Dance to Your Daddy

'They will come here.'

'I shall have nothing to tell them.'

'That, most likely, will be my case, too, so there is nothing for us to worry about, thank goodness.'

'I should never worry if you were with me.'

'Good. By the way, it is essential to be quite frank with them.'

Rosamund looked scared.

'But I can be nothing else,' she insisted. 'I don't know anything about Hubert Lestrange at all. I had no idea he was dead.'

'They will ask you to account for your movements, and so forth.'

'Suppose I can't remember?'

'Tell them so.'

'But they'll bully me into trying to remember, won't they? Romilly was always bullying me and shouting at me and losing his temper.'

'The police will not behave like that, I promise you. But don't attempt to conceal anything from them, even if it is embarrassing or painful for you to admit some things which you may wish to keep to yourself. We all have our weak points and it is useless to attempt to disguise or hide them.'

Rosamund looked at the keen, black eyes and the quirky, beaky little mouth and then dropped her own eyes and said quietly:

'You are thinking of something in particular.'

'Yes,' agreed Dame Beatrice, 'I am. As I suppose you know, Hubert's body was found on Dancing Ledge.' She saw the girl flinch. 'Yes,' she went on, 'Romilly will have told the police that he saw you drown the cat and the monkey somewhere along that stretch of coast, and throw the large doll into the sea.'

'But you don't believe him, do you?'

'No, I do not, but I am anxious that you shall not deny having run away to those cliffs or that Romilly found you and brought you back-that is, if these things really happened.'

'But the police may believe I drowned things-living creatures-and they may think I'm mad, and that I pushed Hubert over the cliff.'

'Tell the truth, simply and openly. Then I can help you. And now I will tell you the truth about myself. My name is not Beatrice Adler. I did not correct you at the time, because it was unnecessary and, for you, perhaps, alarming. I am Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, and I am attached to the Home Office in the capacity of psychiatric adviser.'

'But then-but then-' she raised her eyes and gazed first at Dame Beatrice, who had seated herself composedly in an armchair, and then at the tall and magnificent Laura, who, like Rosamund herself, was still standing.

'Yes,' said Dame Beatrice quietly, 'failing yourself and Romilly, who is quite as infamous a man as you have always suspected, I am the heiress named in your grandfather's Will. Nevertheless, I have every intention of seeing that you get your rights. I cannot prove this to you at present. I can only ask you to believe me and to tell the police the whole truth.'

'But I-but I-'

'There's nothing else you can do,' interpolated Laura bluntly, 'so there's no point in raising objections. Besides, you're being cagey. You read this morning about the body on Dancing Ledge.'

(2)

The police, called up by Laura and told that Dame Beatrice was at home and would be pleased to see them, turned up in the person of a friend of hers, Detective-Inspector Nicholas Kirkby, recently promoted, youngish, keen, efficient and fair-minded. He was shown into the library, where she greeted him warmly. Laura had already made his acquaintance through Dame Beatrice and her own husband, so Rosamund was introduced and the two young women went out of the room.

'So that's the young girl I've been hearing about,' said Kirkby. 'The lady who chucks things, animate and inanimate, into the sea. The theory at Galliard Hall seems to be that this dead man was one of them. What can you tell me about her, Dame Beatrice? I was told you've been staying at the house, but left before the body was discovered.'

'That is so. I was invited to go to Galliard Hall to examine and treat this girl with a view to curing her of what I was told was an obsession. In my opinion, she is perfectly normal, and the stories which have been put about are lies. I hasten to add that this is only an opinion. After all, I have only known her for about a week. In her own view, she is the centre of a conspiracy to rob her of her fortune. When she dies, after she attains the age of twenty-five, the money goes to the man who claims to be her husband.'

'Mr Romilly Lestrange? Yes, he told me she was his wife. Why, do you doubt it, Dame Beatrice?'

'Yes, I do. I believe the girl, who asserts that she is merely his ward. I think the housekeeper, Mrs Judith, may be married to him.'

'It sounds an odd sort of set-up. Reminds you of a mid-Victorian novel, doesn't it? However, all I have to find out at the moment is who killed the Reverend Hubert Lestrange, so I am trying to discover where everybody was, and what each of the household was doing, at the probable time of his death.'

'And when was that?'

'That's my chief difficulty at present. It's hard to pin the doctors down about it. The furthest they will go is to say that when they examined him he had probably been dead for five or six days, but that, as the body had been in water, it could be as long as seven or eight days. Now, just for the record, could I have an account of your own movements for the past eight days?'