murders of Luton and Spey, but the killing of Gordon seems to me to stem from a different source. Does nothing strike you about the murder of Gordon?”
“Well,” said Laura, dubiously, “there are two things, I suppose, when one thinks it over. Spey was killed pretty soon after Luton, but it was months before the murderer got around to the idea that Gordon might also be a danger.”
“And your second point?”
“Oh, ah, yes. All three murders were somehow mixed up with pageantry. The first two were connected in some way with old Kitty’s do, and the third was done when Julian Perse put on another silly show.”
“Do you detect any special significance in these facts?”
“Special significance? No, I don’t think so, unless the murderer was allergic to pageants.”
“Was there any good, valid or sufficient reason for staging a second pageant, do you suppose?”
“To my mind, it was a wrongheaded gesture and completely unnecessary.”
“So the murderer thought, in a sense. I believe he saw it as a carefully rehearsed trap.”
“I believe that idiot Julian did have some such notion, but, of course, it didn’t come off.”
“I think it has come off now, you know,” said Dame Beatrice. “I wonder what our dear Robert will have to tell us?”
Laura looked up and met the keen black eyes and a saurian, mirthless smile.
“You briefed him!” she said accusingly.
“He asked me to do so,” Dame Beatrice meekly replied. Laura snorted indignantly.
“You might have put me wise at the same time,” she said. Dame Beatrice cackled.
“Robert cannot afford to make mistakes,” she said. “And you are making only one mistake at the moment.”
“Oh? Well, you might at least tell me what it is.”
“Do you really believe that a doting, although outwardly censorious, aunt, and an uncle subservient (if I mistake not) to that aunt, would disinherit Giles Faudrey because of his amorous adventures and their consequences?”
“I still think he’d be out on his ear in two flicks of a horse’s tail if his behaviour came to the notice of Mrs Batty-Faudrey, this in spite of what you said.”
“There, I think, you are wrong. Remember that, so far as we know, neither the girls nor their parents have complained. It was Mr Luton’s heroic role to confront Squire’s Acre with its sinfulness.”
“And he ran into Giles (although Giles says he didn’t) and taxed him with getting the Sunday School teacher into trouble? Yes, we settled all that, I thought. What’s new?”
“What I have already said. I do not believe that Giles would have been disinherited.”
“He might have had some other motive, then, for murdering Falstaff.”
“Yes, he might. I must keep that in mind. Giles Faudrey was successful with women, don’t you think?”
“I suppose he was. Are you going off at a tangent?”
“No, indeed I am not.”
“Prove it, then, because I don’t follow you at all.”
“The Sunday School teacher had been a domestic servant at Squire’s Acre Hall.”
“Well, it used to be a common or garden practice to seduce the servants.”
“Used to be? You would not suppose it to be a common practice nowadays?”
“Well, I shouldn’t think so, but, if it did happen, I should say the boot would be on the other foot.”
“By which you imply…?”
“That servants are like gold-dust nowadays, and a girl who was doing a Daphne would merely have to give in her notice. It was different when servants were two a penny and jobs were hard to get, especially if you left without getting a reference.”
“You mean that, nowadays, if an untoward incident took place, it would be because the servant was as willing as her employer that this should be so.”
“That’s it, but where does it get us?”
“It gets us to the important fact, my dear Laura, that Giles Faudrey is not an employer.”
“No, but he’s got this fatal fascination we’ve mentioned, and it was often the son of the house who seduced the servants.”
“You would do well to take the car and go for a drive and, in tranquillity, recollect the main items of this conversation. As the schoolmaster said to the insolent boy, I fear we do not see you at your best.”
“The trouble is, I’m hungry,” said Laura, “and tea-time is in the dim distance. Suppose I nip down to the kitchen and see what I can rustle up in the way of bodily sustenance? Then I’ll do as you say. As a matter of fact, I do dimly see what you’re getting at. I can’t believe it, that’s all.”
She took herself off and, twenty minutes later, Dame Beatrice heard the front door being closed. The time was a quarter to three. At half-past three Detective Chief-Superintendent Robert Gavin was shown in.
“You were right, Dame B., but my blokes still have to prove it,” he said. “They know how to keep their traps
