were hollowed out as though snapped by a camera. Rosette Grimaud cried out, making a movement of her raised arm as though she would dodge under it, but the flash of the previous look had been bitter, watchful, dangerously triumphant. Jerome Burnaby stood motionless, his chest rising and falling. Silhouetted against the sickly electric light behind, and wearing an old-fashioned broad-brimmed black hat, he bore a curious resemblance to the lean Sandeman figure in the advertisement. But he was more than a silhouette. He had a strong, furrowed face, that ordinarily might have been bluff and amiable like his gestures; an underhung jaw, and eyes which seemed to have lost their colour with anger. Taking off his hat, he tossed it on a divan with a swash-buckling air that struck Rampole as rather theatrical. His wiry brown hair, patched with grey round the temples, stood up as though released from pressure like a jack-in-the-box.

  ‘Well?’ he said with a sort of thin, bluff jocularity, and took a lurching step forward, on the club foot. ‘Is this a hold-up, or what? Three to one, I see. I happen to have a sword-stick, though—’

  ‘It won’t be needed, Jerome,’ said the girl. ‘They’re the police.’

  Burnaby stopped; stopped and rubbed his mouth with a big hand. He seemed nervous, though he went on with ironical jocularity. ‘Oh! The police, eh? I’m honoured. Breaking and entering, I see.’

  ‘You are the tenant of this flat,’ said Hadley, returning an equal suavity, ‘not the owner or landlord of the house. If suspicious behaviour is seen . . . I don’t know about suspicious, Mr Burnaby, but I think your friends would be amused at these – Oriental surroundings. Wouldn’t they?’

  That smile, that tone of voice, struck through to a raw place. Burnaby’s face became a muddy colour.

  ‘Damn you,’ he said, and half-raised the cane, ‘what do you want here?’

  ‘First of all, before we forget it, about what you were saying when you came in here . . .’

  ‘You overheard it, eh?’

  ‘Yes. It’s unfortunate,’ said Hadley, composedly, ‘that we couldn’t have overheard more. Miss Grimaud said that you were in this flat last night. Were you?’

  ‘I was not.’

  ‘You were not . . . Was he, Miss Grimaud?’

  Her colour had come back; come back strongly, for she was angry with a quiet, smiling poise. She spoke in a breathless way, and her long hazel eyes had that fixity, that luminous strained expression, of one who determines to show no emotion. She was pressing her gloves between the fingers, and in the jerkiness of her breathing there was less anger than fear.

  ‘Since you overheard it,’ she answered, after a speculative pause while she glanced from one to the other, ‘it’s no good my denying it, is there? I don’t see why you’re interested. It can’t have anything to do with – my father’s death. That’s certain. Whatever else Jerome is,’ she showed her teeth in an unsteady smile, ‘he’s not a murderer. But since for some reason you are interested, I’ve a good mind to have the whole thing thrashed out now. Some version of this, I can see, is going to get back to Boyd. It might as well be the true one . . . I’ll begin by saying, yes, Jerome was in this flat last night.’

  ‘How do you know that, Miss Grimaud? Were you here?’

  ‘No. But I saw a light in this room at half-past ten.’

  1 See the admirable and startling book by Mr J. C. Cannell.

  XV The Lighted Window

  Burnaby, still rubbing his chin, looked down at her in dull blankness. Rampole could have sworn that the man was genuinely startled; so startled that he could not quite understand her words, and peered at her as though he had never seen her before. Then he spoke in a quiet, common-sense tone which contrasted with his earlier one.

  ‘I say, Rosette,’ he observed, ‘be careful now. Are you sure you know what you’re talking about?’

  ‘Yes. Quite sure.’

  Hadley cut in briskly. ‘At half-past ten? How did you happen to see this light, Miss Grimaud, when you were at your own home with us?’

  ‘Oh no, I wasn’t – if you remember. Not at that time. I was at the nursing-home, with the doctor in the room where my father was dying. I don’t know whether you know it, but the back of the nursing-home faces the back of this house. I happened to be near a window, and I noticed. There was a light in this room; and, I think, the bathroom, too, though I’m not positive of that . . .’

  ‘How do you know the rooms,’ said Hadley, sharply, ‘if you’ve never been here before?’

  ‘I took jolly good care to observe when we came in just now,’ she answered, with a serene and imperturbable smile which somehow reminded Rampole of Mills. ‘I didn’t know the rooms last night; I only knew he had this flat, and where the windows were. The curtains weren’t quite drawn. That’s how I came to notice the light.’

  Burnaby was still contemplating her with the same heavy curiosity.

  ‘Just a moment, Mr – Inspector – er—!’ He humped his shoulder. ‘Are you sure you couldn’t have been mistaken about the rooms, Rosette?’

  ‘Positive, my dear. This is the house on the left-hand side at the corner of the alley, and you have the top floor.’

  ‘And you say you saw me?’

  ‘No, I say I saw a light. But you and I are the only ones who know about this flat. And, since you’d invited me here, and said you would be here . . .’

  ‘By God!’ said Burnaby, ‘I’m curious to see how far you’ll go.’ He hobbled over, with a trick of pulling down the corner of his mouth each time he lunged on the cane; he sat down heavily in a chair, and continued to study her out of his pale eyes. That upstanding hair gave him somehow a queerly alert look. ‘Please go on! You interest me. Yes. I’m curious to see how far you have the nerve to go.’

  ‘Are you really,’ said Rosette, in a flat voice. She whirled round; but her resolution seemed to crack and she succeeded in looking only miserable to the point of tears. ‘I wish I knew myself! I – I wish I knew about you! . . . I said we’d have this out,’ she appealed to Hadley, ‘but now I don’t know whether I want to have it out. If I could decide about him, whether he’s really sympathetic, and just a nice bluff old – old—’

  ‘Don’t say friend of the family,’ snapped Burnaby. ‘For Lord’s sake don’t say friend of the family. Personally, I wish I could decide about you. I wish I could decide whether you think you’re telling the truth, or whether you’re (excuse me for forgetting my chivalry for a moment!) a lying little vixen.’

  She went on steadily: ‘—or whether he’s a sort of polite blackmailer. Oh, not for money!’ She blazed again. ‘Vixen? Yes. Bitch if you like. I admit it. I’ve been both – but why? Because you’ve poisoned everything with all the hints you’ve dropped . . . if I could be sure they were hints and not just my imagination; if I could even be sure you were an honest blackmailer! . . .’

  Hadley intervened. ‘Hints about what?’

  ‘Oh, about my father’s past life, if you must know.’ She clenched her hands. ‘About my birth, for one thing, and whether we mightn’t add another nice term to bitch. But that’s not important. That doesn’t bother me at all. It’s this business about some horrible thing – about my father – I don’t know! Maybe they’re not even hints. But . . . I’ve got it in my head somehow that old Drayman is a blackmailer . . . Then, last night, Jerome asked me to come over here – why, why? I thought: well, is it because that’s the night Boyd always sees me, and it will tickle Jerome’s vanity no end to choose just that night? But I don’t and I didn’t – please understand me! – want to think Jerome was trying a little blackmail himself. I do like him; I can’t help it; and that’s what makes it so awful . . .’

  ‘We might clear it up, then,’ said Hadley. ‘Were you “hinting,” Mr Burnaby?’

  There was a long silence while Burnaby examined his hands. Something in the posture of his bent head, in his slow heavy breathing, as though he were bewilderedly trying to make up his mind, kept Hadley from prompting him until he raised his head.

  ‘I never thought—’ he said. ‘Hinting. Yes. Yes, in strict accuracy, I suppose I was. But never intentionally, I’ll swear. I never thought—’ He stared at Rosette. ‘Those things slip out. Maybe you mean only what you think is a subtle question . . .’ He puffed out his breath in a sort of despairing hiss, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘To me it was an interesting deductive game, that’s all. I didn’t even think of it as prying. I swear I never thought anybody noticed, let alone taking it to heart. Rosette, if that’s the only reason for your interest in me – thinking I was a blackmailer, and afraid of me – then I’m sorry I learned. Or am I?’ He looked down at his hands again, opened and shut them, and then looked slowly round the room. ‘Take a look at this place, gentlemen. The front room especially . . . but you’ll have seen that. Then you know the answer. The Great Detective. The poor ass with the deformed foot, dreaming.’

  For a second Hadley hesitated.

  ‘And did the Great Detective find out anything about Dr Grimaud’s past?’

  ‘No . . . If I had, do you think I’d be apt to tell you?’

  ‘We’ll see if we can’t persuade you. Do you know that there are blood-stains in that bathroom of yours, where Miss Grimaud says she saw a light last night? Do you know that Pierre Fley was murdered outside your door not long before half-past ten?’

  Rosette Grimaud cried out, and Burnaby jerked up his head.

  ‘Fley mur . . . Blood-stains! No! Where? Man, what do you mean?’

  ‘Fley had a room in this street. We think he was coming here when he died. Anyhow, he was shot in the street outside here by the same man who killed Dr Grimaud. Can you prove who you are, Mr Burnaby? Can you prove, for instance, that you are not actually Dr Grimaud’s and Fley’s brother?’

  The other stared at him. He hoisted himself up shakily from the chair.

  ‘Good God! man, are you mad?’ he asked, in a quiet voice. ‘Brother! Now I see! . . . No, I’m not his brother. Do you think if I were his brother I should be interested in . . .’ He checked himself, glanced at Rosette, and his expression became rather wild. ‘Certainly I can prove it. I ought to have a birth certificate somewhere. I – I can produce people who’ve known me all my life. Brother!’

  Hadley reached round to the divan and held up the coil of rope.

  ‘What about this rope? Is it a part of your Great Detective scheme, too?’

  ‘That thing? No. What is it? I never saw it before. Brother!’

  Rampole glanced at Rosette Grimaud, and saw that she was crying. She stood motionless, her hands at her sides and her face set; but the tears brimmed over her eyes.