Race smiled.
'I was with Chief Inspector Kemp when the question of interviewing your daughter came up. I suggested it would be much pleasanter for her if Inspector Kemp came round here than if she had to come down to Scotland Yard, and I thought I'd come along too.'
'Oh – er – well, very decent, of you, Race.'
'We naturally wanted to upset the young lady as little as possible,' put in Chief Inspector Kemp.
But at this moment the door opened and Miss Patricia Brice-Woodworth walked in and took charge of the situation with the coolness and detachment of the very young.
'Hallo,' she said. 'You're from Scotland Yard, aren't you? About last night? I've been longing for you to come. Is father being tiresome? Now don't daddy – you know what the doctor said about your blood pressure. Why you want to get into such states about everything, I can't think. I'll just take the inspectors or superintendents or whatever they are into my room and I'll send Walters to you with a whisky and soda.'
The general had a choleric desire to express himself in several blistering ways at once, but only succeeded in saying, 'Old friend of mine. Major Race,' at which introduction, Patricia lost interest in Race and bent a beatific smile on Chief Inspector Kemp. With cool generalship, she shepherded them out of the room and into her own sitting-room, firmly shutting her father in his study.
'Poor daddy,' she observed. 'He will fuss. But he's quite easy to manage really.'
The conversation then proceeded on most amicable lines but with very little result.
'It's maddening really,' said Patricia. 'Probably the only chance in my life that I shall ever have of being right on the spot when a murder was done – it is a murder, isn't it? The papers were very cautious and vague, but I said to Gerry on the telephone that it must be murder. Think of it – a murder done right close by me and I wasn't even looking!'
The regret in her voice was unmistakable.
It was evident enough that, as the Chief Inspector had gloomily prognosticated, the two young people who had got engaged only a week previously had had eyes only for each other.
With the best will in the world, a few personalities were all that Patricia Brice-Woodworth could muster.
'Sandra Farraday was looking very smart, but then she always does. That was a Schiaparelli model she had on.'
'You know her?' Race asked.
Patricia shook her head.
'Only by sight. He looks rather a bore, I always think. So pompous, like most politicians.'
'Did you know any of the others by sight?'
She shook her head.
'No, I'd never seen any of them before – at least I don't think so. In fact, I don't suppose I would have noticed Sandra Farraday if it hadn't been for the Schiaparelli.'
'And you'll find,' said Chief Inspector Kemp grimly as they left the house, 'that Master Tollington will be exactly the same – only there won't have been even a Skipper – skipper what – sounds like a sardine – to attract his attention.'
'I don't suppose,' agreed Race, 'that the cut of Stephen Farraday's dress suit will have caused him any heart pangs.'
'Oh, well,' said the inspector. 'Let's try Christine Shannon. Then we'll have finished with the outside chances.'
Miss Shannon was, as Chief Inspector Kemp had stated, a blonde lovely. The bleached hair, carefully arranged, swept back from a soft vacant baby-like countenance.
Miss Shannon might be, as Inspector Kemp had affirmed, dumb – but she was eminently easy to look at, and a certain shrewdness in the large baby-blue eyes indicated that her dumbness only extended in intellectual directions and that where horse sense and a knowledge of finance were indicated, Christine Shannon was right on the spot.
She received the two men with the utmost sweetness, pressing drinks upon them and when these were refused, urging cigarettes. Her flat was small and cheaply modernistic.
'I'd just love to be able to help you, Chief Inspector. Do ask me any question you like.'
Kemp led off with a few conventional questions about the bearing and demeanour of the party at the centre table.
At once Christine showed herself to be an unusually keen and shrewd observer.
'The party wasn't going well – you could see that. Stiff as stiff could be. I felt quite sorry for the old boy – the one who was giving it. Going all out he was to try and make things go – and just as nervous as a cat on wires – but all he could do didn't seem to cut any ice. The tall woman he'd got on his right was as stiff as though she'd swallowed the poker and the kid on his left was just mad, you could see, because she wasn't sitting next to the nice-looking dark boy opposite. As for the tall fair fellow next to her he looked as though his tummy was out of order, ate his food as though he thought it would choke him. The woman next to him was doing her best, she pegged away at him, but she looked rather as though she had the jumps herself.'
'You seem to have been able to notice a great deal, Miss Shannon,' said Colonel Race.
'I'll let you into a secret. I wasn't being so much amused myself. I'd been out with that boy friend of mine three nights running, and was I getting tired of him! He was all out for seeing London – especially what he called the classy spots – and I will say for him he wasn't mean. Champagne every time. We went to the Compradour and the Mille Fleurs and finally the Luxembourg , and I'll say he enjoyed himself. In a way it was kind of pathetic. But his conversation wasn't what you'd call interesting. Just long histories of business deals he'd put through in Mexico and most of those I heard three times – and going on to all the dames he'd known and how mad they were about him. A girl gets kind of tired of listening after a while and you'll admit that Pedro is nothing much to look at – so I just concentrated on the eats and let my eyes roam round.'
'Well, that's excellent from our point of view, Miss Shannon,' said the Chief Inspector. 'And I can only hope that you will have seen something that may help us solve our problem.'
Christine shook her blonde head.
'I've no idea who bumped the old boy off – no idea at all. He just took a drink of champagne, went purple in the face and sort of collapsed.'
'Do you remember when he had last drunk from his glass before that?'
The girl reflected.
'Why – yes – it was just after the cabaret. The lights went up and he picked up his glass and said something and the others did it too. Seemed to me it was a toast of some kind.'
The Chief Inspector nodded.
'And then?'
'Then the music began and they all got up and went off to dance, pushing their chairs back and laughing. Seemed to get warmed up for the first time. Wonderful what champagne will do for the stickiest parties.'
'They all went together – leaving the table empty?'
'Yes.'
'And no one touched Mr Barton's glass.'
'No one at all.' Her reply came promptly. 'I'm perfectly certain of that.'
'And no one – no one at all came near the table while they were away.'
'No one – except the waiter, of course.'
'A waiter? Which waiter?'
'One of the half-fledged ones with an apron, round about sixteen. Not the real waiter. He was an obliging little fellow rather like a monkey – Italian I guess he was.'
Chief Inspector Kemp acknowledged this description of Giuseppe Balsano with a nod of the head.
'And what did he do, this young waiter? He filled up the glasses?'
Christine shook her head.
'Oh, no. He didn't touch anything on the table. He just picked up an evening bag that one of the girls had dropped when they all got up.'
'Whose bag was it?'
