her position in the bed a natural one?”
“How do I know how she generally laid in bed?” Heath was restive and in bad humor. “She was half sitting up, with a coupla pillows under her shoulders, and the covers pulled up.”
“Nothing unusual about her attitude?”
“Not that I could see. There hadn’t been a struggle, if that’s what you mean.”
“And her hands: were they outside or under the covers?”
Heath looked up, mildly astonished.
“They were outside. And, now that you mention it, they had a tight hold on the spread.”
“Clutching it, in fact?”
“Well, yes.”
Vance leaned forward quickly.
“And her face, Sergeant? Had she been shot in her sleep?”
“It didn’t look that way. Her eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead.”
“Her eyes were open and staring,” repeated Vance, a note of eagerness coming into his voice. “What would you say her expression indicated? Fear? Horror? Surprise?”
Heath regarded Vance shrewdly. “Well, it mighta been any one of ’em. Her mouth was open, like as if she was surprised at something.”
“And she was clutching the spread with both hands.” Vance’s look drifted into space. Then slowly he rose and walked the length of the office and back, his head down. He halted in front of the District Attorney’s desk, and leaned over, resting both hands on the back of a chair.
“Listen, Markham. There’s something terrible and unthinkable going on in that house. No haphazard unknown assassin came in by the front door last night and shot down those two women. The crime was planned—thought out. Some one lay in wait—some one who knew his way about, knew where the light-switches were, knew when every one was asleep, knew when the servants had retired—knew just when and how to strike the blow. Some deep, awful motive lies behind that crime. There are depths beneath depths in what happened last night—obscure fetid chambers of the human soul. Black hatreds, unnatural desires, hideous impulses, obscene ambitions are at the bottom of it; and you are only playing into the murderer’s hands when you sit back and refuse to see its significance.”
His voice had a curious hushed quality, and it was difficult to believe that this was the habitually debonair and cynical Vance.
“That house is polluted, Markham. It’s crumbling in decay—not material decay, perhaps, but a putrefaction far more terrible. The very heart and essence of that old house is rotting away. And all the inmates are rotting with it, disintegrating in spirit and mind and character. They’ve been polluted by the very atmosphere they’ve created. This crime, which you take so lightly, was inevitable in such a setting. I only wonder it was not more terrible, more vile. It marked one of the tertiary stages of the general dissolution of that abnormal establishment.”
He paused, and extended his hand in a hopeless gesture.
“Think of the situation. That old, lonely, spacious house, exuding the musty atmosphere of dead generations, faded inside and out, run down, dingy, filled with ghosts of another day, standing there in its ill-kept grounds, lapped by the dirty waters of the river. . . . And then think of those six ill-sorted, restless, unhealthy beings compelled to live there in daily contact for a quarter of a century—such was old Tobias Greene’s perverted idealism. And they’ve lived there, day in and day out, in that mouldly miasma of antiquity—unfit to meet the conditions of any alternative, too weak or too cowardly to strike out alone; held by an undermining security and a corrupting ease; growing to hate the very sight of one another, becoming bitter, spiteful, jealous, vicious; wearing down each other’s nerves to the raw; consumed with resentment, aflame with hate, thinking evil—complaining, fighting, snarling. . . . Then, at last, the breaking-point—the logical, ineluctable figuration of all this self-feeding, ingrowing hatred.”
“All of that is easy to understand,” agreed Markham. “But, after all, your conclusion is wholly theoretic, not to say literary.—By what tangible links do you connect last night’s shooting with the admittedly abnormal situation at the Greene mansion?”
“There are no tangible links—that’s the horror of it. But the joinders are there, however shadowy. I began to sense them the minute I entered the house; and all this afternoon I was reaching for them blindly. But they eluded me at every turn. It was like a house of mazes and false passages and trapdoors and reeking oubliettes: nothing normal, nothing sane—a house in a nightmare, peopled by strange, abnormal creatures, each reflecting the subtle, monstrous horror that broke forth last night and went prowling about the old hallways. Didn’t you sense it? Didn’t you see the vague shape of this abomination continually flash out and disappear as we talked to these people and watched them battling against their own hideous thoughts and suspicions?”
Markham moved uneasily and straightened a pile of papers before him. Vance’s unwonted gravity had affected him.
“I understand perfectly what you mean,” he said. “But I don’t see that your impressions bring us any nearer to a new theory of the crime. The Greene mansion is unhealthy—that’s granted—and so, no doubt, are the people in it. But I’m afraid you’ve been oversusceptible to its atmosphere. You talk as if last night’s crime were comparable to the poisoning orgies of the Borgias, or the Marquise de Brinvilliers affair, or the murder of Drusus and Germanicus, or the suffocation of the York princes in the Tower. I’ll admit the setting is consonant with that sort of stealthy, romantic crime; but, after all, housebreakers and bandits are shooting people senselessly every week throughout the country, in very much the same way the two Greene women were shot.”
“You’re shutting your eyes to the facts, Markham,” Vance declared earnestly. “You’re overlooking several strange features of last night’s crime—the horrified, astounded attitude of Julia at the moment of death; the illogical interval between the two shots; the fact that the lights were on in both rooms; Ada’s story of that hand reaching for her; the absence of any signs of a forced entry——”
“What about those footprints in the snow?” interrupted Heath’s matter-of-fact voice.
“What about them, indeed?” Vance wheeled about. “They’re as incomprehensible as the rest of this hideous business. Some one walked to and from the house within a half-hour of the crime; but it was some one who knew he could get in quietly and without disturbing any one.”
“There’s nothing mysterious about that,” asserted the practical Sergeant. “There are four servants in the house, and any one of ’em could’ve been in on the job.”
Vance smiled ironically.
“And this accomplice in the house, who so generously opened the front door at a specified hour, failed to inform the intruder where the loot was, and omitted to acquaint him with the arrangement of the house; with the result that, once he was inside, he went astray, overlooked the dining-room, wandered up-stairs, went groping about the hall, got lost in the various bedrooms, had a seizure of panic, shot two women, turned on the lights by switches hidden behind the furniture, made his way down-stairs without a sound when Sproot was within a few feet of him, and walked out the front door to freedom! . . . A strange burglar, Sergeant. And an even stranger inside accomplice.—No; your explanation won’t do—decidedly it won’t do.” He turned back to Markham. “And the only way
