"Your belief, or non-belief, does not affect the situation unfortunately, Mr. Daventry. Lady Anne has been foully done to death in her own house and in our midst, and her murderer has to be found and punished whoever he may be."
John Daventry ran his hand through his hair. Though his face had somewhat recovered its ordinary colour, the sickly, greenish hue had not wholly disappeared.
"It—Of course I know that Lady Anne is dead," he said, with a little stammer between his words of which he had never been conscious before. "Dead! Murdered! That is horrible enough, Heaven knows. But you say—you said—"
"I say now what the world will probably say later," interrupted Bruce Cardyn, "that Lady Anne may have been murdered by one of the five people in the room."
"But how could it have been one of us?" Daventry stared at him again. "Myself, yourself, Soames, the two girls—could one of us have murdered her? Would any of us have murdered her?"
"Could anyone else have murdered her?" Bruce counter-questioned pithily.
"The doors were not locked," John Daventry said, looking at Soames. "Somebody might have rushed in from the outside."
"Yes. I have thought of that, sir," Soames interposed shakily. "If the assassin had been in concealment outside—"
"Or that brute at the window?" Daventry went on. "I believe myself he did it by some devilry or other. I don't profess to know how."
"It would be an impossibility," Bruce said shortly. The face at the window was puzzling him more than he would have cared to confess. "We were all at the open window looking for him. How could he have got in?"
"I don't know," Daventry said moodily. "He seemed to vanish. Where did he go anyway? As likely into that room as anywhere else, I should say."
Bruce shook his head.
"He couldn't have come in through the window while we were all looking out of it. The other window nearest Lady Anne was closed."
"The window by her ladyship wasn't quite closed, sir," Soames corrected. "Her ladyship," with a brave attempt to swallow down a rising sob, "always had it left open a couple of inches at the top, for ventilation like."
"That wouldn't—"
Cardyn broke off. Steps were coming along the corridor. He opened the door. Two men came up to him, one whose profession was clearly stamped upon his clean-shaven face, its expression of geniality for once overclouded. The other—a very familiar face and figure to Bruce Cardyn—was Inspector Furnival of Scotland Yard, a thin man of middle height, still considerably on the sunny side of fifty.
"And that is all you can tell me, Mr. Cardyn?"
Inspector Furnival of Scotland Yard was the speaker. He sat at the head of the table in the dining-room in Lady Daventry's house in Charlton Crescent. He was rather unlike the ordinary detective of fiction in that he was small and alert-looking. His sharp inquisitive-looking little face had earned him the sobriquet of "The Ferret," when he was lower down in the Force, and the name stuck to him still. But there was many a crook who had learned to dread the Ferret's gimlet-like grey eyes more than he dreaded anything on earth.
Those same grey eyes were fixed on Bruce Cardyn's now, as if they would force the truth out of him. The younger detective was seated a little lower down the table where the clear light from a French window fell full upon his face.
"Absolutely everything," he said, meeting the inspector's eyes steadily. "It seems inconceivable, but—"
"But you and I have learnt that there is nothing inconceivable, Mr. Cardyn," the other interrupted. "Now, just let me run over my notes. You and Mr. Daventry, and the two girls were at tea with Lady Anne; the butler brought a tray in, and at the same moment a sixth person appeared at the window furthest from Lady Anne. You all rushed to the window, opened it, looked for the man outside. He had apparently disappeared. You heard a groan, and when you turned you found Lady Anne dead, stabbed to the heart with her own dagger."
Bruce nodded.
"Quite correct!"
"And the inference you have drawn, I gather, is that the crime was committed by one of the people in the room."
Bruce looked at him.
"Is it not unavoidable?"
The inspector's eyes were gazing out into the garden with an abstracted far-away look just now.
"Not quite, think," he said gently. "How long were you at the window, Mr. Cardyn?"
"I should think about three minutes," Bruce said thoughtfully. "We were all so puzzled, or, speaking for myself, I should say I was so puzzled by the disappearance of the face at the window, that I signalled to one of my men who was walking about and watching the house from the outside to know what he had seen of him."
"And—" the inspector prompted.
"And he fancied he had seen something move in the ivy. But certainly no man had come down."
"Supposing he had gone up?" Inspector Furnival suggested.
Bruce shook his head.
"I thought of the roof at once, and looked up as well as down, but there was no one to be seen. As a matter of fact getting up to the roof at all in that fashion would be an impossibility—-even for the most expert climber. The ivy gets much thinner when it gets past the second floor, and stops altogether far short of the roof."
There was a pause. Inspector Furnival was drumming with his fingers on the table. Bruce Cardyn sat silent and motionless. His face was grave and troubled. From the moment her summons reached him, the case of Lady Anne Daventry had intrigued him as nothing else had done during his career as a detective. He had felt so hopeful, so certain of being able to safeguard Lady Anne, and to discover her would-be murderer. And never before had he failed so signally.
At last the inspector spoke again.
"I notice that you speak of the 'face at the window,' never of the 'man.'"
"No," Bruce acknowledged. "Because from my own observation I could not say whether it was a man or a woman. It was just like a chalk-white face with staring eyes and a mass of black hair. There seemed to be a kind of vague, intangible mist round it. That is all I can say."
"And a very queer 'all' it is too," the inspector remarked. "Now was it a real man or woman at all? Or was it—could it have been an illusion caused by some arrangement of lights—thrown on the window?"
"Not by any that I have heard of," Bruce said at once. "No. The face looked solid enough. Besides, what reason could anyone have for—"
"Why, they might want to do exactly what really happened. To divert your attention while the murder was committed," the inspector proceeded, his grey eyes looking here, there and everywhere except at the young man's face, and yet somehow noting every change of expression that flitted over it. "Might not that man, face, illusion, whatever it was, have been arranged for by someone who was waiting outside the door until the opportunity came? From what the butler says the door was not even shut."
Cardyn's face did not look responsive.
"Lady Anne was stabbed with her own dagger. No outsider could have arranged for that to have been found close at hand."
"That might have been seized when the murderer got there. He may have intended to use some other weapon, and been quick to see the advantage that using her own dagger would give him."
"Yes, he would have had to be quick indeed!" Bruce asserted satirically.
There was another pause. Both men were listening intently.
Though barely two hours had elapsed since Lady Anne's death, already it seemed to Cardyn that a lifetime had passed away. Inspector Furnival on the point of setting out for Charlton Crescent,