‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I expect there’s an extension, isn’t there?’

‘Oh, yes-in the Blue Room. I don’t think there’s anyone there.’

He showed her the way and displayed a tendency to linger.

Ray said, ‘Thank you very much. I’m afraid I don’t know your name.’

‘ Frederick, Miss.’

‘Well, Frederick, do you think you could wait in the hall while I put through my call? Because I may have to go out for a little, and if I do, perhaps you would find Mary Good for me and ask her to come up and stay with Miss Lila.’

‘Oh, yes, Miss.’ He got as far as the open door, took hold of the handle, twisted it nervously, and said all in a rush, ‘she didn’t have anything to do with it, Miss-not Miss Lila, did she? I mean, there’s things you can believe and things you can’t, and that’s what I couldn’t believe, not if it was ever so.’

Ray gave him one of her best smiles.

‘Thank you, Frederick -that’s very nice of you.’

Frederick clung to the handle.

‘They won’t go and make out she did it, will they? Nor yet Mr. Waring. Ever such a nice gentleman, I thought he was. And a cruel shame not letting him see Miss Lila when he come all that way.’

What Marsham would have thought of this conversation, Ray did not care to speculate. She had a feeling herself that perhaps it had better stop. She said,

‘Thank you, Frederick. Now if you’ll just shut the door, I’ll get on with my call.’

She had never fully realized the beneficence of the telephone until just in a moment with a brief click it gave her Bill’s voice, speaking from the Boar.

‘Hullo!’

She said, ‘It’s Ray,’ and heard his tone warm as he answered her.

‘Ray! I wondered how I was going to get on to you. I thought it wouldn’t be considered exactly tactful if I rang up, but I was getting to the point where I was going to crash in and chance it.’

She thought, ‘He wants to know about Lila. I’m only a kind of extension of the telephone.’ Out loud she said,

‘Lila is quite all right. She had a good sleep this afternoon, and then she got up on the sofa and we had a tea-party in her room-Adrian Grey, and Miss Silver, and me.’

He didn’t seem tremendously interested in the tea-party.

‘Ray, I want to see you. Could you come out to the gate? We could sit and talk in the car. I don’t suppose I’d better come up to the house.’

‘No.’

‘Do you mean no, you can’t come, or no I’d better not come up to the house?’

‘I mean no, you’d better not come up to the house. I’ll come and meet you.’

‘All right-I’ll stop just this side of the gate.’

She left Mary Good with Lila and went down the drive in the dusk. When she turned out of the gate Bill was there, walking up and down on the grass verge of the country road. He put an arm round her shoulders.

‘Good girl! Punctual to the minute.’

‘Do we get into the car, or do we walk up and down?’

After being shut up in a warm house all the afternoon she thought it would feel good to walk with Bill in this cool, soft air.

‘Well, I don’t know. They may have put someone on to shadow me. I think we’d better sit in the car. I want to talk.’

When they were shut in together he came back to Lila, as of course she knew he would. But it wasn’t quite what she expected. He had turned round to face her, his back in the angle between the door and the driving-seat. From his voice she knew just the kind of frowning look he had.

‘What has Lila got to say about it now she has come round?’

She told him.

‘Do you mean to say she doesn’t remember anything at all?’

‘Nothing between going to sleep on the sofa in her room and waking up with Sir Herbert lying dead on the study floor.’

‘Do you think she is telling the truth?’

‘I’m quite sure of it.’

‘Then she really was walking in her sleep?’

‘Oh, yes. She does, you know, when she is worried or upset. She used to do it at school. Miriam St. Clair woke up with a cold hand on her face one night and screamed the place down.’

He said in a dogged voice,

‘Then she did it in her sleep.’

‘Bill! She didn’t do it at all!’

‘I don’t see how you can get away from it. She wasn’t responsible of course. But she had been holding that dagger-her hand was all red.’

‘Bill, you’re mad! Lila couldn’t kill anyone if she tried. And she wouldn’t try.’

‘You didn’t see her standing there like I did.’

‘I don’t care what you saw. If the police thought she had done it they would have arrested her. They came up and saw her after tea-the Scotland Yard man and the local one. I could see they didn’t think she had done it-not by the time they went away anyhow.’

Bill said gloomily, ‘I can’t think why.’

She let some real anger into her voice.

‘Because they’ve got eyes in their heads and some sense in their brains! And because Adrian Grey swears that he was just behind her all the way from her room, and there simply wasn’t time for her to kill Herbert Whitall. I mean, there would have been a scuffle and a pretty heavy fall. Adrian would have been bound to have heard it.’

‘My dear child, Adrian Grey would swear the moon was made of green cheese if he thought it would get Lila out of a mess.’

‘Oh!’

Bill went on in tones which reached a new depth of gloom.

‘I suppose you know what happened when she woke up?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I came in from the terrace, and he came in from the passage. And Lila woke up. Just like that. She saw Whitall lying there, and the dagger-and her hand. And then she saw me. Get a good hold on that, will you-she saw me first, before she saw Adrian, and I wasn’t any good to her. She kind of shuddered away, if you know what I mean. But as soon as she saw Adrian she fairly chuckled herself into his arms. Well, there’s only one thing you can make of that, isn’t there?’

‘She had just had the most awful shock. She didn’t know what she was doing.’

‘She knew which of us she wanted all right,’ said Bill. ‘When you have had a shock like that you don’t reason, you act on instinct. Lila’s instinct didn’t take her to me, it took her to Adrian.’

‘Oh, Bill!’

‘Don’t sit there saying, “Oh, Bill! ” Do you suppose I want to marry a girl who shudders when she looks at me and flings herself into somebody else’s arms? Because if you do, you had better start thinking again.’

Ray was silent, because she didn’t know what to say. She had too many insurgent feelings, and they wouldn’t go into words. What she really wanted to do was to put her arms round Bill and kiss the hurt away. She clamped her hands together and sat as far back in her corner as she could get. Anyhow it was a good thing that he could talk about it.

He went on talking.

‘If they don’t think Lila did it they are absolutely bound to think it was me. I can’t imagine why they haven’t arrested me already. They found my note to Lila, so they know I had asked her to come down and meet me. Only I didn’t say the study-I said that room just inside the hall door. I told her if she wanted to marry Whitall she could, but if she didn’t want to, I would take her away to you. I can’t imagine why she went down to the study instead.’

Ray found words.

‘Darling, you don’t listen. She-did-not-know-what- she-was-doing.’

‘That’s what you say. I want to know how she got that blood on her hand.’

Ray felt cold through and through.

‘She must have touched him-or-or the dagger.’

‘Ray, can you believe that Lila would touch a dead body? Or that dagger in cold blood?’

Ray was up against the one thing she could really not believe. She had to fall back on,

‘She didn’t know what she was doing.’

‘Then why did she do it?’

They sat facing one another. Feature and expression were hidden by the darkness, yet each knew the other so well that this darkness was only a black screen upon which memory could throw its pictures. Bill holding doggedly to what he had said and saying it all over again, as if battering repetition was an argument in itself. Ray on the defensive-quick thrust and parry to meet his bludgeon blows, eyes wide and the colour in her cheeks like flame. How many times had they fought each other to a standstill over something that wasn’t worth a tenth part of all that force and fire? Things that didn’t matter. And this thing that mattered more than all the world because it was a matter of truth and honesty between them. It wasn’t Lila’s guilt or innocence which was in question, it was their own integrity.