‘No – I wondered what she’d got on her mind.’

Henry leaned forward with his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand. ‘Well, you said yourself that her evidence nearly hanged Geoffrey Grey.’

‘Yes, it did. She’d been up to turn down Mr. Everton’s bed, you know, and she swore that when she came down again she heard voices in the study and she thought there was a quarrel going on, and she was frightened and went to the door to listen, and she swore that she recognised Geoffrey’s voice. So then she said she thought it was all right, and she was coming away, when she heard a shot, and she screamed, and Mercer came running out of his pantry where he was cleaning the silver. The study door was locked, and when they banged on it Geoff opened it from inside with the pistol in his hand. It’s frightful evidence, Henry.’

‘And Grey’s story was?’

‘His uncle rang him up at eight and asked him to come along at once. He was very much upset. Geoff went along, and he would have got there at between a quarter and twenty past eight. He went into the study through the open French window, and he said his uncle was lying across the writing-table and the pistol was on the floor in front of the window. He said he picked it up, and then he heard a scream in the hall and the Mercers came banging at the door, and when he found it was locked he unlocked it and let them in. And there were only his finger-prints on the handle and on the pistol.’

Henry said, ‘I remember.’ And then he said what he had forborne to say during the six months of their engagement – ‘That’s pretty conclusive evidence. What makes you think he didn’t do it?’

Hilary’s colour flared. She beat her hands together and said in a voice of passionate sincerity,

‘He didn’t -he didn’t really! He couldn’t! You see, I know Geoff.’

Something in Henry responded to that sure loyalty, it was like trumpets blowing. It was like the drum-beat in a march. It stirred the blood and carried you along. But Hilary might whistle for the comfort of knowing that she had stirred him. He frowned a little and said,

‘Is Marion as sure as you are?’

Hilary’s colour failed as suddenly as it had flamed. She wasn’t sure, poor Marion – she wasn’t sure. She was too worn out with pain to be sure. A cold terror peered at her from her own thoughts and betrayed her from within.

Hilary looked away and said in a voice of sober courage,

‘Geoff didn’t do it.’

‘Then who did?’

‘Mrs. Mercer knows,’ said Hilary. Her own words startled her so much that she felt herself shaking. She had not known that she was going to say that. She hadn’t even known that she was thinking it.

‘Why do you say that?’ said Henry quickly.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must. You can’t say a thing like that without knowing why you said it.’

Henry was riding the high horse. Its trampling had a reviving effect upon Hilary. She might marry Henry, or she might not marry Henry, but she simply wasn’t going to be trampled on. She stuck her chin in the air and said,

‘I can. I don’t know why I said it, because it just popped out. I didn’t first think, “Mrs. Mercer knows,” and then say it – I just said it, and then I felt perfectly certain that she did know. That’s the way my mind works – things I’ve never thought about at all come banging out, and then when I do start thinking about them they are true.’

Henry came down off the high horse with a bump. She was so comic when she talked like that with her colour glowing again, and her eyes as bright as a bird’s, and the little brown curls all shining under her perky hat. She wanted shaking and she wanted kissing, and meanwhile he burst out laughing at her.

‘It’s all very well to laugh!’ But in her inside mind she laughed too and sang a little shouting song of joy, because once you begin to laugh together, how can you go on quarrelling? You simply can’t. And she was tired right through to the very marrow of her bones of quarrelling with Henry.

‘Prize fool!’ said Henry, no longer strangely polite.

Hilary shook her head and caught the inside corner of her lip between her teeth, because she wasn’t going to laugh for Henry to see – not yet.

That’s only because you can’t do it yourself. And you’ve got a nasty jealous disposition – I’ve told you about it before -and if you ever marry anyone, Henry, you’ll have to watch it because she’ll either walk out on you or else turn into a dreep because you’ve broken her spirit by giving her an ingrowing inferiority complex.’

Henry’s gaze rested on her with something disturbing in it. This was the Henry who could laugh at you with his eyes, and make your heart beat suddenly and hard.

‘I haven’t noticed any signs of it,’ he said.

‘Oh, I’m the sort that walks out,’ said Hilary, and met his eyes with a hardy sparkle in her own.

Henry said nothing. He didn’t intend to be drawn. He continued to look at her, and in a panic Hilary returned to Mrs. Mercer.

‘Don’t you see, Henry, if you don’t believe Mrs. Mercer’s evidence – and I don’t – well then, she must know who did it. She wouldn’t just go telling all those lies to amuse herself – because she wasn’t amused, she was frightfully, frightfully miserable – or to spite Geoff, because she was frightfully, frightfully miserable about Geoff and about Marion. So if she was telling lies – and I’m sure she was – it was because she wanted to screen somebody else. And we’ve got to find out who it is – we’ve simply got to.’

Henry stopped laughing at Hilary with his eyes and frowned instead, not at her, but past her at the Mercers, and the Everton Case, and the problem of finding about a quarter of a needle in several hypothetical bundles of hay. It was all very well for Hilary to propose a game of Spot the Murderer, but the trouble was that so far as he himself was concerned he had a conviction amounting to certainty that the murderer had already been spotted, and was now expiating his exasperated shot at the uncle who had cut him out of his will. It was, and had been all along, his opinion that Geoffrey Grey had got off light and was uncommonly lucky not to have been hanged.

Henry’s regiment was in Egypt, and after a leave spent very pleasantly in the Tyrol he had gone back to Cairo. James Everton was shot a couple of days before his leave was up. He had, at the time, been a good deal preoccupied with trying to make Hilary see the question of an engagement in the same light as he did. In the end they more or less split the difference, Henry asserting that they were engaged, whilst Hilary maintained that being engaged was stuffy. Snippets about the Case filtered through to Egypt. Hilary wrote voluminously about it from a passionately personal and partisan point of view, but he had never really read the evidence. He accepted the verdict, was sorry for Marion Grey, and counted the days till he could get home and make Hilary marry him. And here she was, without any intention of marrying him at all and every intention of trying to drag him into a wild goose attempt at re-opening the Everton Case. He reacted in the most obstinate and natural manner, focused the frown on Hilary, and said in his most dogmatic voice,

‘You’d better let it alone – the case is closed.’

Hilary beat her hands together again.

‘It isn’t – it can’t be! It won’t ever be closed until the real murderer is found and Geoff is free – and the more I think of it, the more I feel quite, quite sure that Mrs. Mercer knows who it is. Henry, it’s a hunch!’

Henry frowned upon the hunch.

‘What’s the good of talking like that? You say yourself that your first impression of the woman was that she was mad. I don’t mean to say she’s a raving lunatic, but she is obviously a morbid, hysterical person. If she was fond of the Greys she would naturally feel having to give evidence against Geoffrey. I can’t see anything in what you told me except that having given the evidence she apparently tried to crash in on Marion and make a scene about it.’