Rebecca was lying there on the cabin floor. She was not in the crypt at all.
Some other woman was lying in the crypt.
Maxim had killed Rebecca.
Rebecca had not been drowned at all.
Maxim had killed her.
He had shot her in the cottage in the woods.
He had carried her body to the boat, and sunk the boat there in the bay.
That grey, silent cottage, with the rain pattering on the roof.
The jig-saw pieces came tumbling thick and fast upon me.
Disjointed pictures flashed one by one through my bewildered mind.
Maxim sitting in the car beside me in the south of France.
'Something happened nearly a year ago that altered my whole life.
I had to begin living all over again…' Maxim's silence, Maxim's moods.
The way he never talked about Rebecca.
The way he never mentioned her name.
Maxim's dislike of the cove, the stone cottage.
'If you had my memories you would not go there either.'
The way he climbed the path through the woods not looking behind him.
Maxim pacing up and down the library after Rebecca died.
Up and down. Up and down.
'I came away in rather a hurry,' he said to Mrs Van Hopper, a line, thin as gossamer, between his brows.
'They say he can't get over his wife's death.'
The fancy dress dance last night, and I coming down to the head of the stairs, in Rebecca's dress.
'I killed Rebecca,' Maxim had said.
'I shot Rebecca in the cottage in the woods.'
And the diver had found her lying there, on the cabin floor…
'What are we going to do?' I said.
'What are we going to say?'
Maxim did not answer.
He stood there by the mantelpiece, his eyes wide and staring, looking in front of him, not seeing anything.
'Does anyone know?' I said, 'anyone at all?'
He shook his head.
'No,' he said.
'No one but you and me?' I asked.
'No one but you and me,' he said.
'Frank,' I said suddenly, 'are you sure Frank does not know?'
'How could he?' said Maxim.
"There was nobody there but myself.
It was dark…' He stopped.
He sat down on a chair, he put his hand up to his forehead.
I went and knelt beside him.
He sat very still a moment.
I took his hands away from his face and looked into his eyes.
'I love you,' I whispered,
'I love you.
Will you believe me now?'
He kissed my face and my hands.
He held my hands very tightly like a child who would gain confidence.
'I thought I should go mad,' he said, 'sitting here, day after day, waiting for something to happen.
Sitting down at the desk there, answering those terrible letters of sympathy.