‘Oh, sir, I seen it! I wish I never, but I did-Miss Lila’s dress and that ’orrid stain-and the blood on her hand!’

‘I though you said she wiped the knife before she put it in Miss Dryden’s hand?’

Frederick stared.

‘Yes, sir, she did. But she didn’t wipe it clean-it was all blood-and some of it stayed on Miss Lila’s hand.’

‘What did Miss Lila do?’

‘She didn’t do anything-she just stood there. I was afraid she’d wake up-it’s awful bad for them to be waked sudden- but she didn’t. She left go of the knife, and it fell down on the floor.’

‘Can you show me the place?’

‘Oh, yes, sir.’

It was better now that he had got it out. The worst part was over. He could show them where the body was, and where Lila Dryden stood and let the knife fall.

‘And Miss Whitaker?’

He could show them that too-where she was when he looked between the curtains, and how she straightened up with the knife in her hand and went over to where Miss Lila was.

Frank Abbott scribbled on a bit of paper and passed it to the Chief Inspector. Lamb glanced down at it, read, ‘Positions O.K.’ and turned back to Frederick.

‘All right, my lad, you can sit down again…Now go on and tell us what happened after that.’

‘She come away-Miss Whitaker. She says, whispering like, “You’ll be for it, lovely Lila,” and I see she was going to do a bunk, so I got down off the step and behind the bush on the far side, and she come out and down off the terrace as quick as quick-didn’t make a sound neither. I thought I had better get out of it-only I didn’t like leaving Miss Lila like that.’

Lamb said in his weighty voice,

‘Why didn’t you give the alarm? That’s what you ought to have done, you know.’

Frederick disclosed an unexpected vein of shrewdness.

‘And have everyone thinking it was Miss Lila-and me making up a story against Miss Whitaker that no one liked in the house? I thought about it as well as I could, and I seen how it would look, and-I darsn’t.’

‘Well, what did you do?’

‘I stood there and thought, and I didn’t know what to do. And then I heard someone coming along the path by the side of the house and up on to the terrace. It was Mr. Waring, sir. Miss Whitaker, she’d left the study door ajar when she come out, and as soon as he touched the handle it moved. I see him go in. At first he looks through the curtains, and then he pushes them and goes in. That’s when I see it was Mr. Waring. I knew he was sweet on Miss Lila, because he give me a note for her the time he come up to the house and Lady Dryden sent him away. So I thought if he was there he’d look after her a lot better than what I could, and no need for me to get myself mixed up with it. And I come away.’

‘And then?’

‘And I got back through the window in the housekeeper’s room and went up and got into my bed.’

Lamb took a moment, tapping with his fingers on his knee. Then he said,

‘Any idea what time it was when all this happened-Miss Whitaker coming up the drive on her bicycle-Mr. Waring coming along to the study?’

‘Yes, sir-it was gone twelve.’

‘What do you fix that by?’

‘The church clock, sir. You can hear it strike when the wind is that way.’

‘You heard it strike on. Saturday night?’

‘Yes, sir. Miss Whitaker, she had gone up on to the terrace, and I was waiting like I told you. That’s when I heard it-just before I went up too.’

Frank Abbott wrote that down. It fitted-it all fitted-the boy was telling the truth. Bill Waring had listened to the church clock striking twelve a little after he heard something move on the shrubbery path, and a little before he took his own way to the study.

The Chief Inspector bent a long, serious look upon Frederick.

‘It’s all true what you’ve been telling us?’

‘Cross my heart, sir!’

‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? You’ll have to swear to it, you know. Are you prepared to do that?’

‘Oh, yes, sir.’

‘All right then. Inspector Abbott has been taking down what you have said. It will be read over to you, and then you can sign it. Don’t put your name to anything you’re not quite sure about.’

Frederick wiped the sweat of relief from his forehead. It was over-he had got through with it. The awful burden that he had carried since Saturday night was shifted to the broad shoulders of the police. He felt as if he had waked up from a nightmare.

CHAPTER XXXIX

There was a knock on Miss Whitaker’s bedroom door. She did not pause in her pacing up and down. She had risen early because bed had become intolerable during the endless hours of a wakeful night. The fire was dead, but a couple of half burned logs sprawled on the still warm ash. She coaxed them until a smoulder of sparks quickened in the wood. She had paper to her hand. She had sat till past midnight reading old letters. Now she fed them to the springing flames, leaf by leaf and sheet by sheet. Sometimes a line would catch her eye, starting out in letters of fire before the page crumpled into ash like Herbert Whitall’s promises. ‘You and the child’-that was one of the sentences. It came to her then with a deadly certainty that if the child had been strong and healthy she wouldn’t have had to whistle for her ten thousand pounds. It was because he was frail, because he was delicate, because he needed so much care, that Herbert denied him the means of having these things. She would never, never forgive him for that. She fed the flames with his letters as she fed her anger with the thought of him lying dead, and of Lila Dryden with the blood on her hand and on her dress. Herbert was dead, and the girl would hang for it. She fed her anger.

When all the letters were burned, she fell to pacing the room. With brief intervals, she had been at it ever since, her door locked against the housemaid.

‘It’s your tea, miss.’

‘Put it down. I’ll take it presently.’

She had gulped the scalding tea, and only realized then how cold she was-through and through, and deep, deep down in spite of her anger and the blaze Herbert Whitall’s letters had made.

Presently she dressed and fell to her pacing again. So many steps to the window, so many steps to the bed. Count the steps, and it stopped you thinking. Go on counting, or you’ll start thinking again.

The knock came on her door for the second time. She jerked her head round and said,

‘I don’t want anything. Let me alone!’

It was Marsham’s voice that answered her.

‘Chief Inspector Lamb and Inspector Abbott are in the study, Miss Whitaker. They would be glad if you would come down.’

She stood for a moment before she unlocked the door. She went to the dressing-table, touched the ordered waves of her hair, used powderpuff and lipstick. She was wearing the black dress which looked like mourning, high to the neck and long to the wrists. She was thinner than when she had bought it. Her eyes burned against the pallor of her face. She walked past Marsham as if he wasn’t there, and so down the stairs and along the passage to the study.

As she came in, three pairs of eyes were turned towards her. Frank Abbott murmured, ‘Medusa-’ under his breath, the word being most unfortunately overheard by Lamb, who had never heard of the lady but was immediately convinced of her being foreign. The blank innocence of Inspector Abbott’s regard did nothing to shake this conviction, but at the moment he had Miss Whitaker to deal with.

Having offered her a chair and seen her seat herself in what he would have described as a ‘tragedy queen kind of way’, he cautioned her that anything she said would be taken down and might be used in evidence, and proceeded to unmask his guns.

‘Miss Whitaker-in a statement made on Sunday morning you say-’ Here he paused, received a paper from Frank