Without glancing at the portrait, Miss Lynne said: ‘It’s a stupid looking face in the picture. In my opinion that’s what she was. A stupid woman.’

CHAPTER FIVE

According to Terence Lynne

THE ASPECT OF Terence Lynne that struck Alleyn most forcibly was her composure. He felt quite sure that, more than any of them, she disliked and resented these interminable discussions. Yet she answered his questions composedly. Unlike her companions, she showed no sign of launching into a continuous narrative and the sense of release which had encouraged them to talk was, he felt certain, absent in Miss Lynne. He had the feeling that unless he was careful he would find himself engaged in something very like routine police interrogation. This, above all things, he was anxious to avoid. He wanted to retain his position as an onlooker before whom the spoil of an indiscriminate rummage was displayed, leaving him free to sort, reject and set aside. Terence Lynne waited for a specific demand, yet her one contribution up to date had been, in its way, sufficiently startling.

‘Here at least,’ Alleyn said, ‘are two completely opposed views. Losse, if I remember him, said Mrs Rubrick was as clever as a bagful of monkeys. You disagree, Miss Lynne?’

‘She had a few tricks,’ said Terence. ‘She could talk.’

‘To her electors?’

‘Yes, to them. She had the knack. Her speeches sounded rather effective. They didn’t read well.’

‘I always thought you wrote them for her, Terry,’ said Fabian with a grin.

‘If I’d done that they would have read well and sounded dull. I haven’t the knack.’

‘But wasn’t it pretty hot to know what they’d like?’ asked Douglas.

‘She used to listen to people on the wireless and then adapt the phrases.’

‘By golly, so she did!’ cried Fabian delightedly. ‘Do you remember, Ursy, the clarion call in the speech on rehabilitation? “We shall settle them on the good ground, in the fallow fields, in the workshops and in the hills. We shall never abandon them!” Good Lord, she had got a nerve.’

‘It was utterly unconscious!’ Ursy declaimed. ‘An instinctive echo.’

‘Was it!’ said Terence Lynne quietly.

‘You’re unfair, Terry.’

‘I don’t think so. She had a very good memory for other people’s ideas. But she couldn’t reason very well and she used to make the most painful floaters over finance: She hadn’t got the dimmest notion of how her rehabilitation scheme would work out financially.’

‘Uncle Arthur helped in that department,’ said Fabian.

‘Of course he did.’

‘He played an active part in her public life?’ asked Alleyn.