"Yes."
"Any of us. Why" — her voice grew vague, and she put her hands together as though she were uncertain of their position, "I might kill you. I might take the gun out of that desk drawer, just because I couldn't help myself, and all of a sudden…" She shuddered. "Why, if all those old people weren't damned to suicide, or being thrown off the balcony by destiny — ghosts — I don't know — then somebody was damned to kill them — in the family…."
"You've got to stop this! Look here! Listen-!"
She nodded gently, touched her eyelids with her finger tips, and looked up. "Do you think Herbert killed Martin?"
"No! No, of course not. And it wasn't any foolery about ghosts, either. And-you know your cousin couldn't have killed Martin. He admired him; he was solid and dependable―"
"He talked to himself," the girl said, blankly. "I remember now; he talked to himself. It's the quiet people I'm afraid of. They're the ones who go mad, if it's tainted blood to begin with…. He had big red hands. His hair wouldn't stay down, no matter how much he slicked it. He was built delicately, like Martin, but his hands were too big. He tried to look like Martin. I wonder if he hated Martin?”
A pause, while she plucked at the edges of the sofa.
"And he was always trying to invent something that never worked. A new churn. He thought he was an inventor. Martin used to laugh at him… "
The dim room was full of personalities. Rampole saw two figures standing in the middle of a white road at dusk, so like in appearance and yet so vitally unlike. Martin, drunk, a cigarette hanging from his lips. Herbert gawky and blunt-featured, with a badly fitting hat set exactly high and straight on his head. You felt that if Herbert smoked a cigarette, too, it would protrude from the exact centre of his mouth, and waggle awkwardly.
"Somebody opened the wall safe in the library last night," said Dorothy Starberth. "That was something I didn't tell Dr. Fell last night. I didn't tell him so much that was important. I didn't tell him that at dinner Herbert was more flustered than Martin… It was Herbert who opened that library safe."