“No, but I don't think I'm really one of his suspects,” said Antonia. “He's got his eye more on Kenneth, or, rather, he had till Rudolph cropped up. I wish I could make my mind up about Rudolph, by the way.”
“Whether to marry him or not? Let me help you.”
“Oh no, not that! As a matter of fact,” she added candidly, “I shouldn't be surprised if he called the engagement off. He was considerably peeved last night, you know. What I meant was, did he do it, or not?”
“You know him better than I do, Tony. It doesn't look as though he did.”
“No, but I'm not so sure. I didn't think he'd be so rattled, somehow. Because the only time I've ever seen him in a tight corner, which was when a motor lorry shot out of a side-turning one day, he was as cool as a cucumber, and completely and utterly efficient. That was partly why I fell for him. The ordinary person would have jammed on the brakes, and we'd have been smashed into, but he just trod on the accelerator, and sort of skimmed by in a huge semicircle, and then went on with what he'd been saying before it happened.”
Giles was unimpressed. “The biggest ass of my acquaintance is an expert driver,” he said. “It's one thing to keep your head at the wheel of a car, and quite another to keep it when confronted by the shadows of the gallows, so to speak. My own impression of your elegant young man is that he wouldn't — to put it vulgarly—have had the guts to do it.”
“That's what I'm not sure about,” said Antonia, quite unresentful of this slur upon her betrothed's character. “His mother was foreign - at least, half, because she had an Italian father or mother or something - and occasionally Rudolph reverts a bit. He has white rages. You never know with people like that. They might do anything. Of course, that story he told might have been true, though I admit it sounded thin, but, on the other hand, it might be a masterpiece of low cunning. Same as me now. For all you know I'm being cunning talking like this.”
“Yes, that had occurred to me,” agreed Giles.
“Kenneth, too,” pursued his cousin. “Kenneth won't say one way or the other, because partly, I think, he's enjoying himself, and partly he holds that it's no use saying he didn't do it, because naturally he'd be bound to say that. But I'll tell you one thing, Giles.” She paused, frowning, and when he looked inquiringly at her, said in a serious tone: “If it was Kenneth I'll bet every penny I've got no one'll ever find out.”
“I shouldn't, Tony.”