“I hope,” said Hunter with barely restrained violence, “that the dentist had to pull Milo’s tooth, and that it was quite deep-rooted.”
All the way down to his toes, thought Sarah, bending to give corn to the fluffed little black hen. “Is this usually Milo’s job?”
Hunter uttered a bark of laughter. “It’s Peck’s job,” he said dryly, “and failing that mine or Bess’s. Never Milo’s.” He turned to swear briskly at the Silkie rooster, who had suddenly fancied danger to one of the hens and rushed forward with a ridiculous air of menace. The bantam held his ground, stance implying that if the broody hen were disturbed he would tear Hunter to pieces. Hunter by-passed the nest; he was almost done now, and Sarah had still not said what she had come to say.
“Your mother is certainly patient with Peck, isn’t she?” Even his name seemed subtly dangerous now, but she managed it carelessly.
“It’s an obligation of sorts,” said Hunter after an instant of total stillness. His strong light-eyed face bent down and away from her, intent upon the distribution of dry sweet hay. “Bess repeated something to the police that the nurse had told her, about having been accosted by a strange man when she was walking in the field here one day. That’s what put them onto Peck in the first place.”
“Accosted?” said Sarah, her brows going up involuntarily.
“Miss Braceway’s word, I take it. I suppose he shouted, or said something she took for an improper suggestion. At any rate she told Bess, and Bess told the police, that the man had come from the direction of a hut at the back of the mink farm. So . . Hunter shrugged. “It seemed to add up to Peck, particularly as he’d been in trouble with the police before.”
How very suitable Peck was in every respect for the role of brutal killer, and what a nuisance for the Gideons that he had not only been freed but was in a position to demand work from them. Only why work, why not just money? Peck didn’t sound like a man to worry inordinately about the devil and idle hands.
He would have been furious at being arrested on Bess’s hearsay statement, particularly if—this went shockedly through Sarah’s mind—it were pure invention. Miss Braceway had complained of being drugged at the time of Nina Trafton’s death. Bess wouldn’t want that issue brought to light again after all these months, and what better diversion for the police than Peck, already known to be a dubious character?
Peck was a countryman, and shrewd; he might very well have argued to himself that the Gideons, wilfully implicating him in the murder of the nurse, had something to hide. The fact that Bess hired him on demand would seem to him proof, and he would be emboldened. And he had access to the pheasant pens. . . .
Hunter stood the hayfork in the corner, surveyed his handiwork, and reached for the door latch. He said over his shoulder, “Has it occurred to you, Sarah, that if you keep on with this you might find out something about Charles that you won’t like?”
Sarah had thought herself too single-minded to be surprised into anger by anything these people might say to her, but Hunter’s cool curious tone caught her off guard even while her mind registered the openness of the jump from Peck to Miss Braceway to Charles. “You mean,” she said with careful distinctness, “something I’ll like even less than the fact that after six weeks of marriage to me Charles jumped out of a window? Frankly, no, it had not occurred to me. And while we’re on the subject, did you have a lunch date with Charles that day?”
Hunter, who had opened the door to let in a flutter of white light and biting cold, closed it again, turning a face of almost musical-comedy astonishment. “Lunch date?” he repeated. “In New York?” His tone removed New York to the distance of Hong Kong. “No. What on earth put that into your head?”
“I just wondered.”
Hunter’s expression changed. He held the door for her without a word and Sarah walked by him, more shaken by that brief glance than by anything he could have said.
He might have lied to her only moments ago, but could he have contrived that look of pity?
Charles had not killed Miss Braceway, she assured herself, rushing at this particular fence in the refuge of her room. Putting everything else aside, he had been in New York at the time, so that she had not, in spite of Hunter’s frighteningly off-hand suggestion, lived with and slept beside a man capable of battering a woman’s head and face so viciously that identification had to be made through other means.
Was it the obvious thing, then—a physical fear of Sarah after that chance incident on the bluff? Dr. Vollmer had blunted that spear, but it still hurt surprisingly. Sarah tried to reconcile Charles’s nightmares with the possibility that he had confided the subject of them to his family, but she could not. In any case, no matter what the state of his mind, he could not have confused her with a Reeves or an Elliot pheasant.
There was one other area to explore, and she had to force herself to do it as though she were opening the door of a dark and dangerous room. Harry Brendan had indicated it in that curiously remembering voice when he said about Nina Trafton: “Every man who ever met her was a little in love with her at one time or another.”
Did it all lie there, the key to the whole business? Consider Nina, married to an embittered man almost twice her age, acquiring in the process a tall good-looking stepson only a few years younger than she. Consider Charles, for
