“Absolutely.”

“And are you equally sure you didn’t put the book on embalming in the cheese-dish?”

Cedric gaped at him. “I?” he said. “Why should I? Oh, no! I don’t want Sonia to turn out to be a murderess. Or I didn’t, then. I’d rather thought… I… we’d… it doesn’t matter. But I must say I’d like to know.”

Looking at him, Alleyn was visited by a notion so extravagant that he found himself incapable of pressing Cedric any further on the subject of his relationship with Miss Orrincourt.

He was, in any case, prevented from doing so by the entrance of Pauline Kentish.

Pauline entered weeping: not loudly, but with the suggestion of welling tears held bravely back. She seemed to Alleyn to be an older and woollier version of her sister, Desdemona. She took the uncomfortable line of expressing thankfulness that Alleyn was his wife’s husband. “Like having a friend to help us.” Italicised words and even phrases surged about in her conversation. There was much talk of Panty. Alleyn had been so kind, the child had taken a tremendous fancy to him. “And I always think,” Pauline said, gazing at him, “that they KNOW.” From here they were soon involved in Panty’s misdoings. Pauline, if he had now wanted them, supplied good enough alibis for the practical jokes. “How could she when the poor child was being watched; closely, anxiously watched? Dr. Withers had given explicit orders.”

“And much good they’ve done, by the way!” Cedric interrupted. “Look at Panty!”

“Dr. Withers is extremely clever, Cedric. It’s not his fault if Juniper’s drugs have deteriorated. Your grandfather’s medicines were always a great help to him.”

“Including rat-bane?”

“That,” said Pauline in her deepest voice, “was not prescribed, Cedric, by Dr. Withers.”

Cedric giggled.

Pauline ignored him and turned appealingly to Alleyn. “Mr. Alleyn, what are we to think? Isn’t it all too tragically dreadful? The suspense! The haunting suspicion! The feeling that here in our midst…! What are we to do?”

Alleyn asked her about the events following Sir Henry’s exit from the little theatre on the night of his death. It appeared that Pauline herself had led the way to the drawing-room, leaving Troy, Paul and Fenella behind. Miss Orrincourt had only remained a very short time in the drawing-room where, Alleyn gathered, a lively discussion had taken place as to the authorship of the flying cow. To this family wrangle the three guests had listened uncomfortably until Barker arrived, with Sir Henry’s summons for Mr. Rattisbon. The squire and the rector seized upon this opportunity to make their escape. Paul and Fenella came in on their way to bed. Troy had already gone upstairs. After a little more desultory haggling the Birthday party broke up.

Pauline, Millamant and Desdemona had forgathered in Pauline’s room, Bernhardt, and had talked exhaustively. They went together to the bathrooms at the end of the passage and encountered Mr. Rattisbon, who had evidently come out of Sir Henry’s rooms. Alleyn, who knew him, guessed that Mr. Rattisbon skipped, with late Victorian coyness, past the three ladies in their dressing-gowns and hurriedly down the passage to his own wing. The ladies performed their nightly rites together and together returned to their adjacent rooms. At this juncture Pauline began to look martyred.

“Originally,” she said, “Bernhardt and Bancroft were one large room, a nursery, I think. The wall between is the merest partition. Milly and Dessy shared Bancroft. Of course, I know there was a great deal to be talked about and for a time I joined in. Milly’s bed was just through the wall from mine, and Dessy’s quite close. But it had been a long day and one was exhausted. They went on and on. I became quite frantic with sleeplessness. Really it was thoughtless.”

“Dearest Aunt Pauline, why didn’t you beat on the wall and scream at them?” Cedric asked, with some show of interest.

“I wasn’t going to do that,” Pauline rejoined with grandeur and immediately contradicted herself. “As a matter of fact I did at last tap. I said wasn’t it getting rather late. Dessy asked what time it was, and Milly said it couldn’t be more than one. There was quite an argument, and at last Dessy said: ‘Well, if you’re so certain, Pauline, look at your watch and see.’ And in the end I did, and it was five minutes to three. So at last they stopped and then it was only to snore. Your mother snores, Cedric.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“And to think that only a little way away, while Dessy and Milly gossiped and snored, a frightful tragedy was being enacted. To think that if only I had obeyed my instinct to go to Papa and tell him—”

“To tell him what, Aunt Pauline?”

Pauline shook her head slowly from side to side and boggled a little. “Everything was so sad and dreadful. One seemed to see him rushing to his doom.”

“One also saw Paul and Panty rushing to theirs, didn’t one?” Cedric put in. “You could have pleaded with him for them perhaps?”

“I cannot expect, Cedric, that you would understand or sympathize with disinterested impulses.”

“No,” Cedric agreed with perfect candour. “I don’t think they exist.”

“T’uh!”

“And if Mr. Alleyn has no further absorbing questions to ask me I think I should like to leave the library. I find the atmosphere of unread silent friends in half-morocco exceedingly gloomy. Mr. Alleyn?”

“No, thank you, Sir Cedric,” Alleyn said cheerfully. “No more questions. If I may go ahead with my job?”

“Oh, do. Please consider this house your own. Perhaps you would like to buy it. In any case I do hope you’ll stay to dinner. And your own particular silent friend. What is his name?”

“Thank you so much, but Fox and I,” Alleyn said, “are dining out.”

“Then in that case,” Cedric murmured, sidling towards the door, “I shall leave Aunt Pauline to divert you with tales of Panty’s innocence in the matter of cheese-dishes, and her own incapability of writing anonymous letters.”

He was prevented from getting to the door by Pauline. With a movement of whose swiftness Alleyn would have thought her incapable, she got there first, and there she stood in a splendid attitude, the palms of her hands against the door, her head thrown back. “Wait!” she said breathlessly. “Wait!”

Cedric turned with a smile to Alleyn. “As I hinted,” he said, “Lady Macduff. With all her pretty chickens concentrated in the persons of Panty and Paul. The hen (or isn’t it oddly enough ‘dam’?) at bay.”

“Mr. Alleyn,” said Pauline, “I was going to say nothing of this to anybody. We are an ancient family—”

“On my knees,” said Cedric, “on my knees, Aunt Pauline, not the Sieur d’Ancred.”

“—and perhaps wrongly, we take some pride in our antiquity. Until to-day no breath of dishonour has ever smirched our name. Cedric is now Head of the Family. For that reason and for the sake of my father’s memory I would have spared him. But now, when he does nothing but hurt and insult me and try to throw suspicion on my child, now when I have no one to protect me—” Pauline stopped as if for some important peroration.

But something happened to her. Her face crinkled and reminded Alleyn instantly of her daughter’s. Tears gathered in her eyes. “I have reason to believe,” she began and stopped short, looking terrified. “I don’t care,” she said, and her voice cracked piteously. “I never could bear people to be unkind to me.” She nodded her head at Cedric. “Ask him,” she said, “what he was doing in Sonia Orrincourt’s rooms that night. Ask him.”

She burst into tears and stumbled out of the room.

“Oh, bloody hell!” Cedric ejaculated shrilly and darted after her.

iii

Alleyn, left alone, whistled disconsolately, and after wandering about the cold and darkening room went to the windows and there made a series of notes in his pocket-book. He was still at this employment when Fox came in.