Her voice cold and steady, she said: “I’d advise you against making remarks like that, Miss Lumsden. They’re not only malicious and patently untrue. They’re libelous. What possible right have you to suggest that the Chilterns…?”
“That they murdered Mr. Drake?” cut in the nurse, her eyes hectically bright. “The police were the ones who suggested it, weren’t they? All I’m doing is to say there was a motive. Don’t think I’ve been fooled. I’ve been living here with the Chilterns for four months now. I’ve seen what their little game was. They were living in plenty as long as Mr. Drake was alive. Can you imagine their killing him unless they knew he’d be even more profitable dead?”
Kay stared at that gaunt face which was alive now with spite and contempt. “I think you’d better go upstairs and pack, Miss Lumsden. Unless the police object I’m quite sure my brother-in-law will want you to leave the house immediately.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be going. You don’t think I’d stay on anyway, do you? But I’m not going until I’m ready, not until I’ve found out who killed Mr. Drake and seen that they’ve got what they deserved.” A large hand moved convulsively to the little clasp at the throat of her uniform. “And don’t think it will be hard. I’ve got my suspicions already. Tell your charming Chilterns that. Tell them I’m going to do everything in my power to bring Mr. Drake’s murderer to justice. Tell them that until I’ve done it, I dare them to fire me.”
The laugh came through her words again, short and harsh like a dog’s bark. She tossed back her head, glared at Kay a moment, and then with a rustle of starched cotton swept out of the room.
Feeling very shaky, Kay watched her go. What was there to do now? What was the good of having won Simon around when there was this woman to face, this woman who already hinted at “suspicions” and who would now be fighting against them to the last ditch?
And how dangerous was she? Had she been up and about last night? Had she seen any of the mysterious, damning things that Kay herself had seen? Or was this all a bluff, based solely on a wild hunch about a changed will.
Because it must be a wild hunch. Whatever they might or might not have done, the Chilterns were not scheming and unscrupulous. Gilbert might shiftlessly have accepted bed and board from Ivor, but it was impossible to think of him working on him with Machiavellian craft to change his will in their favor—in order that one of them could kill him!
And yet, suddenly uneasy, she remembered what Maud had said the day before about Ivor settling a “little income” on them after the wedding. Had that arrangement been already drawn up and signed? Almost certainly Alice Lumsden would tell Major Clifford her suspicions about a financial motive. That meant he would go to Gilbert as Ivor’s lawyer and find everything out very soon. If Ivor had drawn up a document making the Chilterns financially independent of him, what would the Major think then?
Kay stared out at the vivid Bermuda landscape. There was only one thing to do—to go to Gilbert herself, find out the truth, and warn him that Alice Lumsden was their enemy.
She hurried down the corridor which led to her brother-in-law’s ground-floor bedroom. Her knock was answered by a calm “Come in.”
Gilbert was sitting up in bed, propped against the pillows. A breakfast tray lay in front of him on an invalid’s table. The wheel chair stood in a corner, and the French windows, wide open, presented a tranquil vista of the lawn with its weather-flagged path winding down to the beach.
Clinging wistfully to the ghost of his former vigor, Gilbert had lined the walls of the room with photographs of himself in the old days when he had been Harvard’s ace track star and one of the outstanding amateur baseball pitchers in the country. The contrast between the photographs of that exuberant young athlete and the paralyzed man on the bed was poignant. Somehow it made Kay feel closer to her brother-in-law than she had been in years.
Poor Gilbert! The easy life he had chosen had not proved so easy after all.
His face, which the long siege of illness had given a remote, spiritual quality, was alert and anxious when he saw her.
“Is there more bad news, Kay?”
“Yes. I’ve just fired Alice Lumsden.”
“Fired her?”
“She refuses to leave. But I fired her anyway.”
He stared. “What on earth’s the trouble?”
“It’s very serious, Gilbert. She not only came right out and told me she thinks one of you murdered Ivor. She also said you murdered him because you—you benefit financially by his death.” Kay looked steadily at Gilbert.
The look of shock in his eyes changed slowly to ironic amusement. “You mean she thinks we benefit under Ivor’s will?”
“That’s what she said. I can’t imagine where she got the idea. She thinks you deliberately worked on him to make a new will in your favor.”
“How very interesting!” The amusement had gone from Gilbert’s eyes and his voice was cool, slightly acid. “If it calms Miss Lumsden’s savage breast at all you may tell her that we aren’t even mentioned in Ivor’s will. I drew it up myself two years ago. There has never been a new one. As his lawyer I receive a certain small fee for settling the estate, of course. That is all.”
“Gilbert, I’m so relieved. I didn’t know naturally, but I was sure it was all a neurotic, malicious invention of her own.” Kay paused uncertainly. “But yesterday Maud said something about Ivor arranging a sort of income on you after the wedding. That Lumsden woman’s dangerous. I guess she was in love with Ivor and she hates you all. She’d do anything she could to hurt you. I know she’ll go to Major Clifford about the will. And even though we can prove that’s all false, he may find out about the income thing and then he’ll suspect…”
“I see what you mean.” Gilbert inclined his head gravely. “Perhaps you’d be good enough to remove this fancy table. It hems me in.” He nodded toward a desk in the corner of the room. “Over there you’ll find a lot of papers. Will you bring them to me?”
Kay lifted the invalid table off the bed, propped it against the wall, and fetched the papers which she laid on the light blanket that covered his shrunken legs. Composedly Gilbert leafed through the papers and selected one.
“This, my dear, is what in a more solid epoch would have been called Elaine’s marriage settlement. I drew it up under Ivor’s advisement last month. There’s no need to go into details, but I can assure you that he was planning to settle a very comfortable sum on Elaine—a very comfortable sum indeed.”
“But…”
“Wait a minute, Kay. Here is the clause you referred to, the thing Maud must have been talking to you about yesterday. And to my friend and father-in-law, Gilbert Chiltern, I guarantee to… oh, well, the figures don’t matter, but this settlement was more than generous to Maud and me. As Ivor’s in-laws we would have wanted for nothing.”
He let the papers drop onto the blanket, looking up at Kay sardonically. “But we are not Ivor’s in-laws. Elaine is not married to Ivor and Ivor is dead. These papers have not been signed by Ivor. They were not to have been signed until the day of the wedding. They are utterly worthless—just so much waste of good typing.”
He paused. “That answers your question, doesn’t it? It should also settle the distracted mind of that battle-ax nurse of mine. If one of us had wanted to kill Ivor for a financial motive, it is to be supposed that he or she would at least have waited four days, until after the wedding, when there would have been a certain financial benefit to be gained.” He gave a short laugh. “I imagine Major Clifford with his sound head for logic will appreciate that when I show him these various documents.”
Kay looked over his elbow at the unsigned typewritten document, feeling extreme relief. This paper would prove conclusively that so far from gaining, the Chilterns had lost considerably by Ivor’s death. It would destroy once and for all the menace of Alice Lumsden.
Gilbert was watching her, his face tired and pale. “Now that we’ve disposed of that little matter, Kay, I would like to talk
to you. I know you’ve never approved very highly of me. Probably you’ve been quite shocked at the way we’ve all moved into Ivor’s house. I admit quite frankly that I have accepted a great deal from him. But there are qualifying circumstances. Dr. Thorne, like all doctors, chooses to be kindly if insincerely optimistic about me. But I know perfectly well that I shall never walk again. Oddly enough, though, one clings to life, however impaired, and my chances for staying alive lay here with the sunshine and fresh air of Bermuda. Ivor made that possible for me when he offered us this vacation. As his lawyer I know that financially having us all in the house was in no conceivable way a burden to him. Consequently, I didn’t feel a contemptible parasite in accepting an offer which was made in all sincerity. I appreciated just how obligated I was to Ivor and I shall always be extremely grateful to him for what he did for us.”
He paused, his hands moving leisurely over the sheaf of papers. “Last night I had the feeling that you didn’t like Ivor, that you had something against him. I’m sure there are a great many women—particularly sensible, unromantic women like you—who would have disapproved of him. I never felt that way. Perhaps because I am a man. I knew he had had a great many affairs, of course. He was not conventionally above reproach. But who is these days? It seems to me that he loved Elaine genuinely. Certainly he was always the soul of kindness to us.”
His hand moved upward, running over his smooth white hair. “I think you should know all this, my dear, just in case you have any tendency to credit the hysterical murder talk of Miss Lumsden and Major Clifford. As Maud said last night, Ivor was our good friend. I think I can speak for the others. I know I can speak for myself.” The ironical smile curled the corners of his mouth again. “I would hardly have wanted to kill Ivor Drake four days before a wedding of which I thoroughly approved and which would have left me financially independent for the rest of my life.”
His cool reasonableness acted like a breath of fresh air to Kay after the turbulent emotional upheavals of the last hours. Even though his bland assumption that the family loved Ivor as much as he did was tragically false, at least his own attitude, although it clashed basically with hers, was a sane one and one that she could respect.
He was looking at her from quiet, intelligent eyes. “Bermuda’s a funny place, Kay. If you’d been here longer, you’d understand. Perhaps all small islands are the same way. They get you. Everything’s so small, on top of you. You’re very apt to be driven in on yourself. Emotions get pent up and then suddenly they break out in a wild rash of neurotic scenes. I’m not surprised at poor Alice Lumsden’s outburst. Repressed spinsters like that get the Bermuda jitters worse than anyone. I was a little horrified though at the solid, British Major last night. I had expected him to keep his common sense, even in Bermuda.”
Kay said eagerly: “You mean you—you don’t think Ivor was murdered?”
“I see no reason at the moment to suppose that he was, do you? After all, the evidence produced by Major Clifford at the swimming beach was hopelessly flimsy from a lawyer’s point of view. I could have riddled it with holes. I’m afraid the Major has been cooped up too long in a little world of bicycle thefts and petty larceny. He was ripe for a juicy murder, anything to relieve the monotony. Last night when he was confronted with a rather dramatic accident he just gave way to an attack of wishful thinking. You’d understand if you’d known some of these local Bermudians. They’re so bored with their own respectability that they spend most of their time inventing fantastic scandals about each other which no one really believes but which gives them all a vicarious thrill. This murder thing’s going to be inconvenient and painful for us. But I don’t think it’ll be anything— worse.”
Kay wished she could be that sanguine. If she had not known Gilbert so well she might have been convinced by his placid logic. But he had always had a genius for shutting his eyes to unpleasant reality. She recognized the symptoms now. She also saw how his own argument could be turned against him. If Bermuda bred the violent neurotic energy that he claimed, why then wasn’t it all the more likely that the violent neurotic energy would one day manifest itself as murder?
Gilbert was looking at her quizzically. “I can see you think I’m an ostrich, Kay. I hope to heaven you’re wrong. And I think you are. In the first place, apart from a few emotional upheavals, a few adolescent spats, I can think of no reasonable murder motives. At least”—he paused—“there is only one reasonable murder motive,”
He shuffled the documents on the bed again and selected a sheaf of papers backed with blue cardboard. A dark, almost impish gleam showed in his eyes.
“I deliberately saved this for the last, Kay, because it strikes me as amusing. This is a copy of Ivor’s will. Since he had no near relatives, there are virtually no personal bequests. In fact there is only one.” He flicked the sheets over to the last page and without the slightest emphasis read: “I further bequeath a sum of twenty-five thousand dollars and the property in the Isles of Bermuda known as Hurricane House to my second cousin—Alice Lumsden.”
He looked up, the smile spreading from his eyes to his lips.
“You must admit the humor of that, Kay. Possibly one of Ivor’s most successful pleasantries. Alice Lumsden, the woman who has accused us of benefiting by the will, the woman you just fired so peremptorily, as soon as the will is probated, she will be the legal owner of Hurricane House.”
He paused. “And, unless I am very much mistaken, she will take full advantage of her position to—fire us.”
Chapter Ten
THIS WAS INDEED one of Ivor’s most successful pleasantries. A final hand grenade thrown derisively from beyond the grave. By an ironical turn of the table, the Chilterns, so long as they remained in Bermuda, would now be entirely dependent on the charity of a woman who mistrusted and hated them; a woman who had been little more than a paid attendant.
And that wasn’t all. This utterly unexpected legacy put Alice Lumsden high up on the list of suspects.
Kay watched her brother-in-law’s faintly sardonic face. “Gilbert, this is amazing. Do you suppose she knows? If she does, she must have faked that scene just now, accused you to make herself seem innocent.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you if you want Alice for your murder scapegoat,” said Gilbert dryly. “I don’t know, of course, but it would be my feeling that Ivor never told her anything about her prospect. She always rather irritated him. I’m sure he would have found her insufferable if she’d started to think of herself as a possible owner of Hurricane House. The will was drawn up two years ago and like all wills of young men with a probability of long life ahead it wasn’t much more than a gesture. He had some vague idea of wanting to keep Hurricane House in the family and Alice was the only living relative.”
“Even if he didn’t tell her, she might easily have found out. She looks the sort of woman who would be good at snooping.” Kay added abruptly: “Well, Gilbert, what’s going to happen now?”
“You mean about us and the house? That is very clear. Sometime today I shall be obliged as Ivor’s lawyer to pass on the glad tidings to Alice. After that we are in the lap of the gods. If she chooses to be nasty, then she will turn us out and, as soon as the police have finished with us, I suppose we will go back to Pittsburgh and the mortgaged ancestral homestead.” The surface flippancy of his voice did not deceive Kay. She knew exactly what a return to the rigorous climate of western Pennsylvania would mean for Gilbert. It would mean the end of his slight hopes of improvement, and, possibly, something far worse than even that.
She looked at him earnestly. “And if you go back to Pittsburgh, how will you live?”
“That, my dear, we shall have to face when the time comes.”
“I’ve saved a little and I’m making quite a good salary. You’re welcome to anything I’ve got.”
“That’s extremely kind, Kay, but…”
“Don’t be silly. I’ve always wanted you to give me a chance to help. It won’t be much, I’m afraid. But whe
n you add it to Maud’s little income it should be enough.”
Gilbert’s face, softened by gratitude, changed. An awkward flush stole into his cheeks. “I’m not so sure that Maud’s little income is with us any more.”
“What do you mean? Gilbert, you can’t have done something foolish; you can’t have spent Maud’s capital or…”
“You must try to be patient with me, Kay. I was going to speak to you about this anyway. For you can help me.” His eyes, normally so self-possessed and mocking, were pleading. “When you hear the truth I know you’re going to feel justified in the poor opinion you’ve always had of me. But I hope you can be sympathetic because this affects Maud and the children as much as it affects me.”
“What is it? What have you done?”
“It’s quite a story. Although you probably don’t believe it, as Ivor’s legal and financial adviser I was able to do very well for him. By reinvesting his money I increased the value of his estate considerably. I was always on the lookout for advantageous investments. There was one in particular…”
He broke off. “I won’t go into details, but this particular opportunity was so good that I decided to put some of my own funds in it as well as Ivor’s. Of course my investment was a drop in the bucket compared with his, but it meant a lot to me. You see, I’d heard from a legal friend of mine that a certain small company was being taken over by a larger one. I knew the details of the stock transfer. The thing couldn’t misfire.”
He looked at her with a little rueful smile. “And so I overextended myself. I bought more of the company’s stock than I could really afford. You see, I was certain the merger would take place.”
“And then I suppose it didn’t?” said Kay accusingly.
“No, the merger took place all right, but it was delayed by the death of one of the company’s directors. I had to put up more collateral to cover the temporary decline in the value of my stock. I—I borrowed Maud’s gilt-edge securities. Oh, I know I was wrong technically. I was gambling with everything Maud possessed without telling her. But—well, I was certain of my facts, certain that everything would work out in the end, that it was just a question of waiting.”
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