Hannasyde's slow smile crept into his eyes. “Nasty case, isn't it? What's happened to your disarming client?”
“Gone to the Police Station,” replied Giles, with complete gravity, to give Sergeant - “I'm afraid I've forgotten his name, but he breeds Airedales - an infallible prescription for the cure of eczema. Mesurier turned out to be a bit of a red herring, didn't he?”
“Oh, you spotted the snag, did you?” returned the Superintendent. “I thought you would. I'm satisfied, by the way, that he was not in his rooms between twelve and two that night, but at first glance that doesn't seem to help much. Sergeant Hemingway here, however” - he indicated his bright-eyed subordinate - “thinks there might be a way out of it. We shall see.”
“Several ways,” said Giles, nodding to the Sergeant. “We discussed them all ad nauseam last night. But, speaking for myself, I don't like the idea of an accomplice.”
“No, sir,” said the Sergeant instantly. “Not in a murder case. That's what I say. But that isn't to say it couldn't have been done without, not by a long chalk.”
Giles was looking at Hannasyde. “You don't much fancy Mesurier, do you?” he said.
“I don't know that I fancy anybody much,” answered Hannasyde. “One thing seems fairly certain, though. Whoever murdered Arnold Vereker was a very cool, clever customer.”
“I rather think that rules out Mesurier then,” said Giles. “He's neither cool nor clever.”
“You can't go by how he acts now, sir,” said the Sergeant. “Some of the wiliest of 'em lead you up the orchard by making out they're so silly they couldn't tread on a black beetle without carrying bits of it all over the house for hours after. He was cute enough, the way he cooked the Company accounts.”
Giles took out his cigarette-case and opened it. “All carefully planned,” he said. “Not done in the heat of the moment.”
The Superintendent nodded, but Sergeant Hemingway pursed up his lips. “It looks like it was coldblooded,” he said, “but you can go astray on that line of reasoning. Some people lose their heads when they're all worked up, but there's others as don't. Seem to get needle-sharp. Same effect as taking a pinch of cocaine - not that I've ever done so, but that's the effect they say it has. Comes in psychology - which the Superintendent here doesn't hold with.”
Hannasyde smiled, but declined the gambit. His shrewd grey eyes were on Giles's face. “What have you got up your sleeve, Mr Carrington? Are you going to spring something new on us?”
“Oh, no!” said Giles. “But I became prophetic yesterday, and the fit hasn't passed yet. Something is going to turn up.”
The Sergeant was interested. “Kind of premonition?”
“Premonition!” snorted the Superintendent. “A very safe bet! Of course something's going to turn up. All I hope is that it'll have an alibi I can check up on, and won't have spent the night walking to Richmond, or in bed with a headache, or alone in somebody else's house!”
Giles's eyes were alight. “I'm afraid you're feeling ruffled, Superintendent.”
Hannasyde laughed and held out his hand. “Can you wonder at it? I must be getting along now. That minx of a client of yours! The idea of saying "Oh, hullo!" to me in Court! Did she tell you we parted yesterday not on the best of terms? You can warn that young brother of hers, if you like, that it isn't always wise to be too clever with the police. Good-bye!”
They shook hands. “Come to my chambers, and smoke a cigar this evening, and talk it over,” invited Giles. “Without prejudice, you know.”
“Without prejudice I will, gladly,” replied Hannasyde. “Thanks!”
On this they parted, Hannasyde and the Sergeant to catch a train, Giles to extricate his cousin from the Police Station, and take her to have lunch before motoring back to town.
She was in a cheerful mood, and appeared to consider herself safely out of the wood. Giles disillusioned her, and she at once declared that to arrest her now would be an extremely dirty trick, and one of which she did not believe Superintendent Hannasyde capable.
“Except for an occasional brush we don't get on at all badly,” she said. “In fact, I think he quite likes me.”
“That won't stop him doing what he believes to be his duty.”
“No, but I don't think I'm really one of his suspects,” said Antonia. “He's got his eye more on Kenneth, or, rather, he had till Rudolph cropped up. I wish I could make my mind up about Rudolph, by the way.”
“Whether to marry him or not? Let me help you.”
“Oh no, not that! As a matter of fact,” she added candidly, “I shouldn't be surprised if he called the engagement off. He was considerably peeved last night, you know. What I meant was, did he do it, or not?”
“You know him better than I do, Tony. It doesn't look as though he did.”
“No, but I'm not so sure. I didn't think he'd be so rattled, somehow. Because the only time I've ever seen him in a tight corner, which was when a motor lorry shot out of a side-turning one day, he was as cool as a cucumber, and completely and utterly efficient. That was partly why I fell for him. The ordinary person would have jammed on the brakes, and we'd have been smashed into, but he just trod on the accelerator, and sort of skimmed by in a huge semicircle, and then went on with what he'd been saying before it happened.”
Giles was unimpressed. “The biggest ass of my acquaintance is an expert driver,” he said. “It's one thing to keep your head at the wheel of a car, and quite another to keep it when confronted by the shadows of the gallows, so to speak. My own impression of your elegant young man is that he wouldn't — to put it vulgarly—have had the guts to do it.”
“That's what I'm not sure about,” said Antonia, quite unresentful of this slur upon her betrothed's character. “His mother was foreign - at least, half, because she had an Italian father or mother or something - and occasionally Rudolph reverts a bit. He has white rages. You never know with people like that. They might do anything. Of course, that story he told might have been true, though I admit it sounded thin, but, on the other hand, it might be a masterpiece of low cunning. Same as me now. For all you know I'm being cunning talking like this.”
“Yes, that had occurred to me,” agreed Giles.
“Kenneth, too,” pursued his cousin. “Kenneth won't say one way or the other, because partly, I think, he's enjoying himself, and partly he holds that it's no use saying he didn't do it, because naturally he'd be bound to say that. But I'll tell you one thing, Giles.” She paused, frowning, and when he looked inquiringly at her, said in a serious tone: “If it was Kenneth I'll bet every penny I've got no one'll ever find out.”
“I shouldn't, Tony.”
“Well, I would. Because generally murderers get found out because they did something silly, or left some important detail to chance. Kenneth never does.”
“My dear girl, Kenneth is hopelessly casual.”
“Oh no, he's not! About things that he doesn't think matter he may be, but when he gets interested in anything, or thinks something worth while, he concentrates on it in a dark and secret way which Murgatroyd says is like our grandfather - not the Vereker one, but the other. By the way, ought he to go to the funeral?”
“Yes, of course. He must.”
“Well, that's what Murgatroyd and Violet say. It's about the only thing they've ever agreed on. But Kenneth says no. He says it would be artistically wrong. However, I'll tell him what you think.”
Her method of conveying this information was characteristic, and wholly lacking in tact. Set down at the entrance to the mews shortly before four o'clock, she ran up the outside stairway to the front door, let herself into the flat, and went at once to the studio. Undeterred by the presence not only of Violet Williams, but of Leslie Rivers, who was curled up on the divan, watching Kenneth at work, and of a tall, fair man in the early thirties, who was smoking a cigarette in the window embrasure, she said: “It was a rotten Inquest, so you didn't miss anything. But Giles says of course you must show up at the funeral, Kenneth. Hullo, Leslie! Hullo, Philip, I didn't see you. Has anyone taken the dogs out?”