11. The Episode of the Neurotic Physician

At the time, however, events were moving so fast that he had no opportunity to examine the scene in detail. Down into St. Giles’ came Dr. Havering, and along St. Giles’, travelling in the opposite direction and on the wrong side of the road, came Wilkes. Just in time the doctor perceived his peril. He turned half-right to evade Wilkes and found himself face to face with Fen and Cadogan, who were running towards him. The undergraduate mob was moving up behind. He hesitated, and then with sudden decision twisted away to the left. Wilkes braked violently, nearly falling off in the process. And the doctor cycled furiously into the alleyway which runs between the ‘Lamb and Flag’ and St. John’s. Without a moment’s hesitation, everyone followed—everyone, that is, except the proctorial authority, which stopped, baffled; for the alley-way is too small to admit a car. After some hesitation they set off to drive round to Parks Road, where the alley debouches, and it was the merest bad luck that they ran over a nail on the way and were delayed so long that they lost all track of the chase.

Some ingenious person has contrived, half-way down the alley, an arrangement of posts, and chains, which can only be negotiated on foot, and the pack nearly caught up with Dr. Havering here. But he just eluded them, and was to be seen cycling furiously down the short residential road which leads out into the Parks Road near the various science laboratories. The odds, of course, were unequal, and neither Mr. Barnaby nor Wilkes, the only two who had bicycles, seemed capable of tackling the doctor singly, or even in combination. Cadogan’s heart was pounding fiercely. But there was a sprinkling of determined Blues in Mr. Barnaby’s army; Fen was still running with an easy, loping stride; and Sally, in perfect training and fortunately wearing flat shoes and a split skirt, seemed to have no difficulty in keeping up. Scylla and Charybdis, defeated, dropped out of the race, but for the time being no one paid any attention to them, and they followed at a clumsy jog-trot.

From Parks Road Dr. Havering turned left into South Parks Road, tree-lined and pleasant, with the rout still indefatigably pursuing. Two classical dons, engaged in discussing Virgil, were submerged in it and left looking surprised but unbowed. “My dear fellow,” said one of them, “can this be the University steeplechase?” But as no enlightenment was forthcoming, he abandoned the topic. “Now, as I was saying about the Eclogues—”

It was at the end of South Parks Road that Dr. Havering made his great mistake—a mistake which can only be ascribed to the workings of blind panic. Doubtless he had hoped to throw off his pursuers long before, and was in the grip of nightmare. In any event, just as Fen was wasting his breath in chanting (rather inappropriately) “‘But with unhurrying chase, and unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, majestic instancy…’” he ran down the lane which leads to Parson’s Pleasure, abandoned his bicycle, flung sixpence at the gate-keeper, and disappeared inside. And from the hounds a howl of victory went up.

Here a word of explanation is required. Since Oxford is one of the few civilized cities in the world, it gives facilities to its inhabitants for bathing in the only way proper to that activity: which is to say, naked; though as even civilized persons are prone to the original errors of the flesh, some segregation is involved. Parson’s Pleasure is set aside for men. It consists of a broad strip of green turf, fenced in and with some stable-like bathing-huts, which runs down to a loop in the river where it by-passes an island. Young women in punts must go round the other way or else, blushing and ashamed, run the gauntlet of much bawdy comment. There is another part of the river, called Dame’s Delight, which is available for them, though it is not known that they take advantage of it to any great extent; and with that, at all events, we are not here concerned. The chief point to be observed is that there is no way out of Parson’s Pleasure except by the gate or by the river itself, which sufficiently explains the delight of Dr. Havering’s pursuers.

Mr. Barnaby was actually the first to arrive. Dismounting his bicycle, he pressed a pound-note confidentially into the gate-keeper’s hand, with the remark: “These are all my friends. Admit everyone, please.” In this request, however, he was over-sanguine. Worlds would not have induced the gate-keeper to admit Sally, and she was forced to remain outside, looking rather lorn and dejected. Cadogan, pressing in after the rest, promised to return and give her news as soon as possible.

The evening was warm, and a few people were splashing about or standing on the bank when Dr. Havering broke on their tranquillity, one old man, indeed, was so alarmed by the crescent uproar that he fled incontinently back into his bathing-hut. The doctor, after standing irresolute for a moment, looking desperately about him, ran to the opposite side of the enclosure and began trying to climb the fence. He was in the midst of this endeavour when Mr. Barnaby appeared. Looking helplessly round, he dropped again on to the springy green turf and made for a punt which was moored just by the springboard. A brief struggle with the punter, and he was in it and pushing away from the shore. But by this time the vanguard had reached him, and it was too late. Shouting incoherently and struggling like a damned soul in conveyance to hell, he was dragged ashore again before the amazed eyes of the bathers.

And here they suddenly heard Sally shouting for help in the lane outside. Scylla and Charybdis, hapless and forgotten in the rear, had caught up with her. Leaving Dr. Havering well guarded, Cadogan headed a troop to the rescue. The fight which followed was brief, violent, and decisive, the only casualties being Scylla and Charybdis and Cadogan himself, who received a blow on the jaw from one of his own side which nearly laid him out. Finally, the two men were half-hoisted, half dragged back into Parson’s Pleasure (the gate-keeper receiving another pound and a conspiratorial leer from Mr. Barnaby) and there triumphantly thrown into the river, while they bawled and cursed dreadfully. Once immersed, their attitude became conciliatory, largely owing to the fact that they were unable to swim. A science don, who was standing slapping his belly on the bank, regarded them helpfully. “Now is the time to learn,” he said “Bring your body up to a horizontal position and relax the muscles. The surface tension will support you.” But they only cried “Help!” more violently, their hats floating desolately in the water beside them. Eventually the river bore them downstream to a shallower place where they were able to struggle to land. It is probable that after this fiasco they left Oxford, for they were never seen or heard of again.

In the interim, more important matters were afoot. They consisted, in the first place, of Fen’s borrowing the punt, by cajolery, from its reluctant possessor; and in the second, in getting Dr. Havering into it. In case it should be thought that the doctor acquiesced at all in these proceedings, it must here be stated that he did not—that he pleaded piteously with the astonished sprinkling of nude bathers to rescue him. But even had they not been in their unprotected condition they would have known better than to try to stem an undergraduate rag in mid-career, and this one appeared to be supported—no, engineered—by a celebrated poet and the Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature. Some of them, weakening, even lent their support to the business, which is another testimony to the well-known power of majority opinion. Dr. Havering entered the punt with Fen, Cadogan, Wilkes, and Mr. Hoskins. Sally promised to go back to Fen’s room and wait there. And Mr. Barnaby stood with his army on the bank to wave than good-bye.

“Too Watteau, my dear Charles,” he remarked. “Embarquement pour Cythère. Or is it Arthur’s soul, do you suppose, being conveyed to Avalon?”

Charles having opined that it was more like the Flying Dutchman, and the punt being by now in mid-stream, they returned to Mr. Barnaby’s rooms to drink. And none too soon; as they passed out of Parson’s Pleasure, they could distinctly hear the gate-keeper phoning the proctor’s office in the Clarendon Building. His tale of woe, floating through an open window, pursued them for a little while, like a wraith, and then receded beyond earshot.

For some while the five men in the punt were silent. Havering’s anger had subsided into fear, and Cadogan studied him curiously as, aided by Mr. Hoskins, he paddled in a direction vaguely indicated by Fen. Of his thinness there was certainly no question. The skull-bones seemed bursting through the taut, shiny skin of the face, and the body was lean as a rake. Thin cobwebs of white hair straggled over the dome of the head. The nose was sharp and slightly hooked at the end, the eyes large and green, with long lashes, beneath a convex brow; indefinably glassy in appearance. A network of veins was prominently etched on the forehead, the movements were curiously jerky, and the hands trembled persistently, as though with the beginnings of some neural disease. Cadogan was reminded of a starved, vicious, half-wild cur he had once seen crouching in an East End gutter. Like Rosseter, Havering conveyed obscurely an impression of seediness and of professional ill-success.

“Where are you taking me?” Havering’s voice, soft and lacking in inflection, broke the silence. “You’ll pay for this—all of you.”

“A nice backwater,” said Fen dreamily. “Quite close to here. When we arrive you’re going to tell us everything that happened last night”

“You’re quite mistaken, sir. I am going to do nothing of the kind.”

Fen made no answer; his pale blue eyes were reflective and far away, scanning the banks, the willows with their branches panoplied over the water, the clumps of rushes with dead branches caught in them, the dull, evening reflection of light in the river. Clouds were coming up in the west to cover the declining sun—rain-clouds. The air was growing colder. A kingfisher, shining with green and blue, rose from an overhanging branch as they passed underneath. Wilkes, in the bow, looked very near to sleep. Mr. Hoskins, large and melancholy, paddled with steady persistence; Cadogan, still a trifle groggy from his blow on the jaw, with less certainty. If the truth be told, he was becoming a little tired of the adventurous life; in his discourse to Mr. Spode the previous night he had not quite contemplated anything like this, or if he had, it had been veiled in the curtains of romance, suitably disguised, bowdlerized, and expurgated. He only hoped that the end was in sight; that Havering was the murderer; and that he was not going to be knocked about any more. He fell to wondering how Mr. Scott and Mr. Beavis were faring, and then, finding this occupation a trifle barren, said to Mr. Hoskins:

“How did you get on to this man?”

Mr. Hoskins gave his account in slow and cheerless tones, watched in angry silence by Havering. “A Welshman from Jesus,” he said, “put us on to him in the first place. He seemed to think from the description that there could be no mistake, and in fact”—a faint expression of gratification lit up Mr. Hoskins’ face—“there was not. I made my way into his consulting-room,” he pursued obliquely, “by a strategy connected with the perils of parturition, and the necessity in such circumstances of immediate gynaecological aid. Some individuals were fortunately assembled in various positions round the house lest he should attempt to escape. On my first seeing him, I came directly to the point by asking him how he had succeeded in disposing of the body. He was very much alarmed, though now I imagine he will deny it.”

“You young blackguard,” the doctor interposed. “Certainly I deny it.”

“I pressed my inquiries further,” Mr. Hoskins went on, unperturbed, “with questions concerning his movements during last night, his inheritance, Mr. Rosseter, and some other matters. At every moment I could see his alarm growing, though he tried to conceal it. Eventually, I said that in view of the unsatisfactory nature of his replies I must take him with me to the police-station. He said that this was absurd, that I had mistaken his identity, that he had not the least idea what I was talking about, and so forth; adding, however, that he was prepared to accompany me to the police-station in order to prove his own innocence and make me pay for what he mysteriously called a ‘libellous intrusion’. He took leave of me to get, his hat and coat and, as I expected, did not return. In a very few minutes, as a matter of fact, he was leading his bicycle, with a small case strapped to the carrier, surreptitiously out of the back gate.”

Here Mr. Hoskins paused and frowned. “I can only explain the fact that our ambush did not there and then capture him by saying that Adrian Barnaby was in charge of that particular section of it, and that he is not a person capable of concentrating for very long on any one thing. What happened, in any case, was that the doctor was mounted and away before the alarm was raised. I stayed for a moment in the consulting-room to phone you at the ‘Mace and Sceptre’, and the rest you know.”

“Ah,” said Fen. “Why didn’t you leave in your car, Havering?”

Havering snarled: “I was going about my business in the normal way—”

“Oh, my dear paws,” Fen interrupted disgustedly. “I suppose you thought Mr. Hoskins would hear a car. Or was it just that you didn’t happen to have it there?” He glanced round. “Here we are, anyway. Hard a-port… No, port, Richard—left…”

The punt swung through a clump of reeds into the backwater he had indicated. It was a stagnant, unhealthy place. A green scum lay on the shallow water, and there were too many mosquitoes for comfort. Cadogan could not think why Fen had brought them here, but by now he was beyond questioning anything that happened; he was as passive as an ox.

“Now,” said Fen, standing up.

The punt rocked violently and Wilkes awoke. Cadogan and Mr. Hoskins shipped their paddles and looked expectantly at Fen. Alarm was intensified in Havering’s large green eyes, but they still had something of the glassy, lifeless look about them; it was like the face of a frightened man, only obscurely seen through a grimy window-pane.

“There has been too much shilly-shallying in this case,” Fen said deliberately, “and I haven’t time to linger, Havering, while you treat us to a lot of childish evasions and outbursts of false indignation. We know quite enough about the murder of Miss Tardy to have you indicted for conspiracy, but we don’t yet know who killed her. That’s the only reason we’re bothering about you.”

“If you think that threats—”

Fen raised a hand. “No, no. Actions, my good medico—actions. I’ve no time for threats. Answer my questions.”

“I shall not. How dare you hold me here? How—?”

“I warned you against chatter of that sort,” said Fen brutally. “Mr. Hoskins, kindly help me to put his head in that filthy-looking water and hold it there.”

A punt is the safest variety of boat for a struggle; virtually nothing will capsize it. Havering never had a chance. Six times his head was plunged into the green scum, Wilkes carrying on a sort of running commentary of obscure encouragement and applause. “Duck him!” he squealed with medieval ferocity. “Duck the murderous devil!” Cadogan contented himself with looking on and advising Havering to fill his lungs well before each immersion. When they had held him under for the sixth time:

“That’s enough,” Fen said. “Pluck up drowned honour by the locks.”

Havering fell back, choking and gasping, into the punt He was certainly a dismal sight. His thin hair clung, damp and disordered, to his skull. The green stuck to him in fiecks and patches. He exuded a disagreeable smell, and it was obvious that he would not hold out much longer.

“Damn you,” he whispered “Damn you. No more! I’ll tell you—I’ll tell you whatever you like.” Cadogan suddenly felt a twinge of pity. He produced a handkerchief for Havering to dry his face and head, and the older man took it gratefully.

“Now,” Fen said briskly, “in the first place, what was it you knew about Rosseter that induced him to take part in this plan to get the money?”

“He—he was a lawyer in Philadelphia when I was in practice there as a young man. He was involved in some very shady business—manipulation of the stock market and eventually embezzlement of a trustee fund. He—give me a cigarette, will you?” Havering took one from Fen’s case, puffed nervously at it, and held it between trembling fingers. “I needn’t go into all the details, but the end of it was that Rosseter—that wasn’t his name then—had to get out of the country and come over here. I never knew him personally, you understand—only by reputation. A few months later I wrecked my career in America by performing an abortion. People weren’t so tolerant then. I’d put by some money, so I came to England and set up in practice. Ten years ago I settled here—in Oxford. I recognized Rosseter, though he didn’t know me, of course. But I didn’t want to take things up again, so I said nothing and did nothing.” He looked quickly round, to see how they were taking it. “I’d got newspaper clippings about Rosseter, you see, with photographs. He couldn’t afford to have those published.”

A bull-frog was croaking in the rushes, and the mosquitoes were becoming more insistent. Cadogan lit a cigarette and blew out thick clouds of smoke in a futile endeavour to keep than away. It was growing dark and an occasional colourless star showed between the ragged edges of the clouds. Colder, too: Cadogan shivered a little and drew his coat more closely round him.

“I built up a fair practice,” Havering went on. “Particularly as a heart doctor. From the money point of view, it wasn’t anything spectacular, but it was enough to live on. Then one day I was called in to attend the old woman.”

“You mean Miss Snaith?”

“Yes.” Havering sucked listlessly at his cigarette. “She thought she had a weak heart. There was nothing more wrong with it than there normally is at that age. But she paid well, and if she wanted to fancy herself on the point of death, I wasn’t the one to discourage her. I gave her coloured water to drink and examined her regularly. Then one day, about a month before that bus knocked her down, she said: ‘Havering, you’re a sycophantic fool, but you’ve made some endeavour to keep me alive. Take this,’ and gave me an envelope, telling me at the same time to look in the personal column of the Oxford Mail—”

“Yes, yes,” said Fen impatiently. “We know about all that. And you guessed she was leaving you something in her will?”

“She called me Berlin,” Havering said, “because of some fool rhyme or other. Yes.” He hesitated, seeming for the moment at a loss as to how to proceed. “I found out Rosseter was her solicitor, and some time after she died I went to see him. I left it for a while, because I didn’t want to reopen the past. But she had money, that old woman. She might leave me a lot, and I wanted to know.” He stared at them, and Cadogan could see the twilight reflected from the water into his eyes. “It’s funny when you come to think of it—that I should have wanted the money so much. I wasn’t badly off, and I wasn’t in debt and I wasn’t being blackmailed. I just wanted money—a lot of it. I saw men with a lot of money in America—not the sort of money you get by just working.” He laughed shakily. “You’d think when you got to my age you wouldn’t be worrying about buying women and luxury, wouldn’t you? But that was what I wanted.”

He stared at them again. It was a kind of feeble bid for understanding and sympathy, but it made Cadogan’s blood run cold. On the bank, a colony of crickets had begun their incessant, metallic cry.

“That’s what lots of men have wanted,” Fen commented drily. “The prison cemeteries are crowded with them.”

Havering almost shouted: “I didn’t kill her! They can’t hang me!” Then, quietening a little: “Hanging’s a filthy business. When I was a police doctor I saw an execution at Pentonville. A woman. She screamed and struggled and they took five minutes just putting the rope round her neck. Her nerve had gone, you see. I wondered what it would be like, waiting for the boards to give way under you…” He put his face in his hands.

“Go on with what you were telling us,” Fen said immediately. There was not a trace of emotion of any kind in his voice.

Havering pulled himself together. “I saw Rosseter, and told him I knew who he was. He wouldn’t admit it at first, but he couldn’t hold out long. He told me the provisions of the will—do you know about that?”

“Yes. We know. Go on.”

“We planned to get the Tardy woman to sign away the money. Rosseter said she’d easily be frightened.”

“Not exactly what he told us,” Cadogan interposed.

“No,” said Fen. “But in the circumstances that was to be expected.”

“I wish I’d had nothing to do with it,” Havering said bitterly. “Much use I shall have for the legacy. That damned old woman’s to blame, with her idiotic schemes.” He paused. “Rosseter brought in two of the other legatees. I didn’t want that, but he said we’d arrange things so that if anything ever came out they’d get the blame. That wasn’t so bad. Then the night came, and we got everything ready at that place in the Iffley Road. Rosseter didn’t want the woman to see him, because, although she didn’t know us, she did know him, and might recognize him. So we arranged that I should put bandages round my face; that would disguise me, but not obviously, because I could say I’d had an accident. Then after I’d sent the girl away the other man—we called him Mold—was to get on with the real business.”

Again Havering paused, glancing round at his auditors. “I was nervous. I must have been nervous, or I should have seen at once what it meant when Rosseter said he was going in to see the woman. He said, too, that he wanted us to separate to different rooms. I thought that was part of the plan to incriminate the others, so I backed him up. And then when I was alone I suddenly realized that he must be intending to kill her if he was letting himself be seen, and that this separating was to incriminate one of us.” He relit his cigarette, which had gone out. “It sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? And it was fantastic. I think we all knew there was something odd and wrong about it, but the trouble was, we’d left things too much in Rosseter’s hands, and now I knew he was double-crossing us. I went to the woman in the other room—to give myself an alibi. Then after a while Rosseter came back. I expected him to have killed her, but he hadn’t, because I heard her say something to him as he left the room, about troublesome legal formalities.”

“Just a minute. What time was this? Do you know?”

“Yes, I happened to look at my watch. It was twenty-five past eleven.”

“So she was still alive then. Have you any idea what Rosseter was talking to her about, and why?”

“I don’t know. I think perhaps he was setting his stage somehow. You could ask him.”

Cadogan glanced quickly at his companions. The same thought was in all their minds. Was this a neatly contrived bluff, a pretended ignorance of Rosseter’s death, or was it the real thing? For the life of him Cadogan could not tell. The remark had been made before it was possible to attend to the facial expression or the inflection of Havering’s toneless voice. Wilkes sat placidly in the bow, a small, old figure lighting a battered pipe.

“Rosseter said the woman wasn’t going to be as easy to frighten as he’d thought, and that perhaps we ought to abandon the whole scheme as being too dangerous. I argued with him about that for a while, but it was more for form’s sake than anything else; I knew he was going to kill her, but I didn’t want him to know I knew yet. Then the other man—Mold—came in from his room and said there was someone walking about the shop. We put out the light and stayed quiet for a while—quite a long while. Finally we decided it must be a false alarm, and Rosseter gave the other man a gun and told him to go and get on with the job.”

“What time was this?”

“About a quarter or ten to midnight. After a short while he came back and said the woman was dead.”

There was a tiny pause. Euthanasia, Cadogan thought: they all regard it as that, and not as wilful slaughter, not as the violent cutting-off of an irreplaceable compact of passion and desire and affection and will; not as a thrust into unimagined and illimitable darkness. He tried to see Havering’s face, but it was only a lean silhouette in the fading light. Something took root in him that in a week, a month, a year perhaps, would become poetry. He was suddenly excited and oddly content. The words of his predecessors in the great Art came to his mind. “They are all gone into the world of light.” “I that in heill was and in gladnesse.” “Dust hath closed Helen’s eye…” The vast and terrifying significance of death closed round him for a moment like the petals of a dark flower.

“I went and examined her,” Havering was saying. “There was a thin cord round her neck, with the usual bruising. Death, of course, due to asphyxia. It was while I was doing that that the girl appeared. She had been all the time in the shop below. Rosseter sent her away and promised she would keep quiet about what she had seen. He was unnerved, and that surprised me, because I thought he’d killed the woman. We were all unnerved, and wanted to get out, but someone had to get rid of the body and get the toys back to the other shop. We arranged how it was to be done, and then we three men drew lots for it, and it came out that I had to do it. I stayed there for a while, thinking. I was frightened, and afraid I should be caught with the body.

“Then someone came into the shop below.” He looked at Cadogan. “It was you. What happened you know. I knocked you out and put you in that closet place downstairs. I locked the door so that you wouldn’t be able to get into the shop again, and see that it had been changed, but I left the window open so that you could get away. I knew that you’d go to the police, but I thought that if they came back and found the body gone, there would be nothing they could do. I—I didn’t want to injure you, you understand—”

“Never mind the apologies,” Fen said. “What happened to the body?”

“I got it out into the car the woman had left. It was heavy, and I’m not a strong man, so it took a long time. It was beginning to get stiff by then, and I had to push the head and arms about to move it through the car door. That was horrible. I took it to the river and put stones inside the clothes and pushed it in. I thought it was deep there, but it wasn’t, and the thing just lay wallowing on the edge, lying in the mud and stones. I had to pick it out again, and carry it somewhere else. It was dark, and once it slipped and the wet arms fell round my neck… Then I had to take the stones out again because it was too heavy…” A second time Havering put his face in his hands.

“Where did you put it in the end?” Fen asked.

“A little way up the river from here. There are three willows close together at the edge.”

In the twilight a bat was flying; the piercing, strident chatter of the crickets never ceased; and far away in the town the clocks were striking half past seven. The river water was black now, and the small fishes would be clinging to the woman’s eyes. In the punt they were no more than silhouettes, the obscurity pierced only by the glowing ends of their cigarettes.

Fen said: “And her handbag—what happened to that?”

“Rosseter took it away with him. I don’t know what he did with it.”

“Go on.”

“I was wet and filthy, but I had to go back and get those toys away and replace the groceries and change the flat round. By the time I’d finished it was nearly light. I heard you go”—this to Cadogan—“and I pushed some stores into the closet and went away myself. I don’t think anyone saw me.” The toneless voice degenerated to a whine. “No one can prove anything.”

“How do you mean ‘changed the flat round’?” Cadogan demanded.

“I cleaned it up and moved the furniture and oiled the door. I knew you’d only seen one room. I thought you’d imagine you’d mistaken the place.”

“You were quite right,” Cadogan conceded. “For a time I did. But why was the shop-door left open?”

Havering’s face darkened. “It was those other fools—when they left. I didn’t know it was open. If it hadn’t been, none of this would have happened.”

Fen stretched out his long legs and smoothed his hair. “While we’re on the subject of your going home, would anyone have known you were away last night?”

“No one,” Havering replied sulkily. “My servant sleeps out. She leaves at nine o’clock at night and doesn’t return till 7:30 in the morning.”

“By which time, no doubt you were in bed and asleep. What were you doing between 4:30 and 5 this afternoon?”

“What?” Havering stared. “What do you mean?”

“Never mind that. Answer the question.”

“I was—I was returning home from my afternoon round of visits.”

“What time did you get in?”

“A little after five. I don’t know exactly.”

“Did anyone see you come in?”

“The maid. But why—”

“What time did you leave your last patient?”

“Damn it, I can’t remember,” Havering exclaimed. “What does it matter, anyway? It’s got nothing to do with last night. Listen: I didn’t kill that woman, and you can’t prove I did. I’m not going to hang. I’m a sick man, and I can’t stand much more of this.”

“Be quiet,” Fen said. “Was it you who set those two men to follow Cadogan and myself?”

“Yes.”

“Where did they come from?”

“I got a man I knew in London to send them down. They were prepared to do anything, and ask no questions, if they were only paid well enough.”

“What happened exactly?”

Havering spoke to Cadogan. “Rosseter rang me up and said you’d been to see him. He described you, and asked if I knew how you’d come to be meddling in the business. I recognized you as the man in the shop. I was alarmed. I sent Weaver and Faulkes to follow you and prevent you talking to anyone who might give the game away—especially the girl.”

“So when we seemed likely to catch up with her, they disposed of us and took her away to stop her mouth once and for all.”

“I gave no orders to kill—”

“Don’t quibble, please. The cottage they took her to belonged to Miss Winkworth. How did they know to take her there?”

“I knew her. I recognized her last night in spite of the mask, and she recognized me. I rang up to tell her the girl was dangerous and would have to be shut up for a few hours. She suggested the cottage near Wootton.”

“Knowing, no doubt, what the euphemism ‘shut up for a few hours’ meant.”

“That’s a lie.”

“The girl would have traced the owner afterwards, wouldn’t she?”

“We arranged for Weaver and Faulkes to break in. Then no responsibility could fall on her.”

“Let it pass. It’s as good an evasion as any. And now”—Fen leaned forward—“we arrive at the most important point of the lot. Precisely what did you see when you examined the body which made you say no one who was present could have killed Miss Tardy?”

Havering drew a deep breath. “Ah, you heard that, did you? Well, it’s true. I’ve been a police doctor, as I told you. You can’t ever tell exactly how long a person’s been dead, but the quicker you get to the body the more accurate you can be. I examined it at about nine minutes to midnight. And I’m willing to swear that that woman died not later than 11:45 and not earlier than 11:35. Do you see what that means?”

“Certainly,” Fen answered placidly. “As a matter of interest, did you inform any of the others of this fact?”

“I told Rosseter.”

“Ah, yes.” In the darkness Fen smiled. “Between 11:35 and 11:45 you were all together in a different room. No one could have got in from the outside, either.”

Havering was shivering and half hysterical. “So unless the girl killed her,” he said, “no one did, because the thing’s impossible.”