Last Will and Testament by E. X. Ferrars

Author:E. X. Ferrars
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Felony & Mayhem Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

About two hours later the doorbell rang and I found Felix on the doorstep. It did not really surprise me. I had been half-expecting him all the afternoon, which I had spent restlessly cleaning out my kitchen cupboards, the kind of job that I normally put off to the last possible moment, but I could not have sat still.

All the same I asked him, not very warmly, “What’s brought you?”

“I want to know a lot more than you told me,” he said. His car was in the road and he had a small suitcase in his hand. Evidently he intended to stay. “You’re never very good on the telephone. I can always see you in my mind’s eye counting the pence as they tick away. Anyway, I don’t want you getting yourself in a mess with the police on my account. But you’re dead wrong about the Bodwells, you know. They didn’t steal the miniatures. How often have I got to tell you that?”

“Who did then?”

I did not mention the fact that I was far less convinced that they had than I had been the evening before.

“I should have thought that was obvious.”

He had come in, shut the door and followed me into the sitting room.

“Not to me,” I said. “I haven’t got your insight into the criminal mind.”

“There was nothing criminal about it. Well, relatively nothing.” He dropped on to the sofa and lit a cigarette. “Don’t tell me you can’t sort out a simple thing like that.”

“You’ve always loved your little mysteries,” I said. I sat down too. “I’m ready to wait for enlightenment.”

He inhaled deeply and let the smoke come dribbling out of his nostrils.

“Sarcasm, as usual,” he said. “You’ll never change, will you?”

“Will you? For instance, will you ever give up smoking?”

“Because it’s lethal?” He smiled. “Who cares if I live or die? I’m as unnecessary a person as you could meet. And who knows, I may be one of the lucky ones who smoke fifty a day and live to be eighty.”

“That’s what everyone thinks about themselves.”

“I’ll give it up when I can’t afford it.”

“Don’t tell me you’re actually paying for all those cigarettes you smoke. Haven’t you some cheap source of supply?”

“Well, occasionally I’m lucky and get them cheap from a chap I know, that’s true, but it’s irregular. And just think how few other vices I have. I drink far less than you do. But do I criticize you for it? I think one needs a vice or two to stay human.”

“Well, what about the miniatures?” I said. “Who took them?”

“Nigel, of course.”

“But they’re his. As you said yesterday yourself, he wouldn’t have taken them.”

“That was before he returned them.” His vivid blue eyes, under their drooping lids, looked bright with secret knowledge. “Just tell me when he discovered they’d been left to him.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t thought about it.”

“As I remember what Imogen said to you that evening when she came here and I kept out of the room and just listened to the two of you talking, she told you that Mrs.

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