She was seated at her dressing-table, fully dressed, her hands clasped in her lap. She smiled faintly when she saw Clay, and said: “Darling!”
“Mother, have you heard?”
“Your father? Yes, dear, of course.”
“Not that! I thought perhaps Loveday might have told you, for I suppose all the servants know by this time.”
She fixed her eyes on his face with an expression in them of painful intensity. “I sent Loveday downstairs to have her breakfast a little while ago. What is it?"
“Rame wouldn’t sign the death certificate!”
It seemed to her that her pulses stopped beating with her heart. She knew quite well what Clay meant, but her instinct screamed to her to be careful, and she said, to gain time: “I don’t understand.”
“Well, it means that Rame thinks he didn’t die a natural death. Frightful situation, isn’t it?”
She moistened her lips. “Why should he think that.” Lifton warned me that your father couldn’t go on as he was doing! Did no one tell him what your father ate and drank last night?”
“I don’t know what they told him. I wasn’t there. Apparently, Rame suspected poison straight away . Asked if Father were in the habit of taking sleeping draughts. Martha and Reuben said he wasn’t, and the end of it was that Rame walked off with the whisk decanter from beside Father’s bed, and Father’s body is going to be taken away by the police for a post-mortem examination. Pretty ghastly, isn’t it?”