“It leaves you everything.”

Edward sat down on the corner of the writing-table. He could not have seemed more casual or completely at home, yet Susan found herself wincing. It was as if at that moment the Hall and all that it stood for had changed hands.

Sitting there at his ease, Edward said,

“Well, I think this is where we ask Susan to leave us. It’s going to flutter the legal dovecotes a bit, isn’t it?”

“I would rather she stayed.”

Edward shook his head.

“Oh, no, I don’t think so. She can go back to her sorting, but she had better not find any more wills.” Then, when she had most thankfully escaped, “That’s better! Now it’s between you and me. Was there a letter with the will-anything to show why he did it?”

Arnold came over to the table. The envelope with its enclosure lay there across the blotting-pad. He took it up and gave it to Edward. The envelope dropped back upon the pad. The will dropped.

It was James Random’s letter that Edward took over to the window to read. A short letter to take up so much time.

“I am altering my will, because I am quite sure that my boy is alive. I saw him in a dream last night, and he told me that he was coming home. So I have altered my will.”

There was a shaky signature-a very shaky signature. Edward stared at it until it disappeared in a momentary clouding of his sight. With the outer vision darkened, he had an astonishingly vivid picture in his mind-an old man sitting there writing at that table behind him-a very tired old man- writing in the faith and hope of a dream. And it touched him to the depths. It was a little time before he could turn round and say,

“Well, he took a chance.”

Arnold had moved to watch him.

“You haven’t read the will,” he said in a kind of dull surprise.

Edward came up to the table again and stood there reading it. Simple, comprehensive. “Everything to my nephew, Edward Random.” He looked over his shoulder at Arnold and said,

“I see both the witnesses are dead.”

“Yes.”

“In fact there would have been no questions asked if the will had never turned up.”

“I suppose not.”

“But Susan found it. Very inconvenient of her-from your point of view. I feel that I ought to apologize. Only it wasn’t I who brought her down here to rummage in the library, which has done very well without being catalogued for all these years. It looks almost as if you thought she might find something. It even looks as if you wanted her to find it.”

Arnold had gone back to staring down upon the blazing logs. He said stiffly,

“You cannot imagine-” and heard Edward laugh.

“My dear Arnold, I can imagine anything-I’ve always been quite good at it. I can imagine, for instance, that a will like this turning up when you were perfectly sure that I was dead must have presented you with a horrid vista of legal obstacles and delays. It might be years before my death could be presumed, and meanwhile a minor state of chaos! I can imagine its appearing in an extremely unattractive light. What I can not imagine, and what I hope you are not going to ask me to believe, is that Uncle James climbed to the top of the library ladder in the last week of his life and hid the will he had been at so much trouble to make behind old Nathaniel Spragge’s ditchwater sermons. After all, why should he?”

Arnold said nothing. The firelight showed that there was sweat on his face.

Edward stood now with his back to the table, leaning against it. It came to him that it was his table, and that the room was his room. And a lot of good it would do him if he lay in Embank jail on a charge of murder. But the production of the will-how was that going to affect the prospect? Not very greatly, he thought. The police already knew from Miss Silver’s account of her conversation with Clarice that William Jackson had witnessed a will and was proposing to blackmail Arnold on the strength of it. They knew that James Random had told Clarice about the will, and about the dream which had induced him to make it. All that the actual production of the will could do would be to provide strong corroboration of what Clarice had told Miss Silver. It left him no motive at all for the murder of William Jackson, and the merest thread of a motive for the murder of Clarice Dean. After all, you don’t bump girls off because they drop hints that they know something to your advantage, or even because they throw themselves rather assiduously at your head. On the whole, then, his position would be improved. But Arnold ’s wouldn’t. If the police got the idea that he had been suppressing the will, they might begin to think very seriously indeed about the possibility that William Jackson had actually made some blackmailing attempt, and that Clarice was following it up. And if Arnold showed the police the same sweating mask that he was now turning to the fire, they would probably arrest him at sight.

He said in a voice which had lost its ironic edge, “It seems to me that we have got to be extremely careful what we do next. The family wash strictly in private, and a convincingly united front. I think the best thing will be for you to take the initiative. Drive over to Embank this afternoon and show this will to the solicitors there. You can take Susan along if you like. But no, on the whole better not. You don’t want to appear to need any backing up. You’ve been having the library catalogued, and this will has turned up behind some old books. I shouldn’t mention the top shelf or anything like that. Just say it was behind some early nineteenth-century sermons. And of course nobody is better pleased about it than you are.” He smiled, and the ironic flavour returned for a moment as he added, “Do you know, curiously enough, I’ve really got a feeling that’s the truth.”

CHAPTER XL

I simply will not hear of it,” said Frank Abbott. Miss Silver gazed at him across the last of the pink vests. “My dear Frank!”

“My dear ma’am, it’s no use-I simply will not lend myself to any such thing. And you know very well that you ought not to ask me to take such a responsibility.”

The mildness of her aspect remained quite unchanged.

“Then perhaps you will tell me what you propose to do about it.”

The time was just after lunch, and they were in Ruth Ball’s comfortable morning-room. Two empty coffee-cups testified to the fact that her hospitality had not been lacking. Outside, a November murk had begun to gather between the hedgerows and along the course of the stream. It would be early dark tonight, and there would be no moon. But within all was cosy and bright. The standard lamp behind the sofa had been switched on and shed a warm glow over Miss Silver and her knitting. A fire burned cheerfully upon the hearth, and in front of it stood Detective Inspector Abbott, extremely polished and elegant, in the immemorial attitude of the man who is laying down the law to his womenfolk. He said,

“I shall do what I should have done this morning if Bury hadn’t taken me off on a wild goose chase. It seems the girl William Jackson was running after at Embank has a husband, and when it was suggested that we had better find out what he was doing on the night that William was drowned, I naturally had to agree. He is said to be a man of violent temper, and there is some evidence of his having been heard to utter threats-the quite commonplace sort-like breaking every bone in William’s body if he ever found him speaking to his wife. He works for a contractor over at Hanmere, and Bury couldn’t get hold of him till he came off the job for his dinner. Well, he said he and his wife were visiting her parents at Littleton on both those Friday nights. He says it’s a regular thing- they bicycle over, have supper, and get back about eleven. Bury has gone to check up on it. The chap says half a dozen people can speak to their having been there. Well, according as that pans out, we either go on and arrest Edward Random-or we don’t. As for your plan, it is absolutely out of the question, and it is no use your asking me to have any hand in it.”