Grant rolled the honey on his tongue and swallowed it.
"Someday," Owen Hughes said, "someone is going to screw Jammy Hopkins's head off his blasted shoulders. If my face wasn't insured for the sum total of the world's gold, I'd do it myself. He once said I was 'every girl's dream'!"
"And aren't you?"
"Have you seen my cottage lately?"
"No. I saw the photograph of the wreck in the paper one day."
"I don't mind telling you I wept when I got out of the car and saw it. I'd like to broadcast that photograph to the ends of the earth as a sample of what publicity can do. Fifty years ago a few people might have come a few miles to look at the place, and then gone home satisfied. They came in charabanc loads to see Briars. My lawyer tried to stop the running of the 'trips, but there was nothing he could do. The County Police refused to keep a man there after the first few days. About ten thousand people have come in the last fortnight, and every one of the ten thousand has peered through the windows, stood on the plants, and taken away a souvenir. There is hardly a scrap of hedge left — it used to be twelve feet high, a mass of roses — and the garden is a wilderness of trampled mud. I was rather attached to that garden. I didn't croon to the pansies, exactly, but I got a lot of kick out of planting things people gave me, and seeing them come up. Not a vestige left."
"Rotten luck! And no redress. Maddening for you. Perhaps by next year the plants will have taken heart again."
"Oh, I'm selling the place. It's haunted. Had you ever met Clay? No? She was grand. They don't make that kind in pairs."
"Do you know of anyone who would be likely to want to murder her, by any chance?"
Hughes smiled one of the smiles which made his fans grip the arms of their cinema seats. "I know lots who would gladly have murdered her on the spot. But only on the spot. The minute you cooled off, you'd cheerfully die for her. It's most unlikely death for Chris — the one that happened to her. Did you know that Lydia Keats prophesied it from her horoscope? She's a marvel, Lydia. She should have been drowned when she was a pup, but she really is a marvel. I sent her Marie Dacre's year, day, and minute of birth from Hollywood. Marie made me swear an oath before she divulged the awful truth of the year. Lydia hadn't the faintest notion whose horoscope she was doing, and it was marvelously accurate. She'd be a wow in Hollywood."