Lisle stood and looked at her. She had the feeling that her eyes were fixed. She couldn’t look away. She said in a stiff, unnatural voice,

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“I wonder,” said Aimée Mallam. “And if I were you I should do some wondering too. And there’s something else I’d do, and I wouldn’t wait about, thinking it over either.”

“What do you mean?”

Mrs. Mallam gathered up her bag and walked over to the door. With her hand on it – a bare, plump hand with too many rings – she turned.

“I should go back to America.”

Chapter 31

MISS Silver had tea in the parlour of the Green Man before walking up Crook Hill to catch the bus into Ledlington. Both before and after the inquest she managed to talk to a good many different people. People will always talk about an accident or a murder. In this case there was but one opinion, voiced with varying degrees of heat and animus. Cissie Cole was a good girl. Not one of your go-ahead ones, but a good girl. You couldn’t blame her being fond of that Pell when she thought he was a single man. What she had seen in him the dear knows, but once she knew he was married and it come to anything more she wouldn’t have it, and he pushed her over out of spite. A dozen times Miss Silver had occasion to say, “Dear me – how very shocking!” or “Really one can hardly believe it.” The latter phrase she had always found extremely useful in provoking a flood of corroborative detail.

She used it to Mrs. Mottle, the landlady of the Green Man, when she brought in the brown teapot with the bright blue band round it and a plate of rock cakes. The milk-jug and sugar-basin already stood on the parlour table, which was of figured walnut with a single massive leg. The top, much valued, was protected by a number of thick mats crocheted in shades of olive green and salmon pink. An old metal tray with gilt scrolls and a pattern of painted red and blue flowers rested upon two of these mats, whilst a fern in a rose-pink pot had another all to itself in the middle of the table.

Mrs. Mottle set down the teapot beside the milk-jug and sugar-basin on the tray, pulled up yet another mat for the rock cakes, and heaved a responsive sigh. She was a buxom woman, short and stout, with a quantity of frizzy black hair only just beginning to be touched with grey, and cheeks as firm and red as Worcester Pearmains.

“Ah – you may well say so!” she said. “And I’m not one that thinks badly of men, because take them all round, well there’s good in them same as there is in most of us. But what I do say and always have said is that some of’em’ll do anything, and you can’t get from it.”

Miss Silver gave a timid cough.

“Dear me – I suppose so. And of course you must have such opportunities for observing them. Human nature must be quite an open book to you.”

“Well you may say so!” said Mrs. Mottle. “Men talk free and easy over their beer. Not as I wouldn’t soon put a stop to language or anything of that sort, and my husband too – there’s nothing of that sort goes on in our house. But human nature, that’s another thing – there it is and you can’t help noticing it. That Pell now, he’d come in most nights, and how he’d the face after it come out about him being married passes me. But there – some have got face enough for anything, and he’d come in here as bold as brass, and so soon as he’d got into his second glass he’d begin to let himself go and – talk of not believing things – you wouldn’t credit what he’d say.”

“Really? How very interesting. What sort of things?”

“All sorts,” said Mrs. Mottle with gusto. “And just as well for him they weren’t brought up at the inquest.”

“Dear me!”

“Saying what he’d do to anyone that crossed him. Why, I heard him with my own ears – nobody ever came to any good once they got across him. That was after Mr. Jerningham give him the sack, and it wasn’t only a fortnight later that Mrs. Jerningham was as near killed as makes no difference with the steering of her car broke through. And not saying he done it, but there’s more than one has their own thoughts about it. And he could have done it easy if he had a mind, and it was only the night before he set down his glass hard enough to crack it and said how he always got his own back on those who got across him. And I told him straight, ‘That’s not the kind of talk I’ll put up with, not while I’m behind the bar.’ And he laughed and said, ‘You wait and see!’ and went out, and a good riddance.”

Miss Silver began to pour herself out a cup of tea.

“What a good-looking family the Jerninghams are,” she observed. “I was quite struck by it at the inquest. Lady Steyne – really very pretty. She is a cousin, is she not? And Mr. and Mrs. Jerningham – such a very good-looking couple. And the other cousin, Mr. Rafe Jerningham-”

She heard nothing but good of the Jerninghams from Mrs. Mottle. Mr. Jerningham had a very feeling heart. There weren’t many gentlemen would go with their wives same as he did to see poor Miss Cole, and kindness itself, as she told me with her very own lips. And a pleasure to see him married to such a sweet young lady. “Lost his first wife in an accident in Switzerland a matter of ten years ago, and took him all this time to get over it and put his mind on someone else. Not like some people I could name, and him such a good-looking gentleman and all.”

Miss Silver put milk and sugar into her tea.

“Did you know the first Mrs. Jerningham?”

Mrs. Mottle had got as far as the door. She leaned a firm shoulder against the jamb and shook her head.

“Not to say know – there wasn’t many that did. She used to come visiting here when she was Miss Lydia Burrows. That was in old Mr. Jerningham’s time, but she and Mr. Dale went off travelling after they were married. A bit of an invalid she was, and not supposed to stay in England for the winter – and after all she might just as well have stayed as fall down one of those nasty precipices and get herself killed!”

Miss Silver sipped from a cup with a pattern of pink and gold roses, the pink very bright, the gold very shiny.

“How extremely shocking!” she said.

“Picking flowers or some such,” said Mrs. Mottle vaguely. “And then old Mr. Jerningham died and Mr. Dale come in for the property. And of course we all thought he’d marry again, so young as he was and all, but no – seemed as if he hadn’t got a thought for anything except the place. Up early and down late, and building cottages here and putting on a new roof there. He come in for a lot of money from his wife, and seemed all he wanted to do was to spend it on the place – left the girls to Mr. Rafe.”

Miss Silver sipped again.

“The good-looking cousin. Yes, indeed – I can imagine that he would be popular with the ladies.”

Mrs. Mottle’s firm red cheeks wobbled as she laughed.

“All over him like bees in a lime tree,” she said. “And what’s a young gentleman to do? He can’t afford to get married, and there isn’t a girl anywhere around that’ll leave him alone. He works, you know, up at the aircraft place – clever as they come, Mr. Rafe is. But Saturday afternoons and Sundays it’s tennis games and golf games, and bathing parties and boating parties and picnic parties. Not that there’s any harm in it, and as to anyone saying there’s any harm in Mr. Rafe, well, they won’t say it a second time, not to me anyhow! You’re only young the once, and why shouldn’t you have a good time – that’s what I say!”

“And Mr. Rafe has a good time?”

Mrs. Mottle laughed again – a full, jolly laugh.

“It’s not his fault if he don’t nor the girls’ neither.”