“Thank you,” she said with a note of bitterness, and her deep eyes gleamed with resentment. Jim understood the change and sympathised with it. Hanaud had spoken of setting a trap when he had set none. For there was no conceivable reason why she should hesitate to admit that she had seen Mrs. Harlowe in the presence of the nurse, and wished her good night before she went to the party. But he had set a real trap a minute afterwards and into that Betty had straightway stumbled. He had tricked her into admitting a dread that Mrs. Harlowe might have spoken of her in disparagement or even in horror after she had left the bedroom.
“You must know, Monsieur Hanaud,” she explained very coldly, “that women are not always very generous to one another, and sometimes have not the imagination—how shall I put it?—to visualise the possible consequences of things they may say with merely the intention to hurt and do a little harm. Jeanne Baudin and I were, so far as I ever knew, good friends, but one is never sure, and when you folded up her statement in a hurry I was naturally very anxious to hear the rest of it.”
“Yes, I agree,” Jim intervened. “It did look as if the nurse might have added something malevolent, which could neither be proved nor disproved.”
“It was a misunderstanding, Mademoiselle,” Hanaud replied in a voice of apology. “We will take care that there shall not be any other.” He looked over the nurse’s statement again.
“It is said here that you saw that Madame had her favourite books and her drink beside the bed. That is true.”
“Yes, Monsieur.”
“What was that drink?”
“A glass of lemonade.”
“It was placed on a table, I suppose, ready for her every night?”
“Every night.”
“And there was no narcotic dissolved in it?”
“None,” Betty replied. “If Mrs. Harlowe was restless, the nurse would give an opium pill and very occasionally a slight injection of morphia.”
“But that was not done on this night?”
“Not to my knowledge. If it was done, it was done after my departure.”
“Very well,” said Hanaud, and he folded the paper and put it away in his pocket. “That is finished with. We have you now out of the house at five minutes to nine in the evening, and Madame in her bed with her health no worse than usual.”
“Yes.”
“Good!” Hanaud changed his attitude. “Now let us go over your evening, Mademoiselle! I take it that you stayed at the house of M. de Pouillac until you returned home.”
“Yes.”
“You remember with whom you danced? If it was necessary, could you give me a list of your partners?”
She rose and, crossing to the writing table, sat down in front of it. She drew a sheet of paper towards her and took up a pencil. Pausing now and again to jog her memory with the blunt end of the pencil at her lips, she wrote down a list of names.
“These are all, I think,” she said, handing the list to Hanaud. He put it in his pocket.
“Thank you!” He was all contentment now. Although his questions followed without hesitation, one upon the other, it seemed to Jim that he was receiving just the answers which he expected. He had the air of a man engaged upon an inevitable formality and anxious to get it completely accomplished, rather than of one pressing keenly a strict investigation.
“Now, Mademoiselle, at what hour did you arrive home?”
“At twenty minutes past one.”
“You are sure of that exact time? You looked at your watch? Or at the clock in the hall? Or what? How are you sure that you reached the Maison Grenelle exactly at twenty minutes past one?”
Hanaud hitched his chair a little more forward, but he had not to wait a second for the answer.
“There is no clock in the hall and I had no watch with me,” Betty replied. “I don’t like those wristwatches which some girls wear. I hate things round my wrists,” and she shook her arm impatiently, as though she imagined the constriction of a bracelet. “And I did not put my watch in my handbag because I am so liable to leave that behind. So I had nothing to tell me the time when I reached home. I was not sure that I had not kept Georges—the chauffeur—out a little later than he cared for. So I made him my excuse, explaining that I didn’t really know how late I was.”
“I see. It was Georges who told you the time at the actual moment of your arrival?”
“Yes.”
“And Georges is no doubt the chauffeur whom I saw at work as I crossed the courtyard?”
“Yes. He told me that he was glad to see me have a little gaiety, and he took out his watch and showed it to me with a laugh.”
“This happened at the front door, or at those big iron gates, Mademoiselle?” Hanaud asked.
“At the front door. There is no lodge-keeper and the gates are left open when anyone is out.”
“And how did you get into the house?”
“I used my latchkey.”
“Good! All this is very clear.”
Betty, however, was not mollified by Hanaud’s satisfaction with her replies. Although she answered him without delay, her answers were given mutinously. Jim began to be a little troubled. She should have met Hanaud halfway; she was imprudently petulant.
“She’ll make an enemy of this man before she has done,” he reflected uneasily. But he glanced at the detective and was relieved. For Hanaud was watching her with a smile which would have disarmed any less offended young lady—a smile half friendliness and half amusement. Jim took a turn upon himself.
“After all,” he argued, “this very imprudence pleads for her better than any calculation. The guilty don’t
