“I thought I smelt black magic in Lady Wutherwood’s conversation.”

“She didn’t start off about it to you!”

“Well, there were some rather cryptic allusions to unseen forces.”

“Oh, no. Really, Violet is too odd.”

“Lady Charles,” said Alleyn, “do you think she’s at all—”

“Dotty?”

“Well—”

“You needn’t be apologetic, Mr. Alleyn. Violet popped into the drawing-room on her way to see you and if she kept up the form she showed then I’m surprised that you didn’t whisk a strait jacket out of your black bag. Was she very queer?”

“I thought her so, certainly. I wondered if it could all be put down to shock.”

Lady Charles said nothing but solemnly shook her head.

“No?” murmured Alleyn. “You don’t think so?”

“No. I’m afraid I can’t honestly say I do.”

“Has there ever been serious trouble?”

“Well, of course, we don’t see very much of them. My husband rather lost touch with Gabriel when we were in New Zealand but we did hear, from Aunt Kit and people, that she had gone away to a private nursing-home in Devonshire. It had been recommended by old Lady Lorrimer whose husband, as everybody knows, has been under lock and key for a hundred years. We heard that Violet’s trouble comes in sort of bursts, do you know? Cycles.”

“Is there anything of that sort in the family history?”

“Of that one hasn’t the faintest idea. Violet is a Hungarian, or a Yugo-Slav. One or the other. Her name isn’t Violet at all. It’s something beginning with ‘Gla,’ like Gladys, but ending too ridiculously. So Gabriel called her Violet. I think her maiden name was Zadody, but I’m not sure. She was nobody that anyone knew, even in Hungaria or Yugo-Slavia, which was quite another country, of course, in Gabriel’s wild-oatish youth. Gabriel said he had found her at the Embassy. I’m afraid Charlie used to say it was at a cabaret of that name or something slightly worse. You must remember her when you were a young man at parties. Or perhaps you are too young. He had her presented, of course, and everything. She was rather spectacular in those days, and looked like a Gibson Girl who didn’t wash very often. Of course you were too young, but I remember them both very well. I believe that even then there were crises-de-nerfs.”

“That must have been rather difficult for Lord Wutherwood.”

“Yes, miserable for him. Luckily there were no children. Luckily for us too, I suppose, as things have turned out, although I must say I don’t think it’s the pleasantest way of becoming the head of the family.”

Her cigarette had gone out and she lit another. Alleyn felt quite certain that there was more than a touch of bravura in this rapid flow of narrative. It was a little too bright; the inconsequence was overstressed; the rhythm somewhere at fault. He thought that he was being shown a perilous imitation of the normal Lady Charles Lamprey by a Lady Charles Lamprey who was by no means normal. Once or twice he heard the faintest suggestion of a stutter and that reminded him of Stephen who, he felt sure, was overwhelmingly present in his mother’s thoughts. Extreme maternal devotion had never seemed to Alleyn to be a sentimental or a pretty attachment, but rather a passionate concentration which, when its object was threatened, developed a painful intensity. Maternal anxiety, he thought, was the emotion that human beings most consistently misrepresent, degrading its passion into tenderness, its agony with pathos. He was too familiar with the look that appears in frightened maternal eyes to miss recognizing it in Lady Charles’s and, though he was perfectly prepared to make use of her terror, he did not enjoy the knowledge that he had stimulated it. He heard her voice go rattling on and knew that she was trying to force an impression on him. “She wants me,” he thought, “to believe that her sister-in-law is insane.”