I cannot stay to be a candle-holder at Kinsey-Hewitt’s triumph. And I am too old to have more triumphs of my own. But I can light a blaze that will make the candles on the Kinsey-Hewitt altar look small and pale and uninteresting. My funeral pyre will be a beacon to light all Europe, and my achievement in murder a tidal-wave that will sweep Kinsey-Hewitt and Wabar into the waste-paper baskets of the world’s Press.
This evening, at dusk, I light my own pyre, on the highest slope of the highest mountain in Europe. Mahmoud does not know this. He thinks we are flying out to Athens. But he has been with me for many years and would be very unhappy without me. So I am taking him with me.
Good-bye, my dear Mr Grant. It grieves me that someone of your intelligence should be wasting his talents in that rather stupid establishment on the Embankment. It was clever of you to discover that Charles Martin was not Charles Martin but someone called Kenrick, and I salute you. What you are not clever enough to discover is that he did not die by accident. What no one would ever be clever enough to discover is that I am the man who killed him.
Please take this letter as a mark of my esteem and pour prendre congé. Mrs Lucas will post this on Friday morning.
H. C. Heron Lloyd.
Grant became aware that Mrs Tinker was showing Tad Cullen into the room, and that she must already have been in without his noticing because the envelope from the Yard was lying beside him on the desk.
‘Well?’ said Tad, his face still thunderous. ‘Where do we go from here?’
Grant pushed over the pages of Lloyd’s letter for him to read.
‘What’s all this?’
‘Read it.’
Tad took the thing up doubtfully, looked for a signature, and then fell on the manuscript. Grant put his thumb in the envelope from Cartwright and broke it open.
When Tad had finished he looked up with a shocked face and stared at Grant. When at last he spoke what he said was: ‘I feel dirty all over.’
‘Yes. It is an evil thing.’
‘Vanity.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s the crash that was in the evening papers last night. The crate in flames on Mont Blanc.’
‘Yes.’
‘So he would have got away with it after all.’
‘No.’
‘No? He had thought of everything, hadn’t he?’
‘They never think of everything.’
‘They?’
‘Murderers. Lloyd forgot so obvious a thing as finger-prints.’
‘You mean he didn’t do that job in gloves? I don’t believe it!’
‘Of course he did it in gloves. Nothing he touched in that compartment would have any print of his. What he forgot was that there was something in that compartment that he had handled before.’
‘What was that?’
‘Charles Martin’s papers.’ Grant flipped them with his finger-tip where they lay on the desk. ‘They are covered with Lloyd’s prints. They never think of everything.’
15
‘You look like a bridegroom,’ Sergeant Williams said in great satisfaction, pump-handling Grant on Monday morning.
‘Well, I’d better go and have rice thrown at me, I suppose. How is the old man’s rheumatism this morning?’
‘Oh, fairly good, I think.’
‘What is he smoking? A pipe? Or cigarettes?’
‘Oh, a pipe.’
‘Then I’d better go in while the barometer is still high.’
In the passage he encountered Ted Hanna.
‘How did you run into Archie Brown?’ Hanna asked, when he had greeted him.
‘He’s writing a Gaelic epic in the hotel at the place where I was staying. And his “ravens”, by the way, are foreign fishing-boats.’
‘Yes?’ said Hanna, stiffening into interest. ‘How do you know?’
‘They got together at a party. It was the old “have-a-cigarette-no-no-keep-the-packet” routine.’
‘Sure it wasn’t cigarettes?’
‘Quite sure. I picked his pocket in the course of one Grand Chain and unpicked it next time round.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve been country dancing!’
‘You’d be surprised at the things that I’ve been doing. I’m a little surprised myself.’
‘What was the “bread” like?’
‘A packetful of the most beautiful “large coarse” notes you ever saw.’
‘Yes?’ Hanna said, thoughtfully; and then amusement grew in his face and spread to a grin. ‘Someone’s wasting an awful lot of the needful.’
‘Yes. A sheep in wolf’s clothing. And you should see the clothing!’ Grant said and moved on towards his Chief’s door.
‘Your holiday seems to have done you good,’ Hanna said. ‘I’ve never seen you so on top of the world. You’re positively purring.’
‘As they say in the far North, I wouldn’t call the King my cousin,’ Grant said, and meant it.
He was happy not because of the report that he was going to give Bryce, not even because he was his own man again; he was happy because of something young Cullen had said to him at the airport that morning.
‘Mr Grant,’ Tad had said, standing very straight and solemn and making a formal little speech of leave-taking like a well-brought-up American, ‘I want you to know that I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me and Bill. You couldn’t bring Bill back to me, but you’ve done something much more wonderful: you’ve made him immortal.’
And indeed that was just what he had done. As long as books were written and history read, Bill Kenrick would live; and it was he, Alan Grant, who had done that. They had buried Bill Kenrick six feet deep in oblivion, but he, Alan Grant, had dug him up again and set him in his rightful place as the discoverer of Wabar.
He had paid back the debt he owed that dead boy in B Seven.
Bryce greeted him amiably, and said that he was looking well (which didn’t count, because he had said that at their last interview) and suggested that he might go down to Hampshire in answer to an appeal from the Hampshire police which had just come in.
‘Well, if it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d like to get the Kenrick murder off my chest first.’
‘The what?’
‘This is my written report on it,’ Grant said, laying in front of Bryce the neat bundle of quarto pages that was the product of his pleasant Sunday at home.
As he laid the thing down he remembered in a vague, surprised way that what he had planned to lay in front of Bryce was his resignation.
What odd notions occurred to one on holiday.
He was going to resign, and be a sheep farmer or something, and get married.
What an extraordinary idea. What a most extraordinary idea.