She looked down into her lap, clasping and unclasping her hands in a nervous pressure. The small, thin, beautifully-boned face was subtle and still, but it was a braced and wary stillness.

  “I made my mistake,” she said, in a dry and careful voice, “being born into a clever and distinguished family. It is a mistake, when you turn out to be the plain, dull, nondescript one. Uncle Edward – everybody knows how brilliant he is. And my mother – she’s his sister, you know, – she has an arts degree, and she paints, and sings, and plays, she can do everything. It’s only because of her ill health, and because she happened to make a rather unfortunate marriage, that she didn’t become a scholar and celebrity like him. Aunt Audrey isn’t an intellectual, like them, of course, she doesn’t come from such an intellectual family. Her people were tradesmen who’d just got into the money. She went to a terribly select boarding school, and all that – Pleydells, I expect you’ve heard of it? – but she didn’t get any great distinctions, they took her away before her final exams. I’ve never understood why. Maybe they weren’t interested in academic success, all they wanted was the cachet. But she was everything else, you see. It’s enough to be so beautiful, don’t you think so? She’s beautiful, and she knows how to do everything beautifully, even if she doesn’t do it so terribly well. Me, I’m well-read, and I’m not stupid, but that’s all I’ve got, and in our family it just isn’t enough. Even things I can really do well, I find myself doing so badly… It’s… a personal thing. I try too hard, and over-reach myself. It isn’t easy, being the one without any gifts at all. I can’t see any future ahead of me, except playing second fiddle all my life to someone. I know I have moods! Wouldn’t you have moods?”

  Most of which was her mother speaking; and the faithful repetition of the threnody of complaint only went to show the helpless and vulnerable affection she had for her mother. She hadn’t yet turned to doubt any of that, or pick it to pieces as some young people can and do, and find all the flaws in it. There was a lot of undeserved loyalty wrapped up in this rather pathetic package.

  She caught his eye, and her pale cheek warmed a little. She liked the thick, strongly marked eyebrows that yet stood so tranquilly apart, with none of the menace of those brows that almost meet over the bridge of the nose. She minded his penetrating glance less than she had expected, and yet she was afraid of it.

  “I suppose I’m a psychiatric case, really,” she said rather loftily, “only nobody’s done anything about it, so far.”

  “On the contrary, I think you’re a completely normal adolescent who has suffered from rather too much adult companionship,” said George candidly, and smiled at her astonished, even affronted stare. “Abnormalities are the norm, when you’re struggling out of one stage and into another. Let’s face it, Felicity, you’re not grown-up yet, you’re only growing up. I haven’t forgotten how damned uncomfortable it is. I’ve seen it happen to others. You’re not doing too badly. Just don’t take any of your elders too seriously. Above all, don’t take any of them as the gospel. Not even the psychiatrists, some of them need psychiatrists too. Is that what was troubling you, this afternoon?”

  He had brought her back to the matter in hand none the less firmly for the gentleness of his manner; but she didn’t hold it against him, she knew she had to face it. The long, fair lashes lay on her cheeks. Her face was set, and she wasn’t going to show him her eyes.

  “It makes it worse that I have been so much with grownups. I still am. They expect me to act like an adult, and yet they don’t treat me as one. They get the work out of me, and then expect me to be in bed by ten. I did try to confide. I… I didn’t choose very well. He hadn’t got time to listen to me. I thought… he’s only twenty-three, and women are so much more mature… I thought we could be contemporaries but he… I saw it wasn’t any good,” said Felicity with dignity, “so I went away and left him. But you’ll understand, I didn’t want to talk to anyone after that.”

  “I do understand. You left him… where?”

  “Just under the redwood tree,” she said firmly, “where the paths cross.”

  “You took the path to the bridge? And left him standing there?”

  “Yes,” she said, with the flat finality of a slab of stone being laid over a grave.

  “Let me be quite certain… he was then at the crossroads, and outside the fence that rails off the riverside enclosure with the grotto?”

  “Yes,” she said, with the same intonation.

  “You didn’t look round to see where he went from there?”

  “I didn’t look round at all. I’d been dismissed, I went,” said Felicity, with completely adult bitterness.

  “And that was the last you saw of him? You don’t know where he went from there?”

  “I do now,” said Felicity. “I didn’t then. That was the last I saw of him.”

  She looked up. Her eyes were enormous in fear and grief, greedy for reassurance. Of this terror and this hope there was no doubt whatever. “Mr. Felse, do you think something happened to him? You don’t… you don’t think he’s…?”

  “I don’t think anything yet,” said George. “I hope he’s simply suffered a crisis of his own, and run away from whatever was on his mind. Don’t think he’s exempt at twenty-three. Maybe he was so full of his own problems he couldn’t spare any consideration for yours. If we can find him, be sure we will. Now you go to bed, and leave it to us. If you’ve told me all you know, there’s nothing more you can do.”

  “I’ve told you all I know.” She got as far as the door, and looked back. Her face was mute and stiff, but her eyes were full of haunted shadows. “Good night, Mr. Felse!”

  “Good night, Felicity!”

  And all that, thought George, watching her go, sounds like truth, and nothing but truth. But he still had an uneasy feeling that truth, with Felicity, was an iceberg, with eight-ninths of its bulk under water.

  “I’d better tell you at once,” said Dickie Meurice, settling himself at his ease and spreading an elbow on Edward Arundale’s desk, “that of course I’ve realised what this is all about, even if there’s been no official admission that anything’s wrong. Old Penrose has given the impression that everything’s proceeding according to plan, and he had no intention of using Lucien Galt in to-night’s lectures. Without even saying so, which is pretty good going, but then, he’s a deep old bird. But I know too well what Lucifer costs. If they bought him at all, they wanted him on-stage the whole week-end. And I know him too well to miss the moment when he absents himself from among us. He went off, voluntarily or otherwise, between lunch and tea. And you’re here to cover the management, in case it turns out he didn’t disappear voluntarily. Solicitor? Or private trouble-shooter?”

  “County C.I.D.,” said George without expression but not without relish, and saw with satisfaction the instant recoil, quickly mastered but not quickly enough.

  Dickie Meurice tapped his cigarette on the arm of his chair, and stared, and thought so hard that his blond countenance paled. He said carefully, lightly: “You don’t mean you’ve found him? You’ve got a genuine police case? This is official?”

  “Not yet. If everybody co-operates it may not have to be. No, we don’t know yet where Lucien Galt is. Do you, Mr. Meurice?”

  “Why should I know?” The smile a little strained now, the voice demonstrating involuntarily its disastrous tendency to shrillness.

  “You had, it seems, about the same chance of being the last to see him, this afternoon, as any of the others who passed up the sight-seeing trips and stayed at Follymead. Were you?”

  “Look,” said Meurice, persuasively, leaning forward with the look of shining candour that meant he was at his most devious, “if this is on the level, if it’s a police job, of course I’ll co-operate.” He had made up his mind rapidly enough where his interests lay, and that they were already involved; tweak that string occasionally, and he’d cooperate, maybe even a bit too much. “Tell me what you expect of me, ask me whatever you want to know, and I’m with you.”

  “I expect you to keep this strictly to yourself until, or unless, publicity becomes inevitable. Only a handful of people know about it, and it’s better for all concerned that it should remain that way. Better for Follymead, better for all these people attending the course, better for the artists involved, and better for me. Publicity may be very good business in your profession, of course, but only the right kind of publicity. And as you happen to be one of those who stayed at home to-day… Though of course, you may be able to account for every minute of your time, and provide confirmation of your account…”

  The artless, concerned smile became even more winning and anxious to help. So he couldn’t account for his time; and he would play ball, though perhaps not strictly by the rules.

  “I don’t need that kind of publicity, I can’t use it. I’ll keep it quiet, don’t worry. What can I tell you?”

  ““You were going on one of these coach-trips, I gather, originally. What made you change your mind?”

  “I thought I could use my time better here. There’s no chance to talk seriously to anyone at this sort of affair, with seventy or eighty people milling around in a communal spree. And there was someone I wanted to talk to. And she didn’t go, so I didn’t go.”

  “Liri Palmer?”

  “That’s right. I thought there might be a good opportunity of cultivating her company while the place was virtually empty.” He was being very frank, very open; an honest man would have looked less eager, and sounded a good deal less forthcoming. “I like Liri. She’s wasting herself on a heel like Lucien Galt, whether she loves or hates him. I wanted to tell her so, and get some sense into her. I don’t know whether they’ve told you what’s in the background between those two, or what happened last night?” He didn’t wait to be answered, he told it anyhow; no one could do it better. Maybe he wanted it on record officially that someone, and not himself, had threatened Lucien Galt’s life; if, that is, you cared to take that impromptu revision of a song as a serious threat. He liked Liri Palmer – or did he? – but he liked Dickie Meurice a lot better.

  “I see you don’t exactly love Galt, yourself,” observed George.

  “That’s no secret. Why should it be? He’s treated Liri badly, and the rest of his profession didn’t christen him Lucifer for nothing. But I didn’t set eyes on him all this afternoon,” he said firmly. “The last time I saw him was at lunch.”

  “But you did see Liri?”

  “Yes, I hung around in the gallery until she went out, and gave her five minutes start. Just after two o’clock, that would be. She made for that artificial ruin on the hillock across the park, and I came along shortly afterwards and found her there. I tried to get her to write off Galt and spend her attention on something better worth it – me!” A gleam of apparently genuine self-mockery shone in his eyes for an instant; it was the nearest he had come to being likeable, but in all probability he was merely experimenting to find out what attitudes would recommend him to George.

  “Was she amenable?” asked George, with a wooden face.

  “Metaphorically speaking, she spat in my eye. Nobody was going to put Liri off her grudges or her fancies.”

  “And which was this?”

  “At that stage, I’d say practically all grudge. She’d been badly hurt, and she can be an implacable enemy. I saw I was getting nowhere, so I gave up and came away. There was hardly anybody about, I’m afraid, I can’t bring witnesses, but I give you my word I was back in the walled garden soon after three o’clock, and I didn’t leave there until I came in to tea. There are archery butts there. I was practising all by myself until four, and then I came indoors to wash. And that’s all. Not a very productive afternoon.”

  “And you left Liri there at the tower. When would that be?”

  “Maybe about twenty minutes to three. She was sitting there alone, nobody else in sight that I noticed.”

  “You wouldn’t see very much of the river’s course from there?”

  The winsome blue eyes lit with a flare of intelligence that was not winsome at all. “Well, not from the ground, that I do know. There are tall trees in between, all you see is a gleam of water here and there. But there’s a stairway up that tower,” he added helpfully. “I haven’t been up there, but I should think you’d get a pretty good view with that added height. Not that she showed any signs of making use of it,” he concluded fairly, “while I was there.”

  “Well, thank you, Mr. Meurice, you’ve been very helpful. If we should have any difficulty in filling in the details of the afternoon, I’m sure you’ll do your best for us again. And you will keep the matter confidential?”

  Give him his due, he could take a double-edged hint as well as the next man. He promised secrecy with almost unnecessary fervour, and departed, having done his level best to plant the suggestion that, if something had really happened to Lucien Galt, Liri Palmer had made it happen. Who else, after all, had threatened his life?

  George sighed, grimaced, and sent for Liri Palmer.

  “Oh, he was there, all right.” Liri crossed her long and elegant legs, and declined a cigarette with a shake of her head. “He was doing his best to make up to me, but I wasn’t having any. What it adds up to is that he was inviting me to join in an all-out attack on Lucien’s professional position. A lot of dirty work goes on in the record business, and popular disc-jockeys have a lot of influence. With a few like-minded assassins as dedicated as himself, Meurice could ruin a man.”

  “And you were not interested?”

  Her lips curled disdainfully. “If I decide on assassination, I shan’t need any allies. I told him where he could go.”

  “Yesterday, I hear, you made what could be considered as being a threat against Galt, about as publicly as possible.”

  “Oh, that!” A tight, dark smile hollowed her cheeks, but she was not disconcerted. “Dickie made sure you knew about that, of course. He needn’t have worried, I’d have told you myself. Yes, it’s true. I did that.” She sounded faintly astonished now in looking back at it, as though it had become irrelevant and quite unaccountable in retrospect.

  “Did you mean it?” asked George directly.

  “Did I mean it… Yes, at the time I probably did. But even then what I really had in mind was not action so much as a declaration of my position. All the rest of them just happened to be there,” she said, with an arrogance Lucifer himself could not have bettered. “It was nothing to do with them.”

  “Then you didn’t act on it, this afternoon?”

  It was the first direct and deliberate suggestion that Lucien Galt might have suffered a murderous attack, might, in fact, be dead at that moment. She received it fully, thoughtfully and silently, and betrayed neither surprise nor any other emotion. What she thought, what she felt, she kept to herself. Like her private communications in song, they were nothing to do with anyone else. This was a young woman accustomed to standing on her own feet, and asking no quarter from anyone.

  “I didn’t see Lucien this afternoon. He never came near me, and I didn’t go looking for him. I sent Dickie Meurice away, and stayed up there at the folly until it was time to come in to tea.”

  “Not, I feel, without some sort of occupation?”

  Her smile warmed a little, but remained dark and laden. “I was wrestling with an idea for a song. It didn’t work out.”

  “Miss Palmer, I’ve gathered – and not only from Meurice – that a little while ago your relations with Lucien Galt were very close indeed. Would you mind telling me the reason for your break with him?”

  “Yes,” said Liri, directly, firmly, “I would mind. It’s a private matter between him and me, and I want it to stay that way.”

  He accepted that without question. “Then, if you’re good at keeping things private, keep this interview, this whole investigation, between the few of us. This week-end may as well run its course without a general alarm, if it can. And there’s one more thing I’d like to consult you about.”

  He laid upon her knee the small box in which he had placed the silver medal and chain. “My son found this at a certain spot by the river. Maybe you’ve already seen it.”

  She took up the box in her palm, and touched the little disc gently with one long finger. “Yes, I’ve seen it. Dominic showed it to us – the few of us who knew. It’s Lucien’s. He always wore it.”

  “Always? As long as you’ve known him?”

  “Yes, from the first time I met him. He said he’d worn it ever since he was a child. It was the one thing he had that belonged to his father.”

  “He told you that himself? And how long have you known him?”

  “Just over two years now. Yes, he told me himself.” There had been confidences between them then, and confidence. He was not, by all accounts, a person who talked about himself, or indeed much of a talker on any subject. “He wouldn’t have much left from his parents, obviously, after their shop was flattened by a buzz-bomb. You know about the Galts? They had a newsagent and tobacconist business in Islington. It was one of the last bombs of the war that got it. Both his parents were killed. He grew up in a children’s home.”

  “I know what’s been published about him,” said George.

  “That’s all most of us know. He loved his foster-parents at the home, though, there wasn’t any warping there. He still goes back there pretty regularly.” She looked up suddenly, her face was pale and still. “He did,” she said, and closed the box carefully over the silver medal.

  “Mr. Marshall has told me,” said Audrey Arundale in a low, constrained voice, “about this affair, and about your great kindness in coming here privately to help us. We’re very grateful to you. My husband would wish me to thank you on his behalf, as well as my own. I feel – you’ll understand and excuse me – terribly lost without him.”

  She stood in her own rose-and-white sitting-room, herself a white rose ever so slightly past her most radiant bloom, fair and frightened and gallant, terribly lost without Edward. She was used only to things that went smoothly; things that went hideously off the rails bewildered and confused her.