“Calmly! Seeing what you think and where you’re trying to land us! But just let me ask you something.” He thrust his head forward, the chin advanced, the eyebrows in arched semicircles rising almost to his hair. “Do you happen to remember there were five hundred people on the island that afternoon? Any kind of person could have been here on any kind of errand.”
Rawson answered with a slight show of impatience:
“Just leave our business to us, Mr. Stokes. You’re here to answer questions.”
“Oh, that’s plain—questions all pointing one way. But there were other people on the island besides that crowd—besides us—who might have had a motive. Isn’t anger a motive?”
He projected the sentence with a malevolent force, the words enunciated with an actor’s incisive diction.
“Anger!” ejaculated Williams. “Where does that come in?”
“Here, on Gull Island. Oh, we’ve had more than jealousy. Rage and spite will go as far. Take your eyes off my wife and me for a moment—look somewhere else.”
Rawson’s face showed no surprise, blankly inscrutable, but Williams wheeled in his chair and turned an expression of startled inquiry on Bassett. Bassett, in his turn, was staring in astonishment at Stokes.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “Rage and spite—whom do you mean?”
“I mean Joe Tracy,” was the answer.