Eva doubted it. Auntie Joan clearly didn’t look as if she needed any more truth. A slug of liquor more like. Eva wasn’t risking her having a stroke.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the Coopers, ‘but they must go to their room. I’m not having any more rudeness from them.’
The quads filed out grumbling.
‘I guess you have a different system of education in England,’ said the Revd Cooper when they had gone. ‘And I heard they have religious service in school first thing every morning. Seems they don’t give them Bible reading or anything.’
‘It isn’t easy bringing four girls the same age up all together,’ said Eva, in a desperate attempt to salvage something from the disaster. ‘We have never been able to afford a nanny or anything like that.’
‘Oh, you poor things,’ said Mrs Cooper. ‘My, how dreadful. You mean to say you all don’t have servants in England? I wouldn’t have believed it after seeing all those films with butlers and castles and all.’ She turned to Auntie Joan. ‘I guess you were lucky having the daddy you had, Joanie. A Lord who stayed with the Queen at Sandrin…that house you told me about where they go duck hunting. Why he’d just be bound to have a butler open the door for him and all. What was the name of the butler, you know the one who was so fat and drank port wine you told us about at the country club that time Sandra and Al had their silver anniversary?’
A strange, choking sound from Auntie Joan suggested that her condition had worsened. The afternoon was not a success. That evening Eva tried to put her fourth call through to Wilt. There was no answer. Eva went to bed that night and hardly slept. She knew now she should never have come. Wally and Auntie Joan knew that too.
‘We’d better go up to the lake tomorrow,’ he said helping himself to four fingers of bourbon. ‘Get them out of the way.’
But as the quads were going to bed Josephine found what Sol Campito had pushed among the things in her hand luggage. It was a small sealed gelatine cylinder and she didn’t like the look of it. The other girls didn’t like the look of it either and swore they hadn’t put it there.
‘It could be something dangerous,’ said Penelope.
‘Like what?’ asked Emmeline.
‘Like a bomb.’
‘It’s too small for a bomb. And it’s too soft. When you squeeze it–’
‘Then don’t. It might burst and we don’t know what is in it.’
‘Whatever it is I don’t want it,’ said Josephine.
Nobody wanted it. In the end they threw it out the window where it landed in the swimming-pool.
‘Now if it’s a bomb it won’t do any harm,’ said Emmeline.
‘Unless Uncle Wally’s taking his early-morning dip. He could be blown up.’
‘Serve him right. He’s a big mouth,’ said Samantha.
Chapter 12
By the time Ruth Rottecombe got to bed it was after 7 a.m. Her night had been an exceedingly unpleasant one. The police station at Oston was not a new one and while it might have held some quaint charm for old lags, it had held none whatsoever for Mrs Rottecombe. For one thing it smelt and the smells were all horrible and revoltingly unhygienic. Tobacco smoke mingled with the various foul by-products of far too many beers and too much fear and sweat. Even the Superintendent’s attitude had changed once
