“Shut up, or I’ll make you.”
Sydney Crawford’s eyes seemed to return at last from the cosmic universe. They contracted and shivered to points of horror. Everything about her, from her clinched hands to her vivid chalk-white face, put itself headlong into one word:
“Murderer!”
And Nadia Mdevani was looking all too ready to be one when Julian, standing in the door, interrupted them.
“Don’t tell me anything’s wrong,” he said with a thin sarcasm.
Poised against each other as the two women were, it took them both several breaths to withhold their momentum and divert it to new channels. Nadia was the first to recover.
“We need a doctor, Mr. Prentice,” she said quietly. “And we need him soon.” She threw a glance in Crawford’s direction and, in a low voice, risked more: “I’ve seen a few poisons in my day, and this is a poison! Arsenic. You know how rapid that is.”
Sydney sprang toward Julian.
“Don’t go, Mr. Prentice! I tell you if you go—”
But Julian had fled; down the corridor, down the dim stairs, and out into the fog. They heard the door close loudly behind him. Sydney dropped her hands loosely, resignedly, at her sides. “That’s that,” she said quietly. “Not that it really matters. I am completely at your mercy, Miss Mdevani. You may think it makes a difference. It doesn’t. There are others now who care as little as Bertrand Whittaker cared.”