“Oh, yes. They really do not trouble to hide it. A most attractive couple.”
His smile became a little more pronounced.
“Your well-known partiality for lovers! Would it surprise you to learn that Desborough had a serious quarrel with Miss Lyle on Wednesday night, and that the quarrel was about Laura Fane?”
“It would not surprise me in the least,” said Miss Silver. “I saw them leave the room together, and they were away for some time. But I would like to know who told you that they had quarrelled.”
He made a face.
“Perry—the complete eavesdropper. Well, I shall see Desborough when he comes in.”
Miss Silver got up.
“I should believe very little that Perry says,” she observed.
March laughed.
“I am not biased in her favour. What about Desborough? Is he to be believed implicitly?”
Miss Silver smiled too, with rather a charming effect.
“According to David all men are liars. I am afraid that our profession does not incline us to disagree with him. But I may at least say of Mr. Desborough that I do not think he has had much practice in lying, or that he would be able to do it at all convincingly.”
Making her exit on that, Miss Silver proceeded upstairs to Miss Fane’s room.
She found Agnes Fane in the armchair by the fire with a book on her knee, but she did not think she had been reading it, for she had the impression that the eyes which were turned upon her entrance had been dwelling upon a still vividly remembered past. It seemed to her that Agnes came back from it with a reluctant effort.
She took the opposite chair and proceeded at once to her errand.
“I hope you will not consider me inopportune, but I think you ought to know, without any further delay on my part, that the work for which you engaged me has been done.”
Miss Fane regarded her with some surprise.
“Oh, that?” she said. “It was not important.”
Miss Silver coughed.
“It is not always easy to say what is important and what is not. In this case the reliability of a witness may be in question.”
Agnes Fane said, “I see. So you have found out who has been pilfering. Who is it?”
“Your maid, Perry,” said Miss Silver.
If she had expected denial or opposition she was to be surprised. Miss Fane’s hand rose slightly and fell again upon the arm of her chair.
“How exceedingly tiresome,” she said.
“You are not surprised?”
The pale lips moved into a smile.
“I have known Perry for forty-one years. I don’t think you could tell me anything which would surprise me. She dislikes my having evacuees here. I suppose she hoped I should blame them for the thefts and take steps to get rid of them. That would be quite in character.”
“Yes. May I ask what you intend to do?”
Miss Fane raised her finely arched eyebrows.
“I shall let her see that I know. She will not do it again. By the way, I suppose you are quite sure?”
“Oh, yes. I talked to her about the thefts. She said you were distressed about them, and allowed a good deal of animus against the evacuee families to appear. She asserted that they came prowling into the bedrooms when the family was in the drawing-room and the staff at supper in the servants’ hall. I told her that I intended to mark some money and leave it on my dressing-table. I let her see me do it. You will perhaps remember that on Tuesday night I left the drawing-room as soon as Dean had removed the coffee service. I went up to my room. The money was still on the dressing-table. I stood behind the curtains and waited. Presently Perry came in. She stood listening for a moment. Then she picked up the money and went out again. She will, I am sure, have found an opportunity of hiding it in one of the rooms occupied by the evacuees.”
Miss Fane said, “I see.” And then, rather abruptly, “This is Friday. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I did not wish to upset you just as you were expecting a party of Tanis’s friends. As they were only coming down for a couple of nights, I thought it would be better to wait until they had gone.”
“That was very considerate.” The deep voice had a note of irony.
Miss Silver drew herself up as she replied.
“I did what I thought best. But now that my professional engagement is at an end—”
Miss Fane interrupted her with energy.
“Who said it was at an end? I most certainly did not.”
Miss Silver coughed.
“I do not quite—”
She was again interrupted.
“Oh, yes, you do—you understand me perfectly. What? Do you think I take steps to discover a petty theft, and stand aside and do nothing when my niece has been murdered?”
Miss Silver contemplated her with calm.
“The police—” she began, and heard an angry echo of the words.
“The police! Grinding their own axe and keeping their mouths shut! Keeping me in the dark—me! Have you seen the Superintendent? Do you know what he came up here to tell me not half an hour ago?”
“I think so.”
Miss Fane stared at her.
“He came up to tell me that Jeffery Hazelton is out of it. He was fool enough to suppose that it would be a relief to my mind.”
Miss Silver said quietly, “If you think of the child, Agnes, it should be a relief.”
The white face went rigid for a moment. There was some strong control. She said more quietly,
“It leaves us in a terrible uncertainty. I wish you to work upon the case as my representative.”
Miss Silver said very seriously indeed,
“Agnes, this is a murder case. I cannot be anyone’s representative. I can only work to discover the truth.”
“That is all I am asking you to do. I am asking you to find out who shot Tanis. And why. You may work with the police, or you may work separately. I lay no obligations on you. I ask neither fear nor favour. I ask that the murderer should be discovered—and punished.”
Miss Silver looked at her.
“Have you considered that the murderer may be someone whom you know, with whom you are on terms of friendship, relationship even—a family connection, a member of your household? All these are included among the possible suspects.”
“I am not a fool. I make no reservations. The murderer is to be discovered. Do you accept?”
Miss Silver inclined her head.
“On those terms—yes.”
Agnes Fane relaxed slightly. That same ironic smile just touched her lips.
“If it is Perry, I shall have to find a new maid. It would be incredibly tiresome.”
“Agnes!” Miss Silver permitted herself a shade of reproof.
“And if it is I,” said Agnes Fane, still smiling, “then Perry will have to find herself a new mistress, which will be almost equally tiresome for her.”
CHAPTER 27
THE CURTAINS WERE DRAWN in Miss Fane’s study. They were of a handsome golden brown damask, a shade lighter than the woodwork. In combination with the glowing fire—the police are always handy with a fire—they made the room a good many degrees less bleak. Light came from a bowl in the ceiling. It showed Superintendent March, pleasant but official, at the writing-table, and Carey Desborough facing him across it in as easy an attitude as a hard and upright chair allowed. March had just said,
“I believe you and Miss Lyle were engaged.” The statement was a little disingenuous. Or perhaps that is putting it too politely, since he believed no such thing. He merely wished to observe Mr. Desborough’s reactions. They were displayed in a lifted eyebrow and a faint stiffening of manner as he replied to what he chose to regard as a question. “Oh, no—that’s a mistake. There was no engagement.” The Superintendent wondered whether this was a quibble. He said,
“You would prefer to call it an understanding?” This time Mr. Desborough frowned. The expression suited him very well. A fine looking young
fellow, if you liked them on the dark and gloomy side. This was of course not the moment to be wreathed in smiles.
Carey said, “I don’t know where you got your information. We were not engaged, and we had no understanding. We were merely friends.”
March moved some papers which lay at his right hand, bringing one of them to the top and leaving it there.
“My information comes from Miss Fane. She tells me that there was an understanding, and that the engagement would have been announced very shortly.”
Carey nodded.
“I thought so. It’s what she wanted, and when she wants anything she makes up her mind she’s going to get it. But in this case she was all out. We were just friends.”
“You knew that she had this idea?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Did you do anything to disabuse her of it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
The eyebrow went up again.
“Not a very easy thing to do. As a matter of fact I told Tanis she ought to do it.”
“And what did Miss Lyle say to that?”
“She didn’t want to at first, but afterwards she said she would.”
“Why didn’t she want to?”
Carey frowned. He was aware of delicate ground under his feet. He wanted to tell the truth. But how do you convey the truth about a very complicated situation to someone who knows nothing about it, without embarking on a three-volume novel? You have to eliminate, but what you eliminate is part of the truth. What he wanted to do was to eliminate Laura. Yet as far as he was concerned the whole situation pivoted on Laura. He did the best he could, saying after no more than a momentary pause,
“Miss Fane was very keen on our marrying. She hated the idea of a film career. She wanted her to settle down here and have a family. Tanis was dependent on her. She didn’t want to offend her, but she definitely didn’t want to marry me or anyone else. If she had told Miss Fane, it would have upset her very much.”
March put out his hand to the paper he had extracted. This time he put it down in front of him on the blotting-pad. He said,
“I don’t think you are telling me very much. You haven’t, for instance, said anything about a quarrel with Miss Lyle on Wednesday evening.”
“A quarrel?”
“On Wednesday evening at about a quarter to six you left the drawing-room together and went to Miss Lyle’s sitting-room, where, I am informed, you had a violent quarrel.”
Carey sat back and put his hands in his pockets. The attitude was an easy one, but the unseen hands were clenched. Fatal to lose the temper. Under the pressure of a very considerable self-restraint his dark skin flushed a little. He said with quite a good effect of nonchalance,
“Violent is a bit strong. I wanted her to tell Miss Fane, and she didn’t want to—for the reasons I have just given. We both lost our tempers a bit, but I shouldn’t have called it a violent quarrel.”
“No?” March touched the paper before him. “This statement does.”
The flush deepened.
“Someone listening in? Who was it?”
“Miss Fane’s maid, Perry. She came down in the lift, meaning to go out through Miss Lyle’s sitting-room to the hall on her way to fetch something or other from the kitchen wing. She says she always comes down that way to avoid the stairs because she’s got a stiff knee. Anyhow she was there in the octagon room when you were talking, and she seems to have heard a good deal of what you said. She says the door was ajar, and she doesn’t deny that she listened. Would you like to add anything to your account of your relations with Miss Lyle?” The Superintendent’s tone robbed the words of as much offence as was possible.
Carey pushed back his chair and stood up. He walked a few paces, stopped, turned, and came and sat down again. There is a time to speak and a time to be silent. The voice of common sense became insistent that this was a time to speak. It is, in fact, better to go than to be dragged. He said,
“All right, I’ll tell you the whole thing. There’s nothing in it, but when it comes to eavesdroppers you never know how things are going to be twisted. You can have the facts. My people and the Fanes were old friends. My mother used to bring me here when I was eight or nine. Tanis and I were about the same age. My mother died, and I didn’t come here any more. I didn’t see Tanis again till last summer, then I saw a lot of her. I came down here once or twice when I had leave. Miss Fane was very kind to me. It ended in my asking Tanis to marry me.”
“And she accepted you?”
This was the difficult bit, because he had believed himself to be accepted. It was Tanis who had, a good deal later on, dealt summarily with that belief. He said,
“I thought—I was—encouraged. Afterwards she told me I had been mistaken—she only wanted to be friends with me.”
“How long afterwards?”
“I crashed in October—I was in hospital for a couple of months. It was after I came out.”
“And while you were in hospital?”
Carey was silent. The bitterness of that time came back.
“She came to see you?”
“No.”
“Wrote?”
“No.”
“I see.... And after you came out of hospital you asked for an explanation, and you were given to understand that you were just a friend? Was there any quarrel?”
“No. We went on seeing each other. I had a lot of time on my hands.”
“I see. Perry says she heard Miss Lyle claim that there was an engagement between you. She says that you wanted it broken off, but that Miss Lyle was not willing to release you.”
Oh, well, it had got to come—he had known that all along. He said,
“That’s what I meant when I said things got twisted. If I was Perry I’d swear to every word we said. As it is, I’ve only got a sort of general impression. I took Tanis out of the drawing-room because I wanted to talk to her. She had shown me as plainly as anyone can that she didn’t care for me, but it suited her to let her aunts think that there was some understanding between us. It didn’t suit me, because I had fallen in love with someone else—with her cousin, Laura Fane. That’s what she was angry about. She didn’t want me herself, but she didn’t want to let me go.”
Randal March turned a leaf in Perry’s statement, glanced down the page, and turned back again.
“I think I had better read you some of this,” he said.
“‘Miss Tanis was talking to him very loving. She called him darling and said they were engaged, weren’t they, and didn’t he want to make love to her. And he spoke very hard, and said she was to tell Miss Agnes that the engagement was broken off. And she said that would be all on account of Miss Laura—and a bad day she came into this house, the same as her mother, breaking off other people’s engagements.’”
March glanced up.
“The last bit is, I gather, Perry’s own comment. I don’t know whether you would care to add yours?”
Carey Desborough smiled. The smile changed his face quite a lot. He appeared for the moment to be genuinely amused.
“A most ingenious liar, you know. Because nearly all of that’s true—with a twist. Tanis used pretty well those words, but she wasn’t being loving, she was being sarcastic. And I certainly didn’t ask her to tell Miss Fane we had broken off an engagement—because there wasn’t any engagement, and I asked her to tell Miss Fane that there wasn’t.”
March returned to the statement.
“‘They began to quarrel very hot about Miss Laura. Miss Tanis said she wasn’t any better than she ought to be, and Mr. Carey he fired right up, and he said, You’ll go too far one of these fine days.’”
“Did you say that?”
Carey nodded.
“Something like that. I told you we lost our tempers.”
“But it wasn’t a quarrel?” The Superintendent’s tone was pleasantly ironical. He went back to the statement.
“‘And Miss Tanis said, I suppose you’d like to murder me?
And he said there was nothing he’d like better.’”
He looked up.
“Any comment on that?”
In a split second of astounded realization Carey saw what those idiotic quarrelling phrases could be made to suggest. He kept his voice cool as he said,
“Perry’s got her knife into me—you can see that.”
“Did you use those words?”
“Not those words. As far as I can remember, she said wouldn’t I like to murder her, and I said it would be a pleasure. We were both being sarcastic—not quite Perry’s line of country. I suppose she doesn’t mention that after I started to go away, and came back to try to make it up?”
“No, she doesn’t.”
Carey squared his shoulders.
“Well, I did. We’d been pretty good friends, and we’d had some good times—I said something like that. I didn’t want to quarrel with her.”
“And what did she say?”
The dark colour came to Carey’s face. He took a longish breath before he spoke.
“She said something pretty foul. I expect Perry’s got it down.”
March read from the statement.
“‘Miss Tanis, she up and told him he might have lost his nerve for flying but he’d got plenty when it came to treating her the way he was.’”
“Is that correct?”
Carey met his look.
“Near enough. It got me on the raw. I haven’t lost my nerve, but I can’t fly yet because I can’t judge distances properly. It’s coming right, but I’ve been feeling pretty badly about it, and when she said that, I told her that was about enough, and I went.”
Randal March put down the statement, observing drily, “So Perry says.”
He was thinking that a woman with a tongue like Tanis Lyle’s might very easily get herself murdered, and that it was a good thing for Carey Desborough that his quarrel with her had taken place in the early evening of Wednesday and not on the night of the murder. It would require a very revengeful disposition to brood for from eighteen to twenty hours over a bitter word and then shoot a woman in the back. Unless there had been some fresh provocation. He looked across the table in a meditative manner and said,
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