Return to the Scene by Patrick Quentin & Q. Patrick

Author:Patrick Quentin & Q. Patrick [Quentin, Patrick & Patrick, Q.]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Crime, OCR-Finished
Publisher: Books Inc.
Published: 1941-11-09T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Kay thought: So it’s all over now. From behind shaggy brows Major Clifford’s keen blue eyes had moved to the diary in Maud’s hand and then to the pile of torn paper on the ragged turf at her feet. He said: “Well, ladies, this is a surprise,”

Kay’s gaze met Dr. Thorne’s. His dark face, with its lean cheekbones, its quiet reassuring mouth, and its black, faintly ironical eyes, was sympathetic, friendly. And she felt a queerly disproportionate pleasure at seeing him—as if he were no longer a mere stranger; as if their brief, extraordinary conversation of the night before coupled with this new menace of the diary, which affected him as well as her, had accelerated them into intimacy.

His eyes shifted from her face to the diary. Kay looked at it too, clinging to the desperate hope that her sister might still find some way of keeping it from the Major.

But she knew it was a hope without foundation. Peremptorily Major Clifford stretched out a large hand.

“Since you were tearing that book up, Mrs. Chiltern, you presumably won’t be needing it. Perhaps you’d give it to me.”

Maud seemed entirely unruffled. Placidly, almost as if she were presenting him with a glass of iced tea at a garden party, she stepped forward and handed him the diary.

For one paralyzing moment Major Clifford stared at its green cover. Then he tucked it under his arm. His face, rugged as the gray coral rocks jutting up out of the grass, was grim and set.

“I think you owe me an explanation, ladies. Last night I made it plain that no one was to come to this island. What are you doing here?”

Kay’s pulses were throbbing. She glanced rather wildly at Maud. Her sister’s mouth had moved in a little social smile.

“I know we shouldn’t be here, Major. But it’s all quite simple. Until yesterday my son was sleeping in the playhouse, and last night when Ivor decided to use it there was no time to move Terry’s clothes out. He hasn’t a thing to wear, so my sister and I came over to get him a clean shirt and some shorts. We didn’t think you’d mind.

That lie, so preposterously innocent-sounding, could only have been thought up by Maud. Probably it was the only one which could have rattled the Major. Obviously he did not believe it and yet its very weakness made it difficult to refute. He cleared his throat and then took the diary from under his arm and looked at it again. By that gesture he seemed tacitly to be conceding the first round to Maud and gathering his forces for victory in the second.

“Perhaps you’d explain to me, Mrs. Chiltern, since you came to the island to get a shirt for your son, why you’re up here destroying this book.”

“Oh, it’s just something we didn’t want the children to see,” explained Maud easily. “While we were here, we thought we’d destroy it where they weren’t likely to find us.”

The gentle candor with which she delivered that second, very thorough lie was amazing.

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