about that, of course. He needn’t have worried, I’d have told you myself. Yes, it’s true. I did that.” She sounded faintly astonished now in looking back at it, as though it had become irrelevant and quite unaccountable in retrospect.
“Did you mean it?” asked George directly.
“Did I mean it… Yes, at the time I probably did. But even then what I really had in mind was not action so much as a declaration of my position. All the rest of them just happened to be there,” she said, with an arrogance Lucifer himself could not have bettered. “It was nothing to do with them.”
“Then you didn’t act on it, this afternoon?”
It was the first direct and deliberate suggestion that Lucien Galt might have suffered a murderous attack, might, in fact, be dead at that moment. She received it fully, thoughtfully and silently, and betrayed neither surprise nor any other emotion. What she thought, what she felt, she kept to herself. Like her private communications in song, they were nothing to do with anyone else. This was a young woman accustomed to standing on her own feet, and asking no quarter from anyone.
“I didn’t see Lucien this afternoon. He never came near me, and I didn’t go looking for him. I sent Dickie Meurice away, and stayed up there at the folly until it was time to come in to tea.”
“Not, I feel, without some sort of occupation?”
Her smile warmed a little, but remained dark and laden. “I was wrestling with an idea for a song. It didn’t work out.”
“Miss Palmer, I’ve gathered – and not only from Meurice – that a little while ago your relations with Lucien Galt were very close indeed. Would you mind telling me the reason for your break with him?”
“Yes,” said Liri, directly, firmly, “I would mind. It’s a private matter between him and me, and I want it to stay that way.”
He accepted that without question. “Then, if you’re good at keeping things private, keep this interview, this whole investigation, between the few of us. This week-end may as well run its course without a general alarm, if it can. And there’s one more thing I’d like to consult you about.”
He laid upon her knee the small box in which he had placed the silver medal and chain. “My son found this at a certain spot by the river. Maybe you’ve already seen it.”
She took up the box in her palm, and touched the little disc gently with one long finger. “Yes, I’ve seen it. Dominic showed it to us – the few of us who knew. It’s Lucien’s. He always wore it.”
“Always? As long as you’ve known him?”
“Yes, from the first time I met him. He said he’d worn it ever since he was a child. It was the one thing he had that belonged to his father.”
“He told you that himself? And how long have you known him?”
“Just over two years now. Yes, he told me himself.” There had been confidences between them then, and confidence. He was not, by all accounts, a person who talked about himself, or indeed much of a talker on any subject. “He wouldn’t have much left from his parents, obviously, after their shop was flattened by a buzz-bomb. You know about the Galts? They had a newsagent and tobacconist business in Islington. It was one of the last bombs of the war that got it. Both his parents were killed. He grew up in a children’s home.”
“I know what’s been published about him,” said George.
“That’s all most of us know. He loved his foster-parents at the home, though, there wasn’t any warping there. He still goes back there pretty regularly.” She looked up suddenly, her face was pale and still. “He
“Mr. Marshall has told me,” said Audrey Arundale in a low, constrained voice, “about this affair, and about your great kindness in coming here privately to help us. We’re very grateful to you. My husband would wish me to thank you on his behalf, as well as my own. I feel – you’ll understand and excuse me – terribly lost without him.”
She stood in her own rose-and-white sitting-room, herself a white rose ever so slightly past her most radiant bloom, fair and frightened and gallant, terribly lost without Edward. She was used only to things that went smoothly; things that went hideously off the rails bewildered and confused her.
“Please sit down, Mr. Felse. I feel so guilty at making use of you in this way, when we have really nothing to go on. Is there anything you want to ask me?”
“As a matter of form, I should like to know how you spent this afternoon, whether you saw anyone, and what time your husband left. I want to form as full a picture as possible of the hours between lunch and tea.”
“I understand, yes. I was indoors all afternoon. Edward was here with me until just before three o’clock, then he went out to the car, to load it for his trip. I can’t say exactly what time he got off, because I didn’t see him go. I think he wanted to pick up some books from the library, but that wouldn’t take long. I should think he was away by a quarter past three. After he left I was in here writing letters.” She made a faint gesture of one hand towards the neat little pile of them, lying on her writing-desk. “I didn’t go down to join the party at tea, I had it in here. I didn’t realise that Mr. Galt was missing, though I noticed, naturally, that he didn’t take part in the five o’clock session. He hasn’t come back, of course.” Her anxious face hoped against hope for reassurance.
“He hasn’t. On the contrary, we’ve found certain traces which suggest that we have a serious matter on our hands.”
“May I know?” she asked hesitantly, “what they are?”
He told her. She turned half aside from the mention of blood, and seemed for an instant to want to withdraw absolutely from this place and these events, which obeyed no rules in her ordered existence, and made chaos of her security. She reached out blindly and briefly with one hand for Edward, who had always been there, but Edward wasn’t there. She said, though with dignity and quietness, exactly what George had felt sure she would say:
“Don’t you think we ought to contact my husband and tell him what’s happened? I wouldn’t think of suggesting it in any normal circumstances, when Harry’s in charge, but these aren’t normal circumstances. This is more than the mere responsibility for the present course, it’s a question of the responsibility for Follymead as an institution. Edward can’t delegate that, not in such a serious matter.” She looked across the room at Henry Marshall, who had sat silent throughout this exchange. “I’m sorry, Harry, I ought to have left it to you even to make the suggestion. I know you would have done.”
