Chapter Four

Morose and mistrustful, Tuesday’s dawn loitered in from the east like a trade unionist contemplating a strike. From the bedroom window of her Bloomsbury flat Judy Flecker looked out at it, and at the damp prospects it revealed, and sleepily sighed. Then she stripped off her pyjamas, bathed, dressed, cooked and ate her breakfast, and by eight o’clock was in the street. A short walk brought her to a bus stop at which, while waiting, she was able unemotionally to contemplate the massive colonnades of the British Museum; and the bus took her to Marylebone, most restful and appealing of the London termini, where she embarked on a train for Long Fulton.

By ten o’clock of a day which was to be the most eventful—as also the most sheerly terrifying—of her life, Judy had cleared up such routine work as the Music Department could provide, and was in Sound Stage Number Two, listening while the Philharmonia Orchestra, under Griswold’s direction, rehearsed and recorded the score for Ticket for Hell. Upon the screen in front of her two lovers, bereft of their sound-track, mouthed preposterously at each other; in the sound engineer’s glass-fronted control-room, behind her, the composer sat complacently imbibing through a substantial loudspeaker the noises he had contrived. The ticker on the wall spelled out the seconds; Griswold, with headphones adjusted and a cigarette in his mouth, glanced rapidly and continuously from the players to the score to the ticker to the screen; and music appropriate to its erotic context—susurration of strings, plangency of French horns, the oily sweetness of tubular bells and the aqueous ripple of harps—filled and overflowed the room. Not a bad score, Judy conceded: in his concert works Napier was a somewhat acrid modernist, but like most such composers he unbuttoned, becoming romantic and sentimental, when he was writing for the films.

Presently the take ended and the lights went up again. Someone came and sat down rather heavily in the canvas chair next to Judy’s, but for the moment, since the film’s Chief Editor had buttonholed her and was talking shop, she had no idea who it was. Only when the Chief Editor had taken himself off did she turn round to identify the newcomer.

It was David Crane.

His appearance there did not surprise Judy particularly, since in recent months he had developed the habit of drifting into her office at odd times of the day for a purpose which he seemed at a loss to isolate and define but which struck Judy as being in all probability fundamentally amorous. These irruptions were a nuisance, but with David Crane it was impossible ever to be seriously exasperated—and, moreover, his diffidence was such that it usually drove him away again, inchoately apologising, within five minutes of his arrival. Of all the Cranes, David, in spite of his intolerable gaucherie, was the one Judy liked best. The air of blank misgiving with, which he habitually faced the world aroused her protective and maternal instincts. He got little sympathy, she suspected, from his fellow-workers in the Script Department, and was consequently obliged to forage abroad for that commodity.

“Hello,” she said pleasantly. “How are things?”

“G-good morning, M-Miss Flecker.” Despite the studio vice of always using Christian names, he had never addressed her in terms less formal than these. “I hope I’m n-not in your w-way.”

Judy laughed. “Of course not. I’m slacking.” She stretched her long legs out luxuriously, noting in amused but not scornful tribute to his solid conventionality that he was wearing black. “And you?”

“I b-beg your pardon?”

“I mean, has the Script Department given you an hour off?” Rather a condescending turn of phrase, Judy reflected: he wasn’t, after all, an office-boy. But David, it seemed, had been born to be victimised, even by those who wished him well, and in his presence one’s language seemed to mould itself automatically into shapes of unintended derogation. Fortunately, he seemed quite incapable of taking offence.

“There’s n-not much d-doing this m-morning,” he said; and suddenly smiled. “And anyway, they n-never let me handle anything i-important because they’re afraid I should m-make a m-mess of it. So I can g-get away whenever I l-like, really.”

“What nonsense!” said Judy, who was none the less admitting to herself, with regret, that if this were so they were probably very wise.

“I d-don’t m-mind it, really. I’m quite happy just p-pot-tering about. No b-brains, that’s my trouble.”

Judy felt slightly embarrassed by this admission, which in candour it would have been difficult to gainsay. Rather awkwardly she changed the subject.

“And how is everybody at home?” she asked; in the circumstances—she realised as soon as the words were out—a fatuous and even slightly impertinent question. But again David seemed unconscious of the blague. He ran a hand through his scanty hair and applied himself to answering as earnestly and painstakingly as if some detailed piece of technical information had been required of him.

“M-mother’s all right,” he said. “B-but I c-can’t imagine anything ever really ups-setting her. N-Nick’s a b-bit jumpy, as you can imagine. And we h-haven’t h-heard from Madge at all.” All at once he looked wretched. “It’s h-horrible, isn’t it? About that g-girl, I m-mean.”

“Did you know her?”

“I m-met her for the f-first time at N-Nick’s p-party. She s-stayed with mother at Ch-Christmas, but I was away with Nick in Bermuda.”

“And I suppose you’d no idea what was going on?”

“No. N-none. They d-don’t confide in me m-much. B-but it’s a frightful d-disgrace. I c-could hardly b-bring myself to c-come here this m-morning. I f-felt I wanted to c-creep away and hide s-somewhere, like c-cats do when they’re ill.” Upon this zoological simile he paused; he was a man who rarely indulged in such advanced and literary tricks, and this present lapse must, Judy thought, be the issue of powerful emotions.

“No one,” she hastened to reassure him, “could possibly blame you, David.”

“No, I know, but you s-see, it’s a f-family affair. A m-matter,” he said simply, “of honour. Th-that’s how I s-see it, anyhow, though I suppose it’s v-very old-f-fashioned of me.”

“I think it’s a very proper feeling to have,” said Judy. “But you mustn’t,” she added firmly, “let it g-get—damn! sorry—get you down.”

He smiled. “It’s f-funny how c-catching a stammer is.”

“Anyway, it’s not as bad as my lisp,” said Judy repentantly. “I’m afraid that between us we must sound like the ‘Before’ section of an Elocution School advertisement.”

“Oh n-no. I l-like your lisp.” David flushed. “It’s very attractive.”

“Plebeian,” Judy countered severely. “I’ve studied the subject, and I know. You hardly ever get it in the middle and upper classes.”

David appeared to be uncertain about the proper response to this.

“Anyway,” he said at last deprecatorily, “it’s only v-very slight… I say, though, it’s awful ch-cheek of me to be t-talking about you l-like this. Rotten b-bad form.”

Judy looked into his large spaniel eyes and was saddened by the feeling she glimpsed there, since she knew that she would never be able to reciprocate it. She was, however, a particularly feminine young woman, and consequently her mild dejection was mixed with a determination to make modest use of David’s infatuation. She crossed her legs and looked shyly at her toes.

“Good lord,” she said, “I should be a fool if I thought there was anything offensive about that… I say, David, is your brother going to sue that loathsome paper?”

It had been decided that the last take was satisfactory, and Griswold was accordingly going on to deal with the next music section. “Roll the film, please,” he said; and when it obediently appeared on the screen he conducted the score through, in silence, with one eye on his stopwatch, while the Philharmonia gossiped, did crossword puzzles or read detective stories. Napier came up, and before David could answer her question, Judy said:

“Good morning, Mr. Napier. It’s a beautiful score.”

“For heaven’s sake,” said Napier, visibly pleased, “don’t judge me by this stuff.”

“That’s what all you composers say.” Judy smiled. “On the day one of you admits that his film score is the best thing he’s ever done, the Music Department will take a week off and get plastered by way of celebration.”

Napier chuckled and went off to pester Griswold. “Sorry, David,” said Judy. “I interrupted you.”

“N-not at all,” he said, with conscientious civility. “Actually, N-Nick isn’t going to s-sue.” He wriggled and hunched his shoulders. “You s-see, he admits it’s all t-true—about that g-girl and the c-contract, I mean.”

“Oh,” said Judy rather blankly. “But surely he must realise that if he doesn’t, the studios—”

“They’ll k-kick him out.” When David, who was the soul of courtesy, descended to interruption, it was patent that he was strongly moved. “He knows that and he’s ready to p-put up with it. Atonement, he s-said. Quite d-decent of old N-Nick, in a way. I m-mean,” David added unhappily, “one’d think it was d-decent if he hadn’t p-played such a rotten uns-sportsmanlike trick. And on a g-girl, too. That m-makes it m-much w-worse.”

“And Madge? What will she do? If this story isn’t disproved, then even the abysmal film-going public is likely to lose a lot of their enthusiasm for her. And that means that Leiper will be in a state about it, too.”

“M-Madge is i-incommunicado.” And David paused, slightly disconcerted, it was possible to surmise, at having dredged up so venturesome a word. “W-we c-can’t,” he interpreted, “c-contact her. I j-just d-don’t know what she’ll do.” He glanced nervously about him and lowered his voice. “I s-say, d-did you hear that s-someone had tried to p-poison N-Nick?”

Judy sat up abruptly. “What?”

“It’s quite t-true. S-someone put p-poison in his medicine.”

“Lord, Lord...” Mingling with Judy’s very genuine shock there was an impulse of unholy curiosity. “But this morning’s papers—”

“No, the P-press hasn’t been told about it yet,” David explained gloomily, and there was a brief, painful silence before he went on. “It’s like a n-nightmare, isn’t it?”

“Oh, David, I’m so awfully sorry,” said Judy in unfeigned sympathy. “It must be hell for you.”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t do to m-make a f-fuss about these things,” he said rather shortly. “G-grin and b-bear em, that’s the ticket.” He turned towards her, once more diffident. “But I say, Judy—ah, M-Miss Flecker, I m-mean…”

Here we go, thought Judy: this is the storm cone going up. And aloud she said: “Yes, David?”

“You-you w-wouldn’t c-care to have d-dinner with me some t-time, w-would you? I d-don’t expect you w-would,” he added rescissorily, “b-but I thought I’d j-just ask. I just thought I’d—”

“But of course, David,” said Judy. “It’s sweet of you to invite me. I’d be charmed.”

“You really w-would? You d-don’t think it’d be b-bad form, with M-Maurice d-dead? We c-could g-go somewhere v-very quiet.”

“No, of course I don’t think it’d be bad form.” Oh dear, Judy thought, how appallingly ingenuous this conversation must sound… “Did you have any particular day in mind?”

“It’s awfully d-decent of you.” David’s gratitude was so overwhelming as to be almost pitiful. “Just whenever you s-say, of course… I s-suppose you w-wouldn’t be f-free tonight?”

“Well, it’s rather short notice, but—”

“P-please don’t let me be a n-nuisance. I—”

“But as a matter of fact I am free tonight. What time, and where?” said Judy somewhat brusquely; in order to stop David apologising and get to the point, it was necessary, she felt, to be forthcoming and unmaidenly. Moreover, there had occurred to her a scheme calculated to satisfy the rather unscrupulous inquisitiveness she was nourishing as to the Cranes’ reactions to the scandal in which they had become so suddenly involved, and it would be desirable, in pursuance of this, to keep the conversational initiative—no very difficult job, admittedly, where David was concerned.

“W-well,” he said, “where would you l-like? There’s the S-screenwriters’, or the S-savoy, or…”

“I’ve got an idea.” Judy smiled a conscientiously winning smile. “Do you think we could perhaps dine at your house?”

David looked rather doubtful. “W-well,” he began.

“I’ve never been there, you know, and I’ve often wanted to see it. But of course,” Judy added wistfully, “if you’d really rather not…”

The glance he gave her was disconcertingly shrewd.

“You want to s-see the house?” he enquired. And had Judy not been convinced that he was temperamentally incapable of being sardonic, she might well have suspected him of it now. As it was, she felt slightly uncomfortable.

“Yes, I should like to,” she said a little breathlessly. “And also, of course, also”—she cast about in her mind for some more specific object of curiosity, and after a rather too lengthy pause found one—“oh, the Maze.”

“The M-Maze?” David echoed; and again there was that in the way he spoke which evoked in Judy a fleeting uneasiness. “Well, I d-don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t s-see the M-Maze, if you’re i-interested. I should quite l-like to have a l-look at it myself.”

“You never have?” said Judy incredulously; she could scarcely believe that there existed a person capable of having a maze on the estate and yet not exploring it at the first possible opportunity. Labyrinths are romantic and adventurous places, and beneath her surface urbanity Judy was a romantic and adventurous young woman. “You really never have?” she reiterated.

David made a fussed, apologetic gesture.

“Well, it’s a l-long w-way from the house,” he explained. “N-near where the old T-Tudor m-manor used to be. And it’s v-very n-neglected and over-g-grown. But you can certainly have a l-look at it if you c-come before the l-light goes.”

“David, what’s at the centre?”

He stared, for the moment uncomprehending. “The c-centre?”

“Of the Maze, I mean. There’s always something at the centre of a maze. A sundial, or—”

“A t-tomb.”

“Well, perhaps, but that must be—” Abruptly Judy checked herself; her eyes widened; for an instant looked absurdly young. “You mean there is a tomb,” she said excitedly, “at the centre of your Maze?”

“That’s what I’ve been t-told,” said David with indifference. “T-tomb of the chap who m-made the M-Maze, oh, hundreds of y-years ago. F-funny idea, if you ask me.”

Judy drew a deep breath of pure pleasure.

“David, we must explore it. Promise you’ll take me.”

“Yes, all right.” He was quite honestly uninterested. “I d-don’t mind.”

And at this point Judy remembered, rather belatedly, that her suggestion of dining at Lanthorn House had not been received with any great enthusiasm, and that she must not be so discourteous as to forget that it was still a re infecta.

“Oh, but look here,” she said contritely, “it isn’t really fair of me to intrude on your family when—well, with things as they are. Perhaps some other time…”

“N-no, please.” David seemed preoccupied with some species of inward calculation. “It’ll be quite all right. M-mother’ll be d-delighted to m-meet you. And p-perhaps it’d be as well if I w-wasn’t s-seen d-dining out. L-looks callous, you know.” He emerged from his abstraction and smiled. “G-good idea of yours, really.”

“Well, if you’re really sure…”

“Oh, yes. You see, I w-want M-Mother to m-meet you. I’m sure you’ll t-take to each other.”

Like a serialised Victorian novel, Judy reflected: the son, of good family, introduces to his termagant Mamma the poor but honest girl whom he loves and hopes to marry. Will she turn up in a frightful hat? Will she drop her aitches and eat peas with a knife? Will he be threatened with disinheritance if he persists in his suit? And which will prevail in him—his passion for that quite impossible She or his sense of class solidarity? (No, that wasn’t right: unsullied family traditions.) Read what happens in the next quarter’s issue of Household Words…

Poor David, thought Judy, as she abandoned this fantasy, it’s a shame to take advantage of him when one’s feeling for him is so irremediably temperate… But such penitence as she felt was unfortunately quite inadequate to restrain her from taking advantage, and she therefore said:

“Yes, I’m sure we shall. I look forward to it.”

“I’ll d-drive you there, shall I? I b-borrowed Nick’s B-Bentley to c-come here this morning.”

“That sounds lovely. But what time are you likely to finish work? I may have to stay a bit later than usual.”

“Oh, I c-can w-wait for you.”

“No, don’t hang about.” Judy’s considerateness was partly conditioned by the fear that he might elect to do his waiting in her office. “You go on home as soon as you’ve finished, and I’ll borrow a car from Frank Griswold, or someone, and follow you on my own. I can be there by seven—it’s just outside Aylesbury, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Once you g-get to Aylesbury anyone will d-direct you. But are you sure you d-don’t mind?”

“No, of course not.” Judy stood up. “That’s settled, then. And now I must go back and do some work. So au revoir.”

For a moment he did not reply, and in his silence there was something of that obscurely unsettling, incalculable quality she had glimpsed earlier. But then he, too, got to his feet—his delay in performing this courtesy was also vaguely discomposing—and nodded and slowly smiled.

“Au revoir,” he said. “T-till this evening.”

The picture of Judy that emerges from the foregoing conversation is, I suppose, rather mixed and ambiguous, and more particularly where her motives in accepting David Crane’s invitation are concerned. But she was, as a matter of fact, a perfectly ordinary, straightforward young woman, and her predominant emotion, for the time being, was a perfectly ordinary, straightforward curiosity. Since Saturday the studios had been full of gossip about the Cranes—a tongue-wagging of epic scope which the Mercury’s revelations had enormously intensified; and the opportunity of studying the Cranes at close quarters was one which in consequence she found quite irresistible. Woman-like, she was a great deal more interested in people than in facts, and it cannot, therefore, be asserted that her reason for contriving the invitation to Lanthorn House stemmed from any very avid desire to solve the mystery of Maurice’s death and the attempted killing of Nicholas. But the Crane family were important, half-legendary figures in her world, and she was not intellectually sophisticated enough—or intellectually snobbish enough, if you prefer—to be convinced of their ultimate insignificance in the larger scheme of things. She wanted to stand at the very centre of the scandal and contemplate it from there; and David Crane’s infatuation was her only passport to that dubious privilege…

Vulgar curiosity, she told herself as she strolled back to the Music Department: that’s all it is.

And at this stage she did not recollect that it was curiosity, in the proverb, which killed the cat.

It was when she was on her way to get lunch at the studio Club—a preserve of the Upper Orders which she sometimes used in preference to the overcrowded canteens—that she encountered Gervase Fen, who was carrying an old raincoat and had on his extraordinary hat.

“Hello,” she greeted him. “Are you detecting?”

He shook his head. “Unluckily no. I’ve just come away from an Unfortunate Lady conference.”

“Good Lord, are they still going on? I thought Saturday’s was the last.”

“So did we all. But Leiper didn’t concur with the particular brand of nonsense we agreed on, and convened us again this morning.”

“But the Cranes…”

“The Cranes were unanimous in staying away. Everyone else was there. A certain gloom was perceptible, I thought. I’m, surprised, myself, that Leiper’s going on with it.”

“So am I. What on earth does he imagine is going to happen about Nicholas and Madge?”

“From what I heard him say to Stafford, he believes the whole affair to be a conscienceless newspaper stunt having no basis in fact whatever.”

“Do you really mean to say he’s so stupid as to think it’s all lies?”

“Just that. And no one seems to have the nerve to disillusion him. I find it all,” said Fen comfortably, “very pathetic… By the way, you remember I asked you on Saturday what attitude the Crane family adopted towards Gloria Scott?”

“Yes.”

“You said that about Nicholas you didn’t know. Do you know now?”

“Yes. After all the talk there’s been I can hardly avoid knowing. It seems he was always exceedingly nice to her—and not at all because she was bedworthy, or anything of that kind. Just pure altruism.”

“So that people were a good deal surprised when the letter was published?”

“Lord, yes. Bowled over…I say, is this important?”

“God knows,” said Fen. “I’ll tell you what it is, Miss Flecker,” he went on rather balefully. “Humbleby is getting above himself. He’s not keeping me au fait with the case. All he’s done so far is to telephone me at some ungodly hour last night, gabble a few incoherent words at me, and then ring off before I had time to extract a single solid piece of information from him. Did you know that someone has tried to poison Nicholas?”

“Yes. I heard this morning. David told me.”

“David…? Oh, that’s the dim brother, of course. I haven’t met him yet.”

Judy hesitated. “Professor Fen, you—you don’t think he could possibly be the murderer?”

“My dear girl,” said Fen kindly, “for the moment I know of no cogent reason for eliminating any human being who is at present walking the earth. Why do you ask?”

“Well, he’s invited me to his mother’s house for dinner this evening, and I thought you might know if he was under suspicion, and if he had been I would have kept my eyes open, that’s all.”

“To dinner? At his mother’s house?” Fen shook his head. ‘“Tis ill pudling in the cockatrice’ den,” he murmured, “and they must walk warily that hunt the wild boar.”

“This excursion into Bunyan signifying what?”

“Keep your eyes open in any case… And now I must catch my bus. Good-bye. And look after yourself.” He was gone.

Tea-time found Judy exceptionally busy, and she was not pleased to be interrupted by David Crane. On this occasion, however, he stated the pretext for his visit with unusual directness.

“I s-say, Miss Flecker, it’s my c-car,” he said. “N-Nick’s car, I m-mean.”

Judy said patiently:

“What’s the trouble? Won’t it go?”

“S-someone’s s-smashed up the engine.”

“What?”

“W-with an iron b-bar.”

Judy stared at him. “David, are you sure you’re not dreaming?”

“N-no, of course n-not. L-look for yourself if you d-don’t b-believe me.” He seemed quite distraught. “I t-tried to s-start her, and she w-wouldn’t g-go, and then I l-looked to see if I could s-spot what was wrong, and—and there it w-was.”

“It was all right when you arrived, though, wasn’t it?” said Judy not very intelligently. “I mean—”

“Oh, yes. It w-was all right then.”

“But in broad daylight, David! I don’t understand how anyone can have dared…”

“It was in Nick’s l-lock-up,” he explained. “Only, of course, n-no one ever actually l-locks them, and I didn’t. So you s-see…”

Judy did see. Adjoining the carpenters’ workshop there was a row of lock-up garages (whose doors, as David had rightly observed, nobody ever bothered to secure) reserved for the use of the studio’s Upper Twenty. And since from morning to night the carpenters’ shop yielded an unintermittent uproar of hammering and mechanical saws, the noisy act of vandalism which David had reported could have been carried through, behind the garage’s closed door, in reasonable safety… Vandalism. Judy’s heart sank. The car was Nicholas’, not David’s, and she knew that in certain quarters the feeling against Nicholas was running high…

But this explanation had apparently not occurred to David; he seemed completely perplexed. “I d-don’t understand it,” he muttered haplessly. “I just d-don’t understand it at all.”

“What are you going to do?” Judy demanded; it could serve no useful purpose, she felt, to blurt out the theory she had just formulated.

“Oh, I’ll hire a c-car in the v-village to t-take me home. That p-part’s all right. B-but I w-wish I knew why. It seems so p-pointless, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Judy agreed. “Yes, it does.”

“I know I oughtn’t to be b-bothering you about it, n-not when you’re w-working. B-but I just had to t-tell someone.”

“You’ll see the police about it, I suppose?”

“Yes. C-certainly I shall. Filthy rotten t-trick,” said David miserably. “Must catch the b-bounder who did it.” He stood there shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, and now his self-consciousness, which the outrage had sent temporarily into abeyance, began to seep back. “Well. As I s-say. Thought I’d just t-tell you about it.”

“I’d go to the police straight away if I were you.”

David squared his shoulders. “Quite right. G-get it over and done with. Thanks for l-listening, Miss F-Flecker.”

“Why not Judy?”

He made a gesture so preposterously bashful that she had the utmost difficulty in suppressing a gust of ribald and unseemly mirth.

“Thanks, Judy,” he said. “I’ll g-get along now. See you l-later.”

And “Heavens!” thought Judy as the door closed behind him, “what have I let myself in for? Fathomless abysses of nescier faire…”

“But it’s damned queer,” she murmured aloud, “about that car. I wonder…”

And after a moment’s cogitation she reached for the telephone, put a call through to the College of St. Christopher in Oxford, and asked for Professor Fen.

Professor Fen was there. His voice sounded as if the telephone had awakened him from a particularly deep and agreeable bout of slumber; which in fact it had. What, he enquired rather surlily, was the matter?

But on hearing Judy’s story he became audibly more complaisant and alert. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” Judy said in conclusion, “but I thought it just possibly might have something to do with the case, and so…”

“Yes, you may very well be right. Will you do something for me?”

“What?”

“The car’s still there, is it? It hasn’t been towed away?”

“No, it’s still here.”

“Well, then, get a garage-man up from the village—or else someone at the studios who knows about cars—and have him look at the steering-gear.”

“The steering-gear? But why—wait, though: I think I see what you’re getting at. Only—”

“Don’t theorise, please. Act. And ring me back, will you? as soon as you’ve found out.”

This proved to be about an hour later.

“Well?” Fen enquired.

“You were right. Something essential in the steering had been filed almost completely through—I’m afraid I’m stupid about these things, so I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but the man said it was a murderous trick, because if it snapped when the car was moving fast, there’d be an appalling smash.”

“Quite so. Well, I continue to guess quite nicely, even if I don’t actually deduce very much. Has David Crane told the police?”

“Yes. The local bobby came along and scratched his head over it. I told him he ought to get in touch with Inspector Humbleby and tell him about it. Was that right?”

“Perfectly.”

“And was it meant for Nicholas?”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“And then, I suppose, the person who’d done it found out David was driving the car, and didn’t want to kill him, and put the engine out of action because that was the best way he could think up of cancelling what he’d done.”

“Yes. Quite a plausible hypothesis, in the circumstances. Of course, there’s one other possibility.”

“I know what you mean: David did the whole thing himself, after he arrived here, so as to create a—a red herring.”

“You have a good, lively, sceptical brain,” Fen commented. “But don’t let it make you careless when you go to Lanthorn House this evening. Remember, we’ve none of us any idea what face this particular cockatrice is wearing… Good-bye.”

It was five past six, and the air was full of a slow, depressing drizzle, when Judy left the studios and set off for Aylesbury.

She had borrowed Griswold’s car—a large, rather antiquated Humber saloon badly scarred by the destructive proclivities of its owner’s innumerable children. Judy had commandeered it before, and it was not, in her experience, at all a reliable machine; but it was better than a sequence of buses, or the inordinate expense of hiring a taxi. It had the peculiarity, which Griswold freely admitted no one had ever been able to explain, of seeming on the point of petering out and then, at the last possible moment and quite without human intervention, suddenly revving itself up until the bonnet rattled, the cheeks of the passengers quivered as with an ague and an efflux of pastel-blue smoke shrouded it like dense fog. Griswold was accustomed to maintain (though not with much confidence) that this had something to do with the hand throttle’s being caught up with the clutch, and in the course of time he had become inured to it, but it never failed to unnerve strangers, and it was with a good deal of wariness that Judy edged the eccentric vehicle out on to the road.

At the outset, however, it behaved tolerably well, and she made good progress until she was almost into Aylesbury. Then, just as she was rashly congratulating herself on this state of affairs, the front off-side tyre, which was worn wafer-thin at the sides, exploded resoundingly. Fortunately she was not travelling fast—the Humber, indeed, was not endowed with any great turn of speed—and she was able to come bumpily but safely to a halt at the road’s verge. She climbed out and examined the tyre with dismay.

Aylesbury was still four miles off, and the rain, tiring of its earlier indecisiveness, had begun to fall more heavily. The road was deserted and there was no house in sight. Judy moaned faintly and groped in the car for the raincoat which luckily she had with her. Then, resigning herself philosophically to manual labour and to making her début at Lanthorn House looking like something the cat had dragged in, she fished out the tool-kit. She was an independent young woman who when professional help was not available believed in coping with her misfortunes herself.

Back in the early thirties some engineer had been visited with the inspiration of a Trouble-Free Jack, and for weeks had toiled to devise a tool capable of being manipulated (as the advertisements setting forth the thing’s virtues presently announced) by a Child. All scientific progress, however, has its drawbacks; no bath water is ever thrown out without some species of baby goes down the plughole with it; and it proved that, in the case of the Trouble-Free Jack, Ease of Manipulation could not be achieved (by this particular engineer, anyway) without Extreme Difficulty of Assembly. The manufacturers did not, of course, overtly admit this depressing discovery; they were at pains to supply an Instruction Chart indicating how the Jack might swiftly and easily be put together. But as regarded the particular instrument which Judy now had in her hands, this vade mecum had long since vanished, and after ten minutes’ uninterrupted toil the thing still remained as hopelessly unworkable as ever.

She beat a retreat to the interior of the car and sat there wondering sombrely what to do next. To walk into Aylesbury in the rain was an intolerable prospect—but there was likewise no future in sitting here till darkness fell, fiddling with the irreconcilable component parts of a Trouble-Free Jack. She must stop someone, therefore, and bespeak assistance or a lift to the nearest garage. Two cars had passed already. They had looked at first as if they might be going to stop, but as soon as they were near enough to make out that the penalty for this would be changing a wheel in what looked like developing into a cloud-burst, they had accelerated again and gone by. How, Judy wondered, could a subsequent motorist be effectively halted? The traditional formula was to be fixing one’s suspenders and hence showing one’s legs; but Judy felt sufficiently disgruntled and mistrustful of her luck to suspect that if she attempted this the first person to happen by would be some species of sexual maniac. And besides, she had on nylons and it was wet. She decided that the less blatant forms of allure would have to do.

At first they were notably ineffectual—and in view of her soaking hair and sodden raincoat Judy was not altogether surprised. Three cars in succession ignored her signalling. But the fourth stopped, and a large, jovial, middle-aged man emerged from it with massive cries of dismay at Judy’s plight and unreserved offers of help. No trouble at all, he assured her heartily: he’d have it fixed in a jiffy, see if he didn’t. Having taken one look at the Trouble-Free Jack, he produced his own; and in very little more than a jiffy the wheel was in fact changed.

Judy, her fears of sexual maniacs submerged in relief, informed the jovial man that he was an angel and that she could kiss him. And he, having in a brief, brotherly, pleasant fashion accepted and reciprocated this offer, assured her again that it had been no trouble, re-inserted himself, chuckling vastly, into his car and drove away.

By the time Judy reached Aylesbury it was twenty past seven; and in spite of Davids optimistic prognosis, she had some difficulty in finding anyone who could direct her to Lanthorn House, and even when she had done so, continued on her way without much faith in the correctness of the route that had been indicated. Surely—she was asking herself twenty minutes later—this abominable cart-track I’m on can’t be right? Or is it some idiotic short cut? At a small stone railway-bridge she pulled up and gazed bewilderedly about her. The twilight was closing in like an ambush, the rain fell monotonously, the rubber of the wipers creaked against the windscreen. In all directions there were dripping woods and fields and hedges and fences—but of a house, or a human being, no sign. The engine sputtered in a sullen, foreboding way; obscurely but unmistakably it conveyed to Judy the impression that it was not prepared to go on like this for very much longer.

Well, the only thing to do was to go on following the instructions of that palsied old imbecile in Aylesbury, and hope for the best.

Over the ruts and pot-holes of that unconscionable lane the car lurched forward. There appeared a succession of conspicuous landmarks for which Judy had no brief—a barn, a chalk escarpment blurred and ghostly in the rain and the dusk, a ruined church or priory. “He didn’t mention this,” she muttered crossly as each one hove in sight. “He never said anything about this.” Presently she had to switch on the lights. And all at once, without quite realising what was happening, she found that the Humber was crawling painfully up a one-in-seven slope between cataracts of water which raced downwards on either side. She changed down; changed down again. But the engine was no longer in good heart for such stoic enterprises. Its pulse grew momently feebler; it began to knock; it developed, in its extremity, a sort of death rattle. In anguished auscultation Judy wrestled with the controls, but vainly. Long before the summit was reached a sudden explosion from beneath the bonnet delivered the coup de grace, and the whole infuriating mechanism fell silent.

Judy crammed on the brakes, panicked momentarily when in spite of them the car started to slip back, and succeeded in bringing it to a halt by letting it drift against the lanes bank at an angle of forty-five degrees. The lack of optimism with which she plied the self-starter proved abundantly justified. In a final desperate effort she wound the handle until it kicked, and wrenched her arm so badly that she could not go on. Then she resigned herself, at long last, to the inexorable fact: the car was stranded.

“Damn,” she said. “Damn, damn, damn!”

And standing there alone in the rain, while a small river of water gurgled round the Humber’s back wheels, she wept hot tears of frustration.

As if its appetite had been whetted by its earlier, more gradual conquests, the darkness was coming on faster now, was licking greedily at what remained of the day. Judy stemmed her tears and a moment later turned abruptly, thinking that someone stood behind her. But it was only a scarecrow on the other side of the hedge—a scarecrow leaning backwards, rigid like a day-old corpse propped on a shooting-stick… And that sort of simile, Judy told herself sternly, isn’t calculated to cheer you up very much. Pull yourself together, girl; make up your mind what you’re going to do.

And of course, there was only one answer to that: she could scarcely stay here all night. The car must be abandoned and she must find shelter. She had long ago lost faith in the directions given her in Aylesbury for getting to Lanthorn House, but she had followed them to the bitter end, and if by some remote chance there was any truth in them, she ought by now to be quite near her destination. There was, too, another feature of the situation which offered a pale, faute-de-mieux sort of encouragement: the rain was palpably slackening off, and in a minute or two might with any luck cease altogether… She looked at her watch: ten to eight. But there was not the least possibility, as far as she could see, of finding a telephone whereby she might recite her mishaps to David and apologise for her lateness and, proleptically, for her drowned and unprepossessing condition. By this time she would naturally enough have been glad to waive the visit altogether, but there would, she realised, be no advantage to her in that, for to get back to Aylesbury and civilisation would probably be an undertaking even more formidable than the search for Lanthorn House. No, her best course was to plod onwards and once again hope for the best. She did what she could to immobilise the car and then set off.

At the summit of the hill she paused to get her bearings. According to what she had been told, this track ought to debouch in a main road, along which she must walk, northwards, for about a couple of hundred yards, and then turn off to the right. As far as she could make out at the moment, she was heading straight into a pathless wilderness, but none the less she pushed on doggedly between monotonous hedgerows and was presently rewarded by coming upon an isolated cottage, at whose door she knocked. A weedy, furtive-looking scion of the emancipated peasantry appeared to be the cottage’s sole occupant, and the particular fashion in which he eyed her warned Judy that it would be impolitic to linger there; but the information she received was encouraging, for it revealed that her mentor in Aylesbury had not in fact led her astray: the main road was only a short distance away and Lanthorn House tolerably close at hand. Moreover, there was an hourly bus, she learned, which would take her right to its gates.

The hourly bus, however, swept maddeningly by before she was able to achieve the main road, and she was obliged in consequence to continue walking; by this time the condition of her shoes and stockings was incapable of deteriorating much further, and there was a kind of perverted comfort to be derived from that. With her long, athletic stride Judy marched on, devising conversational gambits suitable to be employed on arrival, and from time to time ruefully contemplating the indelible oil-marks which the Trouble-Free Jack and the starting-handle had imprinted on her slender hands. And before long she came to the branch road of which she was in search, and turned off along it.

The rain was still holding off, and here and there the canopy of cloud was splitting like stretched canvas, so that the encroachments of night were temporarily halted and reversed by the veiled illumination of the sun’s dying rays. The road ran grey and ghostly into invisibility, hemmed in by beech trees whose bare wet branches gleamed wanly, like fading phosphorescence, and whose last year’s leaves still lay in mouldering drifts against the grassy banks where now and then a primrose could be discerned. It was very quiet—so quiet that the sound of your footsteps began after a while to seem like a wanton profanation of some supernatural conspiracy of silence; and without being properly conscious of it Judy began to hum jauntily to herself, buttressing her independence against the insidious, pervasive hush. The road wound downwards and the trees that stood sentinel along it thickened and multiplied. There were deep dells among them, fringed with brambles and dead bracken except where the outcropping chalk prevented their growth. Probably a good place for bluebells, Judy thought irrelevantly; not a bad place for highway robbery, either…

And was she never going to get to Lanthorn House?

But even as this rhetorical question presented itself, she rounded a bend and came within sight of the gates. At least, she supposed that these were the gates. Someone was entering them from the opposite direction, anyway—a man in a hat and mackintosh; and there was that in the way he walked which suggested to Judy that it might be Nicholas Crane. He had not, however, seen her or heard her steps, for he went on in ahead of her without looking round.

Arrived at the entrance to the drive, Judy paused to take stock of the situation. In the heraldically carved stone gateposts there was nothing to indicate that this was her destination, and the lodges, where she might have enquired, were patently uninhabited—looked, indeed, uninhabitable. But there had been no other house in this particular road, and it was a fairly safe bet that this was what she was seeking. No harm in finding out, anyway. Judy walked through the gates into the estate.

The continuing downward gradient was vaguely disconcerting; in the dusk you had the sense of descending into positively troglodytic depths. The trees and grass and bushes and undergrowth grew rankly here, unchecked by cultivation—though, as only the evergreens were in leaf, there was an impression of barrenness, too; the small buds on the tangled stems were invisible, and they looked dead. Distantly a night-owl cried, and a clock chimed half-past eight. There was a cold wind stirring in the foliage, and as it fingered her sodden clothes and hair Judy shivered and quickened her pace.

The man (Nicholas?) who had preceded her was not in sight; but the drive twisted incessantly, and unless he had turned off it into the grounds he could scarcely be very far ahead. He might, of course, be waiting for her among the bushes—and the vision which that possibility conjured up was not wholly agreeable. None the less, Judy went forward steadily. Soon, surely, she was bound to come in view of the house, and there would be lights and food and hot fires and cheerfulness. She pictured herself demurely wrapped in a dressing-gown while her outer clothes dried, humorously reciting the tribulations she had gone through. Even now she was capable of looking back on them fairly tolerantly; so in an hour’s time—

And it was at this point that she heard the voice.

It came from beyond the bend confronting her, and she knew it at once for Nicholas’s. It said: “Hello! Enjoying the weather? “

And then, in an altered tone: “What are you—so you’re the—”

And then a shot.

Birds flew up out of the trees with a whirr of wings, calling distractedly. The echoes of the explosion resounded through the hollow in which the house lay.

And beyond the bend in the drive a man cried out feebly and fell.

It was all over in a moment. And Judy, who had her share of courage, quickened her steps and ran—not away from whatever ghastly thing had happened, but towards it. She came round the bend and stopped short at what she saw.

Nicholas Crane lay sprawled on his back at the drive’s verge. His lips were curled back from his teeth in a kind of snarl; his hat had dropped off and his immaculate fair hair was spattered with mud; his eyes were open but sightless; beside his right hand lay an automatic pistol. A long knife had been driven upwards through his ribs into his heart, and even in that faint and waning light it needed no more than a glance to tell Judy that he was dead.

No more than a glance; and since the moment of the attack scarcely twenty seconds had passed. That meant that the attacker must still be near at hand—and no sooner had Judy realised this than her blurred senses became sharply focused as she tried to determine which way he had gone. Though her heart was beating fast, she was for the moment queerly devoid of both fear and repugnance. To pursue seemed somehow natural and inevitable, in spite of the appalling peril it must certainly involve; and long before this primordial instinct had taken conscious shape she found that she was, indeed, pursuing.

Hearing guided her. Nicholas Crane’s murderer, who had obviously heard her running up, was plunging noisily away through the undergrowth in blind flight. Racing frantically after him, Judy was conscious that the automatic was in her hand—though she had no recollection whatever of having picked it up—and conscious, too, that the butt was still warm where Nicholas had held it. It gave her immeasurable confidence, and that despite the fact that she had never fired any sort of gun in her life. In an Amazonian frenzy she ran recklessly ahead.

And now, as if at a signal, darkness had shut its jaws over the last remnants of day, and its annihilating conquest was complete. The rain was falling again—but Judy was past caring about rain, was transmuted, indeed, into a creature wholly compounded of impulse, wholly devoid of calculation. Her heart pounded; the salt sweat dripped from her forehead into her eyes; in a dozen places her clothes were ripped and rent by brambles, and there was scarcely a square inch of her stockings that the brush had not mauled. A Maenad figure, physically splendid, she fled through the unkempt grounds of Lanthorn House like an arrow, stumbling sometimes but always recovering, beating against hardly visible obstacles yet never falling, oblivious of reason, stripped in a second of the veneer with which centuries of civilisation had overlaid what was natural in her… And Chance, rejoicing in the overthrow of its age-old enemy the considering intellect, took her into its special care, driving her along the track of her quarry, whenever sense faltered or doubted, as unrelentingly as a ravenous brute in pursuit of its prey.

The terrain was rising as she ran, up towards the rim of the bowl in which Lanthorn House lay secluded; and presently the chase led out of the trees and thickets on to bare turf which ascended, at the last steeply, to what was apparently a flat, grassy terrace of some description. Judy’s foot struck a fragment of submerged masonry and she fell. She was up again instantly, but by wretched bad fortune the automatic had flown out of her hand, and her helpless groping failed to discover it again. If she lingered to search for it her quarry would irrevocably elude her; she must not, therefore—the decision was made at once and unhesitatingly—linger to search for it. And she was running again even before that decision was made.

The person she hunted must be tiring, for she was closer to him now—so close that she could hear his frantic breathing above the sound of her own. What she was to do on overtaking him she never once paused to consider: it would be a hand-to-hand fight now, and she would have to be extremely lucky to get the best of that. But circumspection had altogether deserted her. She dimly sensed that, once undertaken, an affair like this must in honour be carried through to the end, however mortal its issue might be. Her stride lengthened; her breath and pulse grew quicker; and she knew she was gaining ground fast.

The distance between the two of them cannot have been more than a couple of yards at the moment when the high hedge—at least two feet higher than a tall man—loomed up out of the obscurity and the ground became overgrown again. For an instant Judy paused, feeling for the gap through which her quarry had blundered. Then she found it and followed. A second hedge immediately confronted her, and after briefly listening for the sound of her quarry she turned right between it and the first. It had been a gruelling run and her energy was flagging now, but so also must be the energy of the person she pursued, and she pushed on, grimly determined to make up the leeway she had lost in seeking a breach in the hedge. To the left she turned, to the left again, to the right; and was obscurely though incuriously aware that hedges were all about her. But presently, at a bifurcation, she halted, the better to choose her direction, and for the first time realised that she could no longer hear the attacker’s movements; which meant, of course, that he had gone to ground and was lying in wait… Judy took a few uncertain steps along the left-hand fork; stopped, bewildered, when she saw that this alley forked again…

Then, somewhat belatedly, she understood where she was.

In an emergency the human mind is apt to function in odd, incalculable ways. Into Judy’s, as she stood there a little dazed by the sudden knowledge that she had plunged unwittingly into the Lanthorn House Maze, there drifted with the sharp clarity of a lesson learned by heart certain words that she had encountered long ago.

“I have heard or read… of a man who, like Theseus, in the Attick Tale, should adventure himself, into a Labyrinth or Maze… but as the Night fell, wherein all the Beasts of the Forest do move, he begun to be sensible of some Creature keeping Pace with him and, as he thought, peering and looking upon him from the next alley to that he was in…”

And Judy shivered. Somewhere in this maze, as in that, there was a tomb.

At heart Judy was superstitious—and let no one mock at her for it. Superstition is not mere intellectual error; it is a part of the emotional life, and the worldly-wise who suppress it do so at the risk of impoverishing their souls, an eventuality which for the most part they do not succeed in avoiding. So the words of the story (only a story, she told herself fiercely: nothing more than that…) wrought in Judy an effect which in the circumstances was very far from being beneficial. They shattered, suddenly and horribly, the spell of frenzy which the hunt had cast upon her, and as her normal perceptions returned, she realised that she was exhausted and that it would be futile to attempt more…

And as a matter of fact, she reflected sombrely, it had been futile to attempt as much. Worse than futile: crazy… and the recognition of her folly in attempting to tackle a desperate murderer single-handed came upon her like a douche of ice-cold water. Mad, mad! She had been possessed, she now saw, possessed by those devils whose name was said to be Legion; and after propelling her headlong down the most appropriate local equivalent of the Gadarene slope, they had deserted her, left her to fend for herself in a condition of physical and spiritual exhaustion, the virtue—so to call it—gone out of her, all passion spent. Common sense, the more insistent for its temporary exile, returned to plague and rebuke her from every side. What ought she to have done? Hurried on to the house, of course, and reported the killing. No one would have dreamed of blaming her for not embarking on this fantastic enterprise, and she would long ago have been safe, with light and warmth and company… Company; Judy was beginning to feel a longing for that, as she stood there in the darkness, between the high hedges, with water dripping off her ruined clothes on to the bumpy, cluttered ground underfoot. Yes, company, she thought, would be a very pleasant thing at the moment.

In the meantime, what strength she had left must be devoted to getting out of this atrocious place and as far away from it as possible.

She was not, as yet, badly frightened. That was to come later. But she knew that somewhere a killer lay in ambush; and a maze, ordinarily an innocuous plaything, can in certain circumstances begin to seem like a trap. With a wry grimace Judy recalled the pleasurable anticipation of just this exploration which she had expressed to David Crane only that morning. Aeons ago, it seemed; and now—

Well, now the thing to do was to make a move, and that as furtively as might be.

Direction? Easy enough. She must go back the way she had come, and fortunately she remembered the turns she had taken. Right at the entrance, then left, left, right. That meant left, right, right and the entrance would be on her left.

What she did not remember was that mazes are designed specifically to confuse people who have made a note of the way they came.

After ten minutes of anguished searching—the more nerve-racking in that her progress was necessarily far from noiseless—Judy, realised that she was indeed trapped. In a Maze with a Murderer, she thought, and because the springs of hysteria were starting to trickle inside her, she giggled inanely to herself. Unless, of course, the murderer had succeeded where she had failed, and got himself out somehow or other. But that was unlikely. Perhaps he was as afraid of her as she was of him—and as this possibility occurred to her Judy giggled again. More loudly, this time. And “My God,” she thought, as with an effort she got control of her nerves again, “if I’m going to go on like this I might just as well shout and tell him straight out where to find me.”

(“…So he stood still and hilloo’d at the Pitch of his Voice, and he suppos’d that the Echo, or the Noyse of his Shouting, disguis’d for the Moment any lesser sound; because, when there fell a Stillness again, he distinguish’d a Trampling (not loud) of running Feet coming very close behind him, wherewith he was so daunted that himself set off to run…”)

Not loud. No, of course it wouldn’t be. That was to be expected.

…But you must make up your mind, Judy my girl, just what it is you’re frightened of: on the one hand, M. R. James-plus-tomb, or on the other Mr. X, who pushed a knife into Nicholas Crane. You can’t have it both ways. Or can you? It rather looks as if you can… Well then, put it like this: which would you rather have waiting for you round this corner you’re coming to, X or—or the inhabitants of the place, whispering in conference? Take your pick, ladies and gents: a guaranteed triple-proof homicidal maniac or a group of fine spectres, jewelled in every hole…

But this won’t do. It won’t do at all. Stand still, Judy. Stand still, get a grip on yourself, and do some hard thinking.

As soon as her own movements ceased, it was very quiet there. There was the unrelenting patter of the rain, of course, but beyond that, nothing. Really nothing? Well, sometimes the hedges rustled, as though there were a person fumbling at them on the other side.

“And, indeed, as the Darkness increas’d, it seemed to him that there was more than one, and, it might be, even a whole Band of such Followers: at least so he judg’d by the Rustling and Cracking that they kept among the Thickets…”

The rustling was due to the rain. Of course it was due to the rain. Or—since this was a neglected, abandoned place—to animals. Small animals.

“…wherein all the Beasts of the Forest…”

Rats?

Judy put two fingers into her mouth and bit them till the blood came. It wouldn’t do to scream, wouldn’t do at all, not with Mr. X lying doggo perhaps only a few feet away… Cats, presumably, lay catto—and despite all she could do to prevent it, Judy giggled again, and went on giggling. The imbecile noise of it got out of hand, continued (as it seemed to her last surviving outposts of caution) interminably.

Then, when at last it stopped, the silence that replaced it seemed even more horrible than before.

All at once black misery overwhelmed her: misery bitter and intense beyond guessing, seas of it millions of fathoms deep. It was—had she known it—a reaction altogether healthier and more salutary than the half-wit facetiousness in which her shaken mind had earlier been indulging; but to her it was far more ghastly than that, was the ultimate abyss beyond which there could be nothing, nothing worse. On all sides the high, abominable hedges hemmed her in, their unpruned summits just perceptible as a ragged line against the night sky. She was cold, soaked, inexpressibly tired and terribly afraid. And careless, now, of what might happen to her, she fell to sobbing like a lost child.

How long that lasted she was never afterwards able to say, for this was the point at which her mind grew numb and refused—last prophylactic against its own impending ruin!—to accept any longer the messages of her senses. She was vaguely aware that when the sobbing ceased she started to move again, but what impelled her to do this, and how long it lasted, remains unknowable. Probably her blind wandering about that unspeakable labyrinth did not continue for so very long, but to her it seemed like days. She remembers—remotely, like something in an almost-forgotten dream—that whenever she turned into a cul-de-sac, which was often, she would emerge from it again without any sense of frustration or disappointment; and the truth is that at this stage she was a mere automaton, as bereft of will and cognition and conation as a robot, without the least consciousness of what she was looking for, or why. Days, it seemed; no, months, centuries…

So that when at last she came out from among the hedges she did not immediately realise what had happened.

But something made her hesitate, staring blankly into the darkness. And at that hesitation her brain began painfully to function again. She was in the open. She was no longer penned in. She had escaped, at last, out of the crazy, bewildering sequence of alleys and bends and impasses.

So it was all over. For a moment she could hardly take it in. After what she had been through it seemed impossible to assimilate. But it was true. It was true. She could feel that she was free… She gave a choking gasp of relief.

And quite near her, something moved.

Judy’s throat went dry; she tried to cry out and could not. Her hand, jerking in a nervous spasm against the pocket of her raincoat, rattled something there. Matches. She did not pause to reflect that the cold rain would extinguish a flame almost instantaneously. With trembling fingers, in a last frantic snatching at courage and reason, she dragged out the box and struck one of the matches.

For an instant it flared up brightly. And Judy’s heart sickened at what, in its brief and wavering illumination, she saw.

She was not out of the Maze at all. On the contrary, she was in the clearing at its centre. And a short distance in front of her was the tomb…

Only it wasn’t a tomb. It was a grave, a humped mound with a decaying headstone askew at one end. And something that might or might not have been human was crawling across that mound.

The flame went out.

So then Judy did scream.

Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, was restless that Tuesday afternoon. Term was over: for the vacation he had no specific plans, and he felt—which was uncommon in him—very much at a loss for something to do. Moreover, he could not disguise from himself the fact that his criminological amusements were beginning to display the ominous characteristics of an addiction, or at the very least of a settled habit, and in consequence of this he fretted at being kept out of touch with the Crane case by Humbleby’s deplorable uncommunicativeness. Sherlock Holmes, when circumstances omitted to supply pabulum for his febrile intellect, had soothed himself with doses of cocaine, but the Dangerous Drugs Act had put a stop to all that sort of thing, and such lawful alternatives as remained—alcohol, for instance—would be only very doubtfully efficacious. It was not—said Fen, addressing himself to the impassive quadrangle outside his first-floor rooms at St. Christopher’s—it was not that he had any ideas about the Crane case, as things stood; it was simply that he feared Humbleby might have overlooked some clue germane to its solution. And although he knew that the C.I.D. are not fools, and that this was therefore very unlikely, such considerations failed to soothe him. Mistrust of experts, in spite of all that the apologists for technocracy can advance against it, is deeply rooted in the English character, and Fen, whose habit of mind was not cosmopolitan, shared in it abundantly.

His restlessness was accentuated by Judy’s report on the tampering with Nicholas Crane’s Bentley, and its odd sequel. A scrupulous murderer, Fen thought—scrupulous, anyway, where the lives of those he considered innocent were concerned; and that attitude might prove to have its importance… But more facts were needed, more facts. A dozen times Fen had examined and analysed the data he already possessed, and he was convinced, by now, that no enlightenment whatever was to be derived from them; but somewhere or other the significant, the vital, indication must be awaiting discovery. Fen had no faith in the absolute dogma that such ciphers as man can create man can also solve, since he was aware that the history of crime exhibits a number of instances to the contrary; but he did believe that in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases mysteries are susceptible of explanation, and that this was the hundredth case he was not at all prepared to assume. So he prowled and pondered and grew peevish, and the afternoon waned into early evening, and still there was no news from Humbleby.

At seven-thirty Fen decided to take the initiative, and telephoned to Scotland Yard. But Humbleby was not there, and they either did not know, or else from policy refused to say, where he might be found. Fen’s irritation increased, and he rang up Lanthorn House. Eleanor Crane, who, answered, was civil and appeared to recognise his name, but no, she said, Inspector Humbleby had not been there since the previous evening, and he had not said when, if at all, he proposed returning.

“Ah,” said Fen. “Well, thanks very much, Mrs. Crane. I thought it just possible that he might be with you. I hope I didn’t interrupt your dinner.”

“Not at all. David’s guest”—the husky voice was ever so slightly sardonic—“David’s guest hasn’t turned up yet, so we’re keeping dinner back.”

A little cloud of obscure foreboding—for the moment no larger, certainly, than a man’s hand—took shape at the back of Fen’s mind.

“I suppose,” he said, “that that would be Miss Flecker.”

“Yes. I didn’t realise you knew her. To judge from my son’s not over-subtle allusions, I’m afraid he may have been pestering her rather.”

“Is she very late, may I ask?”

“It seems that she said she would be here by seven definitely. I hope she hasn’t had an accident. But we’re rather out of the way here, so it may just be that she’s not able to find us. She hasn’t been here before.”

“Just so. Thank you again, then.” Fen said good-bye and rang off.

An accident…But in forty minutes’ lateness there was no reasonable ground for misgiving, and Fen had no cause for thinking that Judy stood in any danger from the unknown X—the more so since X had apparently gone to such trouble and risk to prevent David from driving home, and probably smashing himself up, in Nicholas Crane’s car. None the less, Fen found that he was oddly perturbed, and after a short interval of vague and futile worrying he telephoned the Long Fulton Music Department. He had not much hope that at this time of day anyone would be there, but it happened that Johnny, who was currently engaged in the composition of an immense and vacuous symphony, had decided that the Music Department was a convenient, quiet and sympathetic place in which to score this opus during the evenings, and he was consequently available and able to give Fen the information required. Yes, he said, Miss Flecker had left for Aylesbury, in Mr. Griswold’s car, shortly after six.

And that being so, Fen reflected as he rang off, she ought certainly to have arrived there by seven; the distance between the two places was not great. But no doubt Eleanor Crane’s explanation was the true one: she had simply lost her way… Fen confabulated with his soul and discovered that his indistinct anxiety on Judy’s behalf derived in the long run from nothing more subtle and altruistic than the desire to do something. It was largely a sham, a pretext—all else having failed—for purposive action of some sort. That fact elicited, he felt a good deal easier in his mind. Judy had probably arrived at Lanthorn House by now, but there was no reason why he should not drive over there and make sure of it, and the excursion would keep him occupied for a while. Having dressed himself for rain, he left his rooms and went out to his car.

It was a small red sports model, exceptionally strident and dissolute-looking, which he had purchased from a cashiered, impoverished undergraduate years before. A chromium nude leaned forward from the radiator cap, and the name LILY CHRISTINE was engrossed in large white letters across the bonnet. A leaky hood shielded the car’s seating rather perfunctorily from the elements. Fen ascertained that he had enough petrol for the eighteen- or twenty-mile journey and noisily set forth.

It was completely dark, and raining hard, when at a quarter to nine he drove in through the Lanthorn House gates; and he came upon the body of Nicholas Crane so suddenly that only the gleam of the knife’s haft in the headlights prevented him from running over it. He stopped the car, climbed out, and made a brief, melancholy examination. “Poor devil,” he muttered. “But I don’t suppose he had time to be much afraid.” To judge from the flaccidity of the limbs, death was still only somatic—which meant that it had probably not occurred earlier than four hours ago; but it was not possible, he thought, to make a more definite estimate than that. He took a torch from the car and by casting about discovered with its aid a crumpled, muddy handkerchief lying near-by, with the initials J.A.F. embroidered on it. And at that his anxiety was abruptly renewed. From what he knew of Judy he thought it very unlikely that she had killed Nicholas Crane, but it looked as if some time this evening she had been on the spot, and if by any chance she had witnessed what happened… Fen’s investigation of the area became notably swifter and more purposeful as soon as this possibility occurred to him.

And it did not take him long to find what he was looking for; Judy’s reckless pursuit was imprinted in mud as plainly as any zealot for footprints could desire. The small, sharp impression of the shoes were superimposed on the impressions made by the person she had followed—and that showed that at any rate she had not gone with him under duress. But there was more: both persons had been running fast, since the impression of the heel was consistently deeper than the impression made by the ball of the foot and the anterior edge of the sole was in every case prominently etched. And since Judy had been running, she had been tracking the other person not by his footprints—to follow footprints in tangled undergrowth while continuously running fast is an impossibility—but by his actual presence; in other words, she must have been chasing him close behind. More yet: by comparing the amount of water which had collected in the footprints with the amount which had collected in the natural hollows of the ground, it was feasible to make a rough guess at how long ago the chase had taken place; not more than an hour previously, Fen estimated, and probably rather less…

These observations occupied him for scarcely more than half a minute, and they left him seriously alarmed; much as he admired the girl’s courage, he could scarcely commend her wisdom, and what the issue of the chase might have been he did not at all care to imagine. He began to follow the tracks, taking care not to tread in them and moving as rapidly as he could. And until he came out of the trees and bushes on to an open slope, he made good progress. Here, however, he was obliged to pause uncertainly, swinging his torch this way and that, for at this higher level the turf was springy and porous, and in spite of the rain one’s steps, as an experiment speedily proved, left no marks on it. Without much optimism Fen walked slowly upwards; at this stage the only thing he could do was to look about at random. And presently he came to the terrace of flat ground where Judy had tripped and fallen, and where he was able to make out the scanty, ground-level remains of a dismantled or ruined house. He paused irresolutely, listening, but apart from the steady hiss of the rain the silence seemed absolute. A moment later, however, his eye was caught by a dull metallic gleam in the torch-light, and he stopped to pick up a small automatic pistol from which, as the contents of its clip demonstrated, a single shot had been fired. Though admittedly equivocal, it was not, he felt, a very reassuring discovery, except in so far as it indicated that he was still on the right track; and there remained the problem of what direction he should take now. For a few minutes he walked in continually widening circles centred on the spot where he had come on the gun, but without finding any trace that would help him. And he was just setting off in the upward direction, on the not specially cogent but unimprovable grounds that this would be a direct continuation of the line that Judy and her quarry had taken thus far, when he heard the scream.

It was not a loud scream, or a long one, but it was enough to indicate the way he must go, and a few moments hard running through ruin and darkness brought him to the Maze. With the help of his torch he was able to make out immediately what it was—the more immediately in that he already knew that such a place existed in the Lanthorn House grounds; but for all that, his fears for Judy’s safety were so intense that he needed the exercise of all his will-power to restrain him from the idiotic course of plunging heedlessly in. He must go in, of course: here the footsteps were visible again, and like the spoor of the animals in Aesop’s fable they pointed exclusively inwards—they did not emerge again. Other ways of egress were a possibility, but he would have to accept the likeliest hypothesis, that Judy was still in the Maze, and hope that it turned out to be correct. Should he call out? If he did so, it might have the effect of scaring Judy’s assailant away from her (supposing that she was being attacked, which at the time seemed probable), but on the other hand it might conceivably provoke him to an even greater ruthlessness. Fen decided against it. Stealth and surprise were useful weapons; if the intention was to kill Judy his bawling would hardly impede it, and if that intention were absent he would simply be giving the enemy warning of his presence, a needless handicap. So he kept silent—and in the meantime the thing to do was to devise some means of marking his route into the Maze so that when the need arose he might readily get out of it again.

All this takes long to tell, and, moreover, savours of cold-blooded calculation in the face of another person’s peril. But in fact it occupied only a few seconds’ thought, and even that necessary delay Fen bitterly grudged. Then, blessedly, he remembered something. In the pocket of his raincoat was a huge ball of thin string, bought the previous day, and that, plainly, was exactly what he wanted. He tied one end of it rapidly to a sapling which grew just outside the Maze’s entrance and then, unrolling the ball as he went, strode forward into the warren of damp, rank, weed-cluttered alleys. The string would almost certainly not last out to the Mazes centre, but it would be useful as far as it went. He was in two minds as to whether to keep his torch alight or not. It would infallibly mark out his progress, but that would help the girl as well as the murderer, and in the end he elected to keep it on. In an affair like this, he reflected grimly, there arrived fairly early on a point at which reasoning became valueless and one simply had to trust to luck.

Fen was well-read in the more interesting by-ways of human activity, and he knew a certain amount about labyrinths—knew, for instance, that their basic plan is always very simple and that in almost every case their centre can be reached by the application of some brief, straightforward formula. He was not, accordingly, so much at a loss as a less-informed person would have been, and his preliminary explorations were of a methodical sort, aimed at eliminating the more palpable blind alleys and false trails. Unreeling his string, and rewinding it whenever a cul-de-sac obliged him to go back on his tracks, he fairly quickly whittled the possible routes down to two, and on noting that one of them involved a symmetrical plan—first right, second left, first right, second left—-while the other did not, followed it unhesitatingly. By choosing his turns according to this prescription he would probably be working towards the perimeter of the Maze, which his initial survey had told him was rectangular; at some point, therefore, he would have to vary the formula—or, more accurately, deduce for it a second part—so as to be able to move back towards the centre. And since mazes arc essentially no more than large-scale toys, it was tolerably obvious that the second part of the formula would be significantly related to the first-—second right followed by first left, for instance, as against first right followed by second left. The devisers of such places, having thoroughly bewildered their victims, had liked to be able to point out how extremely simple it was once you knew. And although Fen was aware of the grave warning against over-confidence contained in the adventures of Mr. Jerome’s Harris at Hampton Court, he did not believe that this particular maze would turn out to be any exception to the overall rule.

He had, of course, no reason for supposing that Judy would be at the Maze’s centre when he got there; she might be anywhere. But the route from the entrance to the centre, once established, would provide a point of reference from which lateral excursions could be made, and prevent him from roaming about at random and getting lost himself; moreover, even his errors constituted a part of the search which had to be made. He has confessed since that he was far from liking the atmosphere of the place, and that although for obvious reasons he was not so strongly affected by the story as was Judy, Dr. James’ ill-advised jewel-hunter kept incongruous company with the egregious Harris in the literary quarters of his mind. He was, however, methodically active, and this kept his imagination in check, as also did the much more tangible danger of an assault by X. To proceed soundlessly was, he soon discovered, quite impracticable, and he therefore abandoned caution in favour of speed. This made him unpleasantly vulnerable, but there was no help for it. Often he stopped still and listened before pressing on again between the interminable high hedges; twice—in view of the fact that his presence must long ago have been perceived—he called Judy’s name. Silence alone answered him; and he grew sick with misgiving.

Though he attempted to apply it too soon, and was temporarily led astray in consequence, his guess about the second part of the Maze’s formula proved to be correct, and in due course he came to the centre. Against all expectation, the string had lasted wonderfully—there seemed to be miles of it, and Fen blessed the ironmonger who had pressed it on him with sophistries about the most expensive being always the cheapest in the end. He was, indeed, negligently blessing the ironmonger at the moment when, on the point of investigating the Maze’s centre, he was struck down by a blow on the back of the head.

He estimates that he was probably unconscious for between five and ten minutes. In retrospect his view of this episode is cool and detached, but he is not the man to suffer pain stoically, and there can be little doubt that at the time he was mightily aggrieved. When he came round, dazedly and painfully, among the soaking brambles and weeds, his first coherent thought was for his life-line, and he was not much surprised to find it gone: X had beaten a retreat and taken it with him to delay pursuit. He was not, however, excessively upset by this circumstance; it was an eventuality which he had all along considered possible, and having grasped the principle on which the Maze had been planted, he was confident of his ability to get out of it again. His torch remained, and after collecting it he got dizzily to his feet, fondling the back of his head and noting with a certain sour gratification that there was no blood. In another half-minute he had found Judy.

She was lying unconscious, her face muddy and paper-white, but as far as he could see she was not injured in any way. Presently, having sat down beside her for a minute or two in order to give his head a chance to spin itself to a standstill, Fen put her across his shoulder and tottered away with her. Before searching for her he had taken the precaution of marking, by means of a handkerchief tied to a twig, the particular alley by which he had come to the centre, and with that initial signpost there was, as he had anticipated, no serious difficulty in finding the way out. The Maze behind him, he was guided back to the drive by the headlamps of his car, which he had left burning.

And by a quarter to ten he and Judy were in sanctuary at Lanthorn House.

All that night the windows of Lanthorn House blazed with light, and there was a confused, interminable coming and going of doctors, policemen and, in the last stages, newspaper reporters. Fen, having made sure that Judy was safe and unharmed, grew irritable at the inconclusiveness of what was being done, and departed in Lily Christine shortly after midnight; his adventure had left him feeling distinctly unwell, and his interest in the case was submerged in an overwhelming desire to go home and to bed. But the routine of investigation went on until daybreak. At the start, Humbleby was in charge of it; he had been summoned from London and had driven to Aylesbury with all possible speed. Latterly, however, he was absent, since at two in the morning a distraught Inspector Berkeley telephoned through from Doon Island to tell him that Madge Crane was dead.

At five o’clock on the afternoon of the following day, which was the Wednesday, Fen sat and drank tea with Humbleby in Humbleby’s room at New Scotland Yard.

It was a small room, solidly but austerely furnished. Its windows, high up in a corner of the building, looked towards Parliament and the river. A small but vehement gas-fire warmed it. Humbleby was in the swivel-chair behind the broad oak desk, and Fen, his head bandaged in a needlessly dramatic and elaborate fashion, was in the chair reserved for visitors, his long legs resting irreverently on a corner of the desk. Fen is exigent in the matter of sympathy for his afflictions, but he knew that at the moment it was Humbleby who deserved commiseration, and he did not, therefore, as in minor discomforts he normally does, adopt the air and hollow tones of a man precariously convalescing after a severe operation. Instead, he eyed Humbleby compassionately, noting the pallor of his face, the strained lines of his mouth, the blue suffusions of sleeplessness under his eyes, the dishevelment of his usually neat grey hair and the soiled, creased condition of his clothes. Humbleby had laced their tea with rum, and he drank greedily, exhaustedly, gazing out over sooty roofs into the grey March afternoon.

“I’ve just been to see the A.C.,” he said. “He was extremely pleasant, but now Madge Crane has been murdered the case will be front-page news until it’s solved”—he nodded towards the heap of evening papers in front of him—“and in those circumstances I quite realised they’d have to take it away from me. Nothing less than a Chief Inspector will do now. Chichley. Do you know him?”

Fen shook his head.

“A nice fellow, and very able. Still, it’s disappointing. The A.C. made it clear that the transfer didn’t constitute any criticism of me; as he said, I simply haven’t had the time to get down to anything yet. But just the same—”

“Dispiriting, yes,” said Fen; he was fond of Humbleby and thought it a great pity that because of Madge Crane’s stardom he should have to be elbowed out. “How long have you got?”

“Before Chichley takes over? A few hours, I dare say. I really can’t discuss the details with him till I’ve had some sleep.”

“It might,” said Fen, “be possible to wind up the case today.”

“I wish I could believe that, but I’m afraid you’re too optimistic.”

“Perhaps. But shall we make the attempt? Or are you too tired to discuss things for half an hour or so?”

“No. I’m not too tired. We’ll do that. And if you can throw any light on this business, I’ll be eternally grateful. It’s not a question of promotion—I could have had that years ago if I’d wanted it. It’s just that I detest leaving any job half-done.”

Fen nodded. “Understandable,” he said briskly. “Let me get my information up to date, then. Nicholas first, and then Madge.”

“Right.” Humbleby finished his tea, leaned back and lit a cheroot. “As far as I can see, I’ve uncovered all the really important facts. I left Doon Island at midday today, you understand, and called in at Lanthorn House before coming back here.”

“And you talked to the girl?”

“To Miss Flecker, you mean? Yes, I did.”

“How is she?”

“Quite recovered, I’m glad to say. And very anxious to see you and thank you for rescuing her. She’s gone back to her flat, and a woman friend is going to sleep with her for a few nights, until she’s recovered from the shock.”

“Her unconsciousness was just a faint, I take it.”

“Yes. She must have been horribly overwrought, so it’s not surprising. Brave of her to chase after this fellow, but scarcely sensible. However… she hasn’t, I’m afraid, the smallest notion who it was.”

“And Eleanor Crane—did you talk to her?”

“Not a chance of it. The doctors were—um—adamant. Extraordinary, the way she collapsed when she heard Nicholas was dead.”

“She was very fond of him, then?”

“Doted on him, it seems, though she took care never to show it. And the consequence is that now she’s a dangerous hysteric.”

“Yes,” said Fen. “Let’s get down to business, then. I gather that Nicholas returned to Lanthorn House shortly after eight. Where had he been?”

“Getting an early dinner in Aylesbury. Apparently he travelled there and back by bus. Eating out, you realise, was one of the precautions he was taking against poison.”

“Quite so. And now, the murder and the business in the Maze. Alibis, to start with. How about the people at Lanthorn House?”

“Except for the servants, they’re none of them exempt. Eleanor Crane is assumed to have been indoors all the time, but there’s no proof of it, or, rather, so little that it’s almost valueless. Medesco left at half-past seven to drive back to London, and—”

“Medesco?”

Humbleby explained Medesco’s status in the household, a status of which Fen had not hitherto been aware. “It seems,” he said in conclusion, “that the fellow wasn’t actually staying there, but he’d developed the habit of travelling down quite often and spending the day… I don’t know where these people get all their petrol from.” Humbleby sighed. “Or, rather, I do.”

“And David?”

“He left the house, on foot, shortly after Medesco, at about twenty to eight. According to his own incoherent account, he jumped idiotically to the conclusion that as Miss Flecker hadn’t turned up punctually she wasn’t coming at all—had deliberately stood him up, in fact. So he went out for a walk in the rain, ostensibly to nurse his wounded pride, and didn’t get back from it, as you know, till just before ten. Not at all a reasonable way to carry on, but then, he strikes me as being an exceptionally stupid person.”

“M’m… Well now, the murder itself. What about the knife?”

“An oversized boy-scout affair, not specially uncommon. It had been ground razor-sharp. No fingerprints.”

“Nicholas fired a shot. Do you think he wounded his man?”

“I’m certain he didn’t. We found the bullet in a tree-trunk.”

“A pity. The footprints?”

“Size nine in men’s—a very popular size, unluckily. I’m still waiting for the detailed report to come in, and it’s our best bet at present, because it will certainly give us height and weight, and that will mean only a few hundred thousand suspects instead of several million.”

“Come, come,” said Fen. “That’s surely far too gloomy a view. One can assume, I imagine, that it was someone Nicholas knew.”

Humbleby gave him Judy’s account of the incident, and ended by saying:

“Yes, I suppose Nicholas’s shout of ‘So you’re the—’ does suggest someone he knew.”

“And his casual ‘Hello! Enjoying the weather?’ must mean it was someone he wasn’t surprised at finding in the grounds.”

“Well, no, there’s a snag there, I’m afraid. According to Miss Flecker those words weren’t spoken casually. They were spoken nastily, as if Nicholas knew straight off why the person was waiting there. So if you think about it you’ll realise that it needn’t necessarily have been someone who had a right in the grounds.”

“Yes, I see,” said Fen slowly. “Do you think it was a man?”

“There’s no conclusive proof—unless you count the footprints, which after all might have been made by a woman wearing a man’s shoes—but in view of the head-on way Nicholas was knifed I can’t believe any woman did it.”

“I quite agree. We do make progress, then. A man whom Nicholas knew, of the height and weight the footprints report will specify.”

“It’s a start,” Humbleby admitted without enthusiasm.

“And now,” said Fen, “tell me about Madge.”

Humbleby’s narrative was clear and to the point. Like Maurice, Madge had been killed by colchicine, but in her case the poison had been introduced into a decanter of gin, some of which she had drunk at about nine o’clock the previous evening; and she had died at one-thirty a.m. It seemed that in spite of her protests she had secretly been glad of the surveillance organised by Inspector Berkeley; and the strictness of that surveillance made it quite certain that after nine p.m. on the Monday, when the watch was inaugurated, there had been no opportunity whatever for poisoning the gin. Moreover, at lunch-time on the Monday it was certainly innocuous, since some of it had been drunk without ill-effect. That left some eight hours of the afternoon and early evening to be accounted for. For most of the period Madge Crane had herself been in the sitting-room where the gin was kept, but between six and seven she had gone out for a walk, leaving her secretary, Miss Oughtred, in charge.

“The Oughtred woman,” said Humbleby, “is a sad case. I’m tolerably certain Madge Crane bullied her abominably, but in spite of that she’s horribly upset by the girl’s death. And since in a way she was responsible for that death, you see—”

“I don’t see at all,” Fen interposed. “How was she responsible?”

“Well, she gave Madge to understand that the cottage hadn’t been left unguarded for a second, when in fact it had been—and for very much more than a second. And Madge, as I’ve told you, was a great deal more nervous of being poisoned than she pretended: Maurice’s death must have shaken her up. So if the Oughtred woman hadn’t lied to her, stating that she’d never left the cottage, Madge would probably never have touched the gin, or any other food and drink that could have been tampered with while the cottage was empty. She fooled Berkeley into thinking that she didn’t believe in the possibility of an attempt to murder her, but from what the Oughtred woman says, she was really rather frightened.”

“But why,” Fen asked, “did Miss Oughtred lie to her?”

Humbleby groaned. “Believe it or not, Miss Oughtred was having an affair with the Doon Island butcher… If you’d seen the poor plain creature—she must be forty at least—you’d find that barely credible; but I’ve checked it and it’s true. So as soon as Madge went off for her walk, Miss Oughtred slipped out, met her butcher and stayed with him at least half an hour. She was supposed to be getting the dinner, but apparently it was the sort that doesn’t need watching while it cooks. She got back to the cottage ahead of Madge, and not unnaturally didn’t mention her rendezvous; she knew Madge would not only sneer at her pathetic liaison, but also put a stop to it. Madge was that sort of person. So she kept silent. And now Madge is dead, of course, and as Miss Oughtred realises that the colchicine must have been put in the gin while she was away spooning between six and seven on Monday evening, the poor wretch is in a terrible state about it.”

“Our murderer does get about the country, doesn’t he?” said Fen thoughtfully. “Do you think it’s possible he has an accomplice?”

“I think it’s very unlikely indeed.”

“So do I. Do you think he has a private aeroplane?”

“An aeroplane?”

“I’m not being facetious.”

“No, of course I don’t think he has a private aeroplane. Or if he has, he certainly wouldn’t use it for flying about from murder to murder. Too conspicuous altogether.”

“Yes. I quite agree. How long does it take to get from Doon Island to Lanthorn House, or vice versa—aeroplanes apart?”

“Three hours,” said Humbleby, “would be the minimum.”

Fen took his feet off the desk and stood up.

“And that being so,” he said, “you can arrest a certain gentleman straight away—provided, of course, that you ignore the possibility of an accomplice, which I think you’d be quite right to do. The point is—”

He broke off as a new thought occurred to him.

“No, I’m being a bit previous,” he said. “It’s not quite watertight… What time did you get to Lanthorn House on Monday evening?”

“About eight.”

“And David Crane was there at that time?”

“Yes.”

“So he couldn’t possibly have been on Doon Island between six and seven, poisoning the gin decanter.”

“No. Nor could Medesco, nor Nicholas, nor Eleanor Crane.”

“Then it is watertight. And the answer—”

The telephone rang, and Humbleby picked it up in no very good humour at the untimely interruption. But as he listened, his impatience vanished; and when, after a few words of warm commendation, he rang off, his tiredness had vanished and he was exultant. “Got him!” he said.

Fen smiled. “A confession? He’s been so careless that I’ve often wondered if he meant to give himself up as soon as Gloria Scott was avenged.”

“No, not a confession. Something even more conclusive. You remember you advised me to circularise the stewardesses of passenger-ships which berthed in this country about two years ago in the hope that one of them would recognise Gloria Scott’s photograph?”

“I remember,” said Fen sardonically. “At the time, you gave it as your considered opinion that my brain was softening.”

Humbleby grinned, his cheroot at a rakish, triumphant angle between his teeth. “I apologise,” he said unapologetically. “I abase myself… And that’s very generous of me, because as a matter of fact I did act on your suggestion. And it’s worked.”

“All my suggestions work,” said Fen smugly.

“Gloria Scott,” said Humbleby, with the air of one who recites intoxicating poetry, “landed at Liverpool on February 19th, 1947, from the S.S. Cape Castle, which had brought her and her mother from South Africa. The stewardess who looked after them on the voyage retired a year ago and went to live in the western Highlands; and since she reads no newspaper but The Scotsman, and The Scotsman was not one of the papers that published Gloria Scott’s picture, she wasn’t in the least aware that she knew anything which could help us. Mother and daughter kept to their cabin almost the whole time, so the other passengers saw next to nothing of them. But this Mrs. MacCutcheon, the stewardess, necessarily saw a good deal of them, and she remembers the couple perfectly. On that voyage, I need hardly tell you, Gloria Scott’s Christian name wasn’t Gloria and her surname wasn’t Scott.”

“As to her Christian name,” said Fen equably, “you have the advantage of me. But I can tell you what her surname was.” And he did so.

“Yes, yes!” Humbleby was vastly pleased. “You’re perfectly right. I don’t at the moment understand how you arrived at it, but you’re perfectly right. Good enough for a warrant, don’t you think?”

“Quite good enough,” Fen assented gravely. “But before you go, don’t forget to see your Assistant Commissioner and tell him that Chichley’s services will not now be required.”

“Such pleasures,” said Humbleby in a judicial manner, “come rather low on the moral scale, but they’re not the less alluring for that… Do you want to accompany me?”

“No, thanks. I’m squeamish about creatures in snares, however much they may have deserved it.”

“Yes, you’re right,” said Humbleby more soberly. “It’s never a pleasant business.” He stood up. “But if you’ll meet me later, we’ll discuss it all.”

“I’ll be at the Athenaeum,” said Fen. “Dine with me if you have time. And come there anyway.”

“Explicit.” Humbleby moved to the door. “Explicit the Crane case. From now on the lawyers take over… Till this evening, then.”

An hour and a half later he was knocking at a certain door. It was opened to him by a maidservant—a slatternly, full-bosomed girl, irresistibly suggestive of the low-life episodes in an eighteenth-century novel. No, sir, she said, the master ‘adn’t been ‘ome, not since morning. And no, she ‘adn’t a notion where ‘e might be. Bin out a lot the last few days, ‘e ‘ad. Funny goings-on, if they asked ‘er. Oh yes (sniffing haughtily), they could come in and ‘ave a look round if they didn’t believe ‘er…

They went in and had a look round, and the house’s owner was certainly absent. Humbleby posted two men there against the contingency of his return, and drove off resignedly with his sergeant. The sergeant was not moved at being personally involved in the denoument of a case which the whole country was discussing. He was of the old school: as far as he was concerned, a murder was a murder, whether the victim was a film star or a vagrant, and all arrests were alike in representing an ethic vindicated and job done. Having cleared his throat loudly, he did, however, permit himself to address a sociable question to his superior. “Think ‘e’ll be able to slip out of the country, sir?” he enquired conversationally.

Humbleby grunted. “I hope not. And nowadays it isn’t easy, is it?”

“Not with all these Government regulations it isn’t, sir. I know they ‘elps us in some ways, but I’d as soon be without ‘em, just the same. The more red tape you ave the more petty wangling there is for us to dirty our fingers on. And there’s a lot too much of it, if you ask me.”

Humbleby concurred in these strictures. “Still, red tape’s useful in this case,” he observed. “The odds on our fellow’s escaping are—oh, at least ninety-nine to one…”

But unless natural death claims him, Evan George will no doubt still be congratulating himself, many years hence, on the fact that it was the hundredth chance which came off.