During a brief visit to Paris, in the old days when she and Jervis still had plenty of money to burn, she had gone with a gay party to the Grand Guignol. There she had seen acted a terrifying little play which showed the walls of a room closing in on a man. That was exactly how she had felt during the long examination and cross-examination she had endured this morning.
One of the things that had made her feel so dreadfully frightened was that the two men from Scotland Yard had not begun their investigations by seeing her, the widow of the dead man. They had first interviewed Nurse Bradfield, and then the cook.
While this had been going on, Ivy had waited in the drawing-room, sick with terror and suspense, wondering what the two women were saying about her. At long last, the strangers had come into the drawing-room, looking very grave indeed.
And now, as she walked back to Duke of Kent Mansion, choosing instinctively a roundabout way, Ivy kept living over again that strange, even she had realised momentous, interview.
The inspector had gone straight to the point. When had she, Mrs. Jervis Lexton herself, last been in the company of her husband before his unexpected death? After an imperceptible pause, during which she was wondering fearfully if Nurse Bradfield had remembered all that had happened on that sinister last afternoon, she had answered the question truthfully. She said that she had been with Jervis after luncheon, while the nurse had gone out for a short time.
When Ivy had made this admission, there had come a look of alert questioning on the inspector’s face, for Nurse Bradfield had not mentioned that fact, which indeed she had forgotten. And then it was, on seeing the sudden change of countenance on the part of her inquisitor, that Mrs. Jervis Lexton had gently volunteered the statement that, after she herself had gone out, the sick man had had another visitor that afternoon, a friend of her own and her husband’s, a young man named Roger Gretorex, who was a doctor.
She had allowed, and consciously allowed, herself to look embarrassed, as she made what sounded like an admission. As she had intended should be the case, the inspector had at once run after that hare. But she had not bargained for what had followed immediately—insistent questioning as to her own and her husband’s relations with the man who had been, with the exception of the cook and the nurse, the last person to see Jervis Lexton alive.
How long had they known Dr. Gretorex? Did they see much of him? What had been her own relations with him? When, for instance, had she herself last seen him before the death of Jervis Lexton?
At last, when she was beginning to feel as if the meshes of the net were becoming smaller and smaller, he had “got out of her,” so Ivy put it to herself, that Roger Gretorex cared for her far more than a bachelor ought to care for the wife of a friend.
Nevertheless, everything would now have been “quite all right” from Ivy’s point of view if it had stopped there. But to her dismay and surprise, Inspector Orpington suddenly began on quite another tack.
In spite of the fact, which he assured her he accepted as true, that she had rejected with indignation Dr. Gretorex’s advances, he suggested that it was odd that her own and her husband’s friendship with the young man had gone on. He “presumed” that Lexton had known nothing of Gretorex’s unwelcome attentions to Mrs. Lexton? Ivy had reluctantly admitted that that was so. And, as he pressed her, with one quick, probing question after another, she saw, with a clear, affrighted, inward vision, that what she had intended should be a molehill was growing into a mountain.
At last had come the most alarming query of all—had she ever been to see Dr. Gretorex at 6 Ferry Place?
All the questions put to her she had answered with apparent ease and frankness. And, as to the last, she explained that she had gone to Dr. Gretorex’s house with a great friend of hers, a lady who had then been a widow, a Mrs. Arundell, but who had married again, and was now in India. They had been accompanied by a young man who was a friend of Mrs. Arundell.
As to going out with Roger Gretorex, she had done so only occasionally, and never since he had confessed he loved her. No, never since her husband’s illness.
How deeply thankful was Ivy Lexton that she had really seen so little of Roger Gretorex of late!
And then, all at once, the inspector had said something which had made, as she put it to herself, her heart stand still.
“I suppose there is a surgery attached to the house in Ferry Place?” he had remarked, speaking his thought aloud. And it had been those words, as to the probable existence of a surgery, that had suddenly made up her mind for her as to the line she would take concerning Roger Gretorex and their relations to one another.
Did Ivy Lexton then realise the full import of what she had done? Most certainly not. Subconsciously she was aware that her avowals, her timorous admissions as to his passion for her lovely self, could do Gretorex no good. But her only object had been to shift, at any cost, suspicion from herself.
There had been an interval, perhaps as long as a quarter of an hour, when she had been alone with Inspector Orpington. He had sent away his sergeant into the dining-room next door. At the time she had not known why.
Then he had spoken to her kindly, yet in a very solemn, searching tone, adjuring her to be frank, and to tell him of any knowledge, or even suspicion, she might harbour
