Some Must Watch (British Murder Mystery) by Ethel Lina White

Author:Ethel Lina White [White, Ethel Lina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788075830357
Publisher: Musaicum Books
Published: 2017-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVI. THE SECOND GAP

Table of Contents

As Helen listened, a herd of vague suspicions and fears galloped through her mind. Lady Warren spoke with the ring of authority. She was not guessing blindly; she knew something—but not enough.

It was this half-knowledge which terrified Helen. Had any of Dr. Parry's audience told her about the murder she would naturally have heard, also, about the discovery of the body in Captain Bean's garden.

Nurse Barker, alone, stood outside the circle of informed listeners. That fact did not necessarily assume the most sinister significance. To use the Professor's phrase, her alibi was established. When Ceridwen was being done to death, she was bumping, in the old car, towards the Summit, in Oates' company.

Yet—if she had told her patient—she must have possessed some horrible specialised knowledge of the movements, or intentions of the maniac—which stopped short with the commission of the murder.

As Lady Warren gripped her wrist, Helen realised that it was useless to lie.

"How do you know?" she asked.

The old woman did not reply. She gave a hoarse gasp. "Ah! Then they've found her. That knocking was the Police. I knew it. Tell me all."

"It was Ceridwen," Helen said. "You remember? She used to dust under your bed, and you objected to her feet. She was strangled in the plantation, about tea-time, and carried afterwards to Captain Bean's garden. He found her."

"Any clue?"

"One. She tore out a handful of fringe from the murderer's white silk scarf."

"That's all. Go away," commanded Lady Warren. She pulled up the sheet, and covered her face entirely, as though she were already dead.

On her guard against foxing, Helen sat by the fire, where she could watch the bed. Although one fear had swallowed up the other—like two large snakes snatching at the same play—she had an instinctive dread of exposing her back to Lady Warren.

To steady her nerves, she made a mental inventory of the situation

"There's the Warren family—four; Mrs. Oates, Nurse Barker, Mr. Rice and me. Eight of us. We ought to be more than a match for one man, even if he's as clever and cunning as the Professor says."

Then her mind slipped back to a former situation, as nursery-governess in the house of a financier. With her phonographic memory for phrases, she reproduced one o his remarks to his wife.

"We want a merger. Separate interests are destructive."

Her face grew graver as she thought of heated passions rising to boiling-point, and the strangling complications of the triangle. Had she known of the actual situation in the drawing-room, she would have been still more worried.

Stephen was affected most adversely by the confinement. He was not only specially rebellious against closed windows, but he was nervous of Simone. Her ardent glances made him uncomfortable, as he remembered the Oxford episode, when he had been made the goat in another undergraduate amour.

He remembered that when the wretched girl had screamed, Newton had been first to come to her alleged rescue, and that he had always been censorious in his judgement, and his refusal to believe in Stephen's innocence.

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