“Oh dear, I do wish I hadn’t come home!” said Aubrey. “I can see, because I am very quick-witted and sensitive to atmosphere, that everything is going to become too morbid and repellent for words. Char, my precious, do put us out of this frightful suspense! I can’t bear it!”
“If you want it in plain words, Rame thinks Father was murdered,” said Charmian.
Clara dropped her teaspoon with a clatter into her saucer. Bart half-started from his chair, and sank back again, his eyes fixed incredulously on his sister’s face. Clay turned chalk-white, and moved his lips stickily.
“Rot!” said Conrad loudly and scornfully.
“Yes, that’s what I said, but apparently I was wrong,” Charmian replied, drawing her cigarette-case from her pocket, and taking a cigarette from it. She shut the with a snap, and turned to feel for a matchbox on the mantelpiece behind her.
“But what — how… ?”Bart demanded.
She struck a match, and lit her cigarette. “Poison, of course.”
“Rubbish!” said Clara strongly. “I never heard of such a thing! Poison, indeed! He ate and drank a lot of foolish things last night, as anyone could have told Rame! What next!”
“There was a sort of blue look about him,” Charmian said. “I noticed it myself, though it didn’t, of course, convey anything in particular to my mind. Rame asked if Father was in the habit of taking sleeping-draughts. Reuben and Martha both swore that he wasn’t. Them was a drain of whisky left in the decanter beside the bed, and he tasted it. He has taken both the glass and the decanter away with him, and I suppose you know what that means.”
“Do you mean — do you mean that there’ll have to be an inquest?” Conrad said, in a stupefied tone. “On Father."