Hobby of Murder by E.X. Ferrars Page B

Singleton by mistake.’
    ‘There you are!’ Mollie exclaimed. ‘The Bartletts may never have met Luke Singleton in their lives and so just couldn’t have had any reason to kill him. But it isn’t at all unlikely that they’ve sometime encountered Roland. Perhaps one of them had a lover once and Roland got him put in gaol, and that dinner was the first opportunity they’ve had since then to have their revenge. They’d have known he was coming to it and could have laid in the cyanide somehow, in preparation for it, and simply relied on their reputation for virtue not to be suspected.’
    ‘How did they get the cyanide?’ Ian asked.
    ‘Oh, I’m sure there are all sorts of ways of getting it, if you’re determined enough. And knowing who was coming to the dinner, they’d have had time to do it.’
    ‘You don’t actually believe a word you’re saying, do you?’
    She sighed. ‘I suppose I don’t. But there’s one thing I’m sure of and that is that the Inspector isn’t going to take their innocence for granted. He’ll have thought of all the things I’ve just been saying to you and he’ll investigate those two good women very thoroughly, just as he’s going to investigate all of us, and Felicity too, who was sitting beside Luke, and Eleanor, who was sitting beside Roland. After all, when Roland was talking to Luke, with his head turned away from Eleanor, she might have reached out and slipped something into Luke’s cup. And she used to know Luke, when they were both teachers.’
    ‘Do you think she’d really have paraded that, as she did, if she’d been intending to kill him?’
    ‘And how could she know beforehand that she’d be sitting near him?’ Andrew asked. ‘We all sat down pretty much at random, and she might easily have found herself with a helping of cyanide in her handbag, but no chance of getting near him.’‘I wonder if Felicity ever had an affair with Luke,’ Mollie said thoughtfully.
    That seemed to bring the discussion to a close. For a little while they remained there, silent, Ian helping himself to more brandy, but both Mollie and Andrew refusing it, and Andrew then standing up and saying that he was going to bed.
    ‘We’re going to be so tired of the whole subject before we’re finished,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in exhausting all its possibilities now. Good night. Sleep well.’ He left them and went up to his room.
    In bed, he turned out the light on his bedside table, but as he had expected, sleep did not come with the darkness. But it was restful to be stretched out and still. It was strange that he did not find himself thinking much of the scene in the Waldrons’ dining-room. It was as if a curtain had come down in his mind, concealing it from him. Instead he began to think of other occasions when he had been away from home, on holidays with Nell. There was one that he remembered which they had spent in a small fishing village near Marseilles, almost as soon as it had been possible to go abroad after the end of the war. The amount of foreign currency they had been allowed to take with them had been minute, and they had had to consider carefully the cost of every cup of coffee that they had, every bottle of the cheap
vin du pays
.
    But they had been young, the weather had been perfect, the swimming in the little bay delightful, and Nell’s excellent French had made a firm friend of their landlady who had had a way of slipping little delicacies to them that did not appear on the bill. Andrew remembered that there had been a small Greek staying in the village, who went about naked except for a faded and tattered pair of shorts, and who had tried very hard, though without success, to persuade them to buy a variety of goods from him on the blackmarket. He was ready to let them take the goods home with them without payment, if they would agree to deposit a cheque for what they owed him in a certain London bank. ‘I trust you, you see,’ he said. ‘I do business