but that’s nonsense, Cecile! Who would? . . . I mean
Oh, damn it all, it’s impossible!” Her teeth bit into her red lip, and she looked almost wildly round the little company. “Why, there are only three of us now,” she said.
Her clear, pleasant voice shook a little. There was a faint but perceptible air of tension in the room, as though the impact of brutal facts had tautened nerves and senses. Eyes, Mortimer Shearsby might have said, were opened. Vivien Ardmore’s certainly seemed to be opened with a vengeance.
She was now staring at Cecile Boulanger as though there was nobody else in the room. Cecile stared back. For a moment the two cousins were in a world of their own, searching one another’s face, probing, speculating, on guard and almost inimical.
Suddenly Vivien shook herself. With an exasperated gesture she pulled off her grey hat and flung it on the divan.
“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t know yet what has happened to Blanche and Raymond. For God’s sake, tell me, somebody! ”
She was looking at Mr. Tuke. “Passed to you, mademoiselle,” he said. “I take it that Mr. Mainward knows all about this?”
“Oh, yes, Guy knows.” Cecile’s glance at that young man strangely altered her prim and guarded expression. She paused, frowning, her eyes now on her cousin. “Very well,” she said.
She never took her gaze off Vivien Ardmore as she told the story of her experience in Warwick Way. Vivien’s face was almost expressionless: only her left eyebrow rose as the other described the lorries thundering by and the sudden push in the darkness. Mr. Mainward reappeared at his hostess’s side with a third glass of punch, which she accepted with an abstracted nod. Cecile was now running rapidly and briefly through what she knew of the deaths of Raymond Shearsby and Blanche Porteous—the facts about the writer’s end being a repetition of Mortimer Shearsby’s tale, told to her that morning. At the end, she sat still, breathing rather fast, watching her cousin, her brown eyes narrowed v Vivien, the stump of a forgotten cigarette smouldering in her fingers, was staring in front of her; and for some seconds after Cecile’s voice, with its faint accent, had ceased, she remained motionless. Then, with another shake of her shoulders, she threw her cigarette into the grate and sat up. She looked at Mr. Tuke.
“Well,” she said, with a wry twist of her lips, “I suppose you wouldn’t be interested, Mr. Tuke, if there wasn’t something pretty rum in all this. Pity Mortimer isn’t here.”
“He has been to see me.”
“What ho!” Her brightness appeared a trifle forced.
“You have got the family round your neck, haven’t you? What do you think of us? And what are you going to do?”
“It is not for me to do anything. I seem to have been co-opted as a consultant. In which capacity,” said Harvey, knocking the ash off his cigar, “I have made inquiries in a quarter more likely to be interested—and active. As I told Mr. Mortimer Shearsby, the police are satisfied that your cousin Sydney’s death was accidental. I think you may take that to be that. The other two cases are being reopened.” Vivien Ardmore’s grey eyes were watching him closely. “Oh, lord,” she said, “what a mess! Well, Gecile, we’re all in it together—you, and I, and Mortimer. Where were you on the fifteenth ult., or whatever it is.” She gave a hard little laugh. Then suddenly her expressive eyebrow went up. “I say, there’s still a dark horse. What about Cousin Martin?”
CHAPTER VIII
CECILE BOULANGER looked astonished. “Uncle Martin?” she exclaimed. “What do you mean, Vivien? He has been dead for years.”
“That’s the story,” Miss Ardmore agreed. “But has he? You saw more of Sydney than the rest of us. What did he say about it?”
“He hardly ever mentioned Uncle Martin. And I did not drag in the subject—naturally.” Cecile was still frowning at her cousin in a perplexed way. “I never even knew him. When Sydney did mention him, it was only en passant, perhaps when he was talking of something he did with his parents when he was a boy. That Was all. He never spoke of the later time. And naturally, too. And then Sydney was always reticent. . . . Anyhow, Uncle Martin must be dead,” his niece added with a touch of irritability. “I was always told so. He died in Belgium, when Sydney was quite young.”
“Are you following this, Mr. Tuke?” Vivien asked. “I expect you are well up in our family tree by now.”
“I know it like my own. Your cousin Martin—more correctly your first cousin once removed—was the late Captain Dresser’s father. He was, therefore, Mile Boulanger’s uncle. She told me he was dead, with the rest of his generation. Have you any evidence to the contrary?”
“Not evidence,” Vivien said. “But my mother, who knew him better than any of them, used to hint mysteriously that the report of his death had been greatly exaggerated. She said we only had Sydney’s word for it.”
“I don’t believe it,” Cecile exclaimed sharply. “It is the first time I have ever heard such a thing suggested. Why, Sydney sent mother an obituary notice from a Chelmsford newspaper. And I’m sure he would have told me.”
Miss Ardmore shrugged. She reached for another cigarette, and Mr. Mainward was instantly at her elbow with a lighter.
“It’s the one thing he wouldn’t tell you,” she remarked through a cloud of smoke. “Because if mother was right, there must have been some jolly strong reason for deceiving everybody. And anyway, it wasn’t a story Sydney would want to dwell on.” She turned to Mr. Tuke. “If you’re acting as family adviser, you’d better hear it. It’s the skeleton in our otherwise tolerably respectable family cupboard. Have you broken the news to Mr. Mainward, by the way, Cecile?”
“No,” Cecile said shortly. “And I don’t see——”
“Well, I think Mr. Tuke ought to know. Because
