The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

put her head in the door.
    “Miss Sanders?” Fredericka asked impatiently.
    “She’s off now—since eight o’clock.”
    “Oh—please could you get some brandy. I’m afraid Colonel Mohun—in fact we’re both—rather ill—” The nurse looked at them suspiciously for a moment and then disappeared.
    Peter stared at Fredericka blankly and then said slowly, “The sight of you is good. There was one moment when I didn’t think I’d ever have it again…”
    Fredericka reached for his hand and held it tightly in hers until the nurse returned with two small medicine glasses of brandy on a tray. She put this down on the bed table with a look of bewildered disapproval.
    “Is there anything else you want, Miss Wing?” she asked Fredericka, but she looked at Peter, who shook his head and waved her away.
    “Thanks so much,” Fredericka said quickly, and, when the girl had gone, she added: “Drink both of them and don’t try to talk. There’s no hurry.”
    When he had taken all the brandy, slowly, and with obvious pleasure, he offered Fredericka a cigarette and took one for himself. Then he said quietly: “It’s all over.”
    “I thought it must be from the look of you. Can you talk about it?”
    “Yes. In a minute. Tell me first what you wanted me for.”
    “It seems unimportant now, but I did think it might be the evidence you needed. You see, I tried to do what you told me to. I went backwards in my mind over everything and particularly that last night. And then I realized that it couldn’t have been a third person who hit me. It must have been Philippine.”
    “Yes. It was. But how did you work it out?”
    “Well, you said I had been hit with her flashlight—I suppose it must have had bits of me on it and bits of her. That seemed reasonable until I remembered that she had said, “I’ve dropped the flashlight,” or something like that, and then instantly I was hit. There just wasn’t time for anyone to have picked it up. So if it was that flashlight that hit me, she couldn’t have dropped it at all but must have just switched it off and used it herself.”
    “That’s exactly what she did do. It was careless of her. But the attack on you was not carefully thought out. She had to remake a lot of plans because of you. Moreover she must have felt that she could afford to be careless since she intended to do the job up brown and silence you completely. She had no idea that the well was dry, you see. Otherwise she’d have finished you off before she pitched you into it.”
    “Oh, Peter!” Fredericka clutched his large hand more tightly. “Somehow I feel I would have known that it was Philippine much sooner if only I hadn’t—oh, dear—I liked her so much.”
    “That was the secret of her amazing success. Everyone liked her—except, of course, Catherine Clay. She could bank on being liked and indeed cultivate her own likableness as she cultivated her poisons in that laboratory of hers—”
    “Did she poison Margie, then?”
    “Oh, yes. And in the most diabolic way. You see that story that she told you about coming on Margie filling capsules in the lab was true, the other way around . It was Margie who discovered Philippine and, being Margie, she asked questions. Whatever answers she got satisfied her at the time and Philippine wasn’t unduly worried then, because she intended to have Catherine’s death look like an overdose of dope either by accident or design and that would have been by injection not capsule. She intended to recover the little silver box and any remaining poisoned capsules after Catherine’s death and before the police found them. If she had succeeded, Margie would never have thought anything more about surprising Philippine in the lab.”
    “But Philippine couldn’t get at the corpse.”
    “She may have done. I believe she trailed Catherine around because I found out from Roger that they were not together on their herb hunt but went in separate directions. Unfortunately for Philippine’s plans, Catherine had dropped the box in the long grass near your back door. Philippine may well have looked for it and not been able to find it.”
    “And then it turned up—too late.”
    “Yes. But it might not have been too late even then. It was Margie who told Philippine that the box had been found. And, in fact, the silly child remembered then that she had seen the box in Philippine’s hand that day in the lab and said so. At that time no one had suggested poison in