Smallbone Deceased

And the night of Miss Chittering’s murder: that seemed to be a singularly clumsy alibi that Bob had put up: quite out of keeping with the rest of a carefully-planned performance. And could anyone have been so incredibly careless as to drop that incriminating letter in the office by mistake? But if Bob was not the murderer, further vistas of speculation at once unrolled themselves. What about that letter? It was, more and more clearly, a plant. Put there to be found. Put there by someone who felt the breath of suspicion on their own neck and was becoming pretty desperate to avert it. Put there by…

It was possible. Yes. It was more than possible.

The clinching thought in this train of thought, the item which finally brought conviction was so trivial as to be ludicrous. It turned on nothing more nor less than the shape of an ordinary steel screw.

Feverishly, Bohun dragged back from his memory the events which had led up to the discovery of that letter. Miss Chittering had wanted to move a mirror. Miss Bellbas—he thought it was Miss Bellbas—had suggested putting it up beside the window. He had offered to fix it for them. Just at the moment when he had everything ready Mr. Craine had appeared and he had been obliged to hand over to Miss Cornel. He was not certain what had happened next, but when he reappeared—not more than thirty seconds later (Mr. Craine had only wanted to give him a letter)—everything seemed to have been dropped on the floor. Miss Cornel was on her knees looking for the screws. She had found one of them by the window and the other underneath her own desk, the middle desk of the three. That was it. And it was whilst they were trying to fish the screw out from under the desk that the letter had come to light.

In other words, shorn of all surrounding circumstances and in the plainest language, Miss Cornel had dropped a screw over by Miss Chittering’s desk under the window and had purported to find it under her own desk in the middle of the room. Her explanation had been: “It must have rolled.” He remembered that Hazlerigg had later measured the distance between the two desks. Ten feet. How on earth, said Bohun slowly to himself, how on earth could a screw have rolled for ten feet. Why, a screw couldn’t roll one foot. It couldn’t roll six inches. If you dropped a screw on the floor it went round in a circle. Even on a sloping surface it couldn’t roll.

He got up and started to walk up and down the long room. An even more deadly question had sprung, fully armed, from the dragon’s teeth of his thoughts. And one way or the other it was a question which had to be decided, and decided quickly.

Wait! There was just a chance—a very slender chance—that even now he might be wrong.

He looked up a name in the desk telephone book and dialled a number.

Perry Cockaigne, being a sports writer on a Sunday paper, was one of the few people who could be relied on to be found at his desk late on a Saturday night. He greeted Bohun with enthusiasm, and listened to him without surprise. It seemed quite natural to Perry that people should ring him up in the middle of the night with questions about the sport in which he specialised.

“Yes,” he said. “I remember her. She doesn’t play competitive golf now. No, old boy. You must be muddling her up with someone else. She was a right-hand golfer. Of course, I’m sure. I’ve seen her play dozens of times. Hits the strongest tee shot of any woman I know.”

“Thank you very much,” said Bohun, and hung up.

He was now certain.

II

When Bob Horniman’s telephone call came through, Anne Mildmay was seated in Miss Cornel’s living-room.

It was a comfortable, neutral sort of room. The enlargements of golfing photographs and the silver trophies gave it a masculine air which was contradicted by the Japanese flower prints and the Lalique work, and the large and carefully-arranged bowls of flowers.

Miss Cornel answered the telephone and came back and said: “It’s for you. It’s Bob Horniman. He would seem to be ringing up from Norfolk.”

Anne was away for some time. When she came back into the room her eyes had the story in them for the older woman to read.

“He’s asked me to marry him,” she said.

“What did you say?” enquired Miss Cornel.

“I said Yes,” said Anne. She stood outside herself for a moment, viewing herself in the new, exciting, exacting, terrifying role of bride and married woman.

“I shall make a rampaging wife,” she said.

“In my day,” said Miss Cornel, “that sort of thing was done in a conservatory, or a summer-house, at two o’clock in the morning, to the strains of the Vienna Woods Waltz. Not over the long-distance telephone from a friend’s house.”

“I’m sorry,” said Anne. “There were complications. Perhaps I’d better explain.”

She did so.

“I see,” said Miss Cornel. “And what would you have done if the report had been the other way—excuse my frankness—would you have allowed the child to be born out of wedlock?”