marry again," said Dr. MacMaster, "and good luck to him. A very nice young woman. Warm-hearted, kind, good company and very much in love with him. Has been for a long time. What did she feel about Mrs. Argyle? You can probably guess just as well as I can. Naturally, Mrs. Argyle's death simplified things a good deal. Leo Argyle's not the type of man to have an affair with his secretary with his wife in the same house. I don't really think he'd have left his wife, either."
Calgary said slowly: "I saw them both; I talked to them. I can't really believe that either of them -"
"I know," said MacMaster. "One can't believe, can one? And yet - one of that household did it, you know."
"You really think so?"
"I don't see what else there is to think. The police are fairly sure that it wasn't the work of an outsider, and the police are probably right."
"But which of them?" said Calgary.
MacMaster shrugged his shoulders. "One simply doesn't know."
"You've no idea yourself from your knowledge of them all?"
"Shouldn't tell you if I had," said MacMaster. "After all, what have I got to go on? Unless there's some factor that I've missed none of them seems a likely murderer to me. And yet -1 can't rule any one of them out as a possibility. No," he added slowly, "my view is that we shall never know. The police will make inquiries and all that sort of thing. They'll do their best, but to get evidence after this time and with so little to go upon -"
He shook his head. "No, I don't think that the truth will ever be known. There are cases like that, you know. One reads about them. Fifty - a hundred years ago, cases where one of three or four or five people must have done it but there wasn't enough evidence and no one's ever been able to say."
"Do you think it's going to be like that here?" "Well," said Dr. MacMaster, "yes, I do..."
Again he cast a shrewd look at Calgary. "And that's what's so terrible, isn't it?" he said.
"Terrible," said Calgary, "because of the innocent. That's what she said to me." "Who? Who said what to you?"
"The girl - Hester. She said I didn't understand that it was the innocent who mattered. It's what you've just been saying to me. That we shall never know -"
"-who is innocent?" The doctor finished for him. "Yes, if we could only know the truth. Even if it doesn't come to an arrest or trial or conviction. Just to know. Because otherwise -"
He paused.
"Yes?" said Calgary.
"Work it out for yourself," said Dr. MacMaster. "No -1 don't need to say that -you already have."
He went on: "It reminds me, you know, of the Bravo Case - nearly a hundred years ago now, I suppose, but books are still being written about it; making out a perfectly good case for his wife having done it, or Mrs. Cox having done it, or Dr. Gully - or even for Charles Bravo having taken the poison in spite of the Coroner's verdict. All quite plausible theories - but no one now can ever know the truth. And so Florence Bravo, abandoned by her family, died alone of drink, and Mrs. Cox, ostracised, and with three little boys, lived to be an old woman with most of the people she knew believing her to be a murderess, and Dr. Gully was ruined professionally and socially.
"Someone was guilty - and got away with it. But the others were innocent - and didn't get away with anything."
"That mustn't happen here," said Calgary. It mustn't!"
Chapter 8
Hester Argyle was looking at herself in the glass. There was little vanity in her gaze. It was more an anxious questioning with behind it the humility of one who has never really been sure of herself. She pushed up her hair from her forehead, pulled it to one side and frowned at the result. Then, as a face appeared behind hers in the mirror, she started, flinched and swung round apprehensively.
"Ah," said Kirsten Lindstrom, "you are afraid!" "What do you mean, afraid, Kirsty?"
"You are afraid of me. You think that I come up behind you quietly and that perhaps I shall strike you down."
"Oh, Kirsty, don't be so foolish. Of course I wouldn't think anything like that."
"But you did think it," said the other. "And you are right, too, to think such things. To look at the shadows, to start