“No,” said Joyce. “She was strangled.”
“Strangled?”
What Joyce tried to say was “murdered.” Her mouth shook and faltered round the syllables; she couldn’t say them; her thoughts, it seemed, shied back and ran from the very word. But she looked at Dan steadily.
“Brenda went out to swim early this morning, yes.”
“Well?”
“At least, she must have. I didn’t see her. I was still-asleep in that back bedroom she always gives me. Anyway, she went down there in a red swim suit and a white beach robe.”
Automatically Dan’s eyes moved over to an oil painting above the fireplace. Painted by a famous R.A., it showed a scene from classical antiquity; it was called The Lovers, and left little to the imagination. It had always been Brenda’s favorite because the female figure in the picture looked so much like her.
“Well!” said Joyce, throwing out her hands. “You know what Brenda always does. She takes off her beach robe and spreads it out over King Arthur’s Chair. She sits down in the chair and smokes a cigarette and looks out at the sea before she goes into the water.
“The beach robe was still in that rock chair,” Joyce continued with, an effort, “when I came downstairs at half-past seven. But Brenda wasn’t. She hadn’t even put on her bathing cap. Somebody had strangled her with that silk scarf she wore with the beach robe. It was twisted so tightly into her neck they couldn’t get it out. She was lying on the sand in front of the chair, on her back, in the red swim suit, with her face black and swollen. You could see her clearly from the terrace.”
Dan glanced at the flesh tints of The Lovers, then quickly looked away.
Joyce, the cool and competent, was holding herself under restraint.
“I can only thank my lucky stars,” she burst out, “I didn’t run out there. I mean, from the flagstones of the lowest terrace out across the sand. They stopped me.”
“ ‘They’ stopped you? Who?”
“Mr. Ireton and Toby. Or, rather, Mr. Ireton did; Toby wouldn’t have thought of it.”
“But—”
“Toby, you see, had come over here a little earlier. But he was at the back of the bungalow, practising with a .22 target rifle. I heard him once. Mr. Ireton had just got there. All three of us walked out on the terrace at once. And saw her.”
“Listen, Joyce. What difference does it make whether or not you ran out across the sand? Why were you so lucky they stopped you?”
“Because if they hadn’t, the police might have said I did it.”
“Did it?”
“Killed Brenda,” Joyce answered clearly. “In all that stretch of sand, Dan, there weren’t any footprints except Brenda’s own,”
“Now hold on!” he protested. “She... she was killed with that scarf of hers?”
“Oh, yes. The police and even Dr. Fell don’t doubt that.”
“Then how could anybody, anybody at all, go out across the sand and come back without leaving a footprint?”
“That’s just it. The police don’t know and they can’t guess. That’s why they’re in a flat spin, and Dr. Fell will be here again tonight.”
In her desperate attempt to speak lightly, as if all this didn’t matter, Joyce failed. Her face was white. But again the expression of the dark-fringed eyes changed, and she hesitated.
“Dan—”
“Yes?”
“You do understand, don’t you, why I was so upset when you came charging in and said what you did?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Whatever you had to tell me, or thought you had to tell me—”
“About — us?”
“About anything! You do see that you must forget it and not mention it again? Not ever?”
“I see why I can’t mention it now. With Brenda dead, it wouldn’t even be decent to think of it.” He could not keep his eyes off that mocking picture. “But is the future dead too? If I happen to have been an idiot and thought I was head over heels gone on Brenda when-all the time it was really—”
“Dan!”
There were five doors opening into the gaudy hall, which had too many mirrors. Joyce whirled round to look at every door, as if she feared an ambush behind each.
“For heaven’s sake keep your voice down,” she begged. “Practically every word that’s said can be heard all over the house. I said never, and I meant it. If you’d spoken a week ago, even twenty-four hours ago, it might have been different. Do you think I didn’t want you to? But now it’s too late!”
“Why?”
“May I answer that question?” interrupted a new, dry rather quizzical voice.
Dan had taken a step toward her, intensely conscious of her attractiveness. He stopped, burned with embarrassment, as one of the five doors opened.
Mr. Edmund Ireton, shortish and thin and dandified in his middle-fifties, emerged with his usual briskness. There was not much gray in his polished black hair. His face was a benevolent satyr’s.
“Forgive me,” he said.
Behind him towered Toby Curtis, heavy and handsome and fair-haired, in a bulky tweed jacket. Toby began to speak, but Mr. Ireton’s gesture silenced him before he could utter a sound.
“Forgive me,” he repeated. “But what Joyce says is quite true. Every word can be overheard here, even with the rain pouring down. If you go on shouting and Dr. Fell hears it, you will land that girl in serious danger.”
“Danger?” demanded Toby Curtis. He had to clear his throat. “What danger could Dan get her into?”
Mr. Ireton, immaculate in flannels and shirt and thin pullover, stalked to the mantelpiece. He stared up hard at The Lovers before turning round.
“The Psalmist tells us,” he said dryly, “that all is vanity. Has none of you ever noticed — God forgive me for saying so — that Brenda’s most outstanding trait was her vanity?”
His glance flashed toward Joyce, who abruptly turned away and pressed her hands over her face.
“Appalling vanity. Scratch that vanity deeply enough and our dearest Brenda would have committed murder.”
“Aren’t you getting this backwards?” asked Dan. “Brenda didn’t commit any murder. It was Brenda—”
“Ah!” Mr. Ireton pounced. “And there might be a lesson in that, don’t you think?”
“Look here, you’re not saying she strangled herself with her own scarf?”
“No — but hear what I do say. Our Brenda, no doubt, had many passions and many fancies. But there was only one man she loved or ever wanted to marry. It was not Mr. Dan Fraser.”
“Then who was it?” asked Toby.
“You.”
Toby’s amazement was too genuine to be assumed. The color drained out of his face. Once more he had to clear his throat.
“So help me,” he said, “I never knew it! I never imagined—”
“No, of course you didn’t,” Mr. Ireton said even more dryly. A goatish amusement flashed across his face and was gone. “Brenda, as a rule, could get any man she chose. So she turned Mr. Fraser’s head and became engaged to him. It was to sting you, Mr. Curtis, to make you jealous. And you never noticed. While all the time Joyce Ray and Dan Fraser were eating their hearts out for each other; and he never noticed either.”
Edmund Ireton wheeled round.
“You may lament my bluntness, Mr. Fraser. You may want to wring my neck, as I see you do. But can you deny one word I say?”
“No.” In honesty Dan could not deny it.
“Well! Then be very careful when you face the police, both of you, or they will see it too. Joyce already has a strong motive. She is Brenda’s only relative, and inherits Brenda’s money. If they learn she wanted Brenda’s fiancé, they will have her in the dock for murder.”