Valerie gave a scream, and clutched at the nearest support, which happened to be Roydon’s arm. He paid no heed to her, but stood staring at Stephen, with his jaw dropping.

Mottisfont said in an angry, querulous tone: ‘I don’t believe it! This is one of your mistaken ideas of humour, Stephen, and I don’t like it!’

Maud’s hands were still clasped in her lap. She sat still, a plump, upright little figure, with a rigid back. Her pale eyes studied Stephen, travelled on to Mottisfont, to Roydon, to Valerie, and sank again.

‘It’s true?’ Mathilda said stupidly.

‘Unfortunately for us, quite true.’

‘You mean he’s been murdered,’ said Roydon, as though the words stuck in his throat.

‘Oh no! I can’t bear it!’ Valerie whimpered. ‘It’s too ghastly!’

Mottisfont passed a hand across his mouth. He asked in a voice which he tried hard to keep level: ‘Who did it?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Stephen replied. He took a cigarette from the box on the table, and lit it. ‘Interesting problem, isn’t it?’ he drawled.

Six

His words were followed by a rather stunned silence. He smoked for a moment, looking round in malicious amusement at the various countenances turned towards him. It was impossible to read the thoughts behind them; they looked shut-in, suddenly guarded, even a little furtive. He said cordially: ‘Really, no one would know which was the actor amongst us! we’re damned good, all of us.’

Maud looked at him, expressionless, but said nothing. Edgar Mottisfont said angrily: ‘A remark – a remark in the worst of bad taste!’

‘Herriard,’ Mathilda said succinctly.

Joseph came in with Paula. She looked pale, exchanged a glance with her brother, and asked him curtly for a cigarette. He put his hand in his pocket, withdrew it again, and nodded to the box on the table. Joseph had gone over to his wife, and had taken her hand in both of his. ‘My dear, we are bereaved indeed,’ he said, with a solemn depth of tone which made Mathilda feel an insane desire to giggle.

‘Stephen says that Nathaniel has been murdered,’ Maud said calmly. ‘It seems very strange.’

The inadequacy of this comment, although typical of Maud, momentarily robbed Joseph of the power to display deeper emotions. He looked disconcerted, and said that he could see that the shock had numbed her. The rest of the company perceived that whatever feelings of grief or of horror might inhabit Joseph’s inmost soul he would not for long be able to resist the opportunity thus afforded him to seize the centre of a tragic stage. Already he was seeing himself, Mathilda thought, as the chief mourner, the brave mainstay of a stricken household.

Attention swerved away from him to Valerie. Fright had enlarged the pupils of her lovely eyes; her mouth drooped; she said in a soft wail: ‘I wish I hadn’t come! I want to go home!’

‘But you can’t go home,’ Stephen replied. ‘You’ll be wanted by the police, like the rest of us.’