“I’ll ask you to sign it later, if you will. What I hope you will do now is give us some sort of side-light of Lord Wutherwood himself. I’m afraid many of my questions will sound impertinent. Perhaps the most offensive part of police investigation is the ferreting. We have to ferret, you know, like anything.”
“Ferret away,” said Lady Charles.
“Well, can you think of anybody who would want to kill Lord Wutherwood?”
“That’s not ferreting; it’s more like bombing. I can’t think of anybody who, in their right minds, would actually and literally want to kill Gabriel. I expect lots of people have, as one says, felt like killing him. He was a frightfully irritating fellow, poor dear. Not a fragment of charm and so drearily ungay, do you know? I mean, it does help if people are gay, doesn’t it? I set enormous store on gaiety. But of course one doesn’t kill people simply because they are not exactly one’s own cup of tea and I suppose he had his grey little pleasures. He was passionately interested in plumbing and drainage, I understand, and carried out all sorts of experiments at Deepacres where one pulls chains when one would expect to turn taps and the other way round. So, what with his drains and his Chinese pots, I daresay he had quite a giddy time. And with Violet wrapped up in her black magic, you may say they both had hobbies.”
“I thought I smelt black magic in Lady Wutherwood’s conversation.”
“She didn’t start off about it to you!”
“Well, there were some rather cryptic allusions to unseen forces.”
“Oh, no. Really, Violet is too odd.”
“Lady Charles,” said Alleyn, “do you think she’s at all—”
“Dotty?”