“But our man was in the basement by that time. If he heard you he thought it was O’Brien, making rounds. We heard the elevator going down to the cellar, and we knew it was all right. We had him. We had a half dozen cops guarding the doors of the shaft, from the top down, and he hadn’t a chance in the world.

“He knew he was caught when your gun went off. That scared him. He started the car down again, but he couldn’t get out. All he could do was to keep the thing moving. Then I remembered to shut off the power. It left him between floors, but he knew the game was up.”

That was when Dwight Elliott shot himself.

The motive, Tony has always maintained, was perfectly clear once you knew the facts. From nothing he had built himself a strong position in the Wainwright Company. Not only wealth, but prestige. Then the day Maud has asked me to smuggle him into the house she laid her cards on the table.

She was not legally old J.C. Wainwright’s wife. She had seen her husband. He was still alive, and what she wanted to do that day was to clear out, bag and baggage, to tell the truth, hand over the mills and the Cloisters to the Wainwright family where she thought they belonged, and go away.

But he managed to keep her quiet, for a time at least. “Take time to think it over,” he probably said. “There’s no hurry.”

He must have been fairly desperate that day, however. He had never married. The business had been his wife and his child, and there was also the fifty thousand a year he drew as its counsel. But there was more at stake than that. For years he had fought the Wainwrights, fought them and hated them. Now Maud threatened to hand everything over to them.

Even then he probably had some hope. He could influence her. Given time enough he might persuade her. But then he got a letter from Don Morgan in New York: I have just learned who and where Maud is. I would like to see her. In fact, it’s essential to see her. There are matters which should be settled at once.

They found that letter in his safe after his death. But it was Don’s return to Beverly that was the real blow. He had no reason to believe in him, his good faith or anything else. Perhaps at first he thought he could make an arrangement between them, Maud and Don; meet them, secure a modus vivendi of some sort. Almost certainly he never dreamed of murdering them. He telephoned Don, agreeing to have Maud meet him that night, and Don came.

What happened after that? Was there a quarrel? Did he slip to the playhouse from his bridge game, and in some bitter anger knock Don into the pool? Or was it more cold-blooded than that? Elliott walking in on him in evening dress, neat and impeccable, and Don looking down at the water.