When Last I Died

She cried it out so loudly that her voice rang through the house. At the same instant a shrill whistle came from the direction of the scullery, and, as Muriel's face grew pale, a sound stranger and more eerie than any that had so far been heard that night seemed to come from the courtyard outside. Part of it was homely enough—the steady clop, clop of a heavy horse, the sound of the hoofs muffled by the courtyard weeds—but, mingled with this was another sound, unusual to most men's ears, but apparently familiar, in some horrid and personal sense, to the wretched, guilty woman who had now dropped the razor on the floor.

"The cover of the well! They're here! They're here! They've come to be revenged on me! Go away! Go away! Go away! Leave me alone, you little fiends!" she shrieked at the top of her voice.

The sounds ceased. Mrs. Bradley picked up the razor.

"I think you dropped this," she said.

"I?" faltered Muriel, recoiling. "I don't know what it is! I never saw it! Didn't you hear what I heard?"

"I only heard someone screwing down a coffin lid," said Mrs. Bradley, quietly as before. "Or could it have been the trapdoor down to the cellar? Listen! Do you hear it too?"

She half-turned, and at that instant Muriel opened the razor and made a sudden slashing attack. Mrs. Bradley, who had been waiting to do so, side-stepped, and banged her on the elbow with a cosh which she had drawn from the deep pocket of her skirt when she had half-turned away.

"Listen!" she said again.

Muriel was moaning with the agony of the blow on the elbow, but her moans of pain changed suddenly to a dreadful cry of terror. From beneath their feet came the sound of someone digging. She was in a state of hysterical panic when the inspector stepped out of the kitchen to make the arrest. She made a full and babbled confession on the way to the station.

Chapter Eleven

THE DIARY

"Hark, now everything is still, The screech-owl and the whistler shrill, Call upon our dame aloud, And bid her quickly don her shroud!"

WEBSTER.

"THE thing is," said Ferdinand," when did you first suspect her, mother?"

"I don't know," replied Mrs. Bradley.

"Genius," said Caroline, without (her mother-in-law thought) much justification for the compliment.

"I thought you were convinced of Bella's guilt."

"I was."

"Well, then, you must know when your ideas changed."

Mrs. Bradley was silent for a minute or two. One would have said that she was in contemplation of the hedge which divided part of her garden from the paddock. "I don't know," she repeated, "but if I am being asked to hazard an opinion, I would say that I was convinced of Bella's guilt until I went to see her down in Devon."

Ferdinand nodded, as his mother turned her basilisk eyes on him.

"Personally," he said, "I did not think anything could disprove Bella Foxley's guilt. The ancient, wealthy aunt, the blackmailing cousin, the dangerous and criminally minded boys, and the golden opportunity of making herself safe for life by assuming the identity of a murdered sister—the thing seemed self-evident, fool-proof, satisfactory and horrible."

"But it wasn't altogether satisfactory," said Mrs. Bradley, "as I realized the moment I began to examine it from Bella Foxley's point of view. If you assume for a moment that Bella was not guilty, you get a different impression entirely of the course events may have taken. You get the impression, for instance, that every ill deed we had attributed to Bella could just as well have been performed by Muriel."

"That means, though, that the aunt died accidentally," said Ferdinand. "Bella was the only person to have had a motive there for murder."

"Not necessarily," replied his mother. "Bella certainly had the motive, for she stood to gain by the death, but if she could be blackmailed successfully, Tom and Muriel stood to gain something too. It was a clever plot, but it was apparent, before I suspected Muriel at all, that Tom was somewhere involved. It was evident that Bella had not written that diary."

"The diary?"

"Yes. You've read it. You know what the mistakes and discrepancies were. Some of the mistakes could, but others could not, have been made by a single author, especially if that author were Bella. Collaboration was indicated—an unheard-of thing in a genuine diary."

"I see what you mean. But there was no way of telling which part was Bella's own work, was there? And, even if there were, the only other part-author of the diary, as you say, could have been Tom. At least, let's put it that the collaborator couldn't have been Muriel."