“If you’re anxious to deny that, my dear fellow, I should imagine you’d have no great difficulty. Surely Olivia can vouch for you at that hour?”
“Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Had it been yourself involved, no doubt your wife could meet the situation. But Amy is kind enough to arrange for us to have a dressing-room if we require it, and on a night when I was perturbed about our affairs, as I was then, I prefer solitude.”
“It only shows, doesn’t it, that the slovenly makeshifts of the poor, whose dressing-rooms have to be utilised as additional bedrooms for the children, have their advantages? As you remark, Sophy would certainly have been in a position to vouch for me. But surely Olivia isn’t so squeamish that she’d hesitate over a trifle like that?”
“I really can’t tell you what Olivia will say. No doubt she can satisfy your curiosity on her return. Though as to that,” he added, on a sudden note of rage, “I fail to see what damned business it is of yours how my wife and I spend our nights.”
“Normally, I agree it would be impertinent on my part to raise the question, but in the present position, when so much depends on where the various members of the family were at stated hours, you will admit it is important, particularly as the tide of suspicion seems to be running heavily against myself.”
“And you’ve no one but yourself to thank for that. But about that cheque. I’ll swear you know more than you’ll say.”
“So far as I’m aware, such a cheque was never even drawn,” said Brand earnestly, and, as it happened, with accuracy. “But perhaps he changed his mind and destroyed it later.”
“There seems very little point in drawing it in the first place if he meant to do that. And he would certainly have cancelled the counterfoil in that case.”
“You think of everything, don’t you? You’re right. He was a methodical man. Still, have they examined the wastepaper basket?”
“I understand that they have. The basket, I’m told, contained some torn envelopes, and your own letter demanding assistance.”
“That they’ll glue neatly together, no doubt. It may be useful to them. I wonder what I said.”
“By this time you should be pretty familiar with your own demands.”
“This was more ambitious—more outrageous, as you and Amy would say—than my previous suggestions.”
But though he was inwardly cool, and even gave the appearance of enjoying this sparring-match, Brand’s heart jolted uncomfortably, as he was compelled to realise more and more the immense paraphernalia of the law against which he had pitted himself. His roving glance took in the whole room, so full of enemies, eager to see him condemned and put out of the way, so that they might themselves take up their own lives and forget him as soon as might be. Only Miles Amery watched him intently, and it was impossible to gauge the quality of his thoughts. Ruth, who had also returned from the grandmother’s room, stood, pale, serene, untouched, like the young Christina, against the wall. Somehow she seemed aloof from all this noisy business of scandal and greed. Probably, reflected Brand, because she had no ambitions that any of them could destroy. But Eustace, seeing the thin, keen face of the lawyer, experienced sudden, unreasoning rage, and that sense of inferiority, that he knew to be unfounded and absurd, attacked him again. This shabby fellow, whom he never met in his own more exclusive circles, never ceased to give him that impression, as though he, Eustace, were in some way insignificant, all his fine plans so much tinsel and his hopes as worthless as the paper hoop through which the clown in the circus leaps to amuse the crowd in the auditorium.
6
One by one the family was put through its paces by the thoroughgoing young man downstairs. At the end of the ordeal, a few significant facts emerged. Chief among these was Eustace’s inability to deny Brand’s story of seeing him on the stairs; before she realised the implications of the admission, Olivia said vaguely that her husband had left her before midnight. Later she had tried to retract that, putting the hour of his departure considerably later, but Murray would not let her off, and she left him disturbingly conscious that she had on the whole made things worse for her husband. And, being in his confidence, she realised that a very black case could be brought against him.
One question she had failed to understand until she received his explanation. Ross had said unconcernedly, “It was a great relief to you, wasn’t it, when your husband could tell you that he had every hope your father would help him?”
She said blankly, “I didn’t really know the position. My father had been busy all day, and I didn’t know whether he actually appreciated how we all stood.”
“But if your husband mentioned the cheque to you…?”
“The cheque?”
“That your father had promised him.”
Olivia stared; it would have been difficult to recognise in this haggard, distraught woman the beautifully manicured, waved, and sophisticated creator of Dot and Lalage.
“I know nothing of that.”
“I beg your pardon.” But Ross offered no explanation. Not until she had her husband to herself could Olivia say, “But, Eustace, why didn’t you tell me? How could you let me go down there unprepared?”
“Tell you what?”
“About the cheque.”
“How could I? I never had the chance.”
“You could have told me this morning before the police came. There were plenty of opportunities.”
“I’m trying to make you understand that I’d never heard of the cheque until that fellow flung his questions at me.”
“Then there was one?”
“Apparently.”
“Where is it now?”
“He says they’ve searched the room with a microscope and there’s no sign of it. But it may have been burnt, of course.”
“By father? Why, if he’d just drawn it up?”
“Not by your father. By that precious hangdog brother of yours.”
“But how would Brand get hold of it?”
“My idea is that in some way, probably dishonest, he persuaded his father
