Short, deep-chested, and with an immense span of shoulder, Blundell seemed, as always, to fill the room, and to overcharge the atmosphere with his superabundant vitality. His head, with its back-sweeping mane of coarse, iron-grey hair, had a crude, compelling magnificence only partly offset by the comedy lines of a battered nose and mobile muscles ever ready, it seemed, to convert his leathery face into a mask of quizzical humour. There was, as Diana had often thought, more than a touch of the lion about him—a caged lion, pacing restlessly behind bars of his own making; and now for the first time in her life she wondered what would happen if those bars were smashed and the passions pent behind them let loose to rampage. The idea sent a stab of fear through her. She glanced at his eyes. They were compassionate, reassuring; but they were also light-coloured and flickering, their lids wrinkled less from age than from exposure; and they were three-cornered in shape.
Where had she heard it said that three-cornered eyes denoted recklessness? Solicitors as a rule were cautious folk—and yet, Nicholas Blundell, late of Johannesburg, was no cut-and-dried representative of his profession. Always there had been something adventurous and expansive about him. Too expansive for her liking, that was the trouble. Even his open-handedness irritated her. It struck her as too—flamboyant? Exuberant? Perhaps overpowering best described his manner of lavishing gifts and so plainly deriving pleasure therefrom. It had the effect of driving her into a shell; but it was petty now to cavil at a quality which had smoothed rough places for her parents in time past and at the present moment was trying to find means of bringing comfort in her sorrow. She made fresh resolutions to keep watch over her feelings, meet any exasperating witticisms with the amiable tolerance her mother would have shown.
“Well, Didi! Hard at it, eh? Quite right to keep busy. Here, let me pick those up.” And with one hand resting with clumsy playfulness on her shoulder, Blundell stooped towards the scattered letters. “Hers, I take it? Going to keep ’em?”
“Don’t trouble, Uncle Nick.” She tried not to stiffen under his touch. “I’ll burn them, I think. What was it you wanted to say to me?”
He was squeezing his big body into her mother’s small arm-chair—a close fit, as his squirming showed. Diana tore several letters across and dropped them into the waste-paper basket. Then she looked at the two from Vichy, hesitated, and slipped them into the back-flap of her bag. Blundell was eyeing her, apologetically, and with a half-hearted smile. Now he rested his hairy hands on his knees and leant forward.
“It’s Herbert. He’s in a bad way, but you know that as well as I do, don’t you? Well! One thing’s obvious. He’s got, somehow, to be shaken out of himself. Make a clean break. Otherwise, we can’t answer for him, eh? I see you agree. Right! Then here’s a scheme—mine—cropped up in the nick of time. Nick! Not bad, what?”
It was the typical Blundell pun, which, for all her good intentions, found no response. She waited, stony-faced, for him to continue. He changed his tone to one of business-like shrewdness.
“Now, then! Ever heard of Boris Weingartner?”
“The Hollywood film director? Yes. He’s in London now.”
“Quite so—and I’ve had the luck to run into him, at Lord Limpsfield’s, the other evening. He’s doing a big historical film and he wants to get hold of an English actor who’s well educated and a gentleman to vet his effects and steer him clear of—of—what’s the word I want?”
“Anachronisms?”
“You’ve said it. Well, I told him Herbert was his man. I’ve just come from having the two of ’em meet, and Weingartner’s made an offer. Everything’s on velvet, only Herbert has to have his mind made up for him. Quick, too, because the Gigantic’s sailing on Wednesday, and if Herbert don’t go on it, some other chap will. How about it? Think you can manage it?”
Diana gasped. Hollywood—her father’s dream! Now it would mean to him infinitely more than the realisation of a pathetic ambition. To go completely away from all that reminded him of her mother, to be deferred to, made to feel important. . . . It was the one perfect solution. . . .
“Weingartner wants to take him for a bit to a big ranch he’s got and let him pull himself together. Work won’t start till January, and meantime Herbert can ride, bathe in a super-swimming pool, browse in an A-one reference library. He’ll get a retaining fee, understand; and if you hate the idea of separation, why, I might arrange for him to take you along. You may even get a part in the next production. It’s a chance worth considering. Does it appeal to you?”
Diana stared, dazed by the rapidity with which things were moving. She shook her head.
“Not for me—thanks tremendously, Uncle Nick. Daddy must go, of course. We can’t let him refuse.” Her godfather looked ludicrously downcast.
“You won’t go? I rather hoped you would. There’d be more opportunities. Look!” He lowered his voice. “If it’s this business you’re thinking of, your being on the spot won’t get the inquiry one bit forwarder. I’ll guarantee the police don’t lie down on their job. Besides, where so much public feeling’s been roused—”
“I—I’d rather stay in London, I think.”
He watched her kindly, but asked no questions.
“Well,” he said with regret, “you know best; but if you think better of it, just say the word and I’ll see what can be done. You will tackle Herbert?”
“Leave him to me. It’s terribly good of you, Uncle Nick.”
“No, no!” He waved an expansive hand. “I was in luck, that’s all.”
She wished she had been able to make her thanks sound less formal. The truth was, in spite of her vast relief, she was thinking how irksome it was to accept so much at Uncle Nick’s hands, even for her father, for whatever Uncle Nick might say, she felt certain it was he who was paying this retaining fee, perhaps offering the hard-boiled Weingartner other inducements to choose, from a great army of eligibles, her own not-very-competent father. Then she recalled what her mother had said about Lord Limpsfield’s being on such friendly terms with the solicitor who managed his affairs. The Limpsfield Press was a mighty power which no film magnate, however successful, could afford to antagonise. No doubt influence had been at work. Limpsfield probably had shares in Weingartner’s company. Maybe Uncle Nick had some interests there as well.
The tick of the little gilt clock became audible above the purring of the gas fire. Blundell, his eye beginning to rove, stirred restlessly in his tight-fitting chair, and from an alligator cigar-case drew forth a fat Corona.
“Uncle Nick.” Diana spoke in a dry voice, not raising her eyes from the letters in her lap. “Have you had any news at all about—Aunt Rose?”
He paused, looked at her. His face hardened.
“Not yet,” he replied grimly. “It seems the chap who does these things is down with ’flu. Why?”
“I was wondering, that’s all. It struck me they were taking a long time over it.”
Blundell slowly ripped the band from his cigar.
“You’d a talk with your mother that evening I saw you. That right?” As she nodded, he went on, “Did she tell you what she told me?”
“You mean about her telephone conversation with Aunt Rose? She did. Up till that time, I suppose, it hadn’t ever occurred to you her death mightn’t be—natural?”
“I don’t believe it now,” he said shortly. “At least—well, that feeling she mentioned may not have meant anything except what the doctor said. Some lunatic’s been starting a rumour, of course. I hoped it might come to nothing. That’s why I didn’t want to distress your mother—in case it petered out, you know. I didn’t know myself till I saw the evening papers, just after I left her. Do you think she ever saw that notice?”
“She did. One of the cast showed it to her in her dressing-room. She—wouldn’t make any comment on it.” Diana gripped her two hands tightly together, thinking what that silence must have meant. “You say some lunatic . . . Have you the least idea who it was?”
“Not the ghost of one. I’ve done my damnedest to find out, but the Home Office people won’t give me any clue.”
From the mortified chagrin in his voice she knew he was speaking truth. It must, she thought, be intensely humiliating to him that some person had been sharper-eyed than himself where his beloved Rose was concerned. His peace of mind, like hers, had been shattered. If she was apprehensive, so was he, if for a different reason. Adrian Somervell could not fail to be uppermost in his thoughts, no whit less than in her own. That his name had been mentioned by neither of them seemed ominous.
“I’ll speak to my father,” she said, getting up and going into the passage. “As you say, there’s no time to lose.”
As she reached her father’s door she heard Blundell behind her, at the telephone, dialling a number. She stopped to listen, holding her breath.
“Blundell speaking,” she heard the gruff voice saying. “Sir Bruce able to carry on? Oh, he has! Well, what’s he found?”
Sir Bruce! That meant Sir Bruce Baynes, the analyst, whose decisions figured in all cases of suspected poisoning. Her heart beat suffocatingly. A smothered “Good God!” reached her ears, then after an interval, “H’m—I see. What did you say it was? . . . Spell it. . . . Ah-h-h! Yes, I’ve got it. Aconite. What does it do? . . . You say it paralyses the lips and tongue? . . . That’s enough! I’m coming round.”
Diana’s bag, clutched in her hand, clattered to the floor. She turned to confront a being she scarcely recognised. Blood had surged into Nicholas Blundell’s three-cornered eyes, knotted veins bulged forth from his temples. As she saw his powerful hands clinching and unclinching and heard his laboured breathing wheeze through his nostrils all she could think of was the enraged man-killer—old, wounded, revengeful.
If only she could calm him down—for one instant claim his attention! She laid her hand on an arm unyielding as the limb of an oak and vibrating with fury; but before she could speak her father, come out from his room, spoke for her.
“They’ve made the examination? Nick, old man! You can’t mean they’ve—that Rosie Walsh was poisoned?”
“Poisoned! Murdered’s the word. Don’t stop me!” Blundell glared at the father and daughter, seeing neither; then with a savage violence which left them speechless, he caught up his overcoat and hat from the hall-chest and charged from the flat. All the way down the three flights they heard him thundering. The banging of the street door shook the house, and following hard upon it the Sunbeam’s engine whirred raucously.
Gone—to the Home Office. For what purpose? Diana could conceive of but one. He had formed his conclusion, could envisage no alternative possibility. Before an opportunity of making him see reason presented itself, who could say what damage might be done? She must act—now, at once. Even so, it might be too late. . . .
Herbert Lake drew his hand over his eyes. It was a fine, shapely hand, but ineffectual, like the rest of his handsome person.
“Rosie meant so much to him,” he murmured. “We always knew she did. He’ll leave no stone unturned to . . . Why, Diana, I thought you were with me?”
The passage was empty save for himself. Diana too, had flown.