can’t have proved that button was mine because it wasn’t. Why don’t you tell me what you have found so that I can explain away whatever it was? If you have new evidence you can surely ask me for an explanation. I have a right to know, haven’t I? Whether I can explain or not?”
“There isn’t anything you could explain away, Tisdall. You’d better get ready to come with us.”
Tisdall got to his feet, his mind still entangled in the unbelievableness of what was happening to him. “I can’t go in these things,” he said, looking down at his waiter’s dress. “Can I change?”
“Yes, you can change, and take some things with you.” Grant’s hands ran over his pockets in expert questioning, and came away empty. “But you’ll have to do it with us here. Don’t be too long about it, will you? You can wait there, Sanger,” he added, and swung the door to, leaving Sanger outside. He himself moved over to lean against the window-sill. It was a long way to the ground, and Tisdall, in Grant’s opinion, was the suicide type. Not enough guts to brazen a thing out. Not enough vanity, perhaps, to like the limelight at any price. Certainly the “everyone sorry when I’m dead” type.
Grant watched him now with minute attention. To an outsider he was a casual visitor, propped casually in the window while he indulged in casual conversation. In reality he was ready for instant emergency.
But there was no excitement. Tisdall pulled his suit-case from under the bed, and began with automatic method to change into his tweed and flannels. Grant felt that if the man carried poison, it would be somewhere in his working garments, and unconsciously relaxed a little as the waiter’s dress was cast aside. There was going to be no trouble. The man was coming quietly.
“I needn’t have worried as to how I was going to live,” Tisdall was saying. “There seems to be a moral somewhere in this very immoral proceeding. What do I do about a lawyer, by the way, when I have no money and no friends?”
“One will be provided.”
“Like a table napkin. I see.”
He opened the cupboard nearest to Grant, and began to take things from their hangers and fold them into his case.
“At least you can tell me what my motive was?” he said presently, as if a new thought had struck him. “You can mistake buttons; you can even wish a button on to a coat that never had it; but you can’t pin a motive where there couldn’t be one!”
“So you had no motive?”
“Certainly not. Quite the opposite. What happened last Thursday morning was the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my life. I should have thought that was obvious even to an outsider.”
“And of course you had not the faintest idea that Miss Clay had made a codicil to her will leaving you a ranch and a large sum of money.”
Tisdall had been readjusting the folds of a garment. He stopped now, his hands still holding the cloth, but motionless, and stared at Grant.
“Chris did that!” he said. “No. No, I didn’t know. How wonderful of her!”
And for a moment doubt stirred in Grant. That had been beautifully done. Timing, expression, action. No professional actor could have done it better. But the doubt passed. He recrossed his legs, by way of shaking himself, recalled the charm and innocence of murderers he had known (Andrew Hamey, who specialised in marrying women and drowning them and who looked like a choir soloist, and others of even greater charm and iniquity) and then composed his mind to the peace of a detective who has got his man.
“So you’ve raked up the perfect motive. Poor Chris! She thought she was doing me such a good turn. Have I any defence at all, do you know?”
“That is not for me to say.”
“I have a great respect for you, Inspector Grant. I think it probable that I shall be unavailingly protesting my innocence on the scaffold.”
He pushed the nearer cupboard door to, and opened the further one. The door opened away from Grant, so that the interior of the cupboard was not visible. “But you disappoint me in one way. I thought you were a better psychologist, you know. When I was telling you the story of my life on Saturday morning, I really thought you were too good a judge to think that I could have done what you suspected me of. Now I find you’re just a routine policeman.”
Still keeping his hand on the door-knob, he bent down to the interior of the cupboard as if to take shoes from the floor of it.
There was the rasp of a key torn from its lock, the cupboard door swung shut, and even as Grant leaped the key turned on the inside.
“Tisdall!” he shouted. “Don’t be a fool! Do you hear!” His mind raced over the antidotes for the various poisons. Oh, God, what a fool he had been! “Sanger! Help me to break this open. He’s locked himself in.”
The two men flung their combined weight on the door. It resisted their best efforts.
“Listen to me, Tisdall,” Grant said between gasps, “poison is a fool’s trick. We’ll get you soon enough to give you an antidote, and all that will happen is that you’ll suffer hell’s pain for nothing. So think better of it!”
But still the door resisted them.
“Fire axe!” Grant said. “Saw it when we came up. On wall at the end of the passage. Quick!”
Sanger fled and in eight seconds was back with the axe.
As the first blow of it fell, a half-dressed and sleepy colleague of Tisdall’s appeared from next door and announced, “You mek a noise like thet you hev the cops een!”
“Hey!” he added, seeing the axe in Sanger’s grasp. “What the hell you theenk you do, eh?”
“Keep away, you fool! There’s a man in that cupboard committing suicide.”
“Suicide! Cupboard!” The waiter rubbed his black hair in perplexity, like a half-awakened child. “That is not a cupboard!”
“Not a cupboard!”
“No, that is the what you call eet—leetle back stairs. For fire, you know.”
“God!” said Grant, and made for the door.
“Where does it come out—the stairway?” he called back to the waiter.
“In the passage to the front hall.”
“Eight flights,” Grant said to Sanger. “Lift’s quicker, perhaps.” He rang. “Williams will stop him if he tries to go out by the door,” he said, searching for comfort.
“Williams has never seen him, sir. At least I don’t think so.”
Grant used words he had forgotten since he stopped campaigning in France.
“Does the man on duty at the back know him?”
“Oh, yes, sir. That’s what he’s there for, to stop him. But Sergeant Williams was just waiting for us.”
Words failed Grant altogether.
The
