“I should say you did, miss! It’s been in all the newspapers. The Daily Budget’s out still to catch the man who did it. It seems, according to them, as our police are no good at all. Well, I hope they’ll get him—although a nice-looking young fellow he was and no mistake. A kind of soldierly look about him—ah, well, I dare say he’d been wounded in the war, and sometimes they go a bit queer afterwards, my sister’s boy did. Perhaps she’d used him bad—they’re a bad lot, those foreigners. Though she was a fine-looking woman. Stood there where you’re standing now.”
“Was she dark or fair?” I ventured. “You can’t tell from these newspaper portraits.”
“Dark hair, and a very white face—too white for nature, I thought, and her lips reddened something cruel. I don’t like to see it—a little powder now and then is quite another thing.”
We were conversing like old friends now. I put another question.
“Did she seem nervous or upset at all?”
“Not a bit. She was smiling to herself, quiet like, as though she was amused at something. That’s why you could have knocked me down with a feather when, the next afternoon, those people came running out calling for the police and saying there’d been murder done. I shall never get over it, and as for setting foot in that house after dark I wouldn’t do it, not if it was ever so. Why, I wouldn’t even stay here at the lodge, if Sir Eustace hadn’t been down on his bended knees to me.”
“I thought Sir Eustace Pedler was at Cannes?”
“So he was, miss. He come back to England when he heard the news, and, as to the bended knees, that was a figure of speech, his secretary, Mr. Pagett, having offered us double pay to stay on, and, as my John says, money is money nowadays.”
I concurred heartily with John’s by no means original remarks.
“The young man now,” said Mrs. James, reverting suddenly to a former point in the conversation. “He was upset. His eyes, light eyes, they were, I noticed them particular, was all shining. Excited, I thought. But I never dreamt of anything being wrong. Not even when he came out again looking all queer.”