“You were all right. I’ve known men I liked better.”

“And plenty of them,” he said, his voice rising. “So you came here and raised hell. You used us all. You used my mother for your own dirty purposes. You used me. You even used Margery Stoddard. That was straight blackmail, and you know it.”

She had recovered somewhat, however. “She paid me a little,” she said flippantly. “Why shouldn’t she? I’d made some bad investments and I had a lot of bills. She had plenty.”

“I see. She had plenty,” he said. “That explains everything, doesn’t it? It must have been a nice little racket while it lasted. Only it’s over now. It’s over and you’re through. Get that and get it right. You’re through.”

He got up abruptly, overturning his chair and banging the door as he left the room. It must have sounded like a battle from the pantry. Certainly that was how it was reported the next day, when the police interrogated Reynolds.

“You say they quarreled?”

“It sounded that way. Mr. Tony seemed excited.”

“Hear anything he said?”

“He said it was over. He said Mrs. Wainwright was through. That’s all I remember.”

“He left her there? In the dining room?”

“Yes, sir. He upset his chair getting up. When I heard the door slam I went in.”

“Mrs. Wainwright was still there?”

“Yes. She was lighting a cigarette.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

THEY FOUND BESSIE DEAD early the next morning. Andy McDonald, on his way to town in his car, saw something gaily colored just outside the door to the west wing. He got out to investigate, and it was Bessie, still in the flame-colored dinner dress she had worn the night before. She was lying on her face, and her small pearl-handled revolver lay near her. Apparently she had not had time to use it. He bent over her, to see that the back of her head was bloody and crushed.

But he was a canny Scot. He rang the front doorbell, and told Reynolds to get the police. After that he stood guard. He allowed nobody to come near the body, nor did he touch it himself. “Keep back,” he called when the servants began to run out. “Keep back, or I’ll knock the heads off the lot of you.”

That was what I found when I drove up early that morning, after a sleepless night: Andy on guard, Bessie on the ground, the side door open, and Reynolds keeping the servants back. Andy would not even let my car pass, or allow me to get out of it. “Stay where you are,” he said. “We’ve maybe some tire prints around here.”

“But what’s wrong?” I asked, bewildered. “Is she—”

“Aye, she’s dead,” he said. “I never liked her, God forgive me. But she’s been murdered, and the law comes first.”

I felt very sick. Like Andy I had not liked her, but she had loved living. Her very faults had been due to that, her greed to get all she could out of life. Now she was only a flame-colored heap at the foot of the west wing steps. Not even covered. Just lying there.