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XXIV
The destiny of all of us, writers who heed the call of vocation and not the eagerness for lucre, is a continual search for reasons to delay taking up the pen. With what solicitude reality provides those pretexts; with what delicate devotion it schemes with our indolence! I could not continue bewitched in the clinical issue of the suicide or murder which had taken place at Bosque del Mar. The time to react had arrived. I cloistered myself in the silence and asylum of my room, I sank myself into the commodious embrace of the armchair, I opened the almost virginal notebook and Petronius. I thought about Mary.
 As one who investigates a text permissive of interpretations subtly contradictory, I revisited the argument between the two sisters which had occurred the night before Mary's death. I questioned the motives that might lead a suicide to leave her posthumous message lost among other papers.
I asked myself if this last were not the act of a tortuous honesty. Through it Mary placated her conscience. She left the proof that would absolve an innocent, but she left it hidden.
This suicide was the inevitable end of a drama of which I was catching a glimpse. With the desperate vehemence of evil causes, Mary loved Emilia's sweetheart. Secretly she tried to steal him away. When she lost, she resolved to die. Planning that death she discovered the sweetness of vengeance. Suppose someone interpreted her suicide as murder? In her final night she provoked Emilia to anger. Then she wrote the note declaring her death a suicide, but wrote it on a piece of paper identical to those she used for her translation of Michael Innes; she placed the note among the pages of the translation. She left it to chance to cover it up or expose it, believing thereby to save her soul.
I went on to consider Atwell's part in the inquiry. He had told me he avoided intervening in the investigation because of a legal principle I had not understood and because of his relation to the sisters. His argument was convincing. I am a doctor, and I know how emotions can fetter our professional judgment. He added further that he had not wanted to offend the commissioner's susceptibilities.
I was not ready to admit that Atwell's participation was as simple as he tried to present it. It seemed evident that Manning had achieved the solution to the mystery. But had he done so alone? Through the course of his deductions, did one not divine the directing mind of Atwell?
Later I took Aubry aside and asked him who exactly the inspector was.
"The most esteemed man in the distribution," he answered. "Atwell has become so famous he has to travel incognito, like the kings do, in order to get some rest."
I looked into Aubry's eyes. They were full of respect, not irony.
The "distribution" he referred to was the Federal Police Agency. Atwell worked in the investigative branch.
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