“But he was lost, too,” Pyke rejoined, then stopped and looked keenly at French. “By Jove! Inspector, I get your idea! You think Berlyn may have murdered him and cleared out?” He shook his head. “No, no. You are wrong. It is impossible. Berlyn wasn’t that sort. I knew him slightly and I confess I didn’t care for him, but he was not a murderer.”
“Why did you not like him, Mr. Pyke?”
Pyke shrugged.
“Hard to say. Not my style, perhaps. A good man, you know, and efficient and all that, but—too efficient, shall I say? He expected too much from others; didn’t make allowances for human errors and frailties. Poor Mrs. Berlyn had rather a time with him.”
“How so?”
“Well, an example will explain what I mean. On this last holiday after Stanley and I got back to London we met Berlyn and his wife, who were in town. The four of us dined together and went to a theatre. We were to meet at the restaurant at seven. Well, Mrs. Berlyn had been off somewhere on her own and she was five minutes late. What was that for a woman? But Berlyn was so ratty about it that I felt quite embarrassed. You see, he wouldn’t have been late himself. If he had said seven, he would have been there—on the tick. He couldn’t see that other people were not made the same way.”
“I follow you. You say that Mrs. Berlyn had rather a time with him. Did they not get on?”
“Oh, they got on—as well as fifty per cent of the married people get on. Berlyn did his duty to her strictly, even lavishly, but he expected the same in return. I don’t know that you could blame him. Strictly speaking, of course he was right. It was his instinct for scrupulously fair play.”
“Your late cousin and Mrs. Berlyn were very good friends, were they not?”
“We were both good friends with Mrs. Berlyn. Stanley and I knew her as children. In fact, it was through Stanley that Berlyn met her. I was in the Argentine at the time, but he told me about it. Berlyn was going for a holiday—one of those cruises round the western Mediterranean. Stanley happened to have met Phyllis Considine, as she was then, in London, and she had mentioned she was going on the same trip. So he gave Berlyn an introduction. Berlyn, it appears, fell in love with her and was accepted before the cruise was over.”