Mr. Tuke paused to knock the ash from his cigar. Parmiter sunk in his chair, had taken out a pipe, but he made no attempt to fill it. His heavy-lidded eyes were almost closed; and his lined, cynical face reflected in repose some deep inward melancholy. It hardly seemed that he was listening.
Harvey blew a jet of smoke and resumed his tale.
“That was the situation when in March of this year Captain Dresser was killed in a street accident. It may interest you to know that the police have no misgivings about that accident. No one was to blame but the poor fellow himself.”
Parmiter was playing idly with his pipe. His fingers tightened as he glanced from under his lids at his companion, who gazed before him and continued with scarcely a pause:
“At this point we enter the realms of supposition—and very slanderous supposition, too. I rely on your promise.”
The obituarist nodded absently, but he seemed more alert.
“Of the five surviving cousins of my story,” Harvey went on, “Mortimer, the chemist, was married to a dissatisfied wife. She was infected by the snobbery of a provincial town, and by the even worse snobbery of a large commercial concern whose employees were graded socially according to their salaries. She was constantly meeting the wives and daughters of her husband’s colleagues who were in better positions than his. They would not allow her to forget it. She must soon have realised that Mortimer himself would never rise far. He was commonplace, pompous and priggish. He was also very mean. Possibly his obsession with money, about which he was always talking, worked on her, too, in time. At any rate, she wanted more money, a better position, display, equality with the well-to-do. It is an instructive point that she fed her mind on court memoirs and romances of the peerage. When the war came, she achieved a modicujm of salvation through good works with the W.V.S., where! she met the local nobs, and her taste for high life was whetted, and her disillusionment with Burnside Avenue enhanced. And who,” added Harvey, “having seen Burnside Avenue, can blame her?”
Parmiter, now listening with keen attention, gave him a curious look at this last remark, but did not comment on it.
“But if it was money she wanted,” he observed, “there was her husband’s inheritance to look forward to.”
“Oh, no doubt at this time she was counting the months till old Mrs. Rutland Shearsby should die. But the inheritance would be divided among six people. In my story Mrs. Shearsby always resented this. She was jealous of her husband’s cousins, and even of his sister. Though all of them had to work for their living, they were socially in a class above hers. Very silly of her, but not an uncommon state of mind. In particular, she hated Miss Ardmore, who without effort was everything she herself wanted to be —smart, sophisticated, able to hold her own in any company. Miss Ardmore was well aware of this animus, and did not put herself out to be conciliatory. It infuriated Lilian Shearsby to think that her bete noire would inherit equally with her own husband.”
Harvey paused, for two members had strolled to the window near by. They turned away, and he resumed his tale.
CHAPTER XXV
“THE turning point in my story,” he said, “is Captain Dresser’s death by accident. It meant an increase in Mortimer’s share of the money to come. It also put some very evil ideas into his wife’s head. With her obsession about money and position, and her jealousy of the rest of his family, once the ideas were there they grew and flourished. She had not too much time—old Mrs. Shearsby had only a few more months to live. Anyhow, in April, she had her first shot at murder.”
“In April?” Parmiter exclaimed.
“Yes. On a dark night she tried to push Mile Boulanger under a lorry. She was still in the imitative stage. The attempt failed, and she realised that murder requires study. Though in view of her hatred of Miss Ardmore I have wondered if that young woman has not had one or two escapes of which she is happily ignorant. I am sure Lilian Shearsby always had her in mind. However, there was a way in which Miss Ardmore might be involved in the general scheme. Is this boring you?”
“Boring me? Good heavens, no.” As though picking his words, Parmiter added: “But it is one thing to theorise about the story behind an item or two in the press, and quite another to find one’s theory come to life. I was wondering, if I had not called your attention to these fatalities—”
“You were not the sole instrument of providence,” Mr. Tuke said drily. “And we are still theorising, remember. Well, we must now go back a little. About this time last year a family in Bedford was accidentally wiped out by sodium nitrite poisoning. The man was employed by Imperial Sansil. Soon after this, Miss Ardmore spent a week-end with her cousins there, and this tragedy was discussed. And, according to my story, something else happened. Mrs. Shearsby went through
