Charles.’
‘I’ve let him off his duty dance,’ said Rosamund. ‘Doctor Tokareff is telling a story a thousand years old, and I must hear the end.’
‘This is a history,’ began Tokareff, ‘of a hospodin…a noble…and two ladies. It is what you call eternal triangle…very old motif in human history.’
‘So old that it is, don’t you think, rather boring?’ asked Rankin.
‘Do dance, Marjorie,’ said Angela.
Without waiting for her consent, Rankin put his arm round Mrs Wilde, and at once Nigel saw that she was translated.
There are some women who, when they dance, express a depth of feeling and of temperament that actually they do not possess. He saw that Mrs Wilde was one of these women. Under the spell of that blatantly exotic measure she seemed to flower, to become significant and dangerous. Rankin, rapt and serious, was at once her foil and her master. He never took his eyes off hers, and she, unfriendly, provocative, stared back at him as though she were insulting him. Nigel, Angela, and Handesley stopped talking to watch these two, and Wilde, returning, stood stock still in the doorway. Only the Russian seemed disinterested. He had bent over the wireless set and was examining it intently.
The quicker second movement slid back into the original theme of the tango. The dancers had come together in the first steps of their final embrace, when an ear-splitting shriek from the wireless shattered the spell.
‘What the devil!’ exclaimed Rankin angrily.
‘Please forgive,’ said Tokareff calmly. ‘Evidently I have blundered. Sush a funny muck-up and screechiness I never before have heard…’
‘Wait a moment…I’ll get it back,’ suggested Handesley.
‘No, no, don’t bother—it would be too stupid to go on,’ answered Rankin ungraciously. He lit a cigarette and walked away from his partner.
‘Charles,’ said Handesley quietly, ‘Arthur and I have been discussing your dagger. It really is enormously interesting. Do be a little more forthcoming about its history.’
‘All I can tell you,’ said Rankin, ‘is this. I pulled a wild-looking gentleman out of a crevasse in Switzerland last year. I don’t speak Russian, and he didn’t speak English. I never saw him again, but apparently he traced me—through my guide, I suppose—to my hotel, and thence, presumably, to England. The knife with the two words, “Switzerland” (so lavish) and “thanks” only reached me yesterday. I conclude it was from him.’
‘Will you sell it to me, Charles?’ asked Sir Hubert. ‘I’ll give you much more than you deserve for it.’
‘No, Hubert, I won’t. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll leave it to you. Nigel here gets all my possessions. Nigel! If I kick the bucket, my lad, Hubert is to have the dagger. Bear witness, all of you.’
‘It shall be done,’ said Nigel.
‘Considering I’m ten years your senior, it’s not what I should call a handsome offer,’ complained Handesley. ‘Still, let’s have it in writing.’
‘You old ghoul, Hubert!’ laughed Rankin.
‘Hubert!’ shrieked Marjorie Wilde, ‘how can you be so utterly bloodsucking!’
Rankin had walked to the writing-desk.
‘Here you are, you maniac,’ he said. ‘Nigel and Arthur can witness.’
He wrote the necessary phrase and signed it. Nigel and Wilde witnessed, and Rankin handed it to Handesley.
‘You’d much better sell it to me,’ said Handesley coolly.
‘Excuse me, please,’ boomed Doctor Tokareff. ‘I do not entirely understand.’
‘No?’ The note of antagonism had crept into Rankin’s voice. ‘I merely leave instructions that if a sticky end should overtake me—’
‘Excuse me, please…a sticky end?’
‘Oh, damn! If I should die, or be murdered, or disappear from view, this knife which you, Doctor Tokareff, consider has no business to be in my possession, shall become the property of our host.’
‘Thank you,’ said Doctor Tokareff composedly.
‘You do not approve?’
‘Niet. No. By my standpoint of view, zis knoife does not belong by you.’
‘The knife was given to me.’
‘Such indiscretion has doubtless been suitably chastized,’ remarked the Russian peacefully.
‘Well,’ broke in Handesley, noting perhaps the two little scarlet danger signals in Rankin’s cheeks, ‘let us hope it will give no offence by hanging for tonight at the foot of my stairs. Come and have a cocktail.’
Charles Rankin lingered in the drawing-room with his cousin. He slipped his arm through Nigel’s.
‘Not a very delicious gentleman, that dago,’ he said loudly.
‘Look out, he’ll hear you!’
‘I don’t give a damn.’
Wilde paused in the doorway and detained them.
‘I shouldn’t let it worry you, Charles,’ he said in his diffident voice. ‘His point of view is not unreasonable. I know something of these societies.’
‘Oh, hell, what’s it matter, anyway? Come and let’s drink. This murder’s got to be done.’
Nigel glanced at him sharply.
‘No, no,’ laughed Rankin, ‘not by me…I didn’t mean that. By someone.’
‘I’m not going to be left alone with anyone,’ Mrs Wilde was announcing.
‘I wonder,’ speculated Handesley, ‘if that’s true—or is it a bluff? Or am I bluffing?’
‘I’m going to take my drink up with me,’ said Rosamund. ‘No one will try to murder me in my bath, I hope, and I shan’t come down till I hear voices in the hall.’
‘I’ll come up with you, Rosamund,’ said Mrs Wilde and Angela simultaneously.
‘I also will make myself for the dining,’ announced Doctor Tokareff.
‘Wait a bit!’ called Handesley. ‘I’m coming up. I won’t go down that passage alone!’
There was a concerted stampede upstairs, only Nigel, Rankin, and Wilde being left in the hall.
‘Shall I bath first?’ Nigel asked Wilde.
‘Yes, do,’ he agreed. ‘It’s safe enough for Charles and me to be left together. Whichever of us tries to do in the other would be accused by you as the last person to see the corpse alive. I claim the bath in ten minutes.’
