'Of course, nobody believes that Chelion murdered that wretched woman.' At Dame Beatrice's well-simulated look of surprise, she gave an account of the circumstances which had overtaken Weston Pipers.
'Then why is he under arrest?' asked Dame Beatrice innocently.
'Well, Evesham thinks it's just a ruse, you know.'
'A ruse?'
'Oh, my dear Mrs Farintosh, the police are up to all kinds of tricks these days. Evesham says that the real murderer thinks he is perfectly safe and so he'll do some stupid thing or other and give the game away. Poor Chelion - such a nice, modest, unassuming fellow and so much liked by everybody - is just a stool-pigeon, Evesham says.'
'Your husband appears to have given a great deal of thought to the matter.'
'Well, of course, he was there with Chelion and that sinister man Latimer Targe when they found her body, you know. Targe made off at once on the excuse of telephoning the doctor and the police, but I always think there is something very underhand and unpleasant about a man who earns his living by wallowing in crime.'
'Oh? How does Mr Targe do that?'
'He looks up and writes up real-life murder cases, but, of course, a person of your education and breeding - it's easy to tell the real sort when you meet them, isn't it? - would never dream of touching his books.'
'Risque?' asked Dame Beatrice in a low and horrified tone.
'Worse, my dear. After all, sex is a perfectly natural thing, whatever strange antics it may get up to, as I try to explain in my novels. Not that I could ever approve or countenance the path pursued by those two young women who left us just about the time of Miss Minnie's death.'
'Oh, dear me! You found their conduct shocking?'
'Yes, indeed. Such strange goings-on! I believe the Greeks had a word for it, but I simply call it unhealthy. And the names they choose to be known by! Billie, for instance. Why could she not write under the name of Wilhelmina, which must have been how she was christened, indeed she was christened at all. And the other one, Elysée, when of course her real name is simple, undistinguished Elsie! I wonder she did not call herself Desiree and have done with it.'
'So you got rid of them?'
'My dear, I had to insist that Miss Nutley did. They were a most undesirable pair. Besides, Evesham had begun making what used to be called sheep's eyes at Elysée. Never, Mrs Farintosh, be persuaded to marry a man younger than yourself.'
'I was not so persuaded and the chance is unlikely to be presented to me now.'
'Ah, well, I spoke rhetorically. I made that mistake and have regretted it for years. My marriage, Mrs Farintosh, has not been a happy or an easy one.'
Dame Beatrice said she was sorry to hear it, but she supposed that nobody's life was a bed of roses.
'You may wonder,' Constance went rightly ignoring this deplorable cliche, 'why I write the kind of novels I do. With my undoubted talents I could have done anything, simply anything I chose, Mrs Farintosh.'
Dame Beatrice said that Thomas Gray had been so right, so very right.
'Thomas Gray? You mean Gray of Gray's Elegy?'
Yes, Dame Beatrice had meant Gray of Gray's Elegy. (It sounded like some owner of a stately home open to the public at fifty pence a time, she thought.) She quoted:
'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.'
Constance Kent did not appear to be flattered.
'That is hardly me,' she said. 'I certainly was not "born to blush unseen".'
'Ah,' said Dame Beatrice, 'perhaps, then, you see yourself as:
Some village Whitehouse who, with dauntless breast,
The pornographic tyranny withstood;
Some mute inglorious Joan of Arc may rest,
Some Corday guiltless of foul Marat's blood.'
'I don't recollect that Gray wrote those words,' said Constance, looking puzzled.
Dame Beatrice waved a yellow claw. 'I was attempting to rescue the poet from the charge of being a male chauvinist pig,' she said.
'Oh, dear! I am not a Women's Libber, Mrs Farintosh, and that,' said Constance, looking happier, 'brings me back to Kennett and Barnes.'
'You said you got rid of them.'
'I got the idea from a letter which was actually sent to me myself - anonymously, of course. Well, you know, all is grist which comes to a novelist's mill, so although the letter was very unpleasant both in content and in the unpleasant words it used, I thought Why Not?'
'Why not what?'
'Write one myself, of course. I was stuck in the fourth chapter of my Split Summer - Split being that place on the Dalmatian coast, so it was rather a clever title, I thought - but somehow I had come to a full stop. Then came this letter. It horrified me at first, but then I suddenly saw how to open up my book. I am, of course, a purist where my work is concerned, so I wanted to find out for myself what effect an anonymous letter was likely to have on the recipient.'
'But I thought you knew the effect such a letter had on the recipient. You say you yourself had received one.'
'I am hardly a typical case. I knew that the statements and accusations contained in my letter were lies. The letter I wrote to these two misguided girls was the truth.'
'May I ask-?'
'What was in the letter I myself received? Certainly. I have nothing to hide. The letter accused me of having trapped Evesham into marrying me and it enquired, in a most disagreeable way, how I had managed it. My reply, I should explain, was only tit for tat. I knew where my letter came from. Kennett and Barnes wrote it.'
'What made you decide that
