The fact was that he had gone into it. He was soaking wet when I found him. So we had to conclude that somebody unknown had first struck him down and then fished him out. It was not rational, but then most of the things which followed could not be rationalized either. Perhaps most curious of all was the fact of the missing trousers, although Tony refused to consider them significant that night when he came hurrying home. “That’s easy,” he said. “The fellow switched them for his own after he got wet in the pool. Took off his coat when he jumped in. Didn’t have time for his pants.”

“But Evans’s must have been wet too.”

He laughed, although he looked rather crestfallen.

“That’s right. Spoil everything,” he said. “But what the hell did he want with the old boy’s trousers? He looked like a scarecrow most of the time.”

There was no answer to that, and soon the ambulance drove in. Tony went to the hospital with the injured man. But we did not tell Maud the real story until later. Perhaps it would have been better if we had. She did not know, of course, but she might have guessed. Or would she?

Chapter Six

ALL IN ALL IT was not a pleasant night. Following some burglaries a year or two earlier the river settlements around Beverly had united to support a local police car with a radio, and a local boy, Graham Brown—naturally called Cracker—was in charge of a small but neat radio outfit above the police station and jail.

I had not thought much of the arrangement, after noticing that the car spent most of the nights in the alley behind Miss Mattie’s, where I presume the two officers took turns in sleeping. And I have no doubt that it was there when, having seen Tony and the still unconscious Evans off, I notified the police. Certainly Jim Conway arrived before it did, skidding to a stop on the drive and leaping out without killing his engine. I was waiting for him on the terrace.

“What’s happened, Pat?” he said. “You sounded as though you had a murder.”

“I don’t know what we’ve got,” I told him, and began to shake violently.

He caught me by the arm. “Stop it,” he said. “Here, you,” he called to Reynolds, hovering in the background, “get some whisky, will you? Now, Pat, who was in that ambulance? I passed it.”

“Evan Evans, the night watchman.”

“Not dead, was he?”

“No. He’d been hit on the head. He—”

The patrol car arrived then, and he left me to deliver a few choice epithets to the men inside. When he came back I had had the whisky and was feeling stronger.

“All right,” he said. “Evans was hit on the head. Where was he? In the grounds?”

“In the playhouse, beside the pool.”

But, of course, the patrol car had come in wide open, and Maud had heard it. I saw her on the stairs, her hair in its usual braid and her face livid.