A tear trickled down Clara’s weather-beaten cheek.
She wiped it away. “I wish I’d been taken first!” she said. “I’ve lived too long: I shall never get used to havin’ our name dragged through the mud, and bein’ pointed at and talked about. I’m too old: it’s no good expectin’ me to change my ideas at my time of life.”
Faith looked at her with wide, frightened eyes. “No one will point at you, Clara! It hasn’t anything to do with you!”
“No, my dear, but I know what people are. It isn’t about that, either. I know he was a wicked old man, but I cant bear to think of him bein’ murdered like that, and all for a paltry bit of money!”
Charmian lit a second cigarette, and blew a cloud of smoke down her nostrils. “Well, I’m not so sure that he was murdered for money,” she said, frowning. “I’ve been thinking it over, and I can’t see why Jimmy had to poison Father to get hold of that three hundred pounds. Father was out of his room all the afternoon yesterday. It seem; to me Jimmy could have taken the cash, and made his getaway without the slightest difficulty. In fact, the more you look at it the more senseless it seems to be that he should have murdered Father.”
Ingrain stared at her. “Well, but damn it all, Char, isn’t it obvious? He was afraid of getting caught and jugged!”
“Be your age!” besought his sister. “For one thing, it’s extremely unlikely that Father would have prosecuted him; and for another, we all knew that that three hundred was in Father’s tin box, so he can’t possibly have hoped to have got away with it. Why on earth should he have tied a noose round his own neck?”
“The fact remains that he’s missing, and the money too, my dear girl.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me to find that Jimmy’s disappearance with the money hasn’t got anything whatsoever to do with Father’s death,” Charmian said deliberately.
Ingram took a minute to assimilate this. “Yes, but — I say, Char, that’s a bit grim! If Jimmy didn’t poison the old man, it means that somebody else did, and — Hell, that points to its having been one of us!”