“Impossible!” said Race.
“No, my friend, not impossible. Remember the evidence of Tim Allerton. He heard a pop–followed by a splash. And he heard something elsethe footsteps of a man running–a man running past his door. But nobody should have been running along the starboard side of the deck. What he heard was the stockinged feet of Simon Doyle running past his cabin.”
Race said:
“I still say it’s impossible. No man could work out the whole caboodle like that in a flash—especially a chap like Doyle who is slow in his mental processes.” “But very quick and deft in his physical actions!”
“That, yes. But he wouldn’t be capable of thinking the whole thing out.” “But he did not think it out himself, my friend. That is where we were all wrong. It looked like a crime committed on the spur of the moment. As I say it was a very cleverly planned and well thought out piece of work. It could not be chance that Simon Doyle had a bottle of red ink in his pocket. No, it must be design. It was not chance that he had a plain unmarked handkerchief with him. It was not chance that Jacqueline de Bellefort’s foot kicked the pistol under the settee where it would be out of sight and unremembered until later.”
“Jacqueline?”
“Certainly. The two halves of the murderer. What gave Simon his alibi? The shot fired by ]acqueline. What gave Jacqueline her alibi–the insistence of Simon which resulted in a hospital nurse remaining with her all night. There, between the two of them, you get all the qualities you require–the cool resourceful planning brain, Jacqueline de Bellefort’s brain, and the man of action to carry it out with incredible swiftness and timing.
“Look at it the right way, and it answers every question. Simon Doyle and Jacqueline had been lovers. Realise that they are still lovers and it is all clear.
Simon does away with his rich wife, inherits her money, and in due course will marry his old love. It was all very ingenious. The persecution of Mrs. Doyle by Jacqueline, all part of the plan. Simon’s pretended rage. And yet–there were lapses. He held forth to me once about possessive women–held forth with real bitterness. It ought to have been clear to me that it was his wife he was thinking about–not Jacqueline. Then his manner to his wife in public. An ordinary inarticulate Englishman, such as Simon Doyle, is very embarrassed of showing any affection. Simon was not a really good actor. He overdid the devoted manner. That conversation I had with Mademoiselle Jacqueline, too, when she pretended that somebody had overheard. I saw no one. And there was no one! But it was to be a useful red herring later. Then one night on this boat I thought I heard Simon and Linnet outside my cabin. He was saying, ‘We’ve got to go through with it now.” It was Doyle all right, but it was to Jacqueline he was speaking.
“The final drama was perfectly planned and timed. There was a sleeping draught for me in case I might put an inconvenient finger in the pie–there was the selection of Miss Robson as a witness–the working up of the scene, Miss de Bellefort’s exaggerated remorse and hysterics. She made a good deal of noise in case the shot should be heard. En veritY, it was an extraordinarily clever idea.
Jacqueline says she has shot Doyle, Miss Robson says so, Fanthorp says so–tnd when Simon’s leg is examined he has been shot. It looks unanswerable! For both of them there is a perfect alibi–at the cost, it is true, of a certain amount of pain and risk to Simon Doyle, but it is necessary that his wound should definitel;y disable him.
“And then the plan goes wrong. Louise Bourget has been wakeful. She has come up the stairway and she has seen Simon Doyle run along to his wie’s cabin and come back. Easy enough to piece together what has happened the ollowng day. And so she makes her greedy bid for hush money and in so doing igns her death warrant.”
“But Mr. Doyle couldn’t have killed her?” Cornelia objected.