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."
"There was no need for it to have been Muriel. I spoke just now of a plot. But, to revert to the diary itself, it seemed to me to indicate that the writer had a rather pleasing style, and a definite, although possibly rudimentary, sense of form. Of course, we must admit that Bella may have possessed both these literary qualities, but Tom, as a practising writer (he made some of his income out of articles for journals devoted to psychical research, you will remember), was the more likely author, on the whole, in my opinion. Still, one cannot generalise about such things, for it is a well-known fact that people whose powers of conversation are crude, boorish, unready, or even, for all social purposes, non-existent, can sometimes contrive to express themselves, when in receipt of pen and paper, in unexceptionable prose."
"I don't see, all the same, why you think two people wrote the diary between them," said Caroline.
"I don't know that they did. Bella was an unconscious collaborator. What interested me, and caused me to investigate the matter in the first place, were the ending of the diary, abrupt yet undramatic, and the mistakes in fact which were apparent almost at a glance and which became ludicrously obvious as soon as one began to examine the matter.
"Then came the very odd fact that, although the diary continued long past the time when everyone concerned had left Aunt Flora's house, the diary itself remained there. That seemed very curious."
"Last entries faked? Written beforehand ?" said