"I said good-bye to you, Giulio, when we parted before," she spoke in a low broken voice, "there is no one I love left for me to say it to now." Turning her head away with something like a shudder, she passed swiftly from the room.
Di Monti was pale enough now. Tears stood in those fierce, cold eyes. Eyes that looked as though they might have been handed down from some Etruscan tyrant of old. He blinked them away, straightened his straight back still more, smoothed a non-existent belt, and faced Pointer.
"Ebbene?" he snapped, "but if it was that whelp Bellairs who betrayed that I was at his studio"—he thrust his jaw forward—"I told him that I would kill him if he dared speak of my having been there, when heard that she had been found dead—"
Pointer did not trouble to answer him.
"This way, if you please. There are still a few proofs to be accumulated before the whole story is cleared up."
"And the handcuffs clicked on?" Di Monti threw back his head. "Hardly on my wrists, my good man."
"The end is very close at hand, Count di Monti," Pointer repeated quietly.
The Italian's face stiffened, as though he tightened all his muscles, but without a word he stalked through the double door into Pointer's second room, which again was almost filled by a big table with chairs set close around it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
POINTER followed hard on di Monti's heels. Everybody summoned was present.
The Italian, after a derisive glance at Bellairs, who stared back at him like an angry cat, sat down at the place where his name lay.
Thornton alone seemed to have drunk from some fountain of youth since the previous meeting, though he shot a reproachful glance at the Chief Inspector.
As for Bond and Cockburn, they watched the proceedings with rapt attention again.
The colonel, looking ten years older, sat a little to one side, almost by himself. It was to him that Pointer first spoke.
"While the inspector is getting the mixture just right, I should like a word with you, sir. Kindly step this way." Pointer's tone was very frigid. Superintendent Harris and Inspector Rodman stared inscrutably at the inkstand before them. There had been something very official in Pointer's manner.
"By jove!" Bond muttered under his breath.
"Just so!" Cockburn replied. Di Monti bit his lip. Bellairs started to speak, then checked himself. Thornton took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Pointer led his captive—for Scarlett was practically that—into the farthest room.
"Now, sir, we may not know yet who killed Miss Rose, but we do know who did not. Among those who did not kill her, is your son, the commissioner. Mr. Reginald Scarlett had no more to do with his cousin's death than I."
Colonel Scarlett went red, then white, then a blotched red again. His features twitched.
"I suggest a whisky and soda," Pointer continued cheerily, placing them before the colonel, "while you're helping yourself, sir, I'll get to business. First of all, I'll tell you what we know, and then I'll ask a little further information. If I'm wrong on any point, please correct me as we go along."
The colonel sat silent, breathing fast.
"Your son, the Commissioner of Uganda, had a motor accident nearly three months ago now. That accident, coming on top of a bad head wound got in the war, brought on epileptic seizures. The Government, anxious to keep him if possible, sent him home secretly on sick leave, while he was given out as exploring around Tanganyika. I may say, that false report threw us off the track completely for a while. It was thought safer to leave you out of it, so Professor Charteris went to meet your son at Marseilles, putting his journey forward a couple of weeks. He travelled on with him to Genoa, where the commissioner was to undergo a sun cure at a helium establishment outside the town. He went there under his middle name of Sayce, and once, when an introduction was absolutely necessary, the professor introduced him by that name. The commissioner found that the sun cure, at Hotel Quisisana made him worse. He left suddenly on the Tuesday of the week in which his cousin was found dead. The doctors at Quisisana wired to a friend of yours in town, Sir Henry Carew, who was evidently in your confidence."
"All but at the end," the colonel said huskily.
"Sir Henry got the cable Wednesday, and sent the message down to you in a letter by his car. The Genoese doctors cabled—we had a copy, which is now destroyed—that they feared lest the young man who had left them before his cure had hardly begun, should develop homicidal tendencies."
The colonel nodded. He could not trust himself to speak of that awful cable even yet.
"He had told me that he didn't write to you. I talked with him yesterday in the nursing home, which he leaves to-morrow, as fit as ever. He says he felt too miserable to write to any one. I take it that you, here at home, were on the alert?"
"We took turns, Carew and I, watching for him at night. That was how I could play bridge on Thursday. Sir Henry was patrolling all the roads around Stillwater House till midnight. Then I took over. On the Wednesday we had reversed the hours."
"Yes, I thought that was about it." Pointer nodded to himself. "The commissioner got out at Barnet station on Thursday about ten; he was not recognised or noticed, and walked to Stillwater, hoping that the exercise would do him good. He must have got in unnoticed."
The colonel nodded. "If my son came across by Green Tree Farm, he would have been able to slip in through the orchard."
"He made for the summer house," Pointer went on, "and lay down in one of the bedrooms there, after finding that you were not in your study. There he fell asleep. What sound it was that woke him, he says he doesn't know, but it brought him up all standing, with a feeling that there was something wrong. And something wrong there was! It must have been his cousin's body that he heard striking the flags below his window."
The colonel drew in his breath with a hiss.
"He heard no cry," Pointer went on quickly, for the other was labouring under an almost intolerable strain, "but only the sound of steps running down from the top of the look-out."
"Thank God!" murmured the soldier, covering his face with his hands for a moment. "But then—however, that's for later. He heard no cry, you say? Thank God for that, too!"
"It was an instantaneous death, if ever there was one," Pointer assured him. "Your son opened his window, but the sky was overcast. He saw something rush past, below, bent double like a wild animal. And a wild, savage animal it was, true enough. He would have gone out to investigate, but just then came the sound of all your voices, as you went out after that shot."
"And I still don't understand that shot!" burst out Scarlett.
"Patience just a bit longer, sir. Being so ill, and weary after his walk, the commissioner lay down and fell asleep again at once. When he awoke the second time, it was half-past twelve. He remembered the steps running down the outside stairs, and the sudden rush past below. Curiosity, mingled with an odd sense of unease, he says, made him go out on to the flags. He stumbled headlong over Miss Charteris's body lying in a little pool of blood from the wound in her head where it had struck the edge of a flower-pot. That frightful shock brought on an attack. I confess when I think of some of the fancies those broken flower-pots gave rise to in my mind—"
Pointer shook his head. Then he went on, "You found him, colonel? How?"
"I heard him. Heard