(Saturday, April 2; 12.30 p. m.)
Slowly Markham brought his eyes back to Vance.
“It’s mad,” he remarked, like a man confronted with something at once inexplicable and terrifying.
“Tut, tut!” Vance waved his hand airily. “That’s plagiarism. I said it first.” (He was striving to overcome his own sense of perplexity by a lightness of attitude.) “And now there really should be an inamorata to bewail Mr. Robin’s passing. You recall, perhaps, the stanza:
“Who’ll be chief mourner?
‘I,’ said the dove,
‘I mourn my lost love;
I’ll be chief mourner.’ ”
Markham’s head jerked slightly, and his fingers beat a nervous tattoo on the table.
“Good God, Vance! There is a girl in the case. And there’s a possibility that jealousy lies at the bottom of this thing.”
“Fancy that, now! I’m afraid the affair is going to develop into a kind of tableau-vivant for grown-up kindergartners, what? But that’ll make our task easier. All we’ll have to do is to find the fly.”
“The fly?”
“The Musca domestica, to speak pedantically. . . . My dear Markham, have you forgotten?——