“Oh, I don’t know that we really harboured expectations,” Lady Clevedon retorted bluntly. “I had seen your photograph, so that your features do not come upon me with any overwhelming sense of novelty. Mrs. Mackaluce showed me the portrait.”
“Yes, I know she had one,” I said. “I found it in the house. But I don’t know how she got it.”
“I think she said her lawyer procured it for her. ‘I quarrelled with his father and mother,’ she told me, ‘and I’m not going to make it up with him. But he is the only relative I have in the world, and he has only me, and I shall make him my heir.’ Are you really as lonely as all that, Mr. Holt?”
“Lonely?” I echoed, perhaps a little vaguely. “Oh, you mean the only relative—no, it’s not quite so blank as that. True, my relatives do not worry me much, but there are some about somewhere.”
“Are you going to settle in Cartordale?” she demanded. “It’s slow enough as a rule, though there is excitement just now, more than enough. Sir Philip Clevedon stabbed and with my hatpin—it was my hatpin, you know—”
She closed her lips together with what was almost a snap, as if she feared to say too much. But she was not constructed for long silences.
“That man Peppermint, Peppercorn—”
“Pepster,” Dr. Crawford murmured.
“Ah, yes, Pepster—thinks I did the murder. Where did I last see my hatpin? Did I leave it at White Towers? ‘My good man,’ I said, ‘I haven’t been in White Towers for three years.’ Wasn’t I friendly with Sir Philip? Had I quarrelled with him? when did I last see him? Of course I had quarrelled with him. Philip Clevedon was always quarrelling with somebody. He was—but there, he’s dead now.”
She paused again and began to draw on her glove.