What followed she had not yet told her mother.
The telephone rang, and Judy herself answered it.
It was for Howard, apparently a long distance call, and he appeared rather surprised when he answered it.
“Tonight?” he said.
“Where are you?
It’s pretty late.
You’ll be a couple of hours yet.”
But in the end he agreed, and Judy said he seemed thoughtful as he hung up the receiver.
“Your Uncle Jim,” he said.
“He’s motoring up.
I thought he was ill.”
“He has been,” said Judy, thinking hard.
“I wish you wouldn’t see him, father.
He’ll upset you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.
He’s in trouble, father.
Of course it’s silly, but the police are trying to connect him with Sarah, and all that.”
“Nonsense!
Why should he want to do away with Sarah?
It’s an outrage.”
She wanted to wait up, but he said Jim had been very urgent that his visit be kept a secret.
He proposed to come in by the service entrance and up the stairs, and she was to unlock that door on the floor below.
He called up the night watchman while she was still there and asked him to admit a visitor there, or better still, to open the door onto the alley and go away.
He was smiling when he hung up the receiver.
“Probably thinks I’m receiving my bootlegger,” he said.
“Or a lady, father!” said Judy.
“I think I’ll tell mother!”
“Your mother is not to know.
He’s very insistent about that.”
She persuaded him to go to bed and see Jim there, and after he was settled she went in and herself gave him a book and fixed his light.
“Door unlocked?” he asked.
“All fixed.”
He had not touched the whisky in the glass at that time.
She remembered that.
She kissed him good-night and went to her own room.
But she was very uneasy.
How Jim had escaped surveillance did not interest her, but she was fearful for Howard; Jim bursting in on him with that whole hideous story, perhaps begging for help to escape, perhaps—she says this entered her mind—perhaps even confessing.
She heard no footsteps by two o’clock, and she dozed off.
At three she wakened suddenly, sat up and finally got up. She went along the corridor to her father’s door, and listened.
She could hear voices, one low and quiet, her father’s louder and irritated.
Shortly after that she had heard a sort of thud,
“Like somebody falling,” she said with a shiver.
She had sat up and listened, but it was not repeated, and soon after that she heard Jim come out and close the door.
She went to sleep after that.
At nine o’clock the next morning she was wakened by a shriek and the sound of a chair being overturned. Quick as she had been to throw on a dressing gown and run out, Mary Martin was before her. She was standing staring into Howard’s room, where Katherine lay in a faint on the floor, and Howard was quite peacefully dead across his bed.
He was in his dressing gown, a thing of heavy dark brocade, and his face according to Judy was very quiet and very peaceful. Whatever his last thoughts had been, if indeed he had any, they were wiped clean.
Some weeks afterward Inspector Harrison was to give me a little talk on just such things.
“There is no expression on a dead face,” he said.
“In two minutes it’s wiped clean, like a slate.