Free Fair Warning by Mignon Good Eberhart Page A

with the hat on rose from beside Ivan. He jerked his head toward the little cluster across the room.
    “Take ’em away,” he said. “I’ll see ’em in a minute. Keep ’em all here. How long has he been dead, Doc?”
    They were being taken away. Altogether like prisoners—Verity still clutching her blue train as they went through the hall, into the closed, chill drawing room. And they didn’t talk when they were there, for two policemen followed them and watched them. As they left the library Dr. Blakie was talking to the police doctor and handing him the knife. The police doctor looked at it without expression; took it gingerly in his fingers and wrapped it in a handkerchief and said something to the little dark man with the hat, who looked at it and seemed for an instant less bored. Then Dr. Blakie followed them into the drawing room. And almost immediately they were being questioned. Questioned by policemen; questioned by the little man in the hat, who still did not remove it, although he had pushed it wearily back on his head, further exposing a bored, sallow face with lazily drooping eyelids. His name was Jacob Wait and he was a detective, and the thin policeman at his elbow who kept looking impatiently at his watch was a lieutenant of the police and his name was Davies. Marcia did not know that then, but she was to learn it.
    She did hear and remember their names. And she knew that she was afraid of them, or rather of what they represented. But just then, from surfeit of shock, it was only surface things that were sharply and acutely clear to her; it was like seeing the people around her in only one dimension. That one dimension was sharp and bright but had no depth and thickness. She did realize that she must rouse herself, must make herself comprehend the meaning of all this turmoil, this strange, terrifying intrusion—and must try to protect herself. But there was nothing to do but answer any questions they asked. … Except that Rob had killed him.
    And except that Rob had said she must not tell them or anyone that she had touched the knife. But Beatrice knew it; and she hadn’t had time to tell Rob that Beatrice believed she had killed Ivan.
    That was shocking. That was dreadful. But it was too shocking, too utterly incredible. It was only one more part of a fantastic whole which happened so you had to accept it and it was real.
    Rob seemed to know what was going on; he looked alive and as if he understood what they were doing. Verity, however, was just a flat, blue paper doll, sitting there with a blue train around her feet and her face utterly still and flat, washed of all color. They were all paper dolls; no depth, no meaning, no power of motion. If you turned them around there would be nothing there. Ivan was lying dead in the next room. Rob had killed him.
    “All right, Marcia?” said Rob in a low voice.
    “Quite.”
    The little man in the hat was talking and she hadn’t known it.
    He was talking briefly and very much to the point. Jacob Wait was actually a living apotheosis of the ellipsis in word and thought, mainly because he was very bored and liked to save himself effort. Also he hated murders. There was a small, warm Jewish strain in him which made him very sensitive to pain and very imaginative, so that the sight and smell of murder gave him a sickening wrench which was physical. And an investigation—any investigation—was likely to give him now and then moments of horror when he looked, with that inconvenient sensitiveness, out of the eyes of other people—the people he was pursuing. That was dreadful, and he hated that, too, and thus more than anything he hated those people. He had overlaid that small, warm strain with a great many other things, and he was mainly very bored and knew that the shorter he made the unwelcome job the sooner it would be over. The idea was to get hold of the guy that croaked the guy, see? And be done with it.
    Already, it seemed, he knew as much as they knew