“It boils down to this, that you’ve got nothing to go on then, unless something unexpected transpires?”
“That’s about the size of it, sir. Still, we’ve not caught Jimmy the Bastard yet, and you never know how people will give themselves away once they get a bit scared. I think I’ve rattled one or two of them already, and I don’t despair, not by any means. After all, they don’t know how little I’ve got to go on.”
The Major shook his head. “It looks nasty to me, very nasty, Logan.”
“You’re right, sir: it is nasty, or I’m much mistaken. I got the feeling I’m only on the fringe of the truth of all that’s been happening in that house lately. Every now and then it came over me that I was standing on the edge of a regular volcano. And I’m not what you’d call fanciful, either. Plymstock felt it too. He passed the remark to me as we came away that it wouldn’t surprise him if something was to break at any moment.”
“Well, we’ll hope it may,” said the Major.
“Yes,” agreed Logan slowly. “We’ll hope it may, sir.”
Chapter Nineteen
Inspector Logan, although he might suspect that his investigations had alarmed some members of the household, had as yet little conception of the extent of the turmoil into which Penhallow’s death, coupled with his own activities, had plunged Trevellin. Faith, watching with growing terror the unforeseen results of her crime, felt as though she had loosed a relentless tide which would soon engulf them all. When the Inspector’s suspicions seemed to draw first this innocent person into his net, and then that, her horror caused the danger in which she herself stood to occupy a secondary place in her mind. It had never occurred to her that any suspicion at all would attach itself to Penhallow’s death; far less that the death of the one person from whom every ill had seemed to her to emanate, should, instead of solving all difficulties, have been as a match set to a train of gunpowder.
Bart’s open avowal of his intention to marry Loveday had precipitated a storm whose repercussions were felt even in the kitchen, where Reuben, thunderstruck at a development quite unsuspected by him, solemnly cast off his niece; and Martha, shocked out of her abandonment to grief, declared that in her day no girl who had caught the Master’s fancy would so far have forgotten her station as to dream of marriage. “Look at me, you malkin!” Martha said. “I did things decent! I knawed my place! I never prated to un of marriage, nor there wasn’t no one troubled by the bit of pleasure I had with un!”
Sybilla, having loudly congratulated herself on being no blood relation of such a shameless hussy, penetrated into the front of the house, and confronted Raymond there, laying it upon him that he owed it to the family, to poor deluded Bart, and to the blessed memory of his father to put a swift end to so unnatural alliance. When he told her impatiently that he had no control over Bart’s actions, she sought out Bart himself; reminded him of the innumerable occasions when she had spanked him across her knee, expressed her fervent desire to perform this office for him again, and would have favoured him with a most unflattering reading of Loveday’s character had he not first shouted her down, and then, when her shriller tones mastered his, slammed out of her presence.