"Then, just then, Captain Sharpless opened the door. He'd been up in Mrs. Fane's room (And there's things the Good Lord won't allow in this world, either, if you ask me!)
"And he said, he said, 'Don't bother, Daisy; I'll take it up to her.' And I handed him the tray." Her eyes were fixed and horrified. She made an illustrative gesture of handing the tray. "And out he walked with it. And so if anybody put that dreadful stuff in the grapefruit… God love us, it must have been that Captain Sharpless himself."
Her voice had grown louder, ringing in the kitchen. Footsteps crossed the floor of the dining room beyond. Frank Sharpless, pushing open the swing-door so that it almost caught Ann a blow behind the shoulder, poked his head round the edge of the door.
"Hullo!" he said pleasantly. "Did I hear somebody mention my name?"
Fifteen
"Daisy said you were out here," he went on. "What's the conference all about? Is anything up?". Mrs. Propper's expression must have betrayed her to anyone who was looking at her. She moved her ample body as though about to utter a stifled shriek. Her wide-open eyes conveyed that she had thought he was wicked, but not this wicked.
Sharpless did not look at her. He was a very different person from the hag-ridden talker of the garden. A clearer picture of (as the Sunday School weeklies would say) youth, health, and innocence could not have been found.
Fresh from shave and hair-cut. at the barber's, his hair sleekly groomed, his good-humored smile widening and his eyes untroubled, Sharpless saluted them with his cap. His stick was tucked under his left arm.
Chief Inspector Masters did not step into the breach: he jumped there. Perhaps they were all afraid that Mrs. Propper might leap up and cry, "Murderer!" or some such perfectly sincere melodramatic gesture, making the kitchen explode with emotionalism.
"Just clearing up a few matters, sir," said Masters, in a voice loud with warning to the cook. "You don't happen to remember carrying — what was it? — a grape fruit, yes! You don't happen to remember carrying half a grapefruit up to Mrs. Fane on Thursday afternoon, do you?"