"Watch his behaviour now!
"There was something wrong with his mother. Something seriously wrong. Ricky Fleet was worried. He knew it couldn't have been caused by any casual reference made to a twenty-. year-old death by Stannard…"
Thank you," Stannard intervened gravely. As he sat on the sofa-arm, bent a little forward, Stannard's black little glittering eyes were absorbed in the story.
"What upset his mother? When young Fleet hurried home, and followed her partway up the stairs (Drake and Ruth Callice saw that scene), all she'd say was that there was something he'd got to learn soon; and that she'd just put In a telephone-call for her now-closest friend, Sophie Brayle. But we can guess what was wrong with Cicely Fleet.”
"It was the sight of that ruddy great skeleton-clock being carried into the door of the pub just opposite. I'd sent it on ahead of Masters and me, by the carriage-people. Masters and I stopped at a couple of pubs in Brayle and didn't get there till late afternoon. Aunt Cicely must 'a' thought the secret was on the point of coming out”
"But what about Me?”
"I was dragged into Fleet House, along with Sophie there, by Ricky himself. I was shanghai'd, I was, and shoved into the library with the rest of you people. And Ricky Fleet had just before that got another shock.”
"He'd recognized, or half-recognized, Stannard as being the man standing at the upstairs study window. It jumped at him out of the past: Stannard was the bloke who looked down, when he came round the edge of the terrace that day, and he saw his father lyin' with a smashed head under the tapestry-cloth.”
"But let's take the events in their order! In that library, first off I had a bit of a dog-fight with Sophie. At least she gave confirmation to my notion (remember?) that Arthur Puckston might 'a' written the anonymous postcards about the pink flash and the skeleton-clock.
"Whereupon in tripped Aunt Cicely, at her artificial archest and most charmin', to carry away Sophie for a private talk. And there occurred something that was embarrassin' to the point of the horrible."