Vera wouldn’t do that on a night like this!” said Tony, loudly and firmly.
“Who else is coming?” asked Meg.
Philippa sighed again. “At such short notice I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. I’ve got a widow from down the road who is writing her first novel at the age of sixty-seven, and her son, home from school for the Christmas holidays. The name is Pusey. And then I’ve got the Willings from Westport, He is, or was, one of Tony’s authors.”
“Willing?” repeated Maurice. “Not Basil Willing?”
“You know him?”
“I know of him. They call him a forensic psychiatrist but he seems to me more like a criminologist. He solved a number of rather curious murder cases when he was with the district attorney’s office in New York.”
“You mean he’s really a sort of detective?” put in Philippa. “If I’d known that, I would never have dared invite him. There’s no knowing what he may find out about us!”
Everyone laughed and Tony said, “I told you not to bury that last body in the dahlia bed! The next time you murder someone, use the incinerator.”
Just then the doorbell rang.
In the sudden silence, they could hear the Negro man’s step as he crossed the hall to the door.
“It must be Amos!” Gus’s voice sounded as if he were praying.
“And Vera.” Meg discovered that her hands were ice. Her heart was racing jerkily. Her gaze went through the archway to the hall and she saw lamplight shining on Vera’s brassy hair.
Amos stumbled as he came into the room. Gus and Tony looked incredulously at Amos’s flushed face and muddied eyes.
It was Tony who whispered to Gus, “God almighty, the bastard is drunk!”
“Submerged in his mystique,” murmured Philippa. “Cottle spares us nothing.”
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