“I didn’t look round at all. I’d been dismissed, I went,” said Felicity, with completely adult bitterness.
“And that was the last you saw of him? You don’t know where he went from there?”
“I do now,” said Felicity. “I didn’t then. That was the last I saw of him.”
She looked up. Her eyes were enormous in fear and grief, greedy for reassurance. Of this terror and this hope there was no doubt whatever. “Mr. Felse, do you think something happened to him? You don’t… you don’t think he’s…?”
“I don’t think anything yet,” said George. “I hope he’s simply suffered a crisis of his own, and run away from whatever was on his mind. Don’t think he’s exempt at twenty-three. Maybe he was so full of his own problems he couldn’t spare any consideration for yours. If we can find him, be sure we will. Now you go to bed, and leave it to us. If you’ve told me all you know, there’s nothing more you can do.”
“I’ve told you all I know.” She got as far as the door, and looked back. Her face was mute and stiff, but her eyes were full of haunted shadows. “Good night, Mr. Felse!”
“Good night, Felicity!”
And all that, thought George, watching her go, sounds like truth, and nothing but truth. But he still had an uneasy feeling that truth, with Felicity, was an iceberg, with eight-ninths of its bulk under water.
“I’d better tell you at once,” said Dickie Meurice, settling himself at his ease and spreading an elbow on Edward Arundale’s desk, “that of course I’ve realised what this is all about, even if there’s been no official admission that anything’s wrong. Old Penrose has given the impression that everything’s proceeding according to plan, and he had no intention of using Lucien Galt in to-night’s lectures. Without even saying so, which is pretty good going, but then, he’s a deep old bird. But I know too well what Lucifer costs. If they bought him at all, they wanted him on-stage the whole week-end. And I know him too well to miss the moment when he absents himself from among us. He went off, voluntarily or otherwise, between lunch and tea. And you’re here to cover the management, in case it turns out he didn’t disappear voluntarily. Solicitor? Or private trouble-shooter?”
“County C.I.D.,” said George without expression but not without relish, and saw with satisfaction the instant recoil, quickly mastered but not quickly enough.
Dickie Meurice tapped his cigarette on the arm of his chair, and stared, and thought so hard that his blond countenance paled. He said carefully, lightly: “You don’t mean you’ve found him? You’ve got a genuine police case? This is official?”
“Not yet. If everybody co-operates it may not have to be. No, we don’t know yet where Lucien Galt is. Do you, Mr. Meurice?”
“Why should I know?” The smile a little strained now, the voice demonstrating involuntarily its disastrous tendency to shrillness.
“You had, it seems, about the same chance of being the last to see him, this afternoon, as any of the others who passed up the sight-seeing trips and stayed at Follymead. Were you?”
“Look,” said Meurice, persuasively, leaning forward with the look of shining candour that meant he was at his most devious, “if this is on the level, if it’s a police job, of course I’ll co-operate.” He had made up his mind rapidly enough where his interests lay, and that they were already involved; tweak that string occasionally, and he’d cooperate, maybe even a bit too much. “Tell me what you expect of me, ask me whatever you want to know, and I’m with you.”
“I expect you to keep this strictly to yourself until, or unless, publicity becomes inevitable. Only a handful of people know about it, and it’s better for all concerned that it should remain that way. Better for Follymead, better for all these people attending the course, better for the artists involved, and better for me. Publicity may be very good business in your profession, of course, but only the right kind of publicity. And as you happen to be one of those who stayed at home to-day… Though of course, you may be able to account for every minute of your time, and provide confirmation of your account…”
The artless, concerned smile became even more winning and anxious to help. So he couldn’t account for his time; and he would play ball, though perhaps not strictly by the rules.
“I don’t need that kind of publicity, I can’t use it. I’ll keep it quiet, don’t worry. What can I tell you?”
““You were going on one of these coach-trips, I gather, originally. What made you change your mind?”
“I thought I could use my time better here. There’s no chance to talk seriously to anyone at this sort of affair, with seventy or eighty people milling around in a communal spree. And there was someone I wanted to talk to. And she didn’t go, so I didn’t go.”
“Liri Palmer?”
“That’s right. I thought there might be a good opportunity of cultivating her company while the place was virtually empty.” He was being very frank, very open; an honest man would have looked less eager, and sounded a good deal less forthcoming. “I like Liri. She’s wasting herself on a heel like Lucien Galt, whether she loves or hates him. I wanted to tell her so, and get some sense into her. I don’t know whether they’ve told you what’s in the background between those two, or what happened last night?” He didn’t wait to be answered, he told it anyhow; no one could do it better. Maybe he wanted it on record officially that someone, and not himself, had threatened Lucien Galt’s life; if, that is, you cared to take that impromptu revision of a song as a serious threat. He liked Liri Palmer – or did he? – but he liked Dickie Meurice a lot better.
“I see you don’t exactly love Galt, yourself,” observed George.
“That’s no secret. Why should it be? He’s treated Liri badly, and the rest of his profession didn’t christen him Lucifer for nothing. But I didn’t set eyes on him all this afternoon,” he said firmly. “The last time I saw him was at lunch.”
“But you did see Liri?”
“Yes, I hung around in the gallery until she went out, and gave her five minutes start. Just after two o’clock, that would be. She made for that artificial ruin on the hillock across the park, and I came along shortly afterwards and found her there. I tried to get her to write off Galt and spend her attention on something better worth it – me!” A gleam of apparently genuine self-mockery shone in his eyes for an instant; it was the nearest he had come to being likeable, but in all probability he was merely experimenting to find out what attitudes would recommend him to George.
“Was she amenable?” asked George, with a wooden face.
“Metaphorically speaking, she spat in my eye. Nobody was going to put Liri off her grudges or her fancies.”
“And which was this?”
“At that stage, I’d say practically all grudge. She’d been badly hurt, and she can be an implacable enemy. I saw I was getting nowhere, so I gave up and came away. There was hardly anybody about, I’m afraid, I can’t bring witnesses, but I give you my word I was back in the walled garden soon after three o’clock, and I didn’t leave there until I came in to tea. There are archery butts there. I was practising all by myself until four, and then I came indoors to wash. And that’s all. Not a very productive afternoon.”
“And you left Liri there at the tower. When would that be?”
“Maybe about twenty minutes to three. She was sitting there alone, nobody else in sight that I noticed.”
“You wouldn’t see very much of the river’s course from there?”
The winsome blue eyes lit with a flare of intelligence that was not winsome at all. “Well, not from the ground, that I do know. There are tall trees in between, all you see is a gleam of water here and there. But there’s a stairway up that tower,” he added helpfully. “I haven’t been up there, but I should think you’d get a pretty good view with that added height. Not that she showed any signs of making use of it,” he concluded fairly, “while I was there.”