Janice moved her neck in discomfort. She added abruptly:
“Mother’s over there now,”—she nodded in the direction of the villa across the street,—“condoling with Toby. Toby’s been so very badly treated. But then I expect all mothers are like that.”
“Ah!” said Uncle Ben profoundly.
Janice got up from her chair.
“Eve,” she cried with a startling vehemence, “I was almost as bad as Toby was. But I’m sorry. Please believe that! I’m sorry about everything!”
And, after struggling without effect to say something else, she ran across the garden, up the path past the side of the villa, and disappeared. Uncle Ben rose more slowly.
“Don’t go!” said Eve. “Don’t —”
Uncle Ben paid no attention to this. He was pondering deeply.
“I’m not,” he grunted. “Sorry, I mean. Good thing for you, if you know what I mean. You and Toby. No.” Powerfully embarrassed, he turned away, but swung back again. “I made you a ship-model this week,” he added. “Thought you might like it. I’ll send it over when it’s painted. G’bye.”
And he shambled away.
When he had gone, Eve Neill and Dr. Dermot Kinross sat silent for a long time. They did not look at each other. It was Eve who spoke first.
“Was it true what you said yesterday?”
“About what?”
“About having to go back to London tomorrow?”
“Yes. I’ve got to get back sooner or later. The point is, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Dermot: I wanted to —”
He interrupted her. “Now, look here. Any more of this damned gratitude —”
“Well, you needn’t be so snappish about it!”
“I was not being snappish about it. I was only trying to get gratitude out of your mind.”
“Why? Why have you done all this for me?”
Dermot picked up the packet of Maryland cigarettes. He offered it to her, but she shook her head. He lit one himself.
“That’s an infantile trick,” he said. “You know perfectly well. One day, when you’re over this state of nerves, we may talk about it again. In the meantime, I still ask what you’re going to do?”
Eve shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know. I thought of packing my traps and going down to Nice or Cannes for a while….”
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s impossible. Our friend Goron was quite right in what he said about you.”
“Oh? What did he say about me?”
“He said you’re a public menace, and that nobody can tell what you’ll get into next. If you go to the Riviera, some prowling male or other will cross your path, make you think you’re in love with him, and … well, here we go again. No: you’d better come back to England. You won’t be out of danger there, God knows; but at least an eye can be kept on you.”
Eve considered this.
“As a matter of fact, I had thought of going to England.” She lifted her eyes. “Tell me. Do you think I’m breaking my heart about Ned Atwood?”
Dermot took the cigarette out of his mouth. His eyes narrowed. He stared back at her for a long time, and then struck his fist on the arm of the chair.
“That’s practical psychology,” he said. “Trust you to go straight through verbiage, if you like.”
“Do you?”
“I didn’t exactly murder the fellow. ‘Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive, officiously to keep alive.’ I encouraged him to die, at least. If I hadn’t done it, and he’d been nursed back to health, the guillotine would have done it very efficiently. But I wasn’t considering that side of it.”
Dermot’s face darkened.
“Toby Lawes,” he went on, “was never anything to you. You were lonely and you were bored and you wanted somebody to rely on. You mustn’t ever make that mistake again, and I’m going to see to it you don’t. If a little thing like a murder hadn’t interrupted it, something else would have. But Atwood—maybe!—was different.”
“Was he?”
“That fellow really loved you, in his own way. When he talked about what he thought, I doubt whether he was acting. It wouldn’t prevent him from using you for his alibi….”
“No. I noticed that.’
“But it didn’t alter his feelings. What I wondered was whether it had altered yours. The Atwoods of this world are a little too dangerous in every sense.”
Eve sat motionless. Her eyes were shining damply in the darkening garden.
“I don’t mind your doing the thinking for both of us,” she told him. “In fact, I prefer it. But if there’s one thing I won’t have you thinking, it’s what the Lawes family thought. Will you come here for a moment, please?”
M. Aristide Goron, prefect of police of La Bandelette, swung along the rue des Anges at the stumpy but magnificent walk suggestive of the Grand Monarch. His chest was thrown out, he twirled a malacca stick, and he was well satisfied with all the world.
The learned Docteur Kinross, he had been told, would be found taking tea with Madame Neill in the back garden of the latter’s villa. He, Aristide Goron, was in a position to inform both of them that the Lawes affair was now satisfactorily closed.
M. Goron beamed on the rue des Anges. This Lawes affair had redounded to the credit of the La Bandelette police department. Reporters, and especially photographers, had come from as far as Paris concerning it. He had been puzzled by Dr. Kinross’s refusal to have his name concerned in the case, and in particular to being photographed. But if somebody must have the credit… enfin, let’s not disappoint the public.
In fact, M. Goron had to revise his earlier suspicion about Dr. Kinross. This man was a thinking-machine, no more and no less. He was admirable. He lived for his little mental puzzles, and nothing else, exactly as he had told the prefect. He dissected minds like clocks, and was a clock himself.
M. Goron opened the gate in the wall round the Villa Miramar. Seeing, at his left, the path which led round the side of the house, he followed it.
It was a relief, too, to find some of the English who were not hypocrites like this M. Lawes. M. Goron was beginning to understand the English better now. In fact…
Cutting at the grass with his stick, M. Goron emerged jauntily into the back garden. The evening light was darkening; a hush was on the chestnut trees. He was just rehearsing the speech he would deliver, when he caught sight of two persons in front of him.
M. Goron stopped short.
His eyes bulged almost out of their sockets.
For a moment he stood staring. He was a discreet man, a polite man, a man who liked to see people have a good time. So he turned round, and retraced his steps. But he was also a fair-minded man, who liked to be dealt with fairly. As he emerged again in the rue des Anges, he shook his head despondently. He stumped back along the street more rapidly than he had come. He spoke in too low a voice for anybody to hear what he was muttering to himself, but the word “zizipompom” floated out and died away in the evening air.
THE END.
About the Author
John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was one of the most popular authors of Golden Age British-style detective novels. Born in Pennsylvania and the son of a US congressman, Carr graduated from Haverford College in 1929. Soon thereafter, he moved to England where he married an Englishwoman and began his mystery-writing career. In 1948, he returned to the US as an internationally known author. Carr received the Mystery Writers of America’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of the few Americans ever admitted into the prestigious, but almost exclusively British, Detection Club.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1942 by John Dickson Carr
Copyright © renewed 1970 by John Dickson Carr
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4804-7275-4
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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