time.”
She fixed her eyes on his face with an expression in them of painful intensity. “I sent Loveday downstairs to have her breakfast a little while ago. What is it?'
“Rame wouldn’t sign the death certificate!”
It seemed to her that her pulses stopped beating with her heart. She knew quite well what Clay meant, but her instinct screamed to her to be careful, and she said, to gain time: “I don’t understand.”
“Well, it means that Rame thinks he didn’t die a natural death. Frightful situation, isn’t it?”
She moistened her lips. “Why should he think that.” Lifton warned me that your father couldn’t go on as he was doing! Did no one tell him what your father ate and drank last night?”
“I don’t know what they told him. I wasn’t there. Apparently, Rame suspected poison straight away . Asked if Father were in the habit of taking sleeping draughts. Martha and Reuben said he wasn’t, and the end of it was that Rame walked off with the whisk decanter from beside Father’s bed, and Father’s body is going to be taken away by the police for a post-mortem examination. Pretty ghastly, isn’t it?”
She said, with a catch in her voice: “It’s absurd! I don’t believe it! Everyone knew how foolishly Adam had been behaving lately!”
“I know, that’s what Aunt Clara said. She’s fearfully upset. But the thing is that that little swab Jimmy seems to have disappeared.”
'Jimmy?”
“Stayed out all night, and hasn’t turned up yet. When you remember the sum of money Father made Aubrey fetch him from the Bank yesterday — well, pretty obvious., isn’t it?”
Her eyes started at him; she said faintly: “Oh, no, no!'
“Yes, but, Mother, think! I know it sounds ghastly, Father being killed by that filthy little beast, just for three hundred pounds, but if it wasn’t Jimmy — not that I think there’s the least doubt that it was, mind you! — it’s going to be absolutely dire for the rest of us! I mean, already Aubrey’s been saying the most poisonous things, and you can bet your life...”
“What has Aubrey been saying?” she interrupted.
“Oh, about so many of us having motives! Actually, I shut him up pretty quickly, because he had the cheek to start on you, and naturally I wasn’t going to stand that.”
Her colour fluctuated; she leaned forward in her chair. ' On me? Why? What did he say about me?”
“Oh, well, I don’t think he really meant anything: it was a sort of joke — you know what Aubrey is!”
“Did Aubrey suggest that I had anything to do with your father’s death?” she demanded.
She sounded indignant, as indeed she was, for although she had killed Penhallow she still felt her action to have been so alien to her nature that it was with a sense of the deepest injury that she learned that one who should surely have known her better could believe her to be capable of committing murder.
Not having any desire to figure as a tale-bearer before his half-brothers, Clay made haste to palliate his original statement. “Oh, he wasn’t serious, Mother! There’s nothing to get het-up about. I shut him up at once, and, anyway, nobody paid the slightest attention to him. In fact, Char said it was the most fatuous thing she’d ever heard.”
“I should hope so!” she said sharply. She picked up her handkerchief from the dressing-table, and pressed it to her lips for a moment. “What — what has to happen now, Clay?” she asked.
“Well, I suppose Rame will do a post-mortem. We shan’t know much till after that. If he does find that father was poisoned, it will be a case for the police, of course.”
She shuddered. “Oh, no! Oh, how dreadful!”
“I know, that’s what Aunt Clara says, but it can’t be helped. Mind you, I daresay Rame won’t find any poise at all! It’s all very well for that ass, Aubrey, to say that we’ve all got motives, but personally I agree with Bart that none of us would dream of doing such a thing. If he was poisoned, then it’s obvious that Jimmy did it.”
She swallowed convulsively. “Clay dear, go downstairs now! I — I really feel so upset about this that I must be alone for a little while. It’s so appalling — I never dreamed! I think I’ll lie down for a time.”
But when he had left the room she remained seated in her chair, clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap, her eyes travelling round the room as though in search of some way of escape. They alighted presently upon the two bottles of veronal, standing side by side upon the shelf above the wash-stand, and she began at once to consider how she could best dispose of the empty one which should have been full. An impulse to conceal it in one of her drawers made her start from her chair, only to sink back again as she reflected that nothing could be more fatal than for the bottle to be found in such a place. She knew very little about police procedure, but she believed that they might search the house very strictly. Then she thought that she would be better advised to leave the bottle where it was, since everyone knew that she alone amongst the household was in the habit of taking drops of veronal when she could not sleep. In the few detective novels which she had read, efforts at concealment had almost invariably proved the criminal’s undoing. It would be wiser to do nothing; to leave the bottle in full view would even appear, perhaps, to the police as a strong reason for believing her innocent. And if they did suspect her, and made inquiries about her relations with Penhallow, although it would be found that Penhallow had frequently been unkind to her, it must also be found that she had borne his unkindness for twenty years, and had never in all that time quarrelled with him. Her step-children might despise her, but they knew that she was not the kind of woman who would murder her husband. They knew nothing of the brief madness which had possessed her on the previous evening; apparently they regarded the very possibility that she might be the guilty person in the light of a joke. No one had seen her enter Penhallow’s room: of that she was certain. Without considering who might become implicated in her place, she began to reflect that anyone could have poisoned Penhallow’s whisky, and with the veronal prescribed for her, since she kept it in full view in her room, and had never made any secret of her possession of it.
She remembered Jimmy suddenly, and stirred uneasily in her chair, for although she disliked Jimmy she would have thought his arrest for a crime which he had not committed a more dreadful thing than the murder itself. Then she gave herself a mental shake, realising that since he had had nothing to do with Penhallow’s death the probability was that he had merely taken French leave for a day, and would reappear in due course.
She thought that perhaps she ought to go downstairs, that it would appear more natural in her than to remain in her bedroom while such momentous events were in progress. She glanced at her reflection in the mirror, tidied a strand of her faded hair, and got up.
The house seemed strangely quiet, although why it should have done so, at an hour when she might have expected, in the ordinary run of things, to have found it deserted by most of its inhabitants she did not know. A housemaid, encountered on the upper hall, threw her an awed look. She ignored the girl, and went down the stair to the morning-room.
Myra had followed Ingram up from the Dower House some time previously, and was now seated on the sofa beside Clara, discussing Penhallow’s death in the hushed voice which she apparently considered suitable to the occasion. Ingram was standing on the hearth-rug with his hands in his pockets, talking to Charmian, who way leaning against the window-frame, a cigarette in one hand, and a cup of tea in the other. All three ladies were partaking of this stimulating beverage, but Ingram seemed to feel the need of a more invigorating tonic, since a glass half-full of whisky-and-soda stood on the mantelpiece behind him. When Faith entered the room, they all looked round quickly, and Myra at once rose from the sofa, and came towards her, exclaiming: “You poor dear! I’m so terribly sorry for you! If there was only anything one could do!”
Faith submitted to having her cheek kissed, saying in a subdued tone: “Thank you. It has been such a shock — I don’t seem able to realise it.”
Clara blew her nose. “I never thought I should live to see the day when my poor brother’s body was carried off by the police,” she said.
Faith shivered. “Oh, don’t!” she begged. “Has — have: they… ?”
“An hour ago,” replied Ingram, clearing his throat. “A beastly business! Can’t get over it. The old Guv’nor, you know! I always said he’d rue the day he brought that little swine into the house. Never would listen to reason! And this is what has come of it! Mind you, I blame Ray for allowing him to keep a sum like that in his bed! Asking for trouble!”
She raised her eyes nervously to his face. “I don’t quite…What do you mean?”
“It was that Jimmy, my dear,” Clara said. “The strongbox is missing, with three hundred pounds in it.”
She uttered an inarticulate sound, turning so pale that Myra put an arm round her.
