“Rob,” said Kate almost pleadingly, and he stopped with a shrug.
Evelyn hadn’t been about to quote anything at anybody, Sarah thought, watching the other woman curiously. Sudden death was a topic which ought to have set her off on a marathon of other sudden deaths she had known or read about, but instead she sat wrapped in a silence of her own, lashes down over—what? But then what had it been on the night of Sarah’s arrival, when Evelyn had first spoken about Peck? Pleasure, triumph, some secret and malicious excitement?
Milo had followed the direction of Sarah’s gaze and slid his glasses down, observing his wife over them. “Cat’s got her tongue,” he said blandly to Sarah. “Nice pussy.”
Evelyn smiled absently without looking up; for Sarah the smile had a spine-prickling quality and she glanced hastily away.
The others were talking about Peck and what poor Mrs. Peck would do now. (“Heave a great sigh of relief,” said Rob roundly.) It was true that Peck had lost jobs as fast as he got them, but there was always work to be had in the country, and whatever else his faults, Peck had been wise in the way of birds and animals. Mrs. Peck, evidently a woman of strong character, had managed to extract enough of his pay to keep them in food before he went off on his periodic benders. The wonder was that he hadn’t smashed his car into a tree or come to some other violent end long before this.
Sarah listened and was almost lulled. Drunks did not require pushing; they fell of their own accord, and the soaking in the brook combined with the bitter cold would have done the rest. It was all very predictable for Peck, it fitted him as exactly as the murder of the nurse.
“I wonder,” said Evelyn almost apologetically, “where he got the money?”
There was a pause, and a focussing of attention unusual for Evelyn’s utterances. Then Hunter said shortly and gloomily, “He’d just been paid.”
“But that was Thursday night, wasn’t it?” The bright blue gaze held only an innocent wish for enlightenment. “And if he’d been drinking all that evening, and all yesterday— I mean, Peck usually went through his pay faster than that, didn’t he?”
A calculation of dollars and cents travelled silently around the room. Rob said sardonically, “Now that we’ve all discovered what a sterling character he was, I suppose I’d better not say that he mightn’t have been too particular about where his money came from.”
The subject had grown acutely uncomfortable. Perhaps to change it, Kate Clemence said, “What happened to your hand, Bess?”
“My . . . ? Oh, this.” Bess moved her right hand with a recollected air, showing a stab-like cut, short but vicious, in the flesh between thumb and index finger. “Long John. He’s always had a bad temper and he’s getting worse, although I do think someone’s been teasing him. Those Elwell children, probably. They’re absolute devils.”
“And he’s never liked his new pen, has he? I suspect that he’s quite an age and set in his ways,” Kate said thoughtfully. “When he calms down you might put the pair of them in one of the outside pens. The Manchurians would probably like—”
Sarah didn’t hear what the Manchurians would like; the moving of the Silver pheasants was a signal her mind stopped at and stayed with. When had that taken place? Had Charles, when he wrote down “Reeves” and “Elliot”, put the Silvers in the same ill-tempered category, and then crossed out the name because at that time they were in an outdoor pen that held no place for concealment?
It would make quite a difficulty, if you had hidden something in a pen occupied by tame and docile pheasants—the Lady Amhersts, say—to find it presided over by a trumpeting and militant Silver. At most seasons of the year the Silver would not molest Bess, the source of his food and water and raisins and tomatoes; now, with the breeding season not far off, he would harm any intruder and probably damage himself in the process.
It was a safeguard, in a way, for something you didn’t dare leave in the house, in case of a search. (But why keep it at all, whatever it was? Why not destroy it?) On the other hand, a delicate balance had been achieved here. Four deaths had been laid variously to accident, suicide, and random violence, and whoever had been responsible for them would not want the balance upset. Say that X had hidden something incriminating in one of the pheasant pens—because it was something that couldn’t be destroyed easily and there wasn’t time after murdering Nina Trafton? Because the laundry truck had stopped and X had fled in a panic? —and, after all these safe and lulling months, along came Sarah, rebelling against the motives for Charles’s suicide, intent on examining the background.
X would now want to get rid of the tangible object that Charles had known about or deduced, but a distinctive stab on the hand, combined with a breaking of the proud snowy tail feathers and a disturbance of the stable planks, would mark his progress all the way. The hairline division between coincidence and a related plan would be fatally crossed.
And what had Bess just said about the Silver? “Somebody’s been teasing him.”
Bess had a cut on her hand.
“. . . Sarah?” It was Harry Brendan, whose preoccupied silence during lunch had gone unremarked because he was apt to be like that and, a virtual stranger to Peck, not really qualified to speak. “Before I forget, did you ever find that memo of Charles’s for me? He said he’d written it down on the stub of something or other.”
“Business,” explained Harry in an aside to Bess. “A well-feathered bird in Brookline.”
“I don’t know,” said Sarah, and although this had been prepared between them in the car, as had the envelope she took from her bag, her voice sounded to her hollow and
