Miss Silver put a sponge, a nailbrush, a toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste into a blue waterproof case which had been a last year’s Christmas gift from her niece by marriage, Dorothy Silver, who was the wife of Ethel Burkett’s brother. She said,

“Men do not take the same view of these things that we do. Mrs. Repton has the type of looks which is apt to render them indifferent to practical considerations.”

Joyce laughed.

“How right you are! And I was being thoroughly catty. I daresay she is all right against her own background, and she must have been hideously bored down here, but I do hate to see anyone take on a job and then not lift a finger to make a success of it. Look here, I’ll walk back across the Green with you and carry that case.”

It was when they were alone under the night sky with the empty Green stretching round them that Joyce Rodney said out of the middle of what had been quite a long silence,

“Miss Silver-about Colonel Repton-you never did say whether you thought it was suicide. Do you know, I don’t somehow feel as if it was. Florrie has been telling everyone that he said he was going to divorce his wife. Well, as you say, if he was going to do that he wouldn’t commit suicide, would he?”

To this bald but commonsense statement of a problem upon which she did not desire to enlarge, Miss Silver thought it best to observe in a noncommittal manner that suicide was sometimes due to a sudden impulse, and that there was not at present enough evidence to show how Colonel Repton had met with his death.

It was about this time that Valentine was saying to Jason Leigh, “He didn’t kill himself. Oh, Jason, he didn’t-he wouldn’t!” She stood in the circle of his arms and felt safe.

But outside of that charmed circle there was a world of which the foundations had been shaken. She had never known her father, and she could only remember her mother as someone very vague and shadowy who lay on a sofa, and then one day wasn’t there any more and Aunt Maggie said she had gone to heaven. But Roger had always been there, part of the established order of things. He was not at all exciting, but always a kind person round whom the house revolved. It had never occurred to her to think whether she loved him or not. Now that he was dead, it was like being in a house with one of the walls sheared off and letting in all the winds of calamity. She pressed against Jason and heard them blow, but they couldn’t touch her as long as he held her close. He said,

“I shouldn’t have thought he would either.”

“He didn’t. I am quite sure he didn’t. He talked to me about suicide once, and he said it was running away. He said he didn’t believe it got you out of anything either. It was shirking, and if you shirked you only made things harder for yourself and everyone else.”

“You had better tell that to the Chief Constable.”

“I have. He didn’t say anything. Jason, what is so frightful about it is that if he didn’t do it himself, there is only one person I can think of who would have done it.”

“Scilla? You’d better not go about saying that, darling.”

“As if I would! As if I wanted to! I’ve been trying not to say it to myself, but it keeps on coming back. There was a story I read once about a room in a house. Someone had been murdered there, and the door wouldn’t stay shut. It’s like that-about Scilla-in my mind. I try to shut it away, but the door won’t stay shut.” Her voice had gone away to just a breath against his cheek. They were so close that he couldn’t be sure whether he heard the words or just knew that she was saying them. He kept his own voice down, but it sounded too loud.

“Why should she?”

“He was going to divorce her. He told Maggie. That is why she looked so ghastly at the Work Party this afternoon-he had just been telling her. There was an affair-with Gilbert- and he had found it out.”

“Is that why you broke it off?” The words came hard and hot before he could stop them.

“No-no, it wasn’t. You’ve got to be quite sure about that, because it’s true. I didn’t know-I hadn’t any idea until that Wednesday night. When I left you and came back to the house they were in her sitting-room. I was coming in through the drawing-room window, and the door between the rooms wasn’t quite shut. I heard-something-and I oughtn’t to have listened-but I did. He was telling her it was over. He said he was-fond of me.”

“That was very kind of him.”

“It was quite horrid,” said Valentine with sudden vigour. “I came away after that. In the morning I got one of those poison-pen letters. It said Gilbert had been carrying on with Scilla. But you are never to think that that was when I made up my mind to break it off, because it wasn’t. It was quite, quite made up when I was with you in the gazebo. You told me I couldn’t marry Gilbert, and I knew I couldn’t. I knew it the way you know something that you don’t have to think about. It was just there.”

They kissed.

CHAPTER 29

Miss Repton was better in the morning. She was in deep grief, but the sense of shock was lifting. She found herself able to read her Bible, and expressed a wish to see Mr. Martin, with whom she presently had a very comforting talk. It appeared he did not adhere to the school of thought which believed that those who passed away remained asleep in their coffins until the Day of Judgment, a belief which had been entertained by her parents and handed down to her by them. It had never occurred to her to question it before, but she found the Vicar’s more modern view very comforting indeed. She was also extremely grateful for the continued presence of Miss Silver, both on her own account and for the sake of Valentine. As she put it with rather touching simplicity,

“I do not wish to have unkind thoughts about anyone, and I have been praying to be delivered from any harsh judgments, but I am afraid that everyone will know by now that dear Roger was going to divorce his wife, and one can’t help wondering-no one can help wondering whether- whether-And it does seem more suitable that there should be somebody else with dear Valentine.”

Late in the morning the Chief Constable came over. He asked to see Miss Silver, and she came down to him in the study, where she found him looking out of the window. He turned as she came in, informed her briefly that the post mortem had established the fact that death was due to cyanide poisoning, and went on.

“Crisp saw the gardener last night, and he says it was used to destroy wasps’ nests near the house in July. Everybody knew it had been used. He had pointed the nests out to Roger Repton and told him something ought to be done about them or they would be over-run with wasps hatching out in August, and then what was going to happen to the fruit? Scilla Repton came along while he was talking and wanted to know all about it, and said she was scared of wasps. Was he sure there was something that would kill them, and what was it? In fact considerable interest was displayed, and when he was destroying the nests she came out and watched him. He said he had to tell her not to touch the stuff, because it was the worst kind of poison. Casting back to my interview with her yesterday, it seems to me that she rather overdid her ignorance of cyanide and all its works.”

Miss Silver had seated herself in the corner of the leather-covered couch which she had occupied at that interview. Then Scilla Repton in her tartan skirt and emerald jersey had been sitting by the writing-table. An excellent memory recalled the naive manner in which Scilla had stumbled over the very word. It had been “Cya what?-Cya stuff.” As she opened her flowered knitting-bag and took out little Josephine’s now almost completed cardigan she said gravely,

“I do not feel that too much attention should be paid to that. She is not a young woman of any education. She practically never opens a book, and her knowledge of current events is obtained from the more sensational headlines in the papers, a brief glance at the pictures, and the news-reel at the cinema. I think it more than possible that an unfamiliar word like cyanide would leave her mind as casually as it had entered it. It was, in any case, the possibility of a plague of wasps which she found interesting and alarming. The cyanide would only come into it as a means of averting that threat.”