Rehearsals for Murder by Elizabeth Ferrars

front of someone they know as they are when they’re by themselves.”
    â€œYou’re expecting her to lie, are you?”
    â€œWell, Lou says she’d betrayed Mrs Clare’s confidence. Seems likely she won’t want to betray it to us herself.”
    Vanner tilted his chair back, giving Toby a curious look. “You know, there are several ways of interpreting that letter.”
    â€œOf course there are,” said Toby. “All the same”—impatiently he reached across Vanner and pushed the bell himself—“let’s have our Eve and Roger in together.”
    Together, a few minutes later, Eve and Roger Clare appeared. Together they seated themselves, together regarded the face worn at that moment by the law that had taken command of their house. Together they waited for whatever the law desired of them. But their separateness was like a sign on their brows.
    Eve had a cigarette in her mouth; she was almost gobbling it up. In strong contrast to the nervous alertness of her whole body was the composure of Roger’s. Her nervousness, his composure, they seemed to share nothing with one another, neither to draw support nor to be frayed, stirred or thrown off balance by one another.
    Without any comment Vanner handed Lou’s letter to Eve. When, after a swift reading of it, she looked up he gestured that she should pass it to Roger. Roger took it, read it, frowned, reread it. Eve sat bolt upright, the cigarette gripped by her tense, scarlet lips.
    Roger made a motion to hand the letter on to Toby, but Toby said: “I’ve read it.”
    Vanner took it. “That letter,” he said, “that first half of a letter, was found in Miss Capell’s bedroom on the writing table there. Mr Dyke confirms that the writing is Miss Capell’s.”
    Roger Clare nodded. Eve stared past Vanner at an open window.
    Roger Clare raised a hand to finger his firm chin. “Is there no second half to this letter?”
    â€œNo,” said Vanner.
    â€œIt’s possible,” said Roger Clare, “that it might be best not to take it too seriously.” He looked up at Toby who was standing behind Vanner, one shoulder propped against a window frame. “You knew Lou, didn’t you, Dyke? You’ll bear me out, I think, when I say that although she was honest as the day, as utterly sincere a creature as you could find anywhere, she’d a very naїve and unrealistic view of things.”
    â€œSuppose,” said Toby, “we put that on her tombstone.”
    Roger Clare frowned. It was the slight frown of a man who is accustomed to having the slightest of frowns taken earnestly to heart. “I was going to say——”
    â€œIn marble, I think,” said Toby, “surmounted by a hand pointing upward.”
    â€œI was going to say,” said Clare in a cold voice, “that Lou may have had an altogether exaggerated view of something she’d done. This intended confession may have been about something like—like borrowing a couple of three-halfpenny stamps without permission or—or something like that. Something, that’s to say, that no one else has any knowledge of at all.”
    Vanner was chewing his pencil. “All I can say is, Miss Capell’s couple of three-halfpenny stamps cost Mr Dyke here fifteen pounds.”
    At that point Eve Clare snatched the cigarette away from her lips, stabbed with it at an ash tray and exclaimed: “I don’t know, I don’t know anything about it at all!” Under her fierce fingers the cigarette was ground into a twist of tobacco shreds and mangled paper. Then she put one finger tip against her lip where the cigarette had rested and made a wry face; in wrenching the cigarette away from her dry lips she had torn away some skin. “Damn!” she said, and went on: “I can’t think of anything Lou could have done that’d make this sort of letter necessary. She