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It was a final wail from Lucilla.

Anthony said:

‘She was in her room. Door locked. Her head in the gas fire and the gas full on.’

‘Iris?’ Mrs Drake gave a piercing shriek. ‘Iris has committed suicide? I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it!’

A faint ghost of Anthony’s grin returned to him.

‘You don’t need to believe it,’ he said. ‘It isn’t true.’

Chapter 14

‘And now, please, Tony, will you tell me all about it?’

Iris was lying on a sofa, and the valiant November sunshine was making a brave show outside the windows of Little Priors.

Anthony looked across at Colonel Race who was sitting on the window-sill, and grinned engagingly:

‘I don’t mind admitting, Iris, that I’ve been waiting for this moment. If I don’t explain to someone soon how clever I’ve been, I shall burst. There will be no modesty in this recital. It will be shameless blowing of my own trumpet with suitable pauses to enable you to say “Anthony, how clever of you” or “Tony, how wonderful” or some phrase of a like nature. Ahem! The performance will now begin. Here we go.

‘The thing as a whole looked simple enough. What I mean is, that it looked like a clear case of cause and effect. Rosemary’s death, accepted at the time as suicide, was not suicide. George became suspicious, started investigating, was presumably getting near the truth, and before he could unmask the murderer was, in his turn, murdered. The sequence, if I may put it that way, seems perfectly clear.

‘But almost at once we came across some apparent contradictions. Such as: A. George could not be poisoned. B. George was poisoned. And: A. Nobody touched George’s glass. B. George’s glass was tampered with.

‘Actually I was overlooking a very significant fact—the varied use of the possessive case. George’s ear is George’s ear indisputably because it is attached to his head and cannot be removed without a surgical operation! But by George’s watch, I only mean the watch that George is wearing—the question might arise whether it is his or maybe one lent him by someone else. And when I come to George’s glass, or George’s teacup, I begin to realize that I mean something very vague indeed. All I actually mean is the glass or cup out of which George has lately been drinking—and which has nothing to distinguish it from several other cups and glasses of the same pattern.

‘To illustrate this, I tried an experiment. Race was drinking tea without sugar, Kemp was drinking tea with sugar, and I was drinking coffee. In appearance the three fluids were of much the same colour. We were sitting round a small marble-topped table among several other round marble-topped tables. On the pretext of an urgent brainwave I urged the other two out of their seats and out into the vestibule, pushing the chairs aside as we went, and also managing to move Kemp’s pipe which was lying by his plate to a similar position by my plate but without letting him see me do it. As soon as we were outside I made an excuse and we returned, Kemp slightly ahead. He pulled the chair to the table and sat down opposite the plate that was marked by the pipe he had left behind him. Race sat on his right as before and I on his left—but mark what had happened—a new A. and B. contradiction! A. Kemp’s cup has sugared tea in it. B. Kemp’s cup has coffee in it. Two conflicting statements that cannot both be true—But they are both true. The misleading term is Kemp’s cup. Kemp’s cup when he left the table and Kemp’s cup when he returned to the table are not the same.

‘And that, Iris, is what happened at the Luxembourg that night. After the cabaret, when you all went to dance, you dropped your bag. A waiter picked it up—not the waiter, the waiter attending on that table who knew just where you had been sitting—but a waiter, an anxious hurried little waiter with everybody bullying him, running along with a sauce, and who quickly stooped, picked up the bag and placed it by a plate—actually by the plate one place to the left of where you had been sitting. You and George came back first and you